As a joke (not joke) when talking about great writers,
specifically perhaps great American writers but a Canadian audience often
forgets to specify, I often tell my students that Stephen King’s problem is he
needs to die.
Morbid
humour, sure, but I’ve got a feeling Mr. King would probably get it.
There
are two writers I consider the greatest living American masters of words:
Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King. McCarthy writes prose that sing of the page,
complicated, mad, rife with perfect and yet utterly unique similes. His
characters are impossibly, inhumanly over-human, but I find myself lamenting
his talent because it’s being used consistently to express a world view that is
nihilistic, fatalistic, and anti-human. If his writing is his heart—and I’ve seen
enough consistency across his work to believe it is—then he thinks the very
worst of our race.
He
presents humanity in a very awful light, casting the gleam on the tube we’re
flushing ourselves down. It’s cynical, it’s beautiful, it’s rare. He is unarguably
a genius.
“Stephen
King writes horror.” Agreed, but I’d say Stephen King writes horror well. He
also writes humans well, love well, fantasy well, shock well. He creates human
characters that are somehow based on the people you know. He does this consistently.
And yet, he is not given his due. He’s too popular, too prolific, too readable.
In the
seventh book of his stunning Dark Tower
series (his opus, well, his latest opus, after The Stand, after It, and
before whatever his next opus will be unless he does the sensible thing and dies)
he writes himself in and a character has heard of him says she’s only read a
few of his books because she doesn’t like him. The Gunslinger asks her why she
didn’t stop at just one of his books.
Truth:
find me a person who has read only one Stephen King book.
The
man is one of the greatest writers in American history, a genius of the craft,
a wonder of style. He’s what we all aspire to be. But because he sells millions
and because he usually errs on the side of page-turning creepiness, he
sometimes falls below Mr. McCarthy. Because his heroes often win, because he
believes in all of his darkness that good usually wins, he’s somehow the
lesser.
Stephen
King is a gift. An author prolific, diverse, whose fine-wined personality pours
out onto the page, into his speaking engagements, onto his website. Only death
will grant him the respect he has long deserved. I think he’d dig the irony.
