Stephen King's eyes blink wearily, as if they have witnessed too many nocturnal wrestling matches with demons. King, like the heroine of his first novel, Carrie, possesses a "wild talent". In her case, it is telekinesis, she can make a knife jump off a table and skewer a victim.King's talent is for stirring up subterranean reservoirs of dread.
I found him hunkered with his nightmares in the soupily humid town of Bangor, in the American State of Maine.
He lives in an old mansion complete with creepy towers which look like they could hide insane relatives. The mansion lurks behind a wrought-iron fence, with patterns which evoke thoughts of spider webs and vampire wings.
Yet the writer conducts business in a demountable cabin on a gravel truck beside the airport. It seems an apt location - a novelist so fiendishly productive belongs in an area zoned for industrial use. It was after all once reported that King wrote 5000 words per day, 365 times a year.
To hear King speak, his neighbours are nothing short of the harbingers of the apocalypse.
Nearby is a power plant, getting ready (in the words of one of his characters in The Tommyknockers) "to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile". Opposite King's office, a cabin like his own is occupied by the International Research Centre, which advertises something euphemistically called "fibre supply".
"They're shits over there," says King, gesturing towards the headquarters of the "tree killers". Mind you, King's protests against logging are a tad ironic when you consider the number of trees that have given their lives to produce the 80 million copies of his books now in print.
There's another reason why King's austere surroundings seem appropriate. Although the 51-year old publishing phenomenon receives an advance of about $17 million per book, he looks and talks like a working man. A very opinionated working man, that is.
Thus he drives a dented pick-up truck and works in an office bereft of air conditioner and littered with empty soft-drink cans.
In many ways he seems anti-materialistic. In Needful Things, for instance, he wrote: "everything's for sale, and the only price is your immortal soul"
Recalling the ethos of the 1980's, King tells me the "government bribed as to become yuppies. They gave us Junk bonds, fine clothes, all the cocaine we could snort".
Not, of course, that King sets himself up to be society's moral custodian. Since the early 1970's, he has established himself in popular culture as the "Wizard Of Ooze".
In Salem's Lot and The Tommyknockers, King populates entire towns with affable, homespun characters, then arranges for them to be sucked dry by vampires or gutted by aliens.
In The Stand, he expunges the entire US by infecting the nation with a lethal, incurable virus.
And in his latest novel, Bag Of Bones, he is up to his old tricks. For instance, the narrator's wife perishes on page one.
"Oh, I just loved that - killing off a major character right at the start!"
Asked why so many of his characters suffer grisly fates, King makes a lofty comparison.
"It's just like what God does to us," he says. "Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. people trapped in burning houses…
The skin-of the world is thin, that's what my books show."
King, a man of bear-like proportions, then rises from his chair and nearly touches the cabin's plyboard ceiling.
"We're small!" he bellows, somewhat incongruously. "Something's gonna happen to us and we don't know what it is."
But despite his resemblance to a grizzly, King is a gentle giant. It's just that language, like a demon taking possession, likes to have its volatile way with him.
In conversation, as in print, his natural mode is the tirade.
Now on a roll of biblical proportions, King launches into a tale.
"It's like the tribulation of Job in my new TV thing, Storm Of The Century';" he says. "I have Job complaining to God about his sufferings.
"Oh Lord, you have cast me down, you have killed my sons, you have tormented my body so it hurts when I take a piss -and now, Lord, I find it was all a bet between you and the devil!" King has Job speaking with the tones of a holy-roller preacher.
For dramatic effect the world-famous author sways above me like a skyscraper buffeted by gales and pummels the office ceiling with his huge bunched fists.
The story recommences ...
"There is silence before God answers. And then we see a black cloud travelling across the sky. Finally, it arrives overhead, and a voice speaks out of it."
At this point, King cups his hands like a megaphone as he takes on the words of the Almighty.
"Job, I guess there's just something about you that pisses me off."
The story ends as King erupts in a thunderclap of wicked merriment.
Sometimes he veers into outright grossness. For Instance, Carrie showers in pig's blood and a main character in Rose Madder is a cannibalistic cop. In The Dark Hall; a novelist runs amok and nails a victim's tongue on the wall
Yet he is only gruesome only as a last resort. His proper domain Is terror, not horror, and he strives to induce fear rather than revulsion.
So what does fear mean to the man, himself?
"Me? That depends whether we're talking daylight or night time!"
When pressed a little further, King describes the feeling as "an intensity".
Like many celebrities, King has had to deal with fear in the form of crazed fans.
"I had an obsessive fan In the early 1980s, around the time of John Lennon's assassination, who was always making me sign things," King says.
For a man with King's astoundingly graphic imagination, such people must be genuinely scary.
Little wonder, King says he lives in "the People's Republic of Paranoia".
In real life, he has become reclusive and is notoriously reluctant to give interviews.
King briefly touches on the subject of assassination in Carrie. A fictitious historian in the novel says the two most stunning events of the 20th century are Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John F. Kennedy and the murderous rite of spring when Carrie incinerates her Maine hometown.
During our interview, King draws at analogy between Oswald and the American public's response to the Vietnam War.
"We felt we could unseat the President and change everything! We were now the man in the Dallas Book Depository, we had our fingers on the trigger!
"We started off protesting the Vietnam War, then we sold out. We never atoned for Vietnam, so the war isn't over."
King is a workman who both loves and hates his tools. He recalls his first type writer bought for $35 - "a great big iron thing like an instrument of torture."
"The letter m broke off, and I had to fill it in by hand. I'd be upstairs during the summer pounding away in my underpants, streaming with sweat.
It was a liberating too!, but also an enslaving one. I felt like James Bond on Goldfinger's exercise machine. He's pedalling away, and he croaks out: 'Do you expect me to speak?' And Goldfinger says:
'No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!'.
"The word processor is exquisite, like skating - but it's all on the surface, like the words are behind glass."
King has even occasionally gone back to pushing a pen.
"I wrote most of Misery by hand, sitting at Kipling's desk in Brown's Hotel in London," he says. "Then I found out he died at the desk. That spooked me, so I quit the hotel."
The Writing process is often incorporated into his fiction. For instance, there is a telepathic typewriter in The Tommyknockers, which mysteriously transcribes the writer's thoughts. In Bag Of Bones an astral pencil leaps into the fingers of an author suffering writer's block and spells out occult messages.
King's interest in the supernatural and the extra-terrestrial requires him to think about the big questions of life.
"Fiction is crafted to discuss those questions - why we're here, the difference between predestination and randomness," he says.
He then lifts his eyes to the sky, or rather the room's low ceiling, and in a booming voice asks: "What's it all about, Alfie?"
One of the sad realities of modern life is that truth can be stranger than fiction -even Stephen King's lurid variety.
Thus in America, teenagers are gunning down their playmates and teachers. And after the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, people fully realise that the enemy, can indeed, lie within.
King is fond of a phrase by editor Maxwell Perkins to describe Thomas Wolfe. The astute editor called the esteemed author a "divine wind chime" who responded to cultural breezes.
But a wind chime does not really fit King - he certainly doesn't delicately tinkle.
Let's just call him a demonic fog horn.
