The writer on his new book about a camp for telekinetic children, being a national treasure and listening to rock music as he works

Born in Maine in 1947, Stephen King wrote his first published novel, Carrie, in 1974 and has spent the subsequent half-century documenting the monsters and heroes of small-town America. His rogues’ gallery of characters runs the gamut from killer clowns and demonic cars to psychotic fans and unhinged populist politicians.

His best-loved books include The Stand, It, The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary. King’s latest novel, The Institute, revolves around a totalitarian boot camp for telekinetic children. The kids check in – but don’t check out.

Carrie was published against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Is America a more or less scary place to write about now?

The world is a scary place, not just America. We’re in the spooky house – on the ghost train, if you prefer – for life. The scares come and go, but everyone likes make-believe monsters to stand in for the real ones.

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book?

Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

You were raised in a working-class Republican household. What would your mother make of today’s GOP?

My mother bolted the GOP the last time she voted and cast a ballot for George McGovern. She hated the Vietnam war. I was sworn to secrecy, but feel the statute of limitations on that has run out. In Maine, lots of Republicans are more purple than red. It’s how Senator Susan Collins keeps sliding by.

For all the terrors in your work, there’s an underlying faith in basic human decency. This suggests you think most people are basically good.

Yes, most people are good. More people are anxious to stop a terrorist attack than to start one. They just don’t make the news.

You started out being dismissed by the literary establishment as a lowly peddler of cheap horror. You’re now a lauded national treasure. How does it feel to be respectable?

It feels good to be at least semi-respectable. I have outlived most of my most virulent critics. It gives me great pleasure to say that. Does that make me a bad person?

Isn’t it also partly because the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction has become more porous? The old high/low distinction doesn’t exist in the same way.

Well, there’s still a strange – to me, anyway – and totally subjective line between high culture and low. An aria from Rigoletto, La donna è mobile, for instance – is high culture. Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones is low. They’re both cool, so go figure.

I’ve heard that you like to write to loud music. Isn’t that really distracting?

I’m listening to Fine Young Cannibals [right now]. Soon to be followed by Danny and the Juniors and the Animals. I love rock – the louder the better.

But does the music leave an imprint on a book’s tone or pace? Would a chapter written while listening to the Animals, say, differ from a chapter written under the influence of the Ramones?

The music I happen to be listening to can sometimes affect word choice, or cause a new line, but never affects style.

You’re astoundingly prolific. What’s your feeling about those novelists who spend years crafting and rewriting a novel? Envy at their rigour? Exasperation?

Some writers take years; James Patterson takes a weekend. Every writer is different. I feel that a first draft should take about four months, but that’s me. And I go over my work obsessively. Here’s another thing – creative life is absurdly short. I want to cram in as much as I can.

Have you ever forced yourself to go slower?

Deliberately go slower? No, never. I’ve written longhand [Dreamcatcher], but poke along and obsessively polish? No. You keep picking a scab, you’re gonna make it bleed instead of heal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest King with his son Owen King, also an author, as is his wife, Tabitha King, and their other son, Joe Hill. Photograph: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

You’ve said your characters sometimes speak in your head to the point where they blot out the real world. That makes writing fiction sound like a close cousin to mental illness...

I don’t think writing is a mental illness, but when I’m working and it’s going really well, time and the real world kind of disappear.

If that’s the ideal state of grace, is it sometimes hard to let go? Do you ever find yourself haunted by books or characters you’ve ostensibly laid to rest?

Sometimes characters, like Holly Gibney from the Mr Mercedes books and The Outsider, cry to come back – or Roland of Gilead – but they are the exceptions.

You’ve collaborated with the writer Peter Straub (on the novels The Talisman and Black House) and your sons Owen and Joe. Is there another you’d love to write a novel with?

I loved collaborating with my boys, and with Peter Straub, and will hopefully do it again. I’d love to collaborate with Colson Whitehead, Michael Robotham, Linwood Barclay, Alex Marwood, Tana French. No time, I guess, but those would be cool mixes. The ideal is to groove with someone so completely you make a third voice.

The president orders every book in America to be burned. You have time to save three of your own novels. Which three?

Which books of mine would I save? Dumb question, but I’ll play. Lisey’s Story, The Stand and Misery.



The Institute by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99