I should start off by saying Happy New Year. We can hope it will be happy anyway. And why not? For the first time in a while, we know not only what King’s next book is going to be, but also what he’s currently working on for the book after that, assuming inspiration continues to flow in his direction. Or, as he so colorfully put it, that the “red thread that comes out of a mousehole in the ground” doesn’t break. And there will be at least six adaptations hitting screens of various sizes during 2025.
Never Flinch, the new novel featuring the cast from the Finders Keepers series, lands on May 27. I’ve read the book, but I’ll save my thoughts until closer to that date. On his recent Kingcast interview with Eric Vespe and new co-host Anthony Breznican, King revealed something interesting about the creative process. He’d originally been inspired by hearing about a 2021 dognapping incident involving Lady Gaga. Holly Gibney’s detective agency deals with a lot of missing dog cases and King thought this kind of situation might be something for Jerome Robinson to investigate. But then he added a couple of other subplots.
When he showed the manuscript—then called We Think Not—to his wife, she told him that she didn’t think it was very good. She said that it felt like he was straining too hard to get the plotlines to all connect. King said that, though this was difficult news to accept, he took her critique to heart and completely rewrote the novel, although it incorporated some things from the first draft. The dog story, though, was jettisoned.
For a while the book was going to be called Always Holly, but it ultimately became Never Flinch, which ties into the mantra of one of the novel’s antagonists. You can read an excerpt from the novel here.
Last October, King posted, “I’m back in Mid-World…and the Territories. Don’t know if it will develop into anything—I never know—but it’s good to be back.” There was a lot of speculation that maybe he was writing a new Dark Tower book, but people who’d been paying attention knew that he had the third Jack Sawyer novel in his “active file” and that this post almost certainly meant he was working on what he now calls “T3.” In the Kingcast interview, he says, “By the end of Black House, it’s pretty obvious that the Territories are Mid-World, and Mid-World is the Territories. They’re the same thing.”
In preparation, King reread the two previous Sawyer novels, but also the last few Dark Tower books. He said that some characters from The Talisman and Black House will appear in this new book.
The idea came from an email Peter Straub sent him several years ago, along with a copy of Redheaded Peckerwood about Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska in 1958. Straub said in an interview that both he and King had been fascinated by Starkweather as kids, and both of them had kept a scrapbook about him. King and Straub talked briefly about their plans for the concluding book in the trilogy at an event in 2015. Straub said the real-life incident made him think of “a girl, a car and a gun…the American Dream.”
King said he lost the original message from Straub, so he was working from memory, but he used that incident as the take-off point for the third book in the series. Although he’s excited to be working on the book, King expressed his regret that he and Peter Straub weren’t working on it together. “Peter was a really good guy, and I’ve been channeling him like a motherfucker while I’m working on Talisman 3. I find myself using his verbs. People don’t necessarily walk into a room. They bustle into a room because that’s a very Straubian word, and I’m using as much of that as I can. And of course, the main, major thing is that, you know, I miss him…You always say, oh, there’ll be time. There’ll be time. And sometimes time runs out, and that was the case.”
On the last day of January, King posted to social media about the word “plunja,” which he defined as the largest birds of Mid-World, the size of pterodactyls. “Billy-bumblers fearlessly attack them without fail,” he concluded.
Speaking of Peter Straub, his final, incomplete novel, now called Wreckage, will be published this year by Subterranean Press.
The other King-adjacent book coming out this year is the anthology The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, coedited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene. I have a story in it called “Lockdown.” I’m sure you’ll be hearing much more about the book between now and its August release. Brian Keene talks about the genesis of the project on the Fearmongers podcast.
Issue 79 of Cemetery Dance, which contains the new King story “The Extra Hour” and my interview with King, started shipping in January. King signed a bunch of copies, so take a good look at the cover of your copy when you receive it to see if it looks like the ones below!
“The Extra Hour” is a classic King horror story that explores something worse than insomnia, a dreamlike state filled with horrible imagery, as well as a Revival-like vision of what might be awaiting us after we die. We’ve probably all experienced long, sleepless nights like the two men in this story do, but how long have they really been? And are they getting longer?
Some interview and podcast interviews since we last spoke:
- The Kingcast, January 29, 2025
- Stephen King & the Rock Bottom Remainders lament Teen Angel, November 2024
- I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter, Guardian, October 2024
- Best Horror Movies: Stephen King on the ‘Helpless Terror’ of Night of the Living Dead, Variety, October 2024
- Stephen King reflects on his iconic career and latest release, PBS News Hour, August 2024
Last year was a slow one for cinematic adaptations of King’s work, with only the mediocre ‘Salem’s Lot feature and the cute animated short film Lily, which adapted the 1968 story “Here There be Tygers,” directed by Kate Siegel.
Things are looking much better for 2025. We will soon get to experience the “bat-shit insane” adaptation of The Monkey from Oz Perkins. King added, “As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time, I say that with admiration.” It will hit theaters on February 21, but you can watch the intense and bonkers trailer here. The trailer set a record for an independent horror movie, with over 100 million viewings on all social media platforms. However, it was banned by at least four TV networks for its excessive displays of violence and bloodshed.
Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of The Life of Chuck, which King called “fucking fantastic,” will be in theaters on May 30. The movie won the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Vanity Fair says the film “uses doomsday to evoke some unlikely sentiments: Wistfulness. Gratitude. Even joy.”
We don’t have a premiere date for the series Welcome to Derry yet, but Andy Muschietti says Warner Bros. is happy with how the first season turned out and they’re “very interested in making the second season as soon as possible.” The first season is set in 1962 and the projected second and third seasons would be set in 1935 and 1908 respectively. “It’s a story that’s based on the interludes of the book…that reflect Mike Hanlon’s research.” Entertainment Weekly published this first look article.
We’ll get to go on The Long Walk sometime this year, too. It sounded like King hadn’t seen it yet during his Kingcast podcast appearance. He said, “I’m interested to see what Francis Lawrence has done with The Long Walk. I read Mollner’s screenplay, and I thought it was terrific. And I thought the way that I felt when I read the script for Shawshank Redemption: this is great, but they’ll never fucking make this.”
Variety had the first look at The Institute limited series, which will air on MGM+ this year. The young characters have been aged up a few years from the novel. “We were very aware of not wanting this to be as awful as it can be, what these kids go through,” director and executive producer Jack Bender said. “We didn’t want it to be a sadistic experience. There’s a fine line and, god knows, as storytellers we didn’t want to go there.” MGM+ will drop episodes weekly, and a second season is already being discussed.
On November 7, we’ll get to see the rebooted The Running Man, two weeks earlier than originally announced. This shift ensures that the film will not clash with Wicked: For Good and secures IMAX screen access.
Mike Flanagan hasn’t started production on his Dark Tower adaptation, but King has seen some screenplays and pitches, “and he starts where he should start, and the beats are perfect, just perfect.” Flanagan is also working on an eight-episode modern retelling of Carrie. “Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands,” Flanagan (who King called “the King whisperer”) said.
A feature adaptation of Autopsy Room Four was announced but there’s been no news since then. It will be written and directed by Ranjeet S. Marwa.
A24 has taken over the Fairy Tale adaptation as a 10-episode series. Paul Greengrass’s script will be expanded by Greengrass and J.H. Wyman, who will be the showrunner.
And that’s what’s going on in the Dead Zone for now!
Signed copies of Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences are still available from Village Books in The Woodlands. Be sure to specify if you’d like a dedication and/or inscription on the order form. A new edition, Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition), came out last September, which you can also order from Village Books.
Keep an eye out on the Lividian Publications patreon for news of another King-related chapbook..
