George RR Martin and Stephen King

ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage george RR martin and stephen king thank you it it's all downhill it's all downhill from here bye there a lot of them yeah well good to see you all and uh Steve welcome to the land of enchantment thank you have you been here before you know New Mexico yeah I've been to I've been to New Mexico before but probably I wasn't entirely straight at the time I've been to Taos so listen you know this guy's a native son and he's terrific okay and before we do anything else I have to tell you that that I had not read any of the Game of Thrones books this goes back about I'm going to say about six years and I had kind of a thing where I said to myself you know probably don't want to read these things because you know I tried to read Robert Jordan and I couldn't read any of those books and so I thought probably these are just terrible so you know I I didn't have any real urge to go into them my wife had them all but my wife and I don't talk that much about books we talk about everything else so so here's what happened I was I was down in Florida I don't want to go there but we turn 65 and it's the law so not in Florida and I drove down and we were having dinner with some friends when we were down there and I started to have what I thought was a cramp underneath my left knee and by the time that we got back to our house I could barely walk and I just had to kind of pull myself up the stairs and pretty soon it was all down my leg and up to my hip and everything which scared the out of me because I'd had an accident before where some guy hit me with a van and that was on the right side this leg is not as strong so I went to the doctor and the doctor said well you're getting on in years you have sciatica and and I said how long this is going to last and he said he said it will go away when it goes away and it was sciatica is this weird thing usually if you have a back problem it's in your back but this was in the leg and somehow it's worse when you lie down so I couldn't really sleep and I had a book that I was supposed to record we were in the Sarasota area and I had to go to Bradenton and it even it hurt to drive everything hurt and I couldn't sleep so one night when I'm wake I'm saying to myself I'll try one of these George Martin books and see if this thing is any good and it just carried me away it just carried away the books which are what books is supposed to do and what I had not expected the last thing I had expected from those books is what page turners they are you know and I just got lost and so when I couldn't sleep at night I read the books and then when I had to go and record this thing I had the audio versions and I plug in the CDs and I in the car and they saved my life man so that hey well I'm glad because you've written many terrific books since I would have been shamed not to do that Steve and I actually knew each other back in the the old days by which I mean that like the 70s in the early 80s in those days he used to go to science fiction and fantasy conventions where you know we would run into each other to world fantasy convention play poker together we played poker together in st. Louis convention arc on nickel dime quarter and I learned then a valuable lesson you cannot Bluff Steve out of a pot even if you raise a whole quarter [Laughter] hee hee just hold all my Bluffs but well welcome back to to New Mexico it's great to be here and you're here with the the concluding book of the mr. Mercedes trilogy right well you know I gotta say that I'm doing this with George now like last month George did our conversation like this was my kid Joe Hill is his name his name is actually Joseph Hillstrom King but he didn't want to be he didn't want to feel that he had made a success or whatever on my coattails so he wrote onto this pen name and he's got a book that is currently on the New York Times bestseller list it's called the fireman it's terrific it's amazing an amazing book an amazing book and at the Jean Cocteau cinema in Santa Fe we still have signed copies so drive up to Santa Fe and get an autograph Joe Hill that's right and it's terrific and you should buy it but you should buy my books first cuz I'm older and I'll die sooner so then what do you want to talk about Joe Joe was a yeah Joe was a great great interview actually I'll start with a an embarrassing story that Joe told me so when your name somehow came up in conversation with a with Joe I think it was before he made us all play kazoos hey we're not going to make you play kazoos by the way oh say here you can oh well I guess we disappointed that we should break out the kazoos and I honest I got a kazoo story I got a Talib but Joe Joe said that that you and your wife were old hippies and when he was growing up every every once in a while you would cheerfully announce tomorrow is naked day at that he he and his siblings would have to cover to rise so you had tabatha walked around the house all day they could yes I've heard that story from Joe many times it's not true and that story tells more about my son's ability to to fantasize no it isn't true I got to tell her kazoo story Joe handed out kazoos because he wanted to get people involved and do a sing-along or something like that and and I said well maybe you can get him to play kazoos because almost everybody can play kazoos now I used to play guitar with a group called the Rock Bottom Remainders it was a bunch of directors it was a bunch of writers and and we also had one part of this this group that was called a critics chorus they were rock and roll critics and they were very literate and the thing that I found out about critics and I think that we sort of intuitive is that rock critics can't play music and they can't sing I can't do anything and we had one guy Joel Selvin who was a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and we did a song by the trogs Wild Thing and it was the perfect song for the remainders because it has three chords e a and d and you know it beats but in the middle of the song the pop song there's a kind of a sweet potato or ocarina solo kind of a tootling little thing and Joel Selvin really wondered what was going to happen with that well he was very worried about it finally I said Joel why don't you do it you do it on a kazoo you just play the kazoo anybody can play that and when the time came Joel got so excited that it just nothing came out he'd be so hard just just wheezed and you could but it was like foghorn lock make home comics I could see the red going up his head and it made me feel good because he was after all the enemy I mean as long as we're talking about Joe you know both both Joe and your other son Owen are themselves writers so you have a whole family tradition here is is that something that you wanted them to do or was it the reverse we use eight sons whatever you do don't become a writer I mean do you yourself was your father someone who encouraged you to be a writer or your parents were they readers was was this something a family tradition well I don't know I think that there is a genetic you know component to this and it isn't just the boys my wife has published five six novels and including I'll tell her I'll tell her you said that including one called small world which is kind of like a little bit like the Richard Matheson book - shrinking man so they get it from both sides and my father was a writer who submitted a lot of stories to the pulp magazines like Argosy and Blue Book but none of them ever got published so no I mean tabby and I the thing is like our kids grew up in a house where there were books books everywhere you know and those TV movies we never really you know the censored air TV watching or said you can watch for an hour and then you have to do your studies or whatever I think that the best way to teach kids isn't by laying down a lot of rules and that but given an example and just you know so the books were there and the thing is too you know going back to Joe again a little bit was I think creativity is a mystery we talked about this a little bit and I think that you have a package inside you that at some point it's like live material and it starts to stir you know you get close to something and from my son Joe they used to drive us crazy my wife called when our when Joe was four and our daughter Naomi was six my wife used to call the hours between 4 and 7 o'clock when they went to bed the hours god never should have made because they just fought constantly and they fight over the TV or they fight over anything and one day just out of total desperation I stopped at the drugstore and I got a GI Joe comic book and I took him on my lap and that was the end man that was the end of the fighting that was the end of everything because Joe just fell into that comic book world and now he's got a comic series that he's written for years called lock and key and he's been a successful at that too so it's interesting that your father was a writer who was trying to sell to the Pope's but failed at it and yet did I mean did he encourage you to write even though he had failed at it you know my my father was a longshoreman and he certainly didn't in fact he said just the opposite son you don't want to wind up on the docks unloading a ship do something else but not don't be a longshoreman no my father didn't encourage me to do anything because he split when I was 2 my brother David was 4 he said he was going out for cigarettes and it must have been a rare brand because he's still looking so but yeah so my mother raised us and she was a reader herself and she read to us and she read comic books when we brought him home she didn't like it but she would and I remember very vividly when I was about seven years old sitting out on the porch in this apartment where we lived in Stratford Connecticut and she read us dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde and I kind of you know that was another thing that sort of tripped my dials but around that same time we were living in apartments in Connecticut and my mother was working she worked in a laundry for a while and she worked in a bakery for a while and she was a housekeeper for a while and we didn't have much because our dad left her with a lot of bills when he ran out but my brother came running into the room one time we were latchkey kids before there were Lasky kids so we got home from school my mother was working we had the apartment to ourselves David said you got to come up to the attic I found a whole bunch of our dad's stuff that our mother had you know stowed there so we went up and there were boxes and boxes of stuff he was in the Merchant Marine and there was stuff from overseas and and do a little you know Japanese dolls and there were drink coasters that from foreign Lices ports of calm as they usually say and it was a box of books and they were paperbacks and the one on the top was the thing from the tomb by HP Lovecraft and when I saw that I said that's really scary this is what I want to do haha so well I think you've done it how did it happen for you when did you start to do it why why George why that's why I started writing stories really young I mean and since I'm a packrat I still have most of them I mean I have a like a one of those speckly black and white school notebooks filled with an encyclopedia of space where I would draw a planet and then I would write you know block printing because I hadn't learned to write yet so I must have been like five or six years old the characteristics of this planet and you know the planets were like circles colored in with crayons Mars was red and Venus was green and all that but I had mixed up Mars and Venus with like and and planets that I entirely invented that I was making my own planets that people don't remember they don't remember Ming Ming Emperor Ming the Merciless Flash Gordon um not to be confused with such court in an entirely different movie and then I got a I remember I used to buy these little aliens that they sold at the five-and-dime store for fifteen cents each little plastic aliens and they I got the whole set of them and played with them and invented personalities Rowland I decided they were gang of space pirates and one with the big head was the chief and the one who was holding a weird weapon was the torturer I had episodes right from the first you were crazy basically yes yeah I think it was partly I mean we didn't have much money I lived in ban New Jersey and the federal housing projects my father went through long periods of unemployment before he finally got on as a longshoreman we had no car I we lived on First Street my school was on Fifth Street that was my world there was five blocks long so books and comic books which I also read verse vociferous Lee were my ticket to a wider world I dreamed of you know what the hell was on 8th Street I had no idea you know a whole different world with alien peoples and and on first Street of course we Baylin as a peninsula so there's a deepwater channel called the kill Vaughn call that separates Bayonne from Staten Island New York so I would see the lights of Staten Island from our windows in the dark and that was you know shangri-la to me and I invented all these stories to kind of explore the world yeah I think that the same thing is true for me I just started to fantasize at some point and then I began to put the fantasies down on paper and this is this is a wonderful job but it's a strange job in that the stuff that I've written there's one story called survivor type about a doctor who is mewling heroin into the United States and his ship sinks and he is the only survivor and he winds up on this rocky island where there's really nothing and there are a couple of birds and there's some water that gathers in cracks in them in the rocks but he catches one of the gulls and eats at raw and while he's chasing another one he snaps his ankle and after that he can't catch the birds anymore but he does have all this heroin and he is a doctor and at that time I was living in a little town in Maine and we had a retired doctor who lived next door so I went over to him and I said I said dr. Drew's how long could a man survive by cutting off pieces of himself and eating them [Laughter] and he gave me this look like like well like I was crazy but I persisted and he finally he said it would depend first of all he would die if he didn't have anesthetic and I said well he's got anesthetic you've got plenty of anesthetic and then I said but what would be the biggest problem and he said the biggest problem in a case of cutting pieces of yourself off you see I got this idea because miners and cave-ins if when they run out of water will drink their own urine and so he said it would depend on how long the patient could withstand the repeated shocks to his system and he said he would really have to be a survivor type to do that I thought well there's the name of my story right there survivor type and all I'm trying to say here is you just have these sick ideas George's written his share believe me and instead of going to a shrink and paying the shrink we write them and you pay us pretty good deal right well I mean did you always dream of being a writer what was your first story sale and how long did you have to submit stories and get rejections before you broke through ah yeah I wanted to be a writer I that was for me you know that was the thing that I really cared about because I really liked to do it from an early age I was getting something I was getting something back you always know like when a kid finds his sweet spot because you don't have to tell them to practice it isn't practice you know you're getting something out of it so I started to write stories and submit them around the age of probably twelve my first admissions and you know I submitted them to Forrest J Ackerman oh boy had Famous Monsters of Filmland and he had other magazines there was a magazine called spaceman I think and I got to see 4e before he died and he had saved some of those early submissions so and they're written on a you know old royal typewriter that I had so I started to send stories out and and I pounded a nail into the wall of my bedroom and when I got the rejection slips back I would put them on that nail and by the time that I was 16 or 17 years old the nail tore free from the plaster so I just got a bigger nail and then when I was 19 I sold a story to Starling mystery stories it was called the glass floor and they paid me like I think 35 bucks that's my first sale she's a lot of money back then there was a lot of money and a lot but the thing is like can I can I tell another story turn I I sold two stories to those Robert rounders magazine starlings mystery stories I remember them there was another one tales of horror and suspense or something they were small checks so when I was a senior in high school in college rather I wrote for the campus newspaper and one of the big attractions was they had all these typewriters and my typewriter in the place the apartment where I lived basically sucked the bird so they had these typewriters and just before I graduated I had an idea I'd worked the summer before in a woollen mill and when fourth of July week came along the foreman said we're going to shut down the mill for a week now you have your choice either you can take the week off without pay or you can join this Creek cleaning crew we're going to go down and we're going to clean the basement in the sub-basement where nobody's bothered to clean anything out for years so I took the week off and when I came back this guy I worked with in the dye house said oh man Steve you should have been there it was it was a far-out they gave us hoses and we went down there were no rats everywhere man they were jumping out they were his biggest cats and we washed him down the gummies and you know into the Androscoggin River so I was thinking about this and I said I'm going to write a story but in my story is going to be even bigger rats and they will have mutated down there in the dark they're going to be as big as cats are going to be as big as dogs and so that story was called graveyard shift because that's when they were doing it and and so I was working on this story and one of my friends came in Mack came in and he said what are you doing Steve and I said well I'm writing a story about giant rats under a mill and this cleaning crew is kind of besieged by these rats and driven backward he said man that's great he said what you got to do is like one of these guys goes crazy and he's running around he's ripping rats heads off you know I'm flinging the bodies beside and everything and and I thought to myself it's good but it's not literary okay it doesn't have that sort of like feeling that John Cheever John Updike kind of feeling him so what I did instead of that was because he was on the right track he just didn't he wasn't shooting high enough so in my story one of the guys is bitten by rats all over his legs and he screams and while his mouth is open to scream a rat climbs into his mouth and I just wanted to try and you know do it as elegantly as possible so you can feel the rats fur on the roof of his mouth and the legs scrabbling it his chin and his throat as the rat grabs hold of the guy's tongue and rips it out of his mouth and I sold that story for 200 bucks okay which is more than 35 pardon me is more than 35 it was more than 30 you were moving up in the world that was too Cavalier magazine and I sold a bunch of others to those I got married the next year and and we had a little girl Naomi and when she got the ear infections my my wife would say hurry up think of a monster oddly enough rats helped launch my own writing as well they've been good to us rats have been a good distinguish to us I think I was a sophomore in high school and I was kind of a nerdy kid at you know I wasn't one of the cool kids I wasn't good at sports I was good I was good at you know on a roll and stuff that doesn't cut in East any slacking in in school that just gets you more abuse but sophomore year my one of my English teachers was teaching pose pit in a pendulum and he said you know this story has a terrible ending if you remember that story two guys in the pit two pendulums coming lower and lower and then suddenly in the last paragraph trumpet sound and depending on pulls up and he saved the Inquisition is in the hands of its enemies is the last thing and and you know my English teacher said this is a classic example of the deus ex machina so our assignment was to write a bitter ending for the bit oh boy and so I wrote an ending where the rats came out and ate the guy and they ate is they ate his cheeks and they ate his toes and and you know they ate his face and the pendulum cut him in half and he died horribly screaming and in horrible pain I thought it was a much better ending than the one that Edgar Allan Poe came up with it has a certain uplift to it I feel it does but what was the real boost for me is the teacher liked it too and he had me read it to the class and suddenly suddenly all these kids who'd never thought much of me thought I was the coolest kid in class man wow what a great what a great story the rats ate the guy they loved it and I said I got to do more this writing stuff it's really it's really pays off yeah yeah that's uh pretty much my experience with it too and you know one of the things it's it's funny is we do this we talk about these things and you guys all laugh and applaud but later on you know when you get home and you're in the dark it's not gonna seem so funny then I was I was I've always taken heart these some of the stuff you wrote in your your first book about running Danse Macabre which I was totally engrossed by I thought it was amazing perfect thanks and you you talked about how you strove to create terror in your stories but when you couldn't create terror which is very hard to create you settled for horror and when you couldn't create horror you settled for gross-out right what I said was I'm not proud and you know I took that to heart and adopted that the kind of philosophy of myself and I can still see all that going on in your in your books you know I think the rats in the mouth are probably the gross out would you would you say I would say that that's the gross out and probably the survivor type story is a grosser too but there are other things with our where I think you it sort of depends on the story and what you want to put across and there I did a book called full dark no stars thank you thank you those are nasty stories in there and one of the one of the stories is called a good marriage and I got sort of fascinated by Dennis Rader who is uh called BTK bind torture and kill and he had killed eight or nine women over a period of years and when he was finally caught his wife didn't know she didn't know that she was married to this monster this this psychosexual homicidal maniac and a lot of people didn't believe her but I did and I wanted to write a story about about a woman who finds out that she's married to a man who's a monster and that was like what I would call terror her situation there so it varies from story to story but I don't necessarily think that the gross-out is a bad thing no no it's it's fun in a HUD ways the rats have done very well for both of us yeah I would say so there plenty of gross out moments in your books yours whether are yes yeah although I've never done shitweasels as you did in hindrance yes shitweasels not one of my finest accomplishment I think actually you know to my mind the the finest gross-out movie a moment was in a movie that I wrote called Creepshow and and and eg Marshall was in the movie and he played a guy there was the last story in the Creepshow thing was called they're creeping up on you and this was a guy who is deadly afraid of bugs and at the end of the movie he sort of exploded and there are thousands of cockroaches that came out of him and Tom Savini did the special effects for that movie and I and also to do well I'm not exactly proud or humiliated I played a character called Jordy Verrill in that movie and to this day fans come up to me and say say meteor which I just did so but at the end of the Jordy Verrill story Jordy who is growing and becoming a weed at that point bows his head off what remains of his head with a shotgun and so I had to have a full head mold made of my my head and it's a very uncomfortable experience they give you a straw that you can breathe through and you have to sit there for about a half an hour while it hardens so you think about like a cat scan or an MRI only spread all over your head and it was a creepy experience so eg Marshall comes in because he had to have one done - and I thought to myself I'm gonna watch this because this guy's going to freak out when he gets this plaster all over his head with just the straw but he was just as cool as a cucumber about it and the thing is over his head and he's got the straw out of his mouth and we're in the makeup room the special effects area and eg Marshall raises his hand and he goes like that so Tom knew what he wanted and he got a pad of paper and he put a pencil in eg Marshalls hand and he's all covered with plaster down to the neck and I'm washing as he writes be oh you are be a f bo n bourbon so they got some bourbon and they got an eyedropper and they put it down a stone and he was just as happy as a pig in so I've avoided that experience so far the but I at one point during first season a game of Thrones I was hoping to be a severed head you know there was a scene where Ned was killed and his head was on the wall and Sansa was made to look at all the heads on the wall it's quite a moment I'll tell you that and I suggested to David Benioff and Dan Weiss that the three of us be the heads next to next to Ned and and they were all cool for the idea so we were all going to have our severed heads made and mounted on the wall but then you know we were like many television shows facing budgetary problems and they found out what those severed heads cost so they said uh sorry George we can't we can't afford to make up these special severed heads for just a shot instead you know they've recycle a lot of things in Hollywood instead they they bought a big box of used severed heads from a previous a previous production and we we put all the severed heads next to the wall and they were cheap we got the box I don't know what they came from the severed heads that we got in the box but they were cheap and they saved us money and everything worked well except one of the severed heads would george w bush and and that was fine too because he was bald and nobody mentioned him until like a year later when they're doing me the the blu-ray version and one of the directors doing the commentary said oh and you see the head next to the net that's George W Bush and of course the the right-wing talk radio got ahold of it and it went crazy rush limbaugh was was having kittens and people were claiming we wanted to assassinate the ex-president and you know it we were Hollywood liberals who had mounted head and I'm trying to say oh no it was just we just bought a big box of heads ha ha ha it could have been anybody's head in there you know what I'll tell you what that's that's what you get into when you do what we do I mean it's a wonderful thing but it's really strange we did a miniseries of the stand and we filmed a lot of it out here on West Thanks thank you and we filmed a lot of it on location in in Boulder Colorado because a lot of it said in Boulder and we did this one scene where Harold otter and he's on this burial crew and they go into a church where the people have gone when they are sick before they expire and the church is full of dead people so we needed to fill a church with dead people and the director Mick Garris had a call in to some special effects people that he knew that had worked with a couple of other directors who done zombie pictures so the people in Boulder were treated to the sight of two pickup trucks full of dead bodies I would come into this church on the west side of Boulder and they're all they were all spongy you know because that's basically what they are and they're all kind of bouncing up and down and it was very realistic they really look like you know dead bodies which they're supposed to look like because it's so what's up let's talk about aureus for a moment here but let's talk about a little bit about end of watch and the Mercedes thing here your your villain and you guys haven't read it yet but it's it's terrific I think you'll a I don't I hope you've read the first two if you just pick up this book here you have two more to read before it that you have to read them in the right order because it's a trilogy starting with mr. Mercedes there you go buy them all and give them to your friends and missus Mercedes begins with Brady Hartsfield your villain who's a pretty villainous villain driving his Mercedes through a crowd of job seekers who are lined up for poor people who are trying to get a job at a job fair they've lined up and and you know killing a whole bunch of them crippling and injuring many more a completely unmotivated act of random violence and of course all of us have this in mind these days in the light of just what happened in Orlando and yes the situation is a different Brady Hartsville use of Mercedes and the shooter in Orlando used the semi-automatic weapon and had allegedly motivations you know political motivations Isis hate crime motivations hatred of gay and lesbian people but it seems to me that there's a similarity there this dis just desire to kill people people perfect strangers who have never hurt him or done anything to him and and all that this is a really kind of dark side of the of the human psyche yeah I got the idea originally that the kernel of the idea that became mr. Mercedes came to me I was driving up from Florida and I make that drive by myself and it's a place where I sort of recharge and listen to a lot of rock and roll a lot of all country stuff and just kind of let my mind go in neutral and it goes where it's going to go and the first night after I left Florida stayed in South Carolina and there was a story on the local news about a woman who had driven her car into a line of jobseekers at McDonald's this was just after the economy cratered in 2008 and and McDonald's had made a big deal sort of a PR push about how they were going to help out America by hiring all these people at minimum wage whatever it was at that time and the story was that this woman had found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her with an outside woman and that this outside woman was supposed to be at this job fair and by god she was going to take her out well she didn't take her out but she did take out a whole bunch of other people and I thought there's a seed here there's something here in this act of almost random violence that I want to write about and eventually it became mr. Mercedes finders-keepers and end of watch and I was able to go back to the original crime the job fair with each one of those books but to take it mmm from a different perspective so that you know you're seeing it from three different angles if you will and and the thing about braiding Hartsfield and what you're talking about which is this whole kind of evil act on a grand scale is that Brady only kills eight people at the job fair and he wounds a number of others but he gets away with it and his real plan is to get into a very large gathering which happens to be a concert for a boy band in a wheelchair loaded with plastic explosives and kill himself and as many other people as he possibly can and he has random thoughts of violence that come and go he thinks about well maybe I could assassinate the president and then he thinks no no no maybe I'll assassin a Brad Pitt or maybe I'll assassinate Lady Gaga or Adele and he wants to basically he's nobody okay and a lot of these guys are nobodies who see their way to some kind of stardom by creating an act of mass terror and of course the sad thing about this is is that we remember the killers long after their victims are forgotten and that's one of the things that makes this a self-perpetuating act but I would argue that someone like the man who shot all these people in in Orlando he may have pledged allegiance to Isis but before that he was a spouse abuser and somebody with a lot of anger and I think that in a lot of cases these acts are perpetrated by people who may put some political icing on the cake but basically they're just crazy and and and I want and I want to say one other thing about that that if that guy had gone in there with a knife he would have been overpowered before he'd stabbed more than four people and and and as long as long as you know anybody who's got only two wheels on the road can walk into a store and buy a killing machine you know like an ar-15 or something this is just going to go on I mean it's really up to us I mean I'm my fantasy serious of course is often compared to tokine and and I've talked in many interviews about and and I'd love talking I'm the biggest fan in the world of lorded rings but I - yeah Tolkien's view of good and evil when that is is you know evil is externalized it's comes from Sauron or Morgoth before it and and there are there are you know orcs who are absolutely irredeemable and you know the good people get together and and stop the orcs and most of the good people are good I've always been more attracted to two great characters and I've said in many interviews well I do think the Battle of good and evil is a great subject for fiction but in my view the battle for good and evil is waged within the individual human heart and it's our decisions we're all partly good and partly evil and we make we make decisions every day and we may do a good thing on Wednesday and then an evil thing on Thursday or a selfish thing and it's all very complicated and that's kind of the approach that I've taken but I'm also a huge fan of Lovecraft and and I think you are - from reading some of your books and I see Lovecraftian influences in things like the end of revival that you know that the vision of the afterlife there is a terrifying Lovecraftian moment of the short story of the name I'm forgetting about the standing stones that everyone who's like them that's OCD that's a very much crazy title to forget it's just n really okay and yet and the mist the mist is another incredible story very Lovecraftian you know this mist escapes and who knows what the hell is in there but it's really scary in there it's going to be a TV series from spike - and I think it might be interesting Wow but but even though I see the Lovecraftian things when I look at your books the real villains are the people I mean you know Carrie Carrie kills a lot of people in that high school but she's not the villain the villain is the mother and the other kids who torment her and and do that misery Annie Wilkes is what a horrifying creation and one that one that both you and I live in constant terror of any any successful writer and and by the way you know we were talking earlier in the in the green room there and uh you know Steve asked if anyone ever showed up my home and people do occasionally a show up at my home but the creepiest thing that ever happened to me is one day there was a package in my mail and I opened it and it was just a paperback copy of misery ha ha ha no letter [Music] nothing just just some unknown it was from your number one I mean under the dome maybe you can say the aliens are the villains who've trapped it but it's really the horrible ordinary people under the dome who start doing these incredibly horrible things to each other and brady Hartsfield is a you know a very clear and vivid example of that just a human being who's the mist is another one I mean there's the Lovecraftian monsters but it's the crazy religious woman inside that in the thing who really makes things a thousand times worse so I don't know what are your views on the nature of evil is there is there an external evil in the universe is it Sauron or Satan or or Cthulhu or is it our own fucked-up human nature's it's interesting because you're right there there's no Sauron in the Thrones games I mean the evil weaves itself in and out the same way that the good weaves itself in and out of the characters and one of the things about that you know the thing is uh I wrote a series of books called The Dark Tower and and and those books were all done basically the Seven Dark Tower books are one long novel that never got edited because they were done there is short stories that they are done as limited editions from Donald Grant press nobody edited them and nobody copy edited them so I went back and I revised the first one and I really need to go back to all of them and one of the things in there that to me is a problem is there's a my version of Sauron was the Crimson King you know and you see this mark the eye of the king all the time that's outside evil and in a way outside evil is a more comforting concept than you know the idea that the devil made me do it is a way of sucking responsibility and saying that I'm not there so I think that we all understand that evil is inside a lot of people and yet at the same time I think that what a lot of and I'm not expressing this very well but what a lot of horror fiction does and what a lot of fantastic fiction does is it allows us to grapple with the outside evil that strikes us you know you get a call on the phone that says your cousin is dead because he was in that Orlando nightclub or you get a call like in the thing that makes end of watch start you get a diagnosis from the doctor that says you have cancer and you're probably going to die within the course of 16 17 months because this thing's just gone too far and it's the kind that's you know in the book it's pancreatic cancer it's not a spoiler really because it's on page 9 for Christ's sake so yeah so don't yell at me I hate this thing about spoilers why you spoil this you spoiled that you can't spoil a book Jesus Christ is his story I mean you you go in there to have the experience it isn't like you know getting a GI Joe from the you know in in your cereal box is something I girls on a sled I'm not expressing so there are two kinds of evil there's inside evil on this outside evil and I think that when we have the stories like you know N and love crafty and stuff where we're trying to cope with the sort of things that happen in our lives that are bad things that we don't understand George we're going to have to wrap this up pretty soon is there anything that you've always wanted to ask me because George I will yes yes there is something I want to ask you how the do you write so many books so fast I think oh I've had a really good six months I've written three chapters and you've got three books in that time here's the thing okay there are there are books in there books the way that the way that I work I try to get out there and I try to get six pages a day so with a book like end of watch and I work when I'm working I work every day three four hours and I try to get those six pages and I try to get them fairly clean so if the manuscript is let's say three hundred and sixty pages long that's basically two months work it's concentrated but it's a fairly but that's assuming that it goes well and you do hit six pages a day I usually do you don't ever have a day where you sit down there and it's like constipation and you write a sentence and you hate the sentence and okay you check your email and you wonder if you had any Talent after all and maybe you should have been a plumber don't yes tastes like that no I mean this real life you know I can be working away and something comes up and you have to basically get up and you have to go to see the doctor or you have to take somebody care package or you have to go to the post office because whatever but mostly I try to get the six pages in although entropy tries to intervene you know I I did an event at Radio City Music Hall for charity with John Irving and Joe rolling and this was that JK Rowling and this was at the time that she was finishing the seventh Harry Potter books and I know that I've been very fortunate as a writer and you've been terrific ly fortunate as a writer you work for a long time wrote a lot of good books won a lot of awards and then out of nowhere all of a sudden this crazy thing happens where all these books are suddenly New York Times bestsellers and God knows it's deserved but it's a sort of sudden thing and here's the other thing okay people yelling at you and say we want the next book we want the next book they're like babies we want the next book right away I mean it's it's a great thing to want that but the the pressure that you feel or I feel compared to that final Harry Potter book you know everybody everybody wanted that and she came to New York and she was nearly finished with it and she'd agreed to do this event and Joe was trying to do three things at once she was going to do a vacation with her kids she was going to finish the last five or six chapters of the seventh Harry Potter book and she was going to do this event and she showed up to do the soundcheck at Radio City Music Hall and she was just like any housewife or mother or anyone who was on vacation she had a shell top on and white clam digger pants and and loafers or sandals or something and her hair tied back in horse tails and we were trying to talk about what we were going to do and everything and the Scholastic press publishes is pulling her aside and talking to her and Joe is very polite but when she came back and talked to me she was really really angry and what she said was they don't understand what we do do they and I said how can they understand when we don't understand yeah all too true yeah but I do understand that our hour is up sadly we could go on for eight more hours here so I hope you come back to the land the vibe is great and George has been great and thank you so much thank you thank you thank you read more books you

Channel: Andy Atkins

Views: 2,312,088

Rating: 4.9330149 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: v_PBqSPNTfg

Length: 54min 49sec (3289 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/fan_of_the_khan]

George is like a cartoon character, every time I see him he looks exactly the same.

[u/FalsePretender]

This was great. Good to get some banter between two of my favourites. Any more of this series?

[u/APLemma]

"Wait, you publish how many a year?"

[u/Silverskh]

This interview looks like a fantasy itself: two myths together.

[u/NzLawless]

What an awesome interview! Also this is such a good way to find out that the 3rd Mr Mercedes book is out, just needed a new book to read!