Rexer: What in the world possessed you to undertake such a massive project as The Shape Under The Sheet? Labor of love? Pact with the devil? Too much white pizza?

Spignesi:

All or none of the above? Actually, the idea came to me after finishing my first book, Mayberry, My Hometown, which was an "Andy Griffith Show" encyclopedia. That was a relatively straightforward book to work on: The show consisted of 249 episodes, and to my concordance material on those shows, I added a few interviews and some other things and Voila! It was done. I thought tackling King's work in the same manner would be simple. Was I wrong! I had no idea when I signed the contract for The Shape what would be involved. And that's probably why the book is coming out in May of 1991, even tough I signed the original contract on December 14, 1986!

The book kind of got out of hand, didn't it? Kind of possessed you, took control, nearly drove you to a special "laughing place" of your own, didn't it? Fess up!

Spignesi:

Not really, although the potential was certainly there! It was honestly an enormous amount of fun -- truly a great pleasure to do. As far as getting out of hand... I suppose you could say that's true, but that was mostly my fault. I really wanted to make The Shape the definitive word on King's fiction, and that necessitated adding things I hadn't originally planned to, such as interviews, essays, fiction, poetry, the Castle Rock section, the Castle Schlock section, indexes, film sections, and a whole bunch of other unclassifiable material. The book as originally conceived was supposed to just be the concordance, but as I worked on it, it took on a life of its own! It became sort of like Richie Grenadine in "Gray Matter," you know?

Just how big did The Shape end up? What is it, word-wise? Do you know?

Spignesi:

The book runs eight hundred, 8 1/2 X 11 pages. The concordance section (which is essentially the heart of the book) runs about four hundred pages, and consists of 18,000 alphabetical entries comprising approximately 400,000 words. We figure that the rest of the book runs another 300,000 words or so, so we're pushing three-quarters of a million of those babies.

How many hours did it take you, Steve? Any idea? Broken down, will you even make minimum wage -- and if you don't, isn't that some sort of labor violation? (I know, if you do it for the money, you're a monkey, right?)

Spignesi:

No one has ever asked me that before, so I've never taken the time to figure it out until now. The Shape Under The Sheet took me approximately 6,500 hours to write. That doesn't include the research/reading time where I sat with the works and took notes on the People, Places and Things in the tales. So add maybe another couple of thousand hours or so to that figure and you're looking at 8,500-9,000 hours. This comes out, believe it or not, to one solid year of time. As far as whether or not I'm making minimum wage for my efforts, I hope, of course, to do well with the book, but if I don't, I don't. Doing the book was its own reward, and yes, you're right: Anything looked at strictly as a vehicle for financial gain makes you a monkey. We are talking the creative arts here, and I think that necessarily brings with it a certain willingness to ignore the money side of the equation and instead focus on the art. If a project is done right if the writer/musician/actor/poet/painter, whatever, puts his or her soul into the art and finally and ultimately believes that the work says something about the human condition and our life on this little pebble -- then we can be satisfied that we have been successful, regardless of the money realized for the project. That sounds kind of high-minded, but I really believe that. "If you build it, he will come," you know? (And to quote SK: "Faith and power are interchangeable.") George Beahm (the author of The Stephen King Companion) and I were recently discussing this and he said something that really made a lot of sense. He said, "Let's face it. People don't enter the field of the creative arts to get rich quick." And he's right. If it happens, fine, but a lot of artists need a day job, or at least some kind of supplement to their "creative" income.

I know you have a full time job other than writing, so where do you find the time to pull this off?

Spignesi:

I manage a family jewelry business that takes up a lot of my time -- close to sixty hours a week. I'm moving towards less time there and more time writing, but while working on The Shape I was putting in those kind of hours. The way I was able to write The Shape and also work full-time was by getting up very early (5:30 or so) and writing from 6:00 until 9:00 A.M. Then I'd shower, hit the post office, and work at the store until 9:00 at night. Weekends I'd put in ten to fourteen hours per day writing. Doing The Shape required a total commitment and no whining. There were many days when I didn't feel like sitting down with this thing, but I did it because I believed in it and I wanted to see it brought to fruition. It meant using vacations to write, and skipping a lot of family functions. But in the end I think it was all worth it. I'm very pleased with the end result of my efforts.

What about the rumor that you regularly "flipped" into the Territories while writing The Shape, supposedly to do research? Any truth to that?

Spignesi:

It's all true. In fact, I was one of those guys Jack saw flying around the wooden tower off the Western Road. That was fun. I had never had wings before... except for Band On The Run and a couple of other albums.

While researching this book, you essentially performed a complete literary dissection on just about every King novel and short story known to man, didn't you?

Spignesi:

That's correct. I cover every novel and collection from Carrie through Four Past Midnight, and every uncollected short story from 1963's "People, Places and Things" collection through 1990's "An Evening at God's" (a one-minute original play Steve wrote for a charity auction) and "The Moving Finger" (which appeared in a special SK issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December of 1990. I include details and specifics on such rare works as The Plant, "Slade, and "Before The Play" as well as on three unpublished novels (The Aftermath, Sword In The Darkness and Blaze), an unpublished, unfinished short story called "Keyholes," and even Steve's original first-draft handwritten screenplay outline of the film Silver Bullet. I also cover the legendary unpublished short story "Squad D." For each work I researched and wrote a comprehensive alphabetical concordance broken into "People," "Places," and "Things" sections. As I said earlier, the concordance alone runs 18,000 entries and 400,000 words.

Were you surprised at what you found? Were there things in his books that you didn't expect... trends, themes, ideas you never noticed before?

Spignesi:

Yes. For instance, I found characters "crossing-over" from book to book. After a year or so of working on this thing and finding all these inter-connected people and places, I found myself telling people that it seems as though Stephen King is actually writing one huge book and telling one incredible story and just breaking it up into annual volumes. If I didn't spend so much time studying the texts, I probably wouldn't have noticed that Mrs. Kaspbrak (and, it is assumed, Eddie) from It, appears in Misery. Or that a "Mr. Halleck" appears in the 1982 Different Seasons novella "Apt Pupil." Was this "Billy Halleck" from Thinner? In 1982?

And was Stephen King planting "Richard Bachman" hints all along? Also, I found a couple of instances where King used an image twice. Weird things. In It, King describes Stan Uris's erection as "an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair." And in the short story "Sneakers" from Night Visions 5, he describes the dead guy Sneakers' erection as "a huge peeling hard-on sticking up from the thatch of his pubic hair like an exclamation point." That one sort of "stuck-out" at me. (Ha, ha.)

There are also a preponderance of overweight characters in King's fiction, most of them not portrayed in too sympathetic a manner, either. Also, two of King's characters share an affliction called gynecomastia -- enlarged breasts in males. It, as a child, Ben Hanscom wore a sweatshirt every day of the year because Belch Huggins called him "Tits" when he once wore a Ban-Lon shirt to school. And in The Stand, when Doe Soames examines Sheriff Baker after he comes down with the flu, he says, "Take off y'shirt, John, and lets see if your boobs are as big as they used to be." After the sheriff takes off his shirt, the doctor says to Nick Andros, "There, what'd I tell you? Hasn't he got a set?"

And then there are the thematic similarities. Of course, there are King's recurring themes of fear of machinery, and paranoia about government and authority, to name just two. But there's also a subtext in much of King's fiction that was called to my attention by Doug Winter. King writes in the school of naturalism, which states that man is ruled by fate, but that he has the power to make moral decisions, and throughout King's canon of work, we find ordinary characters bring thrust into extraordinary situations and circumstances, and having to make decisions that affect their own lives and the lives of others.

When the decisions made are morally correct, the results are good; when morally incorrect, the results are tragic. It was fate that Johnny Smith would be in a car accident and wake up from his coma precognitive. But it was Johnny's morally correct decision to use this power for good, by attempting to assassinate Greg Stillson, and thus save the planet from a lunatic who would undoubtedly unleash a nuclear holocaust. By so doing, Johnny sacrificed himself for a greater good. That's just one example of how King's work has greater thematic depth and scope than many critics give him credit for.

There are hundreds more. Doug Winter really shines a light on this facet of King's writing in Stephen King: The Art Of Darkness, as does Michael Collings in much of his interpretive critique.

How in the world did you keep track of all these facts? You had to be computerized, right?

Spignesi:

Every work was originally researched by either myself or one other research assistant. "Researching" the work consisted of sitting down with the novel or short story and, while reading through the piece, making note of every person, place or thing mentioned, and giving a brief "definition" of the item. This resulted in a stack of file folders approximately three feet high filled with yellow legal pad pages loaded with notes. (I reproduced two pages of It notes in The Shape Under The Sheet on page 376.) I then had to sit down at the computer and type in the information. I had a data base file for every novel and short story and worked on a Macintosh 128K with PFS File and Microsoft Word. PFS File alphabetized the entries for me and I was then able to move the data into Word for editing and rewriting. I ended up with approximately forty-five 400K diskettes of material. I submitted the final manuscript of The Shape to my publisher on disk. This facilitated ease of editing and allowed me to make last-minute changes simply by sending a new disk with the new material. There is no way this book could have been done in five years without a computer. It would have been a lifetime project if it all had to be done by hand.

One of the sections in the book is called "How King Kills," a lighthearted look at death, torture and mutilation in the Great One's work. Just how does King kill?

Spignesi:

Any way he can. I broke that section of my book into nine parts, and let me read them to you for the record:
1) Death from Amputation(s), Decapitation, or Loss of Bodily Parts or Fluids.
2) Death from Being Eaten (By Anything, Including Animals and/or Bugs)
3) Death from Diseases
4) Death by Monsters
5) Drowning Deaths
6) Most Bizarre Deaths
7) Gentlest Death
8) Nonsupernatural Deaths (nonspecific, But Including Murders and Vehicular Deaths
9) Suicides

There are some very strange "executions" in King's fiction, including being murdered by and having her brains eaten by her son (that was Mrs. Donlin from It); and death from having their heads ripped off and used as bowling balls and their arms and legs used as bowling pins (that was Regi-Men from the unfilmed segment of Creepshow 2 called "Pinfall.") Reading through the listings of all the ways King Kills people is very funny. After a few descriptions, it becomes so bizarre that it moves into "overkill," if you'll forgive the pun. One of my favorite (and funniest) deaths is that of Miss Polly Peachtree from "Slade" who (supposedly) died when a flaming Montgolfier balloon crashed into her barn and killed her. Also, I like Mrs. Leighton's death in the short story "The Blue Air Compressor;" an air hose was stuck down her throat and she was "over-inflated" until she exploded.

Shouldn't this book be on every library reference shelf in America?

Spignesi:

Yes. "And I thank you for your support."

You were able to get over twenty people to contribute to The Shape from writers like Richard Matheson to King's boyhood friend Chris Chesley (whom you call his "first true collaborator"). Two questions: Did you find people anxious to share their views about King? And did you end up with a lot of things in the book that have never seen print before?

Spignesi:

Yes, as a rule, I found people very willing to share their thoughts and feelings about King and his work. The only one who hesitated for a little while was Chris Chesley -- until he got to know me. Chris is very cautious about whom he speaks with -- about anything, not just his childhood with Stephen King -- and he wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing a frivolous, useless book. I was probably most excited about snagging interviews with Steve's brother, David (no one had ever interviewed him about their childhood before), and with Shirley Sondregger, Steve's personal secretary.

As far as ending up with things that had never been published before, I'd have to say, yes, I was fortunate to get my hands on some material that no one has ever seen in print before. I'm publishing the last surviving issue of "Dave's Rag," a community newspaper written and published by Dave and Stephen King when they were kids. The issue I'm publishing contains writing by Stephen King, including a "TV Review" column, and a classified ad for a "new King book."

Also, Dave King allowed me to reprint heretofore unpublished photos of Steve and his mother in my book. I think King fans will find a lot of surprises in The Shape Under The Sheet. I'd also like to add that the interviews I did with King's contemporaries (Douglas Winter, Robert McCammon, Ray Garton, Joe Lansdale, J.N. Williamson, Richard Christian Matheson, Joseph Payne Brennan and others) are incredibly insightful, and when taken together, provide a very keen appraisal of Steve and his work.

What pleased you most about doing The Shape?

Spignesi:

A few things. Among them, the fact that this was destined to be the definitive word on King's work; and also, being able to get up every morning and work on something I enjoyed so much. It's great fun to be able to beg off from some social function in order to work -- especially when the "work" consists of watching Pet Sematary a couple of times and then writing a review of it! Even though writing The Shape was hard work, it never really seemed like "work," you know? It was too much fun for that, and anyway the work "work" usually connotes some sort of unpleasant drudgery, and it was far from that.

Now that it's several months done, is there anything you wish you could've added to the book, maybe something that made you slap your forehead and say, "Why didn't I think of that before?"

Spignesi:

Actually, it's almost the exact opposite. The book, as published, contains only about two-thirds of the material that I either planned on including and actually did the work, or wanted to include, but just ran out of time. Things like a 15,000 word astrological interpretation of King, several other interviews, articles and essays, best-seller charts and info, more fiction (including my own short story "Orchids"), a lengthy section on King's non-fiction, and more. Most of this material will likely be included in volume 2 of the encyclopedia, tentatively scheduled for 1997 or so.

Hey, I know! How about an unabridged audio recording of The Shape -- read by the author?

Spignesi:

Yeah, right -- if you'll sit there and turn the pages.

I have a friend named Leonard Norman who tells anyone who'll listen that the works of Stephen King will be required reading within thirty years in every school in the nation. Could this be true? Should this be true?

Spignesi:

It definitely could be true, and in fact I think it may even be almost true today. I have many friends who have told me that they've had to read The Shining and/or 'Salem's Lot for an English course on the Gothic novel. (Both at high school and college level.) And in fact, my mother sent the daughter of a friend a copy of my Stephen King Quizbook because she needed it for a Contemporary American Lit course at college.

As for whether or not it should be true, I'd have to say unquestionably yes. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say it will be true. Stephen King is the Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens of our time, and sometimes it takes "serious" culture and academia a bit longer to catch up with "popular" culture and "the masses."

Your second book, The Stephen King Quizbook, was published last year by Signet. Is it still doing well?

Spignesi:

Thankfully, yes. It did very well when first released, and Signet is re-issuing the book this year to coincide with the paperback edition of King's Four Past Midnight. I think they're planning on the book being a perennial release -- as long as King keeps writing, I guess! I am extremely grateful for the privilege of being allowed to do the authorized King quiz book.

Any chance of a second quiz book? I'm sure you've still got lots of untapped King trivia trapped somewhere in that brain of yours just waiting to be let out.

Spignesi:

Not a second book, but instead a periodic, revised, expanded edition. Two or three years from now we'll release an edition that will bring the quizzes up to date and include the novellas in Four Past Midnight, the novels The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands, Needful Things and Dolores Claiborne, the short story "The Moving Finger," and any other stories and books King releases between now and then. I may also expand the movie quizzes, add new material to some of the existing Miscellaneous Quizzes, and add a few more quizzes besides.

What does Stephen Spignesi like to do when he's not writing? What's a typical SS day?

Spignesi:

Well, that's actually two questions -- and two answers. Since I currently do work full time, there really isn't too much time when I'm not writing. But when that rare time does occur, I usually spend time with my wife and watch a movie (usually something we wanted to see when it came out but didn't have time -- I recently rented and watched Total Recall, for instance). I also spend time reading, walking or playing piano and writing music. Then there are the times when I'm called on for a lot of media interviews. That's beginning to happen now with the release of The Shape Under The Sheet, and those take up a lot of time. I also lecture periodically (on King, The Andy Griffith Show, and Woody Allen). I like to visit my brother and his family (I'm the godfather of his daughter, Jennifer). That's how my free time is spent. Work days are another story. Usually I'm at my desk by six, put in about three hours, and then go to work until nine at night. Weekend writing days are usually ten to twelve hour stretches broken up by the periodic MTV and iced tea break.

Is it true that King based his short story "The Cat From Hell" on a certain New Haven feline that sheds twelve months a year?

Spignesi:

No, but don't tell my cat, Ben. He thinks it's about his evil twin Aldo.

Is it also true that Steve Spignesi is Daryl Hannah's favorite author? Hey, I think I read it in "The Star" or something, so it must be true.

Spignesi:

Well, shit, if it was in "The Star" then it's gotta be carved in stone, right? I can't confirm it though. I guess you'll have to ask Daryl.

So what's next for Steve Spignesi?

Spignesi:

Right now I'm working on a book about Woody Allen called The Woody Allen Companion for a Fall, 1992 release. After that, who knows? I've got several ideas in early stages of development, but I'm not committing to anything until "The Bell" goes off. Every one of my book ideas came to me in a flash of insight that struck me as though I was standing inside the Liberty Bell when someone slapped it upside the head with a recoilless hammer. When that happens for me, it's then just a matter of filling up the pages.

(Editor's note:) This interview with the editor/writer of The Stephen King Encyclopedia was conducted by Ray Rexer a few months prior to its May 1991 publication. Ray Rexer, a police officer, never lived to see the book as he was slain in the line of duty in April 1991. This interview was one of the last projects Ray completed.)

Stephen King and Clive Barker: Masters of the Macabre II by James Van Hise, 1992 pp. 49-56