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FEAST OF FEAR. CONVERSATIONS WITH STEPHEN KING.
Limited Deluxe Edition, 1989, No. 339 out of 600 copies, a new, unread, unworn, unopened, otherwise unmarked hardcover, with bound-in red ribbon page marker, also with an equally fine unclipped ($75.00) dust jacket, in a new red slipcase, from Underwood-Miller. Underwood-Miller Series Editors. Conversations with Stephen King. 282 pages. ISBN 0-88733-061-4 (but this links to another book on Amazon) ** The second page has this “This deluxe edition of FEAST OF FEAR is limited to 600 copies, of which 550 have been numbered, 24 have been stamped “Presentation Copy” for contributors, and 26 have been lettered A-Z and leatherbound. This is Copy 339.”
272 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1989
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538 people want to read
About the author
Stephen King
2,617 books885k followersStephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 4, 2008
The title is definitely a misnomer, or at least it requires a sub-subtitle, like "FEAST OF FEAR: CONVERSATIONS WITH STEPHEN KING: WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT WHY HE DOESN'T LIKE THE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF HIS NOVELS" because that is what 85% of the book is about. In addition, it's extremely repetitive (so you read about why King doesn't like the film version of THE SHINING about ten different times) and desperately needed a better proofreader (tons of typos....ugh!). To me it seemed like Underwood and Miller saw a way to make a quick buck by compiling some early King interviews together and slapping a title on them. I'm glad I didn't pay actual money for it!
October 2, 2012
Some of the interviews start repeating the same stuff. But over all you get a lot of behind the scenes info.
April 10, 2020
This compendium is essentially the publication of every major interview conducted with Stephen King from the publication of Carrie through the late 1980s. Other than some dates and interviewer names, it includes no additional context or insights from the editors -- it's years of Stephen King talking about Stephen King, straight from the horse's mouth.
Aside from a few blatant typos, this book is exactly what it promises. Nothing more, nothing less. If you haven't already read or viewed multiple interviews with the author over the years, there might be some insightful stuff here. But of course, if you're like me and bought the book, there's a good chance you already have. That said, there was still a lot I didn't know. While people today say the one and only film he directed--Maximum Overdrive--was a colossal failure, these real-time interviews show the hope and optimism going into it, the work he put into it, the great relationships he built with the entire cast and crew, and even the belief that, while not an Oscar-worthy film by any means, he believed it be great fun for horror audiences. Of course, since then, he's changed his tune. But I suppose that's what time does to us all. It gives us perspective.
It's also interesting to hear how casually he talks of having a drink and his writing process when, since then, it's become public knowledge that he was neck-deep into drugs and alcohol during the 80s. His interviews are clear, insightful, smart, and aptly self-deprecating at times, but you never get the sense that he'd lost control of himself. He seemed genuine to the core, just as you'd hope. More mindblowing is the success he'd had so soon in his life. While that, too, is common knowledge, how he was being given millions and being asked to write movie scripts and direct films by his early thirties is still hard to digest. By the time he published Christine in 1983, he was making so much money that he'd asked for only a $1 advance because he was hyper-aware of how publishers giving him excessive amounts of money was robbing all the other promising authors from getting advances large enough to start their careers. At the time, he was 36, the age I am today.
His career is a behemoth, obviously, and no one is more aware of it than he is. That's why I and countless others are willing to devote time and money to just reading typed interviews with the guy. But sadly, I felt like this book could have been so much more. There could have been more context around each interview, about what he'd recently published or what was in the news at the time. The editors themselves could have at least gotten their own direct interview, and maybe asked all the questions this compendium of interviews never answered. They could have cut back on a lot of the repetition--as authors obviously give a lot of the same answers repeatedly when they're always asked the same questions--and crafted this into more of a timeline. Even the formatting felt like an afterthought, as everything was dropped into large chunks of text with almost no white space on any page, as if they were trying to reduce the number of pages by packing as much in as they could. There was so much missed opportunity that the end product was just a brick of words from a man who self-admittedly knows he could edit his own work better.
Aside from a few blatant typos, this book is exactly what it promises. Nothing more, nothing less. If you haven't already read or viewed multiple interviews with the author over the years, there might be some insightful stuff here. But of course, if you're like me and bought the book, there's a good chance you already have. That said, there was still a lot I didn't know. While people today say the one and only film he directed--Maximum Overdrive--was a colossal failure, these real-time interviews show the hope and optimism going into it, the work he put into it, the great relationships he built with the entire cast and crew, and even the belief that, while not an Oscar-worthy film by any means, he believed it be great fun for horror audiences. Of course, since then, he's changed his tune. But I suppose that's what time does to us all. It gives us perspective.
It's also interesting to hear how casually he talks of having a drink and his writing process when, since then, it's become public knowledge that he was neck-deep into drugs and alcohol during the 80s. His interviews are clear, insightful, smart, and aptly self-deprecating at times, but you never get the sense that he'd lost control of himself. He seemed genuine to the core, just as you'd hope. More mindblowing is the success he'd had so soon in his life. While that, too, is common knowledge, how he was being given millions and being asked to write movie scripts and direct films by his early thirties is still hard to digest. By the time he published Christine in 1983, he was making so much money that he'd asked for only a $1 advance because he was hyper-aware of how publishers giving him excessive amounts of money was robbing all the other promising authors from getting advances large enough to start their careers. At the time, he was 36, the age I am today.
His career is a behemoth, obviously, and no one is more aware of it than he is. That's why I and countless others are willing to devote time and money to just reading typed interviews with the guy. But sadly, I felt like this book could have been so much more. There could have been more context around each interview, about what he'd recently published or what was in the news at the time. The editors themselves could have at least gotten their own direct interview, and maybe asked all the questions this compendium of interviews never answered. They could have cut back on a lot of the repetition--as authors obviously give a lot of the same answers repeatedly when they're always asked the same questions--and crafted this into more of a timeline. Even the formatting felt like an afterthought, as everything was dropped into large chunks of text with almost no white space on any page, as if they were trying to reduce the number of pages by packing as much in as they could. There was so much missed opportunity that the end product was just a brick of words from a man who self-admittedly knows he could edit his own work better.
July 26, 2021
If you want a book that provides insight into Stephen King's writing process, go elsewhere. If you want to know his thoughts on the movie industry and, particularly, Stanley Kubrick's production of his book, "The Shining," this is it. And, lest you forget King's opinion of the movie, the articles in this collection will remind you over and over and over.
The first 100 pages are interesting and offer a nice glimpse into King's mindset. But it gets old and repetitive. These are articles and interviews conducted from around 1979 when Carrie took off to 1984. King was becoming a household name and scores of publications grabbed him for interviews. The questions become mundane, as King even admits. "Where do you get your ideas?" is one that drives him over the edge.
There are a few interesting bits, though. For example, rather than have Christopher Walken play the psychic Johnny Smith in his book "The Dead Zone," King wanted Bill Murray as the lead. He also wanted Robert Duvall or Willie Nelson to play Randall Flagg in "The Stand."
He also adamantly denies he is Richard Bachman when one interview asked him about it. Of course, we later learn King is Bachman.
It's also fun to read about him working on the new novel "It," and making references to an idea he has about the Dark Tower series.
The author is prolific and would be an interesting subject to read about. How does he crank out so much copy in such a short time? He says he writes 1,500 words a day, but there's not much else about his motivations, other than he wants his kids to be able to afford penicillin shots when they get sick. He also touches briefly on his early life of teaching and working at a laundry, which later became the catalyst for his short story "The Mangler."
But, for the most part, this is merely a collection of similar articles that ask King the same stuff. Alone, they are fine articles, but after reading about his dislike for Hollywood and how he made Maximum Overdrive numerous times, it becomes boring. Seems like the editors grabbed as many previously published things, stuffed them in this book and put them quickly on the bookshelves to capitalize on King's booming popularity at the time.
The first 100 pages are interesting and offer a nice glimpse into King's mindset. But it gets old and repetitive. These are articles and interviews conducted from around 1979 when Carrie took off to 1984. King was becoming a household name and scores of publications grabbed him for interviews. The questions become mundane, as King even admits. "Where do you get your ideas?" is one that drives him over the edge.
There are a few interesting bits, though. For example, rather than have Christopher Walken play the psychic Johnny Smith in his book "The Dead Zone," King wanted Bill Murray as the lead. He also wanted Robert Duvall or Willie Nelson to play Randall Flagg in "The Stand."
He also adamantly denies he is Richard Bachman when one interview asked him about it. Of course, we later learn King is Bachman.
It's also fun to read about him working on the new novel "It," and making references to an idea he has about the Dark Tower series.
The author is prolific and would be an interesting subject to read about. How does he crank out so much copy in such a short time? He says he writes 1,500 words a day, but there's not much else about his motivations, other than he wants his kids to be able to afford penicillin shots when they get sick. He also touches briefly on his early life of teaching and working at a laundry, which later became the catalyst for his short story "The Mangler."
But, for the most part, this is merely a collection of similar articles that ask King the same stuff. Alone, they are fine articles, but after reading about his dislike for Hollywood and how he made Maximum Overdrive numerous times, it becomes boring. Seems like the editors grabbed as many previously published things, stuffed them in this book and put them quickly on the bookshelves to capitalize on King's booming popularity at the time.
October 4, 2020
This doesn’t feel like a necessary book- probably a shameless moneygrab. It’s not particularly well-curated or edited. Chapters start off seemingly grouped by time period but then are vaguely lumped by theme. These chapters are frequently repetitive, and often one or two interviews would have sufficed to cover the point. This book could be much shorter and not really lose anything for it.
That being said, this is an interesting primary document/archival document sort of book. Kind of fun to read old interviews and get a peek at the horror movie/book universe at the time and look into the mind of such a prolific author, especially one who seems pretty open about his thoughts- especially after a few years of fame, Stephen King is perfectly happy to complain about the film industry or say some kind of awkward, offensive things. Honestly, this book doesn’t make Steven King seem very interesting- he seems rather normal, and in that respect, that’s kind of interesting. Personally, I think he comes off as a conceited ass half the time, and despite his protests to the contrary, he’s definitely sexist, racist, and homophobic, although maybe his comments read more in line with the general way people talked at the time? It is remarkable how consistent some of his answers to interviewers are over the year though.
That being said, this is an interesting primary document/archival document sort of book. Kind of fun to read old interviews and get a peek at the horror movie/book universe at the time and look into the mind of such a prolific author, especially one who seems pretty open about his thoughts- especially after a few years of fame, Stephen King is perfectly happy to complain about the film industry or say some kind of awkward, offensive things. Honestly, this book doesn’t make Steven King seem very interesting- he seems rather normal, and in that respect, that’s kind of interesting. Personally, I think he comes off as a conceited ass half the time, and despite his protests to the contrary, he’s definitely sexist, racist, and homophobic, although maybe his comments read more in line with the general way people talked at the time? It is remarkable how consistent some of his answers to interviewers are over the year though.
March 13, 2020
HMM, I was sure I had already reviewed this when I finished it a while back......Anyway, I always enjoy interview items from Stephen King. These are early ones, from the early to mid eighties mainly. I liked reading them, but the reason the rating is not great is that way too much time was devoted to the movie made from one of his short stories. The story was 'Trucks" and the movie was "Maximum Overdrive". The movie was King's first foray into directing, so there are many interviews dealing with it. The movie was AWFUL, so not something worth dwelling on! Many of the other interviews are fun reads tho.
May 13, 2023
After many essays and analysis it's time to listen to the author himself. Here you'll come across many interviews and King in his own words. You'll understand why he had to write since being a child, what had an impact on him and his writing, how he became a brand name. He is the true successor of Alfred Hitchcock as most popular scaremonger in the world. A very interesting and detailed volume here, a real feast of fear featuring King. Highly recommended!
January 6, 2025
This one only works for dedicated Constant Readers. It's a series of transcribed interviews from different TV/print outings in the 70s and 80s that give you a pretty good look inside the era that made King a cultural phenomenon.
July 28, 2018
Slightly repetative,but still informative, early interviews with Sai King.
August 1, 2018
It was ok. I was really into it at first, soaking up every word. However after the first 100 pages things started getting very repetitive, to the point where it started getting a little annoying.
March 22, 2013
Fun to go back and read the views on writing and horror from King. Covers articles and interviews from Carrie to pre-release of The Dark Half. Lots of great little nuggets. The articles can get a bit repetitive and a lot of the early ideas were fleshed out in both the introduction to Night Shift and the full non fiction Danse Macabre. While some may cry "Do we have to eat this shit again!" It's easy to skim over some of the repetitive items
July 29, 2009
A great book on a truly powerful writer. Modern Day Horror has to be understood through the mind of Stephen King. This collection of interviews conducted over a decade and a half is a set of marvelous insights into What makes Stephen King tick and why that matters to the rest of us.
January 20, 2017
Spends way too much time on the movies, becomes very repetitive, going over the same information time and time again, and it is riddled with typos. If you want a bunch of King interviews from the 70s to the 80s, though, you'll get em.
October 23, 2008
Really an excellent read. I devoured it when I was first getting into writing horror.
did-not-finish
July 2, 2013I started reading this and it its not what I expected...first chapter is just reprints of articles written around the publication of Carrie...decided I didn't need to read further.
August 27, 2012
Loved reading this book full of interviews with Stephen King. Very insightful and interesting. Only wish there were an updated version as this one was edited around 1989 or so.
March 20, 2013
A good read for some insight into King.
December 14, 2015
Interviews mostly through Maximum overdrive. Enjoyable, but very repetitive.
December 24, 2016
The interviewers ask a lot of the same questions. Reading this book gives you a taste of what it would be like to be famous and have to do interview after interview.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews