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

- Andy Greene

Donald Trump was still months away from being elected president when Stephen King began writing his upcoming novel. But The Institute — out September 10th and centered on a 12-year-old boy stolen from his parents in the night and locked up in a mysterious facility — is likely to remind readers of certain immigration 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. “Sometimes fiction outpaces fact.”

This isn’t the first time a King book predicted the political 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.” and it scared the living shit right out of them,” King says. “They couldn’t wait to go back and see it again.”