The King ain't dead

(and Randall Flagg is the devil)

“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.” Carrie, 1974

I was going to write about Stephen and another author Laurell K Hamilton but I got started and realised I loved/loathed/had SUCH an opinion on so many of his books and his writing that he had to stand alone. Fair enough, especially when you consider that King has also written as Richard Bachman, whom I have reviewed here separately - I think King would approve, I mean the man held a mock funeral for Bachman after he was unmasked and his book The Dark Half is a thinly veiled ‘spookier’ version of how the pseudonym affected his life.

(The) King . . .
No-one is perfect. This is true of everyone. Even The King.
Dude has had a LOT of misses (The Tommyknockers, The Dark Half, Dream-PfftDon’tYouMeanNightmare-catcher which was, and I don’t think this is coincidence, the last King book I bought but that may change because I kind of want to buy his new book Cell – mmmmmm zombies . . .) but he has had sooo many hits, so very very many hits.
The Stand, Carrie, IT, The Shining, Christine, Misery, The Dead Zone.
Classic American literature.
Classic.
And also? Scare the pants off you scary. I can’t read The Shining unless I have checked under my bed, made sure the doors and windows are locked and that there is someone else within audible screaming distance (should Jack Torrance – who of course in my mind wears Jack Nicholson’s face, damn it – leap out of my closet with a mallet and chase me up some stairs *shudder*)
The first time I read IT, I couldn’t walk past those grates in the side of the road for WEEKS, I caught a cold the first time I read The Stand (I’m very impressionable) and Christine has meant that I am SUPER nice to my car. Love my car. LOVE. (Just in case she’s reading my blog although I don’t know how she would get the internet connection. But she could! She’s very smart! Smart car!)

I feel like he drifted for a while after Misery, like he got bored writing good stuff and thought he'd give crap a good solid try. The Tommyknockers and Needful Things were written then, and both novels have always felt more like they were written by Dean Koontz (don’t get me started. Hack.) And yes, Dolores Claiborne is in there as well (and might I add, that ‘sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to’ is a GREAT line) and The Green Mile, but so is Insomnia. Which actually put me to sleep. Honestly. I have NEVER fallen asleep reading a book in my life, except when I was reading Insomnia. In 1999 King was hit by a car whilst out walking – his injuries included a shattered hip and collapsed right lung that kept him in hospital for several weeks and bedridden for even longer and I personally blame whatever drugs he was on at the time for the utter fucking shambles that is Dreamcatcher. Ugh.

His novel on writing called, not terribly imaginatively ‘On Writing’, is actually a pretty damn interesting read for anyone who isn’t a professional writer, ie us. He’s taken on new forms of media for his novels, ‘publishing’ a couple via the internet and reinvented the old, releasing The Green Mile as an ‘olde tyme’ serial (I bought each book as it came out and hungrily devoured them, desperate to know how he would save John Coffey from the electric chair . . . *sob*)
He is inarguably the most prolific and well known American writer in generations. If you haven’t read one of his books, then you’ve seen one of his films – even if you didn’t realise it at the time. I remember many arguments trying to convince people that The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me were Stephen King stories. Currently they are filming Nightmares & Dreamscapes in and around Melbourne – a friend has hit the acting jackpot and has scored himself a role (he was astounded to discover he was actually allocated a TRAILER on set) - Desperation was made into a feature movie for US ABC starring Ron Perlman (Hellboy/Alien Resurrection) that’s apparently on there sometime in May (God knows when we'll be able to see it) and The Talisman (I completely heart that book and its sequel The Black House, both co-written with Peter Straub) is currently still in pre-production hell.


Richard Bachman : I haven’t attempted to reread any of the novels he wrote as Bachman in recent times, but I do recall reading The Bachman Books, a collection that includes short stories The Running Man, The Long Walk, Road Work and Rage in the car one summer - we must have been driving from the Pilbara down to Perth to visit my grandparents. I remember that The Long Walk and Rage had me in tears. In retrospect Rage is even sadder, dealing as it does with the story of a student bringing a gun to school and holding his classmates hostage. When the massacre at Columbine occurred, I recall I commented to someone that it was just like a book that Stephen King had written. It did not surprise me at all to read a few years later that King had advised his publishers not to do any further printings of that story or the Bachman Books and you can now only find them at secondhand bookstores. His writing as Bachman seemed . . . simpler. A lot more . . . accessible? But not as good, not as well written, not as seep-into-your-bones and definitely not as psychological as his work as King – Bachman stories were less about creepy things that go bump in the night or lurk in the minds of men, and more about futuristic possibilities. As a teenager they were fun. As an adult, I don’t know that I’d enjoy them. A little like going back and watching Degrassi Junior High - still a pretty good show but it hasn’t held its age the way say, Press Gang has. Put Running Man or Long Walk up against IT or The Stand and they suffer quite badly in comparison. They’re King’s middle children, they’re Jan Brady.

In short, he is still The King. I suspect he always will be. I immediately flick to his fortnightly column on Pop Culture in Who Weekly before I read anything else (yes, even before the stories on the state of Britney and K-Fed’s marriage or how Tom Cruise is annoying everyone this week). I return to the worlds he has created in his books regularly and I eagerly await the day Cell is released in paperback* . . . . seriously, zombies!!

Long live The King.

*(A real fan would buy it in hardcover, you say? Sod off, I have tiny wee child sized hands and hardcover books make them owie . . . )