Having seen the movie again
recently, I felt it captured the essence of this story, Mort Rainey's
insanity. Here again we see King dealing with his own question of where
he goes when he is writing the story. It is a valid question, because
King is not a psychopath, or insane, and has not hacked his wife up. He
is just exploring the frightening pathways that the mind wanders in the
night.
I think that the exploration is valid and important. We all have those darker sides, Jung called it the shadow. What would happen if your shadow came to you as a completely externalized individual seeking its own life? It would want what you have because it did at least half the work in creating it. I could get repetitious here, because we have already delved into this theme with The Dark Half.
Inspiration:
One day in the late fall 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 in 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 room's two windows. It was casual
curiosity, no more. We'd been living in the same house for eleven or
twelve years, but I had never taken a good hard look out this particular
window before. The reason is perfectly simple; set at floor level,
mostly hidden behind the drier, half blocked by baskets of mending, it's
a hard window to look out of.
I squeezed in, nevertheless, and looked out. That
window looks down on a little brick-paved alcove between the house and
the attached sunporch. It's an area I see just about every day . . . but
the angle was new. My wife had set half 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. The
phrase which occurred to me was, of course, the title of this 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 at the
typewriter or picking up a pencil is a physical act; the spiritual
analogue 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 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?