Stephen King has a Band Aid on the index finger of his right hand. It comes from signing copies of his latest novel, Bag of Bones - 3,000 in three days. This morning's queue snakes through cult fiction, literary fiction and non fiction, outside the bookshop and right round the atrium of Kingston's shopping mall. To get as many people through as possible, fans (and no other word will do) have been requested not to ask for dedications. One eight-year-old hasn't understood and asks him to write "for Ben". So of course that's exactly what King does. Then he has his picture taken with a four-week-old baby. King is one of life's natural good guys. Yet this is the man who brought us Carrie, The Shining, Salem's Lot and every other nightmare you care to name.
For all the publisher's hype ("first interview in 20 years") Stephen King is no Howard Hughes-style recluse. He's a natural entertainer. He reads his own work better than anyone since Dylan Thomas and could give Clive Anderson a run for his money in ironic one-liners. No, his absence from the publicity circuit is just that he "didn't need that stuff". But the master of darkness has recently turned 50, bringing with it a sneaky touch of insecurity. "Basically I'm the Cliff Richard of horror. I'm getting up there in years and we have to work a little harder to stay in one place." Not that he's met Cliff. ("He's turned into quite the lizard though, hasn't he?") Just an example of his chameleon ability to soak up local knowledge and make it his own.
If there's anything lizard-like about Stephen King it's among the night creatures that inhabit his head. "It's probably wrong," he wrote in Pet Semetary - vintage King, where all the good guys end up worse than dead - "to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effects obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls."
It's a premise that has served him well. Sales of King's books (31 including Bag of Bones) amount to a global 80 million. And in spite of those male-menopause anxieties (manifested in coded threats to give up writing on the last page of Bag of Bones but denied in public) his appeal shows no sign of slipping. How does this nice and very funny man explain the enduring appeal of horror?
"We enjoy those things because we understand when we close the book the terrors go away. Terrible things happen in the world. And a horror story is almost like a dress rehearsal for things that really happen in our lives."
Like many small boys, King's childhood reading - books and comics - tended towards fantasy, an appetite encouraged by his mother. He remembers War of the Worlds and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. "I never forgot the part of the story where Hyde comes out of the pub and there's a little girl and he knocks her down and walks over her then walks back over her again just to hear the bones crackle. And I think part of the motivation to write horror stories is to understand how someone could do something like that. And I think that's part of what motivated Stephenson to write the book in the first place. To explore the nature of evil."
In placing the supernatural within the hyper-naturalism of the American small town, King has spawned an entire sub-genre, from David Lynch to the X-Files. This now classic American scenario is only a twist, King says, on the mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie "where there is an incursion from the unknown, something happens that's unexpected and unpleasant, but at the end all is explained, the bad man is caught and things go back to normal." The twist is that things rarely get back to normal in King's work. Like his favourite author Thomas Hardy. "When you begin a Hardy novel you know that eventually everything will go wrong."
Stephen King likes to scare people. "In a way a scary novel should work like a depth charge or a time delayed explosive. You read it with the lights on and everything's OK. But when the lights are off . . . I feel that fantasy and make-believe and things that are horrible, cast the ordinary into a hard fresh light. By the same token if you are able to set tales of terror in an ordinary surrounding it makes the supernatural more believable. I've always thought my job in a way was to sew these two pieces of cloth together so fine that the reader doesn't really know when he or she crosses over from the land that's real to the land that's unreal. But I never sat down to write horror novel per se in my life. I never sat down and said, now what catalogue of ugly things can I think of that can set peoples teeth on edge or make their hair crinkle. I just write stories."
Two of the most successful King screen adaptations are Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption (both from novellas, both very faithful to the originals he says). Although undoubtedly macabre, no supernatural powers are involved, and ultimately the good guys triumph and honour wins through. And although Bag of Bones comes with a full quota of ghouls and ghosts, that's not what it's about. He describes it as love story. "I sometimes say you have things that you want to do with a story and they're like pearls," King explains. "But you have to have a plot, and that's the string that you put the pearls on." The pearls in Bag of Bones are coming to terms with the death of a spouse, racism in turn-of-the-century New England (an extraordinary conjuring of a black "bluesshouter" in the early days of phonograph recordings), the corrupting power of money and most compelling of all, the inner workings - both commercial and creative - of a mega-selling author.
Bag of Bones is not the first time Stephen King has used a writer as his mouthpiece. In The Shining it was the author-in-the garret; Misery was about the pressures on a genre writer; The Dark Half gave us a serious novelist haunted by an alter ego, a pseudonym he has invented to write pulp fiction. But Mike Noonan - the hero of Bag of Bones - is closer to Stephen King than any of his earlier protagonists.
"In all characters there is an element of you because it comes out of you, but there are different characters who are further away from what you think of as yourself. When you write a book oftentimes you make a strong effort to create characters that are a lot different from how you are, so that you can kind of experience the world from other points of view. I didn't make that effort with Mike Noonan and he is similar to me in a lot of ways. Certainly his situation is different, but I was sort of imagining what my life would be like if I lost my wife and if I had a writer's block, that really terrible writer's block with anxiety attacks. But his take on writing is pretty much my own. That was a chance for me to say `this is me 25 years on in the business and here's what I believe now and what I've learned, or what I think I've learned'."
Nor is Stephen King averse to self parody. (He puts Mike Noonan at the forefront of "New American Gothic".) To his obvious amusement King himself features regularly as the subject of doctoral theses. ("Theses rhymes with faeces. There's a reason for that.")
"You think you're writing a story and these people will tell you that you're making a statement." He remembers one based on his short story Children of the Corn. "This guy said that it was really a symbolic exploration of American guilt for the role they played in Vietnam. I mean, hey, you're not making a statement, you're writing a story. Maybe you're trying to articulate some things that are going on in your mind, some things that engage your feelings, things you're emotionally connected to. Because to me, that's what a lot of what story-telling is about. It's about this up-welling of emotion, being able to communicate it a little bit, intrigue people and entertain them. But I think a lot of times critics don't understand that."
Another bugbear is critics "who dance around wondering if I am mentally ill. The idea that anybody whose spent their life writing scary stories must have had some soft of a terribly traumatic event in their childhood and they're still trying to work these things out. Well, I don't remember a traumatic event. To which the Freudian immediately responds, `well of course you wouldn't, you've sublimated it'."
King's childhood, although not traumatic perhaps, left him with a need for safe structures. His mother was abandoned by his father when Stephen was two - one of those men who went out for a packet of cigarettes and never returned, an Irish-American whose family came from Derry. "Because my mother raised me, I tend to think of myself as English descent, but I always think that the Irish side is where some of the wildness comes from, and some of the fantasy and the boogies and the haunts and the night creatures."
They were poor. "Not dirt, hard scrabble poor, running around in potato sacks for clothes, but money was tight. My mother worked in a number of menial jobs, in a bakery, a laundry, stuff like that. And she used to moan about the cost of shoes and how we outgrew them every six or seven months. And man, I'm just grateful to be able to get a new pair of jeans, trade in the car or whatever. It's great." And Stephen King means it. The multi-millionaire has no interest in the trappings of wealth. Just the security of "knowing I can put my children though college". His greatest indulgence is a Jaguar sports car.
Stephen King's small-town America is pitched around Bangor, Maine, renamed Derry in his books. Small-town values ("we still live in the fifties") continue to inform his life. King and his wife Tabitha have been married for 31 years. They have three children - the oldest 28, the youngest 17. Mike Noonan, King's alter ego in Bag of Bones, says that men's lives are defined by two primary forces, work and marriage. In his own case, he says, they are totally interrelated.
`There are two reasons I've been successful and prolific. I've stayed healthy and I've stayed married. Marriage creates a solidity and a routine in life and in my case, because my wife isn't in the slightest impressed by my celebrity or fame or any of those things, she's kept me in my place and my place is not too big and not too small. But just right."
They met at University of Maine; both were scholarship students paying their way through college with jobs in the library. Tabitha King is a novelist in her own right. ("I call them straight novels, by which I mean nongenre. They revolve around the war between the sexes.") And her husband owes her a lot. It was Tabby who retrieved the manuscript of Carrie from the trash can. King was working in a laundry at the time. "I couldn't get a job teaching and I thought to myself, "I've just replicated my mother's life. I struggled to go to college, she worked in a laundry and here I am raising two kids and working in a laundry'." The salvaged Carrie was published in 1973. The paperback sold 1.3 million copies. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bag of Bones by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in the UK