Stephen King: A revelation

So I read this article yesterday because folks were talking about the comments King made about The Hunger Games and Twilight that placed him solidly in the "get off my lawn" category of author.

But that wasn't what actually stood out for me from the article. Aside from the absolute lack of need for a sequel to The Shining, the big takeaway was the realization that there's a correlation between King's precipitous descent as a writer and his recovery from alcoholism.

I wrote about King's two phases nearly ten years ago for Bookslut; little has changed since then. He can churn out decent toilet-reading schlock (Cell, Under the Dome), but he's inconsistent, and capable of writing utter crap that gets published because his name is on it (and sells millions of copies and gets turned into a totally-unrelated SyFy series, not to pick on one book in particular or anything). But it's pretty clear that he sobered up right around Tommyknockers, and while things have hardly been downhill since (you can't really write something worse than Tommyknockers*), he's never come close to his early-career heights since.

You know what? I'd rather he be healthy and churning out mediocre shit**. Any fucking day of the week. Mind you, I'd rather he take the Harper Lee route (retirement), or the Thomas Pynchon route (publish only good books every few years) than churn out his pile of crap, but it's not like I have to buy them (I can spend my money and time on his very talented older son and daughter-in-law, both of whom deserve it, even though neither cashes in on the family name***). So no, I don't take back anything I wrote in that article, but my answer to the question at the beginning of the article remains the same: nothing he does changes what he did at the beginning of his career. The fact that he was dealing with some massively horrible shit during that time, though, means that much as I love everything that came from that period, I'd have been okay if he'd gotten healthier sooner.

That said, I'll probably request the new book from the library at some point.

*I wish this statement were actually true. That said, King has generally kept this book as his nadir, even if other writers have written worse.

**Note that correlation does not equal causation, of course. Nor does

***At the Kelly Braffet signing/reading I went to last week for Save Yourself, there were eight fucking people in the audience. Eight! For one of the ten best books I've read this year!

Stephen King: A revelation

So I read this article yesterday because folks were talking about the comments King made about The Hunger Games and Twilight that placed him solidly in the "get off my lawn" category of author.

But that wasn't what actually stood out for me from the article. Aside from the absolute lack of need for a sequel to The Shining, the big takeaway was the realization that there's a correlation between King's precipitous descent as a writer and his recovery from alcoholism.

I wrote about King's two phases nearly ten years ago for Bookslut; little has changed since then. He can churn out decent toilet-reading schlock (Cell, Under the Dome), but he's inconsistent, and capable of writing utter crap that gets published because his name is on it (and sells millions of copies and gets turned into a totally-unrelated SyFy series, not to pick on one book in particular or anything). But it's pretty clear that he sobered up right around Tommyknockers, and while things have hardly been downhill since (you can't really write something worse than Tommyknockers*), he's never come close to his early-career heights since.

You know what? I'd rather he be healthy and churning out mediocre shit**. Any fucking day of the week. Mind you, I'd rather he take the Harper Lee route (retirement), or the Thomas Pynchon route (publish only good books every few years) than churn out his pile of crap, but it's not like I have to buy them (I can spend my money and time on his very talented older son and daughter-in-law, both of whom deserve it, even though neither cashes in on the family name***). So no, I don't take back anything I wrote in that article, but my answer to the question at the beginning of the article remains the same: nothing he does changes what he did at the beginning of his career. The fact that he was dealing with some massively horrible shit during that time, though, means that much as I love everything that came from that period, I'd have been okay if he'd gotten healthier sooner.

That said, I'll probably request the new book from the library at some point.

*I wish this statement were actually true. That said, King has generally kept this book as his nadir, even if other writers have written worse.

**Note that correlation does not equal causation, of course. Nor does

***At the Kelly Braffet signing/reading I went to last week for Save Yourself, there were eight fucking people in the audience. Eight! For one of the ten best books I've read this year!