Stephen King’s New Novel ‘End Of Watch’ Compares Murderous Antagonist To Donald Trump
Stephen King’s latest crime fiction novel, End of Watch, is the final installment of his bestselling Bill Hodges trilogy that started with Mr. Mercedes. King tells CBS This Morning that the story was inspired by a true event in which a scorned woman plowed her car into a line of job seekers at a McDonald’s, targeting her boyfriend’s girlfriend.
“I was coming up to South Carolina and I saw a story on the news, local news, about a woman who had run her car into a line of job seekers at a McDonald’s,” King described in the exclusive interview.” “This was at the height of the recession in 2008…. Her boyfriend’s girlfriend was in the line, and so she went after him, and I thought, ‘There’s something here that I really want to write about.'”
Congrats, Republicans! You’re about to nominate a thin-skinned racist with the temperament of a 3-year-old.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 5, 2016
In End of Watch, King even mentions Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, by having a character describe antagonist and murderer, Brady Hartsfield, as someone “living like Donald Trump.” King has been quite vocal about his disdain for Trump, recently tweeting, “Congrats, Republicans! You’re about to nominate a thin-skinned racist with the temperament of a 3-year-old.”
“I have to say what I feel, and I’m very concerned about this election because I’m an American,” King explained. “I hate the idea when people come back and say, ‘Well, this celebrity said this, that celebrity said that.’ But at the bottom, we’re all just Americans, and we vote, and we’re citizens and we talk about politics on Twitter the same way that anybody else does. I come from Maine. We have a governor who supports Donald Trump, and I’ve seen the results of that over the years, and I’m just very concerned about the elections.”
Stephen King has written more than 50 books and sold more than 350 million copies, and the New York Times calls End of Watch his best book since 2009’s Under the Dome. Almost all of Stephen’s work draws from organic moments, and these moments have inspired filmmakers to turn to his stories for inspiration.
Check out King’s chat with CBS This Morning via the clip below.
The final installment of End of Watch begins where book two ended. Brady — the man who drove a car into a crowd at a job fair and killed eight people — remains paralyzed while retired detective Bill Hodges races against time to stop him from killing again. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says the supernatural element that King introduces in End of Watch is what makes the novel more compelling in comparison to the trilogy’s first two books.
King told CBS This Morning that he would never be able to write an Agatha Christie-style mystery; instead, he prefers a more Hitchcockian approach. “Hitchcock once said the difference between horror and suspense is, horror is when a bomb goes off. Suspense is when you see the bomb under the table and the people are having a normal conversation and they don’t know it’s there and time is ticking down,” King explained. “So you know in the ‘End of Watch’ who the bad guy is. And if you’ve read the other two, you absolutely know who the bad guy is.”
Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes is his first hard-boiled detective book, which won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and Goodreads Choice Awards for 2014 in the “Mystery and Thriller” category. The second book in the trilogy, Finders Keepers, was published on June 2, 2015, and End of Watch, which is King’s 55th novel, was released on June 7.
[Photo by Mark Lennihan/AP Images]
