The Bone Church: Stephen King publishes poem in Playboy

The Guardian | Alison Flood

The Bone Church, a narrative work about an ill-fated jungle expedition, appears in November edition

Marge Simpson’s appearance as its cover girl has attracted a frenzy of media attention, but this month’s edition of Playboy magazine contains another, almost equally unexpected celebrity appearance: from author Stephen King, making a very rare outing as a poet.

“When travelling to the heart of darkness, terror is not an emotion – it’s a destination,” writes King in the issue, out now, before launching into The Bone Church. Told by a man in a bar, the poem is the story of an ill-fated expedition into a jungle. “There were thirty-two of us went into that greensore / and only three who rose above it,” writes King. “We were thirty days in the green, and only one of us came out.”

The team is killed off, variously, by snakes, leeches (“Dorrance tried to kiss him back to life / and sucked from his throat a leech as big as / a hothouse tomato”) and fevers, until three finally arrive at the bone church, “a million years of bone and tusk, / a whited sepulchre of eternity, a thrashpit of prongs / such as you’d see if hell burned dry to the slag of its cauldron”. Things, unsurprisingly enough, don’t end well, as “mammoths from the dead age when man / was not” start to thunder past in “endless convulsions of tumbling death”.

Playboy has a perhaps surprisingly strong literary background, publishing works by authors including John Irving, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood. This summer, literary editor Amy Grace Loyd acquired first serial rights in Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished novel The Original of Laura for its December issue. It has also enjoyed a lengthy relationship with King, interviewing the author back in 1983.

“The protagonist of Salem’s Lot, a struggling young author with a resemblance to his creator, confesses at one point, ‘Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, I make up a Playboy Interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.’ Ten novels and several million dollars in the bank later, your books are big on campus and everywhere else,” the interviewer said to King.

The author replied that the passage reflected his state of mind in the days before he sold his first book, Carrie, when nothing seemed to be going right. “When I couldn’t sleep, in that black hole of the night when all your doubts and fears and insecurities surge in at you, snarling, from the dark – what the Scandinavians call the wolf hour – I used to lie in bed alternately wondering if I shouldn’t throw in the creative towel and spinning out masturbatory wish fulfilment fantasies in which I was a successful and respected author. And that’s where my imaginary Playboy interview came in,” he said.

King’s fans have been steeling themselves to buy the new issue of the magazine. “Since I have never purchased a magazine of this calibre in my life, my wife was kind enough to purchase me a copy. She knew I would feel like a perv when paying for it and was kind enough to spare me,” wrote one at StephenKing.com. “I just hope Marge’s pictures aren’t too explicit or my wife might not let me get the issue,” said another.

Fans will perhaps feel less awkward buying the 9 November issue of New Yorker, out this week, which features a new short story by King. Set in Castle Rock – a frequent haunt for King’s characters – Premium Harmony is the story of the unhappy ending to an arguing couple’s trip to buy a purple ball.

And the prolific author’s new novel, Under the Dome – a 900-page epic he first tried to write in the 1980s – is published next week on 10 November. With a cast of more than 100 characters, Under the Dome tells of a Maine town sealed off from the world by an invisible force field.