（外文电子版资料）Stephen King - The Road Virus Heads North.pdfVIP

The Road Virus Heads North Stephen King THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH Richard Kinnell wasnt frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard sale in Rosewood. He was fascinated by it, and he felt hed had the good luck to find something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didnt occur to him until later (not until it was too late, as he might have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a young man. He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference tided The Threat of Popularity. You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because hed come to a plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it out. At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative. The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and sometimes even a pearl. Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of Nightmare City this way: Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City. Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of Rosewood. A mile or so beyond