Two Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden Part 1 - Stephen King - Horror Book - Psychological Thriller Book

We are back for Season 5 of the Side Quest Book Club Podcast. Starting with the king of horror, Stephen King. Today, we are discussing Secret Window, Secret Garden from his novella collection, Four Past Midnight. We explore the themes of Stephen King's novella 'Secret Window, Secret Garden,' discussing the inspiration behind writing, the implications of plagiarism, and the psychological aspects of identity and madness. And, of course,  the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on King's work, and the challenges of the writing process.

American Heritage Magazine: HP Lovecraft and Stephen King https://www.americanheritage.com/man-who-can-scare-stephen-king

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(00:00) Intro
(02:03) Exploring Stephen King's 'Secret Garden, Secret Window'
(08:34) Plot Summary and Key Themes
(18:44) Inspiration Behind the Novella
(25:12) Creative Process and Personal Experiences
(25:50) The Journey of Writing an Epic
(29:51) Exploring Mort's Inner Conflict
(32:34) The Impact of Divorce on Mort's Character
(38:22) Lovecraftian Influences in King's Work
(43:47) The Challenge of Writing Inspired Stories
(53:35) The Fate of Shooter and Mort's Legacy

Creators and Guests

Host

Jonathan

Host

Slava

Digital Strategist. Co-Host. Aspiring writer of stories.

What is The Side Quest Book Club Podcast?

If you’re a reader looking for something deeper or an indie author working on your book, The Side Quest Book Club is for you. We skip the usual book reviews and ratings. Each episode turns fun side quests into real lessons, so you’ll leave not just entertained, but with a better understanding of why storytelling matters.

Slava (00:00.246)
I wanted to get some of your thoughts because you've written stories before. How did that come about? Was there something mundane that happened to you that you and Chris decided to write that book?

I've been waiting for this for three years. Been waiting for this question for three years.

coming to you from the endless library where every book is read and every spoiler discussed. Join us as we dig into the lives of fictional people who cannot defend themselves. This is the SideQuest Podcast.

Jonathan (00:34.542)
9 o'clock on a Saturday, the regular shooter shuffles in. He's wearing a six-string movie star, cause he went and wore her skin.

This is why Billy Joel canceled his tour next year.

my AI music.

There you go. speaking of AI, there is an AI music app. Suno. Greatest thing ever. I have made so many silly and dumb songs and enjoyed them immensely.

believe you. No questions here.

Slava (01:19.01)
Would that be plagiarism, Jonathan? Would using Suno be plagiarism? Would Morton Rainey come after us?

It be if you and I put the same prompt into Suno and it spits out the same song and we on different sides of the country start going big at the same time from this pop hit Billy Joel remake. I skinned her alive and wore it to the bar on a Saturday. It might be played.

That's from the deep track

It's the Lorca track.

Lorca. So misunderstood.

Jonathan (01:48.209)
Lorca.

Well, she likes deep nostrils. But would that be us? Would it be our fault? Or would it be AI's fault?

Hmm... Both?

I don't think so. So, okay, that's your opinion. I think it'd be AI.

I split no no I

Slava (02:05.134)
It's a joke. It's a split. Split blame, split personality, no.

That one was a little bit, no, you tried to stretch it too far, like from Dairy to the Cold Mountain Cottage. It's a distance.

On the nose.

Slava (02:23.438)
Well, if you guys haven't guessed it, we're talking about a Stephen King novella called Secret Garden, Secret Window, which is two past midnight in his novella collection from 1990 or past midnight. And it's an interesting little novella, which seeks to address plagiarism. What'd you think of the book overall, Jonathan? And I asked this upfront because you were still a newbie when it comes to Stephen King. Yeah.

I have no qualms being the guy who's not read King very much. That's fine. I say the same thing about Sanderson and I've read him a lot. Cause there's just people who are so much more expert in these authors than I am. I want to read it. I want to enjoy it. I don't need to memorize the name of his third cat that died in 1994. That doesn't matter to me.

What I find interesting, and I'll let you answer the question, what I find interesting about my journey with Stephen King is I haven't read his whole catalog compared to actual fans, quote unquote actual. I probably read a quarter of his catalog and some of the books I reread numerous times, Needful Things, It, I revisit a lot. The Langoliers I read twice now, even though I read

it for the first time last year when we covered it. But I watched so many interviews. your first time? Yeah. When we covered it, that was my first time. But I have watched so many of his interviews and lectures and read his books about writing and read some of his blog-ish posts on his website that describe inspiration for some books. I feel like I know the man or the public persona of the man.

And I understand his impetus for writing some of his stories. And so I feel like I am very much in tune with the man, the writer, Stephen King. And I love the things about him that are those things. And so I can talk about some of his history, some of his life events that caused him to write different books and what inspires him. But I can't say I read every Stephen King book and I know it in and out. The only book that I probably know in and out is

Slava (04:39.208)
it because I read it so many times now. So to your point, it's okay not to know everything about Sanderson, even though you've read probably 90 % of his catalog, if not more, right?

It depends how you slice this catalog, but yeah, we'll call it that.

Anyway, so did you enjoy this little Stephen King novella?

Yeah, it was fun. You asked me a question when I said that I finished it and you said, when did you figure out the hook, the plot, not the plot, the twist. me when you asked me when I figured out the twist and I never answered that question because I like to treat you like an abused dog and not give you the attention you deserve. But I didn't know what the twist was, but I could tell that something was awry and I don't feel like there was enough foreshadowing to me at least where.

You could say, yeah, he's multiple personality. You know, he's split personality. He's got something. I just don't think that there was enough clues for that from what we're given as readers, but if there is like, feel free to spell it out for me.

Slava (05:40.428)
The only thing that gave me a clue was after the people started dying, the two men that he kills, shooter kills with a screwdriver to frame Morton. To me, I was like, damn it. And it wasn't necessarily a disappointing damn it, but I'm like, damn it, I figured it out too early. So it kind of spoiled it for me in a sense. And I was like, damn it, he's the same guy. And it turns out to be right.

And I couldn't tell you a sentence or a paragraph or an event, but that's the moment when Morton is looking at the screwdriver in the guy's head. And I'm like, that's Morton's screwdriver. I think this is not shooter breaking into Morton's house and stealing it for this sole purpose to mess with Morton. Like I think Morton is, well, Morton has a split personality and

What backed up my theory internally was he sure does sleep a lot. Sure. He takes a lot of naps and I'm like, damn it. that's what is happening. I didn't even think about fight clubby, but yeah, kind of fight clubby. So that's when I figured it out. I still like this story.

No.

Jonathan (06:57.812)
it out doesn't make it a bad story. knew what I could tell is when when the cat dies, Lucano or whatever his cat's name is.

That's not the name of game. I know. Same cat, yeah. Same cat.

He came from Italy in a post-apocalyptic zombie world to Maine.

He used his eight lives to get to Maine and stabbed.

That's right. Just to lose another one. I could tell he's like, my cat's friendly, but he killed him with a screwdriver. And I was like, something about this matters to the point of the story with the weapon. And I couldn't figure out what it was because I was like, well, the guy just left, right? Cause it's very early on in the story. He just left. He could have killed the cat. You know, oftentimes animals are friendly with people. Even when he was paranoid saying like he's smoking in my bathroom.

Jonathan (07:50.23)
I was like, Stephen King doesn't strike me as a jump scare kind of guy. I can't remember a time when he's done that. And so I'm wondering, I'm thinking through this is my thought process, right? Is he actually there? I don't know. I could see this guy shooter like lighting a cigarette and leaving it there to like try to put this guy on edge. I thought he was taking the screwdriver because he wanted to frame him for murder because he plagiarized his story.

Yeah.

Jonathan (08:19.446)
I was like, that seems justifiable, but then I couldn't figure out like he's not breaking in necessarily, but anybody could lock back. that's not, he's, he's a podunk guy from Missouri. Like I'm sure he figured out how to Jerry Riga an engine and a lock and you know, they're very ingenious people. down South, that's why I was like, it's not clear to me that I could have guessed that beforehand. The sleep thing didn't stick out to me.

It did to me, but only later. Only later, not right away. This guy's depressed. He's going through some stuff. He just got divorced. He has writer's block. He's not a drunk. He's sleeping. Okay. I get it. But then as it progressively got worse and worse for the writer and then the murder happens, like, this is what's happening. So for those who don't know, I'll read a quick plot summary from good old Wikipedia. Everybody.

During a nap.

Slava (09:12.982)
is on the same page as we were discussing this novel. Morton Rainey, a successful novelist in Maine, is confronted by a man from Mississippi named John Shooter, who claims Mort plagiarized a story he wrote. Mort vehemently denies ever plagiarizing anything. Shooter leaves, but not before leaving his manuscript, secret garden, secret window. Mort throws the manuscript into the trash can,

when his housemaid recovers the manuscript thinking it belonged to Mort. He finally reads Shooter's story, discovering that it is almost identical to his short story, Sewing Season. The only differences are the title, the character's name, the diction, and the ending. Mort is disturbed by these findings. Shooter returns a few days later, having learned that Sewing Season

was published two years before Shooter claimed to have written Secret Garden Secret Window. Mort confronts him with this information, and a raid shooter accuses Mort of lying and demands proof, giving Mort three days to show him his published story. Overnight, he kills Mort's cat and burns down the house of his ex-wife, which contained the magazine in which Sewing Season was published, prompting Mort to order a new copy of the magazine.

He also asks his caretaker, Greg, to tail Shooter and talk to man named Tom Greenleaf, who drove past Mort and Shooter. Shooter, angry at Mort, has involved other people in his business, kills both men, and plants evidence framing Mort for the murders. Upon receiving the magazine and returning home, Mort finds that so-and-season has been removed. Towards the end of the story,

Mort realizes that Shooter is really his own split personality. He created Shooter out of guilt for actually stealing a story early in his career. Mort also realizes he burned down his own home, killed his cat, and murdered two people. Mort hears what he believes to be Shooter pulling into his driveway. Desperate for any sign of his own sanity, he looks outside only to see

Slava (11:37.228)
his wife, his ex-wife, Amy. Devastated, he loses control of his body and his mind to Shooter. He blacks out. Amy discovers that Mort has gone insane, having written the word Shooter all over his house. She goes to Mort's study, where Shooter attempts to kill her in an ambush. She manages to escape. Shooter, chasing Amy outside, is shot by her insurance investigator.

and Mort becomes himself again, addresses Amy and dies. At end of story, Amy and Ted Milner, the man she had an affair with before divorcing Mort, discusses her ex-husband motives. She insists that Mort had become two people, one of them a character so vivid it became real. She recalls something Tom witnessed when he drove past Mort alone.

He saw Shooter and Mort in his rear view mirror, but Shooter was transparent. Amy then reveals that while digging through Mort's house, she found Shooter's trademark hat. She left it right side up on the trash bag. When she returned, she found a note from Shooter inside, revealing that he has traveled back to Mississippi with the story he came for, Crowfoot Mile. Amy remarks,

that Mort had created a character so vivid, he actually came to life.

Slava (13:13.194)
I enjoyed the ending a lot. The reveal that Shooter has somehow manifested in space and time. That even after his death, there was a note. Now one could argue that that was left before the altercation with Morton and Amy. But it seems very King-esque. I liked it.

One of the things that stood out to me was this search for the magazine. Right. And if you're a long time listener, you know that I think about stories differently than Slava, maybe just even weird. But I thought, why doesn't he just go to the library and ask them to send the magazine if they don't have it.

There's a bit of a hint or a bit of an answer to that. There's only a few in circulation, if I remember correctly, or is there's only a few at the publishing house? Right. The archives is where there's only a few left. Okay.

There's a few

Jonathan (14:12.898)
Right, but libraries usually hold these things because they want to have a collection, they want to have a copy. And so it's like, can put, and the thing is I haven't been to library in 20 years, but you could put a hold on something. Thanks. And have them, and they'll go, okay, well, when someone's done reading it, no one is going to be reading this specific magazine from 1982, right? So they could have just been like, yeah, we'll ship it out tomorrow. It might take two days. So like you could say, it would take too long, but it was.

a thing that I thought about, because there was another part during my go through with the story where it's like, why doesn't he just go like find his copy or call the publisher? And then that plot point kind of came up and was addressed. And I was like, okay. And then I was like, well, why doesn't he go to a library? Like, where would they keep these arc? I was like thinking through.

Yeah, and your point makes even more sense when you consider the fact that he's a local writer. The local library would want a famous person from the neighborhood.

Cause he was like signing people's, you know.

Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. He was famous enough to be stopped in the street, something that made his wife upset. Definitely they would have a copy or five of all of his works at the local library.

Jonathan (15:28.908)
That's the episode, folks. I just ruined Secret Garden's secret window. Sorry, gang.

Stephen Krohling, next week we ruin Jane Eyre.

it's not okay to have an affair with someone regardless of if you're young or not

You know how I ruined Titanic for my now dead mother-in-law and her sewing circle?

You took them all out on a boat and drowned them?

Slava (15:48.46)
Well, now you're in another story. They were talking about how much they loved it. And I'm like, I don't think it's that great of a movie. And they were just like, why? I'm like, a rich girl, granted she's in an abusive relationship with an asshole, but she has an affair with a vagabond on a boat, essentially kills him and keeps a multimillion dollar diamond only to

You can't prove that.

Slava (16:16.43)
throw it into the ocean instead of donating it. And this is the love of her life. She has kids, her granddaughters in front of her. And the best part of her life was being shagged in the car on the sinking boat. And everybody hated me. Like everybody thought I was the devil incarnate. And I was like, sorry. Like, and I wasn't even trying to be funny or, you know, a bastard about it. I'm like, it's a stupid movie. I watched it numerous times in my life because it was on or whatever. I'll watch dumb movies all day long.

but anyway, that's how I ruined Titanic for everybody. And this before all the memes. This is before the memes of, you know, last couple of years that said the same thing I said or say the same thing I said about Titanic. So.

We

Jonathan (17:02.594)
Yeah, well, when you said ruined, thought you meant like I told them the boat sank.

No, it's like

great. If they're part of a sewing circle, I think they probably lived through it, but okay. Sure. Well.

funny thing another person who ruined Titanic for people Bill Hader of SNL fame he was given an interview and I'm Conan O'Brien I think and Conan said hey didn't you get fired from working at a movie theater cuz yeah a bunch of teenage girls came in or was making were making fun of me so when I had to give them their you know tear their tickets I would say Leo dies at the end Leo dies at the end Leo dies at the end good man I like it yeah but anyway the

Nice.

Jonathan (17:45.058)
Very nice.

That's PsyQuest over.

Hey, it's dangerous to go alone. So don't. You should always side quest with friends. Hit that subscribe button and join the party.

One other thing that I really like about this story is Morton Rainey doesn't seem like a cardboard character to me. It's a novella, it's short, it gets to the point real quickly. Could argue, it's a writer, it's another trope of kings. There's a writer and he's going through some stuff. It's existential and yada, yada, yada. But he doesn't seem like a cardboard cutout. He doesn't seem cliche. He seems like a guy.

going through some stuff. And yes, because it's a novella, you get to all the major plot points really quickly. This is not a Sanderson book, right? It's not even another King book, which is sometimes 1,000 pages. So for a short story of a man going insane, I think it was pretty well crafted.

Jonathan (18:47.488)
You could say he was well crafted.

You could, you could. That's a better way of saying it, yes.

I want to know audience, just let's zoom out for a second. How do you insult your friends? I just want to know. Just drop it in the comments. Your favorite insult to some of your closer friends.

Maybe if Morton Rainey had more friends that could bust his balls, he wouldn't be in the down-road spiral stabbing cats and innocent bystanders.

You didn't catch that one line about his, his, best.

Slava (19:17.358)
Am I, am I hallucinating? Maybe another part of me read that. What line is that?

It said, you know, his best friend came up from Missouri. His name was John Shooter. Same, same.

Mississippi, but yes, it's the South, right? They're all industrial little buggers down there. Who cares where they come from? Industrial. I meant to say industrious, but whatever. So I want to get into a little bit of what inspired Stephen King to write this book.

I thought you were going to say inbred.

Jonathan (19:45.74)
You were telling me before the show that, and I can't wait to hear more about this, that King was accused of plagiarism after this came out. And to quote you, the person used lines from this story.

Yeah, loosely, not direct lines, but when shooter comes and said, you stole my story, blah, blah, blah. Well, the guy whose name was Keen came to the King's mansion, but the King's, meaning Tabitha and Stephen, basically said, I have a bomb. Your husband stole my story about my aunt or something. And so she got away and he holed up in the attic and was threatening to blow up the house and then turned out to be a fake bomb.

But we'll get into that in the second episode of which Jess of Fight Club fame is going to join us. And I think it's a funny story. want to get into it in some detail, but yeah, this starts out with a guy knocking on the door saying, you stole my story. And then Tabitha opens the door and this guy goes, your husband stole my story, prepare to die. So the inspiration for this book, and this is from Stephen King's website. And I'm going to read a little bit of what

It's Jess.

Slava (20:58.392)
what he writes here, just a little blurb. I published a novel called Misery, which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader. I published a dark half where I tried to explore the converse the power fiction can have over the writer. While that book was between drafts, I started to think there might be a way to tell both stories at the same time by approaching some of the plot elements of the dark half from a totally different angle.

Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act as secret as dreaming, and that was one of the aspects of this strange and dangerous craft I never thought about much. I knew writers from time to time revised old works. John Fowles did it with a magnus, and I have done it myself, the stand, but a revision was not what I had in mind. What I wanted to do was to take familiar elements and put them together in an entirely new way.

This I had tried to do at least once before, reconstructing and updating elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula to create Salem's Lot, which is on our calendar by the way, dear audience. And I was fairly comfortable with the idea. One day late of 1987, while these things were tumbling around in my head, I stopped in the laundry room of our house to drop a dirty shirt into the washing machine.

Our laundry room is a small narrow alcove on the second floor. I disposed of the shirt and then stepped over to one of the rooms two windows. It was casual curiosity no more. We'd been living in the same house for 11 or 12 years, but I had never taken a good look out this particular window before. The reason is perfectly simple. Sat at floor level, mostly hidden behind the dryer, half blocked by baskets of mending.

It's a hard window to look out of. I squeezed in nevertheless and looked out. The window looks down on a little brick-paved alcove between the house and the attached sun porch. It's an area I see just about every day, but the angle was new. My wife had set a dozen pots out there so the plants could take a little of the early November sun, I suppose. And the result was a charming little garden which only I could see.

Slava (23:25.294)
The phrase which occurred to me, of course, was the title of the story. It seemed to me as good a metaphor as any for what writers, especially writers of fantasy, do with their days and nights. Sitting down on the typewriter or picking up a pencil is a physical act. The spiritual analog is looking out of an almost forgotten window, a window which offers a common view from an entirely different angle. An angle

which renders the common extraordinary. The writer's job is to gaze through that window and report on what he or she sees. But sometimes windows break. I think that more than anything else is the concern of this story. What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly. So what I love about King

is and a lot of his short stories, he has these, this was four or five paragraphs, he has these short little synopsis, either the beginning of the story or the end of the book where he just goes through, this story was like this, this story came about like this, this story came about because of a thing that happened in Missouri. Most of his blurbs or the blurbs that describe his inspiration for each particular story involve sometimes very mundane things.

that happened to King. Like the mist, that's because he went to a grocery store after a storm, he thought, what would happen if a bunch of monsters came about and were locked in this store? Huh, okay, cool, I'll write a story about that. He was walking home after his car broke down, he was approaching a bridge and he thought, what if this was just like three little goats gruff? And he goes, okay, it, Pennywise came about here. He happened to be throwing a.

a shirt into a dryer and said, huh, there's a window. Interesting. Only I can see out of this window. Funny. This kind of reminds me of the writing process. This is one of the things I love about King. Because when you read the story and you're like, okay, cool story. I like it. I don't like it. It's, you know, it's mid or it's great. But then whatever your point about that is, wherever your view on the story is, I think for most people, if they go as far as to read the inspiration for it,

Slava (25:51.306)
At least, you know, in my estimation, they should be intrigued by the process. And especially King's process, which something so mundane can turn into something that's a pretty damn good novella. I wanted to get some of your thoughts because you've written stories before. How did that come about? Was there something mundane that happened to you that you and Chris decided to write that book?

I've been waiting for this for three years.

Been waiting for this question for three years. did something mundane inspire the story?

Or if it wasn't mundane, if it was spectacular, tell us that.

It depends how you look at it. So Chris and I went to college together and we were in the filmmakers program, film and video program. And Chris was a part of this Facebook group and he's like, Hey, does anyone want to make an animated short? Cause he likes anime. I watched anime. I was like, yeah, I've never directed an animated short. That'd be fun. Let's do it. So then we spent months trying to find people who would animate and help us build this project, but people were not interested.

Jonathan (26:56.878)
And it was a lot harder to find animators and illustrators than we assumed on the front end, even with where technology was back in 2010, which was leaps and bounds ahead of having to do everything by scratch like we used to. So we met up at a coffee shop here in town and we're like, Hey, let's talk about this project. And I said, do you want to do something crazy? And he said, uh,

Hot top credit.

I don't know, maybe. was like, what if instead of doing an animated short, we instead tried to write the next Lord of the Rings? And he was like, okay. Just like, in my mind, it's a much more epic moment than his response at the time. And that was it. We set out. We started trying to figure out how to write an epic.

And neither one of us was published, still neither of us is published in terms of like large publications, right? Respected publications. I've certainly got things on the internet here and there that I've published. I've made some money from my writing, but nothing, you know, nothing crazy. It's not life-changing money. After that, we started getting together on a regular cadence. started on the weekends where we would try and

write for about eight hours because we were just brainstorming like, does this work? What does this world like? What do we want the themes to be? And we learned a lot through the process of how to create a world that doesn't exist into existence. And do you start with themes? Do you start with characters? Do you start with an idea like you're talking about? And you can start with any of them, honestly. You start with the one that has the most traction for you and momentum.

Jonathan (28:54.914)
because that's the one that's going to help you discover the rest of it. Kind like you were talking about with King, where it's like, well, what would it be like if aliens came in, invaded while we were trapped in this grocery store? Great. That's his story. And he started with a what if. For us, it was my grandiose idea of like, well, what if we wrote the next Lord of the Rings? Nobody's really, and this is actually before I read Sanderson. So Sanderson at the time would have published maybe three novels, maybe four.

Cause think Elantris came out in 2007. So like he wasn't even on the radar yet, but I was like, no one has written the next really big story that people can, you know, circle around because I forget who voted at this, but, they voted Lord of the Rings as the greatest book of the 19th century, like the greatest fiction. And I was like, well, we got about a hundred years. We could, we could put our name in the, in the ring here for greatest book.

Even though neither of us has been published before. So I came up with that and we just started working on it. First, it was eight hour writing sessions. And we were like, we're not getting a whole lot done because we're just making food and talking about the book. And then we hunkered down and did three hour writing sessions and we got more done, but we were building a writing system while we went. And so it was very, very difficult. And so then I tried to figure out how do we chop this up into smaller pieces.

pick some characters and just like pick random times from their life. What was a key incident that happened when they were 14? What was a key incident that happened when they were 21? What was a key incident that happened when they were a child with their sibling? And so we would write these just vignettes to better understand the characters to help us flesh out the world, which I'm kind of just rambling about my world at this point in the journey we've taken. So I don't know if I really answered your question.

I think you did not being able to find any animators and going hey in true Jonathan fashion Let's do his big freaking thing You know answers my question, but let's get back to the book at hand if you will Okay, so what do you think the significance is for shooters? The phrase he uses he wants the correct ending Knowing now that shooter is mort and mort is shooter

Slava (31:18.178)
But Shooter wants the correct ending of Mort's story. Is that Mort's inner guilt playing in it? Is he self-sabotaging? That's probably a second question. So that's the first question. Second part of the question is when he goes to destroy evidence of this, yes, it's obviously self-sabotage, but where is that coming from? Is that Mort's inner guilt? Is he just going crazy? Or the heartbreak that Amy causes, which could also be argued as self-sabotage?

I guess he pushed Amy away from Amy's POV. What do think happens there?

So the first question was, what do I think the right ending is?

No, what is the significance of shooters demand for the right ending? Knowing that shooter and Mort are the same people. So there's two things that happens in this question. Mort is killing people as shooter, self-sabotaging, and shooter is asking for the correct ending, which is actually Mort asking for the correct ending. Is there anything that is in the recesses of Jonathan's big brain that wants to talk about those things?

So the correct ending could be a couple things. It could be, you know, the comeuppance for stealing someone else's story. It could be the fact that he shouldn't have had a career at all because he published someone else's story, which is what then gave people the understanding that he should be a writer, but his first published story was someone else's story. So I definitely think it circles around his career as a writer as a whole and not giving the correct credit.

Jonathan (32:54.53)
The thing is like how the story should have ended. don't think it's as much about giving the original writer the credit he should have, because that could have been a letter to a publisher. Hey, I committed plagiarism. It built my whole career, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that the correct ending is this story overtaking him because of the guilt where a character does come to life. And so he has to die as a payment.

of sorts according to said character.

I like that. self-sabotage, the split personality, Amy leaving, writer's block, pushes him to this breaking point. His marriage is over, his career is kind of stagnant, and the career is based on a story that he plagiarized. So he got successful because he plagiarized a story. His wife left him, partly because he was so successful, he wasn't paying attention to her at all. So all this culminates and...

Shooter. John Shooter is born. And, well, wreaks havoc.

Yes. And can you say your second question again for me?

Slava (34:07.426)
I think you answered both questions, but to repeat, case you wanted to add, shooter asking for the correct ending, and the second part of the question was the sabotage that Moore does as shooter, the connections there.

yeah, I think I did answer both then because it kind of ties together with his internal guilt that he shouldn't have been able to have a whole life at all because the inciting incident was that publishing someone else's story gave him his whole career. So yeah, I think I answered both. The question to me, did King plan it that way or did it just come out that way for him? Or was it in revisions?

I want to say what I know about King's writing style, again based on the interviews I watched with him, is there are certain characters and stories, there's a genesis of it in some sort of incident, like looking out the window in your laundry room, and he begins to write the story and he doesn't know where the characters are going. Like in The Stand, there's an incident in The Stand with a bunch of people die.

And he said in the interview, he's taken them as far as they can go. There's nothing else for them to do in this story. So he kills them off and it's kind of said tongue in cheek, but it underscores his writing style. He also said in a different interview, he knows of some authors that write the last line of the book and then write backwards almost or take, or even they start from the beginning. They know the ending is in said line. He says, I don't do that.

I have a story I want to tell. have characters that I know would be good additions to the story or good vessels to tell the story through and I just take them where they go. So there is an outline, there is an end goal, but certain in-world events and character arcs, they happen in real time as he's writing them, at least for some books, at least based on two or three interviews that I've seen. So...

Slava (36:11.374)
total speculation, but I think King began writing the story and he decided, hey, this guy's going to have a split personality and how certain things unfolded, weren't planned. That was just King imagination in real life, in real time, coming to page and paper.

Fair enough any answer you gave would have been good enough for me because you just like we said earlier, you know King better than I do

Let me ask another question. What'd you think of the subplot of the divorce that plays into some of Moritz anxiety? Maybe I should rephrase that. What'd you think about how the divorce came about? That he was kind of aloof. He was so involved in his work, pulling away from his wife in some way. She found another man and you know, yada yada divorce. Yeah, without any moral.

how it came about I

objections or pontifications on whether the divorce or affairs are good or bad. Yeah, I just don't- a story device.

Jonathan (37:12.874)
as a story device, how it came about, I mean, we're thrust into the middle of it. They've already separated. She's already had an affair and then we have to suss out, when did it start? How did it happen? Is it his fault, her fault? I mean, from the sounds of it, he was a neglectful husband. Didn't give her the attention that she needed to just like very broad stroke. And we honestly just don't know enough about her besides his...

biting comments when they're on the phone together a couple of times, or when she shows up in person. So I don't know. I think if somebody's at fault here, it's him. In terms of a plot device, I think it's useful because that is like a very deep part of people. What I don't think was captured was the utter despair that most people go through because he just kind of felt numb. But maybe that's the whole thing is he feels numb.

which is what led to his divorce in the first place or his wife's affair. Because if they're not getting what they need from home, they'll go somewhere else. That's just like a fact. If people don't feel like they're getting what they need, they'll look for it elsewhere. And once they find it, they'll move that direction.

I felt that it was a decent device, played out well in the story, because we don't get that cliche, he said, she said BS. Even though internally he struggles with a divorce, kind of hates her at times, definitely hates Tom, because Tom's everything he's not. Even if Tom does play a little bit of a kind of a douchey role, he seems to be a douche that pays attention more to Amy than Mort did. And internally, Mort kind of realizes

that he screwed up. Even when he's biting, he pulls back. Or sometimes the biting stuff is only in his head. And he goes, nope, can't say that. I love this woman and I did her wrong. I'm going to relent and say something not completely ass-holy. I think that was done well because there's no stupid cliche battle of the sexes here going on. It's just a man who did something wrong, who then did something wrong again later in life. Both events are almost bookends, right?

Slava (39:23.074)
they're not analogous to each other because one's plagiarism, one is neglect of a spouse, but it kind of shows how he's kind of lived a little bit of a lie. He was engrossed in whatever the hell was happening where slowly writer's block came in. Then his wife left him. Then definitely writer block just overwhelmed him. And next thing you know, it shooters on his doorstep. But I wanted to move on a little bit to a different point that you

Text me.

I have a favor to ask you. If you like what we're doing, the simplest way to support the show is to hit subscribe. In return, we'll keep leveling up, we'll listen to your feedback, and read authors that you suggest. And of course, we'll take side quests along the way.

You said this book felt to you HP Lovecraft-esque. I want you to unpack all that.

So when I texted you that, I actually said this to somebody that I found out was an avid reader earlier this week, but I didn't know they were an avid reader. Lovecraft captures madness in the way that I think madness is meant to be captured. You don't get all the answers. It's not logical. It feels disconnected, but it's deeply grounded in passion. jumps from, perspective's not the right word. It jumps from thought to thought or conjecture to conjecture.

Jonathan (40:49.846)
with enough oomph that that next belief that it takes hold of is also true. All of that is tied together with an internal mycelian network of paranoia, where you're second guessing yourself and you're wondering and you don't know and then you're like...

That person's out to get me. And then you now hate that person who literally just didn't even look at you. They were just at the coffee shop you happen to be at. But there's just all these conjectures. That's what I perceive madness would be like. I don't know. I've never gone mad from what people tell me. Right. There it is. Nobody's done it better than Lovecraft from what I've seen. King is close, but it wasn't so enrapturing for the character. The character's more confused about his own.

Do you know of?

Jonathan (41:45.334)
madness rather than knowing he's in the throes of madness or not even in the throes that he's been overtaken by madness because in Lovecraft stories a lot of the main characters are either descending into madness or they've already been overtaken like Dagon that we read way back when we see the results of madness because Lovecraft lets our imagination play the starring role in reading his works which is what helps us

believe that the madness is real, believe that the madness is of whatever nature that would affect us. So.

That's another good answer, and I'll tell you why. I think we said this in the It episodes, or I might have mentioned it. least I think I did, I hope I did. King is heavily influenced by Lovecraft. Lovecraft is one of his favorite authors, and I remember reading an interview by him, or watching an interview with him, and he says that after Dad left, he went for a pack of smokes and never came back, they found some of Dad's stuff.

And it was all these horror, sci-fi, pulp magazines. And some of it was H.P. Lovecraft's stories. And King became fascinated with it. And then he would start to write as a little kid, his own versions of Lovecraft. So I have American Heritage. It's a magazine. And they have an article on Lovecraft and King. So I'll just read a little bit here. All his adult life, Lovecraft liked to fancy himself an

elderly 18th century English gentleman in a periwagon britches. Yet he was the man who brought the currently thriving genre of supernatural fiction into the 20th century. In such stories as The Lurking Fear and The Color Out of Space, Lovecraft abandoned the demons, ghosts, and vampires of his 19th century predecessors in favor of modern horrors inspired by Darwinian evolution and Einsteinian physics.

Slava (43:52.064)
Now they King.

Quoting King again, Lovecraft, opened the way for me as he has done for others before me. It is his shadow so long and gaunt and his eyes so dark and puritanical which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since. And then just one more sentence or two, Lovecraft's horror, especially his later work, is more cerebral than visceral. The horrors

felt by his protagonist arises not out of the fear of death or pain or loss, it is simply the fear of knowing the unsuspected truth heretofore hiding just beneath the surface of things. And my fear is indeed concerned in the past rather than the future, says the narrator of the Nameless City. then King's, I'll end it with King's quote again. Lovecraft opened the way, says King. His shadow looms over almost all the important horror fiction that has come since.

It's kind of a repeat of what he said above. So yes, to your point, absolutely yes. And King is definitely inspired by the Lovecraft, so yes to you picking up on Lovecrafting themes in this story.

story is so powerful that it can inspire a writer that I think people have said it before, King is prolific for his time. I think he's faded to the background in his old age, right? But that's not a bad thing, that's just part of life.

Slava (45:42.088)
Yeah, he's like 80 years old almost.

Yeah. So like, I don't expect an 80 year old guy who's had a really robust career to be popping out new stories in Derry, Maine, right? He's enjoying the fruits of his labor where he doesn't have to work anymore, I'm sure. So, but back to my, my initial point, if stories are that powerful, why aren't more people trying to write them? Cause we, can, for a fact, like what King said about, you know, being inspired by another writer, that's a normal feeling.

I couldn't pull up a research study for you that says that, but if you just talk to people in your life, they'll be like, my God, this story I just read is like so inspiring, right? Like that's a normal comment that you'll hear a couple of times a year from people, or at least you used to. Maybe you don't hear it anymore. But with that being the case, it seems like a greater good would be to encourage people to write stories.

Well, for myself, I've been trying to write this short story slash novella for...

A while. A while.

Slava (46:48.238)
And it's also inspired by an event that is not mundane at all. And it's inspired by King. So me reading King, me watching King, listening to King's interviews, reading those inspirational blurbs or blurbs of inspiration, however the right term goes. I said, Hey, to myself, said, Hey, why don't I write something? I'm not bad at writing. I'm a decent writer.

I've written more technical stuff and, well, how do I say this? Technical stuff and then scripts for videos, which are more creative, obviously. But I've never written a story story. I lie, I written short stories when I was a kid. I've never written a short story or a story as an adult. So I took up on the endeavor and for some reason, and this is me in part answering your question, for some reason I just can't sit down.

at any point in the last few years for like even an hour and just even write a sentence. It always takes the back seat and it's mostly on me. I'll admit it, but it's hard.

I think if I can offer some live feedback that we'd pre-discuss, I think the hangup that you're feeling is that you're writing something that's based on a real event because you have to literally dig back into that thing that you lived through and then whatever effect it had on your life has to be addressed and dug through again. saying you didn't process it, but like your brain...

Didn't ya?

Jonathan (48:22.816)
is not like, let me take an average Tuesday and dig up this thing from my past that was really, really hard to deal with. Your body doesn't want to do that. I think you've chosen hard mode for your first story when in fact you could instead write something else that's King inspired or Lovecraftian inspired. Cause I know you love horror. God, you could start, you could start by just trying to write a short story in city in the city and you'd be better off because the bar is so low. And I'm not telling you that you're not a good writer, right? Like.

It's just that what we have to do as creatives is move forward. And when we don't have the, let's say quote unquote inspiration, we have to lower the bar for ourselves to start checking things off the list. Because then once you have three published stories, even if it's medium.com, it's like, yeah, I did that. All right, well I can do another. You've moved past the Boulder, which was really just a rock, but it's a perspective thing.

But you're choosing hard mode because you're like, there was this really big event in your life that you had to process because you were young, which is partly where the king stuff comes in. You know, psychologically, your brain probably doesn't want to go there. And so you're finding reasons to not do it. Not because you're lazy, but because your brain's like, I don't want to go through that again.

That might be it. I know I prosed this event, despite how horrible it is. It's starkly different than some of the abuse that I mentioned and discussed with you in private. So those things I know are a lot more lingering than this event. This was just an isolated event that I happened to be involved in. Right. But I think your point still stands.

in respect to starting out, how did you word it, starting out with a bang or going, you know, balls to the wall? Hard mode. Hard mode. So maybe that's it. Maybe I take something less intense.

Jonathan (50:17.666)
Well, and you're not tied to it emotionally. No, no, no. I mean, if you take a new story, you take Sally goes up a hill, Jack and Jill roll down the hill and you know, they live forever in harmony. And you go, okay, great. Now let me add a horror twist. Right. And then it's like, you're not even like, there's no emotional, like, this is a made up thing, but instead you're doing hard mode just to reiterate for the audience where it's like, you did live this thing out. like,

No, not anymore. I'm not. yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan (50:44.654)
Part of you wants it to be accurate probably, and this is all subconscious, right? I don't think that you're consciously doing this. Part of it needs to be like, well, that's not exactly how it happened, but it's also not what I wanna do creatively. Like that's hard mode. You can do that. And I think that you'd be successful if you like, let's say you did an hour a day, right? Even if it was just sitting there staring at it, jotting ideas down. I think you would accomplish this, sorry, Rothfuss. But you're going with the Patrick Rothfuss.

you know, doors of stone approach where it's been, God, 15 years and he hasn't released the book because he wants everything to be perfect. And like, we love that about him, but like, this is your first story. Write a story about a dog named Roxy, you know?

To Rise in the Neighborhood. That's right. podcasters.

Or you could do something like if you wanted to, and I'm just brainstorming now, if you really want to write this story, eventually do it. Sanderson did and like write all the stories around it. What's the perspective from the mother? What's the perspective of the neighbor? What's the perspective of whoever? And like, eventually you'll get here, but you have to like figure the world out for it, right? Like if you wanted to do that, or you just write something, you know, the turtle in the hair, you know, just re retelling it with a horror twist. Like there's options. The problem is we get so stuck and I.

I'm the leader of the guilt for this one. I'm waving my flag is I can't stop thinking about my novel. We, you know, we spent seven years on it. So I've got 40 characters. I've got the outline for book one and roughed in outlines for two and a lighter, even lighter outlines for book three. I've got a timeline from creation to present day for the story we were trying to write with like roughed in historical moments like.

Jonathan (52:35.68)
I'll stop there, but I got a lot of stuff on this world and characters and how it developed and progressed and wars and tragedies and cataclysmic events to use your phrase. And so like sometimes you just can't get past that. So I also understand that.

like your idea about writing stories around it. Even if those never get published, by just sitting down and writing the stories from the mom's perspective, the neighbors, like you said, because both were involved in this event. Yep. And just writing like little vignettes. Forget story building. Forget world building or backstories for characters. Just little vignettes, epigraphs, if you will.

of little things happening and then see how they inform the thing.

neighborhood store clerk feel about the incident right he's gonna hear about it you know or the kids who weren't there but they went to the school down the street

Yeah, or even there's another story that is from the same summer. There was a kid in the bus the same summer that this happened. There was a kid on the bus who accidentally killed himself playing Russian roulette.

Jonathan (53:48.081)
you didn't tell me that.

I rode the bus with this kid and he lived diagonally from us. So we were two houses in on the right side of the street. He was the corner house on the left side of the street. And one Monday, he just wasn't there. On the Tuesday and the Wednesday, he wasn't on the bus. Finally, some of the other kids in our neighborhood were like, did you see what happened to, did you hear what happened to Johnny? His name is Johnny. And like, no, he freaking killed himself.

What do you mean kill himself? Kill himself how? Well, they were in the basement getting drunk, started playing Russian with dad's gun. Forgot where the chamber was, which chamber had the bullet in it. And that was it. So I share that only as I'm processing your advice to me. If I wrote about that event, even if it's just a vignette that never gets published in the, or put into the real story, the big story, that could inform.

some of the decisions of the characters, right? Some of the responses of the characters, some of their motivations too. So all that to say in a roundabout Slava-esque way is I think your advice is spot on.

Yeah.

Jonathan (55:00.844)
Yeah. And the thing is you could, if you wanted to do an exercise in like showing the growth, you could make it really, you could release it on the side quest website, right? Like, Hey, here's the, here's the narrative of me trying to, and you know, you have an opener where it's like, I'm trying to write the house where the kid died as a character. Right. And so that's your thing. You remember I told you that one of my favorite stories was about a house that was automated. and you found it.

Bradbury. Bradbury, thank you. It's like, hey, you want to grow in that. I'm just giving a random example. And so you take the incident of what happened to this kid that you grew up with, and instead you make the house the character, and you say, hey, I'm trying to grow in this. Leave me your feedback, and then you just post the story. it's just the process of getting better as a writer. And maybe I do something too, where it's just like, we're putting it out, we're letting people...

take a red pen to our stuff where it's like, I didn't feel attached to the house. Didn't make sense to me, whatever. And it's maybe the next iteration of SideQuest where we both want to be writers in some sense, whether it's career wise or otherwise. So yeah, just spit balling.

all good stuff.

So what do think, audience? Do you want to read Slava and Mai's writing? Leave us a note in the comment or Instagram, YouTube, something, and let us know. if we get enough yeses, we'll move that direction.

Slava (56:30.018)
Hell yeah, I like it. I got a question for you, Jonathan. Did Shooter really die with Mort, or does Shooter live on? Amy finds a note in the hat after Mort's death. Was that real, metaphorical, or a sign of lingering madness?

in the house.

Jonathan (56:50.72)
I think it depends if King writes a four-past-midnight version, volume two, or not, because Amy could go mad as well because she touched the hat. He could go with this sort of spirit attaching itself to people thing. I don't think it makes sense in the world necessarily, but I bet King could find a way to make it match.

Well, Tom saw Shooter and Mort together, and Shooter was transparent. So somebody who hasn't touched the hat, who's kind of on the sidelines for all intents and purposes, has seen a version of Shooter. Right. And if H.P. Lovecraft is somewhere in Mort's house, peeking from behind a bookshelf, Shooter could be something that came

to life in whatever sense these things come to life in after Mort's final break. Mort could have created him. Yeah.

It's possible. think the implication here then is just to put some words to it. Mort did his own little seance to open a portal to manifest Shooter and now he's out and free and he could be taking a new form to wreak havoc with someone else. I think it'd be interesting if there was a series where the secret truths that authors don't share

Yeah.

Jonathan (58:17.834)
if shooter went around, you know, bringing justice to them. And it was an epidemic across the United States, in this timeframe in the nineties, eighties.

Nineties, yeah. Well, I think this is the perfect place to end it, because next week we have Jess. I'm sure outside of the themes and some of the historical events in King's life, I don't know why I said historical, maybe because they happened in the past, but some of the events in King's life that came after this book, specifically accusations of plagiarism, we'll discuss those things. I'm sure Jess will want to talk about plot points we missed or those that stood out to us.

but this is for the audience. What other Stephen King book about writers or that have a writer as a protagonist, would you like us to cover? We have Bag of Bones. We have Secret Wind, District Garden, which you can check that off your list. We have a short story called The Word Processor of the Gods. This one's kind of fun, 1985. It's a short story part of the Skeleton Crew.

collection about a writer who receives a gift of a custom-built word processor from his 15 year old nephew John. The machine has supernatural powers to execute whatever the user types. Uh, a little bit, it's a little bit death-noddy. 1408, which I would not mind covering at all. Could have been, but I don't know, don't remember.

It sounds like Death Note.

Jonathan (59:49.486)
Wasn't that on our list already?

Maybe we've just talked about it.

Mike Enslen visits places haunted by ghosts or spirits or some other evil and then writes about his experience. At one hotel in room 1408, he meets his match and barely escapes with his life. I'll say that much. Misery, which I've started reading but got sidetracked by Sanderson. It's a fanatical fan who traps a writer in her snowed-in cabin. Lizzie's story, the road versus heads north, Salem's lot.

which is in our list, you don't have to vote for that, The Shining and The Dark Half. So audience, out of those, which by my recollection is the stories that have protagonists as writers, or writers as protagonists, you can vote on that to see what we cover in the coming lot of months, because we have a few books lined up for you already, but eventually we'll be able to get to these.

Sounds exciting. I can't wait for some more Jess Hot Takes.

Slava (01:00:52.57)
Nothing beats a Jess hot take. True. Well, I guess we'll see you next week.

See you next time on the SideQuest Book Club Podcast.

Slava (01:01:07.886)
Why not go with simple? It helps more than you think.