“Survivor Type”—I got to thinking about cannibalism one day—because that’s the sort of thing guys like me sometimes think about—and my muse once more evacuated its magic bowels on my head. I know how gross that sounds, but it’s the best metaphor I know, inelegant or not, and believe me when I tell you I’d give that little Fomit Ex-Lax if he wanted it. Anyway, I started to wonder if a person could eat
himself,
and if so, how much he could eat before the inevitable happened. This idea was so utterly and perfectly revolting that I was too overawed with delight to do more than think about it for days—I was reluctant to write it down because I thought I could only fuck it up. Finally, when my wife asked me what I was laughing at one day when we were eating hamburgers on the back deck, I decided I ought to at least take it for a testdrive.
We were living in Bridgton at the time, and I spent an hour or so talking with Ralph Drews, the retired doctor next door. Although he looked doubtful at first (the year before, in pursuit of another story, I had asked him if he thought it was possible for a man to swallow a cat), he finally agreed that a guy could subsist on himself for quite a while—like everything else which is material, he pointed out, the human body is just stored energy. Ah, I asked him, but what about the repeated shock of the amputations? The answer he gave me is, with very few changes, the first paragraph of the story.
I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.
“Uncle Otto’s Truck”—The truck is real, and so is the house; I made up the story that goes around them one day in my head on a long drive to pass the time. I liked it and so I took a few days to write it down.
“The Reach”—Tabby’s youngest brother, Tommy, used to be in the Coast Guard. He was stationed downeast, in the Jonesport-Beals area of the long and knotty Maine coast, where the Guard’s main chores are changing the batteries in the big buoys and saving idiot drug smugglers who get lost in the fog or run on the rocks.
There are lots of islands out there, and lots of tightly knit island communities. He told me of a real-life counterpart of Stella Flanders, who lived and died on her island. Was it Pig Island? Cow Island? I can’t remember.
Some
animal, anyway.
I could hardly believe it. “She didn’t ever
want
to come across to the mainland?” I asked.
“No, she said she didn’t want to cross the Reach until she died,” Tommy said.
The term Reach was unfamiliar to me, and Tommy explained it. He also told me the lobstermen’s joke about how it’s a mighty long Reach between Jonesport and London, and I put it in the story. It was originally published in Yankee as “Do the Dead Sing?”, a nice enough title, but after some thought I have gone back to the original title here.
Well, that’s it. I don’t know about you, but every time I come to the end, it’s like waking up. It’s a little sad to lose the dream, but everything all around—the real stuff—looks damned good, just the same. Thanks for coming along with me; I enjoyed it. I always do. I hope you arrived safe, and that you’ll come again—because as that funny butler says in that odd New York club, there are always more tales.
STEPHEN KING
Bangor, Maine