Browsing Google News Archive for old news stories about Stephen King (I was actually looking for contemporary reviews of his early books, but found only paid links, bah!), I found this one, which is a little intriguing:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...,1512712&hl=en
It's sort of an interview published on April 5, 1979. King mentions the following around the midpoint of the piece:
This doesn't ring a bell with me; it doesn't sound like a King story I know. Any ideas?For example, I'm working on a story now about a guy who goes to his small town's restaurant every afternoon for coffee. One day he goes in and a different waitress takes his order. When he asks about the other waitress, the new one denies there ever was such a person. That's a frightening situation. How does a person cope with it?
At the end he mentions that he's "also working on a book that has a psychic feel to it, bad psychic manifestations, really dangerous," which sounds sort of like Firestarter, maybe, given the timeframe.