Master of horror Stephen King tells Steve Pratt how he recovered from the horrific car crash that nearly killed him.

FOUR years ago bestselling writer Stephen King was out for a stroll near his house when he was hit by a van and suffered horrific injuries. His leg was broken in nine places, he was left with a fractured right hip, his spine was chipped in eight places, and he had four broken ribs.

Happily, he not only lived to tell the tale but to use his experiences for his book Dreamcatcher, the movie version of which is released this week.

The story concerns four men who've been friends since childhood and, on a winter trip to a cabin in the woods, find themselves confronted by an alien virus threatening thousands of lives.

One character, in particular, has special relevance for him. Jonesy (played by British actor Damian Lewis) has survived a horrific car crash, which is a fictionalised account of the accident that nearly killed King shortly before he wrote Dreamcatcher.

King, 55, says that physically he's "not bad" now. "Sore a lot of the time. Stiff. I don't have a lot of stamina still. I do a lot of rehab exercises but I'm certainly a lot better than I was three years ago. Thank God, I can walk," he says.

The idea for Dreamcatcher came to him in the bathroom. "I had a very clear image of these four guys who were of a certain age, say 35 to 40, with some of the magic rubbing off the world a little bit. I knew they were all fairly unhappy but I didn't know why," he says.

"And so then I was in the bathroom and just trying to sit down because nothing bent or anything like that, and the idea occurred to me that nobody had ever really done anything with what goes on in the bathroom. That was the last unbroken wall in the house.

"Even in a book when the action is going on, it never says 'and then John had to pause in his search for the killer to take a leak'' We never acknowledge this part of our lives, that every day in every normal person's life they have to go to the bathroom."

"We get a lot of bad news in the bathroom. It's where you take your clothes off, look at yourself in the mirror. Maybe that's where you see you've got a lump on the side of your neck. Or maybe you look down in the bowl and see that, besides a little bit of urine, there's a little bit of blood too. That's when you go to the doctor and he says 'you've got something seriously wrong with you'. I'd rather deal with that fear because that fear is unexpressed, and unexpressed fear is the strongest."

He began Dreamcatcher in November 1999, five months after his accident. "I wrote it longhand because I couldn't really sit at the word processor, I wasn't comfortable," he recalls. "I had a big easy chair, and was sort of like a pasha on his throne. I was surrounded by pillows.

"I had these ledger books that I could write in with my fountain pen, and that's how I did it. I was very, very uncomfortable. I didn't have the big metal fixator thing on my leg anymore, but I was on crutches

"Jonesy, in the book and in the movie, is a guy who has suffered a terrible car accident, which I had been through. So I just put myself in his place. It was a good way to get outside what was going on with me."

Many of King's stories - he's sold more than 300 million books - have been adapted into movies, including Carrie, Misery, The Shining, Christine, Cujo, Pet Cemetery, Misery, The Green

Mile, Hearts In Atlantis and The Shawshank Redemption.

Some he likes better than others. One, The Shining, he remade as a TV mini-series because he wasn't happy with the film. Some may consider Stanley Kubrick's movie a classic, but for King it was "boring".

A few years ago, he sparked speculation about the future of his writing by saying there might be a finite number of stories to tell, but the next couple of years will be busy for King. "I've been using the writing, frankly, as a painkiller. It's a place to go and it gets you out of your own head," he says.

He's also finishing the Dark Tower series. One is totally done, and ready to be published in November. The other two are written, waiting to be edited and polished. "The bottom line is if I drop dead today, and I hope I don't, those books could be done," he adds.

He's also working on a TV series, Kingdom Hospital, based on a Danish TV series about a haunted hospital. "Beyond that, I haven't made any plans," says King.

"But I don't have any contractual obligations and that's the way it's going to stay. I'm going to slow down. A lot of what I write will stay in the drawer a lot longer than it did. But I never said I was going to retire."

* Dreamcatcher opens in cinemas on Friday