[QUOTE=lissener]
Based solely on numbers, perhaps. But Dickens wrote books–immensely readable and popular publishing phenomena–that examined and enlightened the modern (to him) human condition, and exposed and criticized important social issues. While King indulges and, what, incubates; massages; stimulates; feeds; celebrates at the very least–the very worst impulses of humankind and wallows in those impulses in a grottily masturbatory way that almost seems violative to me.
I read him voraciously through highschool and my twenties; reread most things several times. But over time I began to notice how spiritually sick he made me feel, even while he was so easily digestibly diverting. After expanding my reading horizons for many subsequent years, whenever I return to King (for the same reason that I occasionally watch a horror movie), I’m reminded by a distinctly visceral reaction how “bad” he is for me. He’s ill. And I’m glad the universe I live in is not the one he’s built in his head.
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I think Dickens was a satirist more than a reformer, which doesn’t make him less of a great author.
King went through a mastubatory period, when it was too obvious that he overly identified with his central characters, all of whom seemed to be writers. But I don’t think he celebrates horror or low impulses. Have you read Danse Macabre? He goes quite deeply into the motivations for horror in general at a societal level, and comes to the conclusion that he suspects it’s the restoration to normalcy as much as the thrill ride that makes people enjoy it. Sort of like the old joke about the guy who wears his shoes too tight because it feels so good when he gets home and takes them off.
I’ll agree that King’s best work is the non horrific stuff - the work in which there is either no horror or where the horror is off-stage, but that’s because I have no personal taste for horror in books or movies; it just doesn’t interest me. It’s King’s style that has always roped me in, from the first time I picked up a book of his because it happened to be there and have a shiny cover. (It was, not surprisingly, The Shining :D) I loved that book for two reasons - one, because it took me into the mind of a child without showing me utter contempt for adults (which at that time in my life I assumed was the default state of mind of all children), and more importantly, because it wasn’t clear where the outer influences coming from the hotel ended and the inner fluences from Jack’s past began - it seemed as if the madness sprang from both.
But there is at least one paragraph in that book which in entirely unnecessary. It is when the black cook who also “shines,” living in Florida, gets the kid’s psychic shout for help and almost has an accident because the shout is so powerful. The person whose car he almost hits with the limo he’s driving yells some insults, and, well:
[QUOTE=The Shining, by Stephen King, A Signet Book, Copyright 1977]
The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limosine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo-driver’s soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the driver’s mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.
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Yeah, it’s a cheap laugh. But I loved it then, and I love it now. If you had your way, things like that would be editted out, and I at least would be the poorer for it.
