First, it will be a miracle if I don't plow through the entire contents of the Halloween candy bowl before any of the sad little trick or treaters show up at our door in search of any leftovers. I swear I am not going out to buy candy on Halloween because of my own acute inabilty to just stop eating the chocolate.

And yet....well, let's just say it ain't looking too good right now for the kids!

Jessa mentioned her love for Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y today and even though I'm only halfway through the book it's easy for me to agree with her opinion. In my review of Thomas's earlier book PopCo I made it clear how impressed I was by her very original and creative story - written without the use of footnotes or requiring the reader to reverse direction or otherwise flip the book upside down on cue (not that there's anything wrong with either of these options, but Thomas does quirky with words and plots, not devices). Whatever I thought of her from PopCo has been pretty much blown away by Mr. Y. In PopCo the story was about a lost treaure and complex map, codemaking and codebreaking in WW2 and the Enigma machine, crossword puzzles, veganism, and the corporate manipulation of the consumer mind (as in "why in the hell does something like Hello Kitty exist"?). Mr. Y is about Derrida, creationism, black holes, academia, and a major trip into a whole new level of consciousness which I don't entirely understand yet, but as I said, I'm only halfway through the book.

Oh and there's a book with a curse on it - which is so cool I can't hardly stand it.

What I can't help but wonder while reading Thomas's work is where in the world she gets her ideas from. I know that's the ultimate fanboy question but I can't help it - I mean how on earth does someone come up with such
disparate ideas and blend them altogether into a cohesive and compelling story? Where do you get the baseline from that prompts the story in the first place?

I guess the basic question is - Ms. Thomas, where do your ideas come from? (And yes, I'm going to see if I can interview her for Bookslut and find out.)

Stephen King is answering that question in his new interview with The Paris Review. King's latest, Lisey's Story, has been getting conflicting reviews - it seems a lot of reviewers aren't quite sure what to make of it. (Jenny D. points out a few opinions in her recent entry and I'm with her - I've got to read this book.) What has really sold me on it though was King's explanation of where the book originated:

I had the idea three or four years after my accident. I thought I was all better, but it turned out that the bottom part of my lung was still all crumpled up. I got pneumonia, and they ended up taking my lung right out of my chest in order to repair it. I almost died. It was really close. During this period, my wife decided that she was going to redo my study. When I came back from the hospital, everything had been pulled out, and I felt like a ghost. I thought, Maybe I died. This what the study would look like after I died. So I started to write this story about a famous writer who died, and about his wife, Lisey, who is trying to get on with her life two years later.

Lisey just took off and went on its own. At some point it stopped being a book specifically about this woman's grieving process and it started to be a book about the way we hide things. From there it jumped into the idea that repression is creation, because when we repress we make up stories to replace the past.

I think that pretty much all of King's books are a peek, in some small way at least, into his head and who he really is. Lisey sounds like a much deeper longer look. I will confess that I'm a pretty huge King fan - It changed my life in more ways than one - and I love love love On Writing, one of the best books about creativity and being a writer that I've ever read (and reread). Having said that, I will also admit that I don't like all of his books, so I think I'm pretty open minded when it comes to his work. But the combination of King the storyteller and King the writer in the same book, makes this book sound irresistible. I also highly recommend his interview which was the only reason I picked up this issue of the Review. He explains the origin of Cujo (a very scary dog that nearly outweighed him) and also The Shining (and why he didn't like Kubrick's movie) and The Wolves of Calla. It's a very illuminating interview and as always King is engaging and revealing and brutally honest.

Reading both King and Thomas in the same few days has made me think about where my stories come from. The AK flying book is a no-brainer - that was my job and my world and my friends and their friends (and everyone else we sort of knew) for four years. It came from my life, directly and my graduate thesis indirectly. And it's done and I understand it and I'm not afraid of it.

But this new book - this book with a girl who lost her father before she was ready and its churches and its hurricane that floods a cemetery and it's reliance on a complex, complicated, family story that lies more than tells the truth is partly who I am (the sad parts) and partly the world I wish I had known better (my father's childhood). And also some stuff that is completely made up, (that would be the dragon parts) but how that part fits into the real stuff is where the story intrigues me, but not as the person reading it, more as the one writing it. Later maybe, much much much later, readers might wonder where it all came from. And maybe I'll tell them if they ask, maybe I'll know all of its secrets by then and be ready for that conversation.

In the meantime, I'm impressed as hell by King and looking forward to more of Thomas.