-Thomas Ligotti
“[It’s] cold, I’m not a cold guy,” King told BBC arts editor Will Gompertz. “I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ I felt that it was very cold, very ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects.’ ”
This, quite simply, is a microcosm of how Stephen King fails utterly to understand horror. Horror, for Mr. King, seems to be something warm. Well! Excuse my hubris, but I would argue that, yes, horror, proper horror, is very much a cold thing. That's why we call it chilling! Who has heard of horror that is warm? Warm is associated with good health, with a good disposition, with softness and tenderness, with a cozy fireplace. Do any of these things speak of horror? Of the uncanniness of being, of something pernicious that lies behind our reality, or even of cheap thrills?
Second, King himself says he is not a cold person. Perhaps for the best regarding his personal life, but... does this not speak volumes about how inadequate King is to write horror? The greatest literary horror masters were all as far as warm as one could get. Edgar Allan Poe's writings are cold, depressive and personal, while the man himself had a deeply troubled personal life which granted him insight on a variety of psychological disorders, and this reflects on his stories. Likewise, Lovecraft was a depressive, a borderline agoraphobic, scared of everything... Nick Land, hopped up on amphetamines, Ligotti suffering from anhedonia and severe depression, Kafka, while not always considered a horror writer, was a bunch of neuroses shambling about in a bipedal approximation of a man, Bataille and his grotesque obsessions with sex... Let us not be shy and say it: Good horror writers were, at large, what the neurotypical world would consider disturbed individuals.
King sees horror as an optimistic reactionary: Life is great, it's an amazing thing, until some horror, always traditionally scary and always highly defeatable comes along. There is nothing uncanny for Stephen King other than wholly fictional monsters. Ultimately, it's fictional nonsense to help us escape from the far more terrifying real nonsense, in which the writers I mentioned before helped elucidate upon.
His prose is slipshod, perhaps because Stephen King is hardly a writer's writer, and I doubt any Stephen King fan cares about prose.
His characters are cartoons: An homophobe will always be going on about how much he hates the gays, a racist will always be out shouting the N-word. No characters develop any amount of psychological depth or insight.
His plots always disappoint and at times go into some really stupid territory, such as the Turtle from It, just for an example off the top of my head.
His novels are absolutely bloated with useless queens: picking up any of his tomes is like picking up some veiny, throbbing insect queen about to ejaculate her brood into the world. This is not as noticeable in his earlier works, but in his later works, as he has likely long since stopped needing an editor to sell books anyway, so the bloating is horrendous.
He repeats his story elements nonstop: His characters are often times just him (writer, famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser, and so on), Small towns in Maine, gratuitous sex, religious Christian fundamentalism, disproportionate retributions, teens being tossers, adults being useless, completely tasteless and cartoonish depictions of abusive parents... one could go on.
He admits he writes "the literary equivalent of McDonalds," but he also acts shitty when academia doesn't take him seriously, which results in one of the cringiest scenes in all of fiction when the poor, oppressed Stephen King self insert stands up to the big bad intellectuals for not taking his pulp crap as being a valid work of literary fiction.
Second, King himself says he is not a cold person. Perhaps for the best regarding his personal life, but... does this not speak volumes about how inadequate King is to write horror? The greatest literary horror masters were all as far as warm as one could get. Edgar Allan Poe's writings are cold, depressive and personal, while the man himself had a deeply troubled personal life which granted him insight on a variety of psychological disorders, and this reflects on his stories. Likewise, Lovecraft was a depressive, a borderline agoraphobic, scared of everything... Nick Land, hopped up on amphetamines, Ligotti suffering from anhedonia and severe depression, Kafka, while not always considered a horror writer, was a bunch of neuroses shambling about in a bipedal approximation of a man, Bataille and his grotesque obsessions with sex... Let us not be shy and say it: Good horror writers were, at large, what the neurotypical world would consider disturbed individuals.
King sees horror as an optimistic reactionary: Life is great, it's an amazing thing, until some horror, always traditionally scary and always highly defeatable comes along. There is nothing uncanny for Stephen King other than wholly fictional monsters. Ultimately, it's fictional nonsense to help us escape from the far more terrifying real nonsense, in which the writers I mentioned before helped elucidate upon.
His prose is slipshod, perhaps because Stephen King is hardly a writer's writer, and I doubt any Stephen King fan cares about prose.
His characters are cartoons: An homophobe will always be going on about how much he hates the gays, a racist will always be out shouting the N-word. No characters develop any amount of psychological depth or insight.
His plots always disappoint and at times go into some really stupid territory, such as the Turtle from It, just for an example off the top of my head.
His novels are absolutely bloated with useless queens: picking up any of his tomes is like picking up some veiny, throbbing insect queen about to ejaculate her brood into the world. This is not as noticeable in his earlier works, but in his later works, as he has likely long since stopped needing an editor to sell books anyway, so the bloating is horrendous.
He repeats his story elements nonstop: His characters are often times just him (writer, famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser, and so on), Small towns in Maine, gratuitous sex, religious Christian fundamentalism, disproportionate retributions, teens being tossers, adults being useless, completely tasteless and cartoonish depictions of abusive parents... one could go on.
He admits he writes "the literary equivalent of McDonalds," but he also acts shitty when academia doesn't take him seriously, which results in one of the cringiest scenes in all of fiction when the poor, oppressed Stephen King self insert stands up to the big bad intellectuals for not taking his pulp crap as being a valid work of literary fiction.
He's likely one of the best pop authors out there (if only because other mainstream horror writers are even worse) but when he dies, he will be largely remembered because of the movie adaptations of his works, which are nearly always superior to the source material (massively so in the case of The Shining.)
