The same day Stephen King’s latest novel, “Holly,” was published, Rolling Stone magazine published an extensive interview with the author in which the Bangor legend shared his thoughts on a number of topics — from the COVID-19 vaccines to his love of a certain 1990s one-hit wonder song.
King told Rolling Stone that he set “Holly” — his latest crime novel, and first to focus on his idiosyncratic private eye, Holly Gibney — during the pandemic, since that’s when he was writing the book. He made Holly’s difficulties with her COVID-denying family a central issue in the story, opening with a scene in which Holly has to attend her mother’s funeral via Zoom — and her mother has died from COVID.
“I wanted to write the book set in the time that I was actually writing the book, which was around 2020 or 2021,” King said. “And I thought to myself, ‘Nobody would believe this if they hadn’t been through it. Nobody would actually understand the paranoia and the fear of COVID.’”
He also held forth on whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to authors like him — a topic he expanded on in an essay published in The Atlantic last month, after learning some AI programs use King’s books to train. He said that AIs can try to ape the works of poets like William Blake or William Carlos Williams, but he believes they’ll never quite get it.
“It’s like the difference between Budweiser and some generic beer,” he said. “So both of them get you a little bit tingly, but it ain’t the same.”
King also gave an update on his corgi, Molly (the Thing of Evil), saying that she’d recently had a tumor removed, but was otherwise doing great. And he shed a little more light on his famously omnivorous taste in music, revealing that he enjoys some electronic music like LCD Soundsystem and Fatboy Slim, and has lately been listening to Travis Tritt and Alan Jackson.
He also said that, for a period in the early 2000s, he had an obsession with a specific one-hit wonder song: Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”
King said he played it so often that his wife, Tabitha, told him, essentially, that he could have a little bit of Monica in his life, or a little bit of Tabitha — but not both.
“My wife threatened to divorce me. I played that a lot. I had the dance mix. I loved those extended play things, and I played both sides of it. And one of them was just total instrumental,” King said. “And I played that thing until my wife just said, ‘One more time, and I’m going to f—ing leave you.’”