（外文电子版资料）Stephen King - The_Glass_Floor.docVIP

THE GLASS FLOOR From: Weird Tales Fall, 1990 INTRODUCTION In the novel Deliverance, by James Dickey, there is a scene where a country fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs his hand with a tool while repairing a car. One of the city men who are looking for a couple of guys to drive their cars downriver asks this fellow, Griner by name, if hes hurt himself. Griner looks at his bloody hand, then mutters: Naw - it aint as bad as I thought. Thats the way I felt after re-reading The Glass Floor, the first story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea. Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in the first place), Ive left the tale just as it was. If I really did start making changes, the result would be an entirely new story. The Glass Floor was written, to the best of my recollection, in the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy magazines for Health Knowledge (The Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories) as well as a vastly more popular digest called Sexology. He had rejected several submissions kindly (one of them, marginally better than The Glass Floor, was finally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under the title Night of the Tiger), then accepted this one when I finally got around to submitting it. That first check was for thirty-five dollars. Ive cashed many bigger ones since then, but none gave me more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real money for something I had found in my head! The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written - clearly the product of an unformed story-tellers mind - but the last bit pays off better than I r