I decided to get the audiobook and listen to a bit of it before I saw that movie. I’m over an hour in and...yeah you really get the impression that Stephen King doesn’t care much for his country. There’s a story in it set in 1984 about a couple of downtrodden homosexuals who are targeted and beaten up by a bunch of anti-gay thugs, they talk about how lousy life is for them as gays in general what with anti gay graffiti and pastors as well as people who turn a blind eye to their abuse in their town and having Reagan as their president...
Gee if I didn’t know better I swear King was trying to tell us something.
In the Green Mile, an orderly at a nursing home takes great pleasure in abusing the elderly patients. When he drives off, King makes note of his Newt Gingrich bumper stickers. (people loved the movie; the book was an extremely muddled, hypocritical anti-death penalty screed)
Much more recently than It, King wrote a truly terrible book called Cell that featured a gay whom he portrayed as virtually a saint. First of all, we’re supposed to cheer when a scared Christian woman is ranting and raving and this gay punches her and knocks her down. Then, in King’s ultimate virtue signaling, the heroes are gathering water from the toilet tanks in the gay guy’s house. King says that the main character only took water from the tank, but as clean and conscientious as the gay guy was, he knew the water in the bowl would be perfectly great drinking water, too. Oh, brother.