Don’t get me wrong, I love Stephen King’s books. I’ve read most of them. However I do find that he tends to oversuse certain writing “features”.
For example:
Writing a characters thoughts interjected between paragraphs, eg:
He looked at the picture, and he felt as though he had been here before, in another
(…help me… look into the picture…)
life, as if a voice was speaking to him from the past.
Hyperbole, especially with respect to laughing, for some reason. Eg:
This got Alice laughing, and soon they were both in gales of laughter. They didn’t stop until tears were streaming down their cheeks.
Also, I sometimes find that his book become more and more fantasy as they progress. A good example would be Dreamcatcher. For the first 1/4 of the book I found it engrossing. It was great storytelling, and it had the ability to creep you out and keep you guessing. But as soon as the aliens and lights in the sky thing came in I thought “Hmm we’ve just entered the world of pure fantasy again”.
Am I being really picky? Anyone else have similar thoughts/critisisms about his books?
some of his books are good, but i wouldn’t want to say that all of them are. as the pseudonym (how DO you spell that again?) Richard (I can’t believe I forgot the last name!) he wrote a lot of great stories (or, rather, six good ones).
Whether or not he’s a “good” writer doesn’t really matter as long as he’s good enough to gain an audience. He’s a good storyteller, that hooks readers. IMO he’s a fairly good writer who is more apt to tell it like it is than to fall into complex prose; that style suits the stories he tells.
I read some time ago that Harvard literature professors were really annoyed when students listed King among their favorite writers. They don’t think he’s good at all.
King himself doesn’t think he’s great – he calls his work “serviceable”. Read his intro to his book On Writing – heck, read the whole book. He acknowledges that people don’t think of him as a great writer or a great stylist, but he does want to talk about the craft of writing, about which he thinks he knows a great deal. (I’m reading Leonard Wolf’s The Essential Dracula right now, and Wolf places King’s writing well below that of Anne Rice.)
My opinion is that King is an important writer and, for my money, a great one. No one else I know of, or hgave read the work of, has captured the culture, psychology, and speech patterns of late twentieth century American daily life as King has. His work has a narrative flow I would die to be able to reproduce. His immense popularity has to count for something. Even King’s earliest stuff continues to sell, and to be read by people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading Peter Straub or Dean R. Koontz or “that science-fiction stuff”. He transcends genre and class lines. A lot of the complaints levelled against him could, I think, have been directed at Charles Dickens, too.
“The Great Books are Wine,” Mark Twain said, “Mine are Water. But everyone drinks Water.” True. If you go through a book like The Experts Speak you’ll find lots of praise for writers thought to be Great in their day, and forgotten now. Dickens and Twain were thought shallow and panderers to the mass audience, and now they’re taught in college classes. It might be the same for King, if his work isn’t too tied to contemporary events.
“King himself doesn’t think he’s great – he calls his work “serviceable”. Read his intro to his book On Writing – heck, read the whole book. He acknowledges that people don’t think of him as a great writer or a great stylist, but he does want to talk about the craft of writing, about which he thinks he knows a great deal.”
My favorite is when King called himself the “Literary equivalent of a Big Mac with Fries.”
King is probably my favorite author, and I have to agree with the Big Mac and Fries statement. Or, like he said at the start of “L.T.'s Theory of Pets” in “Everything’s Eventual” (paraphrased): I grab for the reader’s heart. If you want to learn something, go to school.
And he’s right. Fiction should be about the enjoyment of the story, of the way it makes you feel, not about dissecting it trying to find hidden meanings and morals and the like.
When I had to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” in high school, I absolutely hated it; when I read it again a few years later I loved it. Being forced to read a book, to find meaning in it, completely counters the purpose of the book itself: as something to enjoy, something to take you away from the world for a while.
I haven’t read much King (just some of his shorter works), but it seems clear that he is one of the most important writers of the late 20th century. His literary reputation keeps getting better and better, as people realize there is a lot more to him than surface.
If anyone complains that King isn’t “literary,” point out that he has had not one, but four, stories published in “The New Yorker,” the epitome of literary writing in America.
It’s brain candy, but what’s wrong with that? I’ve been up til 4am and jumping out of my skin at the slightest noise outside the door reading his books. You have to be good to do that. But he hasn’t left me any the wiser about the human condition (except to remind me that we frighten easily when our imaginations are stimulated by a talented storyteller).
If he had written nothing but The Shining, he’d more likely be regarded as a great writer. He definitely has it in him but he also has a talent for painting himself into corners and jumping back out of them with
(Big bears and huge spiders and nukes in Las Vegas, oh my!)
unsatisfying plot resolutions that only tie up the loose ends on the most superficial of the many levels that the tale was working on up until then.
There’s the one who can actually WRITE (think The Stand, parts of Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, etc.)
Then there’s the doppelganger who writes some of the most unmitigated horse hockey (style-wise) you can imagine. I’m thinking of Christine and Cujo here.
Even when his writing is bad, his stories are pretty good though. I guess that’s why I keep reading him.
I agree, it’s not really great literature though. But his best writing is pretty respectable.
Does anybody believe you need to introduce Gary Larson?
Yet Stephen King was asked to write an introduction to one of the far side Galleries.
All he could say was, Larson is funny (we know that) and his style is unique (it isn’t - at that time “Close to Home” came out; it was described as 2/3 of the way to the Far Side.) The way he expressed it was, so funny you will not stop laughing, and the phrase “uniquely unique”.
Firebat- Yes, but I don’t enjoy fiction if it’s written bad. Hemlock- I was jumping out of my skin with his early books, but each one, since Pet Sematary I think, is 200% cliche`.
Insert into threads Misued/overused Words & Books that deserve burning – just the Introduction.
I’d like to edit “Cujo”. I’d take out most of the plot points that would make it recognizable (ie the killer dog), and I think it would be possible to come up with a fairly coherent story about the lives of people living in New England.
I would then submit it for review to a number of literary types, the sort of people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading any book that was ever sold in a supermarket, telling them that it was the work of an undiscovered novelist from New England.
I suspect the results would be illuminating.
They can’t all be gems, but when he’s on his game he is actually, IMHO, a hell of a writer.
King’s underrated. He’s actually a very good writer, by any reasonably objective standard, but he’s disliked because
A) We’re very close to him and have seen his career in real time, so we see the crappy stuff like “The Tommyknockers” that history will forget about,
B) He’s very popular, which causes many people to react negatively to him. Look at how many people have passionately stated on this very board that “Titanic” is “the worst movie ever made” It is of course nothing of the sort, but people say that because it is the highest-grossing film ever made.
C) He’s a conventional style pop author, and
D) He’s put out an enormous body of work, so there’s a substantial amount of mediocre and repetitive stuff.
If you look at almost ANY popular author of the last 100-150 years, they were ripped by literary critics when they were alive, and today are on required reading lists. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
A few years before he died, Mordecai Richler - a pretty honored and critically respected author in his own right - wrote an article about Stephen King in which he said, to paraphrase it, “I don’t understand why people say this guy sucks. I’ve read a bunch of his books and they’re great. He’s the best author I’ve ever read at describing characters.” I’d have to agree; King, at his best, can REALLY draw an excellent character. The character of Jack Torrance (the dad in “The Shining”) might well be the best-drawn character I have ever seen in any book.
I’ve read other authors of the same genre and King is so far ahead of them it’s sad. Nothing I’ve read of Anne Rice or Dean Koontz or the myriad of people writing as “V.C. Andrews” is as good as King’s worst work.
I agree he’s a great storyteller, but his characters are cardboard and much of his dialogue is ludicrous. I’ve read and enjoyed much of his work, but there are places in each book where I put it down, and say, “Jesus!!”
He writes as if he’s known very few people in his life - anyone know bio details? Lonely childhood?
I, for one, love Stephen King. A great writer? Probably not. A great story teller? definitely! The things that bother me the most are:
Profanity. Often, characters in his books tend to over-use profanity, or you find characters using profanity in out-of-character ways.
Hyperbole. How many times, in The Stand, alone, did a character “put his hands on his hips, throw back his head and laugh”? How many times have I seen this happen in real life? Practically never. But this never keeps me from re-reading his books.
As for books like Cujo and The Tommyknockers, it is my understanding that he was in the grips of drug abuse when he wrote these books, and very few people do their best work this way.
As for the people who say his more recent work is no good, I would beg to differ. It is uneven (bound to happen when a writer is trying to stretch himself and branch off in new directions), but I think The Green Mile is one of his best works ever!
Bottom line, I think the fact he’s not a “great writer” is one of his appeals for me. It’s not difficult to read. At any given time, I’m reading three or four books, and it’s pretty certain one of them will be by King.
I find it interesting that Sk (IMO), is at his best when not using supernatural elements. His monsters, when revealed, are always boring. But his despriptions are not cardboard characters. The big spider/Pennywide in It, left me cold, but the backgrounds stories, the descriptions of childhood ASF, were brilliant.
One thing I like about him is that he always puts ‘ordinary’ people in strange situations. A protagonist could be a housewife, a secretary, a truck driver or the widow of a fisherman/housekeeper. Most other writers have hero-type protagonists - a cop, detective, journalist, doctor whatever.
The premise for Gerald’s Game alone is illuminating. Woman is lying, abandoned, in a hunting cabin (or whatever) and dying for 350 pages. No supernatural elements, no other live characters. Can it be interesting? Exciting? And - what the industry loves - a page-turner? You bet.
But I’m sure it would never have been published, if it was a new writer, submitting his first manuscript. SK knows he can take chances. GG Was one of those. The Green Mile too, considering how it was first published. Sometimes he fails, sometimes it works. Dreamcatcher was a huge disappointment for me, whereas Bag of Bones was great.
Is it litchatour? I think so. Many disagree. All I know is that I might pay $25 for a new SK in hard cover, but will wait for a new Rushdie to be in paperback @ $5.99.
He’s a perfectly good writer, but, like most bestselling authors, he really needs an editor who would ruthlessly trim the fat.
But successful authors don’t want to hear it, and the publishers don’t want to offend them. Which is why many authors’ books swell in size and fall in quality the more popular the author becomes.
I’ve read more Steven King books than I like to admit, everything from his short stories to the Gunslinger Trilogy, from fantasy (The Gunslinger or The Talisman) to straight horror (Pet Cemetary, Carrie), from his earliest works to his most recent and still I can’t make up my mind about him.
I generally begin each book enthralled with his insight and ability to really understand human nature and I often, although not always, finish the book feeling slightly disappointed and discouraged with characters that are transparent and plot twists that are obvious.
Of course, I have read so many of his books that I may be personally responsible for sending at least one of his kids to college, so obviously there is something about his writing style that keeps me coming back for more. Maybe the fact that his writing represents such a dichotomy is exactly why his books keep selling. His readers never really know what to expect from book to book, but they are generally guaranteed a good story, if nothing else.
And I must add that there have been passages, even from some his less impressive works, that have stuck with me from adolescence through adulthood. I would never admit it out loud, but he has probably had more influence on me as an adult than any other single writer . . .