Stephen King said he decided to destroy Castle Rock because “It’s easy to fall into a rut, where you know who everyone is, and you know where everything is on Main Street. It gets almost addictive to go back to these people. So, I said I’m done with this.”

“`Needful Things’ is the final part of a trilogy begun with `The Dark Half’ and followed by `Sun Dog’ in `Four Past Midnight,”‘ King explained. “Alan Pangborn was all the things Thad Beaumont in `Dark Half’ wasn’t — he wanted to be a hero, so `Needful Things’ became his book. Then I quite consciously tried to bring back everybody else from Castle Rock.”

Alan Pangborn remains one of the few people relatively unsusceptible to Leland Gaunt’s promises and taunts, and interestingly enough, Gaunt knows to steer clear of Alan. “I think there are a lot of people in this world who are resistant to the Devil’s wiles,” King said, “and to temptation. And there are people who change, who recover from their original disease — acquisitiveness, or jealousy, or covetousness. There is a redemption.”

Speaking of the humor that runs rampant through the book, King remarked that this was not an unusual juxtaposition of humor and horror, because “… horror and comedy are very much the same — we can be watching a drama, and stay engrossed, but when something incongruous happens, I defy people not to laugh.”

The theme of criticism of our money culture was very much in King’s mind while writing this book. “It was an occasion of my looking back over the 1980s and being appalled with what I saw — mostly the stockbrokers’ cases, the traffic in and use of cocaine, and the religious scandals of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and others,” he said.

“My generation started out with a lot of good intentions, and a lot of `cracked’ moral courage, but we sold it off so we could tune in to Geraldo Rivera and so Shirley MacLaine could talk about channeling. It’s bad enough to sell your soul for a pair of magic glasses — at least then you can say you weren’t venal or covetous, you were just stupid.”

King says his next book, “Gerald’s Game,” a Maine story set west and north of Castle Rock, is due out in September 1992, to be followed that December by another novel, tentatively titled, “Dolores Clayborne.” Another Dark Tower book is coming — sometime — and two movies are in the works: in the spring of 1992 a movie called “Sleepwalkers,” and later Rob Reiner will direct “Needful Things.”

“What I’ve been thinking about for the last two years is the differences between men and women,” King said. “That’s what I’ve been doing in the books that make up the trilogy `Needful Things’ ends, and I hope to continue exploring that.”