I am basing my surprise on two recent works, Under the Dome which I have not read but which is being decried by some reviewers for showing some “Rethuglican” type of characters in worst possible light, and Cell which I am reading right now. In Cell two positive characters (one of whom is gay) brave an encounter with a crazy and stupid evangelizing Christian lady and then go on to discuss reasons for why shortage of guns in Massachusetts is a good thing even under some pretty ugly circumstances (but they themselves are special, they need a gun anyway). And there are still lots of pages left in the book.
That’s not an impression I got from reading his earlier works. I would describe them as apolitical, sympathetic to religion and depicting people of all stripes without social and ideological self-identifications translating into sainthood or unruly evil.
So has the man had a conversion experience lately? Or did he do market research and conclude that this is how his target demographic look at the world nowadays?
I would not assume that anything you read in a work of fiction necessarily represents the real-world opinions of the author. But it seems like he’s a liberal in real life.The Wikipedia entry on King has a few paragraphs about his political views, although it doesn’t have anything from earlier than 2008.
He was always pretty liberal. My brother saw him lecture once sometime around the late 80’s/early 90’s, and he was bashing republicans then.
As for religion. he has said that he is religious himself, that he believes in God and believes in cosmic good and evil. That’s not a right-left thing, though.
That’s always been my take on him. I remember reading an article he wrote about 30 years ago where he made some pointed comments against nuclear power. Also, you have to figure that anyone who could write something like The Green Mile would likely be pretty anti-capital punishment.
Check Stephen King’s introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare published back in the early 80s. He really goes all out on Reagan, insisting he’d rather vote for a “dead dog in the street” than for Reagan. King’s leaned pretty heavily left for a long, long time.
Speaking as a conservative, Catholic Stephen King fan…
Nah, this is nothing new. King has always been a man of the left. His villains have usually been big business, the CIA (“Firestarter”), fanatical Christians (“The Mist”). King has always been something of a hippie, and it shows.
I haven’t read anything he’s written recently, so I’m open to the possibility he’s gotten a lot more rabid in his liberalism, and a lot angrier. But I don’t know that for sure.
In any case, he’s always been pretty up front about his convictions, and I’ve usually enjoyed his work anyway.
Holy crap. It never ceases to amaze me the little nuggets dopers pull out of their memory banks. How in the world do you remember a book intro by King from the 80’s well enough to inject it into a thread like this? Impressive.
His religious characters have been both good and bad as well. He’s written a few fanatics, but he’s also written some overtly religious “good” characters as well, and not just written them as religious characters who are good, but as characters whose beliefs are real and justified. The Stand is hardly ambiguous about his stance on the existence of God. It’s straight up God Vs. Satan with the literal hand of God appearing at the end.
yes, I wouldn’t argue with the anti-militarism, anti-nuke and other such aspects. But somehow I always saw the subtext as “small town conservative”, “family values”, “ordinary American” type of thing.
I am not sure why Miss Carmody is being brought up as a negative religious character. Her ideological stand is never specified - you can just as easily read her as a “witch” or a “misguided heretic” or just “gone crazy”. Expiating sins by shedding blood of sinners is not a common position in American Christianity, except for possibly a very short period in 19th century Mormonism. It might be even borderline blasphemous.
Well, I think the important thing to notice is that these bad characters are supposed to be “fanatical.” Regular old Republicans or Christians aren’t bad people in the stories. Isn’t pretty much the whole town in Under the Dome supposed to be fairly conservative? Yet the majority are actually decent people.
ok, maybe. But Cell is just weirding me out. It’s like the land is flooded with zombies but the real threat is working class people who own guns. And that in an environment where a whole lot of food and other stuff is just lying around, i.e. where people ought to focus on banding together for protection and better division of labor rather than trying to outrun others in the race for the last scraps of food.
I wonder when a whole Volkswanderung of millions of people from 3rd world countries that did not have a cell going to show up, btw. In Europe my money is on the Turks and Egyptians; in the States it ought to be the poorer folks from Southern Mexico and beyond. Let’s see if the King has thought of that
actually, no, the States bit is wrong. In the world of Cell the nation that would remain essentially unscathed in Western Hemisphere would be Cuba. They would easily push around all other survivors, whether Haiti or Southern Mexico or those American soldiers and sailors who had no access to cellphones at the time.
Overall, maybe it’s just a not-so-good apocalyptic premise. Too many people are going to survive, and ignoring them detracts from the story’s credibility.
