“I’m not asking you to believe in the boys in the basement,” my host assured me. “But you do have to believe that I believe in them.”

Near as I could tell, Stephen King and I were alone—seated in the lived-in living room of his lakeside home in western Maine, the relatively modest summer cottage of an immoderately prosperous cottage industrialist, an entirely pleasant setting on an unpleasantly humid July afternoon. There’d been no awkward preliminaries, and about an hour into the conversation we’d arrived at an especially interesting topic: King’s funny-little-green-men theory of artistic creativity, which sounded as much like an excuse or an apology as a postulate. When it came to the hard work of writing, he seemed to be saying, the part of his brain that rendered rational decisions was otherwise engaged. (Never, by the way, would I have stooped to ask the great literary terrorist where he gets his ideas. Besides, I already knew the standard reply: “Utica, New York.”) We were talking about process and intuition, not about inspiration, and he was steering the discussion. How did the job get done? The guys you really need to chew this over with, he explained—and what a shame it was they spoke only to him—were the accomplices who had custody of his imagination. Or, as Michael Noonan, the novelist protagonist of his forthcoming book, “Bag of Bones,” muses, “Eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business. . . . So-called higher thought is, by and large, overrated. . . . I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work.”

What, then, have the boys in the basement dictated this time? “Bag of Bones” is, à la King, not a slender volume. “I have a real problem with bloat,” he once confessed. “I write like fat ladies diet.” Here, for more than five hundred pages, he stirs an ample assortment of subplots, skillfully shuttling between the natural and supernatural worlds, along the way exploring the simple and profound intimacies of marriage and love and small-town life. There is, as well, the expected quota of stuff gothic, grisly, and bizarre—the stalking of the present by the past, sudden deaths, ghosts (one with a major attitude), evil wearing a human face, telepathy, scarifying dreamscapes—all of this animated by characters, circumstances, and dialogue that affirm King’s blindfolded familiarity with everything indigenous to Maine.

Some of the most overheated passages in “Bag of Bones” are Noonan’s narrations of his crippling struggle with writer’s block, lamentations one has difficulty imagining rattling the couch even in an Upper West Side shrink’s office and, therefore, a measure of the improbability of that particular subplot. In King’s lineage of novelist-artist-heroes-who-aren’t-quite-alter-egos—following Paul Sheldon in “Misery,” Gordon Lachance in “The Body,” Thad Beaumont in “The Dark Half,” and John Edward Marinville in “Desperation”—Noonan, a scrivener of suspense tales that occupy the middle and lower rungs of the best-seller list, is the first genuine writer to be derailed by verbal constipation. For all I know, Noonan’s symptoms, triggered by the sudden death of his wife—“I can’t write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock . . . I’m like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine . . . once when I tried to force a sentence or two . . . I had to grab the wastebasket and vomit”—might be cribbed from a case study in a medical journal. Or they might just be something the boys in the basement phoned in during their coffee break.

What the world knows is that King himself has never been similarly afflicted. Beginning with “Carrie,” in 1974, he has published what and when he pleases—novels, novellas, short stories, occasional nonfiction; usually a book a year, sometimes two or three. According to the biographical note on the inside back cover of many of the forty or so fiction titles that have been published in mass-market paperback editions, he is “the world’s best-selling novelist”—since 1974, three hundred million books sold, in thirty-three languages. (When the spirit moves him, he agrees to write the inevitable screenplay adaptation; when disinclined, he still cashes a check.) In 1996, he simultaneously released two books—“Desperation” and “The Regulators,” a pair of novels (the latter under his nom de plume Richard Bachman)—with a repertory company of identically named players in radically different predicaments. King’s other over-the-top feat that year was “The Green Mile,” a beat-the-clock six-volume serial novel that one week occupied the first, fourth, tenth, twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth positions on the Times paperback-best-seller list, which his novel “Rose Madder” had vacated some months before. To the average tortoise with a word processor, King’s sheer productivity can arouse as much dread as any creature lurching across the pages of his horror stories.

Introducing King when he gave a reading at Princeton last year, Joyce Carol Oates referred to him as a “great writer . . . both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory and would seem to spring from a collective, unconscious, and thoroughly domestic-American soil.” King’s prolific habits make him, like Oates, suspect in certain circles, and his immense popularity compounds the resentment. Hence, the verdict a while back by the critic Leslie Fiedler that “none of us will be remembered as long or revered as deeply as our contemporary, Stephen King” wasn’t embraced by those arbiters of the official canon who, without bothering to read King, feel comfortable dismissing him as a hack.

Critics tempted to punish King for his success have frequently seen fit to review his contracts and the prepublication hype along with his texts. “Bag of Bones,” perhaps more than his other books, will have to bear this burden. In June, King’s new publisher, Scribner, in the opening volley of a promotional barrage, dispensed nine thousand advance “readers’ copies” of “Bag of Bones,” along with an audiocassette that included a half-hour King monologue and his reading of a chapter excerpt, aimed mainly at bookstore clerks, the most likely bell-ringers in any word-of-mouth campaign. Next came the obligatory Web site, along with refrigerator magnets and a crossword puzzle (both motifs in the novel) and, in general, the sort of all-pervasive marketing assault that makes “synergy” such an obnoxious concept. (Scribner is a division of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom Inc.) At Scribner, September has been designated Stephen King Month—“Bag of Bones” is to be the imprint’s only new title during that period—and, if all goes well, when the first million three hundred sixty thousand hardcover copies appear on bookstore shelves, a couple of weeks from now, prospective buyers either will be oblivious of or will have stopped caring about the indecorous spectacle that brought King to this juncture in his career.