SK was "in the right place at the right time; would not work in today's market"

[jhanic]

We may be seeing something like that in the relatively new future. J.K. Rowling (remember Harry Potter?) has said she wants to do something very, very different next. Let's see what happens to her.

John

[BROWNINGS CHILDE]

Wasnt this discussion made somewhat obsolete by King having success as Richard Bachman?

[Rahfa]

Wasnt this discussion made somewhat obsolete by King having success as Richard Bachman?

Well....That could also be said to show an example of the opposite point - it was the same superstar writer, and it took his alias four genre books published as a paperbacks to earn a genre hardcover publication.


So I'm not sure it was a breakout success...it was a writer grinding out a decent level of success in a competitive market.

[Sam]

I'm not a big believer in talking about what people could do if they wanted to. You either can, or you can't. You do or you don't.

But I agree some could still break out of their perceived genres, at some level, just not nearly at a superstar level like SK has achieved. Who are your examples? I'm trying to come up with some myself...

My best example is Connie Willis. She writes science fiction partly because she is drawn to it, but also , by her own admission, because that's what she WANTS to write. She doesn't have any desire to write outside of the genre. Her writing has made her recipient to numerous Hugo Awards, as well as Nebula Awards, Locus Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award. This year she was inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. She writes wonderfully crafted, real characters and has a knack for making the reader care for them. For a good example of her writing, read Doomsday Book. Her book Passage is as close as she has come to writing outside the Science Fiction genre. She's a damn good writer. Doomsday Book proved that. She also has the ability to write outside her genre. Passage proved that to me.

[Sam]

Wasnt this discussion made somewhat obsolete by King having success as Richard Bachman?

Well....That could also be said to show an example of the opposite point - it was the same superstar writer, and it took his alias four genre books published as a paperbacks to earn a genre hardcover publication.


So I'm not sure it was a breakout success...it was a writer grinding out a decent level of success in a competitive market.

Agreed. What I take issue with the article writer was the statement that many of Stephen King's horror classics would not work in today's market. I simply disagree with that statement and have made arguments as to why.

[BROWNINGS CHILDE]

Wasnt this discussion made somewhat obsolete by King having success as Richard Bachman?

Well....That could also be said to show an example of the opposite point - it was the same superstar writer, and it took his alias four genre books published as a paperbacks to earn a genre hardcover publication.


So I'm not sure it was a breakout success...it was a writer grinding out a decent level of success in a competitive market.

Yes, but he did earn a genre hardcover publication, so it seems reasonable, that he would have eventually been successful even if his name had been Bachman instead of King.

And for me, Carrie is very low on my list of favorites, be it the movie or the book. I can't imagine his success hinging on the success of this one work. In fact, there have been numerous authors that had brilliant success with there first book or movie adaptation, and then had careers that fizzled out. So, yes, I do think that King got a good running start because the market was ripe. But he has had lasting success because of his talent.....and he would have been successful as Bachman as well if he were not "found out".

[Rahfa]

Yes, Bachman was absolutely earning his success.

You're definitley right about Carrie - just because was the movie was good doesn't mean Salem's Lot would be a great book, or The Stand, etc...but I do think the movie made him a superstar, which changed his ability to take some risks and write what we wanted, rather than having publishers/agents tell him, "no, you got to write this kind of book."

I think I agree with the original article's point that - just like music - in today's market, the publisher is concerned only with what will sell RIGHT NOW, so they don't care if some new SK comes along who can be a literary AND genre success. They just want the bestseller on the shelves, and they want the author to dance like a monkey to do that.

I think Dennis Lehane is a good example of somebody who was able to write himself "out of" noirish detective fiction into both horror/thriller like Shutter Island, and also historical literary fiction like "The Given Day." He's a great writer no matter what he writes (again, would he have had the latitide without the movies of his books? Don't know...)

We agree on the most important part - yes, King got a running start becasue of the ripe market at the time, but obviously it took talent after that. And yes, Bachman does prove that, because even this no-name author was attracting attention.

In today's market, I don't know that a 'Bachman' would succeed the same way though...he might have been relegated to paperback pot-boilers, and nobody would have ever invested in the hardcover breakthrough...there's just no patience for author development, and I think that was another point of the article I agree with.

[pathoftheturtle]

In the introduction for "The Bachman Books," King said that if the truth had not come out, he had planned to next publish Misery under Bachman's name. Now, that would have been quite an interesting experiment.

[jhanic]

Don't forget Dan Simmons, who's written successfully in horror, fantasy, science fiction, historical, and crime novels.

John

[mae]

I tried looking up contemporary reviews for King's first books, but the results from New York Times and others are all paid subscriptions. Does anyone by any chance have texts of contemporary reviews of Carrie of 'Salem's Lot, for instance? It would be interesting to read what the critics though of King at that time early in his career.

[Bev Vincent]

Here are their reviews of Carrie and The Shining

[flaggwalkstheline]

yep both of those require subscriptions/ signing in

[Ben Mears]

Don't forget Dan Simmons, who's written successfully in horror, fantasy, science fiction, historical, and crime novels.

John

Excellent point John. I think Simmons is one of the best and most versatile writers working today. I would love to read a collaboration between him and SK!

[mae]

Here are their reviews of Carrie and The Shining

I was able to get the texts:

May 26, 1974
Criminals at Large
By NEWGATE CALLENDAR

Maybe, strictly speaking, it is not a mystery book. But it does have action, suspense and, at the end, a holocaust. And it is exceedingly well-written. So don’t miss Carrie by Stephen King (Doubleday, $5.95) a first novel and one guaranteed to give you a chill.

“Carrie” is about a telekinetic girl in a small town in Maine. She is an unhappy girl. Her mother is a horror: a religious fanatic eager to beat the goodness of Christ into sinners with a powerful right hand. No wonder Carrie grows up all but mute, unattractive, shy. She is the butt of jokes in school; she is poorly coordinated; she does not appear to be very bright. But she has strange gifts. Finally, pushed beyond what her emotional state can absorb, she runs psychically amok, unleashing all the latent powers in her. The result is sheer disaster for her and for all around her.

King does more than tell a story. He is a schoolteacher himself, and he gets into Carrie’s mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism—blood symbolism especially. That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers. This mixture of science-fiction, the occult, secondary-school sociology, kids good and bad and genetics turns out to be an extraordinary mixture.

March 1, 1977
Something Nasty in the Tub
By RICHARD R. LINGEMAN

Stephen King is one of the hottest novelists currently working the horror-occult genre. His books "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" were best sellers in paperback, having been given a considerable boost by the popularity of the movie of "Carrie." Judging from his latest novel, "The Shining," he is a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap. Ranked on a scale of from 0 to Ira Levin and Thomas Tryon, to name two leading practitioners in this vein, he would score, I should say, about a 75. His long suit is an energetic and febrile imagination and a radar fix on the young people who probably make up the large hard core of the market. He is not up to Mr. Levin and Mr. Tryon, however, because he lacks the sly craftsmanship of the former, at his best, and the narrative strength of the latter. Still, like a fast short-order cook during the breakfast rush, he serves up the scary stuff with unremitting dexterity.

Ontologically Grounded

The horror genre, with its convention of unnatural or supernatural menace, has attracted great writers from time to time. One thinks of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw," which insinuated a notion of evil extant beyond the grave, or Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," also essentially a ghost story, yet utterly convincing psychologically. The sophisticated horror stories are grounded in some plausible philosophical or psychological ontology and employ a careful verisimilitude, so that one thinks, "It could have happened." Another kind of horror story, descended from the 19th-century Gothic, employs primitive fears, superstitions or legends rattling around in the collective unconscious, and contemporary writers often deck out these figures in modern guise: the devil in the Dakota, in "Rosemary's Baby," or demonic possession in the post-Vatican II world of "The Exorcist." The resurgence of interest in evil spirits in this day, though harmless, occasionally makes one wonder if the Beast of Unreason is stirring.

In "The Shining," Stephen King resorts to summoning up a melange of ghosts and mixing them with voguish interest in precognition. The story has Jack Dorrance, tentatively reformed drunk and unreformed playwright, taking his wife, Wendy, and 5-year-old son, Danny, for a winter of caretaking at the Overlook Hotel, an old-style mountain resort in Colorado with a "checkered" history. Jim intends to use the off- season isolation to complete his play, a labor that shouldn't call down anything worse than the unhappy shade of George Bernard Shaw, or maybe George Jean Nathan. Danny, however, is gifted with "the shining"-- precognition, mental telepathy, second sight or whatever. This, it turns out, makes him an undesirable guest at the Overlook, which is booked solid with a convention of evil emanations from its checkered past. The hotel's presiding evil spirit does not take a shine to Danny's shining, for reasons never quite clear, and, by the miracle of transmogrification, begins wreaking all kinds of bad things on the Dorrances, who are, by now, thoroughly snowbound.

Anyhow, what with something nasty in the bathtub of 217, those unquiet spirits of Mafia victims in the presidential Suite, the topiary whose animal-shaped bushes start making unfriendly gestures, the ancient boiler that if not constantly nursed is going to blow the whole place Rocky Mountain high, the running 1940's vintage masquerade party in the ballroom and, yes, killer wasps, the Dorrances soon wish that Jack had gone to MacDowell to write his play. Mr. King serves up these horrors at a brisk, unflagging pace, and he undeniably keeps things moving.

Some of the horrors, however, are embedded in his writing style. We have Wendy "trying to rid herself of the awful pent-up feeling that sometimes fell on her like a large-pressing hand over her heart." In the hotel's palmy days, "the money must have rolled down the corridors and into the cash register like a 20th- century Comstock Lode." Mr. King is one of those writers who tries to fend off the onus of a cliche by admitting or underlining it: "For Wendy it was discovering the truth in a cliche; her breath was taken away"; "He held on-- no exaggeration-- for dear life."

Grand Guignol ‘Room Service'

Well, these are the occasional lapses; worse is the muddling of all sorts of supernatural props-- precognition, ghosts, animism-- along with dollops of Freudian psychology and recurring, unhelpful allusions to Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"-- plus an unacknowledged bow to "The Fall of the House of Usher.' So many doors are opening on horror or being bolted frantically shut against threatening evil that the novel resembles a Grand Guignol "Room Service.' The evil is slapdash, unfocused and eventually preposterous. Mr. King is a natural, but he lacks control; he simply rears back and lets fly with the fireball, and a lot of wild pitches result.

That's a pity, because his sheer rookie's energy is engaging, and in the relationship of Jack and Wendy, there is a core of psychological truth that might have been crafted into a subtle psychological chiller. For the Horror, dear Brutus, lies within us, not in our ghouls.

Too bad I can't find the one for 'Salem's Lot.

[jhanic]

Thanks, pablo. Those are very interesting!

John

[Ben Mears]

Here are their reviews of Carrie and The Shining

I was able to get the texts:

May 26, 1974
Criminals at Large
By NEWGATE CALLENDAR

Maybe, strictly speaking, it is not a mystery book. But it does have action, suspense and, at the end, a holocaust. And it is exceedingly well-written. So don’t miss Carrie by Stephen King (Doubleday, $5.95) a first novel and one guaranteed to give you a chill.

“Carrie” is about a telekinetic girl in a small town in Maine. She is an unhappy girl. Her mother is a horror: a religious fanatic eager to beat the goodness of Christ into sinners with a powerful right hand. No wonder Carrie grows up all but mute, unattractive, shy. She is the butt of jokes in school; she is poorly coordinated; she does not appear to be very bright. But she has strange gifts. Finally, pushed beyond what her emotional state can absorb, she runs psychically amok, unleashing all the latent powers in her. The result is sheer disaster for her and for all around her.

King does more than tell a story. He is a schoolteacher himself, and he gets into Carrie’s mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism—blood symbolism especially. That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers. This mixture of science-fiction, the occult, secondary-school sociology, kids good and bad and genetics turns out to be an extraordinary mixture.

March 1, 1977
Something Nasty in the Tub
By RICHARD R. LINGEMAN

Stephen King is one of the hottest novelists currently working the horror-occult genre. His books "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" were best sellers in paperback, having been given a considerable boost by the popularity of the movie of "Carrie." Judging from his latest novel, "The Shining," he is a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap. Ranked on a scale of from 0 to Ira Levin and Thomas Tryon, to name two leading practitioners in this vein, he would score, I should say, about a 75. His long suit is an energetic and febrile imagination and a radar fix on the young people who probably make up the large hard core of the market. He is not up to Mr. Levin and Mr. Tryon, however, because he lacks the sly craftsmanship of the former, at his best, and the narrative strength of the latter. Still, like a fast short-order cook during the breakfast rush, he serves up the scary stuff with unremitting dexterity.

Ontologically Grounded

The horror genre, with its convention of unnatural or supernatural menace, has attracted great writers from time to time. One thinks of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw," which insinuated a notion of evil extant beyond the grave, or Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," also essentially a ghost story, yet utterly convincing psychologically. The sophisticated horror stories are grounded in some plausible philosophical or psychological ontology and employ a careful verisimilitude, so that one thinks, "It could have happened." Another kind of horror story, descended from the 19th-century Gothic, employs primitive fears, superstitions or legends rattling around in the collective unconscious, and contemporary writers often deck out these figures in modern guise: the devil in the Dakota, in "Rosemary's Baby," or demonic possession in the post-Vatican II world of "The Exorcist." The resurgence of interest in evil spirits in this day, though harmless, occasionally makes one wonder if the Beast of Unreason is stirring.

In "The Shining," Stephen King resorts to summoning up a melange of ghosts and mixing them with voguish interest in precognition. The story has Jack Dorrance, tentatively reformed drunk and unreformed playwright, taking his wife, Wendy, and 5-year-old son, Danny, for a winter of caretaking at the Overlook Hotel, an old-style mountain resort in Colorado with a "checkered" history. Jim intends to use the off- season isolation to complete his play, a labor that shouldn't call down anything worse than the unhappy shade of George Bernard Shaw, or maybe George Jean Nathan. Danny, however, is gifted with "the shining"-- precognition, mental telepathy, second sight or whatever. This, it turns out, makes him an undesirable guest at the Overlook, which is booked solid with a convention of evil emanations from its checkered past. The hotel's presiding evil spirit does not take a shine to Danny's shining, for reasons never quite clear, and, by the miracle of transmogrification, begins wreaking all kinds of bad things on the Dorrances, who are, by now, thoroughly snowbound.

Anyhow, what with something nasty in the bathtub of 217, those unquiet spirits of Mafia victims in the presidential Suite, the topiary whose animal-shaped bushes start making unfriendly gestures, the ancient boiler that if not constantly nursed is going to blow the whole place Rocky Mountain high, the running 1940's vintage masquerade party in the ballroom and, yes, killer wasps, the Dorrances soon wish that Jack had gone to MacDowell to write his play. Mr. King serves up these horrors at a brisk, unflagging pace, and he undeniably keeps things moving.

Some of the horrors, however, are embedded in his writing style. We have Wendy "trying to rid herself of the awful pent-up feeling that sometimes fell on her like a large-pressing hand over her heart." In the hotel's palmy days, "the money must have rolled down the corridors and into the cash register like a 20th- century Comstock Lode." Mr. King is one of those writers who tries to fend off the onus of a cliche by admitting or underlining it: "For Wendy it was discovering the truth in a cliche; her breath was taken away"; "He held on-- no exaggeration-- for dear life."

Grand Guignol ‘Room Service'

Well, these are the occasional lapses; worse is the muddling of all sorts of supernatural props-- precognition, ghosts, animism-- along with dollops of Freudian psychology and recurring, unhelpful allusions to Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"-- plus an unacknowledged bow to "The Fall of the House of Usher.' So many doors are opening on horror or being bolted frantically shut against threatening evil that the novel resembles a Grand Guignol "Room Service.' The evil is slapdash, unfocused and eventually preposterous. Mr. King is a natural, but he lacks control; he simply rears back and lets fly with the fireball, and a lot of wild pitches result.

That's a pity, because his sheer rookie's energy is engaging, and in the relationship of Jack and Wendy, there is a core of psychological truth that might have been crafted into a subtle psychological chiller. For the Horror, dear Brutus, lies within us, not in our ghouls.

Too bad I can't find the one for 'Salem's Lot.

Hard to take a reviewer serious he who gets the the last name of the main character wrong (Jack Dorrance) in his first sentence and refers to him as Jim in the second sentence.

[Solar]

I was about to say the same thing. Jim Dorrance? Really?

[mae]

I really like that review of Carrie, even if it's too short.

[Bev Vincent]

By the way -- this is supposedly the guy who wrote reviews as Newgate Callendar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_C._Schonberg

[Blaine Is A Pain]

Back to the first post about the article itself. Basically the writer is trying to say King would not have been successful in today's market with his earlier books. I don't really buy the arguement myself. Granted Carrie is not this greatest book. I think Salem's Lot and The Shining would do just fine myself. Yeah, everything that is entertainment comes along at the "right time"

They do this stuff with athletes to. They argue that Babe Ruth would get ate up by today's pitchers. Kobe is better than Air Jordan. Joe Montana would suck in today's NFL. It's endless.

If you drop the same original Star Wars movie out to people now after all the other films that have come after it. Then sure it would not have people lining up around the block to see it because we have allready seen that type of movie in spades ever since then. But at the time it came out in 1977 it was trully a unique way of seeing a movie.

I just don't really get the point of the article? Is it to say now that King sucks or what? It just does not make much sense to me. The fact is he did come out with the stories he did at the time and he was a hit. You can't change it. Would he not be now? Hard to say really. I think IT would do pretty damn well if it were released for the first time now. Same with The Stand, Misery, and others. I really don't think authors have advanced all that much since his stories came out. You either make a good book or you don't.

[Sam]

The comparison of King to Star Wars is a valid one I think. King reawakened the horror genre and brought it into the modern day. Star Wars revolutionized special effects and in many ways CREATED the effects industry that many people say it couldn't stand up to now. Without Star Wars, the special effects industry would not exist as it is right now. Without King, the publishing industry wouldn't exist as it does right now. King helped to destroy the belief by the publishing industry that the public wouldn't buy more than one book from an author per year. He is constantly pushing the envelope and forcing publishing to grow to accomodate his ideas. He makes the publishing industry keep up with him, and has from the beginning in the same way Star Wars forced the special effects industry to grow in order to keep up with the demands it made. Good analogy.

[lowdown]

he came out when cable was just starting ....so i think he was in a good place for a great writer to take the rains ....and the fact that he still puts out a fuckin wicked book ..(UTD ....i'm on the last part)

[BROWNINGS CHILDE]

King has demonstrated that he can be successful in virtually any medium at his craft. Books, TV, movies, audio, comics, podcasts, chap books, computer installments, etc. Hence, we have a, hopefully not tooooo terrible, collaboration with John Mellencamp for a Rock/Horror/Thriller musical.