Is Stephen King a Hack?
Or is that just too much education talking
If you recall, I break down novelists into two types: writers and storytellers. Most who make a living as novelists are storytellers. Their skill lies in their ability to keep you turning the page. They generally do not write in aesthetically or artistically pleasing way, don’t have large ideas or philosophical ruminations they want their fiction to convey. They just keep your attention, which is no small feat. Writers, on the other hand, are more concerned with the quality of their prose, the way it looks on the page, the way it sounds, the atmosphere of the story rather than its mechanics.
These tend to be academics or write for an audience of professional writers and critics rather than a broad public. Many of these have MFA degrees and the like, can be quite pretentious, and often boring unto death. They do tend to be better prose stylists however, and if you are willing tolerate not being entertained every single page, they can be very rewarding. But they are not necessarily for everyone. But they are also the types who win awards, have their names published in anthologies, have classes taught about them in universities. There is more prestige there, if less of an audience.
I bring this up again because I have been thinking about how I learned to read. This is because of my students, who don’t read and who don’t seem to read fiction anymore. And I don’t mean functionally, but how I learned to read novels, how to understand them and appreciate them. The answer, as with most things, is imitation: I read what my father read, because I naturally imitated him. The first two novels I can remember reading (both of them when I was ten years old) were Call of the Wild, by Jack London, and the other was Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers.
The one novel is easy to explain. My family always had dogs growing up (I have a German Shepherd) and I love dogs, so a novel from the point of view of a dog came all too naturally to me. I am not the greatest fan of naturalism in literature, and the last thing I read by London was his novella The Sea Wolf, years ago, after I had seen a television movie based on it starring Christopher Reeve and Charles Bronson.
King, on the other hand, I read mostly because my father read him. But once I read Tommyknockers, I was hooked. His novels became a sort of obsession for many years. I believe I read most of what he wrote prior to 1990 at one point, though it has been many years now since I have read any of his novels. You can guess why: university and especially graduate school tends to bleed the taste for the supernatural or the weird right out of you, and this explains much of it. But I am also afraid I succumbed to the allure of snobbery; once you learned to read boring but well written novels and other literature, you tend to look down your nose at reading for entertainment.
But then tastes do change as you grow older, as you change. King is a billionaire and spends much of his time as a shitlib internet troll these days, but I can’t help thinking how important reading his novels at an early age was for me. His were in some sense the first “grownup” books I ever read. Part of the reason people look down their noses at King (besides, I suspect, envy at his success), is that he indulges in people’s tastes for fantasy, for the supernatural and the just plain weird. That was one of the reasons I loved him as an adolescent. More than this, King was and remains a great storyteller, someone who makes you have to turn the next page to find out what happens next.
King possessed a talent for placing the familiar (his New England setting, characters that appear familiar to 20th century Americans) in his bizarre stories. He was no master prose stylist but some of his short stories, like “The Body” (turned into the film Stand By Me) are poignant and remain with readers. They are memorable. I have not read Tommyknockers in over thirty five years (Jesus Christ I am old!), but I can tell you the plot off the top of my head: a woman named Bobbi Anderson discovers something digging in her back yard which begins altering her and the people of her small town. The only person unaffected by this is her lover, Jim Gardener, a drunken poet with a metal plate in his head. The source of the change, which soon becomes lethal, is revealed to be an alien space ship, which somehow contains the mind or spirit of the aliens, who have been slowly taking over the people of the town.
You may snicker at the story—in the past I have, I am sad to say—but as a kid it hooked me on reading. It is difficult to overstate how much it meant to read that novel (and many others) of King’s at that age. HIs stories grabbed hold of me the way that only a really good storyteller can, so much so that you feel depressed after having finished reading because you to go back to your day to day reality. If I went on to accumulate too much education and too many degrees, which led me to desire more from literature than great storytelling, well, that never would have happened without the novels of Stephen King.
Actually, I think you can say more than this. Not only is King not a write of trash novels, I think you can make the case he deserves a place in American literature. Not the highest. He’s not Shakespeare, or Faulkner, or anyone like that. But it seems to me good popular reading is more scarce than the haute literature valued by, well, people like me I suppose. I believe at least a couple, maybe one or two more of his novels rise beyond the level of mere entertainment, and capture something important about American culture his time. One is Misery, his novel about a writer who is held captive by an obsessed fan. The relevance of this for modern American society, in which celebrities have been stalked (including King, whose experience inspired the novel) and even killed, ought to be obvious.
The other is Salem’s Lot, King’s first published novel. The story about a writer who goes back to his childhood home town in New England and discovers that a vampire has moved into an old house there, and is slowly bleeding the town dry, so to speak. If this doesn’t sound like a great American novel, consider the timing of its publication and its origins. A few years ago, I went back and reread Salem’s Lot, and it confirmed this for me.
Salem’s Lot was published in 1975, and King wrote it while watching the Watergate Hearings on television. Politics aside, the Vietnam War saw trust in the American government and in institutions more generally speaking plummeted. They have never recovered and have been joined by other institutions—the press, religious bodies, etc. Imagine that you have spent your whole life believing that your leaders were trustworthy, honest and had your best interest at heart, only to have it revealed to you they were lying to you, and acting in ways that harmed you. This has been the experience of a great many people in the past half century and more in America
If you were looking for a metaphor, or perhaps a sort of allegory for this loss of trust, you could hardly do better than Salem’s Lot. The story trades on a universal experience, that of going back to one’s childhood home as an adult and finding it smaller, changed. King takes this experience and supercharges it: not only is your home town smaller, the town elders are under the thumb of a blood sucking vampire. This is how many have felt about a great many institutions in American life, and King’s novel captures some of this.
There is an exchange in the novel that captures this sense, that not everything is as it seems, that doesn’t deal directly with vampires. In the novel, a Catholic priest is trying to explain to the main character why the Catholic Church doesn’t take the supernatural as seriously as it once did and instead focuses on worldly problems. (This is only ten years after the Second Vatican Council, in which the Catholic Church “updated” its teachings for the modern world). Matt, one of the main characters, thinks there is a vampire in town and wants the priest to investigate. Their exchange is worth quoting in full:
“You see, the overall concept of evil in the Catholic Church has undergone a radical change in this century. Do you know what caused it?”
“I imagine it was Freud.”
“Very good. The Catholic Church began to cope with a new concept as it marched into the twentieth century: evil with a small ‘e.’ With a devil that was not a red-horned monster complete with spiked tail and cloven hooves, or a serpent crawling through the garden—although that is a remarkably apt psychological image. The devil, according to the Gospel According to Freud, would be a gigantic composite id, the subconscious of all of us.”
“Surely a more stupendous concept than red-tailed boogies or demons with such sensitive noses that they can be banished with one good fart from a constipated churchman,” Matt said.
“Stupendous, of course. But impersonal. Merciless. Untouchable. Banishing Freud’s devil is as impossible as Shylock’s bargain—to extract a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil—bombers over Cambodia, the war in Ireland and the Middle East, cop-killings and ghetto riots, the billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats. It is in the process of shedding its old medicine-man skin and reemerging as a socially active, socially conscious body. The inner city rap-center ascendant over the confessional. Communion playing second fiddle to the civil rights movement and urban renewal. The church has been in the process of planting both feet in this world.”
“Where there are no witches or incubi or vampires,” Matt said, “but only child-beating, incest, and the rape of the environment.”
“Yes.”
Matt said deliberately, “And you hate it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Callahan said quietly. “I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile.
Matt gets the priest, a Father Callahan (I know, a bit on the nose), to intervene. Fr. Callahan eventually confronts the vampire, but his lack of faith undoes him. The vampire does not kill him but bites him and forces him to drink his blood, and Callahan leaves town on a bus, presumably now to feed as a vampire.
As one of the great changes of my adult life is my conversion to Catholicism, and having become a traditional Catholic at that, I found this scene one of the most haunting in the book. It is in some ways the perfect allegory for an institution that has lost faith in what it believes and so can no longer confront evil.
The book as a whole has a sort of Protestant feel to it, in a way; the notes on my Kindle version of the novel make note of this several times. There are numerous cliches in the book, not the least of which is King’s favorite, that every small town is just full of evil lurking around every corner. Some of it feels like it came out of a bad comic book. Again, it is not Shakespeare.
But it captures that loss of faith and yet still holds out hope for the future, even if it is a desperate one. The main character, Ben, heads out of town with a young boy named Mark. They head down to Mexico, where the boy is baptized by a Catholic priest. The novel ends with them returning to Salem’s Lot and starting a fire, meant to engulf the town and drive the remaining vampires out of their hiding places to finish them off.
In the version I have, there is additional material that I think is unnecessary, and somewhat ruins the cohesion of the story, and some of which is just schlock. I am not sure if it was added for a later edition (I believe it was), but as it ends with the original epilogue, Salem’s Lot is a great novel. It is not The Sound and the Fury, but it is genuine literature, and not cheap entertainment.
Again, I think much of what King has written probably is merely entertainment. But so what? It is fine entertainment, mostly, and surely better than most could have done. But not all of it, and it would be inaccurate to say otherwise. What I am saying, I think, is that he is not a talentless hack, and I am grateful his novels spurred in me a love of reading that has never left me.