Stephen King, whose forthcoming novel Revival features a Methodist minister who condemns his faith after a horrific accident, has described organised religion as “a very dangerous tool that’s been misused by a lot of people”.

In a rare and lengthy question and answer session published in the print edition of Rolling Stone, King laid out how he “grew up in a Methodist church”, but how he “had doubts” about organised religion ever since he was a child, and how “once I got through high school, that was it for me”.

Nevertheless, said the bestselling novelist, he chooses to believe in God “because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength”. He told Rolling Stone: “I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, ‘God, I can’t do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today.’ And that works fine for me.”

Revival opens as its narrator, Jamie Morton, feels a shadow fall over him. It is his small town’s new minister, Charles Jacobs; the meeting sparks a connection that will reverberate through Jamie’s life, taking him to an ending the publisher is calling “the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written”.

King told Rolling Stone that he believed “in evil”, but that all his life he has “gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or whether it all comes from inside and that it’s all part of genetics and environment.”

The behaviour of an individual like Ted Bundy, he now believes, is “hard-wired”. “I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, ‘Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four’,” King told the magazine. “Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll fucking kill ourselves.”

King went on to point to a recent article in the Huffington Post, which said there had been “nothing but silence” in the search for extraterrestrial life for 50 years. “When you see what’s going on in the world today, and you have all this conflict, and our technological expertise has far outraced our ability to manage our own emotions – you see it right now with Isis – what’s the solution? The only solution we see with Isis is to bomb the shit out of those motherfuckers so that they just can’t roll over the world. And that’s what’s scary about that silence – maybe all intelligent races hit this level of violence and technological advances that they can’t get past. And then they just puff out. You hit the wall and that’s it,” said the novelist.

King also used the interview to slam the writing of Ernest Hemingway – “Hemingway sucks, basically” – and to reveal that he doesn’t think much of two of his own novels: The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher. He feels that Lisey’s Story, about the wife of the late bestselling novelist Scott Landon, is his best work, and he will “never be done” with the world of The Dark Tower.

While King’s interview is currently only in the print edition, an extract of Revival is available to read on the Rolling Stone website.