Novelist Stephen King may write scary stories, but he doesn’t necessarily want them to come true.
King appeared on “The View” Wednesday to discuss his latest book, “The Institute,” which is about a group of children with special powers who are kept captive for experiments.
“When I started this book, I just wanted to write a story about defenseless children who were locked up and had to kind of band together in order to fight these cruel adults that are performing tests on them,” King told the show’s co-hosts.
King said his book was initially inspired by the shocking CIA experiments in the early 1950s, as well as “the horrible experiments that were performed on people in the camps during World War II.”
“Sometimes, life comes along and imitates art instead of the other way around,” King said. “As I was rewriting this book, all at once I find out we’re locking little kids up in cages on the border, and I’m thinking to myself, this is like my book.”
Watch the complete King segment below.
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King's first novel to be published was Carrie, which started life as a short story. Fed up with his slow writing progress King threw an early draft of the story in the trash. Luckily for us, his wife retrieved it and persuaded him to make a novel out of it. The book went on to sell sixteen million copies. What a Carrie on!
Derry and Castle Rock in Maine serve as settings in many of King's works, including It and Insomnia but they are completely fictional places. Many fans have tried to work out where they would be in real life.
As a small boy, King is said to have witnessed his friend being hit by a train and killed, though he himself has absolutely no memory of the incident. His family recalls him coming home speechless and suffering from evident shock - it was only later that they learned what had happened. Did this traumatic event inspire some of King's darker imaginings?
When King's family piled the evidence of his addictions - cigarette butts, beer cans, grams of cocaine and marijuana - on the rug in front if him, their message finally got through. Since the late 1980s King has been sober. IMAGE: Wikimedia
In 2008 King raised his concerns about a bill pending in Massachusetts that proposed to ban the sale of violent video games to anyone under 18. He claimed that the bill was an attempt to scapegoat popular culture and that violence in video games only reflects the violence that already exists in society. Guns, he thought, would be more worth banning. IMAGE: Wikimedia
In 1999 King received serious injuries, which threatened to put an end to his career, when he was hit by a minivan while walking by the roadside. To stop the van from appearing on eBay, his lawyers purchased it and had it pulped, much to King's disappointment as he'd dreamed of beating it to pulp himself, with a baseball bat. IMAGE: Press Association Images
In 2008 King came under attack from right-wing bloggers, when a clip of him encouraging a group of high-school students to read, get an education and expand their prospects was posted online. It seems that using the American army as an example of a dumping ground for the uneducated doesn't always go down well. IMAGE: Mark Lennihan/AP/Press Association Images
Not one to miss a trick, King was making a buck as a writer at a young age. He started writing for fun at school and would sell stories based on movies to his classmates. When the teachers found out they confiscated his cash. An early lesson in publishing perhaps? IMAGE: Claude Haller/Claude Haller/EMPICS Entertainment
Stephen King has a habit of going under cover. That is, he has written under various pseudonyms throughout his career, the most notable being Richard Bachman, which he used in the late 70s and early 80s as an experiment to see if he could replicate his own success. He succeeded, but was duly exposed by a particularly keen-eyed bookstore clerk. IMAGE: AP/Press Association Images
Stephen King was born in Maine and he still lives there. He and his wife Tabitha have three properties: two in Maine and a waterfront mansion in Florida where they spend holidays. It's all a far cry from his humble childhood homes. IMAGE: Wikimedia
When Stephen King was two his father left the family home in Maine supposedly to buy a packet of cigarettes. He never came back. King was raised by his mother who often struggled to make ends meet.
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