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With Swine Fl… er, H1N1 running rampant across the globe, GQ sought out the man who first predicted a Flu-Driven apocalypse, Stephen King, for his take on the happenings in the world at large. Shockingly, he’s not very optimistic.—alex pappademas
STEPHEN KING: [Loud, worrisome coughing.] Sorry.
GQ: You should get that checked out.
SK: Yeah, I know.
GQ: We’ve read The Stand like eight times, so as soon as people started getting sick, we were like, “Okay—we know how this ends.”
SK: The book is up about 10,000 places on Amazon this week. But I could do without that. _[laughs] _
GQ: You wrote this book in the ‘70s, when “bioterrorism” wasn’t a household word. Where did the idea of the superflu come from?
SK: 60 Minutes had started to do stories about bio-warfare with horrible graphic images of rats in lab experiments, just shivering themselves to death. So I started to read about the flu. And it’s creepy. The flu is a creepy disease, because you catch the flu and develop an immunity, but only to that strain. The flu shifts its antigen and comes back, and those antibodies that are supposed to protect your cells from invasion don’t work anymore. The idea behind The Stand was a flu that would shift in the body, so that as soon as the body started to beat the flu, it would shift to another kind of flu. It was just plausible enough to scare the hell out of people, I guess.
**GQ: **It seems like it’s scary because it’s so prosaic. Oh, I have the flu. I’m going to take a sick day. And then, all of a sudden…
SK: Yeah. There’s also a certain paranoia in our society now. Everybody says it’s post-9/11 syndrome, but I’m not sure that’s it as much it is cable news, and even nightly news, jostling for ratings. You know what they say: If it bleeds it leads. And if it coughs, it leads, too. I mean, they had a map on CNN yesterday that showed the possible progress of this flu. And you see a white image of the continental United States and then it starts to turn green, and then it starts to turn red, and then pretty soon, the whole thing is red. And it leads you to the idea that it’s going to be a Stand scenario, you know, and they’re going to be burning dead people in piles outside stadiums. But that’s probably not going to be the case. We’ll find out in the next few weeks. What’s your deadline again?
GQ: I shouldn’t even be doing this interview. I should be stockpiling canned goods and making my way to Boulder.
SK: Look, we’re in an apocalyptic frame of mind, that’s all. The whole country, and the whole world. The news encourages that. I think a lot of people are going to get sick, and I think a lot of people are going to go Howard Hughes. My wife has already started to take a little package of sanitary wet-naps to the supermarket. She scrubs off the handle of her cart before she goes in. Really, you should just wash your hands. I don’t think those fucking masks are going to do a bit of good. That’s ridiculous.
GQ: They’re becoming really popular. Lots of people are wearing them in Manhattan this week.
SK: Yeah. Michael Jackson finally looks like everybody else.
GQ: Michael was way ahead on the mask thing. He’s going to make it. He’ll be the last one left.
SK: That’s it. One human being left on Earth, striding through the ruins with a spangled glove on.
GQ: But what do you think is so compelling about the idea of the apocalypse? Why are we so eager to entertain the notion that it’s going to happen in our lifetime?
SK: Well for me, when I wrote the book, it almost seemed like it would be a relief—instead of picking at this Gordian knot of international relations and economic problems, and the cost of oil, and making the house payments, you just swung through it, chopped it wide open with one big stroke. And it’s just gone. Like that. And I thought there [would be] a good side to that happening, because we were killing ourselves. Our technology had far outraced out moral ability to deal with the problems it creates. We’re still so far behind that we can’t decide what to do with stem cells, you know? We’re still arguing the theological benefits while people sit quadriplegic in wheelchairs, blowing into straws to move themselves from place to place. So how in the hell are we supposed to deal with radical Islamic militants who are willing to blow themselves up? How are we supposed to deal with the pollution in the atmosphere? And, of course, in the back of their minds everybody’s thinking, “Well, I might be the survivor.”
GQ: “If the only people left were people like me, it’ll be paradise.”
**SK: **But sooner or later it will happen. We’ve seen so many false alarms—Y2K, the Avian Flu—that there’s a tendency to say, “Well it’s all bullshit, it’ll be fine.” One of these days, though, it really is going to be the Spanish Flu again, and it’s going to kill people. I do have some predictive powers—I mean, I’m the guy who wrote The Running Man, where the guy ends up crashing a jetliner into a New York skyscraper at the end of the book.
GQ: Is there anything else in your books that you think will come true in the next few years?
SK: Well, here’s one thing. We can’t talk about this too long, it’s too much of a bummer. But it’s been almost 65 years since anybody’s blown up a nuclear weapon in a city in the world. Everybody knows that’s going to happen. You’re going to wake up one morning to find out somebody exploded a dirty nuke in Baghdad or Islamabad. Or the North Koreans actually did launch some kind of a shit-kicking little missile and managed to blow up part of Tokyo. In terms of death toll, it probably won’t be any worse than what happened at Chernobyl. But the trauma. I mean, look at the situation we’re in—people fly a jet plane low over New York City, and the city goes all Martian Chronicles.
GQ: But you never did the nuclear threat. You went with the biological calamity instead.
SK: Well, the biological burns itself out in a short period of time, and the world that’s left behind is clean. Whereas if we actually did have a nuclear war, that would be the end of all of us. But you know what? The world would come back. We’d be gone, but the world would come back.
GQ: You’re probably right. I hope you’re right. Although I guess I won’t be there to appreciate it, regardless of what happens.
SK: Well, who knows? You might be one of the lucky ones.
GQ: You know, it’s weird—I’ve been having these dreams, man. I don’t know what they mean, exactly…
SK: You just have to go to Nebraska and find the old black woman.
GQ: Yeah. That’s what I thought. I’m on my way.