The Mix
KRISTA^ SCHLUET
ER/”THENEW^YORKTIMES”
/R
EDUX26 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
D
ONALD TRUMP
was still months
away from being
elected president
when Stephen King began
writing his upcoming novel.
But The Institute — out Sep-
tember 10th and centered on
a 12-year-old boy stolen from
What Scares Stephen King?
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
By ANDY GREENE
CHECKING IN
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 medi-
cal experiments. “I wanted to
write a book like Tom Brown’sabout 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 char-
acters 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 ele-
ments 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 on-
going Holly Gibney detective
series and is due sometime in- 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.”
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 bookKing in
New York
last year“I’ll either collapse at my desk or the ideas will run out —
the thing you don’t want to do is embarrass yourself.”The Institute
By Stephen
King
Scribner
“I wanted to
write a book
like Tom
Brown’s School
Days,” King
says. “But
in hell.”his parents in the night and
locked up in a mysterious
facility — is likely to remind
readers of certain immigra-
tion 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. “Some-
times fiction outpaces fact.”
This isn’t the first time a
King book predicted the po-
litical 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