For going on five years now, King has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and his policies. But, for the most part, the novelist's political opinions have remained isolated to his social media account. Now, in a new interview with the New York Times, King says of his new book that "sometimes you find out that life really does imitate art. I think in this case it really has.”
He's discussing his latest novel The Institute, which follows a group of children with supernatural abilities who are abducted by a mysterious organisation. And if that sounds like it echoes real-life recent events—the crisis at the border where families are being separated and held in what some call concentration camps—it wasn't intentional. As the New York Times writes:
As King neared completion of the book last summer, things got weird. The broad strokes of “The Institute" began to parallel what was happening in real life: Children, seeking asylum at the border, were being removed from their parents under the administration’s family separation policy. “All I can say is that I wrote it in the Trump era. I’ve felt more and more a sense that people who are weak, and people who are disenfranchised and people who aren’t the standard, white American, are being marginalized,” King says. “And at some point in the course of working on the book, Trump actually started to lock kids up.” At least seven children have died while in immigration custody since the policy was enacted. “That was creepy to me because it was really like what I was writing about,” King says. “But I don’t want you to say that was in my mind when I wrote the book, because I’m not a person who wants to write allegory like ‘Animal Farm’ or ‘1984.’”
It's truly horrifying. Not even the greatest horror writer of the last century can think up acts more evil than those being done by the American president.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
