Needful Things (1991)

inspiration

I guess I was one of the few people in the United States who thought the eighties were really funny. It was a decade in which people decided, for awhile, at least, that greed was good and that hypocrisy was simply another tool for getting along. It was the last hurrah for cigarettes, unsafe sex, and all sorts of drugs. It was the final corruption of the Love and Peace Generation-The Big Cop-out-and I thought it was a case of having to laugh. It was either that, or cry. I was thinking about all this one night while driving home from a basketball game, and my thoughts centered on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, of the PTL Club. It occurred to me that in the eighties, everything had come with a price tag, that the decade quite literally was the sale of the century. The final items up on the block had been honor, integrity, self-respect, and innocence. By the time I got home that night, I had decided to turn the eighties into a small-town curio shop called Needful Things and see what happened. I told myself to keep it light and surreal; that if I just kept in mind the Bakkers' doghouse, which had been equipped with heaters and running water, I would be okay. And that's what I did. The book didn't review well. Either a lot of critics didn't get the joke or didn't appreciate it. The readers liked it, though, and that's what matters to me.