Stephen King’s Greatest Fear
His new book predicted Trump’s horrors, and he has a lot more on the way. The only thing he doesn’t want to think about? Retirement
His latest novel eerily mirrors the times, but the only thing that scares the horror icon is retirement.
Donald Trump was still months away from being elected president when Stephen King began writing his upcoming novel. But The Institute — out September 10th and centered on a 12-year-old boy stolen from
his parents in the night and locked up in a mysterious facility — is likely to remind readers of certain immigration policies. “I can’t help but see similarity between what’s going on in The Institute and those pictures of kids in cages,” says King. “Sometimes fiction outpaces fact.”
This isn’t the first time a King book predicted the political future: His 1979 book The Dead Zone was about a Trump-like aspiring president threatening global apocalypse if he took office. “Fiction has foreseen Trump before,” says King, “always as a nightmare. Now, the nightmare is here. But I don’t want to force my worldview on people. I’m not George Orwell, and this book isn’t 1984.”
King is calling in from his house in Maine, just a couple of weeks after traveling to Foxborough, Massachusetts, to see his first-ever Rolling Stones concert. (“Keith looked a little tentative and just putting in the time at first, but then he caught fire.”) He’s still reveling in the surge of interest in his work that followed 2017’s It, now the highest-grossing horror movie ever. “I think a lot of kids watched the [1990] It miniseries with Tim Curry, and it scared the living shit right out of them,” King says. “They couldn’t wait to go back and see it again.”
Like It, The Institute is about a group of children who band together to battle an unspeakably evil force. The twist this time is that they all have telekinetic or psychic powers and the adults who run the facility force them to undergo medical experiments. “I wanted to write a book like Tom Brown’s School Days,” King says, referencing the 1857 Thomas Hughes children’s classic about a British boarding school. “But in hell.”
A book about clairvoyant kids battling a shadow organization will surely draw comparisons to Stranger Things. Which was, of course, heavily inspired by Stephen King books. “I think it does owe something to It,” the author says. “Another book about kids who are weak and helpless by themselves — but together can make something that is very strong.”
The Institute could be the next King project to be adapted by Hollywood, joining The Stand (CBS All Access), Castle Rock (Hulu), and many other TV series — plus the seven movies he has in development, including
It Chapter 2. King has script approval on all of them. “They have to work,” he says. “It can’t have 19 pages of flashbacks to when the characters were kids. I want the pedal to the metal as much of the time as possible.”
The film adaptation of King’s 2013 The Shining sequel, Dr. Sleep, comes out November 8th and features Ewan McGregor playing an adult Danny Torrance. Though King has always hated Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of his book for changing so much of the story, he allowed the Dr.
Sleep filmmakers to use elements of Kubrick’s version. “My problem with Kubrick’s film was that it’s so cold,” King says. “The reason I didn’t have any problem with this script is they took some of Kubrick’s material and warmed it up.”
King’s next book, If It Bleeds, is another in his ongoing Holly Gibney detective series and is due sometime in 2020. He’s already working on the novel that will follow. “I’m 71 years old,” King says, “and a lot of people my age are forgotten. I’ve had this late-season burst of success. It’s very gratifying.”
Naturally, retirement remains the last thing on his mind. “That’s God’s decision, not mine,” he says. “I’ll either collapse at my desk or the ideas will run out — the thing you don’t want to do is embarrass yourself. As long as I feel like I’m still doing good work, I can’t see myself stopping.”
“I’ll either collapse at my desk or the ideas will run out — the thing you don’t want to do is embarrass yourself.”