Post #28? Where you’re praising his story-telling skills?
You might have to spell it out for me. 
I’m going to go out on a limb here and defend King. And I’m the guy who cited “Song of Susannah” as the worst book in the history of written language.
King has written, by my count, 38 novels, not counting novellas, teleplays, short stories, books yet to be published, etc., but counting the stuff he wrote as Richard Bachman or with Peter Straub. My count may be off but it’s about that.
I would consider four of those to be genuinely first rate novels: The Dead Zone, The Shining, The Gunslinger (the real version, not the new Bloat-O-Matic edition) and The Running Man.
At least five more are not great, but pretty good; Cujo, 'Salem’s Lot, Misery, Christine, and The Eyes of the Dragon.
Several more aren’t pretty good, but aren’t bad, and do have their big moments; It, The Regulators, The Drawing of the Three, The Long Walk, From A Buick 8, Needful Things, and a few others.
The rest range from mediocre (The Stand) to genuinely bad (any of the last three Dark Tower books, which are truly awful.)
Having said that, it seems to me that that’s about the spread you’d expect. If the saying is true that 90% of everything is crap, King certainly beats 10% of non-crap. When you throw in the fact that he’s written some absolutely terrific short stories, he’s turned out a fair amount of really good material. To my mind, you’ve got to judge an artist by the good stuff he churned out. Nobody remembers Michaelangelo’s shitty sculptures.
Look, is King a hack? I think that by definition a hack is NEVER really good. A hack is someone who keeps pumping it out for money but never demonstrates, or uses, real talent. King has pumped out a lot of bilge, but you can’t say he hasn’t demonstrated real talent; he IS a hell of a writer, and “The Dead Zone” was a wonderful book. “The Shining” was terrific.
Even in his shitty books there’s obvious talent, often ruined by underediting; “Rose Madder” might have been a great book if King simply had left out all the supernatural parts with the magical painting and the mystical Negro (mystical Negro women who use words like “honeychile” are a favourite of Stephen King) and just made it a straight up thriller.
If you compare King to REAL hacks, like Dean Koontz, or Clive Cussler, or Candace Bushnell, or Anne Rice, or Tom Clancy, there’s just no comparison. He’s WAY better than them. Miles better. Clive Cussler has never written a book as good as “The Tommyknockers,” for Christ’s sake. And suggesting that Tom Clancy is comparable in writing talent to Stephen King is insane. Tom Clancy is comparable in writing talent to Joan Collins.
A hack never produces an outstanding work. That’s not King.
There are exceptions to be sure. Shawshank comes to mind, but I think the credit there goes to the screenplay writer. And that is by far and away the best adaptation and, IMO, a fluke unable to be used as a basis for comparison.
There’ve been a few good ones over the years. The remake of Salem’s Lot wasn’t half bad. The Stand wasn’t terrible. Carrie and Cujo were above average.
But for every Cujo, there’s a Thinner and Dreamcatcher and Langoliers and Tommyknockers and It and Hearts in Atlantis and Maximum Overdrive…
Well, I think you’re mixing up the present tense with the past. If you had asked me when The Dead Zone was new if King was a hack, I’d’ve said No, he’s a reasonably talented pulp writer. Now? He’s a hack. He’s been “pumping it out for money but never demonstrati[ing], or us[ing], real talent” for like 20 years now.
I’m fat. Have I always been fat? OK, bad example. But you get my point.
Oh, and I protest your last post on Joan Collins’ behalf.
I think you mean Jackie Collins. And yeah, but she doesn’t Blow Shit Up Real Good. That’s gotta be worth something.
Stranger
Always advisable to double check before you issue a correction.
No, I meant Joan; yes, she became a novelist. Her novel “Infamous” is often cited by critics as the worst novel ever written. She once wrote a line that went: “The steps crumbled like camembert as she ran up them.”
I really think Tom Clancy is that bad. He has no writing skill whatsoever. He’s thought up some decent STORIES, but as a writer of English his skill extends no further than fitting a subject, a predicate, and an object into most sentences. His books read like technical manuals, which really is what they kind of are.
I agree. I was working in a bookstore when Clancy first started to hit big, and people were always trying to push him on me. I tried, I really tried. But I rarely got more than a few pages in to any of his books before I just had to toss it away, with a sound somewhere between a gag and a chortle.
Well, he writes military porn thrillers, with a lot of tech manual stuff thrown in. I used to be a big fan of his, but after Sum of All fears, felt that he was losing his edge. After choking down “Yellow Sausage Rising(aka The Bear and the Dragon)”, I’d had enough and gave him up.
The IMDB lists no less than 93 entries with King’s name attached at some stage of the writing process!!