New work due from some famous names
New York City was the setting May 31-June 4 as authors, booksellers, publishers and fans arrived for BookExpo America and then BookCon, which is open to the public. USA TODAY’s Jocelyn McClurg made the scene.
A KING AND A PRINCE
Stephen King and his novelist son, Owen King, are teaming up on a novel, Sleeping Beauties (Scribner, September). Expect twice as many thrills and chills.
At a Book and Author Breakfast on Thursday, Owen King explained that the book originated when an idea popped into his head: “How about a story where all the women fell asleep?”
A world without women would be “awful” and “could only be one thing, a Stephen King novel,” he said. Owen told his horror-maestro Dad that he should write the novel. Eventually, they came to an agreement — to write Sleeping
Beauties together. Sleeping Beauties takes place in a small town in West Virginia where the primary employer is a women’s prison. Local women become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze; if the gauze is disturbed, the women become feral and violent.
Stephen King called the experience of writing with his son a “blessing ” and a “thrill.” The “book turned out to be a really good book, and I can say that because I only wrote 50% of it,” he said.
IT’S A ‘MAD’ WORLD
Matthew Weiner, the Emmy Award-winning creator of the seminal AMC series Mad Men, knows a thing or two about telling stories. And he’s telling one that sounds creepy and gripping in his first novel, a slim volume with the unusu
al title Heather, the Totality, which Little, Brown will publish in October. “I wanted it to be intense. I wanted it to give you a little bit of a stomach ache,” Weiner revealed at a small lunch Thursday at BookExpo America. His audience could be forgiven if they pictured Mad Men’s Sally Draper when they heard his story pitch. The idea for his new book, he explained, came one day when he was on the Upper East Side of New York and saw an “extremely beautiful” girl of 14 or 15 in a school uniform go into an apartment building under construction. “And as she walked in, I saw a construction worker … a white guy, a skinhead, and I saw him look at her and it was one of the most terrifying looks I have ever seen in my life. It was sex and murder and everything all at once,” he said. And then, he wondered, what if her father had witnessed that look? That was the starting point for Heather, the story of a wellheeled Manhattan couple, their daughter, Heather, and a dangerous young man.