Now on bbc news, its hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk. Im stephen sackur. Millions of readers All Over The World are drawn to fiction that explores our fears. Horror sells, and no one does it better or more prolifically than my guest today, Stephen King. Hes written more than 60 books, sold close to 400 Million copies. He is the Master Manipulator of dark places and the paranormal. If youre not a reader, you may have seen the shining, carrie, Stand By Me All Films based on his stories. Hes been writing for half a century. How has our appetite for fear evolved . Stephen king in florida, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you very much. Its nice to be here. I wish we could do it in person. Me too. But nonetheless, it is a pleasure to see you on my screen. And let me begin by asking you about the threat that we all, All Over The World in florida, in the uk, All Over The World are living with, and that is covid 19. Has that invisible threat of the virus in any way dimmed your enthusiasm for Writing Fiction about dark places . I would have to say actually not, because ive been in quarantine, sheltering in place for part of the time. Things have eased up a little bit, and ive managed to get my two vaccinations yay, me im not entirely protected yet and i think that we all have to continue to take precautions. But one of the things that all of this Solitude And Sort of being in one place has done is freed my imagination. Its a place to go, a place to forget about whats going on in the world and think about anything from vampires to curses to kids who talk to dead people to any of that stuff. So its been good for me, in a way. And i think youre going to see a Great Flood of novels from writers who no longer have an excuse not to sit down at their machines. But that is very interesting that the, the pervasive anxiety of the society around you certainly hasnt put you off from sort of delving into the macabre, the, the dark, the difficult and the twisted in your fiction, as youve done for more than 50 years. Yeah, well, i think that a lot of people enjoy Horror Stories because it allows them to express their anxieties in ways that dont have anything to do with the real world, if you see what i mean. It gives them a chance to experience emotions, maybe, that are not allowed in polite society like aggression, fear, anger. All those things are great. And when you see a Monster Movie or when you read a scary book, it allows you to sort of Test Drive those emotions, which is a good thing, i think. I think its good to get those things out. Its a kind of catharsis. But, of course, i would say that. Yeah, you would say that. Youre sort of pro scaring people. And i guess you feel that, that scaring people when theyre already scared is a choice, and that many people still make that choice. I think that its almost like the old time days when people would draw blood. This way, it sort of draws anxiety at least i like to think so. I hope so. There are a lot of psychological reasons to enjoy fiction thats fearful. And in particular, when you deal with some of the supernatural elements or the monsters and that sort of thing, we understand its not real. Yeah. So we feel that its safe enough to go there. Whereas when you have something like coronavirus, thats very, very real. And one of the things that interests me is how many books came out right around the time of the coronavirus that dealt with that particular issue. Theres a really good one called The End of october which deals with a pandemic thats eerily like what were going through now. But thats not the same thing that were talking about, because thats very, very close to the real anxieties. You wrote your own book about a contagious, highly infectious, dangerous disease, didnt you, back in the late 1970s . Have you revisited that to look at the degree to which you got stuff right about the way in which societies react to that sort of invisible but pervasive Health Threat . Yes, i revisited it quite a lot because the stand is a miniseries over here on tv, and i think that it will eventually show in england, if it hasnt already. And its very eerie to see scenes where people are wearing masks and dumping bodies into mass graves. We saw too much footage over here of refrigerated trucks, particularly at the height of the pandemic, in places like Los Angeles and new york, where there was just a backlog of bodies and they were being stored. And that really brought me back to the story that i wrote. Are you going to write another Virus Novel . No, i think not. I think that people have seen enough of that. The interesting thing for me is how novelists are going to deal with the current situation, where everybody is masking up and everybody� s trying to maintain social distancing. Let me at this point invite you to travel back in time with me, because youve talked about why horror and the genre that you write appeals to readers because you say it allows them to confront their deepest fears in a controlled environment. But im interested in not the reader, but the writer that is you. And im interested in why, as a very young person, even as a kid, you were attracted to the very dark places. In your childhood writing, and then as a young man in your205. Your first book, of course, that was a great success was carrie, which, you know, delved into the paranormal and was pretty dark in its own way. Why . What was it that took you there . Well, you know, a lot of times when im doing interviews or when im doing appearances where there are questions afterwards, somebody will ask, what were you like as a kid . And the subtext to that question is, what messed you up so badly that you got twisted and you wrote all these horrible stories . Yeah, people want to know whether you are a bit of a sicko or whether there was something very dark in your childhood that took you in the direction you went. Well, thats very freudian. And i could tell you, but then id have to kill you im just kidding, i think. You know, the thing is, i was born with a big imagination. And as a kid, it kind of made my life uncomfortable in a lot of ways. I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of noises in the house. I had nightmares. I could imagine all sorts of awful things happening to me. And Little By little, i was able to turn that in another Direction And Harness what had terrified me, what had scared me as a kid, and start to write stories that would scare other people. You know, in a way, this is the best of all possible worlds, because there are people who go to psychiatrists with their fears and they pay them a certain amount of money to get an hour. Its not even a full hour. Its a 50 minute hour. And what i do is, i bring these fears out and people pay me to read them. But, you know, there is no good, clear answer to your question. Its a mystery. Uh. But it doesnt strike me that you. Sorry to interrupt, stephen, but it does intrigue me that you write a lot about kids kids who are often quite lonesome, but they do have special powers. They see things, including ghostly and paranormal things, which adults simply cannot see. Ive just finished reading your latest crime book, later, which is all about a kid who has that precise talent, that gift. Did you ever, as a kid, feel you could somehow see things . You had a gift that adults around you simply couldnt understand . Oh, yeah, i could see things. And they were very clear and i wrote them down. And one of the ways that you tell somebody whos intensely creative. And as a kid, i was intensely creative, and i still am now but i have better control over it now than i did as a child. So, you know, the thing is, you grow up and you learn how to harness that. And childhood was vivid for me, and i enjoy revisiting that. And one of the things that i like about it is that kids have a wider perspective and theyre more apt to take into account the paranormal or the strange. I mean, kids believe in santa claus, kids believe in the tooth fairy. So its very easy for them to believe that a house might be haunted. Talking of beliefs, does Stephen King believe in god . The jurys out on that, but as somebody famous said, if you dont believe and there is one, youre losing out. It doesnt hurt to believe in god. And so i choose to believe in a power greater than myself. Why not . It seems to help. And so, yeah. The reason that, the reason im intrigued is partly because your books, you know, are in many ways about good and evil. You know, there are good people in your books and there are some really atrociously bad people in your books. I dont know if you yourself use the word evil, but if you do, where do you think evil comes from . Well, evil is a tough one. I was raised a methodist and i had a very traditional protestant religious upbringing and i carried a lot of that to my fiction. And a lot of it is about good and evil. And one of the things that interests me the most about the stories that i write is how do good people behave when theyre faced with difficult circumstances . So i try to work on that as much as i can. But when you talk about evil, the question is is there such a thing as outside evil . That is to say, is possession, demonic possession, really a possible thing, or is it a psychological aberration . We know about inside evil. Whether or not theres outside evil is a question for fiction. And ive written about it many times. One of the things that has always struck me about very evil people serial killers like ted bundy, the moors murders, if you will, in england these are terrible, Terrible Things, but if we put those people to death. The evil doesnt care, the evil just flies away into someone else. And then they you are faced with other Terrible Things because we have those elements, that evil is in All Of Us. So that, thats interesting. That is the perennial question, isnt it . I mean, its raised in your books, but its also raised in world history. What are we, All Of Us, you, me, actually capable of when it comes to the idea that we all have very dark and bad stuff within us that we must control . We do, and maybe we go to a Horror Movie like saw or Salems Lot or the stand, and we get rid of some of those feelings, we find a place to put them thats safe. We almost have to do that because we all have violent impulses. Its part of our genetic make up, if you will. So in that way, i like to think that im serving the public interest. Well, and we thank you for it. But if i may, let me get personal with you, because you come across as a man whos done a lot of deep thinking about your own psyche and the psyche of All Of Us in the human race. Why was there a period in your life where you clearly found real issues with Substance Abuse and with Control And Addiction . What, what went wrong for you . Well, nothing went wrong with me. I was an alcoholic and a Drug Addict from the beginning, and. Really . From. Oh, god, from the time i had my first drink, ijust said, give me some more of that. And the time that i first snorted cocaine, i thought to myself, ive found god. I can remember very well. I had an accident in 1999. Guy hit me with a van and i ended up in the hospital with broken bones and broken ribs and a concussion and. A mess. My leg was basically Pencil Shavings from the knee on down on the right side. Im lucky to be alive. And when i finally came out of it, three days later, the doctor said, hows your Pain Level . Is it. . One to ten . I said, its like 20. Its like 25. And he said, well, we have a wonderful new drug thats called 0xycontin. And i think youre going to find that it controls the pain. And the first time i took one of those pills, i said to myself, this is my new addiction. And i was. I used that stuff for the next four or five years. But thats also like imagination. Its something thats hard wired, i think, into the system. Its a disease. And i control it on a day by day basis. And i dont drink. I dont use. I havent for 32 years. So this is a better way to live. But i am still an active alcoholic, theres No Doubt about it. Well, im not active, but im in remission. Yeah. Let me ask you how you feel american culture has evolved over the last half century, because thats the span of your writing career. It strikes me that when you began in the � 60s, you were writing in a very different context from The One that we see young people growing up in today. You know, the digital revolution, the impact of the information flows that come with the internet, Social Media its, its changed culture so profoundly. Do you think it is changing the tastes of what people want to read and what you therefore need to write . Well, its been a very good thing for creative people, for artistic people. For years, writers, screenwriters, novelists. We were in what youd call a sellers market, but now, thanks to all the different streaming platforms and to Audio Books and to kindle books you know, books that you read on a Screen Everything is exploding so that were now in a. Were basically in a sellers market. Theres all sorts of call for creative. For people who can write stories and make things up, basically. Its everywhere. And the question of whether or not it has changed the way that people consume i would have to say that people are a little more jaded now than they were in the old days. When i started, in 1974, you had some very simple things. You had books that were hard covers, then they became paperbacks. If you were very, very lucky, they might become a movie, but that was pretty much The End of it right there. And now the choices are very wide. And i think, yeah, i have to say people are a little bitjaded. But do you think that theyre jaded in a different sense . A sense that, thanks to the phone they have and the laptop and the tablet, they can access the most extraordinary and often horrifying graphic images and graphic stories at the click of a mouse or a button. Do you feel that, when you sit in your Writing Room and conjure up imaginings for a new story, you have to go further in terms of the, the graphic element the violence, the horror, the fear inducing stuff . Do you have to push the envelope further than ever before . No, i dont need to do that because im not interested in horror, per se. Im interested in people and what people do. What i would like for readers, for you, stephen, to feel when they read one of my books is, i would like you to fall in love with the characters and want the best in the world for them. In other words, yes, im a horror writer, i wont disagree with that. But what i really want to do is to engage your positive emotions as much as i can so that, when Terrible Things happen, you dont want to see somebody� s head come off. I think that, in a way, the Friday The 13th movies were almost like snuff movies. You didnt go to see the campers at Crystal Lake get away, you wanted to see them killed with arrows and Buzz Saws and chainsaws and god knows what. You know, i was in a supermarket down here in florida, and i came around a corner and there was a woman coming the other way, and she pointed at me. She said, i know who you are. Youre Stephen King. You write all those horrible things. And thats ok. Thats all right. But i like uplifting things, like that movie shawshank redemption. And i said, i wrote that. And she said, no, you didnt, no. But interestingly, when you talk about what really matters to you that is connecting with characters, generating love from reader to character you could. You know, shakespeare would have said that, Charles Dickens, tolstoy, all of the great writers would sayjust the same thing. Do you really resent the fact that you get put in this box of the highly commercial Thriller Guy . Youre not really seen as a literary writer, a guy who actually has an enormous, immense gift with words. Does that stick in your throat . Im too old now for it to stick in my throat, but there was a time when i resented it very much. And there was also a time when i believed, as a younger man, more naive, that there was a way to build a bridge between, lets say, the literary and. And the popular. That there was a way to actually have both things at the same time. And i think there was a time when that did happen, although even at the height of his popularity Charles Dickens was loved by the multitude, by the people in the cheap seats, if you will. They crowded the docks at baltimore when the latest edition, the latest chapter of Little Dorrit came in, and the dock actually collapsed and people drowned because they were so anxious to see what happened next. And the literary critics of that day felt that that was just below them. Because there is this sort of elitist attitude, isnt there . That if too many people like it, it really cant be very good. Final thought. And it brings me to the present day. You have 6. 5 million twitter followers. You use your platform, often, to air your political views, which are, i think its fair to say, liberal, and have been very anti trump over the last few years. But it strikes me that Donald Trump has one gift, which is to use fear as an extraordinarily effective political weapon. His famous inauguration speech, january 2017, The One that we sort of call the american carnage speech, was all about using fear as a means to rally political support. Im just wondering whether youre interested in that and whether you, Stephen King, are considering writing a novel about where america is today, weaving politics and fear together . Well, i did, in a way i wrote a book called the dead zone. It had a character in it named greg stillson, who goes from being a door to door bible salesman to a candidate for president of the united states. And hes a terrible person. And at the same time, hes very much like Donald Trump. And i was so distressed by george bushs iraq war, i wrote a book called under the dome. And i had a character in that book, namedjim rennie, who is the worst person in charge of a crisis, a disaster situation, that you could possibly imagine. And i wasnt thinking about bush so much as i was thinking about cheney. You know, everything that i write has a certain subtext because, man, i think that anybody who writes a long book, they have to be thinking about something other than story, there has to be some concern that has to do with their own life. So i try to keep twitter, the political stuff on twitter, but in the books, that subtext is there. Yeah. Its all, its all in there somewhere. Stephen king, it has been a great pleasure having you on hardtalk. Thank you very much. Its been wonderful. Thank you. Hello there. April showers have been in short supply. Its been a very dry month so far. And for most places, tuesday will be another dry day with some sunny spells. But across the north of the uk, we can expect some patchy rain, courtesy of a Weather Front you can see it here on the chart drifting in from the northwest, moving slowly southeastward through the day and weakening all the while. For much of england and wales, were starting off the day dry with some spells of sunshine, although quite misty and murky for some of these eastern coasts. And through the day, i think well see a gradual Build Up in cloud amounts. There may even bejust the odd Rogue Shower into the afternoon. For scotland and Northern Ireland, ourfrontal system bringing cloud, outbreaks of patchy rain southwards. Behind it, the skies will brighten but the winds will strengthen, and it will be quite a chilly afternoon across the northern half of the uk. Further south, were looking at highs 15 16 celsius or so, and as we go through Tuesday Night and into the first part of wednesday, the remnants of that Weather Front will continue to sink southwards, so pushing down across england and wales, with more in the way of cloud here, the odd spot of rain, with clearer skies developing from Northern Ireland and scotland. Some places will see a frost to start wednesday morning. So, through wednesday, that Weather Front will continue its journey southwards. Not much left on it by this stage, Just A Band Of Cloud and the odd spot of rain, high Pressure Building back in behind, bringing Sunnier Skies for parts of scotland and Northern Ireland. So, our Weatherfront Bringing Cloud Southwards across england and wales. The odd spot of rain, quite misty and murky again for some of these eastern areas. Could see the Odd Sharp shower breaking out through the day down toward the southwest, but Sunnier Skies for northern england, Northern Ireland and scotland. The highest temperatures will be where we get a bit of shelter, down towards the south and the west, 15 16 celsius. And then as we move out of wednesday into thursday, the remnants of that Weather Front clear well out into the near continent, High Pressure really asserts itself right on top of the british isles, so that means lots of sunshine through the day, a bit of patchy cloud here and there. Highest temperatures, again, will be out west. We could get up to 15 16 celsius or so. Always a little Bit Cooler for some of these eastern coasts. And quite Breezy Down towards the south of the uk. As we head through friday into the weekend, it stays predominantly dry with some spells of sunshine by day, and still the potential for some frost at night. This is bbc news. Im Lewis Vaughanjones with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. Thejury the jury retires to consider its verdict in the trial of the former Police Officer charged with killing george floyd. It is a key moment in us policing and race relations. Businesses are boarded up in minneapolis in anticipation of unrest over the verdict. Mr guvnor calls for cooperation. Changes will need to be made. It needs to be started with systemic reforms. Some things we can all agree on and work from there. No one should die for a simple traffic violation. 0utrage at zero� s reges gloves announced plans to join a new Breakaway Football super league