I've recently started reading some of King's newer* works and find that, largely, the skills that made his early writing so powerful and horrifying have held up. (*NOTE: To me, the defining break point in King's career was the 1999 accident that nearly killed him and threw him into a bizarre semi-retirement that lasted until the second half of the last decade. What I feel is true about this incident is, like many near-death experiences, it focused him and led him to complete unfinished projects (such as the Dark Tower series), and also that - in a strange way - it improved his writing style. I've never written horror, but I do believe that writing horrifying stuff well requires background real-life material to make the content work. Further, it's my opinion that most of King's work produced in the ten years preceding his accident was his weakest - maybe because King, a recovering alcoholic, was sober and happy in his life. But somehow, in some way, getting hit by a minivan and almost dying led an aging man to write with a youthful pen again. I find it fascinating.)
As is deserving for anyone who can perform at a high level for nearly 40 years, King has won numerous literary awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the National Book series. When this happened, the criticism from the academic literary elite (while not unanimous - some critics realized what I'm about to write, which was nice) was fairly devastating. Below is but one example (which I've pulled from King's Wikipedia page, so take with a grain of salt), from literary critic and renowned douchebag Harold Bloom, who wrote: "[King] shares nothing with Edgar Allen Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."
Bloom does have a point, in the shallowest sense possible - King shares little with Poe. Poe's writing is dry, stodgy, and carries the same mainstream appeal as an article regarding econometric analysis of paying for prostitutes. The idea that King's writing should be the same as Poe's, however, is frightening to me and leads me to the main point of this post. Wherever intellectual capital is spent in academia, whether with regard to cancer research or social psychology, global warming or what constitutes "quality" fiction, there is sometimes a tendency to emphasize the complex over the simple. The inaccessible over the obvious. And this, quite frankly, seems incorrect to me (at least in some instances).
If you look at it through the lens of a technician, King's writing is not the highest quality writing in the fiction universe. He does not use huge words often (though, when he uses them, they are almost always in the correct context), his sentence structure can lack complexity, and the dialogue he creates can, at its worst, remind a reader of the script of a George Lucas movie (particularly when through the vehicle of a female or a minority character - though he deserves credit for ignoring his own weaknesses and putting so many of these characters in his novels).
I think, though, that if you asked King questions about the three points I've just mentioned in the last paragraph, he would tell you that this isn't what he's trying to accomplish in the first place. He's trying to accomplish a feeling - specifically, he's trying to freak his Constant Readers the fuck out - and for this, and for this only, he will never receive the full critical acclaim that he deserves.***************************
The 1990 complete and uncut version of King's The Stand is, far and away, the most frightening novel I will ever read. (In the novel, an accident releases a powerful chemical weapon that kills almost all of the world within two weeks from a horrible version of the flu virus. That's only half the story, and I implore you to read the whole thing though it's over 1,000 pages long. However, it's all you need to know in order for me to make my point.) What makes it most frightening is the prophetic realism of the end-of-the-world scenario - the idea that our human-made technologies may one day outpace us with drastic consequences is a theme that permeates much of King's canon, but nowhere are the implications so crisp nor the details so specific as the first 400 pages (or so) of The Stand. King builds up intricate emotional backstories for about a hundred or so characters, and then kills almost all of them. Mercilessly. It's an incredible literary feat, and the story goes on (and gets better) from this point forward.
(ASIDE: On the other end of the spectrum is the Dark Tower series, a 4,000+ page narrative, written over thirty years and over seven volumes, that I find just as intriguing - though the story centers around less than ten (maybe even fewer) characters. It's a Tolkien-esque endeavor reading so many pages of description - the novels sometimes lack dialogue almost entirely for hundreds of pages at a time - but the writing is so crisp and the suspense so strong that I sometimes can't put the books down for hours at a time. I bring this up as an illustration of King's ability to write effectively in more than one literary context. He's also dabbled in poetry, though I don't care for it.)
In my senior year of high school, I was given free rein - or so I thought - to select my own topic for my English thesis. It had been six years or so since I'd read The Stand (I was WAYYYY too young for reading it the first time, but that's what I did and I'll let mental-health professionals sort out the rest), but I'd sensed a parallel between the end-of-the-world scenario contained therein and the poetry of William Butler Yeats (specifically, 1919's "The Second Coming," for those who are interested). My idea (or how I remember it, a decade later) was to integrate the two works into a coherent whole, trying to understand how two completely disparate pieces of fiction, written in two different generations, can reflect the attitudes of the public in times of distress.
I think it would have been an excellent paper, but it was shot down in its original form by my teacher, who did not feel that Stephen King was a serious writer and did not want my thesis paper to be focused on such a silly topic. Now, in her defense, what I ended up writing was sent to Ivy League admissions departments in an attempt to get me off of wait lists - so she had a huge point in the general sense that other people would be reading the paper. But thinking back to my entire academic career, this was the paper I wish I'd written to this very day - the events of September 11, 2001 were not yet a year old, and I'd understood something that I think was a hell of a point to make in print.
People read things like The Stand (and "The Second Coming," I suppose) because they relate to the emotional aspect of frightening scenarios. It builds them up, somehow, it gives them strength, and perhaps like riding a roller coaster or skydiving, it feels cool. It's the reason why, as much as many of King's readers enjoy his stories, they almost always stay for his first person exit-ludes; they stay for the explanations of the stories, the motivations and what went into writing the story that had just been read. It's slightly pretentious to do such a thing, sure, but it makes things seem human again. It's like the cool-down period after vigorous exercise or after a psychological experiment. It makes sense.
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In retrospect, the failed thesis paper experiment of 2002 explains a lot about the trajectory my career took. I ended up a better social scientist than I would ever have made a writer (though I still think I can - and will - write something useful, one day). Getting back to Ol' Steve, I feel that critical respect for King's "low culture" stories will always depend on the critic's appreciation of an emotional approach to writing. To the extent that an observer can get beyond the Holy shit, this was really effective at scaring people analysis of King's best writing and move onto the Well, how did he make that happen? analysis, what they'll find is the idea that good writing doesn't necessarily need to be difficult to understand.
Quality literature only needs to move the whole damn paradigm of what good writing is forward - and no one has done this more effectively over the past forty years than King.
