I did have enough short pieces for a collection, about a dozen, and decided to put it out there and see if anyone wanted to take a chance on it. I wasn’t surprised when it was passed over by bigger publishers, who still prefer novels to collections for sound commercial reasons. I thought I would try the small-press world and in December 2004 got a callback from Peter Crowther, the distinguished gentleman behind PS Publishing, a very small imprint in the east of England. Peter wrote weird tales himself and had been taken with my story “Pop Art,” the one about the inflatable boy. He offered to do a small print run of the book, 20th Century Ghosts, casually doing me a kindness I can’t ever repay. But then Pete—and some of the other guys in the small-press world, like Richard Chizmar and Bill Schafer—have done such kindnesses for lots of writers, publishing stuff not because they thought it would make them rich but because they loved it. (Ahem, this is your cue to visit the Web sites for PS Publishing, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Subterranean Press and do your bit to support an up-and-comer by picking up one of their publications. Go ahead, it’ll be good for your bookshelf.)

Pete asked me to write some more short stories for the book, so there’d be some “exclusive,” never-published fiction in there. I said okay and started one about a guy who buys a ghost on the Internet. Somehow it got away from me, and 335 pages later I discovered I had a novel in me after all. I titled it Heart-Shaped Box.

Boy, it reads like a Stephen King novel. To be fair, I came by it honestly.

I WAS ALWAYS A LATE BLOOMER, and that first book, 20th Century Ghosts, came out when I was thirty-three. I’m forty-six now, and will be forty-seven by the time this book is out. The days blast past you at full throttle, man, and leave you breathless.

I had a fear when I started out that people would know I was Stephen King’s son, so I put on a mask and pretended I was someone else. But the stories always told the truth, the true truth. I think good stories always do. The stories I’ve written are all the inevitable product of their creative DNA: Bradbury and Block, Savini and Spielberg, Romero and Fango, Stan Lee and C. S. Lewis, and most of all, Tabitha and Stephen King.

The unhappy creator finds himself in the shadow of other, bigger artists and resents it. But if you’re lucky—and as I’ve already said, I’ve had more than my fair share of luck, and please God, let it hold—those other, bigger artists cast a light for you to find your way.