“I have said in the past that Stephen King was a writer of cheap novels, but perhaps I was even too kind,” declared an irate Harold Bloom, high priest of the canon, when the author of The Shining was awarded the prize of the 2003 US National Book Foundation for his distinguished contribution to American letters. No one can doubt at this point the editorial and sociological relevance of Stephen King (Portland, 1947) due to his best sellers, millions of readers and adaptations to film and television. However, Bloom’s outburst is representative of a part of the world of letters that questions his literary quality, although he also has defenders with pedigree such as Rodrigo Fresán or Mariana Enríquez.
This 2024, the novelist celebrates the fifty years of his literary career, which began in 1974 with the publication of Carrie. Two books that respectively review his life and work, and the film adaptations of his novels add to this celebration of an author who is still active. Just published the novel Holly, in May the volume of short stories You Like It Darker will appear in English, which will surely not take long to be translated.
King has sixty-five novels and more than a dozen books of short stories and novellas, as well as some essays. Despite Bloom’s anger, he will end up being considered a classic, in the same way that Lovecraft and other authors of popular genres such as Hammett, Chandler or Bradbury are already today, incorporated into the Library of America, which becomes the American Pléiade. Not all of the king of horror’s novels will survive the test of time, because he has written a lot and has accumulated a few fiascos. However, in his best moments he is an unbeatable narrator, a solvent builder of characters and above all a writer who has known how to give literary form – with or without supernatural elements – to contemporary collective anguish such as bullying, family violence, pedophilia, pandemics or populist politics. Without a doubt this is one of the elements that helps explain his success.
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The years of learning were hard: he married young and had his first two children, the family lived in a trailer house, he worked in a laundry and then as a teacher, and unpaid bills accumulated. While he published some short stories in magazines and the editors rejected his first novels, in horror literature there were two very relevant events: in 1967 The Seed of the Devil by Ira Levin appeared and in 1971 The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Two best sellers quickly turned into films with very high impact. The ground was fertile for the appearance of King, influenced by Poe, Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson.
Bill Thompson, Doubleday’s editor, rejected several novels, but he sensed a future author in him and encouraged him to continue writing. He finally offered her a modest advance of $2,500 for Carrie. However, the business in this type of book is different: Doubleday sold the paperback rights to New American Library for $400,000, of which half went to the novelist. With this amount, King could support his family for a year by leaving work and devoting himself to writing. Thompson published the next four novels, with advances and increasing sales. Until the writer found a literary agent, Kirby McCauley, who got him a million-dollar and unique contract for three novels, starting with The Dead Zone. Millionaire because it amounted to two and a half million dollars; unique because it was signed with the paperback publisher New American Library and they were in charge of selling the hardcover rights to Scribner’s. That is to say, he turned the functioning of the publishing industry upside down.
King was very productive and was also interested in rescuing the first novels that had been rejected at the time. Any sensible publisher knows that the market can absorb a limited number of titles from one author per year. That is why the writer chose to invent a pseudonym: Richard Bachman, and offered those books to his paperback editor at NAL, Elaine Koster. The first title, published in 1977, was Rage, a cursed novel, which the author himself ordered never to be reprinted again due to its theme: a high school student murders his teachers and kidnaps his classmates. Too similar to what was beginning to happen in reality. At first, no one knew Bachman was King. He, faced with the suspicions of the journalists, went so far as to say: “I went to school with him, this guy is crazy, this whole mess will reach his ears and he will come to Bangor to kill me.” Bachman published four novels until the truth was revealed. Then three more appeared, supposedly rescued posthumous papers. In The Dark Half King tells the story of a writer who creates a pseudonym and when he decides to get rid of it, it comes to life and begins to murder.
The novels with the greatest literary ambition and influence – by themselves or by their adaptations to the screen – are concentrated above all in the decades of the seventies and eighties: Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Eyes of Fire, Cujo, Christine , Pet Sematary, It (probably his masterpiece, with more than a thousand pages), Misery and the stories of The Four Seasons. The Dead Zone is the first to make it onto The New York Times bestseller list. At the end of the eighties, she published one of her weakest novels, The Tommyknockers, and stopped writing for a time to enter a rehabilitation program. Her problems with alcohol came from before, but had worsened with the consumption of cocaine and pills. The author himself confesses: “I wrote The Tommyknockers often working until midnight with my heart beating at 130 and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stop the coke-induced hemorrhages.” Her other health scare was the accident in June 1999 when she was hit by a Dodge Caravan and suffered serious injuries.
In The Shining the protagonist is a blocked novelist with a drinking problem, who isolates himself with his family in the Overlock Hotel. The hotel is inspired by a real one where the King couple spent time: the Stanley Hotel, in Colorado. Jack Torrance’s alcoholism also had an autobiographical origin. He is not the only writer who appears in his books, in addition to the already mentioned The Dark Half, Paul Sheldon stands out, the protagonist of Misery: author of romantic novels who suffers an accident and is saved and then tortured by his number one fan, who She is not willing to allow him to carry out his intention to liquidate the protagonist of those serials. In literary fiction, King projects his anguish in the face of pressure and blockage, fame and fans.
Born in Portland, Maine, King has lived almost his entire life in this state that is part of the New England region. For years he resided with his family in a Victorian-style mansion in Bangor, visited by fans and now converted into a foundation, archive and tourist attraction. The writer’s literary universe has the landscapes of Maine as its preferred setting, through fictional towns inspired by real places. Two stand out. On the one hand, Castle Rock, an industrial city that appears in books such as The Dead Zone, Cujo, The Dark Half, The Store, the story The Body… It is also the setting for the two seasons of the television series Castle Rock, a project unique that is based on King’s universe and uses some of his characters, but it is neither an adaptation of his works nor a script written by him. The other fictional city located in Maine is Derry, inspired by Bangor and the setting for It, Insomnia, A Bag of Bones and The Dreamcatcher.
With so many of his novels adapted to film, it was logical that King would be tempted to get behind the camera. He tried it in 1986 with Rise of the Machines, about vehicles and appliances that come to life from the passage of a meteorite. The result was a fiasco, but his acting performance was even worse. The writer has appeared in cameos in several films, but in Creepshow, with his script, he starred in one of the episodes: The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill. It tells the story of a farmer who finds a meteorite on his property, tries to cut it up to sell it and when he touches it his body begins to cover with a type of moss that later gives way to a whole vegetation. His terrible performance is embarrassing.
In 1993, when the Internet was in its infancy, King posted the story The Last Umney Case before it appeared in print in the anthology Nightmares and Hallucinations. In 1996 she serialized the novel The Green Mile. In 2000 he upped the ante and published the short novel Montado en la bala exclusively on the Internet for $2.50; There were 400,000 downloads on the first day. Encouraged by the success, he made another bet: he would upload The Plant by chapters, as he wrote it. Readers were asked to pay a voluntary dollar per download. The public’s interest decreased and the writer abandoned the project. In 2009 he created the story Ur exclusively for Kindle.
It is the name of a Stephen King initiative: film students can acquire the rights to their stories not adapted to film for a symbolic dollar and make a film. With conditions: it must not be commercialized, it can only be screened at festivals or in free sessions, and a copy must be sent to him. A film student named Frank Darabont filmed one of those stories for one dollar. Years later he made three great adaptations of the writer’s novels: Sentence Perpetual, The Green Mile and The Fog.
In 1982, King began the saga of The Dark Tower with The Gunslinger, which consists of eight volumes and a prequel in the format of a comic series. It is a peculiar mix of fantasy and western, with echoes of Tolkien and inspired by a poem by Robert Browning. On the other hand, he has written some works in collaboration: with Peter Straub – The Talisman and its sequel The Black Box – and with the editor Richard Chizman, the lesser-known Gwendy trilogy, which began with Wendy’s Button Box. Of his three children, the two boys have followed in his literary footsteps and have also collaborated with him. The most successful is Joseph King, who adopted the pseudonym Joe Hill to escape his father’s shadow. He is the author of novels and short stories (such as Black Phone, adapted to film with Ethan Hawke), but his greatest success is the Locke comics.