I hope no one opens Stephen King’s novel and sees a reflection of the real world. Again, as evidenced by anyone obsessed with his book, his work has never been completely detached from reality. Again and again, he delivers a creepy, grotesque, and strange, crazy vision, but they always work most powerfully when weaving into ordinary, makeshift, winter American coarse fabrics. Long known for being rich, King has not lost his understanding of the particular oppressed class of society, or at least what he considers himself as oppressed.
“I started thinking that Donald Trump might win the presidency in September 2016,” King wrote a Guardian Trump’s first presidential term. “By the end of October, I was pretty sure.” For most of the year, he “feeled that people were afraid of the status quo and felt tired of it. Voters saw a vast, overloaded apple cart passing them. They wanted to upset the motherfuckers, so they were worried about picking up the apples that spilled later. Or leave them corrupt.” They “just didn’t want change. They wanted guys on horseback. Trump filled the bill. I had written about such men before.”
King’s most visionary and clearly crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with gabs, ready wit, and gifts of general touch. He gets laughed at when he runs for the mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a series of events that repeat as he runs for the House of Representatives and for the presidency – story hero Johnny Smith acknowledged Clairevaudiant Powers by the automotive Wreck. “He one day he finds Stillson laughing and joking to the White House, where he starts World War III.”
Furthermore, similarities in Stillson-Trump can be investigated This interview clip at the top of the post. “I was convinced that politicians could be happy to say that someone outside the mainstream would be born and capture the imagination of Americans.” Read now, Stillson’s demonic rhetoric, describing himself as a “real mover and shaker,” and committing to “throwing the ass” in Washington, sounds rather calm compared to what Trump is saying at his rally. Perhaps King himself has the foresight of Johnny Smith. Or perhaps on one level he suspects that Trump is not as sick as the symptoms, and is not a manifestation of a much deeper and longer permeable state of the American soul. There is a scary concept right now.
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Based in Seoul Colin marshall Write and broadcasting stationTS about cities, languages, and culture. His projects include the Substack Newsletter Books about cities And the book The Stateless City: Walking through 21st century Los Angeles. Follow him on social networks previously known as Twitter @colinmarshall.
