Stephen King: A Shining Master of Horror Tales : Movies: After seeing many of his books become films in someone else’s hands, the terror maestro has penned ‘Sleepwalkers’ directly for the screen, and he says that he is ‘pretty happy with it.’

NEW YORK —  Before you get to the movies, and the books, and the sheer horror of it all, you have to ask Stephen King the really important questions.

“Red Sox in the American League East,” he answers. “American League West? I don’t know. Maybe the White Sox, finally. Who do you like? Mets maybe? Los Angeles? . . . “

Baseball is one of King’s passions; so is rock ‘n’ roll. Interviews are not. But the ponytailed, sweat-shirted King, who’s shaved off the beard he grows between the World Series and spring training every year, is loose, friendly and willing to say what he thinks, especially about “Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers.”

“I’m pretty happy with it,” he said, sipping a cup of tea at his Manhattan hotel. “The thing is, it’s mine. One of the bonuses about this project is that there aren’t going to be any fans who’ll come up and say, ‘The book was a lot better,’ because there isn’t any book.”

“Sleepwalkers,” which King wrote directly for the screen--”There was no deal; I did it on spec”--is about an incestuous mother-son team, played by Brian Krause (“Return to the Blue Lagoon”) and Alice Krige (“Chariots of Fire”) who move from town to town, avoiding their pursuers and stalking their intended victims, in this case Madchen Amick (of “Twin Peaks”).

“They’re a little bit like vampires,” King said, “in that they suck the life essence from unsuspecting, pure women. And they may be the last of a dying race. I don’t know. There are several executives at Columbia, who I won’t name, who kept asking me ‘They come from another planet, right?’ And I’m saying, ‘Well, why do you care where . . . they come from?’

“Studios are so weird. You see these movies where there are car chases, and shots are fired, and finally one of the cars finishes up by hitting a fire hydrant and overturning and the guys inside crawl out and more gunfire is exchanged, and no cops ever come. No crowd ever gathers. And they’re willing to let this go by. But they’re scared to death that people won’t understand what Sleepwalkers are.”

He said there are some nasty things in “Sleepwalkers,” most notably a scene where Krause’s and Amick’s characters go on a date to a cemetery. It’s there that Charles Brady (Krause), whom King compares to a kind of supernatural Ted Bundy, attempts to dine on Tanya Robertson’s (Amick) life essence.

“What goes on in that cemetery,” King said, “is date rape, pure and simple, and it’s an ugly piece of work. But it’s not an untruthful piece of work, and I don’t feel it’s a licentious piece of work--or, I guess, salacious would be a better word. I don’t feel we’re there to look up her dress while she struggles to get away, and we’re not there to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to really do this?’ to the nerds in the audiences who are maybe getting off on it. What I’m saying is, this is what it looks like when some girl does go out with the wrong guy.”

Despite all this, King called “Sleepwalkers” one of the most enjoyable experiences of his creative life. Which isn’t what he says about another film that bears his name, “The Lawnmower Man”--until recently advertised by New Line Cinema as “Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man.”

King has had problems with the way his name was used in the film’s advertising, but he concedes “it’s not a real bad picture. I mean the reviews haven’t been very good, but the reviews in this genre are never very good. Gene Siskel has never liked a horror movie, and very few critics do. In a sense, if critics like the movie, you’re not doing your job.”

No one can accuse King of not doing his job. One of the best-known authors in the country and the grand pooh-bah of the horror genre, he’s published more than 30 novels and short story collections in 16 years, including “Carrie,” “Salem’s Lot,” “The Shining,” “Cujo,” “Pet Semetary” and “Skeleton Crew.” The same number of films, miniseries, home videos and teleplays have been based on his work, most notably “Misery,” “Carrie” and “Stand by Me.” He’s a one-man, $100-million-a-year industry. And although his last novel, “Needful Things,” was pretty well trounced by the reviewers, King remains calm, even when it’s pointed out that Alexandra Ripley’s “Scarlett” kept it from reaching No. 1 on the bestseller lists.

“That’s happened to me before,” he said. “It happened with ‘Christine’; ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ kept me out on that one. That’s OK; Alexandra Ripley’s probably never going to have another No. 1, not to put a knock on her. But a lady asked me this morning, ‘Do you ever want to write anything besides horror?’ And I have, thank you. But I don’t talk about it.”

King said that “Needful Things” was actually intended to be a satire about the Reagan years. “When I finished the book and got ready to turn it in, I thought to myself, ‘Now, people are going to turn on to this and see what it’s about and laugh and give me good reviews. Or they’re going to say this is really a mean-spirited, ugly horror novel.’ And essentially that’s what most of them said.”

King said he finds nonfiction to be the toughest thing. “I wasn’t built to be a nonfiction writer,” he said. “I’ve done two pieces of nonfiction I was really proud of: ‘Danse Macabre’ (his 1981 overview of the horror genre), and a piece in the New Yorker about Little League baseball. And they were pieces I worked very hard on and spent inordinately huge amounts of time writing, rewriting, editing, trying to make it as good as I possibly could. But you have to check the facts.”

He’s also found nonfiction to be less than lucrative. Back in 1983, he wrote a piece about rock ‘n’ roll for Playboy, and subsequently wound up buying an AM rock station. And not only did he give the money from the New Yorker piece to the Bangor Little League, he donated additional money to construct a regulation AA baseball field for the town’s teen-agers.

“The Playboy piece paid $6,000,” King said, “and the New Yorker piece, I think, paid $22,000. So that’s $28,000. The baseball field cost a million and the radio station cost about $65,000. So I got to stop writing nonfiction. There’s no money in it.”