The chill is gone

The once-great Stephen King has been recycling his plots and characters for 20 years now. It's time he made good on his threats to retire.

By Richard Blow

Feb 19, 2002 | At some point in his or her career, every writer probably hits a wall where he wonders if he has anything left to say that he has not said already, and better. Fifty-four-year-old Stephen King, author of over 40 novels, thinks he may have reached that watershed. "That's it," he told the Los Angeles Times last week. "I'm done. You get to a point where you get to the edges of a room, and you can go back and go where you've been and basically recycle stuff."

Better, King suggested, to lower the curtain on a truly dramatic career.

For legions of fans addicted to devouring a new King tome every six months or so, his self-exile would be a devastating loss. But they should not abandon all hope. King has spoken of retirement before, and his agent, Arthur Green, told the Associated Press, "I think it's unlikely he'll stop working."

King's retirement may be unlikely, but it's not a bad idea. In fact, it's a great idea. Truth is, King hasn't reached the point of recycling; he's been recycling for years. His fans may not want to admit it, but Stephen King's most recent books are dull, dreary, repetitive, unoriginal, uninspired hack work. And the best thing -- perhaps the only thing -- that King can do about it is to stop writing.

Don't think I enjoy saying that. I've been reading King novels over the course of three decades now, and I've never felt apologetic about doing so -- never felt defensive about his, shall we say, unpolished literary gifts, or the validity of the horror genre, or what my love for his talents said about my own maturity and mental health.

For me, getting scared by King was one of life's necessary escapes. I remember buying "Salem's Lot" from a supermarket checkout rack when I was 12 years old. I read the book, which is about vampires taking over a small Maine town, in the bedroom of a lonely, creaky house on the wind-buffeted tip of an Atlantic island. My bedroom was the only one on its floor, and I would read the book before going to sleep. When I turned the lights off and the wind-blown branches scraped against my curtainless window, I'd shiver and wonder if, just possibly, just maybe, there weren't vampires scratching the glass with their dirty fingernails, begging to be let in, longing to feed ... on me.

I imagine anyone who's read a Stephen King novel has experienced a similar moment where, if only briefly, horror and reality blur. The unsettling force of King's powers of persuasion -- maybe there really are monsters outside the window -- has sent some readers I know scurrying back to the more secure, high-walled realms of highbrow literature. Others, like me, get hooked on the intensity of being scared, the adrenaline of terror. We are safely scared, though. We know that when we finish a King novel, the worst terrors will have been averted, the protagonists will be victorious (though not usually without casualties) and in any case, our own problems are not nearly as horrible as what happens to the characters in King-world.

And so, after racing through "Salem's Lot," I read gleefully on, back to King's first novel, "Carrie," a pulp classic, then forward to "The Shining," which I read in the backseat of a station wagon while a friend's mother drove a fellow ninth-grader and me to Walt Disney World. Thanks to King, I didn't know the streets of my own suburban hometown until I got my driver's license and was required to look out the window.

With memorable characters and strong plots, "Carrie" and "The Shining" were great reads. So were subsequent books such as "Firestarter," "The Dead Zone," "The Stand," "The Talisman" and "It." They featured a variety of terrors: telekinesis, a haunted hotel, Satanic villains. But all of them worked because King recognized our most basic fear: that some monster, figurative or literal, will invade our daily existence and deprive us of our opportunity to seek -- and find -- happiness. As in that old horror myth about the threatening phone calls that turn out to be made from the attic, the real monsters in King's fiction lie very close to home: In both "Carrie" and "The Shining," for example, the greatest violence is inflicted by the protagonists' parents.

"Horror" was always a reductive label for King's work, for all its guts and gore; his best books are more like Gothic tragedy, in which fulfillment is yanked away from characters just as they think they've finally found it. In "Carrie," Carrie White's chance to become accepted by her high school peers is cruelly stolen from her just as she's finally allowed herself to trust the possibility of happiness. Naturally, much death and destruction result.

Next Page: Are the fans the real bloodsuckers?

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