Stephen Markley stopped by Seth Meyers’ late night talk show to discuss his latest novel, The Deluge.
Markley’s book, published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, follows a cast of characters reckoning with an America battered by climate change and political unrest. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “an ambitious rendering of a forbidding future and the public and private challenges that will define it.”
Meyers noted that Markley wrote the book over a period of more than a dozen years and asked him if he had to change parts of the novel to keep up with the news.
“The hardest part about the editing process was making the zippers of the teeth fit together,” Markley responded. “[I was] constantly revising in these last three years based on stuff that’s happening in the news. The situation where plot points I’m concocting in 2012 are suddenly headlines in 2022, even with…Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’m racing back through the book on fourth pass to try to account for that, because I had it happening in 2032.”
Meyers showed a pair of tweets from Stephen King about The Deluge. The first called Markley’s novel “prophetic, terrifying, uplifting,” and Meyers asked King how it felt to get praise from the horror novelist.
“Not bad,” Markley responded in a deadpan voice, drawing laughter from the audience. “I grew up a total Stephen King fanatic, so basically from ages 11 to 14, I read everything the guy had published to that point, and continued to.”
The other tweet from King called Markley’s novel “more terrifying than THE STAND. Because it’s real.”
“When I die, I want to be remembered as the guy who freaked out Stephen King,” Markley said.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
