He's Still the King
What's truly scary about America's top horror writer
New York Post - 08.04.03

Stephen King has been acting strange lately.

In the most recent issue of Book magazine—which is partially owned by Barnes & Noble—the horror novelist wrote a fictional essay about the publishing industry rewarding serious literature monitarily. (That's why it's fictional.)

For example: King writes that he read Jonathan Franzen's bestseller, The Corrections, and hated it because of "that maddening New York 'tude that seems to whisper, 'I'm smarter than you, more sophisticated than you, better-read than you—just better than you' at least once on every single page."

He then proceeds to mock Franzen's "constant taking of his creative temperature." ("How is Jonathan feeling today?")

Given the majority of King's work ("The Shining," "Carrie," "Cujo," "Misery," to name but a few) one half expects the essay to end with Franzen in pieces—literally. Killed, perhaps, in a tragic body snatching incident or a good clean axe murder—a bloody ending rather than a snarky punchline.

What's happening to Stephen King?

Has he lost his instinct for violence and gore? And why is the Prolific Master of Sublime Horror masquerading as The Guy Who's Randomly Freelancing for Pseudo-Literary Publications That Go Unread by the Masses?

Actually, King is soon to reach a more mainstream audience in a widely-read magazine—Entertainment Weekly.

This week, the Post's Keith Kelly broke the news that the legendary thriller writer will write a weekly pop culture column (for a reported $60,000—or $5,000 a column).

It will run on the back page—once occupied by the recently fired humorist Joel Stein. When asked to comment, Stein quipped that "every column should end in a gory death."

Maybe Stein has a point. Why not have every column end in a gory death? They are, after all, King's specialty and they happen all too infrequently in popular culture.

Think of how much better "Glitter" would have performed at the box office if Mariah Carey made her final exit screaming hysterically as some netherworldly villain ensured that she'd never abuse another personal assistant again.

Then again, gory deaths are so passé. So 1987. So Nightmare on Elm Street Part III.

Mere "blood and guts" is easy. King's forte is psychological manipulation—the tension he masterfully builds up, the affinity for the outsider, his willingness to shock with unadulterated (but rarely gratuitous) violence.

It would be refreshing to learn in King's new Entertainment Weekly column, for example, that Hollywood celebrities are really humanoid zombies. Many of us have long suspected this anyway. Who hasn't, when watching the cast of "Friends" make their requisite appearances on "Access Hollywood," thought that Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer could quite conceivably be sharing the same brain?

Let's assume, however, that King decides to completely abandon the horror genre and write sincere—albeit humorous analyses of Hollywood culture. The Book magazine piece was admittedly funny, and it's easy to see why that kind of sharp humor would be more difficult to work into, say, a particularly graphic description of a chainsaw massacre.

The questions remain: Is Stephen King making a concerted effort to demonstrate his versatility? Does he feel like he's not taken seriously as a writer? Or is this new career move simply indicative of his inability or unwillingness to continue to churn out mass market thrillers?

After all, he seems to have undergone quite a transformation since he was nearly killed in a car accident a few years ago. He's been bravely writing, for example, about his struggle with alcoholism, admitting that he wrote many of his bestsellers while drinking.

But King seems to have trouble abandoning the horror genre altogether—much to the delight, of course, of his fiercely loyal fans. They don't seem to want to accept their master's declaration that the next installment in his long-running "Dark Tower" series, due out next year, will be his last.

These same fans were also strangely unfazed by the news that King planned to collaborate on a Broadway musical with John Cougar Mellencamp. Talk about scary.

At any rate, Hollywood is sure to provide King with more horror stories than he could fit into another lifetime of books. Reality TV alone frightens both small children and adults with moderately discriminating tastes.

There is, of course, one possibility we haven't explored. Perhaps this Stephen King—the one who's writing pop-culture columns for EW and gearing up to be the next Billy Joel of Broadway—isn't really Stephen King at all. Maybe it's an imposter. An imposter with evil intentions.

Or maybe we've all been reading too many Stephen King books.

© 2003, Elizabeth Spiers