"Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful. It's soooo dark."

THE STAND turns thirty, Stephen King, like Neil Young, keeps on rocking in the free world by continuing to write apocalyptic books that are, one would dearly hope, not too prescient in their telling of mankind undone by mankind and the evil perpetuated in the human heart. A timely interview in Salon.com let's us inside the mind of the master.

It's 30 years since the publication of "The Stand," which was written, as you say in "Danse Macabre*," "during a troubled period for the world in general and America, in particular." We're in another troubled period now. Do you feel yourself itching to write another apocalypse?


I just did. I finished a very long book called "Under the Dome," and it isn't like a worldwide apocalypse or anything like that, but it's a very long book, and it deals with some of the same issues that "The Stand" does, but in a more allegorical way.

I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I'm very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we're living in, it's very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that's running things.

His latest collection of stories, "Just After Sunset," arrives in bookstores in November.

*which I read until my copy feel apart.