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.