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Stephen King on Monday dropped by The Late Show to discuss his new crime novel, Billy Summers.
While catching up with host Stephen Colbert, the iconic wordsmith explained that he had to alter plot details in his new book due to the pandemic. He began writing Billy Summers in 2019 before there was a global crisis.
“I had a couple of characters that I had to get off the stage for reasons that have to do with the plot … so I said, ‘I’ll put them on a cruise ship,'” King began. “And then COVID came along and I said, ‘No, this is probably not going to work.’ So what I did was I took the whole book, which was set in 2020 and shoved it back to 2019.”
The cruise ship industry was completely upended by the pandemic and is now only slowly recovering.
King noted that writers will not be afforded that option for long. “Sooner or later, someone is going to have to deal with this thing head-on,” he said of the pandemic and plot points.
While on the topic of the pandemic, King did not hold back his thoughts on Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida; a state being devastated by an enormous spike in COVID-19 cases.
Saying DeSantis could be a villain in one of his horror novels, King noted, “I know the guy fairly up close because we live half of the year in Florida. Ron DeSantis is probably not the brightest bulb in the chandelier at the best of times. He’s got that deer in the headlights look.”
Watch the full segment below.
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