The question has already been asked of former Boulder resident and reigning lord of dark fiction Stephen King: Isn’t the coronavirus crisis just like something right out of “The Stand,” his pandemic saga — with significant passages that were set right here?

King, who is active on Twitter at @StephenKing, addressed this one way back on March 8, which, in the current climate might seem to some like it could be months ago.

“No, coronavirus is not NOT like THE STAND,” he wrote. “It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions.”

No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 8, 2020

Through a representative on Thursday, it was made clear that King, who once applied without success for a job at the Daily Camera, had nothing more to say on the parallels that might or might not exist. At least, for now.

“Stephen doesn’t plan to do any follow up interviews about his tweet as he has several projects he’s working on that require his attention,” Marsha DeFilippo, assistant to King, wrote in an email.

For those whose reading or viewing tastes run toward lighter fare (it was converted into a television miniseries in 1994), a synopsis of the chilling story, as it appears on the author’s website, reads as something that, as King declared, is many notches of ugly beyond where we as a society stand now.

“One man escapes from a biological weapon facility after an accident, carrying with him the deadly virus known as Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu that — in the ensuing weeks — wipes out most of the world’s population,” the synopsis said. “In the aftermath, survivors choose between following an elderly black woman to Boulder or the dark man, Randall Flagg, who has set up his command post in Las Vegas. The two factions prepare for a confrontation between the forces of good and evil.”

King made his most recent public appearance in Boulder in September 2013, when he drew a crowd to Chautauqua Auditorium for an event promoting “Dr. Sleep,” the sequel to his bestseller “The Shining,” which he wrote while living in the Boulder in the mid 1970s, basing the fictional Overlook on the Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park.

“We came very close to living here the rest of our lives rather than going back to Maine,” he said. “We kind of fell between the shoes here. It seemed like there were a lot of people from IBM and we didn’t fit with them, a lot of people from CU and we didn’t fit with them. And a lot of Republicans and we didn’t fit with them …”

In 2016 it was reported that King, while living in a house on South 42nd Street for about a year, applied for a job reviewing movies for the Camera. The young author’s interest was not well received.

“He applied and we turned him down,” the late Laurence “Laurie” Paddock, who served as the Camera’s editor from 1960 until his retirement in 1992, recalled several years ago. “We didn’t have a job for him.” Reflecting on that episode, Paddock admitted it was just as well the newspaper didn’t hire the soon-to-be-blockbuster horror writer.

“He couldn’t have gone on like that,” Paddock said. “He’s a novelist making millions of dollars and he wouldn’t have made that as a newspaper reporter. But it would have been nice to have him among our alumni.”