Why Isn’t Stephen King More Scary?
The trouble with King’s horror novels
Stephen King has written an estimated 31,000 pages spread out across novels, short stories and non-fiction works. That’s approximately 11.2 million words. If you write 1000 words per day, which is the suggested amount to sharpen your story-telling skills, that would be 11,200 days, or 31 years. We’re just talking about printed words here. One can imagine there are that many or more words he has thrown out, or maybe he hasn’t.
I’ve never been a big fan of Stephen King. I started reading him in high school. I liked Carrie well enough but then someone suggested I should read The Stand. I was into big books. I had already gone through The Lord of the Rings. Why not?
I was never more bored in my life. The Stand was truly the biggest waste of time I can remember. All that traveling around an apocalyptic landscape with some nasty guy named Randall Flagg trying to start a demonic cult that in the end led nowhere, or rather to some old lady in Nebraska. I think in this case, King literally kept every word he wrote as the novel just went on and on and on. If that wasn’t enough, he later came out with an uncut version clocking in at 500,000 words, or 1150 pages. You would really have to be a glutton for punishment to read that.
Yet, Stephen King is considered the godfather of the modern-day horror novel. His books have been translated into virtually every known language, probably even Tuvan, and he has a filmography that includes more than 80 film and television adaptations, including two versions of The Stand. As they say in the biz, be it literary or film, you can’t argue with success. He has a net worth of roughly 500 million USD.
At times, I have been tempted to read another Stephen King novel to see if there was something I missed, but then I just as quickly talk myself out of it. I gave up sometime around Cujo. The idea of a demonically-possessed St. Bernard was the last straw. A Chihuahua maybe, but a St. Bernard? No.
I would much rather read the classic horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury, whom King has cited as an influence, although it was pretty hard for me to tell beyond his stories supposedly being scary.
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That was the problem when it came to his novels. They weren’t scary. They might have had a scary idea like demonic possession or the end of the world, but in the end they were just long-winded stories that could have easily been shrunk down to 200 pages or so. Any good English teacher will tell you to make every word count. Seems like Stephen never adopted that lesson.
It has long intrigued me that the cinematic adaptation he hates the most is The Shining. This is the Stanley Kubrick film from 1980. I thought it was excellent. Kubrick managed to distill King’s novel to a genuine horror story with excellent performances that I never forgot. King was livid. He felt Kubrick had butchered his novel. No, Stephen, he just took your idea and made it better.
Not only that but Kubrick’s movie was a huge influence on David Lynch and vice-versa. Kubrick had seen Eraserhead and thought it was one of the best movies he had ever watched. Kubrick wanted to capture the same vibe in The Shining. In turn, Lynch said The Shining was one of the best movies he had ever seen and wanted to capture that vibe in his subsequent productions, most notably Twin Peaks.
Funny enough, Stephen King praised Twin Peaks. He loved it so much he referenced Deputy Andy in Needful Things. Maybe King thought Lynch was basing his surreal themes on his novels and decided to give him a clap back. I gleaned this from the internet.
Whatever the case, King stories are generally better to watch, especially in the hands of a good director, than they are to read. Brian De Palma’s Carrie and David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone being two other notable examples.
Mark Twain once said what makes the English language particularly good in telling stories is that the object follows the verb. You can create more impact that way. To prove his point he took selected passages from his short stories in English and translated them into German, in which the object usually precedes the verb. He noted that his humor was entirely lost because of this dynamic. It’s like putting the punchline ahead of the joke. It’s a great study on translations and why so much is lost in the process. It’s not like it can’t be done, he wrote, but it takes a Herculean effort to get it right, otherwise the joke is lost on the audience.
Reading Stephen King is kind of like that. You know where the story is going virtually from the start. There’s no suspense. It’s pure exposition. Basically, he just lets his stream of consciousness flow onto the page without really bothering to double back to see if any of it makes sense. It’s the way writers did in the 19th century when they were serializing their novels. You produced a new excerpt each week. You didn’t have a chance to go back and revise what you had written before. That is why Dostoevsky novels tend to wander. However, King is definitely not Dostoevsky.
Any director worth his salt sees this and immediately sets to rewriting the script so that there will be tension and suspense and hopefully a dramatic pay off. This is what made Kubrick’s version of The Shining so good. He reassembled the novel and made it into a tense, tightly-knit narrative that had a great pay off.
I know Stephen King fans will vociferously argue against my points. I’ve run into these persons before. They will hold up countless examples from his immense body of work to prove he is a great horror novelist, the best. I’m sorry to say King could have used a good dramaturgy lesson, especially with all these adaptations we see on cable television, most of which are better than his books.
