Moloth - The M-Forums

Mr. King was the closing guest at a Fall for the Book event last night.  My father passed down his King books when I was much younger, so I've been reading his stuff for a while.  I started with all his short story collections, then moved on to his full novel works.  The event started at 7:30 or so, but I thought traffic was going to be awful, so the Mrs. and I hit the road early and got there early.  There never is any traffic when you are prepared for it.  Ugh.

Stephen was awarded the George Mason award, so we didn't know what to expect from him.  Whether he was just going to accept the award or if he was going to sing and dance.  About 75% of the tickets were given out at random to attend the event.  Mason also gave out "golden tickets" to around 400 or so folks so they could get one book signed.  Then people that donated money to Mason could attend a reception with King before the award ceremony, the event, and get a book signed.  I requested enough free tickets that my brother and a date could attend, and I got lucky and received a random golden ticket.

King came out in a red t-shirt, blue jeans, and black boots and spoke about where he got his ideas on about 10 or so books.  Then he read a passage about "The Tribe" from a book he is working on called Dr. Sleep.  It seems to be something he has been working on for a while about Danny Torrance (Jack Torrance's son from The Shining).  The Tribe are disguised as RV traveling white trash old people who's ages jump back and forward in time frequently (old and crippled one day, the next waking up in their twenties) who are afraid of dogs (because dogs can see that they are really special ability/power stealing/sucking monsters underneath).  Then he answered about 10 questions from the audience and signed a ton of books.

We were given postcards to write questions on before the event, so I thought it would be funny to ask "how do you think Dean Koontz feels about always being second best?" thinking that the moderator probably wouldn't ask that, since Stephen probably couldn't comment about other authors.  Well, awesomely, that was the second question asked and the audience erupted in cheers of laughter and so did King.  He was like, "Dean is a very good guy, I am sure he is doing fine," or something like that, taking it as the joking jab that it was.

The line to sign books stretched the entire building and then doubled back on itself.  Even though we purposely sat on the side of the auditorium that he was supposed to be signing books on, our section took so long to get out that buy that time, the line was all the way across the lobby, so we ended up in the last fourth of the line.  Major suck.  But about two hours later, I got my copy of Needful Things signed by Mr. King.  He seemed like a really nice, out going guy.  A people pleaser.  He mentioned turning 64 a day or two ago.  Maybe only a couple years older than my dad.

Well, just wanted to share that with everyone, in case there are any King fans amongst us.  He threatens to retire once a year, so I never thought I would get the opportunity to hear the guy speak live in person, much less get my favorite book signed.  So glad things worked out.