Four_Past_Midnight_-_3_-_Secret_Window_Secret_Garden
Secret Window, Secret Garden
Page 1 of 84
Two PAST MIDNIGHT:
A note on 'Secret Window, Secret Garden'
I'm one of those people who believe that life is a series of cycles - wheels within wheels, some meshing with others, some spinning alone, but all of them performing some finite, repeating function. I like that abstract image of life as something like an efficient factory machine, probably because actual life, up close and personal, seems so messy and strange. It's nice to be able to pull away every once in awhile and say, 'There's a pattern there after all! I'm not sure what it means, but by God, I see it!'
All of these wheels seem to finish their cycles at roughly the same time, and when they do - about every twenty years would be my guess - we go through a time when we end things. Psychologists have even lifted a parliamentary term to describe this phenomenon they call it cloture.
I'm forty-two now, and as I look back over the last four years of my life I can see all sorts of cloture. It's as apparent in my work as anywhere else. In It, I took an outrageous amount of space to finish talking about children and the wide perceptions which light their interior lives. Next year I intend to publish the last Castle Rock novel, Needful Things (the last story in this volume, 'The Sun Dog,' forms a prologue to that novel). And this story is, I think, the last story about writers and writing and the strange no man's land which exists between what's real and what's make-believe. I believe a good many of my long-time readers, who have borne my fascination with this subject patiently, will be glad to hear that.
A few years ago I published a novel called Misery which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader. Last year I published a book called The Dark Half where I tried to explore the converse: the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer. While that book was between drafts, I started to think
Page 1 of 84
Two PAST MIDNIGHT:
A note on 'Secret Window, Secret Garden'
I'm one of those people who believe that life is a series of cycles - wheels within wheels, some meshing with others, some spinning alone, but all of them performing some finite, repeating function. I like that abstract image of life as something like an efficient factory machine, probably because actual life, up close and personal, seems so messy and strange. It's nice to be able to pull away every once in awhile and say, 'There's a pattern there after all! I'm not sure what it means, but by God, I see it!'
All of these wheels seem to finish their cycles at roughly the same time, and when they do - about every twenty years would be my guess - we go through a time when we end things. Psychologists have even lifted a parliamentary term to describe this phenomenon they call it cloture.
I'm forty-two now, and as I look back over the last four years of my life I can see all sorts of cloture. It's as apparent in my work as anywhere else. In It, I took an outrageous amount of space to finish talking about children and the wide perceptions which light their interior lives. Next year I intend to publish the last Castle Rock novel, Needful Things (the last story in this volume, 'The Sun Dog,' forms a prologue to that novel). And this story is, I think, the last story about writers and writing and the strange no man's land which exists between what's real and what's make-believe. I believe a good many of my long-time readers, who have borne my fascination with this subject patiently, will be glad to hear that.
A few years ago I published a novel called Misery which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader. Last year I published a book called The Dark Half where I tried to explore the converse: the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer. While that book was between drafts, I started to think