Stephen King

It was only a matter of time before Stephen King’s world intersected with ours, said

in The

New York Times. In King’s 61st novel, The Institute, a telekinetically empowered 12-year-old is taken from his family and held in a prison camp with other uncommon children. As King was writing, he was aware that migrant children at the U.S. border were being separated from their parents and held in cages at the direction of President Trump, and that some were dying in custody. But the 71-year-old dean of American horror insists that his idea for this novel dates back decades, and that the story speaks to human nature, not current events. “I’m not a person who wants to write allegory like Animal Farm,” he says. “But if you tell the truth about the way people behave, sometimes you find out that life really does imitate art.”

Though he’s best known for the monsters he’s created, King has always been just as interested in how people overcome fear. So The Institute’s protagonist, Luke Ellis, allies himself with other gifted young captives to resist the shadowy organization that holds them. “I wanted to write about how weak people can be strong,” King says, and one way is through friendship. “It sounds saccharine sweet if you just say, ‘Friends make things better,’” he says, “but when you tell a story, people understand.” And for all the terrors in King’s books, said Xan Brooks in TheGuardian .com, he maintains faith that the bad in people, though a persistent source of many of our fears, need not triumph. “Most people,” he says, “are good. More people are anxious to stop a terrorist attack than to start one.”