Stephen King: Trash, or Literature?

[Varenne Rodin]

Personally, I like King's "voice." Even when the material's not good, I'm entertained by his writing style. I also like the fact that he'll spend a hundred pages filling in the background of a character who died just to show what that death meant to the people around her (I think that happened in It). Basically, he's got enough going on in the background that his locations and side characters, as well as the main characters, seem real.

I couldn't agree more.

I love the Dark Tower series. It's a rich, complex tapestry of characters and their development. His female characters are more relatable and well written than any sex & the city type clucking hens. His stories are imaginative. Sometimes the imagined scenarios involve the lowest forms of life, but the most interesting literary characters are usually very flawed. His grammar is excellent. His voice is just fun. If a reader can't connect with a King book, I don't know how they can connect with any lit.

[LeNoirFaineant]

Why read Marlowe when you can just read Shakespeare?

Whoa, take 'er easy there, Pilgrim.
Lovecraft's corpse just sneezed.

But seriously, which book by King am I missing that is so earthshakingly good?

I really tried to get into his stuff a bit, but the only one that I found more than average was "Jerusalem's Lot",
and that was such a blatant ripoff that I am frankly surprised he got it published without reprimands.

[mal4mac]

I couldn't agree more.

I love the Dark Tower series. It's a rich, complex tapestry of characters and their development. His female characters are more relatable and well written than any sex & the city type clucking hens.

That's a rather low point of comparison. How do his female characters compare to those of Austen, George Eliot, or Iris Murdoch?

His stories are imaginative. Sometimes the imagined scenarios involve the lowest forms of life, but the most interesting literary characters are usually very flawed. His grammar is excellent. His voice is just fun. If a reader can't connect with a King book, I don't know how they can connect with any lit.

Well any toddler is imaginative, and sometimes I'm wondering if King is channelling his toddler self too much. Imagine a living car! (Wow!) "Grammar is excellent" should be a given for anything that gets published (unless it's experimental...) You can write awfully bad stuff with excellent grammar, so this really isn't a good point in defence of King.

Many people who dislike King connect with Dickens, Shakespeare, etc, etc... So although you can't imagine it, they certainly *do* connect with "some" lit.

[Calidore]

My reply to both LeNoir and mal4mac would be the same: If you've tried King and he doesn't work for you, fine. It's a matter of taste, which is wired in all of us. What I don't understand is the need for some to pronounce what they don't like as beneath them, rather than simply not their cup of tea.

[Varenne Rodin]

That's a rather low point of comparison. How do his female characters compare to those of Austen, George Eliot, or Iris Murdoch?



Well any toddler is imaginative, and sometimes I'm wondering if King is channelling his toddler self too much. Imagine a living car! (Wow!) "Grammar is excellent" should be a given for anything that gets published (unless it's experimental...) You can write awfully bad stuff with excellent grammar, so this really isn't a good point in defence of King.

Many people who dislike King connect with Dickens, Shakespeare, etc, etc... So although you can't imagine it, they certainly *do* connect with "some" lit.

I still think there's an unreasonable bias. Toddlers are imaginative, they obviously lack well developed story telling abilities. I was comparing King to more modern literature popular amongst females in my country, because I wanted to make the distinction that King's female characters are often intelligent or just more multi-layered than female characters found in "trash" lit. I'm sorry if that was somehow unclear.

Stephen King's characters compare very well to Austen's. Both Austen and King wrote/write the female perspective as being equally important to that of any male character, only Austen often took it to a greater extreme and made women superior. She was writing something bold in her time of living. Lots of people called it trash. Pride and Prejudice was shelved for ten years before being given any credit.

I'll amend what I said about being able to connect with King. I can understand a reader from somewhere other than America not being able to relate to him and his many references to our culture, though his books have had quite an impact on current Asian and French lit. Stephen King is no more a trash writer than Terrence Malick is a trash film maker for having made movies about the darker side of the human condition. You can say you don't like King, I have to wonder how much King you have actually read, but I still don't see how it can be deemed "not literature". If you haven't found a King character or story you can relate to, you haven't read enough King. I'm not a fan of "Eyes of the Dragon," for example, but it's completely different from all of his other stories. I thought "It" was the most like a cheesy pop culture Wes Craven horror flick. Aside from those, the stories vary so greatly, it's hard for me to wrap my head around someone lumping them all together and slapping them with a stamp of negativity. One could say that "The Dark Tower," "Insomnia," "The Talisman," and "Black House" all have similar themes, but that's because they're all continuing and branching off of the same intricate story. Without having read all of them, I don't see how a reader can proclaim authority on the matter.

King gave us The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, The Dead Zone. I think it's sad when he's dismissed by literary snobbery.

[LeNoirFaineant]

Again, don't misunderstand me, please:

I don't think contemporary literature can be measured fully by the, well, contemporaries.

For comparison, just check the nobel prize winners of the first half of the century,
and consider if you had read just ONE of them by your own motivation, outside of school or other research.

I am just asking, which book of his should I read to get an idea what is good about him?
"The Shining"? "The Shawshank Redemption"? "The Green Mile"?

Because an author who cranks out one or two books a year surely has higher and lower points in his writing - so, my impression doesn't necessarily have to be reliable.

So, recommend me a book of his, please.

[stuntpickle]

I will never understand the Stephen King controversy, in which he is either a modern Dickens or a literary scourge. The only thing more ridiculous than Harold Bloom railing against Stephen King is Harold Bloom railing against J. K. Rowling. I fully expect Harold Bloom to soon write a book entitled "Why Batman Comics Aren't Literature."

King's work varies from the heroically awful ("The Lawnmower Man" from Night Shift in which a guy shows up to mow the lawn and then, after having stripped naked, starts to eat the grass--no really) to the fairly decent (the half of On Writing that wasn't actually "on writing" constitutes a mildly pleasurable memoir). I think King is an obviously competent storyteller. However, his novels and his acceptance speech for the National Book Award lead me to believe he fails to understand the whole "art" part of literature. Kafka's "Metamorphosis" is more than just a page turner with believable characters.

Of course, it must be said that Stephen King approaches Harold Bloom's idiocy when he deigns to inform the public about the horrors of Stephenie Meyer. Really, Steve? Perhaps he's now working on his masterpiece of literary criticism "Why Danielle Steel Sucks." Never mind, I think he already wrote it.

[Kyriakos]

I used to think that King is utter trash, but recently i bought a collection of (arguably his best) short stories, and much to my surprise i rather liked a couple of them, and parts of others. The one about the two children that played a game with the wooden ladder in the barn was particularly interesting since i did not think King grasped symbolism that profoundly. I also liked "Grey matter", although it has to be a homage to Arthur Machen's excellent "White Powder", the two stories resembling each other considerably. Finally i liked the twist in "the man who loved flowers" although it was predictable; i liked the aroma of that story.

Some others i read i did not like.

[Varenne Rodin]

Again, don't misunderstand me, please:

I don't think contemporary literature can be measured fully by the, well, contemporaries.

For comparison, just check the nobel prize winners of the first half of the century,
and consider if you had read just ONE of them by your own motivation, outside of school or other research.

I am just asking, which book of his should I read to get an idea what is good about him?
"The Shining"? "The Shawshank Redemption"? "The Green Mile"?

Because an author who cranks out one or two books a year surely has higher and lower points in his writing - so, my impression doesn't necessarily have to be reliable.

So, recommend me a book of his, please.

The Dark Tower series. Start with the Gunslinger, I guess. It's like Tolkien, but if you think Tolkien is non-literature too, read the Talisman.

I've read books from Nobel prize winners that my teacher never asked me to. In fact, I know a still living Nobel laureat who rather likes King. I've read hundreds of classics that my teachers also never asked me to read. I don't live in the past alone though. I appreciate art that is happening now. The fact that it's happening now gives no cause to scorn it.

If contemporary literature can't be measured by contemporaries, why are you measuring Stephen King as lacking?

[Calidore]

I think King is an obviously competent storyteller. However, his novels and his acceptance speech for the National Book Award lead me to believe he fails to understand the whole "art" part of literature.

Possibly he's just not interested in being an "artist" of that sort. His main priority is to tell good stories well and to entertain the reader who likes the kind of stuff he likes. As he put it:

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

On the flip side, I think Sturgeon's Law applies to Literary Artists just as much as anyone else.

[stuntpickle]

Possibly he's just not interested in being an "artist" of that sort. His main priority is to tell good stories well and to entertain the reader who likes the kind of stuff he likes. As he put it:

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

On the flip side, I think Sturgeon's Law applies to Literary Artists just as much as anyone else.

I would agree that what masquerades as literary art today is mostly trash. Thanks to MFA programs, we have an abundance of middle class morons with absolutely nothing to say, who, nevertheless, feel compelled to write mediocre tomes devoid of sentiment and beauty. So we get scores of AM Homeses writing "daring" stories about suburbanites smoking crack. No thanks.

How does King compare to the aforementioned variety of writing? I suspect he compares well. But I also suspect that history will sort out all the AM Homeses. It generally takes generations for us to figure out what really constitutes the art of our age. We're so immersed in the madness of our time that we can't make out the one sane person scribbling in the corner. I find it likely that the great artists of our age are now writing in obscurity, simply because time has not yet equipped us with the proper understanding. We're just too good at buying our own bull****.

I share King's love for Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which critics tend to ignore for precisely the same reason the public loves it: both groups wrongly believe it is simply some ghost story. What Jackson was writing about was alienation and how all people are essentially awful; what haunts Hill House, after all, is the group of persons inhabiting it. Jackson is now deservedly enjoying a critical reevaluation. I suspect over time we will learn to love her better. But it is never popular to stand up and announce that everyone else is crazy. Imagine the fortunes of a presidential candidate suggesting in a debate that what ails America is Americans. I suspect we'd all hang him.

My point is that King is not the same variety of writer as Shirley Jackson. I think he is incapable of the sustained artistry of Jackson's Hill House. The reason he won't be recalled as some literary sage isn't because he has written outlandish stories about vampires and killer clowns, but because he has written thoroughly conventional stories.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a simple storyteller, but if the conversation is chiefly concerned with whether one is MORE than a storyteller, then the answer must be, as it is in the case of King, "no."

[Calidore]

My point is that King is not the same variety of writer as Shirley Jackson. I think he is incapable of the sustained artistry of Jackson's Hill House. The reason he won't be recalled as some literary sage isn't because he has written outlandish stories about vampires and killer clowns, but because he has written thoroughly conventional stories.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a simple storyteller, but if the conversation is chiefly concerned with whether one is MORE than a storyteller, then the answer must be, as it is in the case of King, "no."

I think it's hard to say whether King is capable of Jackson's level of artistry, because he's never shown an interest in writing that way. That may be because he doesn't think he can do it or it may be because he doesn't care.

I can't really argue about King's stories being conventional, as he doesn't load them with allusions and hidden profundity and whatnot, but I would disagree that conventional=simple. King's depth goes a different way, in his fleshing out of his characters and their relationships with each other and their locations. He takes more trouble than most to give the reader a realistic three-dimensional world of realistic three-dimensional people, and that's not simple.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

There is a certain comfort when I open up a King novel. I admit, they are perfect for when I just want to relax and go for a ride. Some people say it's a fault, but I think King's work being "easy" to read is its greatest strength. You don't have to think a lot, you get what's going on, etc. It still always comes off to me as good writing, though. Where King really excels, and I think this balances out his often lame endings/climaxes, is his character creation. I have rarely become as attached to characters as I do in King's books. He has a way of writing that really makes them seem real, and in no small part to his great ability to write dialogue.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being just a storyteller. Just sitting down and reading a story, sans allusions and deep metaphors and difficult prose and more allusions, is quite an enjoyable experience.

[tinybore]

I don't know why people refer him as a horror writer. I think most (those I've read) of his novels are mystery, thriller, and fantasy. Sure some of his book has some "horror" in it, but I find them more irrelevant to the story itself.

I like King's stuff, it's always a joy to imagine and live in the fantasy of his stories, and to get very close to the characters, so close you love the good ones, and really hate the bad people
My fav ones are The Stand, The Shining, Talisman, Dark Tower series and Needful Things.

But damn. Apparently I'm not a "true" literature friend, because I like King...too bad

[Abookinthebath]

I don't think there's anything wrong with being just a storyteller. Just sitting down and reading a story, sans allusions and deep metaphors and difficult prose and more allusions, is quite an enjoyable experience.

Absolutely.

But damn. Apparently I'm not a "true" literature friend, because I like King...too bad

Now now, don't beat yourself up!! But I'm sure you'll be able to live with yourself.....