A Newspaper Novel for the Apocalypse
When Benjamin Percy describes The End Times, he doesn’t call it a novel. He calls it “a short novel told in the form of a newspaper,” a story delivered issue by issue — or rather, edition by edition — directly to readers’ mailboxes.
“Over the course of the year,” Percy explains, “you will, every month, get at your address or in your inbox, depending on whether you want the physical or the digital subscription, you will get a newspaper.”
That newspaper chronicles the efforts of Mary Poole, a survivor rebuilding her world after a devastating contagion. “She decides that this will be her thing,” Percy says. “She is going to contribute to her community by launching a newspaper, The End Times, the tagline of which is the very most of the little we know.”
What begins as a single tacked-up sheet grows into a publication that “educates and entertains” — and soon, saves lives as “some spooky stuff is happening.”
The Stephen King Connection
For Percy, the project scratches what he calls an “experimental itch.” Its structure — serialized, tactile, and defiantly analog — is reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, which first appeared in monthly installments in the 1990s. “I was rushing to the sad Waldenbooks in my sad mall to read The Green Mile,” Percy recalls. “That printed itself upon me and made me really excited about the possibility of taking a swing, taking a risk, pushing back against publishing norms.”
That instinct — to rebel against a screen-obsessed culture and resurrect the ritual of waiting for the next installment — led Percy to Bad Hand Books, a small Midwest press.
“I was insisting on this,” he says. “This is a newspaper. Especially in the time of screens — I love the way that you have to wait, you can’t binge the thing. The suspense will build month to month.”
Then came the moment that changed everything: Stephen King said yes.
An excerpt released exclusively by Forbes.
From Fan to Collaborator
Percy had long admired King, calling him “an essential part of my creative DNA.” The two first connected years earlier when King unexpectedly tweeted praise for Percy’s novel Red Moon. “Within five minutes, Stephen King had emailed me,” Percy remembers after reaching out to a contact who knew King. “You’re not supposed to meet your gods, but he’s so generous, so down to earth.” Over the years, King has blurbed Percy’s books and shared the stage with him at literary festivals.
When Percy finally asked King to participate in The End Times, he was stunned by how quickly King agreed. “The worst thing he could say was no,” Percy says. “And he said yes almost instantly. It’s been so cool to go back and forth with him, to riff on ideas, to have his byline in the paper.”
That byline comes with a twist worthy of the King multiverse: King writes under the pseudonym Claudia Inez Bachman — the fictional wife of Richard Bachman, King’s late alter ego. “His name can’t appear in the paper either,” Percy says. “So what’s his byline going to be? He came up with the idea of Bachman. Richard Bachman died of cancer, but his wife, Claudia, shows up in The Dark Tower series. So the character who gets the byline for King in The End Times is Claudia, and as Bachman. That’s wild.”
A Shared Spirit of Experimentation
Percy also points out that King’s own career helped legitimize The End Times’ serialized experiment. “He’s taken some risks himself—Riding the Bullet and The Plant were early e-books before e-books were really a thing,” Percy notes. “He was selling one directly through his website—this is early days, early days.” King’s willingness to push against publishing norms encouraged Percy to do the same.
That shared appetite for risk and reinvention defines their partnership. “We’re both excited by storytelling that lives between forms,” Percy says. “This feels like something new and something old at the same time—a newspaper that becomes a novel, a horror story that becomes a community record.”
Horror, Hope, and a Hometown Newspaper
King’s influence runs deeper than a cameo. He suggested entire new story elements, including the eerie “Trape Village,” an outlying settlement home to “Scarecrows with button eyes and dead rats and somebody dangling from the rafters of an old barn.”
As the series unfolds over 12 monthly issues, Percy says it will evolve organically. “The first four issues are locked,” he notes. “But beyond that, things keep changing. That’s the thing to lean into with a serialized story — it’s more of a constellation than anything else. You know the bright stars, and you’re filling the darkness between them.”
For all its dystopian dread, Percy insists the story is ultimately hopeful. The End Times reflects his own affection for local journalism and the sense of community it fosters. “I’m inspired in large part by my small-town newspaper, the Northfield News,” he says. “During the pandemic, I realized how heroic it was. You open social media, it feels like you’re shoving broken glass in your eye. But a small-town paper reminds you that you can make a difference in your own backyard.”
A World That Still Holds Meaning
He smiles when asked what headline he’d want above his own byline if The End Times were the last paper on Earth. I joke, “Local writer saves humanity.” “That’s kind of the message of the paper,” Percy reflects. “Mary Poole saves herself and saves the community.”
You can preorder The End Times now, with the first edition arriving on November 19th.
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