Apple has certainly thrown its hat into the TV game lately with a string of announcements of upcoming shows that will be featured in its new streaming service. The latest is Lisey’s Story, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King that he will be producing along with J.J. Abrams and Julianne Moore — with the latter starring in the series. There will be a total of eight one-hour episodes, each of which will actually be scripted by the famed horror author’s, with the search on for high-profile directors to handle the various installments. Stephen and J.J. have previously collaborated on the Hulu adaptation of the former’s time travel story, 11.22.63.

Describes the publisher, Scribner, of the plot: “Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a 25-year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey had to learn from him about books and blood and bools. Later, she understood that there was a place Scott went — a place that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it’s Lisey’s turn to face Scott’s demons, Lisey’s turn to go to Boo’ya Moon. What begins as a widow’s effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King’s most personal and powerful novel, Lisey’s Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness and the secret language of love.”

Lisey’s Story was somewhat inspired by King’s near-death experience in 1999 when he was struck by a minivan on a Maine road, and the resulting thoughts of mortality that consumed him. As he told BookPage, “Sure, there’s no doubt about that. I had the accident, and then as kind of an outfall of the accident, two years later I had pneumonia because the bottom of my right lung was crumpled and nobody realized that. It got infected and that was very serious; that was actually closer [to death] than the accident. So I had some of those mortality issues.”

He added that, while he recovered, he began thinking about the person behind the artist who never gets any of the attention. “Spouses of creative people never get credit, and a lot of time they get the blame,” he says. “There’s that story about Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife urging him to throw the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the fire, which he did, and then he wrote the thing again. What nobody ever suggests is that maybe she was right and that the second go-round was actually better than the first.”

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