Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (3 page)

The
Bram Stoker Awards
have been awarded since 1987 by members of the Horror Writers Association. King has won Best Novel for
Misery
(in a tie with McCammon’s epic,
Swan Song
),
The Green Mile
,
Bag of Bones
,
Lisey’s Story
and
Duma Key
; Best Fiction Collection for
Four Past Midnight
and
Just After Sunset
; Best Long Fiction for
Lunch at the Gotham Café
; and Best Non-Fiction for
On Writing
. Through 2009 he has been nominated a further 18 times. In 2003 he received the HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The
World Fantasy Awards
are nominated by members of the World Fantasy Convention and selected by a panel of judges to acknowledge excellence in fantasy writing and art. King has won the Convention Award and the Short Fiction Award, for
The Man in the Black Suit
. In 2007, King received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The Grand Master Award recognizes important contributions to the mystery genre over time, as well as a significant output of consistently high quality.

The British Fantasy Society has awarded King the August Derleth Award for Best Novel in 1983 (
Cujo
), 1987 (
It
), 1999 (
Bag of Bones
) and 2005 (
The Dark Tower
); Best Short Story for
The Breathing Method
in 1983; and a Special Award in 1981.

Stepping outside genre to more mainstream awards King (and Stewart O’Nan) won a Quill Award in 2005 for
Faithful
and King was nominated for
Cell
in the 2006 Awards. The O. Henry Awards are an annual collection of the year’s best stories published in American and Canadian magazines and written by American or Canadian authors. King won first prize (in other words judged to have been the
best
story written by a North American and published in a North American magazine) in 1996 for
The Man in the Black Suit
. In doing so he joined William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, John Cheever, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Alice Walker as winners of the year’s best stand-alone story.

Even greater recognition was accorded King in September 2003, when the National Book Foundation announced it would award him its 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on 19 November that year. The Medal was presented to King, who then delivered the keynote address to some 1000 authors, editors, publishers and friends of the book industry. Previous recipients of the Medal include Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, John Updike, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Miller and Philip Roth.

In giving the award the Foundation said, “Stephen King’s writing is securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative. He crafts stylish, mind-bending page-turners that contain profound moral truths – some beautiful, some harrowing – about our inner lives. This Award commemorates Mr. King’s well-earned place of distinction in the wide world of readers and booklovers of all ages.” King stated, “This is probably the most exciting thing to happen to me in my career as a writer since the sale of my first book in 1973.” Amusingly enough, King and John Grisham once purchased their own tickets to the annual National Book Awards presentation by the Foundation, King telling
The
New York Times
somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “…that was the only way we were going to get in the door.”

There is no doubt King has been responsible for a revival in reading generally and is actually responsible for many teenagers and young people taking up reading as a pleasure for the first time in their lives.

It is known that King is somewhat uncomfortable about being compared with other writers but it is also true that, as the years have passed, more and more critics, academics and others have found themselves drawn to pass comment upon King’s position in the pantheon.

King’s output will stand the test of time as both popular fiction and as the subject of academic study. Courses teach King works across the high schools and colleges of America. Teachers and professors have come to the understanding that they can offer King stories that not only help teach the art of creative writing but actually engage their students.

King is rapidly becoming the Dickens of our times – popular with readers, although initially unpopular with certain critics. As time passed many of Dickens’ works became the standard fare of entertainment. Characters such as Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, and stories such as
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Great Expectations
are now embedded in our culture. Dickens, as does King, expressed the characteristic concerns of his time.

There is also much of the Mark Twain about Stephen King. Twain was a master of writing characters who were young and creating new twists on old themes. He helped bring a new “American” style of writing to English literature. His body of work is now standard study throughout the American education system. King has all these attributes, being the most visible and popular of writers delivering the mainstream American culture of the last forty years.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose portrayals of New England are still among the richest ever written, was also prominent in establishing a truly American literary voice. There is no doubt King has continued Hawthorne’s tradition. With his roots clearly in the American horror tradition, King stands well beside predecessors such as Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft (another New Englander who expressed well the topography and culture of the area, and was the creator of an imaginary town, Arkham) and Edgar Allen Poe (about whom no more need be said).

Perhaps Dr. Michael Collings, noted King critic and former Professor of English at Pepperdine University in California, writing in Stephen J. Spignesi’s
The Essential Stephen King
, put it the most succinctly, “William Shakespeare was the Stephen King of his generation.”

When King critics and observers such as Douglas Winter, Tyson Blue, Spignesi, Michael Collings and George Beahm, among others, offered similar views a quarter century ago they were
not
welcomed by the mainstream of literary critics or academia. Today, there are still those who resist but they are in the minority and lack credibility. It will be interesting to see an assessment in another quarter century but it does not take one of the crystal balls from the Wizard’s Rainbow to predict that King will become codified as one of the great American writers.

The Visual Arts

King’s stories have been adapted to the big and small screen in near record numbers, with varying degrees of success. For every
Carrie
or
The Green Mile
there has been an unfortunate
Sometimes They Come Back
or
Dreamcatcher
. However, film and television are arguably
the
key influencers of world culture and have been for a half-century or more. This has exposed King’s work to every corner of the earth. Along with the Americanization of world culture one could argue a lesser but still influential King-isation (the man himself would surely be horrified by the very concept).

Almost any Western adult will have heard of a girl called Carrie. Anyone interested in movies will have seen, or been exposed to the opinions of, Kubrick’s
The Shining
. The name of one dog, Cujo, now needs no explanation.
The Shawshank Redemption
is one of the most widely loved movies of all time.
Stand by Me
is regarded as one of the leading “coming of age” films ever made.
The Green Mile
brought audiences to tears wherever it was shown. King television series and mini-series such as
The Dead Zone
,
The Stand
,
Storm of the Century
and
Rose Red
were prime-time successes not just in the United States but wherever they are shown.

King adaptations have served for some powerful performances (think of Ian McKellen in
Apt Pupil
, Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, Kathy Bates in
Misery
) and there is a rapidly evolving shortage of actors and actresses who have not, in fact, appeared in a King movie, television production or read an audiobook. Despite the snobbery aimed at horror, science fiction and fantasy (finally shattered in 2004 by Peter Jackson’s
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
) even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had to deliver Oscars to productions of King’s work. Today, King movies and mini-series fill the world’s DVD shops.

King as a World Phenomenon

One should not make the mistake of thinking of King as a purely North American phenomenon (his sales in the UK or Australia on a per capita basis are just as impressive) or even as limited to the English language. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and there are huge fan bases in countries such as Germany, Italy, France and Holland. As economic and literary freedoms have reached Eastern Europe so have King books, with a growing fan base and publications in the local languages of the former Soviet bloc.
Riding the Bullet
was first published in text form in Japan, where King books and movies have an enormous following. Similarly, King has had widespread influence in Latin America, South Africa, India and South-East Asia. Perhaps only China and the Arab world have resisted the wave, but for how long?

King is not just a successful writer but is also a truly global multi-media phenomenon, with massive exposure on television, film, the Internet, audio books, even the stage and computer games.

There appear to be a multitude of reasons for this but it appears the unique mix of our times and King’s style has resulted in the massive popularity of all things King. The horror, science fiction and fantasy genres have existed in modern form for two centuries, at varying levels of popular acceptance and success. There is no doubt however, that the surge in popularity for horror (and King appeared on the scene just as horror was returning to the fore in the early 1970s), science fiction (again, a comeback of SF can be traced solidly to the mid-1970s) and even fantasy (more recently moving out of obscurity and again confirmed as part of mainstream culture by Jackson’s brilliant interpretations of
The Lord of the Rings
saga) has never reached a higher level than the last quarter of the 20th century and the early 21st.

This allowed King’s works to move easily from “genre” into the mainstream. A few continued to try to peg him as a horror writer, as some badge of disgrace, but as King proved he was capable of more than one genre, so did the common opinion move quickly to a higher level of respect for that very style of fiction.

In the same 35-year period there has been an explosion in the need for entertainment software. Technology advanced rapidly, allowing more channels on cable and satellite television, the video rental industry appeared and boomed, the Internet exploded from literally nowhere in the early 1990s, and DVDs as a method of delivery came to the fore in the very late 1990s.

Ironically, as every year doomsayers predicted the death of the book, that form, magazines and reading each proved resilient. Governments everywhere were in deregulation mode, selling their telecommunication companies, allowing more television and radio stations and introducing Pay-TV into Europe, Asia and specific countries, such as the UK (late 1980s) and Australia (mid 1990s). Major producers of entertainment software such as Disney and News Corporation (owners of FOX) suddenly realized there was more money to be made by selling a video (and later, DVD) than there was in a movie ticket, or television advertising revenues. “Blockbusters” began to run only a few weeks in movie theaters before moving to multiple lucrative avenues of distribution – video and DVD rental, Pay-TV, video and DVD sales, and Free-To-Air television. All this was both the cause and a symptom of the splintering of the media. By 2000 “mass media” was already a contradiction in terms, as the consumer had a choice of dozens, if not hundreds of TV channels, thousands of magazines, multiple local movie screens, tens of thousands of videos and DVDs and literally hundreds of thousands of book titles, along with millions of web sites, all at the click of a mouse or remote control.