My Stephen King Problem: A Snob's Notes

There's no way an article with that title just might, I thought, be of interest to this group.

This critic's assessment of King's work fits with how (not having read any) I've always imagined it would be.

Check the comments, though. The King fan club is not happy.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=737&fulltext=1

Dcozy, thanks for posting that. I sometimes read for escapism, and I enjoy a well-crafted piece of genre fiction (mystery, science fiction), but from my limited experience of his works I'd have to agree with the author of that review that King isn't even good as a genre writer or a storyteller. I tried reading Needful Things because reviews made the premise sound intriguing, but I quit after 200 pages because, in addition to lacking literary value (which I expected), it lacked suspense or horror (which puzzled me). I had the same experience when I tried reading The Gunslinger on the recommendation of a friend whose judgment I value. M. R. James or H. P. Lovecraft packs more suspense and horror into a fifteen-page short story than King conveys in a novel. Much of Needful Things dealt with ancillary backstories, so at first I wondered if King might be attempting literary fiction, and I'd give him a courtesy nod if he were sincerely trying to broaden himself as a writer. Alas, ultimately I concluded it was filler inserted only because a thicker book can be sold at a higher price.

I haven't read King for years--can't remember which novel finally finished him for me, might have been IT or THE TOMMYKNOCKERS. The book was so appallingly awful that I said ENOUGH. A long string of mediocrities then...that.

King wrote some truly terrific short fiction and novels in his early years. THE SHINING is a magnificent achievement. But his fame only encouraged his unrestrained imagination and success rendered him untouchable. His biggest problem is, as his friend Peter Straub has noted, "Stephen hates editing".

Stephen hates editing.

The single most important task or responsibility a writer has, choosing the right words, the right number of words...but Stevie boy doesn't have patience for such niceties. Just churn it out and collect the dough from moron readers (sound familiar?). As a writer gets rich and famous, their novels get fatter and fatter, you notice that? Look at the bloat that over-takes the HARRY POTTER series. The last book required TWO movies, remember?

Stephen King: a fiction factory I wish the EPA would red flag as TOXIC WASTE.

Not a time waster...a waste of time.

From the article in the original post:

"My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book."

This excerpt and the concluding two paragraphs are absolutely smashing. Bang on.

I read the updated version of The Stand and was not impressed. There were sections that fascinated me -- the deaths of random everyday people after the Plague -- but gak! what bloat! And the ending to the Stand was terrible. It reeked of "cop-out." Ironically, I do want to read IT, because, hey, evil clowns. Still, I'll see if I actually trudge through 800 pages of lazily written sub-schlock. And I appreciate schlock, since I'm a hardcore devotee to Warhammer 40K with all the space-demons, supersoldiers, and chainswords.

Stephen King's a far better writer than I will ever be. That being said, King is not a good writer.

Stated in Foxworthy-ese: "You know you're not a good writer if...the movie adaptations of your novels are consistently better than your novels." Cristine, The Shining, and even It come to mind (while It the movie is not perfect, it's a lot better than the book).

In his otherwise-good LARB article, I think Allen botched the landing when he wrote this in his last paragraph: "After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King?"

While I recognize that Wallace and Pynchon have talent, I personally don't like their writing because I find it too convoluted. For better or worse, I think a lot of King fans probably agree with me. Allen was going to piss off King fans regardless of his conclusion, but I think he might've connected with more King fans and pissed off fewer of them if he'd finished a line recommended good writers who, unlike Wallace and Pynchon, are more straightforward. It also probably wouldn't hurt to cite good authors that dabble in horror or horror-esque writing. Something like:

"After you’ve read Margaret Atwood and Shirley Jackson...why would you return to Stephen King?" (I haven't read much horror so I don't know if William Peter Blatty, Bret Easton Ellis, Lovecraft, or Thomas Harris are good writers to list.)

Also, it probably wouldn't have hurt for Allen to give King more credit where credit is due: namely, that King thinks up interesting stories (even though he then writes them poorly). The idea here is to encourage the King fans to let down their guard long enough to consider what the article is saying, instead of being so provocative as to trigger knee-jerk defensiveness.

>6 mcenroeucsb: Great point, mcenroeucsb. Referring King fans to better writers within the same genre would not only make his essay more persuasive, it would also do those fans a public service. They may never embrace Wallace's discursions, but they might well fall in love with Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is an absolutely terrifying story, sparely told.

Unfortunately, I suspect he didn't really aim to win over King fans. If he did, I think he slit his own throat in the essay's title by calling himself a snob because then it takes no effort for King fans to dismiss him as, well, a snob--which, sure enough, is a recurring theme among the comments at the bottom.

As a dark fantasist, Richard Matheson's prose is consistently more accomplished, his novels and short stories more affecting, spare and grim; fairy tales for a post WWII universe.

7: King fans would dismiss him as a snob regardless. Why, then, should he care?

Because not all King fans are alike, and even someone who reacts defensively first can think better of it later? I think some of King's short stories are memorable and scary, and I recognize at the same time that Shirley Jackson is a better writer.

Come to think of it, I wonder if horror as a genre shouldn't confine itself to the short story format. Even the long ones would only work if they were episodic.

"Come to think of it, I wonder if horror as a genre shouldn't confine itself to the short story format."

Anna, I find that at least 80% of the contemporary books I read could be pared down to novella/short story length. Regardless of the genre. Padding is ubiquitous these days. Take a neat concept, stretch it into a three book series. Product, product, product. Keep the widgets coming...

I haven't read enough King, so I'll merely say I'm in broad sympathy with the snobbery. A lot of "genre" writing isn't very good. I love escape as much as the next person, but I don't really believe that escape is fun when the book is badly written. Sometimes I wish I could abide bad writing and enjoy some badly written book with good plots. But I can't.

At the same time, Allen has a very constricted sense of what good literature is, mixing it up, it seems, with what makes a good Victorian Russian novel.(1)

Lots of great literature doesn't have complex characters or development. Lots of great literature doesn't share Allen's sense of how pacing must work—stopping scenes when there's nothing more to "reveal." (And if going on for hundreds of pages about something with "no vital connection" to the "subject of the book" is damnation, half of literature is damned indeed.) Above all, Allen seems to believe great literature should be a little embarrassed about having a great plot idea.

As I see it, the best genre fiction engages aspects of intelligence and even emotion that literary fiction rarely touches. It is often said, for example, that great literature teaches us about what it means to be human. But you won't find very much literary fiction that thinks about what it means to be human in a world of digital information and networks—a world we're hurtling into. Literary fiction today barely notices that digital technology is changing us at all. And it positively looks down on thinking about what it would mean to be human in the far future, spread out across the universe, when we meet aliens—or are one.

To take three example, I think there's something going on in the ideas, largely the fictional universes, portrayed in Snowcrash, Speaker for the Dead and A Deepness in the Sky that's worth something, and isn't often found in literary fiction. Worse, when literary writers tackle genre their ideas and fictional universes can be as paper-thin to people who actually care about them as genre characters can be to people who care about them.

Lastly, take:

My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good … a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil.

This is a world-view issue, not one of literary quality. This is the view of people who think Tolkien is bad literature because he has good and evil characters, and isn't about someone's divorce.

Whose world view is this? Well, it's my impression that the New York literary type indeed believes it is composed of "nice good people," as Allen apparently believes. It's also my impression that these people believe they are "awash in problems" (note the passivity!). By contrast, it's my belief—my world view, perhaps—that they are wrong, and that their number includes some really good people and some really bad, and that we are not so much awash in problems as the cause of them, and the people that must fight them.

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1. The exception is length. In the right context literary snobs will wax lyrical about the days when people had more time to read, and the novels fit that. As far as I'm concerned, any time a critic talks about length as a criterion of taste, he's a fool.

12: As far as I'm concerned, any time a critic talks about length as a criterion of taste, he's a fool.

Good point. Allen hammers away at length, not because King is a bad writer per se, but comes across as a lazy one. (Immediate counter-example: prolific doorstopper machine and literary darling William T. Vollmann) King churns things out at such an insane rate it seems like he doesn't edit anymore ... and since his stuff immediately make the publisher money, why bother editing? See also Rowling, JK; Clancy, Tom; ad infinitum. Vast quantities of money seem to muddy this issue. Like a Reverse Studio Meddling as seen in cinema blockbusters that have been focus-grouped to death to become yet another price point in a marketing juggernaut.

But King is particularly prone to bloat--his books overlong, poorly paced, desperately in need of trimming (with a meat cleaver). To speak of length/page count in King's case is a perfectly valid criticism.

I think the matter of length is less one of taste than one of craft Even superlong literary epics -- Les Miserables, War and Peace, anything by Dickens -- are written where every word counts. And length bears a direct relation to pacing, especially in more genre-centric fare like thrillers, mysteries, and horror.

This also involves the generalization that your Average Consumer will recognize this simple equation: length = profundity. The laziness comes in when the story gets bogged down in repetition, vagueness, and lack of momentum. Granted, different readers demand different things from their books (the Lit Snob vs. Everyone Else). But here's the rub: You work your crap job, you get some free moments to read a book. The inordinate length from sloppy lazy writing insults the reader and WASTE'S THEIR TIME! In King's case, this gets conflated with his I'm an Ordinary Joe Posturing and using it to indirectly attack all those pinhead elitist stuffynoses. In that regard, I cry foul. He can be a pop darling and such, but I find the Martyr Pose rather crass, reeking of exploitation. (Thomas Kinkade did the same thing, only he wrapped it up in tepid middlebrow Evangelical Christianity. "Hey America, you can hate fags and college professors, but still think of yourself as an art aficionado. Here, buy this print of a blurry cabin." -- Yours Sincerely, Thomas "Codpiece" Kinkade.)

>13 kswolff:-14

No, I agree. Lack of editing is a valid concern. But he often phrases his criticism in ways that imply there's a right pacing and structure to literature, and I find that overreach.

I think the primary driver behind length in genre literature, and the proliferation of series, may well be that readers want to stay in the world longer. This is surely one reason why short stories don't sell as well. You can admire the great writing, but you don't get the pleasant anticipation during the day of another night spent in that interesting universe. Personally I'm of two minds about it. I value getting a book over and getting on with the next. But sometimes, as with Card's first three ender books, I was glad I had weeks of audiobook listening ahead of me. The same was surely true of Greeks listening to Homer.

16: I agree with "readers wanting to stay in the world longer" and making that an impetus for trilogies, series, etc. Look at what happened with the Horus Heresy series: a planned trilogy has turned into a 19-book series (as of this posting). Then again, each of those books are 350-page snacks with relatively large print. Easy to burn through in a week. I'm all for series, but why God why! do they each have to be 9000 pages long? The Song of Ice and Fire is going to be longer than Proust at this point and the Malanzan Book of the Fallen series is now 7000 pages long with 8 volumes to date.

George RR Martin's monster tomes are actually what's keeping me from reading his stuff ... and I do want to read it. Do a compare-and-contrast with R. Scott Bakker's "Three Seas" trilogies. But when am I going to have time to get through 5 volumes, each upwards of 900 pages each?

Creating a long-lasting series doesn't mean, by default, every reader wants doostropper after doorstopper. Look at Lawrence Durrell: he wrote numerous series (quartets, quintets, a 2-parter) and each volume was pretty slim. Yet his writing is so luminous and precise and gorgeous, that they contain worlds within worlds. Even his first novel, the Dark Labyrinth was a short little volume, but it brimmed with stories and could have become a series in its own right.

In summary, even with summaries and worlds people want to escape into, the old adage still applies: Less is more.

But when am I going to have time to get through 5 volumes, each upwards of 900 pages each?

Exactly. I could read every Nabokov novel I haven't read, and probably fit in Proust too.

I think his requirement for pace is related to genre novels. I agree with him that a genre novel should have pace. The writing should move the plot forward. A literary novel has the pace it's subject matter requires. If we have that curious hybrid, the genre novel with literary pretensions, then I believe it should also have pace since that is a requirement of the form. If you are writing a villanelle you write poem of 19 lines, with 5 tercets and one quatrain etc. else why bother.

I would take issue with the critic's downgrading of genre fiction, writing a good plot is a separate skill from writing a good sentence. But in either case writing means rewriting and when you rewrite you cut out whatever doesn't contribute to story or plot. Picasso didn't paint a cubist portrait and then sketch in a bit of a landscape because he was feeling bored or he thought his audience would pay more for the picture.

Both Art and Craft have rules and you have to be very, very good to break them. King, who incidentally wrote one of the best books on the craft of writing, consistently breaks those rules without being good enough to do so. His complaint that he hasn't won a Booker or a Pulitzer is pure vanity.

I'll credit Stephen King with being able to draw me into the world he's created — except then I get distracted by the clunky dialogue and the eventual sense of "get on with it!"

I've only read maybe 6 of his books. It was Tommyknockers that finally did me in. That one made me regret not reeling it in after the stupefyingly terrible ending to The Stand.

In all likelihood though, I'll probably still end up reading a couple of his books every decade or so. His stories are entertaining enough — it just needs to be in small doses.

I have more than 10 of King's books, of which I have tried to read almost half of them. I enjoyed some of the ones I was able to finish, but with strong feeling that he could've finished all this in half the pages.

Only reason I got more King's books was because I was repeatedly told that he is a great writer, and I was probably not reading his best work, but after reading this topic, I think I am going to give up on him. I would try some of the other authors/books/series mentioned in the topic, let's see how I like them.

I'm not surprised to see The Tommyknockers listed twice as the King jump-the-shark moment, it was mine as well - a stunningly bad book. I do agree with Cliff though - King has produced some good stuff, in his early novels and short stories. (It is interesting how regarded King's On Writing is, and yet how little insight he seems to have into own writing.

>17 kswolff: - George RR Martin's monster tomes are actually what's keeping me from reading his stuff ... and I do want to read it. Couldn't agree more. I have enjoyed Martin's short stories and his vampire novel, Fevre Dream, is a masterpiece, but I can't think of one good reason to read his current series.

My only reason would be if he won the Hugo since I have read them all to date.

Hm, I did not know that the Hugo could go to a horror writer/work, but just looked it up and sure enough that is what they say.

23: I have never before tried to read "all the books that won x prize in x year" but it seems to be a tool that a lot of people use to decide what to read. Do you find the status of having won the Hugo is a reliable indicator that the book will really grab you? I seem to remember Ian criticizing the Hugos for being less than objective, maybe it was the way the voting is conducted?

I was actually referring to George R. R. Martin who is nominated for a Hugo this year.

I actually find the winners of the Campbell, Clarke and BSFA to be generally better written than the Nebulas or Hugos. I stopped reading SF for a decade or so and when I came back to it I found reading the prize winners an easy way of catching up with what was happening. I had read so many of the Hugos prior to the '80s that completing them was quite easy. I do find that the earlier awards were more representative of the best of the bunch than now.

I'm currently reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Despite its sometimes Old Timey language, it's pure genre goodness ... and SHORT! Then again, it's a mere 250 pages, something King could plop out while on the toilet.

My biggest issue with King (and other writers) is not necessarily length but bloat. To paraphrase the Austrian Jewish journalist-philosopher Karl Kraus, "I say in two pages what he takes a mere twenty pages to say." Something like that, you get the point.

George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire sounds intriguing, but I'm choosing to read Robert Caro instead ... because of his brevity.

Perhaps King should write needlessly long Wikipedia entries:

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/the-6-most-needlessly-detailed-wikipedia-entr...

I liked George R.R. Martin's ARMAGEDDON RAG twenty years ago but have no interest in his fantasy works, gazillion sellers though they may be.

I have about as much interest in "high fantasy" as I do "supernatural romances". As in, NONE.

I used to read King when I was teenager, but, like all my adolescent tastes, I eventually out grew him. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy genre fiction. I enjoy my mysteries and naughty humour books as well as my literary "snobbish" fiction. But, in my opinion, King commits 2 sins against good fiction.

The first is that he doesn't do his research, and it shows. In The Shining, he has a character who is supposed to be a flesh-and-blood human being staggering around, gushing oceans of blood for 3 hours, climbing mountains of stairs, and giving poetic speeches before miraculously surviving her ordeal. Getting attacked by your ghost-and-demon-possessed husband? I'll suspend my disbelief for that. Shedding more blood than a vampire convention and surviving? Not so much. Come on, Stephen! Would it have killed you to do a little research into the kind of axe-induced injuries a human being can survive? Surely there's an emergency room nurse or surgeon you could have interviewed? And have you ever noticed that every single main character in his novels is an professor or author? Research a couple of careers, Stephen! Go interview bankers, career guidance councillors, miners, dancers, zookeepers, chemists! Anyone who will talk to you about what they do for a living!

His second sin is that he doesn't challenge himself. To produce well-written fiction you need to play devil's advocate; not only to the expectations of society but to your own beliefs as well. You devoutly believe that bond between parent and child is unbreakable? Try to create a situation that would stretch that bond until it breaks. You believe that all madness is destructive? Create a situation in which madness provides the solution to a crisis. It doesn't matter what subject you challenge your own beliefs on, as long you challenge them. The best writing comes out of exploring the unthinkable. A good horror novelist should know that.

28: I have some interest, but my go-to high fantasy is R. Scott Bakker's stuff ... and his stuff, while epic and grandiose, are about a third as long as any volume of GRRM. I did read a review that called The White-Luck Warrior -- his latest volume -- an "anti-epic."

But I agree ... not for everyone.

You feel about supernatural fantasies the way I feel about Jonathan Franzen's hipster wankfests.

As far as fantasy, I wouldn't quite call it high fantasy - there is a dragon or two, but there aren't elves in the forests and dwaves forging armor under the mountains. The emphasis is on the characters - fairly well-written - and the political maneuvering of royal houses. Even as a fan of high fantasy, I can say that at least the first three books of Martin's opus stand head and shoulders above the rest of the genre.

I understand to some that's like saying a man's the sanest guy in a nuthouse, but still...

(And, keep in mind, this is coming from someone who quite enjoys King as a break from serious reading.)