Next week EQMM’s July/August issue goes on sale. It contains a new story by Bev Vincent, “His Fathers’ Son.” The Bram Stoker, Edgar, Ignotus, and ITW Thriller award nominated author of more than 120 published stories has not appeared in our pages for many years. We’re glad to feature his work again.  Bev is also the author of several nonfiction books, including The Road to the Dark Tower and Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences. He also co-edited the anthology Flight or Fright with Stephen King. He is, as you’ll see from those credits, an expert on the work of Stephen King, and he makes several references to the “King of Horror” (who is also an MWA Grand Master and multiple Edgar Award winner!) in this post. The post provides an interesting take on a question that must now  concern many editors: Are readers ready for stories about the Pandemic?—Janet Hutchings

In Avengers #74 (March 1970), comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee wrote a Stan’s Soapbox column in which he addressed a frequent question from readers about why the comics contained “so much moralizing.” Comics, according to these readers, are supposed to be escapist reading and nothing more. “None of us lives in a vacuum—none of us is untouched by the everyday events about us—events which shape our stories just as they shape our lives,” Lee wrote.

Do people read mysteries or watch crime series to escape from reality? Some people would say they do, but what exactly are they escaping from? Even the cosiest of mysteries usually contain at least one murder most foul—even if the deed itself is off-screen—or some other dastardly deed, and the motives for the crimes are often familiar and ugly. Something from everyday life.

In the not-so-cozy realm, we often read about the brutal thing people do to each other. Domestic violence, beatings and torture. Grizzly murders. Ruthless behavior. Not exactly escapist. Real world stuff.

Mysteries are usually set against recognizable backdrops. We layer our fictional constructs on top of the familiar world. Many have been set during the chaos of war or in the aftermath of well-known geopolitical or social incidents.

It isn’t realistic to completely ignore certain events, but when is it “too soon”? It’s hard to imagine a crime novel set in the 1940s that didn’t acknowledge World War II. How many years did it take after 9/11, though, for writers to feel comfortable incorporating that tragedy into their stories? Did this reluctance come from writers’ feelings about the experience or from worries they might alienate audiences by referring to something so fraught with emotion? Perhaps a little of both.

I remember (vaguely) a high school English class in which we discussed some romantic poet who talked about how you can’t write about an experience while you’re still in the middle of it. A period of reflection is required to process it. But how long? Stephen King foreshadowed the destruction of the World Trade Center as a plot element in the final Dark Tower novel in 2004, and I remember some readers confessing their discomfort about it.

One of the most impactful incidents in recent years, of course, has been the coronavirus pandemic. It has been interesting to observe how writers—both in print and on screen—have responded to it. Some have chosen to ignore it completely or pay the minimum lip service. A recent episode of Law & Order, for example, featured a murder suspect wearing a “Covid mask,” without any other reference to the pandemic.

Grey’s Anatomy was the first major TV series to tackle the pandemic head on, which made a lot of sense for a medical drama. Even that series, though, postulated a post-Covid reality after that initial season, even though the pandemic was ongoing. Their viewers may have been exhausted by both living through and re-experiencing Covid. The actors, too, probably.

Writing crime stories set after early 2020 has its challenges. The way people have been living has changed. Working remotely means people aren’t as likely to get into violent conflicts with co-workers or experience road rage while commuting to the office. On the other hand, incidents of domestic violence have increased because people in strained relationships were spending much more time together.

As writers, we have to adjust to this new reality if we mean to be contemporary and realistic. I recently published a caper story where a gang of inept criminals has their latest get-rich-quick scheme stymied by the pandemic. Petty thieves don’t find many bills and coins in cash registers at convenience stores these days, since a lot of people have converted to digital forms of payment. A recent TV episode had a character using his presence on a Zoom teleconference as his alibi in a murder investigation, only to have a savvy forensic technician discover he had hacked the conference with a pre-recorded loop. Before Covid, that scenario would have required much more setup to make it relatable to a general audience. These days, most people are all too familiar with Zoom.

When King was working on his 2021 crime novel Billy Summers, he originally intended for it to be set in 2020. However, he reached a point in the story where he needed to get a couple of secondary characters out of town for a while. At first, he thought he’d send them on a cruise, but by mid-to-late 2020, no one was going on cruises. His solution to the problem was to move the entire novel back a year, pre-Covid. That’s the choice facing a lot of writers—incorporate the new reality or find a way to work around it.

In his forthcoming crime novel, Holly, King is going all-in on the pandemic. The main character, who has appeared in five previous stories, is a hypochondriac, so her fastidious attention to personal hygiene serves her and the story well. Other people in her immediate sphere have been seriously affected by the virus. There’s long Covid and Zoom funerals and all the other changes we’ve experienced since early 2020. Fist/elbow bumps. Are you Team Moderna or Pfizer—or no team at all? Negotiating when to mask and when not to. Covid denial and fake news.

King has always written about people in familiar circumstances, so it should come as no surprise that he decided to tackle something we’ve all experienced recently. There’s something else, though. It may be wise to chronicle the wound of lockdowns and prolonged acute illness and death while it is still fresh in our minds. We have been reflecting on it for a while now—perhaps it’s time to turn that reflection into prose. In a few years, we may not think as much about the days when we stockpiled toilet paper, masked before entering crowded rooms, used hand sanitizer like never before, and adopted the phrase—and the associated behavior—“social distancing.”

Writers who incorporate the pandemic into their work now are acting as social historians, in a way. Chroniclers of a unique period in our recent history. There will be, no doubt, many non-fiction books written about the pandemic, but those works may not be as accessible to a general audience. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, when people are reading works of popular fiction written today, they will learn about what it was like to live though a pandemic from the perspective of people who experienced it, but in the more accessible vector of fiction.

This is the reality of 2023. At some point, as writers, we’ll probably all need to face it one way or another.