Excerpt from Stephen King’s The Bazaar of

Bad Dreams
Stephen King muses on Raymond Carver and literary influences in this preface to
“Premium Harmony”:
My mother had a saying for every occasion. (“And Steve remembers them all,” I can hear my
wife, Tabitha, say, with an accompanying roll of her eyes.)
One of her favorites was “Milk always takes the flavor of what it sits next to in the icebox.” I
don’t know if that’s true about milk, but it’s certainly true when it comes to the stylistic
development of young writers. When I was a young man, I wrote like H. P. Lovecraft when I was
reading Lovecraft, and like Ross Macdonald when I was reading the adventures of PI Lew
Archer.
Stylistic copying eventually wanes. Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as
unique as a fingerprint. Traces of the writers one reads in one’s formative years remain, but the
rhythm of each writer’s thoughts—an expression of his or her very brainwaves, I think—
eventually becomes dominant. In the end, no one sounds like Elmore Leonard but Leonard, and
no one sounds like Mark Twain but Twain. Yet every now and then stylistic copying recurs,
always when the writer encounters some new and wonderful mode of expression that shows him
a new way of seeing and saying. ‘Salem’s Lot was written under the influence of James Dickey’s
poetry, and if Rose Madder sounds in places as if it were written by Cormac McCarthy, it’s
because while I was writing that book, I was reading everything by McCarthy I could get my
hands on.
In 2009, an editor at The New York Times Book Review asked if I would do a double review
of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka, and Carver’s own collected stories, as
published by Library of America. I agreed, mostly so I could explore some new territory.
Although I am an omnivorous reader, I had somehow missed Carver. A large blind spot for a
writer who came of literary age at roughly the same time Carver did, you might say, and you
would be right. All I can say in my own defense is quot libros, quam breve tempus—so many
books, so little time (and yes, I have the tee-shirt).
In any case, I was stunned by the clarity of Carver’s style, and by the beautiful tension of his
prose line. Everything is on the surface, but that surface is so clear that the reader can see a living
universe just beneath. I loved those stories, and I loved the American losers Carver wrote about
with such knowledge and tenderness. Yes, the man was a drunk, but he had a sure touch and a
great heart.
I wrote “Premium Harmony” shortly after reading more than two dozen Carver stories, and it
should come as no surprise that it has the feel of a Carver story. If I had written it at twenty, I
think it would have been no more than a blurred copy of a much better writer. Because it was
written at sixty-two, my own style bleeds through, for better or worse. Like many great American
writers (Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen come to mind), Carver seemed to have little sense of
humor. I, on the other hand, see the humor in almost everything. The humor here is black, but in
my opinion, that’s often the best kind. Because—dig it—when it comes to death, what can you
do but laugh?
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Excerpted from THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS by Stephen King. Copyright © 2015 by Stephen King.
Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.