Like everyone, Stephen King is trapped. The author is in Florida, with his wife, Tabby, and his corgi, Molly, trying to stay sane while sheltering in place. Meanwhile, his life’s work seems to be coming to life around him.

People keep comparing the eeriness of the COVID-19 pandemic to the far deadlier one that swept the world in his novel The Stand. They draw parallels between Donald Trump and Greg Stillson, the egomaniacal, world-threatening politician from The Dead Zone. Even the recent rush on grocery stores has vague echoes of The Mist, where shoppers turned against each other while surrounded by unseen threats.

King doesn’t feel good about seeing the worst things he can imagine coming true. He’d rather remain in the realm of the impossible. “It’s like, okay, the worst thing that could happen, in terms of my career, is that somehow, in our society, we’ve cross-pollinated our Greg Stillson with The Stand,” the author told Vanity Fair.

Even he can’t help drawing comparisons. “I’m working on a book, so in the mornings I forget everything and I just do that. I wanted time to work on a book, I got plenty of time,” he said. “I feel like Jack Torrance, for God’s sakes.”

Unlike the father in The Shining, King hasn’t gone mad yet, but he knows that boredom can push anyone to the edge. Relief from quarantine fatigue is one reason he and Scribner decided to release his new book, the novella collection If It Bleeds, this month, a few weeks ahead of its planned May debut. But fair warning—King devises an entire new way of destroying the world in one of the stories. (Maybe we can look forward to that too.)

In the offbeat “The Life of Chuck,” the fabric of reality gradually disintegrates while alarmed and confused characters puzzle over how any of it could really be happening. One of the first symptoms of the decaying world is that the internet mysteriously ceases to function—something to ponder when that endless buffering circle appears on your screen thanks to the world’s bandwidth-straining Zoom calls and Netflix bingeing.

This Keeps Happening

King initially pushed back against some of the comparisons between our troubled world and his fictional ones, noting that the still-fluctuating death rate of COVID-19 is undoubtedly serious, but still in the low single digits compared to the superflu in The Stand, which kills off 99.9% of the human population.

But America’s foremost purveyor of dread also understands why people reference his work when talking about the things that unsettle them in reality. “When you hear reports that 100,000 or 240,000 people are going to die, you’ve got to take notice, and it is going to be bad. It’s bad right now,” King said. “It’s brought the economy to a complete stop. In a lot of ways, I mean, you see the pictures of Times Square or London, and you say, ‘It really is like The Stand.’”

He added: “But the cars aren’t piled up, and nobody’s shooting each other yet.” (That was before masked anti-quarantine protestors began turning up at demonstrations with assault rifles.)

Real life keeps following the lead of his books. First police investigated a rash of creepy clown sightings that terrorized people a year before Pennywise’s comeback in the 2017 It movie, though they had nothing to do with him or the film.

King’s most recent novel, last September’s The Institute, was about children forcibly separated from their families and taken to a secret detention camp. The kids were powerful psychics, not immigrants or asylum seekers, and he began writing it before Trump’s family-separation policy at the border, but he acknowledged the disturbing similarities.

Readers will remember that King’s stories are rarely nihilistic worst-case scenarios. They’re often about people uniting and protecting each other in surprising displays of decency and humanity. They’re about rising up and facing down the cruel and unspeakable.

A Different Kind of Evil Clown

One way King tries to do the right thing is by exorcising his frustration at Trump and the MAGA movement nearly every day to his 5.8 million followers on Twitter.

“Here’s what I really think about Trump and his supporters,” King said, winding up. “There was a game, a baseball game, a playoff game that ended with a home run that they called ‘the Shot Heard Round the World.’ That was in 1951. It took place at the Polo Grounds. I think there were, like, maybe 30,000 seats in that place. And it wasn’t full for the game. But afterwards, in the years following, you would have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people saying, ‘I was there. I saw the shot heard round the world.’

“I think the opposite is going to happen when the Trump fever dies away, and years from now, people will say, ‘No, no, I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t support him,’” King said. “Somewhere in the back of their closet, gathering dust, there will be one of those MAGA hats.”

The author talked about the president with macabre fascination. “Trump’s amazing. No matter how many lies, no matter how many mistakes he makes, he somehow…” King trailed off, one of the rare times he was lost for words. “I love his press conferences,” he added, sounding like he does anything but. “When he does these press briefings, if somebody asks him a really hard question, he says, ‘That’s a nasty question,’ and he moves on. It’s incredible.”

King takes no credit for foreshadowing the rise of a demagogue. “Somebody like Trump was bound to come along,” he said. “In the age of the internet, and in the age of mass communication, he’s basically a con man, a showman.”

The author hopes his made-up malevolence offers an escape from the real kind, which returns us to his new collection. He has been gravitating toward novellas lately with 2018’s Elevation and 2017’s Gwendy’s Button Box, cowritten with Richard Chizmar (who last year published a sequel, Gwendy’s Magic Feather).

“The new book, if it gets done, is actually going to be a novel,” King said of his current work-in-progress. “But a lot of this stuff lately has been too short to be long and too long to be short.”

Four Stories for the Apocalypse

The novella that gives If It Bleeds its title is a detective story, the kind where you basically know whodunnit and it becomes about how to prove it. This one is about a TV news journalist who is a being that not only feeds on the anguish he covers, but is responsible for causing it. Holly Gibney, the soft-spoken but resolute investigator from the Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, returns to help crack the case on this one. (In the recent HBO adaptation of The Outsider, she’s played by Cynthia Erivo.)

The story was inspired by a nightly news reporter King saw always covering the worst of the worst. “I’m down here in Florida right now, and watching the news, they really go for that thing: If it bleeds, it leads. They always have a guy—and it’s always the same guy—and he’s at car crashes, and he’s at plane crashes, and he’s at shootings. I thought to myself, Wouldn’t it be weird if a guy like that set off these tragedies? Then immediately I connected it with The Outsider, and eventually I had the idea: Holly’s perfect for this.”

The first novella in the collection is “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” about an old-school iPhone that picks up on ominous messages from the beyond. “That’s an EC Comics story, that’s what that is,” King said, referring to the brand of 1950s horror comics that inspired him and George Romero to create Creepshow back in the ’80s. “There are stories about guys who are afraid of being buried alive, and they have a phone put in their coffin or their crypt or something like that. It’s playing with that.”

For research, King purchased a first-generation iPhone, which now feels like an ancient relic just nearly 13 years later. “You can do everything with it still. You can get the stock market, and you can send instant messages,” King said. “The only thing you can’t do is make phone calls, because the technology’s gone way beyond that.”

“The Life of Chuck,” the novella about a world that is slowly fading away, is in three parts, told in reverse. It has a wistful rather than horrific vibe that caught King by surprise. “There’s a feeling that was sort of uplifting, in a strange way,” he said. “That’s the one that’s garnered movie interest.”

Finally, there’s “Rat,” about a writer who strikes an unholy bargain to get on the best-seller list. The offer comes from a rodent that visits his remote writer’s retreat. Or he might just be going crazy. “What I liked about it was that it is the Faustian bargain, but it’s also rather funny,” King said.

While he’s published more of his novellas individually, King also favors gathering at least four together and putting them in one book, as he first did with Different Seasons in 1982. Back then it was an unusual idea, and he was trying to showcase work that went beyond nightmare fuel.

“I had these three stories, I had ‘Shawshank’ and I had Stand by Me and I had ‘Apt Pupil,’” King said, referring to his story “The Body” by the title of the movie based on it. “I sent them to Alan Williams, who was then my editor, and I said, ‘What would you think about doing these things as a book? It’s different, but the stories are pretty good.’ And he said, ‘Well, if there was another one, we could call it Seasons, and it would be great if there was one season that was similar to what you do.’ I thought, Oh, then I could call the book Different Seasons, and people would get the idea that it was a little bit different. I had a [horror] story called “The Breathing Method” that was done, and I said, ‘I have that! We could do four.’”

That frightening story is the only one from the book that hasn’t been made into a film. Novellas are where he experiments. Think of them as the Stephen King story laboratory. “And why not?” King said. “Why not try something different every once in a while?”

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