When Did Stephen King Jump the Shark?

Cafe Society
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When Did Stephen King Jump the Shark?

http://www.bookslut.com/fear_factor/2004_01_001311.php
Does half-assed crap like *The Girl Who Loved of Tom Gordon * make *Carrie * and *Salem’s Lot * any less readable?

But before we dismiss King faster than I got rid of my copy of From a Buick 8, let’s consider what he’s really done.

Until early 1987, King was nearly perfect as a horror novelist. His first five novels (not counting works written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman), Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, and The Dead Zone still rank today as five of the best horror novels written.

King continued his streak well into the '80s, with hardcover releases consistently hitting the bestseller list, and sorties into new genres (like the high fantasy Eyes of the Dragon or the pulp throwback Cycle of the Werewolf) were just as successful (qualitatively as well as commercially) as his mainstream horror works. This peaked in 1987, when Misery, his first novel (not counting the Bachman-written Rage) not to feature any elements of the supernatural, was published.

Alas, King seems to have jumped the shark (and the editor) immediately after, following up with The Tommyknockers, still the worst 800 pages he’s ever published… This schlock was followed by the self-indulgent (but blessedly short) The Dark Half.

The barrel kept rolling when King released The Stand: The Complete And Uncut Edition. The original version of The Stand, as I’ve already mentioned, was phenomenal… The additional scenes and characters did nothing but bog down the already-long book.

King’s scattershot approach continued during the '90s. He hit the bullseye a few times (notably in the gimmicky *The Green Mile * and the beautiful Bag of Bones, quite possibly his best work of the decade), and did a wonderful job with his ongoing labor of love, *The Dark Tower * series. He also published more drek than I’ve got space to gripe about in this column.

Which takes us back to the original question. Most of what King has written since editors lost control of him has been trash (bestselling trash, but trash nonetheless).

As time goes by, his lesser works will easily be overlooked in favor of his phenomenal first fifteen years of writing.

Carrie - 1974
’Salem’s Lot - 1975
Rage (as Richard Bachman) - 1977
The Shining - 1977
Night Shift (a collection of stories) - 1978
The Stand - 1978
The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman) - 1979
The Dead Zone - 1979
Firestarter - 1980
Roadwork (as Richard Bachman) - 1981
Cujo - 1981
Danse Macabre - 1981
Creepshow (Comic format) - 1982
The Running Man (as Richard Bachman) - 1982
The Gunslinger: DT1 - 1982
Different Seasons (four novellas) - 1982
Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983
The Talisman (with Peter Straub) - 1984
Thinner (as Richard Bachman) - 1984
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1984
Skeleton Crew (a collection of stories) - 1985
The Bachman Books (Four early novels by Stephen King) - 1985
It - 1986
The Drawing of the Three: DT2 - 1987
Misery - 1987

Jumps the Shark here

The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky - 1988
My Pretty Pony - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989
Dolan’s Cadillac - 1989
The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition - 1990
Four Past Midnight (four novellas) - 1990
Needful Things - 1991
The Wastelands: DT3 - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992
Gerald’s Game - 1993
Nightmares and Dreamscapes (collection of stories) - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile (a six-part Serial Thriller) - 1996
Desperation - 1996
The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) - 1996
Wizard and Glass: DT4 - 1997
Bag of Bones - 1998
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999

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I pretty much gave up on King at about the shark-jumping point you’ve identified–having read everything up to that point, and precious little after. For me, though, it’s the inverse relationship between pages and quality. His Big Books (It, Tommyknockers, Needful Things) are bloated, repetitive self-indulgent pointless piles of crap.

But to answer the OP: I think it was The Talisman, with Misery being an exception.

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I read a lot of King’s early stuff when I was probably too young to appreciate it, simply because my dad left it lying around. (Small child-rearing hint, here–never leave your 12-year-old daughter home alone on a stormy night with a copy of Salem’s Lot.) I can’t say I enjoyed The Tommyknockers, but then, I never made it more than fifty pages into Pet Sematary either, and that’s supposed to be one of the best. I’ll agree that Tommyknockers is a bad, bad book, but I enjoyed Dolores Claiborne, though I didn’t read all of the intervening books, but I didn’t hate King … until Insomnia.

Worst. Book. Ever.

The story is an instant cure for the title. snore I know I read the whole thing. All I remember is some vague impression of the Fates, and that’s only because the name Atropos is vaguely similar to Athos, and gives me a small Three Musketeers mnemonic connection. Insomnia was where I gave up.

I know I read Rose Madder and was deeply disappointed. I read Desperation and enjoyed it a little, but I’ve pretty much given up. I’ll watch the movies and miniseries (I liked the film version of Dreamcatcher, and am thus far enjoying Kingdom Hospital), but I can’t bring myself to read another book.

4

As much as I hate to say it, he jumped the shark post drug rehab.

5

You might have something there, Munch.

6

I can’t draw a hard line between any two books – Tommyknockers was pretty crappy, but I did like Needful Things, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile and about half of Four Past Midnight.

So when did he jump the shark? Apologies to the series’ fans, but I think he jumped when he started devoting so much energy and fictional real estate to the Dark Tower series.

For one thing, I’ve never been crazy about those books. I still think King is at his best when he’s adding a bit of unfamiliar to the unfamiliar. The Dark Tower books don’t play to that strength.

More importantly, from a shark-jumping perspective, I remember when it was fun to catch the little references he made in one book to stuff that had gone in other books. There was Castle Rock, of course, and sometimes references to that weird town 'Salem’s Lot. Cujo became almost an urban legend in Pet Sematary, as I recall.

But with the Dark Tower series, King started taking the whole Kingworld concept too damn seriously. I don’t want his whole universe woven together tightly; loose, offhand connections work far better.

So: King jumped the shark when the Dark Tower series started really clipping along.

Alternate moment: King jumped the shark when he destroyed Castle Rock.

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I liked Insomnia.

I feel like a fool now.

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Yeah, same here. I read everything he wrote up to Tommyknockers, which I don’t recall if I even finished. It was at that point I decided was officially Over him.

Although recently a friend loaned me the Green Mile series and insisted I read them. They were pretty good.

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I’d go back farther. Christine was the first (glaring) sign that the man wasn’t a god.

Stepford Wives the work of a hack? There’s an odd contention.

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In On Writing (which is as much an autobiography as it is a writing guide [not to mention the best thing he’s written in years]) he talks in detail about his drug and alcohol abuse. He specifically says that he has almost no memory of writing Cujo and very few of writing The Tommyknockers and that when he was writing the latter he actually had wads of cotton in his nostrils to hold back the blood from his cocaine damaged nasal linings.
I’ve wondered if the reason for some of his recent less-than-great offerings could be due to the pain from being run down by the van (which he admits tempted him to use drugs again) and from trying to write as much as possible before he’s totally blind.

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I’ll basically agree with your jumping the shark point.

There are, however, two pieces in the post-shark period that I like. I disagree with you about the long version of ‘The Stand.’ I like the long version better, and I think several of the added scenes do add to it. However, this doesn’t really count as post-shark, since the material was written much earlier.

I also thought that ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ was possibly the best short story he’s ever read, and one of my favorite short stories, period.

The rest, though, I wouldn’t feed to my cat, though I still keep reading them and hoping.

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That’s a pretty good jump point, but maybe he’s unjumped with stuff like Black House and Wolves Of Calla. Obviously, some disliked these books and will disagree, YMMV, etc.

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I dunno. Tommyknockers blew, and Four Past Midnight was jawdroppingly stupid, and Nightmares and Dreamscapes actually had, I shit you not, a story about a pair of wind-up gag teeth that was supposed to be scary. “Chattery Teeth,” it was called, IIRC.

But I kinda liked From a Buick 8: it was a story about the people who survive in a Call of Cthulhu universe, and that basic premise – of people who are smart enough not to get their fool selves killed – kept me pretty entertained.

Near as I can tell, that man does the hokey-pokey across the shark’s back.

Daniel

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Stephen King jumped the entire shark as soon as he got his first check for Carrie.

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Two words: Maximum Overdrive.

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(on preview: this is to everyone who feels that SK no longer writes well… not just the OP. I don’t want to come across as attacking anyone) – FG

What makes you think he’s “jumped the shark” (to use the phrase I currently hate the most), exactly? You don’t like his books now? Maybe it’s you who have done the jumping. :slight_smile:

glas onion Insomnia is a wonderful book. It gets a bit slow in the middle, but it is a wonderful book. Don’t let anyone make you feel that if you like something they don’t that you’re a fool.

Have you read the Dark Tower series? The thing is chock full of subtle (and blatant, too, I’ll admit) references to other books. Look at the first pages of Wolves of the Calla and count the bolded book titles. They all have connections to the Dark Tower and to one another… some are hard to find.

As for the OP’s point of shark jumpitude, I can’t agree that SK or ANY author hits a point where he or she no longer can write anything worthwhile. I think that simplifies things way too much. Also, it doesn’t take into account the fact that people might have opinions different than yours. Uh oh, someone wrote a bad book. They must suck now. Come on.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is one of his top three BEST books. I suggest you read it again and try to see how fantastic it is. Carrie, on the other hand, was boring, IMO.

Is it only SK that’s getting beaten on for writing differently than he used to? Or am I just not seeing the articles/threads about other authors?

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I’ve never read a Stephen King book in my life, but questions such as this always make me wonder, “Jumped the shark?..Says who?” If his later books were “trash” but they were “bestselling” trash, who has the moral imperative to declare them as such?

Clearly, lots of people enjoyed them and were willing to spend money to buy them, so doesn’t it become merely a matter of semantics? One person’s trash is another persons favorite, and who is to say which is which?

I’ve heard these same kinds of criticism levelled at Steely Dan, Madonna, The Stones, Charles Schulz, etc. These people are creating products. Maybe you like their work, maybe you don’t. But I think they should have the right to do their work in any way they wish without being accused of coming up with some sort of gimmick (“jumping the shark”) to stay in the game.

I admit that Architectural Digest is a much classier magazine than The Globe. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as quality, but should a writer or entertainer always be compelled to cater to the high-minded at the expense of sales and/or even his or her career?

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I don’t, and I liked it, too. I found it to be pretty original, and while not my favorite, I didn’t dislike it either. For me, I don’t consider King as having jumped the shark, rather like anything in life, having hits and misses. I hated The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, thought it was Cujo - Outside Of The Car. His misses for me, are books that seem to be a repeat of earlier works. To me Black House was The Talisman all over again, without improvement. I couldn’t put a line in that list, because the entire thing reads to me like, “no, no, yes, no, yes, yes…” The books that are good in later years, are as good as the books in the earlier years, IMHO.

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I’ve read all of them up through Wolves of the Calla. Given that I’ve actively disliked every single Stephen King work that mentions the Dark Tower, especially the Dark Tower series, it’s unlikely that i’ll be picking up WotC anytime soon.

But my point is not that he doesn’t cross-reference his “universe” anymore. It’s that he turned what was a fun game into a mind-numbing chore. He overindulges in the crossovers to an absurd degree. It was fun to catch the Cujo reference in Pet Sematary. It’s annoying to have every damn book he’s ever written folded into a series that I find feeble and dull. Your mileage, obviously, may vary.

That all said, I don’t find everything King wrote post-Misery bad. I just think his record is spottier than it was, that the Dark Tower series is uninteresting and that he spends too much time on it, and that his record from 'Salem’s Lot through Misery produced more hits than misses while his record since then has reversed the hit/miss ratio.

(I’d also like to make it clear that I recognize that other people like just about every King book that I don’t, so I’m not trying to make some authoritative statement about his objective quality. I figured that since we’re hashing this out in Cafe Society, people would recognize that every word written in this thread could be prefaced with IMHO and wouldn’t need to have it spelled out.)

There’s deadwood before Misery, there’s good stuff after, and the phrase “jump the shark” has indeed become a silly cliche. But I do think that, overall, King’s work has become less interesting.

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hmmmm…you are forgetting what it means to be a best seller, or a number one movie or number 1 album…these things are [usually] based on presales or “expected sales”. Many of King’s post shark jumping novels dropped right off the list. Or are so well timed that they stick it out until the next Harry Potter book comes out.

Your argument supports the idea that sequels are stellar movies because they usually are GIGANTIC sellers…in the first weekend anyway…Their real quality is let out via critics and second weekend sales.

Same with King’s crappy books…The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is the worst thing he ever put to paper. Which is when I believe he “jumped”.