Consider This from NPR - Stephen King Has Ruled The Horror Genre For 50 Years. But Is It Art?

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

In 1974, Stephen King published his first book, "Carrie". But 50 years on, critics still debate if his work deserves a place in the literary canon.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

What's the scariest situation you can imagine? A creepy clown peering up at you from a sewer gutter, beckoning you closer? Hiya, Georgie. What a nice boat. Do you want it back? Being trapped in a blizzard with a murderous spouse? Wendy? Say what?

Darling, light of my life. I'm not going to hurt you. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not gonna hurt you. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said I'm not gonna hurt you. I'm just gonna bash your brains. Or maybe it's your high school prom suddenly turning into a fiery bloodbath. That last scene is from the movie Carrie. And if you know Carrie, if you love horror, then you know the work of Stephen King. Carrie was King's first book, and it came out 50 years ago this spring. It was turned into the Oscar-nominated film starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie as a daughter and mother in a very unhealthy relationship. Stop it, Mama! Stop hurting yourself, Mama!

He's gonna laugh at you. He's going to laugh at you. They're all going to laugh at you. Vampires, rabid dogs, possessed kids, plagues. If it's terrifying, Stephen King has written about it. And Hollywood has continued to mine King's extensive body of work, over 70 novels, over 200 short stories, giving us some of the most memorable moments on screen. Here's Johnny.

I'm your number one fan. Over the past 50 years, the cult of King has exploded. His books, his movies, the man himself have amassed millions of fans and have become iconic fixtures in pop culture, as evidenced by spoofs like this one from The Simpsons. So, Mr. King, what tale of horror and the macabre are you working on now? Oh, I don't feel like writing horror right now. I'm working on a biography of Benjamin Franklin. There's a universality to King's writing that I think makes him very accessible.

Eric Vespi and Scott Wampler host The King Cast, a podcast devoted to all things Stephen King. It's not until you start trying to read other people and realizing how, you know, just far ahead of the pack King is in terms of being able to craft a story and character that you just really want to want to follow. But not everyone thinks that King is ahead of the pack. For critics like the late Harold Bloom, he wasn't even in the race. Bloom once called King an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. Ouch. King addressed his critics in a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose. There is a feeling among the real critical

intelligentsia that anybody who's being read by a lot of people can't be very good because the middle range is fairly low, And that's total bull. Consider this. It is hard to argue that when it comes to horror, King is anything but, well, the king. But is his work great literature? That has been open to debate. Coming up, we assess his work and legacy, as well as how that legacy has also been shaped by the adaptations of his work.

From NPR, I'm Scott Tetreault. It's Consider This from NPR. If you're listening to NPR, you probably agree with the statement that when it comes to the movie, the book is usually better. In the case of Stephen King, some of his most iconic books have been supplanted in the popular imagination by their screen adaptations. But NPR culture critic Linda Holmes says this should not be a mark against King's talent. Instead, she sees King's appeal to Hollywood pretty simply. He just has interesting, cool ideas for stories.

And I think those stories appeal to people who simply. He just has interesting, cool ideas for stories. And I think those stories appeal to people who want to make films. She says that even 50 years on, a story like Carrie is no exception. In the case of Carrie, it's that idea of what if this girl had this power and used it to get revenge on all the people that hurt her in high school. But she says it's also King's empathy for a young girl that makes him stand out among his male peers. The interesting thing about Carrie is that it is so much about the power of this girl and her discovery of this power that comes out as rage.

That's Satan's power. It's nothing to do with Satan, Mama. It's me. Me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can move things. When he wrote Carrie, I think he was more interested than a lot of novelists, male novelists were at that time in thinking about the interior lives of girls of that age. But the key, I think, to understanding Carrie in the context of the rest of the canon is that we're dealing with the first outsider. This is going to be a theme that will come back over and over again in King's fiction,

the loser, and how the loser has to somehow find a way to survive. Tony Magistrali is a professor of English at the University of Vermont, and he writes about the horror genre in literature. He's been writing serious scholarly books about Stephen King for years. He teaches a popular class on the author. But he says it took a while for his fellow faculty members to recognize that Stephen King was worth studying. My colleagues all were scratching their heads. What are you doing? You know,

talk about self-destructive impulses. Stop, stop with this Stephen King stuff. He's a hack. And I kept trying to tell people, pay attention. There's a lot going on here by way of subtext and things that are under the surface. This guy has also got his, he's got a real pulse of what's going on in American society. What was the first of his books that really drew you in? I'd probably have to start with Carrie. As early as that was, a friend of mine threw a copy of Carrie in my lap and said,

read this. And I did. And I said, wow, I'm hooked. This is really interesting. You mentioned Carrie. That's the anniversary we're looking at. It turns 50 later this year. It was his first book. Of course, it leads to that first movie moment. What do you think it was about Carrie that stood out from other horror novels at that time? Or do you think

it was more the movie it became that made it stand out? Yeah, I think I would go the other way. I would say that it connected to The Exorcist. The Exorcist was a year before. And of course, everyone was caught up with the frenzy of teenage girls being subjected to the devil. And of course, when Carrie came out, it wasn't a bestseller by any means. And it only became a bestseller when it went into paperback, where it sold 200,000 copies. But that was largely attributed to De Palma's film. And as King once commented,

I made Carrie and Carrie made me. Do you think the movies, there've been so many movies and so many of the movies are iconic pop culture, you know, marking points that have lasting power. The Shining, even though Stephen King, I think, had a lot of issues with The Shining, but The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, there are so many of these movies. Do the movies enhance King's legacy or do they supplant it in a way? Well, I think that in the end, and when I'm talking about the end, I'm talking about 20, 40 years from now, I think it's going to be the movies that are going to bring people back to reading King. This is after Steve's of course gone.

And I think that the films are so good that people are going to be attracted to wanting to come back to the source for where this film came from. Going back to how he's viewed critically, you know, I think you can look throughout history and a lot of new mediums or new people in the scene, especially if they're successful or kind of dismissed by academics at first. Do you think that's entirely what was going on? Do you think the fact that he sold books held him back? Or do you think it was something else that you were kind of in the minority view for a while

when it came to people who decide what is or isn't fine literature? If we go back to the 70s when Stephen King was publishing, began publishing, you see a very, very different environment going on in English departments across the country. See, this is important because this is a prescient moment. What you're seeing here is the beginning of the erosion of what used to be viewed as the custodians of culture. Now that notion, it always had something to do with tradition. It always had something to do with history and the accepted

writers. And all of that started to fall apart, I think, around the 70s. How do you think he ranks among American writers, if you could guess that 30, 40 years down the line point of view? that were being raised, political, social, psychological, the gestalt of the time, that Stephen King would be a logical place to go to find out those issues, to find a take on those issues. And I think he's that important. It's Tony Magistrali, an English professor

at the University of Vermont. Thanks so much for talking to us. Hey, my pleasure. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Gennigan. Thanks to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.