Stephen King in Creepshow — Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Stephen King is one of the most successful authors in the world. He's written more than 60 books, all of the them bestsellers. And he writes horror.
Horror!
Yes, that much maligned genre I keep talking about. He's been doing it for 40 some years and he's still going strong.
King himself once called his writing “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” It's not complex stuff. He writes prose that is simple and easy to follow.
He spells everything out for his readers. No literary subtitles here. If he wants you to know what a character is feeling, he tells you what that feeling is and why that character is feeling it.
Writers are weird people. When one of them makes it big, you get articles like this one. Did I mention, writers are weird?
King's simple style does not, however, limit the stories he tells. He is a master storyteller, often weaving complex plots with lots of characters and making it look easy.
His stories are exciting and fast-paced. They suck you in and won't let go. You have to keep reading and reading.
He is also very good with time and place and very good with character. And it is with his characters that his writing shines and wins over his readers.
His characters are always sympathetic, sometimes with heartbreaking backstories that he explicitly writes in detailed flashbacks, usually everyday people.
Even his bad guys are only bad because of some sort of corruption, typically from an outside evil force. And by ‘outside evil' I mean an antagonistic force, often supernatural, that is either out to get his mostly innocent and well-meaning characters (like Pennywise the clown in It), or out to make them do evil things themselves (like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining).
Here's how you do an author pic. Black and white. Stark shadows. No smiling. Intense eyes. Courtesy of Simon and Schuster.
But always these antagonistic forces come from things that are twisted, evil and not human. It's a comforting message that people like to believe. People are good. Other things are bad. A message worth noting as a contributing factor to King's success.
Personally, I have been reading Stephen King since I was 14 years old. I have read a good majority of what he was written, with only some of his newer stuff missing from my list.
Even as I discovered writers I liked more over the years, I've always come back to King's stories. I'm drawn back to them when I need something into which I know I will lose myself.
If you're like me and you grew up with a sort of high-minded ideal for your writing, born out of reading too much Hemingway and Faulkner (or whatever “classic” author you're into), then further perpetuated by college literature and creative writing courses, it's worth taking a step back and looking at the work of an author like Stephen King.
King's writing style is simple, his characters are easy to relate to, and his stories move quickly.
These are traits that sell books.
King is not famous because he writes horror, but in spite of it.
…
Oh, and my favorite King novel?
The Tommyknockers (I know, I know. Considered one of his worst. Ask me in the comments and I'll tell you why it's my favorite.)
Keith Deininger is the award-winning and #1 Amazon bestselling author of many horror and fantasy titles, including WITHIN, THE FEVER TRILOGY and THE GODGAME series. He has been called “one of the finest writers of imaginative fiction” and “Ray Bradbury on acid.” His latest novel, VIOLENT HEARTS, has been compared to Stephen King’s fantasy-based work. He lives in Albuquerque, NM with his wife and two kids. Although he loves a good nightmare, in person he’s a really nice guy. Promise.
I have to agree, completely.
I read a lot as a child, mainly YA fiction, but after awhile I noticed I’d been slacking off.
After quite a few years, college lit. classes bogged me down and I managed to get lost in the sophistocate mentality for literature. King brought me out of this slump (eternally grateful) with Pet Semetery and I’ve been going strong on his material ever since. Currently 800 pages into my first read of The Stand Uncut.
..
Soo, what makes Tommyknockers your favorite of his works?
Love The Stand! But there are some problems with it. It’s a great read, but I’m not a fan of how it all ends. Stephen King didn’t know how to end it, and it shows. Interestingly, even Randall Flagg has a brief backstory seen in the Dark Tower books, so he may actually fall into the corrupted evil category of Stephen King villainy, rather than being an outside evil.
Pet Semetary is one of King’s best too, I think. One of his most heart-breaking, anyway. I read it in high school and it was brutal. Now that I’m older and have kids, it might be even worse (in a good way, of course).
And Tommyknockers? I’d call it an exemplary work of dark fantasy. It has such a depth of imagination, dark imagination, that I love. The story involving Hilly and his magic show and Altair-4 is heart-wrenching and beautiful. The allusions to other King works are great fun for the King fanatic (Pennywise the clown makes a brief appearance; Jack, from “The Talisman,” talks with a hungover Gardner on the beach by the Alhambra Inn; a minor character from “The Dead Zone” appears, as do brief references to “Firestarter” and “‘Salem’s Lot”). A very solid novel to come out of the “golden” age of King.
It does have a slow beginning, especially for those used to King’s more fast-paced novels. But it has so many rich details and is a great allegorical tale of substance abuse.
I’ll admit, it may be that I read it at just the right time in my life and that’s why I love it so much. Certainly, if I read it for the first time today, I’m not so sure I’d like it as much.
If you go into knowing that King wrote it while trying to kick his cocaine habit and pretty much out of his mind, it helps you to know what you’re getting into.