Owen King on the magic of writing his new book “The Curator”: ‘I think, ‘God, how did I get from A to Z?’’

Owen King loves to entertain. Particularly if it includes reading, and particularly when it includes collaborating with others to create new things.

It’s a love that’s apparent in King’s latest book, “The Curator” his sixth, a clever, chaotic historical yarn that pushes up against mystery and fantasy and is influenced by his love of Victorian novelists, especially Charles Dickens. It’s also a very specific homage to Peter Straub, the great American writer of horror and supernatural novels who died in 2022.

“I wrote it to entertain myself and then rewrote it to make sure it entertains readers,” he says on the phone from his home in upstate New York.

“The Curator” began life in 2014 as a short story published in serial form in the zine “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.” Straub, King recalls, had been very nice about the story, and so he dedicated it to him. He was, King says, “one of the nicest, most generous men you could imagine … it’s a joy to open one of Peter’s books and find his voice.”

A happenstance visit to his alma mater Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York and its cabinet of curiosities inspired him to expand the story into a full novel. The cabinet displays historical objects found languishing in various of the departments on campus and includes carved African masks, a wallaby skeleton and a stuffed loon.

King enthuses about cultural institutions such as museums and libraries that are not only cornerstones of democracy but also our collective memory.

“I can’t talk to a person from 1896, but I can kind of commune with them with what there is in the library,” he says, “with photographs, with things that they’ve written and that have been written about them.”

That includes, too, objects that have been left behind, like the one at Vassar’s museum; objects he says, that he wanted to use in the book so it would be “filled up with all of the pieces of the world that are behind us.”

For the novel, King also enjoyed researching fin de siècle life in Victorian England and reading about the Five Points area in New York’s Lower Manhattan and turn-of-the-century Vienna, all of which caught his imagination and inform the spirit of the novel. It is mordantly funny and features a plucky female protagonist who is not what she seems to be.

“The Curator” is an artifact, too, with paper-cut silhouette illustrations by Australian artist Kathleen Jennings that complement the world-building, visual cues that enhance the storytelling, appearing with captions pulled from adjacent chapters, reminiscent of the ink illustrations in “Great Expectations,” a novel King says is deep in his DNA and one of his favourites.

Like Dickens, King’s a chameleon. He’s always been a wide reader; as we speak he enthuses about all kinds of different stories and ways of storytelling — and that shows in the work that he’s produced: horror, science fiction, historical fiction, and now even a crime comic book.

He figures it’s a restlessness, but also he becomes excited about trying to write something different, which sometimes leads to collaboration with other writers he admires. He co-wrote “Intro to Alien Invasion” with Mark Jude Poirier and “Sleeping Beauties” with his father, Stephen King, for example, and is currently working on a crime comic book with Jesse Kellerman. Since writing is a lonely job, King finds collaboration “inspiring and incredibly rejuvenating,” especially enjoying how “when you work with somebody on something, and they come at it from a different angle, it’s fun to pick up a string they have and then run with it.”

When his writing is going well, “it just feels easy. But it’s really difficult to get to that place where all of a sudden you’re sitting down every day and it’s happening.” More often than not, he says, he’ll write several paragraphs and have trouble repeating the timbre, “so it’s back to the drawing board and I do it over and over again.”

It’s at that metaphorical drawing board that magic can happen. when he finishes a book, he says he always feels and aspect of wonder. “It seems a little magical when I look at my book and I can almost never know how I did it … I think, ‘God, how did I get from A to Z?’ It changes from that sparking place where you’re making things up to a very engineered, technical exercise where you try to perfect it as much as it can be perfected.”

And when he — finally — holds a finished copy of a book he’s written? First, he says, he thinks “of all the people who helped make it possible, and it’s enormously meaningful to me. But I tend to be looking forward to the next story a little more — there’s a tiny part of me that’s racing ahead. I have that sense of how finite time is. I need to keep going!”

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