When Rolling Stone asked Stephen King to pick his best book in 2014, he didn’t go for an obvious candidate like The Stand, The Shining, It, Carrie, or Misery. Instead, he picked the relatively obscure Lisey’s Story. The 2006 novel centers around a woman who travels to an alternate universe while trying to come to terms with the death of her husband.
“That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I’d never written about that,” King said. “I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there’s still things that we don’t know about each other.”
The book is so close to King’s heart that he wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Lisey’s Story Apple TV+ miniseries (which premiers on June 4th) by himself. In an exclusive video, King, producer J.J. Abrams, director Pablo Larrain, and cast members Julianne Moore and Clive Owen talk about the project.
“I wanted to tell the story that was in the book, but I wanted to make it better,” King says in the clip. “I thought if someone was going to mess it up…I used to tell my wife, ‘No one is going to mess it up but me.’”
“There was a lot of pressure,” Moore adds. “We wanted to make sure that we did him justice, and that we did the story justice.”
Lisey’s Story is the latest in a long run of recent King adaptations TV adaptions that also includes The Stand, Survivor Type, The Outsider, Mr. Mercedes, The Mist, and 11.22.63. Many more are in the works, including The Institute, Joyland, Sleeping Beauties, and The Talisman.
Meanwhile, King’s new book, Billy Summers, is coming out on August 3rd. It’s about a hired assassin only willing to kill truly bad people.
From Rolling Stone US
