斯蒂芬金 我不仅写了怪兽还写了肖申克

There’s a story Stephen King can’t resist telling. He was shopping for cinnamon buns and potato chips one day when a woman approached him. She told him that she didn’t care for horror stories like the ones he wrote, and preferRed uplifting stories, like “The Shawshank Redemption.” When Mr. King told her he wrote that, too, she didn’t believe him.

斯蒂芬·金(Stephen King)经常给人讲这么一个故事。一天，他去买肉桂面包和薯片，一个女人走到他身边，说她不怎么喜欢他那些恐怖小说，还是更喜欢《肖申克的救赎》(The Shawshank Redemption)之类振奋人心的故事。金告诉她，《肖申克的救赎》也是他写的，她却不肯相信。

If there are any lingering doubts about Mr. King’s stylistic range, they should be put to rest by his new collection, “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams,” which features 20 stories that seem to touch on every genre imaginable, except for romance. There are crime and horror stories, a narrative poem and a grim western, along with realistic stories about marriage, aging and substance abuse.

金创作的体裁如此多样，就算人们对此还有任何疑虑，他的新小说集《噩梦集市》(The Bazaar of Bad Dreams)也足以打消这些怀疑。书中收录了20个短篇小说，几乎涉及除浪漫故事之外所有能想到的类型。有犯罪小说、恐怖小说、一篇叙事诗和一个阴郁的西部故事，此外还有关于婚姻、衰老和滥用药物的现实主义小说。

The collection also functions as a companion of sorts to his 2000 book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.” In his new book, Mr. King introduces each story, describing how he got the idea and what inspired him. The catalyst for one, “The Dune,” about a sand dune where the names of people who are about to die appear, came to him all at once when he was walking his dog on a beach in Florida. Others came from equally unlikely sources: a glimpse of a woman sitting on a bus, losing a bet with his son, eating lunch with his wife at Applebee’s and seeing a man cutting up his older dining companion’s steak. Another, “The Little Green God of Agony,” was drawn from his near-fatal road accident in 1999 and his long recovery.

这部小说集可以和他2000年的《写作这回事：创作生涯回忆录》(On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)对照观看。在这部新书里，金介绍了每一个故事，描述了每个故事的创意和灵感来源。比如《沙丘》(The Dune)，讲的是即将死去的人们的名字会显示在一座沙丘上面，他是在佛罗里达州海滩上遛狗的时候突然想到这个点子的。还有些创意的源头同样不可思议：对巴士上一个女人的惊鸿一瞥、和儿子打赌输了、和妻子在Applebee’s餐厅吃饭，看到一个男人给一起用餐的长者切牛排……《小小的绿色痛苦之神》(The Little Green God of Agony)的灵感则是来自1999年那场差点要了他的命的车祸，以及其后漫长的恢复期。

“When readers come to a short story or a novel, the writer disappears completely, and that should be the case in the story, but it’s sort of fun to be able to talk about where the story came from,” Mr. King said. “It was a pleasure to talk about the craft again.”

“读者们读到一个短篇小说或一部长篇小说时，作者就彻底消失了，故事就是这样，但是能够聊聊故事的灵感来源也不错，”金说，“能够再次聊起创作这门技巧，实在非常愉快。”

In a telephone interview, Mr. King spoke about what scares him, why he’d like to be known for more than horror stories and why he has vivid dreams when he’s not writing. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

在电话采访中，金说起了让自己害怕的事情；他为什么希望以恐怖小说之外的作品而为人所知；不写作的时候，他为什么总能做栩栩如生的梦。以下是经过编辑的谈话节选。

Q. This collection seems to showcase your stylistic range. Was that an intentional effort, to emphasize the diversity of your work?

问：这部小说集展示了你创作体裁的多样；你是不是有意在强调自己风格的多样化？

A. It was. I wanted to try to spread across this whole spectrum of different things that I’m able to do. And I guess part of that might have been a subconscious reaction to the idea of being dismissed as a horror writer and as the guy who does the monsters. I am the guy who does the monsters, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do other things as well.

答：是的。我想试着尽量去写各种我能写的东西。我经常被错误地视为恐怖小说作家，是个只写怪兽的家伙，我觉得我对多样化的尝试部分可能是对这种看法的一种下意识的反应。我确实是那个写怪兽的家伙，但这并不意味着我写不好别的。

Q. You’ve questioned the arbitrary divide between genre fiction and literary fiction in the past. Was that another goal of yours with this collection, to show people that those labels don’t matter or apply to you?

问：过去你曾经质疑类型小说与文学小说之间的壁垒。这本小说集是不是代表了你的另一个目标，向人们显示任何标签对你来说都不重要，或者说不适用于你？

A. That has to happen somewhere else. It can’t happen with me. I never sat down to write a story where I said, ‘This is going to be a piece of literary fiction,’ or ‘This is going to be a piece of genre fiction.’ I picked the story “Mile 81” because it’s a perfect example of the sort of thing that people expect from me, and it does hark back to the days when I was writing short fiction to pay the electric bill, and I knew what those men’s magazines wanted. They wanted a scary story that was kind of gruesome. I loved all that pulp stuff, and that’s what “Mile 81” is, it’s a pulp story, and I like to think it has a little more texture. So you start with that, and then you move on to “Premium Harmony” — that has a little more of a Raymond Carver feel to it. It isn’t an effort to try to convince people that I’m a literary writer, that I’m a Jonathan Franzen wearing a popular fiction hat. I don’t want to do that. I can only write what I can write, but I was able to look at the range of stories and arrange them in a certain way.

答：这种事可能会发生在别的什么地方，却不会发生在我身上。我从来都不会坐下来写一篇小说，并且说：“我要写一个文学小说，”或者“我要写一个类型小说”。我选了《81英里休息区》(Mile 81)这一篇，因为它是一个完美的例子，正是人们期待我写的那种东西，它确实让人想起我当年为了付电费账单而写的那些短篇小说，我了解男性杂志的需求，他们想要那种有点残酷的恐怖故事。我喜欢那些低俗杂志的调调，《81英里休息区》就是一个低俗小说，我觉得它更有质感一些。第一篇是这个，接下来是《和为贵》(Premium Harmony)，它有点雷蒙德·卡佛(Raymond Carver)的感觉。它并不是为了向人们证明我是个文学作家，是戴着流行小说帽子的乔纳森·弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)。我不想这样。我只能写自己能写的东西，但我可以在这些故事的范畴之内，用合适的方式把它们安排好。

Q. In your introductions to the stories, you often describe how an idea will stay with you half-formed for years, until some catalyst makes you go back to it. Do you write your ideas down somewhere?

问：在你为这些故事写的介绍里，你经常说，某个酝酿了一半的点子会在你头脑停留好几年，直到某个催化剂出现，让你重新想起它。你会把这些点子记下来吗？

A. I don’t write anything down, any ideas ever, because that’s a good way to immortalize really bad ideas. The bad ideas fall out. It’s a natural Darwinian process. They go away somehow. It’s like throwing a bunch of crackers in a sieve. Some of those ideas shake out because the crumbs get too small, but the big ones stay.

答：我什么都不记下来，什么点子都不记，因为这样就会永远记住很多真正糟糕的点子。糟糕的点子会被忘掉。这是一个自然的，达尔文式的过程。它们自然地消失了。就像把一把碎饼干扔在筛子上。有些点子被过滤掉，因为碎屑太小了，但是大的都会留下来。

I have an idea right now about a guy who kills his wife, and then his wife shows up and she’s his wife, but she’s strange. She’s pale. I can see her right now. He knows that he’s killed her, and he goes and digs up the place that he buried her, see what I’m saying? And I don’t really know what he finds, whether it’s a body there, but it’s a story idea that stayed with me for a long time.

我现在就有个点子，一个男人杀掉了自己的妻子，然后他的妻子又出现了，她仍然是他的妻子，只不过非常奇怪。她很苍白，她现在就浮现在我的面前。他知道自己杀死了她，于是跑去挖掘他埋葬她的地方，你明白我在说什么吗？我不确定他能找到什么，有没有找到尸体。但这是我想了很久的一个点子。

Q. You’re in an incredibly prolific phase. What do you think is driving your creativity at this late stage in your career?

问：你正处于非常高产的阶段。在你写作生涯的晚期，你的驱动力是什么呢？

A. I’m not as a prolific as I used to be. There was a time when I published four books a year. As a college student, I had so much in my head that I had migraine headaches. Right now, I’m always happy if I have two or three ideas bouncing around that seem tasty.

答：我已经不像过去那样高产了。有段时间，我一年出四本书。上大学的时候，我脑子里有那么多东西，结果得了偏头疼。现在，如果我脑子里还有两三个看上去还不错的好点子在活跃着，我就很高兴了。

Q. You’ve said that when you’re not writing, if you have a break between books, you have especially vivid dreams. Why do you think that is?

问：你说过，不写作的时候，在出书的间隙如果能休息，你就会做特别栩栩如生的梦。你觉得这是为什么？

A. You get habituated to the process, which is very mysterious, but it’s very much like dreaming. A lot of times I can’t remember where these stories came from or what it was like to write them because it’s like being in a trance state when I sit down to write.

答：你已经习惯了这个过程，它非常神秘，但它非常像是做梦。有很多次，我已经记不起笔下的故事是从哪儿来的，或者它们是怎么写的，因为我坐下来写东西的时候，感觉就像处于一种恍惚状态。

Once the book is done, the stories are done, you don’t have anything in particular that you want to do. The process goes on, but it goes on at night, your brain does that, and you have the dreams. When I write again, it stops.

当一本书写完，故事结束了，你又没有什么特别想做的事。这个过程还在继续，不过是发生在夜里，你的大脑非常活跃，就开始做梦。等我再次开始写作，它就消失了。

Q. So you don’t remember your dreams?

问：那你不记得这些梦吗？

A. No. I don’t have them. I don’t dream when I’m writing.

答：不，不记得。而且一开始写作我就不做梦了。

Q. One of the stories was sparked by your near-fatal accident in 1999, when you were walking and were hit by a van. But in the introduction, you say that you’re “not in the business of confessional fiction” and that this story turned into a horror story instead. Why are you opposed to confessional writing?

问：这些短篇小说里，有一篇是受1999年那场差点让你送命的车祸启发写下的，当时你正在走路，被一辆面包车撞了。但在简介里，你却说自己“不写自白式的小说”，而且这个故事最后变成了一个恐怖故事。你为什么不喜欢自白式的写作？

A. You use your experiences to make the fiction more real to the reader. You rely on things that you absolutely know, because that gives you bedrock to stand on when you write the fiction, and I knew about pain. Pain is one of those things like sexual ecstasy that’s very difficult to write about unless you’ve experienced it. I knew about the therapy and how much it hurts, and I did want to write about that from the standpoint of some guy who didn’t want to go through the pain to get the positive benefit of it. And then it turned out that this guy really did have this sort of demonic creature inside of him. That was kind of cool.

答：你运用自己的经历，让小说对于读者来说更真实。你依靠自己彻底了解的事物，因为它给了你一个写虚构小说的基础。我了解这种痛苦。痛苦和性高潮一样，除非你有亲身体验，否则是非常难写的。我知道治疗过程是什么样，知道那有多疼，我很想站在这样一个人的视角来写故事，他不想经历这种痛苦去获得其中的好处。结果这个人体内确实有那种邪恶生物。这还挺酷的。

I don’t live that interesting of a life. All I can do is take pieces of my own experience or even stuff from my reading or viewing and put them in a story that I think will entertain people. That’s the main job, to entertain people, and confession can get boring after a while. I guess that’s why I can’t see myself ever writing a full-blown memoir. I’m not sure anybody would want to read it.

我的生活不那么有趣。我能做的只有把自己经历的片段，或者我读过、看到过的东西的片段拿出来，放进一个我觉得可以娱乐别人的故事里。娱乐别人是我的主业，而自白过段时间就可能让人厌烦。我觉得这也解释了为什么我不会写一本全面的回忆录。我不确定有人会愿意读。

Q. What made you want to write scary stories in the first place?

问：你最早为什么想写那些吓人的故事呢？

A. Nothing. There are certain minerals, for lack of a better word, buried in our nature, that come with the DNA, that are part of the original equipment. For me, I was about 8 or 9 years old, and my brother and I were going through some stuff that my mother had in this crawl space in an apartment in Stratford, [Conn.], and there were boxes and boxes of my father’s stuff. There were a bunch of paperbacks, and one of them had a cover that showed this green monster crawling out of an open grave. My brother didn’t want anything to do with that, and I looked at that and thought, ‘That’s mine.’ I want to know what that’s about. As a kid, I went to see every horror movie I could possibly see. Sometimes my brother went with me. My brother’s two years older, and he would put his hat over his face. I never put my hat over my face.

答：没什么。我们的天性中有某种特殊的“矿藏”——我没有更好的词来形容它——它就在我们的DNA里，就像是我们的原始装备。我在八九岁的时候，和哥哥在（康涅狄格州）斯特拉特福德的公寓里，看我妈妈堆在那低矮空间里的东西，有好几箱都是我爸爸的东西。有一大堆平装书，还有一本书，封面是一个绿色的怪物，从敞开的坟墓里爬出来。我哥哥不想看，我盯着这本书，想：“这是我的。”我想知道这本书里讲了什么。小时候，我看过所有能看的恐怖电影。有时候哥哥也和我一起去，他比我大两岁，看到恐怖的地方总是用帽子挡着脸。我从来不用帽子挡住脸。

Q. What are you most afraid of?

问：你最害怕的东西是什么？

A. Everything? Death, but not even death so much as Alzheimer’s, premature senility. My idea of a horror movie is “Still Alice.” The things that scare me or interest me over the years are less drive-in movie horror stuff, and more, what can you find in real life that scares the devil out of you?

答：最害怕？死亡，但死亡也不像阿尔兹海默症那样可怕，过早的衰老不能自理。我觉得最可怕的电影就是《依然爱丽丝》(Still Alice)。这些年来，让我害怕，或者让我感兴趣的事不再是那种免下车影院里放的恐怖片，而是那种现实生活中能把你吓得半死的东西。

Q. You certainly have a talent for scaring people.

问：你的确很有吓人的天赋。

A. But I want all the people who don’t like to be scared. I want to welcome them in a gentle way, and then scare them. I want to get them in there, where they can’t get out.

答：但我希望吸引那些不想被吓到的人们。我想用一种温和的方式迎接他们，然后再吓住他们。我想带他们进来，然后他们就别想离开。