Has Stephen King Lost It?
December 15, 2003
by Chris Orcutt

Has Stephen King lost it? No, I don’t mean has he "lost" his mind. He's got a few screws loose, as I suspect we all do. I mean – has he lost the ability to captivate readers with engrossing thrillers filled with deep characterizations and dark, enthralling plots?

This raises the question of whether he ever had it in the first place. Anyone who considers himself or herself "literate" or a "serious reader" will generally turn their nose up at the mention of Stephen King. Sure, he won a prestigious O. Henry Prize and was given an honorary National Book Award, but generally no one considers him a serious writer. For example, at the National Book Awards ceremony the author who won the fiction prize turned her nose up at his speech, saying she just hasn't "had time to get around to one" of his books, citing Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad as her current priorities.

More than any of the arts, literature can be the ultimate example of the emperor with no clothes. The hot new fiction book, garnering fantastic reviews in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books, often turns out to be a piece of crap that people struggle to get through so they can rave about it at length, or at least have a copy on their bookshelf or coffee table. The Corrections comes to mind, or almost anything by Umberto Eco. If you're writing endlessly about the dysfunctionality of modern life or cleverly weaving semiotics into a story based in the middle ages you're guaranteed to be considered "serious"; however if you're wiping out 99% of the earth's population and pitting the last 1% against each other in a showdown of good versus evil, you're shuffled off into the completely disreputable "horror" or "fantasy" category.

Which is a shame. I've always enjoyed Stephen King's books just as much as those by "respectable" writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and many others. Different books offer different rewards. With Stephen King's, I know I'll get a great story, fully developed characters, and wonderful details that will put me right into the book. And I'll most likely wind up reading long past the time I thought I was going to turn out the light.

The man is a very good writer, certainly one of the best that this country has turned out. I always looked forward to each new book he published. But, after Misery, I found something strange was happening. He usually wrote tight, economical stories, and even when he did put out a longer book (The Stand, It) the length was appropriate to the story he was telling. But starting with The Tommyknockers, the books seemed to get longer for no good reason. The Tommyknockers was page after page of characters endlessly discussing their situation without moving the plot forward. I started to wonder if King had gotten to be so huge, such a force in the publishing industry, that he was no longer really being edited. 300 pages could have easily been cut out of this 752 page book, and the result would have been a much better story.

So I (sadly) gave up on him for a little while, coming back now and then to try again. Needful Things continued his Tommyknockers trend: numbingly long (752 pages) and not enough story. A few years after that I picked up Insomnia for a four-hour train ride, and (sadly) found it suffered from the same problem – a long (662 page), bloated story where not much happened. And I most recently bought The Black House, which he co-wrote with Peter Straub as a sequel to their wonderful The Talisman. Surely this was going to be good – if editors were no longer using the red pencil on King's books, co-author Straub would. Again, no. I liked the basic framework of the story very much, but I found myself waiting for something to happen. When it finally did I had waded through so many pages of nothingness that it was inevitably anticlimactic and frustrating. I was officially done with Stephen King.

But then (ever the hopeful fan) I started seeing all of this press announcing that he had finished the final book in his 7-volume Dark Tower series. He wrote these books throughout his career (the earliest in 1970), though I have never read any of them.

That’s when this idea struck me: here was a way to see if King's writing in general has become more long-winded and/or less edited as he's become his own publishing industry. I could read each book and a) see how it fit into the overall series, and b) find if it matched up in quality with other books he'd written during the same time period. Volume I: The Gunslinger was published early in his career, right around the time of Firestarter – one of my favorite Stephen King books. Would they be of equal quality? Volume II: The Drawing of the Three came right after The Tommyknockers – so am I going to hate it?

I'll let you know. I'm starting The Gunslinger tonight. The first sentence, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" sure sounds promising. Let's hope that I just happened to pick up the wrong books after Misery, and that the man is still one of our great writers and storytellers.

(Chris Orcutt is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)