Stephen King, bless his heart, describes the afterlife
From a much longer interview in Salon:
Think of it this way. I think of the brain as this great, big, crenelated library with many rooms, billions and billions of books, rooms without number, but at the very end of all those rooms, there’s a little tiny box that says “pull lever in case of emergency,” because that’s the door out, and when you go out, you get pretty much what you expected, because some chemical in your brain is programmed to give you that particular dream at the very end. If you’re expecting [H.P. Lovecraft's] Yogg Sothoth, there he’ll be, along with the 900 blind fiddlers, or whatever it is.
Your mileage may vary, but — for me — that just about nails it.
BONUS PARAGRAPH: I’ve always like King’s work because there was a familiar boomer-political foundation to it:
I’ve always been a political novelist, and those things have always interested me…”The Dead Zone” is a political novel. There’s that scene in “The Dead Zone” where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war. Around my house we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, “That’s Greg Stillson as a woman.”
If you’ve read the book, or seen the most-excellent movie starring Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith and Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson you know exactly what King is getting at.
