What do you think of Stephen King as a Writer?

[Anderton Prime]

Here's a quote from an article from The Guardian which appeared in September 2004:

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]King attracted [criticism] last year when he was awarded the National Book Foundation annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. Harold Bloom called the decision "a terrible mistake", claiming that King was unfit to join such previous winners as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike and Toni Morrison. In the Boston Globe, Bloom argued that the award was "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life... He is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis... By awarding it to King they recognise nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat." Bloom says that "the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education".

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif](You can read the entire article here.)

I want to put this question out there because I am a big fan of Mr. King and have read 95% of his work. While some of his books were not all that good, certain ones I thought were excellent, particularly The Stand, The Shining, Misery, and all seven books in The Dark Tower series. Do you believe he is a popular fiction writer at best, or does his body of work stand as an important contribution to literature? If you've only read one or two of his books, you probably aren't qualified to give an educated opinion, but I'd like to hear from you all the same.

By the way, I put this in the Rumble Strip because no one visits the Hobbies section except plastic car model kit builders and guys who are infatuated with airsoft...not that there's anything wrong with that. I know there's a "What book are you reading" thread started by Mike Rotch, but this didn't seem to fit in there.
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[animateria]

I enjoyed his books... I have a couple at home... I think I've read some of them twice... I don't know if he is a great writer or not since I'm not a good analyzer on literature...

 

[livemusic]

I have read one of his books, I think it´s called "Thinner". It was the first (and only so far) book in english that I´ve read. I wasn´t so good in english at the time, and first I tried to read the book with a dictionary on my side. But every 3 lines I had to pick it up to look for a word I didn´t know the meaning, which was making it even harder to understand.

So I decided not to use the dictionary, and try to understand the words I didn´t know by the context of the whole phrase. Guess what, it worked! And I actually liked the story, 300 pages of good reading, and a lot of new english words in my vocabulary.

I saw the movie they made based on this book a few months later, which proved that I had really understood the story. But the book was better in my opinion.

Thinking about it, I should read more books in english, I only have to find the time to do so.

 

[a6m5]

First off, I've never read any of his books. I mostly read Japanese books, so I haven't read many American or European books. However, thru movies, two American writers caught my attention, and they are Stephen King and Michael Crichton(I'm a sucker for horror & SF). There is no doubt that King can write very entertaining stories, but if he's not an skilled writer(in literature), I can see why some people might have problem with King receiving this award.

P.S. FatAssBR, I've noticed you mentioning your limited english before. I wish my english was up to your limitation, and I've been living in the states since '87!(nothing to brag about....)

 

[CFM]

There is a difference between being a good writer and being a good storyteller.

King is a great storyteller and has a vivid imagination but his writing style is not all that colorful or inventive. I also like the same novels that Anderton mentioned, but a lot of his other books are pretty lame, IMO. That award should have been given to someone else.

 

[Anderton Prime]

Keep in mind that a lot of writers we consider literary geniuses today were merely viewed as "storytellers" while they were alive. I think King's fiction is incredibly inventive. He has explored the magic of childhood, the power of friendship, the horror of both physical and mental abuse, and the miracle of human endurance in such stories as The Body (later adapted as Stand By Me), It, The Green Mile, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (later adapted into the hit movie with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman), Rose Madder, Delores Claiborne, and The Stand.

 

[Bryce302]

I think he is an amazing writer. I have read about 10 of the books and in the process of reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes which I think is incrediable already

 

[Diego440]

Personally, I used to like Stephen King's books a lot. I have read every book published by him since Carrie (the first one) until The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon (1998), so I'd like to think I'm qualified on the subject. Oh, and I read all of them in English, since my parents have always spoken it and they were the only books around the house.

Anyway, I say I used to like his works because at some time they really were excellent. Misery is one of my favorites, Cujo, Pet Sematary, The Dark Tower series, It and so many more. However, after The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon I decided to "close the chapter" on Mr. King, so to speak. His books became too predictable and they always went to some supernatural stage. Maybe The Girl... isn't one of his best works, I'll grant you that and perhaps that wasn't enough reason to stop reading him, but it seemed that Bag of Bones, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder were essentially the same book. The books start with pure psychological terror, but end up with beautiful spirits and 6 year olds that act like Gandalf. Where has the suspense of Misery gone? I think it's why that's one of my favorite works. There's no supernatural stuff in it and it scares the beejezus out of you. On a side note, don't judge Mr. King's talent as a writer by his movies; Misery was so much bloodier in the book, for example.

Nevertheless, I continue reading his Dark Tower series, since I've had to read the fifth volume in Spanish (I'm living in Spain now and they don't have many books in English) and am still waiting for the release of volumes 6 and 7 (here). I also enjoy reading his short stories, and in general, I like almost all the books he wrote BEFORE 1992. Since then it seems he took the chassis of It and applied it to different stories.

 

[Solid Lifters]

His books do nothing for me. But if he ever writes about an antagonizing, man-eating toaster, I'm there dude! (Sorry, inside joke).

 

[Diego440]

His books do nothing for me. But if he ever writes about an antagonizing, man-eating toaster, I'm there dude! (Sorry, inside joke).

He wrote one of a beer-induced monster (Grey Matter, short story)

 

[Anderton Prime]

Diego, have you read the stories from Everything's Eventual? The first story is about a guy who's completely paralyzed and they think he's dead and he's about to go through an autopsy while he's still ALIVE! There's also one of King's scariest short stories ever (in my opinion) about a haunted house seeker guy who has slept in hundreds of so-called "haunted" houses and castles etc., and has never seen a ghost. Then he stays in an apparently haunted room at a hotel, and it comes alive and tries to eat him. Very creepy, and remeniscent of the house that Jake Chambers has to enter to find the door to Roland's world in The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands.

By the way, the last two books of the Dark Tower cycle are excellent; the Dark Tower is King's magnum opus, his best work by far.

 

[Diego440]

Yes, I read that one as well. Really good work, creepy and all. I think I commented that his short stories are usually good, no complaints there. I was somewhat disappointed in the timing of Everything's Eventual, though. When the short-story book that came before Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Skeleton Crew?) came out (in paperback), in the preface, King said that he aimed to make a short story book approximately every seven years. First came Night Shift (I think) in 1978, then Skeleton Crew (again, I'm not sure if it's this one) in 1985/86, then in 93 came Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and the next one should've come in 2000, but it came in late 2002, and with a lot of stories which had been available before. The previous short story books had mostly unreleased work.

Still, the stories you mentioned really were scary and well written. That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French I liked a lot. I'm almost sure (I don't have the book here) that the story you mention of the guy sleeping in the hotel room's name is 1408 or some other room number. And L.T.'s Theory of Pets was pretty good as well. But in general, I didn't like it as much as the previous short story works.

 

[Anderton Prime]

Yes it was 1408...the individual numbers add up to 13.