To say that Stephen King is “back” would be absurd. The man never really goes anywhere, permanently inhabiting his sliver of the spotlight with a steady stream of novels, short story collections, loose magazine pieces, and less formally, his alternately bemused and biting tweets. King topped the New York Times bestseller list last year with his latest novel, End of Watch, and he collaborated with his son Owen on a prison-set thriller titled Sleeping Beauties, set for a release in the fall. But because print is, arguably, dead and, for many, relevance can only be measured on screens big and small, it’s true that King’s public profile is currently enjoying something of a surge.

An unlikely quartet of new King adaptations have all converged on 2017, set for release in the latter half of the year: the dystopian western The Dark Tower comes to multiplexes in August after a decade’s worth of personnel switch-ups and production delays; the killer-clown classic It gets a fresh coat of face paint courtesy of Andrés Muschietti, director of Mama, come September; a new take on The Mist creeps on to TV this week, and the mysterious, recently announced Castle Rock series will bring a wide sampling of King’s compositions to Hulu in the near future. Boom times are here for Stephen King.

As a source of adaptation fodder, King is a studio executive’s godsend, because his work is trend-proof. Scan the long, long list of King adaptations and the standout quality will be the steadfastness of it all; ebb and flow as the cultural tides may, King’s work has never lost its luster or lucre. And its eclecticism is the key to King’s perennial popularity; his style never falls out of fashion because King has never defined it to mean one thing in particular.

The four King works on the docket attempt vastly different things with their storytelling, occupying spaces of the pop-cultural landscape far removed from one another. The Dark Tower, with its fantastical action sequences and franchise-friendly mythology, has been molded as a studio cash cow with a budget and stars to match in Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba (though the lack of promotion for the soon-to-come title has been somewhat conspicuous, a possible ill omen). It sees King in a more straight-up horror mode, boasting a fearsome villain figure worthy of comparison to Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees in the psycho-bozo Pennywise. The Mist trades the supernatural-slasher angle for an ambient horror more reliant on suspense, suggestion and atmosphere than any concrete terrors. Hulu’s recent mounting of the time-travel thriller 11.22.63 added historic speculative-fiction to the King repertoire. And the very premise of Castle Rock is predicated on the variety of King’s oeuvre, that his work strikes such a diverse array of tones that a series would have to jump around in the anthology format just to cover them all.

Pop culture’s most precious renewable resource, King stays impervious to the whims of hipness by creating work that can be retrofitted to any period’s “in” sensibility. King is like Shakespeare in the malleability of his work, the ease with which primal themes that can be styled to match the dominant mode of a given era. In the 1980s, when movies about kids laced with nostalgic sentiment were all the rage, King’s novella The Body was revised as American Graffiti with notes of the macabre and retitled Stand By Me. During the slasher craze of the same decade, the expressionistic psychodrama of King’s more horror-oriented work was transmuted into the all-in gristle of Cujo and Children of the Corn. Based on the talent involved, a King yarn of murderous obsession can be played low-rent like The Mangler, or as Oscar-worthy black box theatre, as in Misery. King provides blueprints, but the individual creative teams and the circumstances of their productions both dictate the details of design.

For all we know, four more King projects will be up and running by 2027, and more thrilling still, the specific nature of those adaptations could land anywhere on the tonal and genre spectrum. As the recent Carrie remake made clear, the process of updating King’s work is sometimes easier said than done, but the potential for renewal was still there. Horror fads flare up and fade, but the abject cruelty of high schoolers – that’s forever.