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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/

Stephen King is a master at creating characters, but when Shooter Jennings came calling, the best-selling author decided to become one, playing a central figure in the musician’s upcoming concept album, “Black Ribbons.”

King is the voice of Will O’ The Wisp, a radio talk-show host being phased out due to government censorship. He spends his last hour on the air delivering a diatribe about the decline of America, and playing the music of an important band — which happens to be Jennings’ new band, Hierophant.

Jennings and King had never met (and still haven’t). But Jennings knew that King was a fan, and figured he would be the perfect narrator for his musical tale, which paints a doomsday future of America if it continues on the warped path painted by Will O’ The Wisp.

“Once the idea of using him popped in my head, it kind of stayed and never varied,” Jennings said in an interview late last month.

The two exchanged ideas through messages, and came up with the foreboding words of Will O’ The Wisp together.

“I wrote a script and I sent it to him, and then he took that and he rewrote it and changed it and added quite a lot of great stuff, so at the end of the day, that part of it was a collaboration,” Jennings said. (A representative for King said he wasn’t available for comment.)

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Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

As the tall, thin man in his mid-40s lay unconscious on the floor of his office, his eyes shut tight and his shirt-front soaked with blood, the silence of the night all around him was broken only by the shrieks of the bats which haunted the rafters of his vast Victorian mansion.

The scene was like something out of a novel by that master of the macabre Stephen King, ironic given that the comatose figure was none other than King himself – dead to the world after drinking countless cans of beer and snorting so much cocaine that his ravaged nose had become a gushing crimson fountain.

Shocking though his condition was, this was no one-off. Writing 63 books over 35 years, with best-selling stories such as Carrie, The Shining, Misery and The Green Mile turned into blockbusting movies, King has long been one of the world’s most successful authors, with an estimated fortune of £135million.

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