Stephen King talks new novel 'Later,' kid protagonists and storytelling during COVID-19

In the hands of Stephen King, the kids are usually all right – even if their situations always aren’t.

From Danny Torrance in “The Shining” to the Losers Club of “It,” the bestselling master of horror has written plenty of kid protagonists facing all sorts of terrifying foes over the decades. His latest, Jamie Conklin in the new novel “Later” (Hard Case Crime, out Tuesday), is a youngster who has to deal with enemies of the supernatural as well as human persuasion.

Jamie sees dead people, usually hanging out where they passed. And they not only can see him, too, but they have to tell him the truth if he asks them a question. His cash-strapped mom, Tia, and her dirty-cop girlfriend, Liz, take advantage of Jamie’s “gift,” but a more terrifying player emerges when Jamie meets a dead serial bomber inhabited by a haunting darkness that chills the boy’s soul.

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“I wanted to write about a literary agent because I never had” before, King says. “One client that this agent has who is worth big bucks dies suddenly. What's she going to do about it? What if she has a kid who can see dead people and they have to answer any question that he asked? And I thought, ‘I got a story.’”

In addition to “Later,” the author has two big projects coming this summer: the new novel “Billy Summers” (Scribner, Aug. 3), about a decorated Iraq war veteran turned hitman who wants out after one last job, and an adaptation of his 2006 book “Lisey’s Story” as an eight-part Apple TV+ limited series starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen.

USA TODAY chats with King about his work, writing youthful personas and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on his storytelling.

Question: What makes Jamie stand out among your many kid characters?

Stephen King: The thing that interested me the most about Jamie was this is a talent that he was born with, and he kind of accepts it as just part of his world view, the way that you would if you were born with a club foot or born blind. You would become used to that situation because you'd not known anything different. It's not like, say, Johnny Smith from "The Dead Zone" who is an ordinary guy and then he has this accident and he wakes up and he's got this ability to see the future.

Q: Do you feel the way you write children is different now than it was, say, 10, 20, 30 years ago?

King: Things have changed in the real world that I have to try to keep up with. I'm always four or five steps behind, and readers notice that. I grew up in a world that didn't have cellphones or computers or video games, and kids, that's a part of the world – the same way that Jamie being able to see and talk to dead people is a part of his world.

I like kids because they're so open and they're so adaptable, and to me, there's a kind of magical quality about them where they're not cynical and they're not world-weary.

Q: “Later” melds detective elements with the supernatural, like what you’ve done with your "Mr. Mercedes" trilogy and “The Outsider." What aspect of crime writing really appeals to you?

King: Well, I'm not very good at mystery and that's OK as far as I'm concerned. Alfred Hitchcock used to say, "If a bomb blows up, everybody has one second of horror, but if the audience sees the bomb under the table, they're going to be terrified for five minutes and wonder exactly when it's going to blow up." So I'm interested in the suspense elements. I always liked that when I was a kid.

Q: What do you think your Constant Readers are going to dig about “Billy Summers”?

King: Billy is a bad guy that I want readers to love. I loved him after a while. And he's a guy who's just on a journey to find a better kind of life than the one he's living. It's kind of a road novel in a way and I hope that people will get immersed in it. What I really want is for people to say, “I burned dinner because I was reading this book.”

Q: What’s next on your plate?

King: I'm working on something now. I came off a long period where we were all working on “Lisey's Story.” It took a long while to get it finished because we had a long layoff thanks to the coronavirus. That took up a lot of my time because I don't work in TV and the movies very much anymore. I'm perfectly willing to sell people a story ... but every now and then I want to hold on to something and I wanted to hold on to this for better or for worse. We hope it will be for better.

Q: How do you think the last year spent dealing with COVID-19 might change you as a storyteller?

King: I don't know how it's going to affect me. I can tell you this: I wrote “Billy Summers” starting in 2018. I set it in the year 2020, and then the pandemic hit and at first it seemed like it wasn't that much. Then it got worse and it got really worse and things started to shut down. I looked at what I had written and one of the characters comes into some money and says to Billy, “We're going to go on a cruise.” And I'm thinking to myself, this can't be because the cruise lines have shut down. So I moved it back to 2019 when it was safe.

But the real answer to your question is: This is going to change a lot of things in the next couple of years. There was a time when the Soviet Union crashed and the Iron Curtain came down and there were all these critics in the book field who said, "This is going to kill the spy genre!" But of course it didn't. This is different. This is on a whole other level.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Stephen King taps into his youthful side again for new novel 'Later'