One thing I forgot to add – I truly hope that Hollywood will eventually realize that King’s books do not translate well into movies. I don’t care what the critics thought about Misery, it still did not hold up to the book and the only movies based on his works that are any good are those from his short stories, such as Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption. IMHO, nothing detracts from his credibility as a great writer like the movies his books have been turned into!
A really, really good example is Rose Madder. The book has two basic storylines:
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A woman attempts to change her identity to escape her psychopathic, homicidal husband.
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The woman simultaneously comes into possession of a painting with supernatural properties.
At the conclusion of the book, storylines 1 and 2 are interwoven into a climax of such appalling stupidity that it ruined the whole book, including a variety of archetypical horror novel things, a prominent one being the Wise Old Rural Negro character King’s used more than a few times. The book would have been a terrific book, one of the great thrillers of all time, if King had completely left out all the supernatural crap. Just the story of Rose escaping Norman held any reader in thrall.
Same thing with “Dreamcatcher.” It was a perfectly good alien invasion yarn except for the incessant interludes with another archetypical King character, the Saintly And Psychic Retarded Child. Had King left the SAPRC out of the story altogether, he could have spent more time on the alien invasion part, which was pretty good.
For that reason, I think a lot of King’s earlier work is better. Rather than having the supernatural intruding into the plot (Rose Madder) he has it where the supernatural IS the plot (The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Dead Zone) which makes the supernatural less of an intrusion on the story, because it IS the story. That makes it more believable. And that makes it scarier.
I’d rate most authors by their peaks, and King’s best horror novels are some of the finest works in the history of the genre.
“At the conclusion of the book, storylines 1 and 2 are interwoven into a climax of such appalling stupidity that it ruined the whole book, including a variety of archetypical horror novel things, a prominent one being the Wise Old Rural Negro character King’s used more than a few times. The book would have been a terrific book, one of the great thrillers of all time, if King had completely left out all the supernatural crap. Just the story of Rose escaping Norman held any reader in thrall.”
I totally agree. The opening chapter of Rose Madder was one of the most harrowing things I read in past decade - too bad the rest of the book couldn’t keep up. 
At worst, he’ll be ranked with Poe by future literary canon-determiners. At best, Henry James. Not a bad career, by any stretch.
King can be a good, even a great writer. Read the Gunslinger series (fantasy), or some of his short stories (Shawshank Redemption).
He can also be a goddam awful writer. Some of his stuff is pure dreck.
I guess he does em afavor by writing so simply. I could even tell in 6th grade that his characters are cookie-cutter representations of how he thinks people think, and that his plot sequences and atmosphere are over-researched and under-inspired. Ive never been able to finish more than 50 pages of one of his.
After all if he disguised his work in flowery prose I would be more likely to plow through it, trying to understand it, not realizing it was a grade below mediocre till the end.
Are you sure you aren’t talking about Robin Cook here? I have read a number of Cook’s books and often feel like he has no concept of the way people really talk… Have you ever heard anyone refer to their children as their progeny in casual conversation?
King, on the other hand, seems to grasp human interaction in a way that seems much more fluid and realistic. The conversations between his characters feel more real and relaxed. Although as someone else mentioned, I tend to feel let down by the bad guys in many of his works… The spider thing in IT and the alien presence in Dreamcatcher ended up not being nearly as intimidating as they’d been built up to be.
I think he’s an awesome story teller-he keeps the reader in thrall. Who cares if he’s “good” or not?
I also think that he’s very good at characterization, though some may disagree. In IT, it wasn’t so much the monster that hooked me, but the Loser’s Club-I liked reading about them.
He entertains me, and that’s all that counts. I also think he CAN be profound-The Body, Apt Pupil, and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption proves this.
I got a great deal of enjoyment out of King’s early novels: The Shining, Firestarter, 'Salem’s Lot, The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, etc. His short stories from that period were also quite creepy and entertaining. The wheels started to come off for me at the end of It: great, great idea about a force that feeds off the fears of children, and at the end?..I just felt sort of let down, with the whole spider/turtle deal. Plus I felt like Dean Koontz had used the idea of “terror in the drains” to slightly greater effect in Phantoms. It does have plenty of chilling moments, though, and I still think it’s a great, creepy book overall. Most of the stuff after that seemed to me to be a little unfocused, and lack of editing may have had something to do with that. Then again, maybe he just moved away from writing the sort of horror book I’m interested in.
King’s a great yarnspinner, no doubt about that. He’ll never be regarded as Great Literature, but that’s okay. He’s certainly earned immortality as master of a specific genre. He does tend to reuse character types a good deal, at least in his early novels; writers and teachers tend to predominate as protagonists; children are pretty much all above average, all gas station attendants are named Sonny, and all overweight Baptist women are evil. Plus, of course, there is the Mystery of the Two Patrick Hockstetters.
Probably the most interesting feature of King’s work, one which shows up most conspicuously in the movie adaptations, is how much things tend to explode. This alone is enough to keep him out of the Western Canon; most enduring works of fiction don’t go up like a Bruckheimer film at the climax, but more often than not King isn’t satisfied until there’s a detonation of some sort. This device is probably best illustrated by Needful Things, where the antagonist’s only real goal seems to be to use his immortal supernatural abilities to blow things up. The Stand, It, Firestarter… the list goes on. I believe he crashes a light plane into a building at the climax of one novel, tho’ I can’t recall which one. In Salem’s Lot the main characters get all the way to Mexico before they realize that they forgot to destroy the town before leaving. In a Steven King novel, that’s just common courtesy.
I totally agree with that. For goodness sakes, it was as if he wove this really good story (#1), then gave up and decided to let magic solve all his problems. That was the one and only book of his that I’ve ever read, and because of it I’ve never read anything else by him. I don’t think he even would have needed to cut the entire painting bit out. Just make the painting something vaguely unsettling from the time whatshername buys it, all the weirdness culminating in the painting swallowing up the husband. Next scene, she’s donating it to someone else at the shelter. Or something.
Hey, I do that all the time!
I also wear a cape and am a Master of the rapier.
I haven’t read much King, and although I kinda liked what I have read, I would accept King’s own characterizations of his work and not call it “great literature.”
What amazes me about King is the sheer volume of pages he turns out. He may not be a great writer, but he is definitely a writer, someone who literally writes all the time!!!
(He’s also an extremely generous man and a wonderful asset to the City of Bangor, Maine.)
King is one of the few authors I’ll take time away from science fiction to read - that says it all for me. (John Irving is another one - his books also hook me in a way that defies description.)
King is my favorite writer. More of an old-timey storyteller than, say Bill Shakespeare, which is what will keep him from being considered literature. The argument for such will be as follows:
" He was popular, but he put out more books that even he can count. Even a blind guy will shoot something sooner or later if you give him enough bullets.
Now JD Salinger, there was a writer!"
Salinger only put out one book, it was really good, so he will be remembered as a good writer, becasue he knew when to get out of the game.
Stephen King is arguably my favorite author. I’ve read almost everything he has written and enjoyed (at least on some level) every one of his books (yes, even Tommyknockers!).
Hemlock puts it best stating that King is “brain candy”, but I say its pretty damn addictive candy…
After reading Missery I was convinced he was a great writer, if not just twisted.
I hated Tommyknockers. With a passion.
I agree with what most people have said about King. He turns out some great books, and some crappy ones. 100 years from now, people will remember the great ones and forget about the crappy. Any writer (feel free to disagree with me, if you can provide an example) who has a substantial body of work has some books that are poor efforts.
For the record, my favorite works of King have always been his short stories. Nightmares and Dreamscapes and Skeleton Crew were both outstanding collections of stories. Right now I’m reading Everything’s Eventual which has only had a handful of good stories, and none that I would consider great. (On a random side note, I heard from a friend that a movie based on the short story “The Mist” is in the works… if properly done, I can imagine this as a great movie. Anyone have more info about this?)
I don’t feel I can comment on literature much, but I’ve got a pretty good handle on the Horror genre (wow, tempt the fates much?), and I think King will be remembered a long time from now, and in a better light than he’s regarded at present.
There are writers who dispense their work with great care, a Thomas Harris “A new novel every 10 years whether you need it or not” sort of thing. There are also writers who work every day and have a vast output. It’s all publishable, but it’s not all gold.
I have a great respect and admiration for Richard Christian Matheson, but that’s based on probably three stories, total word length under five thousand. He used to be a staffer on “The A Team”.
If you’ve got the time and money to dig, I bet you could come up with a lot of stuff that would make Robert Bloch’s status as a legendary figure questionable, if you didn’t also read the stories that made him legendary. He was a working pulp writer for a long time before he was the grand old man.
Some night, when the beer is flowing, I will perform my rant on how King was responsible for the rise and fall of the modern horror genre ('Salem’s Lot begat Interview With the Vampire begat a whole bunch of shiny covered drugstore books begat people losing money begat people not publishing much horror anymore), but that’s a different tangent for another night.
Is he a good writer? Hell yeah. I don’t know what he does with the eternal verities or the exposition of the human condition, but it’s the end of a 1200 page book before I realize that. Plot holes? Maybe, didn’t notice. Cardboard characters? Take your word for it, didn’t notice. Thematic problems? Sure, didn’t notice. I didn’t notice because I wasn’t doing meta, I couldn’t do meta, because I was so hooked into reading what he wrote.
Greatness is something to be decided by scholars later on. I’ll vouch for the good here and now.
Salinger published four books.
Well spoken, my fine, foppish comrade! Ha HA! To Battle!
I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said. I think King is a great story-teller; he has some really good ideas and a good handle on the craft of writing. I like his short stories better than the novels, because I think his “genius” is in his ideas more than his talent as a writer. After 300 or so pages, the stories start to fall apart and all his cliches and mannerisms and trite characters and such start to show through. My favorite book of his is The Shining, and I stopped reading his stuff after Pet Sematary, because it got too repetitive. And I’ve never read The Stand.
Whether or not he qualifies as “great literature,” I think there are two things that everyone has to give him credit for: first, he’s very experimental, especially for someone so popular. Many authors have built huge careers just cranking out the same book over and over again, but King keeps trying new stuff. Non-horror and fantasy, different formats like calendars and serials, different means of distribution like e-books, etc. And his style is pretty experimental as well, even if nowadays it seems hackneyed and overused.
Second, he’s done more than any other author to bring some classic folklore into contemporary settings. He talks about this in Danse Macabre, and while I don’t agree with some of the points he makes (the scariest aspect of The Amityville Horror was not the fear of losing equity in a house!) I definitely like the reasoning behind his books, at least the early ones. Salem’s Lot is contemporary vampires, Carrie is contemporary witches, The Shining is a contemporary haunted house, etc. That’s valuable in and of itself, certainly moreso than Anne Rice’s tiresome goth, bisexual vampires.
I’m not qualified to pass judgement on whether or not something’s great literature. I can, however, testify to King’s ability to snatch a reader by the short hairs and not let go until the end of the book. The characters, the descriptions, they tend to resonate with people. Like the office cleaning lady said in The World According to Garp, it just feels true. Any writer who can hit that mark is, in my opinion, really a good writer.
Oh, and for the record, I have a tendency to stand there with my hands on my hips, head thrown back, laughing so hard I nearly wet my pants. When it happens, I’m standing there about half pissed off about something when the funny side suddenly hits me like a tidal wave and I laugh till I’m almost sick.
Maybe I just know much funnier people than the rest of you.