"Misery" author Stephen King has been slammed as "a horrible, evil, twisted liar" and "more monstrous" than any of his characters for attacking Charlie Kirk's memory soon after the father of two was assassinated.
King, 77, was forced to delete his post and apologize -- repeatedly -- after sparking fury with his response to a heartfelt tribute to the murdered Trump ally.
"He advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin'," the famous horror author wrote in response to Fox News' Jesse Watters remembering Kirk "not a controversial or polarizing figure" but "a PATRIOT."
King's reply sparked revulsion, with many pointing out that Kirk repeatedly said gay people should be welcome in the conservative movement.
"You are a horrible, evil, twisted liar. No, he did not," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wrote on X in response to the post, branding King "dishonest and full of hate."
Kirk's close friend Dave Rubin told King he was "more monstrous than any of the characters you ever came up with."
"Charlie was never anything but kind to me and my husband," Rubin wrote. "We broke bread many times, and he never treated us with anything other than respect. He even came to our house not too long ago and plot twist, didn't throw rocks at us. Write about that sometime, you hack."
Many shared a call for Kirk's family to "sue Stephen King for defamation over this heinously false accusation" -- saying "he's crossed a line" -- while Laura Ingraham called King "a sad, bitter man."
The self-proclaimed "King of Horror" eventually admitted his wrong, deleting his post and apologizing with a nod to what Cruz called him.
"The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes," King wrote. "This is what I get for reading something on Twitter w/o fact-checking. Won't happen again."
In subsequent responses, the writer, who has almost 7 million followers on X, added that he had been "wrong," and had "apologized" as well as "deleted the post."
"I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays," King wrote in a subsequent post on Friday, before adding, "What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages."
King later tried to make amends by sharing a post by former President Barack Obama denouncing Kirk's murder, in which Obama said: "This kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy."
"All correct," King wrote -- later comparing Kirk's assassination to those of President JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., all by "cowards who shot from ambush."
King's representatives did not respond immediately to requests for comment.