He has really soft hands, like the hands of a man who doesn’t do manual labor for a living.
I shook his hand at a reading a couple years ago. I looked the man dead in the eye and thanked him. He may not have realized, I wasn’t thanking him for his stupid autograph; I was thanking him for his years of influence on me as a writer. Bless the man, he is the modern-day Poe. (Not all of Poe’s work was full of Teh Awesome either. Believe me, I’ve read most of both of 'em.)
I think you can’t judge King by reading just one or two of his books. Some have just little tiny snippets of brilliance in them. Some are pure genius from page 1 to the end. Most are somewhere in the middle. After Carrie and Salem’s Lot, there isn’t a whole lot of scary monster/gory horrorshow stuff. You can only do vampires, ghosts, and zombies in so many ways before it all starts to be a cliche of itself, right? Most of is work after those first 4 or 5 novels are about the Unknown that scares the bejeezus out of most of us. The really creepy stuff is what’s in our heads. When King shows us this, it makes a lot of readers very uncomfortable to think about the idea that I might have some sick and twisted shit rattling around in my head too.
Some artistic/literary merits to King’s work, IMO:
•He writes great women. His female characters feel real to me and do not sound like a man trying to write from a woman’s perspective. (See Ira Levin for the anti-example of this. His women are vapid idiots and do not resemble real women in real life at all. John Updike’s women also are one-dimensional bullshit characters.) For some really awesome examples of writing female characters with realism and integrity, see also Delores Claiborne (“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to.”), Rose Madder (brilliant description of the mindset of an abused wife, very accurate), and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (written from the point of view of a 12-year-old girl, which is DEAD ON). Also, Misery is brilliant too.
•He is the master at building suspense. This is much more difficult to do as a writer than one might think, especially when coupled with creating characters a reader actually cares about. In Delores Claiborne (IMO, one of his masterpieces. Can you tell it’s my favorite?), you find out who dies by page 3. Not only does he step outside of the standard third-person voice in that book and tells the entire store in flashback from a single, female character’s point of view, but he builds the suspense backwards. You already know the who died and who done it in the first chapter. The only reason to keep reading to the end is to answer the Why. Brilliant use of suspense and voice. Fucking brilliant.
My advice to those who aren’t as familiar: stick to the earlier works, try to enjoy the more obscure/less mainstream novels and short stories, and avoid anything he wrote while coked out of his brains. That would include the It/Tommyknockers era, most of which was complete crap. It was just offensive to me on so many levels; he could have done so much more with the fear-of-clowns trope.
