“I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner, this old woman—obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, ‘I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.’

“And I said, ‘I wrote that.’ And she said, ‘No you didn’t.’ And she walked off and went on her way.”

It happens, over and over. It happened when he published Misery, his chronicle of toxic fandom; it happened with Bag of Bones, his gothic ghost story about a novelist, with nods to du Maurier’s Rebecca; it happened when he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

We’re not talking in the huge concrete shoe box house. We’re sitting by the pool in a smaller house the Kings bought on the same street, as a guesthouse for their family. Joe King, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, is staying there. He still looks like his dad, although no longer a clonal teenage version, and now has a successful career of his own as a writer of books and graphic novels. He carries his iPad everywhere he goes. Joe and I are friends.

In Bag of Bones, Stephen King has an author who stops writing but keeps publishing stockpiled books. I wonder how long his publishers could keep his death a secret?

He grins. “I got the idea for the writer in Bag of Bones having books because somebody told me years ago that every year Danielle Steel wrote three books and published two, and I knew Agatha Christie had squirreled a couple away, to put a final bow on her career. As of right now, if I died and everybody kept it a secret, it would go on until 2013. There’s a new Dark Tower novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole. That comes out soon, and Doctor Sleep is done. So if I got hit by a taxicab, like Margaret Mitchell, what wouldn’t be done, what would be done. Joyland wouldn’t be done but Joe could finish it, in a breeze. His style is almost indistinguishable from mine. His ideas are better than mine. Being around Joe is like being next to a Catherine wheel throwing off sparks, all these ideas. I do want to slow down. My agent is dickering with the publishers about Doctor Sleep—that’s the sequel to The Shining—but I held off showing them the manuscript because I wanted time to breathe.”

Why would he write a sequel to The Shining? I do not tell him how much that book scared me when I was sixteen, nor how much I loved and at the same time was disappointed by the Kubrick movie.

“I did it because it was such a cheesed-off thing to do. To say you were going back to the book that was really popular and write the sequel. People think of that book, they read it as kids. Kids read it and say it was a really scary book, and then as adults they might read the sequel and think, This isn’t as good. The challenge is, maybe it can be as good—or maybe it can be different. It gives you something to push up against. It’s a challenge.