Stephen King's 'Mr. Mercedes' is not a conventional horror novel. No ghosts, no vampires, no prune-faced escapees of the graveyard.
I didn't want to write a book as Stephen King's son, because all I did was get born, and that's not much of an accomplishment. If that was the reason my book was published, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. I wanted to do my own thing.
I like 'Reanimator,' and I like 'Evil Dead 2.' But I really like the Corman movies from the late '60s and early '70s, and my favorite is 'The Mask of Red Death' with Vincent Price because - spoiler alert - but at the end of the movie, Vincent Price, he's the evil prince, and to kill him, his court just, like, dances at him.
I went to public schools in Bangor, Maine, and had as normal a childhood as you could imagine someone could, living in an enormous red house and being the son of a millionaire best-selling writer. I mean, I actually had a strangely normal childhood despite all that.
My first job was as a groundskeeper at the local ballpark in the town where I grew up. There was a lot of down time, and I got to drive tractor, so it was pretty good gig. I've also taught creative writing, dabbled in reviewing and journalism, and toiled as a screenwriter.
A lot of storytelling... you're a bit hypnotized by it, and things just come out in certain ways, and you look at it and try to gather it.
The last thing I want to do is to present something as 'Stephen King, Part II,' and have it be something that's a big disappointment.
One corollary of the wretchedness of the second trilogy of 'Star Wars' films has been the final, demented sanctification of the first trilogy of films.
For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.
The stock market is for people who live in Manhattan and summer in the Hamptons, for people who can afford fancy cars - a Mercedes, say.
I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.
When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.
I find that I'm extremely unattracted to anything that's humorless. There is writing that is entirely serious, and it doesn't ring true to me, because I think, oftentimes, life is very, very funny. Even the worst, most humiliating, savage disappointments in retrospect have elements of bleak humor.
I suspect that perfect happiness is not possible for me. I suppose if I was ever selected for eternal life - the moment I was informed - that would bring me the closest.
Steve Buscemi is the little black dress of cinema, appropriate for any occasion.
I grew up watching Cinemax, the late-night Cinemax of the '80s and early '90s.
The questions about my father are inevitable, regardless of the characters I create or the subject matter.
I was pretty naive about how hard it would be to get out from under the family name. Not that I'm complaining.
It's not easy for me as a writer to suspend my disbelief in a fantastical zone. I can do it. But it's more natural for me to write stories that are comic. Or hopefully comic.
Just because it's physically impossible for Steve Buscemi to be in every movie doesn't mean he's not capable of dramatically improving them all.
