Stephen King

For Salon.com, John Marks talked with Stephen King about his 30-year-old novel The Stand and other topics. Part of their dialogue:

It's 30 years since the publication of "The Stand," which was written, as you say in "Danse Macabre," "during a troubled period for the world in general and America, in particular." We're in another troubled period now. Do you feel yourself itching to write another apocalypse?

I just did. I finished a very long book called "Under the Dome," and it isn't like a worldwide apocalypse or anything like that, but it's a very long book, and it deals with some of the same issues that "The Stand" does, but in a more allegorical way.

As you worked on it, was "The Stand" at all in your mind?

Not really, because it has a different setup than "The Stand," but beyond that I don't want to say too much about it, because it's got to be rewritten and spruced up and everything. But you're right, the two eras are very similar. I just finished reading a book called "Nixonland," and the parallels to the Nixon campaigns and McCain campaigns are just depressing. He's doing a lot of events that are supposed to be populist but are in reality completely managed. He's got a vice president who's Joe Six-Pack. The parallels just go on and on. You've got the unpopular war, economic problems, gasoline problems. Whatever goes around, comes around. "The Stand" even says that. Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Do you find that Americans have become a lot more apocalyptic in their thinking in the last 30 years?

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue