Stephen King: Hack or Artist?

[diebitter]

I am reading 'The Green Mile' as part of the book club here, and enjoying the writing a lot, and that has got me thinking on Stepen King and his works.

I really like Stephen King...some of his work I love, some I can read and forget. Some I've even stopped halfway through cos I found it self-indulgent ('The Tommyknockers' if you're wondering). However, King is to me the planet's greatest living storyteller at this point. Okay, I've not read every book out (who has?), and I therefore make this call with some degree of ignorance, but I still stand by it. I'm not saying he's a literary genius, or even a great artist, I'm saying the man really, really knows and understands how to tell stories, and how to bring his characters, backstories and main story to life in a way that most writers can only dream of.

Of course, he doesn't do this for every story. Some of his works are mundane (I'd class Carrie as pretty much straight pulp fiction, for example), some are a bit silly (it is blasphemous to many I think, but I find the Dark Tower series a little silly, but just about holds up with the sheer drive and vividness of the writing), but some are masterful.


In my own head, the average Stephen King book is about 90% craftsman, 10% artistry. King is a good crasftman in his writing, and makes his writing clean and straight. No tortuous sentences, not particularly flowery, he says what he has to and gets on with it. He also knows how to put an emotional kick into his works by dropping in the equivalent of an emotional 'nails running down a board' when he wants to. (example: in Pet Semetary, he gives a wonderful little passage about a father playing with his little boy - called 'Gage' - where they fly a kite on a windy day, and it sounds wonderful...but King ends the whole passage with the line something like 'He didn't know Gage would be dead inside 6 weeks.')

Okay, some might consider that cheap, but boy is it a kick in the head.

Like I say, the 'average' book is 90% craft/10% art, and sometimes the balance is more like 100% craft and little art (eg Desperation) - this doesn't make the book bad, it just makes it less emotionally engaging and fulfilling. Even the 90/10 split can produce some great books (eg The Stand, Salem's
Lot, The Dead Zone), but when the balance starts edging towards 80/20, then you get some lovely writing and story telling. Examples of this would be It, or the first 3 stories of 'Different Seasons' (which are Shawkshank Redemption, Apt Pupil and The Body (made into the movie 'Stand by Me'). The Green Mile edges close to that level too. In these books, he transcends craftsmanship and places you in worlds you believe he must have been part of, so authentic are his words and backstory elements - sometimes it is like reading 1/3 Steinbeck, 1/3 Hemmingway and 1/3 Eliot rolled into one an dragged into the modern day - it's that good (IMO). He becomes absolutely convincing in putting you into the story and making you understand where the characters are and are going.

Even his non-fiction works (Danse Macabre, On Writing) hold up darn well and fit the above pattern (90/10), and are thoroughly recommended.


If you've never tried Stephen King cos you're under the impression he's a hack, I urge you to try some sometime.


Recommended tries:

The Green Mile
Different Seasons
It


So, what do you all think?