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Of the many, many impressive things about Stephen King’s career, one of the most remarkable is just how ridiculously prolific the guy is. He is a man who is fully dedicated to his craft, and it’s a dedication that has allowed him to publish at least one book every year since the late 1970s. He has well-earned his reputation as an endless font of imagination, and that makes it all the more comical that he comes across as a victim of his own muse in a reading of his new novel that just arrived online this week.
The author’s blunt honesty about his latest tome Never Flinch is the lead story of this new edition of The King Beat – but it’s just one of two headlines this week, as I’m also fascinated by the apparent King influences on Zach Cregger’s new movie Weapons, which just dropped its first trailer a few days ago. There’s a whole lot to discuss, so let’s dig in!
In A Reading Of His New Book Never Flinch, Stephen King Gets Super Honest About The Terror Of Writing A Plotted Novel
While there are some writers who can’t start working on a story unless they’ve structured the whole thing out and know exactly where everything is going to lead from page one, Stephen King is a different kind of animal. Instead of doing any kind of extensive planning, his methodology is to develop an idea and/or a collection of characters and to just start writing – letting the work take him in the direction that it wants to go. It has clearly served him well in the 50-plus years of his professional career, but he found himself in a position to divert from the normal track in the creation of his new novel Never Flinch, and it’s funny to hear him talk about it because it sounds like it made him mildly miserable.
This past week, Simon & Schuster Books published a video of Stephen King reading an excerpt from his latest book (arriving in stores this month), but before getting into the prose, he talks about the special work that went into creating it. The story is a break from familiar King detective fiction in that the work keeps the reader on the outside looking in where the mystery is concerned, and from the way he describes it, the novel sounds like it was a perilous experience. He explains,
I’ve always wanted to write a whodunit. I like the books by Agatha Christie and people like Ruth Ware, but I also like books like The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, where you know right away from the start who the bad guy is. And this once I wanted to try to write something different and that meant that I had to have a plot. And, ah, God, the amount of trouble that writers get into when they actually try to write a plotted novel, I can’t even begin to tell you. I usually avoid it, but this time I didn’t.
From the sadistic serial killer Brady Hartsfield in Mr. Mercedes to the vile elderly cannibals Emily and Rodney Harris in Holly, King’s mysteries traditionally don’t hide the identities of the people committing the horrible crimes that need to be solved, but Never Flinch is a different kind of beast. Constant Readers are going to be sharing the perspective of talented private investigator Holly Gibney, as it seems we won’t know the identity of the killer she is hunting until she cracks the case at the end of the story.
The sixth story featuring Holly after Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End Of Watch, The Outsider, “If It Bleeds” and Holly, the 2025 novel will find the protagonist on the tail of an unidentified vendetta-driven murderer, but she’ll be doing so while working a new gig: being a bodyguard. As King notes in the reading, she is not a character who is built like a typical member of a security team, but she certainly has the emotional fortitude for the work. Says King,
I wanted to write a book where Holly got a job as a bodyguard. And that interested me because she’s getting on a little bit in years. She’s in her 50s or maybe even the early 60s by now. And she’s a very quiet person. She’s insecure person, but she’s also brave. And that particular contrast really fascinated me about her. And so I wanted to put her into a situation where she had to become a bodyguard for a famous person, kind of like that Kevin Costner movie, but with Holly instead of a big strong guy – a little woman who is about 120 pounds soaking wet.
Stephen King has previously said that the book is partially inspired by the dognapping case involving Lady Gaga, but instead of protecting a famous singer, Never Flinch will see its lead character by the side of a feminist activist who has been targeted by a stalker and wants Holly’s help figuring out what’s going on. Meanwhile, a parallel narrative will see her on a case looking for a revenge-minded serial killer, and from the way King talks about it, he didn’t exactly have a lot of fun building the mystery. While chuckling, the author says in the video:
I wanted to basically have a serial killer that his identity was masked, and Holly was gonna find out who it was at some point. But that was one strand of this terrible plotted novel that went on forever.
That’s not exactly the kind of language that one expects from an author promoting his upcoming book, but it speaks to the specialness of King. You can watch the full reading yourself in the video embed below:
Never Flinch is now just a few weeks away from arriving in stores everywhere (specifically on May 27), and you can be sure that I’ll find opportunities to write about it in the coming weeks in future installments of The King Beat.
Watching The Trailer For Zach Cregger’s Weapons, I Can’t Help But Pick Up On Certain Stephen King Vibes
If you’re a regular reader of his column, you are already well aware that 2025 is a massive year for Stephen King adaptations. Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey was a success when it landed in theaters back in February, and before the end of the year, we’ll see the theatrical releases of Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck, Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk, and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man in addition to the TV premieres of HBO’s IT: Welcome To Derry and MGM+’s The Institute. That’s a lot of King to digest… but that list doesn’t also include titles with some heavy King-esque vibes – and based on the trailer that was released this week, that includes writer/director Zach Cregger’s upcoming horror movie Weapons.
In the new movie from the filmmaker who brought us 2022’s Barbarian, Julia Garner stars as Justine, an elementary school teacher who finds herself at the center of a nightmare when all of the students and vanish from their homes. The fact that all the kids are in her class is the only thing that ties all of the disappearances together, and the preview suggests that the incident is only the start of a broader horror. With a terrific supporting cast that also includes Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, Alden Ehrenreich and more, Weapons is based on an original screenplay by Cregger, but my Stephen King-obsessed mind can’t help but notice two links to the author’s work.
The first and most obvious detail is the noteworthy time of night in the trailer that all of the children disappear: 2:17am. That may seem like a perfectly random clock reading, but I will personally never see the number “217” and not instantly think of Room 217 – the most haunted portion of the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining (famously changed to Room 237 for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation). I don’t suspect that Weapons will end up having any specific ties to The Shining, but I also can’t accept that the time was chosen totally at random.
More broadly, I also find myself mentally putting the plot of the film side-by-side with “Suffer The Little Children” – a short story that King first had published in 1972 before it was ultimately collected in the 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes. In the immensely disturbing tale, a third grade teacher comes to the horrific realization that the students in her class are no longer her students as they have all been replaced by evil doppelgängers. I won’t spoil the ending for those of you who haven’t read it, but it features one of the more fucked up conclusions in the entirety of the King canon. Hopefully things end up a tad bit better for Justine and her class when Weapons arrives in theaters on August 8.
That wraps up this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back here next Thursday on CinemaBlend with the latest news and insights into the world of Stephen King. In the meantime, you can explore everything that is going on with developing adaptations of the author’s work by checking out our Upcoming Stephen King Movies and TV guide.