It didn’t involve any killer clowns, haunted hotels, or avenging, telekinetic high schoolers, but this summer, author Stephen King began telling a new scary story: the precarious state of the US book industry in 2022.
The author, who has written numerous horror bestsellers since the 1970s like The Shining and Carrie, testfied this month on behalf of the Biden administration in the Department of Justice’s effort to stop the proposed $2.2bn merger of Penguin Random House, America’s largest publisher, and Simon & Schuster, another of the “Big Five” companies that dominate the US book industry.
