Why Stephen King keeps coming back

Stephen King is following us like a horror movie villain who just doesn’t want to die. We are in the middle of a King Revival in film and television. The gold rush for marketable intellectual property has brought Hollywood back to the work of the immensely popular author in a spectacular way. While King’s books have always had a fairly constant on-screen presence over the years, the King’s explosion over the past four years has been noteworthy. For the first time we get adaptations of old and new works, such as Gerald’s game, Doctor sleep, In the tall grass, and The outsider, alongside remakes of previously adapted works such as Pet cemetery and IT. And then there are the weird experiments like Hulus short-lived Castle rockwho tried to remix elements of King’s most popular horror works into a meta-TV show, or Chapel attendant, the latest Epix series to expand its short story Jerusalem’s Lot.

The success of these projects is in line with King’s overall track record in film and television adaptations: they are spectacularly uneven. However, the critical batting average is much higher than it has been for decades, and it is reductive to reduce the current wealth of King content to opportunism. King has indelibly shaped culture for better or for worse, and continues to do so – even if the culture has apparently left him behind or that he has strayed even further from the horror genre for which he is almost one-sidedly celebrated.

Although I’ve been thinking about and reading him for years, it was only a few weeks ago when I read the 2003 Foreword The drawing of the three, the second book in his Dark Tower fantasy epic that I think I finally got Stephen King about.

There King writes about what prompted him to create the series, which at the time comprised five books and quickly ended with two more a year later. He’s trying to figure out why he wanted to write these books. He attributes it to the American in him: the urge to “build the highest, dig the deepest, write the longest”. This, I believe, is King’s enduring influence and why he has been returning to him generation after generation. It’s his Americanism – not the lived American reality that many have claimed to keep drawing people to his work, but his incarnate fiction. The hollow American dream, repackaged and sold to many, became flesh in this tall, pale Maine man.

The legend of Stephen King

Whenever questions arise about Stephen King’s longevity and fame as a writer, two fundamental aspects of his legend are mentioned. The first is perhaps the greatest: he is one of the most prominent and influential figures in horror literature, a master with a deep understanding of what scares us all. Add to this the fact of his success, which is usually tied to his work ethic: King is Bulky, a prolific writer who publishes several books a year and is a consistent bestseller.

Like many legends, this one has some truth, but a healthy amount can also be undermined by facts. Some of them are trivial – like the fact that King often refused to refer to himself as a horror writer and has amassed a huge amount of works outside of that genre. (His final fixation is crime fiction – his latest novel, 2021 Billy Summers, is a classic crime story about a hit man on a final job.) Others are a little more substantial, like the fact that his influence and critical acclaim are still largely confined to its prime, the dazzling period since its debut in the 1974s Carrie until the 1980s.

The exact point at which this heyday ends is highly controversial, but personally I would end it in 1987 misery. During this time he produced most of his most adapted and most referenced works – with such overwhelming success that King later became an institution and a fixture that could withstand the mediocre reception of his later works because his early work did never failed to create new converts.

Of these two basic parts of King’s legend, the latter is arguably the most important. No writer can make a universally unique claim to an understanding of the human psyche, even if his work is truly unique. The realities of publishing – on terrifyingly unjust field – makes it hard to ignore that what is published is not representative of what might be available.

That shouldn’t detract from King’s skills as a character writer. In both his best and worst forms, he’s capable of consistently producing near-frictionless prose that envelops the brain and makes plowing through doorstop novels a singular pleasure. It doesn’t take long for a budding Stephen King fan to be dazzled by his bibliography. King himself will often find that he has been outdone by other more prolific writers many times over. But it is his consistent and unprecedented success that makes his work so remarkable, and it is through that success that stories about his work ethic become uniquely alluring.

In his memoir About writing, King speaks cautiously about his work ethic – tossing aside the absurdity that interviewers always want to know the secret of his success – and delves into important details. King’s credo is consistency, an unromantic view of the craft, in which he brings out 10 pages a day without exception. He believes that most writers should make a similar commitment to routine, however it suits their life: a regular time and place for words, every day, necessarily.

Here, in the rift between King the Craftsman and King of Legend, his fundamental Americanism is most pronounced. It’s the dream of good old-fashioned bootstraps capitalism that this guy who worked in laundry rooms, taught high school English and struggled through worker jobs, can sit down, write 10 pages a day, collect rejections, and then become one of the most consistent bestseller in the world. Only in America, right? He could do it. You could too.

Deadly swing

A beneficiary of happiness and great privilege, Stephen King is one of the few novelists who, if he wanted, could publish each of his idle thoughts and make healthy profits. According to some devout King fans, it often seems like he is doing it. Despite the diversity of his work – the human drama of stories like The body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption make as great an impression as his horror – King’s stories have an almost universal unrest.

From horror to coming-of-age to pulp thrillers – King’s stories are the American expanse, which is reproduced page by page. The dynamism of his characters is surpassed by his prose, even if they often go to places of no meaning other than perhaps their own downfall or a frustration regularly shared by King’s readers.

There is a searching element to his work, a determined belief that if we keep moving – from place to place or character to character, we will find it out through our own bootstraps. If we don’t, there will be horror. This is the key, the Dark Tower, that I built to explain this man: Stephen King is the American expanse, a gaping chasm that has only grown over the decades and is large enough to devour us in countless ways .

During his time in which he published numerous books, he made this fear clear to us many times, connected us to countless other people, and then horrified us with this connection. Think of the things that have changed around us over the course of his career, the terrifying unknowns he has guided readers through: cable TV and cell phones, the internet, and infinite scrolling that bring us all to a better version of the world with the promise of more, everything gets worse the longer we get into it. Manifest fate as you please.

Again an excerpt from this preface from 2003 onwards The drawing of the three:

“This head-scratching confusion when the question of motivation comes up? It seems to me that it is part of being an American too. In the end we are reduced to say It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Stephen King is well known to have terrible endings, a habit widely attributed to his self-declared refusal to sketch and his insistence on discovering the story as he wrote it. That is perhaps the most American thing about him: he is an unrepeatable, unprecedented achievement in his field that inspires other people’s dreams, even though he never knows exactly where it is leading us. This, I believe, is Stephen King’s secret, and the most American illusion: that a people can be carried by dreams and momentum and that disaster can be averted if we just don’t think too much about how this could all end.