Dear Stephen,
After well over thirty years of learning, growing, and fond affection, it pains me to say that I believe our relationship must end. We have grown apart, and must go our separate ways. I will always treasure the heyday of our youth, when the world stood in mute awe at the glaring olympian light The Stand cast across publishing and the heady subgenre of postapocalyptic fiction. I stood by you in the Bachman days when you tried to see how much of what made you you was your style or your name, when The Long Walk could stand right up there with S.E. Hinton. I started getting nervous with Misery, not just because it was at least your third novel whose central character was a writer, but because of its murky undercurrents of resentment toward an audience that attained a nearly Pink Floyd level of directed anger toward the people who like you but who just don’t get it.
Perhaps most painful of all you followed Misery with The Dark Half, about a writer whose nemesis is literally himself. I stuck with you because I could see you trying to work it out, trying to find a way out of the corner that fame had painted you into, and even resenting it. Lately you’ve tried to disguise it in books such as Duma Key, by having a protagonist who is a painter and not a writer. I stuck with you because I’m quite aware I’ll never have the slightest idea what that level of fame must be like across every facet of daily life, and I simply admired that you continued to write prodigiously in the spotlight’s glare. Because you’re a writer in your very marrow.
With the challenge of publication itself well behind you, I could see you trying to challenge yourself. Deliberately hamstringing yourself in order to see how much story you could still tell. So you released Misery, which takes place in a house, and Gerald’s Game, which takes place in a room, and Rose Madder, which barely takes place anywhere at all. I hung in there even while I felt as confined by these self-imposed limitations as your characters were.
You lost me a few times, but I’d invested in this relationship and I was rooting for you. You have been a startling phenomenon, our age’s Dickens, a one-man hurricane. People read you who don’t normally read much at all. I’d feel we needed a break and I got fine with not reading you (it was hard to watch the Gunslinger series slot into formula after the open-ended jazz of the first book; I think I can spot the moment you started reading not just Cormac McCarthy but All the Pretty Horses, and I couldn’t get past that). But inevitably I’d hear something that piqued my interest and pulled me back. And I would enjoy what it is I so like about you (your timing is the best in the business, your characters — with the exception of your writer protagonists, who interestingly are often depicted in a harsh light — are people we see in everyday life, not Everyman Symbols or invulnerable and unaffected comic-book heroes). But there would always be that gnawing familiarity of formula, predictability (I think I must be the only person in the world who called giant spider to predict the climax of It), contrived folksiness.
But I’m sorry to say that I think you have finally jumped the shark, and that, as of page 37 of the hardcover edition of Under the Dome, it is truly over between us.
I’d heard good things about this one, and any book that separates an entire town from the rest of the world (it’s been done before, necessarily more obscurely [cf. David Wiltshire, Genesis II]) and deals with the prevailing anarchy has a warm place in my heart before I’ve even cracked the cover. I hit page 34 where a character on a tractor hits the invisible wall, flies off, and breaks his neck while the tractor idles beside him, and tried to regard the end-of-section line “Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere” as just a speedbump, something I could put behind me. A cuteness that should have been resisted because it detracts from the scene, reminds the reader that, after all, this is being written by somebody. It’s the kind of thing any writer could put in an early draft, and that any seasoned writer should remove on revision.
Then I hit section 5 on page 37.
We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester’s Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose.
Ignoring the fatty writing (wouldn’t “broke his nose against something invisible but very hard” have been a more [ahem] active voice and less redundant [we can figure out “face-first” from the broken nose, dude]?), could you give any louder, clearer indication than “thanks to the magic of narration” that you just don’t care about our relationship anymore? That you’re making it all up, and that you no longer care if I know that you’re faking it? Don’t you have enough consideration and professionalism anymore to feel obliged not to yank me completely out of the one-step-removed collusion that is reading? I feel I have paid my twelve bucks for a major studio summer movie and seen bad models dangling on wires, shadows of boom mics, actors glancing off-set. I can practically hear the typing.
Before you accuse me of being unfair, let me take pains to say that I’m fully aware that James Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wake, “brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” But he does it in the first line of the book, and by so doing lets us know what we’re in for. You pull this bait & switch on page 37, well after establishing your standard omniscient, third-person voice, so that this line just sits there like a turd in a punchbowl. This is the moment in the movie where I leave because I understand that I’m better off getting on with my life than getting angrier in a dark room as a lot of money is expended on the assumption that I am an idiot. This is the point, Stephen, where I walked out of your book. Walked out of all your books.
The truth is I’m not mad at you but disappointed in myself for coming back in the first place. Some relationships are about understanding that you will be manipulated. But when the manipulator takes great pains to remind the manipulated that he is not only being manipulated, but shoddily so, anyone with more spine than a gummi worm knows that it’s time to leave. That, from that point on, it’s his own damn fault if he lets it continue. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I realize that I am not really entitled to feel disappointed, because disappointment implies some expectation on my part that you shouldn’t necessarily feel obligated to fulfill. In that sense, then the horrible “dear john letter” cliche holds true: it isn’t you, Stephen, it’s me. You’ll be pefectly fine without me, of course, and I will always treasure the experiences you have given me and the lessons you have taught me, and of course I wish you all the very best in your life and in your future endeavors. And of course I hope that your millions of other relationships continue to flourish.
–steve
My walking-out-on-Stephen-King moment came with “The Tommyknockers”. No amount of cocaine can excuse that book. Like a lot of writers with considerable natural gifts, he needs a firm-handed editor to work with him.
(Though King’s book “On Writing” is one of the best extended essays on the subject I’ve read.)
Oh, I didn’t say I hadn’t walked out on him before! This was just the real true and for-good last time; the quoted paragraph crossed a line of no return for me. Tommyknockers was a definite test of the relationship for a lot of King’s readers (though I can’t recall him talking about cocaine use coloring it; he admits it for It, and it was evident to me on reading it (reallly, a group of 11-year-olds holding a gangbang as a way to ward off evil? Guess your editor was having a power lunch somewhere when you handed that one in, Stephen).
Funny enough, my wife loves horror movies, so I took her to see Dreamcatcher when it was released. When they got to the butt-weasel scene, Maureen — an ICU nurse for 14 years — asked me, “Was he on morphine when he wrote this?” I could only stare in astonishment — because that’s exactly what King was on when he wrote it; he’d had his infamous accident and wrote Dreamcatcher on notepads while hospitalized on major painkillers. Severe constipation being a major side effect. Filter severe constipation through Stephen King on morphine and you get butt-weasels. Go fig.
Tommyknockers owes an enormous debt to a British film called Quatermass and the Pit (released in America as Five Million Years to Earth. Definitely a hard one to forgive.
Whoah. Dude I have this book in my unread stack along with a few other titles (Elegy Beach among them). Although I do agree about some of the shit he’s pulled (gangbang scene included) I almost wanted to believe the “return to form” or “King is back!” that was ringing loudly with this latest release. On a more positive note you have moved me to purchase me some Cormac McCarthy. Just curious, have you read any of Robert McCammon’s Corbett books? I’m sure more people would like to know some stuff you are currently reading. I dug the mention you did a while back to Dhalgren & A Wrinkle in Time.
I read very little fiction anymore because I don’t have the patience for most people’s writing. No one should consider me any kind of arbiter of what to read; I’m an intolerant curmudgeon.
Steve:
I just have to say that I am completely in agreement with your take on Under the Dome. In fact your open letter seemed like a very eloquent translation of what was bouncing around in my head concerning Mr. King. I feel as if I have returned to an old boyfriend that has talked me into “starting over” and finding yeah there was a reason I left in the first place.
I finished and reviewed this last night, but from what I’m hearing people will press on and read it anyway. The power of pop culture.
Thanks for your letter, it was well put and I’m glad I stumbled upon it, now I don’t feel like such an intolerant curmudgeon…:)
– Rachel (Parajunkee)
I watched ‘Five Million Years to Earth’ when I think I was maybe 7 or 8, (in the mid-70’s)…they had it on TV…though I don’t remember it being in color…could have just been we didn’t have a color TV at the time…but that movie stuck with me…I would remember it when I’d seek any sci-fi movie with an insect theme to it…it would have to be one of those ultimate movies that just struck a cord with me…though I’d never have remembered the title if you’d not put it there…I’ll always remember the crane scene of it striking the image in the sky (though I always thought it was some sort of giant preying mantis)
I’ve read a lot of your work, and I’ve read the bulk of S. King’s. When I heard about _Dome_ and later was nearly sucked into its gravity well at a bookstore, I was tempted to buy it. Thousand-page-plus books don’t scare me — but a stale, clunky story does. And King wrote a really nifty book about writing in 2000 or so. Disappointing to hear. It also struck me how familiar the territory is; King admits he started this story years ago and shelved it. I sold my first pro story in ’90 and around ’92 or ’93 I tried to write a novella about a small town that wakes up one morning to find itself trapped by an invisible force-field, and a hick kid in a souped-up Roadrunner who wants out. I shelved mine, too.
This is great commentary, Steve. I’m afraid I never became a King fan. The first couple hundred pages of “The Stand” are fantastic, but it just dwindled into disbelief and irrelevance for me from there.
I was more piqued by your reference to Cormac McCarthy. I just finished my first read through one of his books, The Road, and as I read, I couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d read your “Ariel”. Maybe it’s the only way that post-apocalyptic travelers behave, but the kinship with your earlier work is obvious.
I continue to look forward to reading Elegy Beach; I expect it to be under the tree on Friday.
I can’t imagine McCarthy reading ARIEL (the image tickles me, though). The thematic similarities between THE ROAD and ELEGY BEACH freaked me out (EB was halfway written when THE ROAD came out), especially since I had been singing McCarthy’s praises for a dozen years and nobody knew who I was talking about (I parodied him in my TREKS NOT TAKEN collection, and the response was mostly, Who the hell is Cormac McCarthy? Yeah, well, up yours, cognoscenti.
I highly recommend McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN and THE CROSSING as books that beat the snot out of THE ROAD in terms of pure prose style.
For me there is a distinct turning point which is pre/post ‘The Dark Half’- everything pre is gold, and (basically) everything post is pulp, with a few exceptions such as Head Down in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Desperation/The Regulators was where I decided to get off the bus.
As a bit of armchair psychology, I kind of think back to Danse Macabre, where I think Mr. King relates how if you write for yourself then you’re doing good and if you write for others you’re up shit creek. I’ve heard several different variations of this, such as in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live where a writer for the show says that if you laugh at the joke you’re writing then others will probably think it’s funny too, but if you’re not laughing when you write it but write it anyways in the hopes that others will laugh, it’s most likely going to bomb.
This leads to On Writing where Mr. King says that now when writing he often considers how his wife is going to like what he’s writing, whether she’s going to laugh at his jokes, etc. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I’m with you though, non-fiction has taken the place of fiction these days. Lots of great stories out there.