Q: What do you think it is that we’re afraid of? I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, what are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that is what I’m interested in.

Q: Do you think about which of your books will last? It’s a crapshoot. You never know who’s going to be popular in 50 years. If I had to predict which of my books people will pick up a hundred years from now, if they pick up any, I’d begin with The Stand and The Shining. And Salem’s Lot—because people like vampire stories.

Q: How important are your surroundings when you write? It’s nice to have a desk, a comfortable chair so you’re not shifting around all the time, and enough light. Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

My study is basically just a room where I work. I have a filing system. It’s very complex, very orderly. With Duma Key—the novel I’m working on now—I’ve actually codified the notes to make sure I remember the different plot strands. Because if I do something wrong now, it becomes such a pain in the ass to fix later.

Q: Don’t you also like to listen to loud music when you work? Not anymore. When I sit down to write, my job is to move the story. If people read me because they’re getting a story that’s paced a certain way, it’s because they sense I want to get to where I’m going. I don’t want to dawdle around and look at the scenery. To achieve that pace I used to listen to music. But I was younger then, and frankly my brains used to work better than they do now. Now I’ll only listen to music at the end of a day’s work, when I roll back to the beginning of what I did that day and go over it on the screen. A lot of times, the music will drive my wife crazy because it will be the same thing over and over again. I used to have a dance mix of that song that goes “A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Erica—deega, deega, deega.” It’s a cheerful, calypso kind of thing, and my wife came upstairs one day and said, Steve, one more time…you die!

Q: You have written a lot about children. Why? I was fortunate to sell my writing fairly young, and I married young and had children young. Naomi was born in 1971, Joe in 1972 and Owen in 1977. So I had a chance to observe them at a time when a lot of my contemporaries were out dancing to KC and the Sunshine Band. I feel that I got the better part of that deal. I didn’t know KC and the Sunshine Band, but I knew my kids in and out. I was in touch with the anger and the exhaustion that you can feel. And those things went into my books because they were what I knew at that time. What has found its way into a lot of the recent books is pain and people who have injuries, because that’s what I know right now. Ten years from now, maybe it’ll be something else, if I’m still around.

Q: Do you ever feel typed by your reputation? If you mean, do I feel like I’m blocked in and I can’t go where I want to go—not at all. Other people will hang tags on me like the horrormeister, the schlockmeister, the fearmeister, the master of suspense, the master of horror. But I’ve never said what it is that I do, and I don’t write letters complaining about these tags.