“I can’t understand,” Stephen King said, “why you want to talk to me at a time like this.” Well, for one thing, the prolific mega-best-selling author has a new book out, the novella collection “If It Bleeds.” But to be a little more poetic about it: Here was an opportunity to see how an author who so compellingly depicted a rampaging pandemic — in his apocalyptic novel “The Stand” — and who understands so profoundly what scares us, was seeing the world these days. And as it happens, on the grim late afternoon on which we first spoke, when rain lashed against my windows and their shutters rattled in the wind, even the weather seemed to call for a conversation with the 72-year-old. So, to go back to his query: Why did I want to talk with Stephen King? Because right now, as he himself put it to me, “it’s strange out there.”
Seven years ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of you and your family. The writer describes a game you guys play, where one of you comes up with a scenario for a story in which the protagonist is in trouble and then everyone else has to write a suspenseful ending on the spot. Yeah, that was Joe’s idea. My son Joe loves [expletive] like that.
Think we could give it a shot? Yeah, sure. You’ve probably got something already cocked and locked.
OK, here’s the scenario: It takes place now, during the pandemic. A germophobe is afraid to leave his house, but he has run out of food. His phone is broken, and he can’t order anything online, because FreshDirect and all the other food-delivery services never have an empty slot. You take it from there. What happens next? OK, so here’s this guy, right? He’s afraid to go out. I mean, he’s really afraid to go out, because the virus is everywhere. This guy is washing his hands compulsively. He keeps imagining these germs crawling all over his hands and up his arms, and he’s thinking: Well, the house is pretty good. I Lysol-ed everything and I’m wearing my gloves, but I’m so, so hungry. What am I going to do for food? Then he looks around, and he says to his dog: ‘‘Fido. Come here, Fido.’’
Not bad! That’s why you’re good at your job. Of course, he would’ve already eaten the dog food. So why not eat the dog?
Stephen King at a book signing in the early 1980s. Buddy Mays/Corbis, via Getty Images
You’ve depicted apocalyptic scenarios throughout your work. What’s been interesting or weird to you about how the real world has responded to an event like the pandemic? One thing that’s shocking is how fast things change. Was it only a month ago that people were in stores? To go to the market today, and to see all those people in masks and in gloves. Talk about unreality. In “The Stand,” everything happens so fast that the roads are jammed with cars. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. There’s been very little panic. What there has been — you feel it, I feel it, everybody feels it — is a low, constant fear in the American public. If you sneeze, if you cough, the first thought that goes through your mind is, “Maybe I have this disease.”
Is that what’s making you anxious? You know what? There’s a book, a novel by Robert Harris, called “The Second Sleep,” which is set far in the future after there had been some kind of terrible disaster in the 21st century. These people are trying to figure out what it was, and they find papers by a guy who is talking about what would happen if there was a terrible event — sort of like coronavirus. He points out that in the major cities, everybody is about six days away from starvation because of the food supply chain. So I would say that I worry a little about food.
Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” (1980), one of more than 30 films based on King’s work. Everett Collection
You obviously understand how stories work. What if we tried to project that understanding into the realm of politics? President Trump has had success telling a certain story about America. What story could Joe Biden be telling? Part of the problem is that Biden hasn’t had a chance to tell his story. By the time the primary debates ended — the stage was crowded with all the different candidates — the coronavirus hit. He has been effectively muzzled. But the story that he has to tell is: Do you want somebody who’s capable of dealing with a situation like coronavirus or do you want somebody who’s so focused on his self-image that he’s not able to do that?
Does Trump remind you of any of your characters? Greg Stillson from “The Dead Zone.” Greg Stillson is a politician, and he says at one point: You know what? When I get to be president, we’re going to send our garbage to outer space. There isn’t going to be any more pollution. And people believed it! But then they believed Trump when he said he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, didn’t they? People want a simple answer. They want a man on horseback, and Trump’s that guy.
Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson in “The Dead Zone” (1983), based on King’s 1979 novel. Paramount Pictures, via Photofest
I think it’s in “On Writing” where you point out that you’re part of the last generation of writers who can remember what it’s like not to have easy access to screens. Does the way we’ve become wedded to screens have ramifications for our imaginations? It’s so big that I don’t even know. It’s a bit like these two donkeys are walking along the bridge, and one of them doesn’t have anything on his back and the other one is covered with packages and bales and bundles. The first donkey says, “Jesus, that’s quite a load you got on.” And the second donkey says, “What load?” You get used to it. And I don’t know how much time of the day you spend on screens, but for me — I almost hate to say this — I think it would be the majority. I get up in the morning, and the first thing I do is look to see if there are messages or emails. I got involved with Twitter in 2013, and that becomes addictive. I don’t know the answer to your question. I know that it has changed the way I work. I’ll be writing and my flow gets interrupted, because I say, “I want to write about a 2000 pickup truck.” So immediately I go to Firefox, and I find myself not writing but looking at different 2000 pickup trucks instead. It’s easy to get distracted.
You’re on Twitter a lot. I think it was also in “On Writing” where you said that you don’t really know what you think about something until you write it down. Is Twitter a form that allows for that? I post two different kinds of tweets. One is supposed to be fun and funny. I post pictures of my dog, who has grown a little following as “Molly, a.k.a. the Thing of Evil.” And I tell dad jokes: I went to the apiary for a dozen bees, and the apiarist gave me 13 because the 13th was a free bee. The other kind of tweet is: I’m an American, and I’m a political animal, and Trump outrages me. I’m outraged at how stupid he is. But that’s not his fault. He is what he is. What really outrages me is his laziness. There’s a lot of stuff in that book “A Very Stable Genius” about his inability to buckle down and read the material. Read the material! That’s it. You could do a better job. I could do a better job. Because we feel a sense of responsibility. I mean, we’ve had stupid commanders in chief before. Gerald Ford was no ball of fire. When you watch Trump, David, I’m not sure the man reads very well. I know he doesn’t write very well. I would argue that anybody who can’t read and can’t write can’t think. That’s what we have.
Do you think Twitter has been good for you? It’s a lot of fun. It’s like the world’s longest back fence that neighbors gossip over. Every now and then, you can make a misstep. I’ve done that several times. We’ve gotten very puritanical. And if you screw up — what I said was, “Man, I think it was wrong of that publisher to withdraw that Woody Allen book, because let him go out there and say whatever he’s got to say.” Immediately I was in the stocks, and people threw electronic cabbages at me, and that went on for a while. Then they move on to something else.
King in the film adaptation of his book “Pet Sematary” (1989). Paramount Pictures, via Everett Collection
You also stepped in it with a tweet about the Oscars. I said the difference between diversity and actual accomplishment — the two things should be separate. The whole business about the Oscars is ridiculous anyway. A lot of times, talent isn’t rewarded. But I do think that if you’re going to go in there and decide, it should be on the basis of what’s great and not the color or race of the person who made it. I got a lot of blowback on that, and I wrote a piece in The Washington Post trying to explain my position more fully, and after that I got left alone. But it becomes an act of courage to take certain positions on Twitter. It isn’t that people disagree. It’s that they are ugly about it because they can be anonymous. They can say things like, “You’re just an old [expletive] who doesn’t know anything.”
Did being in the social media stocks make you reconsider your thinking about the issues? Because it seems reasonable for somebody to say it’s not a publisher’s obligation to publish whatever a writer wants to publish. Or with the Oscars, to say that, actually, the real issue isn’t about rewarding diversity or not, it’s about who gets to show their talent in the first place. So what was your intellectual reaction to the blowback you got from those tweets? The knee-jerk reaction is, I’m humiliated that people are making fun or are angry at me. That’s the emotional reaction. The intellectual reaction is to ask yourself, Did I say the right thing? If I said the right thing, it stands. If I said the wrong thing, then I have to apologize or make it clearer. What I said about the Oscars was taken the wrong way by people like Ava DuVernay. So I had to try to make clear exactly what I was talking about. What I was saying about Woody Allen, I never felt any urge to go correct or expand. I didn’t see any need, because the key thing about that was that the publisher accepted the manuscript. They had agreed to publish it. The reason they backed out was because there was negative publicity. I feel like it was cowardly. There was also a lot of controversy about “American Dirt,” the Jeanine Cummins book, which I loved and put a blurb on. There was a feeling that Jeanine Cummins had done what’s called cultural appropriation, which back in my day used to be called imagination. I felt that she had a right to do that, because if you go down that road, you can never have a man who writes a book like “Rose Madder” or “Gerald’s Game,” which are about a woman and her feelings. You have to step carefully, but it can be done. It should be done, because that’s the way we reach out to the other people. This is how it works. It’s supposed to, anyway. That wandered away from the Woody Allen question.
It was related. This is also related, insofar as it’s about shifting cultural contexts: If you wrote your novel “It” today, would you still write the sex scene between Beverly and the boys in the losers club? That’s something that people have pointed to as having aged poorly. I know. The funny thing about that scene is that when I wrote it, it had the same importance to the story as the Derry Public Library. The Derry Public Library has an adult building and a child building, and the two of them are connected by this glass tunnel. This means that I have a symbolic way of talking about the transition from childhood to adulthood. You see what I’m talking about? And with the sex thing: Sex is for grown-ups, OK? It’s not for 12-year-olds. But in the story, I was trying to write about that transition and what’s lost between being kids and being adults. When I wrote that scene where they all have sex with Beverly, what I was trying to do was to allow them to send a message to their adult selves, saying you can get back, you can rediscover enough of the imaginative force to deal with this supernatural being. So I went ahead and wrote it. There was never an eyebrow raised from the editorial people who read that book. There were no reviews saying this is a scene of kiddie porn. There was none of that, because it was a different time. When people land on that scene now, they’re judging the 1980s by the standards of the 21st century. You see a lot of that today. Which is one of the reasons a lot of schools don’t want to allow a book like “Huckleberry Finn.” They say, “We can’t have this book in our schools because it’s got that n-word in it.” Here’s what I’m talking about, OK? The last Michael Connelly book — he’s a wonderful writer — that word, “nigger,” is written “n-----.” The word “[expletive]” is all through it. In the ’50s, the n-word would have been allowed, but you couldn’t have used “[expletive].” Now it’s exactly the opposite. So it’s a question of how things change. Would I write that scene from “It” today? Almost certainly not. Back then it never even struck me as a thing.
But could those changes be positive? That example you brought up with the Michael Connelly book is maybe an instance where enough people have realized that one of those two words is just a swear word that isn’t actually all that powerful and the other word has serious negative power. David, that is the essence of 21st-century thinking. Go with God, that’s fine, but you understand what I’m saying?
I do. That is based on a mind-set that has been formed by the way that you were raised and by the cultural atmosphere that you live in. And that’s fine. That’s great. You’re probably right. It is probably a positive development. But I always think about Frank Norris.
Who wrote “McTeague.” “McTeague.” “The Octopus.” All those books. And Frank Norris said: “What did I care what the critics said? I told the truth.” That’s the important thing. Do you tell the truth or do you not?
King in 1995. Laurel Entertainment Inc., via Everett Collection
In your new book, there’s a story called “Rat” that has a funny invocation of Jonathan Franzen. The protagonist is a writer who seems a little skeptical of his literary status. Is critical esteem what Franzen represents for you, too? I use Franzen because he’s a fantastic novelist. I’ve read all his books. My favorite is an early novel called “Strong Motion,” which is about earthquake guys in Massachusetts. Fantastic book. I’m hoping that there’ll be something new at some point. The whole lecture stuff about Franzen in the story, it’s all made up. The guy is sick, and he’s got the fever, and he fixates on Franzen. It gave me a chance to think some things about writing that are not necessarily what I believe, but it was a lot of fun. It’s a snarky story.
On the subject of critical esteem, there was a lot of debate about your literary merit or place in the canon back when you were honored by the National Book Foundation. That argument seems to have gone away since then. Why do you think that is? When I started, I was seen as a genre writer, and that’s pretty much what I was. I remember going to a literary-guild party around the time of “The Shining.” Irwin Shaw was sitting in a corner, very gouty and very flushed. He had a cane and was wearing a blue suit. He looked morose. He looked at me, and this sneer came over his face, and he said, “Oh, look, it’s the lion,” meaning the literary lion. I shrank, because I love that guy’s books. I still do. I think part of what happened was I outlived a lot of my real bad critics. I still remember in The Village Voice somebody did a long, debunking piece about my writing. There was a caricature of me eating money that was flowing from my typewriter. I thought, Oh, it’s so dispiriting when you work as hard as you can and you see something like that. I kept my mouth shut. I kept my head down and kept doing the best stuff that I could. When you look around at some of the people who’ve worked in the 20th century, the idea that I would be part of that canon is ridiculous. You’re not going to put me with John Updike, let alone people like Faulkner or Steinbeck. Maybe Steinbeck a little bit. I’ve tried to write as honestly as I could about ordinary people and situations. But I think I basically outlived a lot of the bad critics. Now, I won’t be around to see the final tally. Most writers who are perennial best sellers drop dead, and their work falls off the list. They just disappear.
Right, like, who reads James Clavell today? Yeah. It gives me a chill. When I was growing up, the big paperback writer was John D. MacDonald. When he died, his work pretty much disappeared. I don’t know what will happen to my stuff when I die, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that Pennywise will be around. The rest of the stuff may disappear, but 200 years from now, people will say, “Pennywise is really scary.”
Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise in “It Chapter Two” (2019). Warner Bros., via Everett Collection
No one who has written as much as you can have it all be great. How do you tell when a piece of your writing is working or not? I never did anything that I thought was working. When I get in the middle of something, a part of me is always saying to myself, This is certainly a piece of [expletive].
So you felt the same writing “It” as you did writing “The Tommyknockers?” With “It,” I always felt that something was really working. When I wrote “Under the Dome,” I felt like something was really, really working. “Tommyknockers,” I felt good about. “Dreamcatcher,” no, but I was in a lot of pain. I’d had an accident, and I was struggling through that. It’s different with different books. There are books where the thing opens up all at once, and you say to yourself, I’m having a good time. Even when you’re not, and you say maybe this whole thing is a mistake, you have to remind yourself that part of what they pay you for is to surmount those doubts — to say to yourself: I may be wrong. It may be good.
You once said about yourself that if you hadn’t had fiction, you might’ve wound up like the University of Texas tower shooter. And as far as your readers go, I know you’ve had issues with disturbed fans, and you took “Rage” out of print after it was found in the locker of a kid who committed a shooting. How thick or thin do you believe the lines are between a person like yourself, who has a dark imagination, and people like those I just mentioned, who were delusional? And is it just neurochemistry that determines which side of that line a person ends up on? I think a lot of it is neurochemistry. I’m able to open the doors of perception at 8 in the morning, and they generally roll closed around noon. The world then becomes a rational place. I don’t think that’s true for people who are delusional and paranoid. Right now I’m looking at a picture in my office, and I don’t feel any urge to look behind it to see if there’s a camera. I’m not convinced that you’re working for the C.I.A. or that secretly this is going to be a hatchet job on me. As far as “Rage” goes, I wrote the first draft when I was a senior in high school. A lot of it was the pressure cooker of high school. You feel this urge to say, “What if you were able to cut the Gordian knot and take a gun to school and hold your classmates hostage?” It was never a mass-shooting scenario that is enacted in that book. But still, after a couple of those incidents, you say to yourself: “This is like leaving a loaded gun around where somebody who’s mentally disturbed can get a hold of it. So it’s time to lock it up.”
In the past, when people have asked why you write about disturbing things, you’ve given the line, “Why do you assume I have a choice?” Which is a good answer but also maybe a slightly evasive one. What answer were people really looking for with that question? They’re looking for some secret formula: How did you know this would work? Why did you think this would work? My response to that is, I never considered it. I never thought what has happened to me would happen. There are days when I think this is all a dream. But to go back to your question, I never did have a choice. This was the subject matter that appealed to me. It’s like the difference in taste. Some people like broccoli. Some people don’t.
King receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2015. Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
You don’t think in asking that question people were hoping you’d share some revelation about your deeper psychology? No. The question they ask when they want that is, What were you like as a kid? They think you’re going to say, “When I was a kid, I was beaten” or “I was sexually abused” or “I was kidnapped.” The fact is none of that’s true.
But is it true that you saw a friend get run over by a train when you were 4 years old? My mother thought I had seen that. She said that this boy had been run over by a train and that I came back that day after having gone to play with him and I was very pale and wouldn’t talk. I certainly don’t have any memory of it, at least in my conscious mind. What I do remember is my mother saying they had to pick up the pieces of the body in a basket. How’s that for detail? My mother could have been Stephen King.
David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.
Opening illustration: Source photograph by John Lamparski/WireImage, via Getty Image
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
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