{"id":60026,"date":"2025-08-11T21:10:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T21:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/60026\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T21:10:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T21:10:12","slug":"writer-benjamin-percy-partners-with-stephen-king-for-serialized-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/60026\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer Benjamin Percy Partners with Stephen King for Serialized Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gen+AI\"<\/p>\n

‘The End Times’ announcement<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Bad Hand Books<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an exchange between Stu Redman and Glen Bateman in Stephen King\u2019s The Stand, where the latter postulates how society might return from the devastation of a mutated flu virus that nearly wiped out all of humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cMan is a gregarious, social animal, and eventually we\u2019ll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague,” muses the scholarly Bateman, who soon goes on to note the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along \u2014 the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings \u2014 and start it up again. It\u2019s all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acclaimed writer Benjamin Percy (The Sky Vault) is following through on that idea \u2014 and bringing Mr. King along for the ride as contributing writer \u2014 with a serialized novel dubbed The End Times, for renegade horror publisher, Bad Hand Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The post-apocalyptic narrative, which will release installments weekly over the course of a year starting this November, takes the form of a fictional newspaper run by a woman who discovers an old printing press 12 years after a pandemic nearly destroyed human civilization (a premise that feels ghoulishly relatable, post-Covid).<\/p>\n

\u201c[Ben\u2019s] remarked to me that it\u2019s basically influenced by the world of The Stand,\u201d Bad Hand Books founder and CEO Doug Murano says over the phone. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s a really good fit for Stephen to play in that playground, in a little bit of a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

King, of course, is no stranger to serialized stories, having published The Green Mile in six total increments between March and August 1996. \u201cBen thought \u2014 and rightly so \u2014 that Stephen would be interested in doing something like this,\u201d Murano says. \u201cAnd so, they\u2019re off to the races with it. They\u2019ve been exchanging ideas, articles, snippets, and things like that. I\u2019ve kind of just let them take it where they want to go with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing couldn\u2019t be more perfect for King, who celebrates the release of a Stand-centric anthology, The End Of The World As We Know It<\/a>, this month.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019ll see below, the first available page from The End Times carries all the benign hallmarks of a small-town newspaper: an editor\u2019s note, birth announcements, classified ads, an events calendar, and even a small advice section on how to jar your own pickles. But as the story continues, Murano teases, we\u2019ll see more content, including letters to the editor and guest columns by the master of literary horror.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom what I\u2019ve seen so far, Stephen King is going to be writing via a character (or characters) that will be featured throughout the run \u2026 I\u2019m not entirely sure exactly where each of his articles will land, but my perception of what they\u2019re trying to do is build a storyline with a certain character (or characters) writing in to The End Times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The publisher also tees up a subplot involving a local cult that takes over the paper in what sounds like a biting critique of \u201cfake news\u201d and the general division among Americans in the current political landscape.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt helps the project itself take on the topic of misinformation in the news, which I think is really important to a lot of people right now,\u201d Murano explains. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a portion of this project where you only hear what the cult wants you to hear. It\u2019s going to allow readers to confront a lot of the issues that are happening in actual journalism right now, in terms of the importance of getting the real story, the importance of doing things in good faith, and the danger of what happens when you don’t have responsible actors in places of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘The End Times’ front page<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Bad Hand Books<\/p>\n

The End Times got an immediate green-light from Bad Hand, given the fact that it \u201cchecked a lot of boxes\u201d for Murano, a marketing and communications alum who started the company after losing his job in 2018. For one thing, his mother-in-law currently runs a small weekly newspaper, The Waubay Clipper, in the city of Waubay, South Dakota. \u201cBen and I bonded over both being from the Midwest,\u201d says the founder. \u201cHe lives in Minnesota and I live in South Dakota. We talked a lot about the power that small local newspapers have in a community and the importance of that role \u2014 especially as we become more fragmented and distant from each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

For another, the experimental nature of the book was exactly in line with what Bad Hand looks for in prospective \u201coddball projects\u201d that wouldn\u2019t necessarily fly at a mainstream publishing house. \u201cOur philosophy is kind of scrappy,\u201d explains Murano. \u201cWe like to be the underdog, almost to the point of absurdity. It\u2019s the idea of starting a horror publishing company in South Dakota, which is about as far away from the publishing centers of North America as you can get. But at the same time, [it\u2019s about] trying to do really, really big things. Our company’s tagline is, \u2018You can do a lot with a bad hand.\u2019 It’s this mixture of punk rock sensibility and militant optimism that fuels us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirdly, Murano has been a fan of King\u2019s since he read IT at the age of 13. \u201cI was definitely too young in some ways for a story like that,\u201d he admits, \u201cbut when I tell you it is 100% responsible for what I\u2019m doing now, it\u2019s not an overstatement. As a grown-up who still has a spooky inner child, getting to come full circle and work alongside the person responsible for my career choices is just totally wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bad Hand Books founder Doug Murano next to the company logo<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Aaron Packard & Bad Hand Books<\/p>\n

And while Band Hand just signed a major distribution deal with Baker & Taylor that will get their titles into bookstores across the nation, Murano vows that the ethos behind the brand won\u2019t change: \u201cWe\u2019re still going to make time and dedicate resources to doing these off-the-wall projects that are just fun and allow our artists and authors to flex their creative muscles in a way that they wouldn’t normally be able to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The End Times will be available in two different forms: 500 physical newspaper copies (already sold out) printed in the same Minnesota town as mother-in-law\u2019s Waubay Clipper and PDF issues sent out each week. Digital subscriptions only cost $15<\/a> and once they hit 500 sign-ups, Bad Hand pledges to donate a dollar to the ACLU in order \u201cto support freedom of speech and journalism.”<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people now feel like we\u2019re in dystopian times and this newspaper represents hope in a world that\u2019s been torn asunder and the idea that we can come together again in the face of of extreme circumstances that would really work to tear us apart,\u201d Murano concludes. \u201cI think the creation of art itself is optimistic and, in a way, to express not only the horror of the world, but the beauty of the world. That\u2019s one of the things that Ben and Stephen are getting at with The End Times.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘The End Times’ announcement Courtesy of Bad Hand Books There\u2019s an exchange between Stu Redman and Glen Bateman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[32476,457,32477,96,242,2580,32475,8241,11344,19549,15064,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-60026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-benjamin-percy","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-doug-murano","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-features","13":"tag-interviews","14":"tag-newspapers","15":"tag-novels","16":"tag-pandemic","17":"tag-publishing","18":"tag-stephen-king","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}