Here’s something I find rather odd. I enjoy reading Stephen King a hell of a lot. It’s quite possible you do too. But why? Because he isn’t a particularly good writer. Sometimes he’s a bloody awful one. I’ve never managed to finish The Stand, for example, or several of his latest books. I think he’s just going through the motions nowadays (in more sense than one) but even when he was on top form bapick in the 1970s and 1980s the best you could hope for from his prose was that it stayed quietly in the background while the story rolled on through. When he tried a bit of fine writing he mostly, like Johnny Smith at the beginning of The Dead Zone, ended up in a heap on the ice with a cracked skull. Take this bit from Firestarter:

"Thud, thud, thud, riderless black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, ironshod hooves digging up soft gray clods of brain tissue, leaving hoofprints to fill up with crescents of blood."

Well, actually, that isn’t that bad - but that’s because I’ve cut a bit. It should read:

"Thud, thud, thud, riderless black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, ironshod hooves digging up soft gray clods of brain tissue, leaving hoofprints to fill up with mystic crescents of blood."

That "mystic" is a weasel word. It sucks all the yolk out of "crescents of blood". It isn’t the only weasel word in the sentence either, just the most active. It turns up again in a passage from The Shining, and there it is alone. It’s sucking yolk just as busily, though:

"[H]e clenched his fists tighter still, feeling the fingernails sink into his palms and draw blood in mystic quarter-moon shapes."

I think part of what’s wrong with adding the word is that King has tried to do more than just describe one of his characters’ feelings: he’s tried to decorate them too. But he’s decorated them with his own reaction to the shape in question, not his characters’. Andy McGee in Firestarter has a bad headache coming on, and the image that occurrs to him is that of a horse galloping across his brain with ironshod hooves tearing out brain tissue and leaving crescent-shaped hoofmarks to fill up with blood. A powerful enough image, and a plausible enough one too. But did Andy McGee think of the crescents as "mystic"? No, that’s the author sticking in his two-penn’orth. The same applies to Jack Torrance and his fingernails in The Shining.

Those are bad pieces of writing, in other words, and they don’t lack for company in King’s books. Sometimes he gets words wrong altogether, and sometimes he just uses them badly or clumsily (he admits it too). And even when his prose isn’t going off the rails, it isn’t always taking the reader where he wants it to. When the Characterization Express is scheduled for stops in Endearment or Sparkling Wit, it often gets diverted or goes charging straight past the station, whistle shrieking, wheels squealing, and smoke-stack throwing off thick black choking smoke. King is particularly bad at educated-middle-aged-men-with-endearing-touches-of-eccentricity: Matt Burke in ’Salem’s Lot; Dr Weizak in The Dead Zone; someone whose name I forget in Insomnia. He’s not too good at lightning sketches of character either. When he wants to lift the lid on the dark goings-on in the town of ’Salem’s Lot, for example, the best he can come up with is the revelation

"that Hal Griffiths has six hot books hidden in the back of his closet which he masturbates over at every opportunity; or that George Middler has a suitcase full of silk slips and bras and panties and stockings and that he sometimes pulls down the shades of his apartment over the hardware store and locks the door with both the bolt and the chain and then stands in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom until his breath comes in short stitches and then he falls to his knees and masturbates."

And if using an extract from ’Salem’s Lot as a stick to beat him with isn’t entirely fair, because that’s probably the worst of his readable books, it is fair to use the book itself as a good example of another of his literary shortcomings: his derivative plots. ’Salem’s Lot rips off Dracula just as Misery rips off The Collector, and it doesn’t make it much better that King has admitted it both times. King even rips off himself: Firestarter and The Shining are pretty much re-runs of Carrie, and Carrie is pretty much a re-run of The Exorcist. King’s imagination is a plodding, overweight beast - if it galloped across someone’s brain its hooves would be tearing out a lot more than mystic crescents (mystic ponds sounds about right). Not that you could ever imagine it galloping, and on the evidence of Insomnia, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder, it couldn’t even get up a canter nowadays.

To sum up then: King’s prose is at best functional. Sometimes it’s crass. His powers of characterization are at best feeble. Sometimes they fail him altogether. His plots are at best derivative. Sometimes they verge on plagiarism. And yet despite all that I enjoy reading Stephen King a hell of a lot. It’s quite possible you do too. Millions of other people certainly do. Why?

Well, I don’t think I can answer for you or those millions of other people - though I’ll have a go a little later on - but for me King has some more than one virtue to set against his vices. His intelligence, for example. He may sometimes be a crass writer but I don’t think he’s ever a stupid one, and if a writer’s intelligence doesn’t guarantee that his fiction will be any good, it can help a lot. I think one of the ways King’s intelligence shows itself is in his sense of humor. It’s quiet, and it’s not always easy to notice, but there’s definitely some p*ss-taking going on in his writing. Maybe there’s more going on than I’ve managed to notice myself, and maybe I wouldn’t even have noticed that much if I hadn’t come across the word "satirist" in one study of King, but once I had come across it I found it easy to agree with. Stephen King sends up some aspects of American life and some kinds of American people something rotten. Better still, he means to do so. If you don’t agree or don’t agree that this is an important part of his writing, try his novel Needful Things or, for less and better-written of the same, his short story "The Revelations of ’Becka Paulson":

"Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Zenith television and He had been in that same spot for just about twenty years. Before resting atop the Zenith, He had rested atop two RCAS (Joe Paulson always bought American). This was a beautiful 3-D picture of Jesus that Rebecca’s sister, who lived in Portsmouth, had sent her."

Then Rebecca accidentally shoots herself in the head with her husband’s .22 target pistol, does something to her brain, and finds that the 3-D Jesus on the top of the Zenith TV is able to talk to her:

"Joe's granddad was a whoremaster of the purest ray serene, as you well know, 'Becka. Spent his whole life pecker-led. And when he came up here, do you know what we said? 'No room!', that's what we said."

But to satirize American life, he has to depict it, and that’s another of the things I like him for. Well, one of the things I used to like him for. Even though I live in the UK, the unofficial 51st state, I’m not as interested in America as I used to be, but back when I did enjoy learning about American culture from the inside, Stephen King was one of the people I went to. How successful he is I can’t say because I have no direct experience to compare his depictions against, but as records of American speech-patterns and idioms and class-structures and everyday life in the latter half of the twentieth-century I think his books may retain their value much longer than they retain their value as literature.

Not that I think they’ve got much value as literature now. Not literature with a big "L", anyway. Not literature in the sense that it applies to someone like Evelyn Waugh, for example. I’ve re-read Waugh’s Put Out More Flags more times than I’ve ever read any of King’s books, and though Put Out More Flags does weigh in at only 200-odd pages compared to the 400- or 500-odd of your average Stephen King novel, it’s isn’t just a matter of page count. I enjoy Waugh in a different and deeper way. If Waugh’s books and King’s books were food, Waugh’s would be haute cuisine and King’s would be would be fish’n’chips. That’s the difference between them: the similarity is that though I keep going back for further helpings. I know exactly what’s going to happen in Put Out More Flags, but I keep on re-reading it. I know exactly what’s going to happen in Christine, but I keep on re-reading it. I go back to Waugh because I enjoy his prose and his wit. I go back to King because I enjoy his story-telling. I want to see what happens to his characters even when I already know what’s going to happen to them.

Which brings me to the attempt I said I was going to make a few paragraphs back: the attempt to say why King appeals to so many people, not all of whom notice his intelligence, not all of whom get the jokes, not all of whom even care about story-telling, at least not in literary form. To be as popular a writer as Stephen King, I think a lot of your readers have to fall into the same category as a lot of Dick Francis’s readers are said to fall into: the category of people who don’t like books other than books by one particular author. The Queen Mum (God rot her) is said to be like that with Dick Francis, and I think a lot of people will be like that with Stephen King. They don’t like books in general but they do like books by Stephen King.

If so, then I think it will be because books by Stephen King are not like books in general. Books by Stephen King are more like celluloid than cellulose. Reading one is like watching a movie. Only a much longer and more detailed and (in the UK at least) gorier movie than you could ever watch at the cinema. King was weaned on horror movies and I think it’s influenced his books ever since. They are full of incidents that get their power from their indirect appeal to the only two senses that can be directly appealed to on film: seeing and hearing:

"A bloody hand rose out of the huddle of white coats, like the hand of a drowning man. The fingers were streaked with gore and shreds of tissue hung from them. The hand smacked the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a large comma. The chart rattled up on its roller with a smacking sound."

None of the senses can be directly appealed to in writing, because writing uses language and language cannot create what it describes, only evoke it (except, weakly, in onomatopoeia). Film, on the other hand, directly creates the objects with which it tells a story: the sounds and shapes and colours evoked by the written passage above would, in a film based on them, be perceived not indirectly, by a translation of symbols, but directly, in a way that by-passes the imagination. That is the power of film and also its weakness. That is the weakness of language and also its power. Language is at the same distance from all the senses and doesn’t depend on any of them: film is very close to two of them, and is handicapped by that.

Well, in fact things aren’t as clear-cut as that. Human beings are visual and aural animals: we devote much more of ours brains to seeing and hearing than we do to touching, tasting, and smelling, and we don’t make as much use of the parts devoted to the latter three as we could (or should). These facts about our physiology are reflected in our culture and languages: it’s much easier to talk about what we see or hear than about what we touch or taste or smell. Nevertheless, language is far more flexible than film: Stephen King could describe, say, someone being strangled in absolute silence in a pitch-black room and describe it in detail. But he never has done that and (I’d reckon) never will, and that will be because it would be impossible to put on a scene like that on film. In detail, that is - all you’d have is a black screen and no sound, so unless you set things up beforehand and showed what had happened afterwards, the scene wouldn’t mean anything. If it can’t be seen and it can’t be heard, film can’t represent it except indirectly. On film, a character has to react overtly to a smell or a touch-impression (see what I mean about our sensorily impoverished language?) or the audience won’t know that a smell or a touch-impression is supposed to be there. In writing, a character doesn’t have to react overtly, because writing also gives us access us to his or her thoughts.

This probably has something to do with the fact that smells, for example, don’t turn up in Stephen King’s writing unless they’re strong ones, that is, ones whose presence can easily be represented on film because characters are going to react to them by commenting on them or wrinkling their noses in close-up:

""Do you smell it?"
"Yes."
"It's worse back here, isn't it?"
"Yes."

But smell can’t a very strong part of the thesis I’m trying to present here, because it doesn’t play much part in any literature I’ve ever come across, and King, as a horror writer, probably uses it more than writers in general. Nor is this a function of the "death of the senses" in modern life: flicking through the Iliad and the Odyssey at this point, I don’t immediately spot any references to smell, but I do spot plenty of references to sight, and plenty of evidence that Homeric man too was heavily dependant his eyes: Odysseus is "swift-footed" even when he’s sitting down.

What might be useful for my thesis is to compare King’s treatment of reality with the treatment used by a pre-cinematic author. Anthony Trollope, for example. It’s striking how little direct description there is in Trollope: he isn’t interested in what his characters look like or where they live, rather in what they say and do and how they relate to each other. Appearances are important not for helping the reader to visualize a scene but for helping him to know more about the characters in the scene:

"His lordship was at home, and the two visitors were shown through the accustomed hall into the well-known room, where the good old bishop used to sit. The furniture had been bought at a valuation, and every chair and table, every bookshelf against the wall, and every square in the carpet, was as well known to each of them as their own bedrooms. Nevertheless they at once felt that they were strangers there. The furniture was for the most part the same, yet the place had been metamorphosed. A new sofa had been introduced, a horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligeous: such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had given way. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had originally been a rich and goodly ruby had been degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr. Harding, however, thought that the old reddish brown much preferable to the guady buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs. Proudie had deemed good enough for her husband’s own room in the provincial city of Barchester."

That description sets both scene and emotions in a way that would be impossible (or much more difficult) on film unless the viewer had already seen what the room looked like before the Proudies occupied it. Even then it is a rare instance of Trollope referring directly to appearances: his books are full of dialog and apostrophes by the author and descriptions of and speculations on character and are, in one way, very flat and two-dimensional compared to King’s books. The way they are very flat and two-dimensional is that one can rarely, perhaps never, visualize clearly what is taking place.

This is less true in a similarly pre-cinematic author like Charles Dickens, but in Dickens too the descriptions of reality are there more to establish emotion and character than to help the reader in his visualization:

"And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change: not a knocker, but Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot-air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression. [A Christmas Carol, "Marley's Ghost".]

King, as a modern writer, doesn’t combine emotion and description in this way, and though he does of course use description to establish character he does so in ways that are often quite clearly meant to appeal to a cinematic sensibility. You couldn’t imagine Charles Dickens writing the following, and you couldn’t imagine Stephen King writing it either if he hadn’t been weaned on film:

"Mr Gaunt reached between shade and glass to remove the sign which read

OPEN

He replaced it with the one he had taken from behind the curtain, then went to the show window to watch Alan Pangborne approach. Pangborn looked into the window Gaunt was looking out of for some time before approaching the door; he even cupped his hands and pressed his nose against the glass for a few seconds. Although Gaunt was standing right in front of him with his arms folded, the Sheriff did not see him."

A Victorian writer would not have written that scene because it depends for its effect on a double viewpoint. The viewpoint is one that’s perfectly familiar to modern readers because it’s a cinematic one, and the scene is perfectly suited to a translation into film - and perhaps it was deliberately written to be. Film rights are where the real money in writing is, after all, and King is definitely writing nowadays with the film rights in mind.

But the influence of cinema on literature has paradoxes, and one of them is that literature is no longer illustrated unless it’s intended for children. Dickens’ novels had drawings in them: King’s don’t. Is this because Dickens’ novels were not appealing directly to vision and hearing while King’s are? I think it is: we don’t want to see a drawing in a King novel because it would get in the way of the private film-of-the-book we are running in our heads as we read it. Although drawing too is a visual medium, it has conventions and quirks that are separate from those of film, and drawing, like photography but unlike film, is as silent as it is static.

Which is, for drawing and photography, both a disadvantage and an advantage. Each is much better at capturing a moment or strong single impression than film is, and do so more cheaply and conveniently than film ever does. They’re better because they "freeze" time and allow a single moment of it to be viewed over and over again, quickly, conveniently, and at the whim of the viewer.

"Cinematic" writing can achieve the same effect and King himself has said that he tries to scare his readers first but if he can’t scare them, then he isn’t proud: he’ll go for the gross-out. He achieves it too. Lucky the Clown gnashing his razor-teeth together and sending bloody fragments of his lips flying in It… Buddy Repperton’s legs being smashed in the snow by a possessed 1957 Plymouth in Christine… Annie Wilkes driving her lawnmower over the head of a highway trooper in Misery…

But notice that I don’t remember the exact words, only the images. Readers of Trollope or Dickens will remember the characters; readers of King remember the pictures, which is why the story of King and his readers is really the story of King and the eye.



Recommended: Yes