Going for Cheap Thrillers

At press time, only two installments of The Green Mile were available to read. The third episode is being copyedited. ''Four is part done, part here,'' says King, pointing to his head. ''The rest is somewhere in my brain. If I die it would become like The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Some of the other books I've written, I haven't really known where I was going, either, but it's dangerous. It's like taking off in an airplane and not knowing if the landing gear works.''

Even if King himself doesn't know the outcome of The Green Mile yet, it seems that someone with his track record wouldn't worry about being a failure with readers. Not true, says King. ''It does matter if you fail,'' he insists. ''If it doesn't, it means you're no good anymore. You become Harold Robbins. I want to stay dangerous, and that means taking risks.''

King has rarely failed in his career — and his personal life has also been a triumph. King, a Maine native whose father abandoned the family when he was 2, has been married for 25 years to Tabitha Spruce King, whom he met when they were students at the University of Maine. He and Tabitha, who has published five books, have three children. ''I don't need to do this anymore,'' he admits. ''Financially, we're set. The house is paid for, the car is paid for. I don't want clothes. I don't have a nice clothes body. I get a suit at Barneys, a $900 suit. Three times I wear it and it looks like it came from Robert Hall.''

He continues his prodigious output — working four hours a day, seven days a week — ''because I still like it.'' King shuns most of the trappings of fame and affluence; he and his family have a vacation home on a lake in Maine but rarely travel anywhere else. ''Lookit, if I had a place in La Jolla, I'd be the same a--hole in La Jolla that I am in Maine,'' King says cheerfully. ''I like Maine because it's so cold in the winter. There's nothing to do but work.''

After King finishes The Green Mile, he's planning a new version of The Shining in the form of an ABC miniseries, this time from his own screenplay. And then it's back to more novels; Desperation and The Regulators (the latter under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman) are coming out in October. ''I don't consider what I do work,'' he says. ''It's making stories up in my head. I hope I don't ever get into that Harold Robbins rut, but if I do I hope I'll figure it out or someone will tell me. Then I'll shut up and go to the Caribbean, and no one will hear from me again.''

Or will they? That last idea sounds like the start of a great... Stephen King novel.