An introduction, and thoughts on the scariest writer I've always loved
Oh, hi
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In addition to writing books, I also work at NPR, where I write lots of stuff and also am one of the hosts of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. As you can probably imagine, I am not able in that capacity to write about everything, so that is why newsletters were invented. (Also, I gave up Twitter, which was where I liked to write about recipes and my dog and things of that nature, and while I also do that on Bluesky, the world needs more places to hear about my dog. Maybe.) Welcome!
Stephen King
It shouldn’t be a big deal to say Stephen King is a really good writer, but sometimes it feels like it is.
People will say On Writing is really good, or they’ll say some of his movie adaptations are really good (and they’ll make fun of him for the fact that he doesn’t like Kubrick’s The Shining), or they’ll acknowledge his popularity but treat it as sort of a fast-food thing, where big business doesn’t mean high quality. (Obviously a principle that’s true in broad strokes, if not necessarily relevant to this situation.) There was a lot of controversy when he was honored at the National Book Awards, for instance, and I’ve never understood it, because I’ve never doubted that he is a really good writer.
He’s certainly the novelist who most made me a reader when it comes to adult books. (With books for younger people, it was Judy Blume.) When I was a kid, King was the one who got me to fall deeply in love with big, weird, explosively imaginative books that took me forever to read. (Also Jackie Collins. RIP.) And it wasn’t until I was an adult that I really understood him as, yes, a horror writer, but more broadly a stupendous chronicler of fear.
Maybe this seems self-evident, but while all horror might be fear, not all fear is horror. Some of King’s writing, particularly some of the short stories, are certainly nifty little horror tales, sometimes so gross and gnarly that they make me want to clap my hands like a kid who just went through a haunted house. “The Moving Finger” is about a man who finds a single finger poking out of the drain in his bathroom sink. “The Mangler,” is about a possessed laundry machine. “Survivor Type” is about a doctor who gets stranded on a desert island and starts eating himself. These are pulpy, peppery, darkly funny blasts of “Are you afraid of the dark?” yarn-spinning.
But fear is different, and more varied. And unlike a lot of writers who are treated like assembly-line hacks, King has never gone on autopilot. The persistent unevenness of his work is not good, exactly, but it is how you know that he is not executing a blueprint with differently colored boards over and over again, selling it to the same people. These are not interchangeable stories; they remain defiantly, impressively weird, and his interests shift as the space he occupies changes. Some things work better than others. I think he writes great sentences and particularly good and lively dialogue. But I think his superpower is in his storytelling, and in his ability to locate an anxiety that lives in the imagination, to hit it like a buzzer so that you can’t miss it, and then to spin out an idea about what it’s like not necessarily to defeat that anxiety, but to endure it.
I was contemplating the difference between horror and fear, as well as the fact that King is 76 now, while listening to his new story collection, You Like It Darker. In the opening tale, “Two Talented Bastids,” he writes about two friends from the same small town in Maine, one a famous writer and one a famous artist. When the writer is an old man, his son (the narrator) tells the story of a journalist who comes to learn more about how these two friends happened to find such success, both of them in middle age. And then, in an accompanying story narrated by the son’s father, Laird, we learn about a sequence of events that — maybe — was responsible for their success.
Naturally, Laird wonders sometimes whether this story of how he became gifted (that word, gifted, gets some attention, too) means he’s a fraud. There is a gloriously blunt moment in the story in which Laird asks himself, “What the fuck is talent anyway?” It’s dangerous to think of authors as endlessly examining the events of their own lives, but this is such a poignant question about the nature of artistic endeavors in general and successful writers in particular. Do you get to be proud of being talented when it’s clear that plenty of absolutely horrible people are talented? If you feel like you owe much of your success to talent, are you just lucky? How are you supposed to feel about your life’s work if you’re not sure you’re any different, in any way you can control, from a gazillion other people who will never gain any recognition at all?
I wouldn’t describe it as a horror story, but this, too, is fear. As a writer, I see in Laird the fear not only of being a fraud, but of losing what talent you have, of seeing it slip away from you as quickly as it arrived. If you didn’t earn it anyway, how angry can you even be if that happens? King has written about writerly fears in The Dark Half, The Shining, “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” and Misery, and they are all weird, heartbreaking meditations, written in different minor keys, on the nature of inspiration and talent and often the intersections of those things with madness.
Writer fears might be quite specific, but many of the fears King explores are more familiar. Think about a story like “The Body" (which became Stand By Me). Yes, there’s a dead body in that story, but I’ve always felt its emotional punch most deeply in Gordie’s fear of aloneness — a fear King has written about over and over, and which, particularly in men and boys, he answers with the presence of friends. It’s not that he doesn’t write about romantic love or familial love, but Stephen King writes about friendship and its lifesaving properties like few writers we have. He believes deeply in its redemptive power; he believes deeply that no matter how flawed you may be, if you serve your friends well, you have succeeded and — if necessary — you can die in a state of grace. “The Body” is about this, but so is It, and so is “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” and so is “Two Talented Bastids,” and so are long stretches of The Stand.
The most fascinating phase of King’s career, to me, has been a set of stories about women and girls that, perhaps surprisingly, present isolation as the predicament but do not use loneliness as the animating fear. Gerald’s Game is quite specifically about the dangers of being stuck by yourself if you take it literally (in this case, the protagonist is handcuffed to a bed by your horrible husband), but loneliness is not the fear at issue; the fear at issue is confronting your own past. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about having to fend for yourself in the woods, but really, it’s about giving up any illusion of security in childhood long enough to learn that you can fend for yourself. And the great Dolores Claiborne, while it allows Dolores critical alliances at critical moments, is, like Gerald’s Game, rooted in the constant terror brought about by abuse.
So yes, there are the horrors of Christine and Cujo, and there is the indelible Carrie, and there is the almost literally unspeakable story of Pet Sematary. But for me, Stephen King is at his best when he presses directly on a fear (mobs, cults, the slipping away of one’s grasp of reality) and then writes the story of how you live beside it.
Some good things
I just read The Plot, which everybody else already read, I think, but wowza, it is so good. I also, on the very helpful Bluesky advice of writer Mark Harris, read Everybody Knows, a very depressing but not implausible Hollywood thriller about the bad kind of publicist. I really liked Emily Henry’s latest, Funny Story. (As always, I recommend the audio by the great Julia Whelan, who has also narrated my two books.) I hope you’re doing Joe Reid’s diabolical Cinematrix at Vulture every weekday; I am so bad at summoning movie titles out of thin air that I fail at it on a regular basis, but I love the journey. (To failing.)
See you soon
And until then…
