Welcome to Derry, USA.

Working at GP Putnam’s Sons and Penguin USA in the late 80s, early 90s, I had a front row seat to Stephen King’s work. Here, you can catch a glimpse of my first-edition collection and galleys. At the heart of Stephen King’s horror, evil masquerades as our preachers, neighbors, Officer Friendly, or “an elected leader who promises safety at the cost of your memory.” King sent warnings from the future so that we could confront evil today – did we miss the message? Let’s review.

On an unusually warm October night, a child vanished from a quiet suburban neighborhood in Maine. No one heard a scream: no broken fences or muddy footprints. Just a lone red balloon tied to the stop sign at the corner of Elm and Main. At first glance, it could’ve been a twisted Halloween prank—except it wasn’t Halloween.

And the child never came home.

The police issued a generic statement. But online, neighbors swapped stories about flickering streetlights, a rash of shared dreams, and shadowy figures seen just beyond the street cameras’ reach.

“It’s like we’re living in a Stephen King novel,” one Redditor wrote.

Another replied,

“But what if we are?”

America isn’t just flirting with dystopia —it’s inside the narrative arc of a psychological horror story. What we’re living through feels eerily familiar: School shootings, rampant conspiracy theories, cultural splintering, political gaslighting, and rising cruelty. These themes are the very backbone of Stephen King’s work. Whether it’s the novel, It, The Stand, or Needful Things, the monsters in his world aren’t just supernatural—they’re systemic. They feed off human fear, willful ignorance, and our desperate belief that if we just keep smiling, it’ll all go back to normal.

It won’t.

In the horror story arc, normalization is often the scariest part.

Stephen King’s stories, once labeled “fictional exaggerations,” now read like prescient blueprints. America’s reality echoes King’s themes: the breakdown of trust in institutions, the rise of everyday evil, and the terrifying idea that the real monster is never just supernatural—it’s human.

At the heart of King’s horror is the idea that evil hides in plain sight. Evil masquerades as our preachers, neighbors, law enforcement officers, or the elected leader who promises safety at the cost of your memory. In It, Pennywise is the masked monster. In The Stand, it’s Randall Flagg exploiting societal collapse. King’s stories reveal that fear, once institutionalized, becomes a self-replicating virus. America, too, has been infected. And this time, it’s not COVID.

Many believed that King’s tales were hyperbole—entertaining, yes, but far-fetched. After all, how could a democratic superpower fall under the spell of misinformation, mass hysteria, and violent division?

Surely, institutions would hold. Reason would prevail, and the assumption that “normal” would always return.

But here’s the twist ending: King didn’t just write horror—he held up a mirror. From book bans to AI paranoia, from child rape to angry mobs, from mental health crises to algorithmic manipulation—this isn’t a slow burn anymore. We’re past the midpoint of the movie. So, the real question is: who are we in this story? Are we the town that forgets and denies, or the ones who remember and fight back?

In King’s world, the children of Derry eventually remembered what they forgot—and fought back. That’s the power of memory. The moment we forget who we are—curious, communal, courageous- is the moment fear wins.

If we continue to deny what’s happening, we’re not the heroes. We’re the extras—filler characters in someone else’s nightmare.

But if we remember? If we really look at the balloon tied to the stop sign and say “no more,” then we have a fighting chance.

Not just to survive this story, but to rewrite it. We have the power to change the narrative.