The Shroud Underground

A lot of people in the academic community say Stephen King should never have a place in literature. I strongly disagree with this. What do you think and why?

King's own success has made him a target for this kind of uniformed nonsense. I suspect the people that suggest he has no place in "Literature" have never read his work. His premises are just the canvas, his skill as a writer makes those stories literature.

I want to Quote one line of his from Blaze. In the intro he warns readers this is a Trunk book from his Bachman days, so go get your money back now if you were expecting one of his latest works.

This is from the top of page 72. "When Maggie came out, there were tears in her eyes and more on her face, but she wasn'r sobbing. BLaze felt proud of her. When she passed his desk on her way to the door (seventh-graders were in another room), he gave her a smile. And she smiled back. Blaze folded that smile, put it away, and kept it for years."


nuff said.

As far as Stephen King's work it sits on a delicate fence. You read his stories and he makes you sweat in fear, you want to but cannot put them down, and the ideas (while not necessarily revolutionary or meant strictly for the betterment of the human condition) are creative by definition. A clown that turns into your last fear, terrorizing children and them as adults is one thing, but even looking past the delicious horror, The Stand was quite a tantalizing read.

I think a large part of the negativity against King comes from the large mass of work he has amounted. Book after book after book, it becomes more difficult to hold them ALL as high as other authors. But Asimov did the same, and even Cohen branched into different forms of work.

I enjoy almost all of his work, and for that reason alone, I personally accept it as literature. That reason is good enough for me. =)

I totally agree with y'all. There's no denying he's a great writer.

Plus, his influence in horror and in popular culture is unmistakable. I once read Charles Dickens was like King in this respect. He was, at the time, the world's most famous writer and yet the critics of his era bashed him and felt he had no place in literature. They're probably rolling around in their graves now.

It just pisses me off that a pack of pompous pontificating professors are sitting around presenting the plausible paradigm whether or not King's putrid prose is a publishable piece of potential pretentious pulitzer literature, or just preschool pulp.


Pummel the Pricks is my predicament.

I dunno. I always figured literature was an awfully big word for stuff you can read if you want to.

I guess Stephen King fits in there just fine, by that definition.

Mileage may vary.

I guess you could call it pop-literature, "water cooler" horror. I would never use the sole basis of success as a means for derision (I'm a cult film buff but also appreciate many works of Spielberg), but... well the best I ever heard it put is that King's works have become self-indulgent "love letters to his fans". In this postmodern age, popular authors write with the awareness of having a huge following, unlike Lovecraft or Poe who wrote their works not knowing how important they'd be decades later. I think King's books will die with his target audience (ever been to the book section in a Goodwill?), and centuries from now good ol' Edgar & Howard will continue to have a lasting impact. I King will be remembered mostly because of the films based on his work. (the few good ones, that is)

But I don't have any strong feelings about King either way as an author, this is just my analysis, I'm not trying to piss off King fans. The only thing I will strongly declare is that King is completely incompetent as a film director and should never be let behind a camera. Have you seen Maximum Overdrive?!

The people who say King isn't literature are usually bitter and pompous. On the other end of that spectrum are the people who think the horror genre in general is crap. These tend to be the same people who think that they don't need to read a book because they paid attention to "most of a season of 24".

Honestly, I have seen some looks from people when I tell them "Yes, I'm a horror writer" that would strike lesser men dead in their tracks.

I've also seen incidents where you'd get more respect saying you write "erotic harry potter furry fan-fic" than horror. The are also the kind of people that don't feel that King is literature, but that Naruto manga should be on a school's reading list.

The fact is this man wrote The Stand, one of the best books written in the last half of the 20th century. If that book isn't going to be respected, than none of us should even worry about how people look at our work.

Lovecraft was considered crap his entire life, and now what's going on? You can't turn around without seeing his touch on popular art, be it comics, movies, and literature. Maybe these people should try to read something before they try to tell us it's not literature.

watchman83 wrote: Have you seen Maximum Overdrive?!

OK... I must have really bad tastes in movies, 'cause I liked Maximum Overdrive.

Watchman has an interesting point. I have not cared for King's last several books. "Bag of Bones" was the last I really enjoyed, and even that, I felt, got off to an obscenely slow start. I couldn't get into "Cell" (is that bad for a zombie fan?) and although I thought "Lisey's Story" was written with a great deal of tenderness, it wasn't the great read I was hoping for. This is ironic considering that he has been getting a lot of attention from the "literary establishment" in recent years, it seems.

Literature-wise, I far prefer his earliest works, especially the short stories. My personal favorite is "The Shining," though "Salem's Lot" comes in a close second. Those are the books I would read if I were trying to achieve a certain atmosphere in my own work.

Speaking of King, the guys at Marvel Comics are doing several comic book mini-series books based in the world of The Stand. It looks really cool. It's going to go into some of the characters, more into Flagg, etc, so it won't be a full on retelling of the novel, but it looks like it's going to rock. King is fully behind it and has approved everything that's been done for the books. I think it'll be 5 mini-series sets, and there will be 6 in total, so thirty issues total in the long run.

If anything King has written is proof that his work is literature, The Stand is it. And the fact that it can transcend so many genres is more proof of that to me.

I heard somewhere that King writes at a 5th grade level.

Or something like that.

Whatever the case, he's a very popular author which makes him a bigger target for people who like to bitch.

I enjoyed his latest book Duma Key, and I have always been fond of his style of writing; especially his older works. When I read his stuff it's almost like revisiting an old friend.

I like his films too; even the "bad" ones, like Maximum Overdrive and Storm of the Century and The Langoliers.

And like isaiyan said;
"he's a very popular author which makes him a bigger target for people who like to bitch."

I completely agree with that.

I have the following opinion on Stephen King:

His novels sort of hit the peak a long time ago. The man can still weave a tale, but aspects of those tales have become mundane, predictable with him. The main character will suffer some sort of automobile accident. They will be a non-smoker. They won't drink very often. The plot will be...almost normal, right up until the end, when it will take a supernatural left turn.

His horror novels, though, seem written for a target audience. His early works, however...the St. Bernard that ends a child's life, the despondent shunned girl taunted and finally snapping...those are chilling images. The Stand, a picture of a world where good finally must battle evil, or the Dark Tower series, a search for redemption by a man whose own nature won't let him be redeemed. Those are novels that will carry, that will stay.

In addition to the actual "classics", we have Blaze, The Long Walk, Rage, Roadwork...books that are King but aren't at the same time. Then we have his short stories, which is, in my opinion, the strongest argument for his work beign literature. It is rare that a story actually scares me, but 1408 did it. It is rare that a short story moves me, leaves me wondering and hoping, straining for the character, but "All That you Love Will Be Carried Away" made a human connection.

Nobody can say what, if any, of his works will be remembered by future generations, and if even then they will be remembered as obscenely long penny dreadfuls for bored housewives. Only time will tell that. I can say, for me, that his work may not be literature, but I do enjoy most of it.

Course, that's just me. And Lord knows I'm no expert.

I say without a doubt that King is "literature."

I think he just got pigeonholed into being this Book Machine that pumped out a 600-1000 page book every 12 months and those who don't read his stuff just assume that it's all drivel. However...

Read Salems' Lot. Or Pet Semetary. There are horrors on top of horrors and under it all is a very inticate weaving of human lives and the frailty that supports them. Read these terrifying stories and then read the final 100 pages of the final Dark Tower book. Or Duma Key. Duma Key was probably the most touching thing he has written in his entire career.

To be able to make you sweat in terror AND weep within just a few pages shows that he's a talented author. Granted, he's released some duds (Bag of Bones still angers me and I have yet to make it through Delores Claiborne) but the man is good. Damned good.