Stephen King Says Quarantine Is Making Him Feel Like The Shining's Jack Torrance

The current coronavirus pandemic is drawing a number of similarities to the events of Stephen King's The Stand, but the author himself says that the days he has been spending isolating himself from others has him feeling much more like Jack Torrance from The Shining. Luckily, King doesn't mean the parts where Torrance is driven mad by the supernatural beings at the Overlook Hotel, but instead shares that he has plenty of time to focus solely on his writing as the rest of the world is relatively shut down. We can only assume that the outcome for King will be much more positive than how things ended for Torrance.

"I'm working on a book, so in the mornings I forget everything and I just do that. I wanted time to work on a book, I got plenty of time," the author shared with Vanity Fair. "I feel like Jack Torrance, for God's sakes."

The impact of the coronavirus has been so severe, King even revealed earlier this month that the story he is writing is set to take place in 2020, which would be the past by the time the book was released, but knowing that no one is embarking on any cruises due to the virus, he had to tweak his new book's narrative.

"I set [the novel I'm currently writing] in the year 2020 because I thought, 'Okay, when I publish it, if it's in 2021, it will be like in the past, safely in the past,'" King revealed during an interview with NPR. "And then this thing came along, and I immediately looked back through the copy that I'd written and I saw that one of the things that was going on was that two of my characters had gone on a cruise ... and I thought, 'Well, no, I don't think anybody's going on cruise ships this year.' And so I looked at everything and I immediately set the book in 2019, where people could congregate and be together and the story would work because of that."

In The Stand, the world has been afflicted by a devastating virus, with the book following the survivors of the weaponized influenza and society's attempts to rebuild itself, despite supernatural forces making themselves known. A TV adaptation of the story was in production but is currently on hold.

King's latest book, If It Bleeds, is on sale now.

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