We all know Stephen King as the master of the macabre, so we thought it would be fun to subvert expectations and use our interview with him to get a nice clean wholesome Halloween story. We figured a guy who grew up in small-town Maine and invented the word “pie-hole” must have some cutesy-spooky memories of trick-or-treating in the ’50s. King seemed delighted at our request, and we assumed he was eager to show a lighter side of himself. We were wrong.
He’s been talking for the better part of an hour and the shit this man has said will haunt our nightmares for the rest of our lives. He spent 20 minutes describing diarrhea so graphically that I have it now. I don’t even know how we got there! It’s time to get this interview back on track.
The Hard Times: Look, can we just like, reset here? I don’t want to offend you, we all respect you a lot, but I’m not sure you understood the assignment guy.
Stephen King: I thought you wanted a trick-or-treat story?
Yes, but like, a wholesome one, from your real life as a boy in Maine. So far you have said “Cunnie Juice,” “methamphetamine,” a bunch of really dated words for black people, and the sentence “He could feel a trickle of warm blood dripping down his sex” several times.
All that really happened though!
Really? Jesus. Okay well, was there maybe a less macabre Halloween from your childhood?
Oh! I get it. You wanna lean into the cutesy-cornball side of Stephen King. I’m on board!
Awesome! Okay so happy Halloween memory, how old are you? What did you go as?
Well, when I was 10 years old I went trick-or-treating as the spitting image of Michael Landon from “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.” Really went all out, great mask, makeup, the Letterman jacket and everything.
Oh that’s so cool!
Yeah, but the most elaborate parts of the costume were the parts people couldn’t see. I really wanted to capture the angst of a boy who turned into a wolf, so I applied fur to my genitals as well using spirit gum. I’ll tell ya you would howl too if you were chaffing like that every full moon!
O…kay.
Of course, the real horror came at the end of the night when I pulled the stuff off. Talk about pain. I could feel a trickle of warm blood dripping down my…
Stephen.
Whoops. Sorry, note taken. To write is human, to edit is divine I always say.
So what were the highlights of the actual trick-or-treating? Did you get a lot of good candy?
Oh heck yes, me and my buddy Dennis, he wore one of those dimestore vampire costumes, it was a hand-me-down from his big brother Teddy because his abusive father had recently suffered an agonizing leg injury at the mill and taken to drink, which didn’t leave much money for amenities like Halloween costumes or hot meals every night, we were just delighted as our pillowcases got heavy with mars bars, milky ways, starbursts, you name it!
Okay, part of that was sweet.
We could barely carry the dang things by the time we got to the old Cooper place. Crazy Cooper we all called him. Rumor had it he was discharged during the war for making necklaces out of severed German ears, some of them from civilians. He was about the cruelest most cantankerous sonofabitch you ever could meet. We weren’t expecting candy, of course, we just wanted to be able to say we had the balls to ring his bell at school the next day.
Okay this is getting kinda dark.
No no no, this one’s a knee-slapper I promise, stay with me. Cooper had this wife Betty, enormous woman! Boulder Betty we all called her. Boy oh boy I can’t emphasize enough how truly fat this woman was.
Do we really need to focus on that?
Not really. Anyway Betty was big and fat like a monster. Betty the blob we called her. Rumor had it her stepdad Pete was handsy and it screwed her up bad. Sometimes she would just scream at the top of her lungs in the middle of the supermarket and then just keep shopping like nothing happened. Crazy thing was old man Cooper was the spitting image of her stepdad. They started seeing each other a few months after Pete was gunned down outside a nudie bar in Buffalo.
Okay so yeah you rang the bell, then what happened?
Childhood is a funny thing. You have no way of knowing just how fragile and fleeting it is until a big chunk of it is gone. When we rang that bell we expected to hear “Go away!” and maybe the crash of a beer bottle thrown against a wall. We didn’t expect the door to immediately open the way it had, and we certainly didn’t expect what we saw inside to permanently erase an innocence we didn’t even know we had.
This isn’t really… well, Jesus, what did you see?
“An angel’s smile is what you sell
You promised me heaven, then put me through hell
Chains of love got a hold on me
When passion’s a prison, you can’t break free”
– Jon Bon Jovi
THREE WEEKS EARLIER
Betty Cooper heaved her enormous carriage through the narrow doorway into the kitchen, the chirping of morning birds flaring her migraine like fireworks going off behind her eyes. For a moment she thought she would collapse from agony…
Woah woah woah, you’re flashing back?
Yeah just for like 40 pages or so.
How are you even aware of Betty’s point of view?
Oh, I spied on people. Anyway…
No stop, look, this seems like it’s not going in the direction we’re looking for. We just want one SHORT, cutesy little story about you doing normal Halloween stuff as a child, don’t you have any sweet little wholesome Halloween memories?
Okay. The next year I was Frankenstein and Dennis, our friends Stewey, Suzy, and a black kid named Marshel all went as different Universal Monsters. We got a ton of candy, then we camped out on Stewey’s family farm, sat around a fire and tried to spook each other with ghost stories.
Okay! Perfect! That’s all we need, Mr. King thank you so much for your time!
And then we had a gangbang.
Oh, come on!
Cunnie juice.