It’s Official: I’ve Given Up on Stephen King

His Shawshank Redemption novella was my favorite of his so far, but it was still worse than the movie

I get it, these are fighting words.

How dare I dislike this national treasure!

No movie is better than the book!

But while I won’t say that I’ll die on this hill, I will say that I’ve given up looking for reasons to like Stephen King’s books. You can say, “But what about [name of book]? You’ll totally like that one!”

I will respond with…

Horror Isn’t My Genre, and My Reading Time is Finite

I am not a reader of horror novels.

I just don’t get the draw.

You read a book that deliberately sucks you in so that it can scare you and emotionally disturb you as deeply as possible? And you do this deliberately? Of your own free will?

Reading? That sounds more like self-inflicted trauma.

I love reading books that challenge what and how I think, but horror is of a different color.

What that means is that a healthy chunk of King’s work is in a part of the bookstore that I avoid, including many of the books that his fans say are his best. They might be wonderful and perfectly written for all I know. That’s why I’m not talking about them.

What I am talking about are King’s forays outside the realm of horror.

I’ll admit (as I’m sure to hear in the comments) that my opinion that these books are not well written does not pull from very much of his (extensive) bibliography. I’ve read the first three books of his Dark Tower series and the first novella in his collection Different Seasons — the one that got turned into the movie Shawshank Redemption.

How can I possibly judge the King of Writers on such a small sample of his works?

Because what I have read has convinced me that any more time reading Stephen King would be better spent reading someone else.

If King Claims the Dark Tower Series is His Best Work, I Don’t Want to See the Rest

Stephen King describes the Dark Tower series as his “magum opus” and as the books that have “had the most persistent hold upon [his] imagination.”

If these are his books that he is the most proud of and that he regards as his best, then I think it’s reasonable to treat them as a litmus test for whether I would like the rest of his books. If these don’t deliver, then what will?

1. The Gunslinger

The first one, The Gunslinger, was pretty good. I could tell that he was setting the scene for a real epic and saw the strands of foreshadow as they crept into the distance. The combination of western, fantasy, science fiction, and what I would call a gothic vibe were eclectic and clashed loudly against each other, but often in a way that interested me.

It was good, but the writing was already on the wall: A big drawback was how little happened for how many words I read. King was Dickensian. I found that I could read fast, with little concern for missing a detail. The words were cheap.

2. The Drawing of the Three

Book two, The Drawing of the Three, was where the series began to crash for me.

I’ll describe things vaguely enough that it’ll be difficult to say that I’m spoiling the book.

First, there was the (quite literally) plodding plotline. Stated pithily, Roland walks along a beach for 400 pages and meets a couple of people. Those meetings involve time travel, a tactic that I’ve found to be overused and usually poorly, though I didn’t mind King’s execution of it. But overall, I’ve described the events of the book elsewhere as, “like The Road, but Cormac McCarthy has a Pulitzer and King doesn’t.”

Second, the way King writes action scenes is exactly the opposite of the way I write them.

I think that a good action scene should not take the reader much longer to read the scene than it would take for the action to happen in real life. In real life, when you’re in an intense situation, you tend not to see a hell of a lot while it’s unfolding. If you’re not getting into similar situations on the regular, and if you’re not the one initiating the action and executing a definite plan of attack, then you’re kind of just reacting impulsively. You blackout (or at least brownout), react without thinking, and then open your eyes to see the results.

Those are the thoughts behind the action scenes in my own book, Flight of Fools.

King does the opposite, and this is on full display in the shootout in The Drawing of the Three (you can’t say that this is a spoiler; the first book is called The Gunslinger).

The shootout lasts 8 pages.

And this wasn’t some drawn-out battle with fits and lulls. It was like the bar shootout in Inglorious Bastards.

King’s description was tedious. The exact opposite of what an action scene should be.

They were still shooting each other when I put the book down and got myself a drink, and they were still shooting each other when I came back.

3. The Waste Lands

But it was The Waste Lands that turned me off the most, and it was King’s writing that did it.

When I read a novel, the words create pictures in my mind. It’s kind of like a movie. The better the book, the higher the opacity of the movie running before my eyes and the less I’m aware of the outside world.

The downside to experiencing a book like this is that a continuity error throws my train of thought off the tracks. If there are enough of these errors, the train doesn’t bother running anymore. Instead of seeing the movie in my mind I just see the words on the page in my lap and it might as well be nonfiction, but without the learning.

The last third of The Waste Lands has lots of continuity problems.

It’s raining when Eddie fires a gun, but it isn’t raining when Roland hears it.

Eddie rips his pants wide open at one point, but it’s never mentioned again and there are actions that it would have influenced.

Descriptions of the setting mutate so I’m visualizing something that’s constantly changing and letting characters grab things that were nowhere near them, but now somehow are.

Worse, these mistakes make me read more critically. I start to ask questions about other things.

Roland and the gang need to get to the train station but asking for directions leads to guns getting drawn (this is why men don’t usually ask). The others then walk Roland et al to the train station, which ends up being on the same road, not very far away, and topped with a 60-foot statue. Rather than make a standoff, couldn’t they have just pointed?

At this point, I’m no longer suspending my disbelief.

If this is the best that Stephen King’s got, I’ll pass on the rest. Especially considering that the plot was only just getting started in The Waste Land, I had already read over a thousand pages, and the rest of the series was three thousand more. That’s time I could invest elsewhere.

The Movie Was Better Written Than His Shawshank Redemption Novella

But Stephen King fans are everywhere, and several of them urged me to try again. One of them pushed me to keep going in the Dark Tower.

“The next one is where it really starts to get going,” he said.

“It’s book four!” I replied. “It should have ‘started to get going’ in one or two.”

Another King fan, however, persuaded me to give his shorter stuff a go. She recommended the novella in Different Seasons that became the movie Shawshank Redemption.

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was only a hundred pages so I figured sure, why not.

It was good. Having seen the movie, I knew what was going to happen, but letting King walk me through the steps was a nice experience.

I also had no idea how big of a deal it was to have Morgan Freeman play the narrator, Red. Nothing in the book hinted that this character was Black, and a few lines implied that he was white — I seem to recall Red’s line about having Irish ancestry being considered a joke in the movie.

Or maybe the casting call for the character of Red was just, “must be a good narrator.”

However, there’s a small detail in the movie that is not in the book and that has some big implications.

In the movie, Andy leaves prison a wealthy man because he helped the guards and the warden launder money, but Andy secretly made a little back door into their scheme. Once out of jail, Andy took on the identity of the fake person that he had created so the guards could move money around. With all the identification documents for the fake person, Andy could steal the money and the warden and guards could do nothing about it because the money was dirty.

This is called poetic justice.

In the book, Andy leaves prison a wealthy man because he’d created a trust account with a friend before he got convicted and the investments from the account did really, really well.

You could call this a deus ex machina — a plot device where a problem gets solved by an unlikely intrusion into the story.

You cannot deny that, in this regard at least, the movie is better written than the novella. In the movie, Andy gets the money by stealing it from his oppressors. In the book, Andy gets the money by falling into it.

Stephen King left a huge storytelling opportunity on the table, in favor of a plot device that is more at home in a comedy. Good writers don’t do that.

The Shorter Stuff Seems to Be Better But He’s Going in the Wrong Direction

The thing that struck me the most about Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was that the writing was much tighter. Things moved forward. The words mattered more. The prose still made for a fast read, but not so fast that I felt like I could speed read and still get it all.

If things moved forward any more slowly in the Dark Tower series, they’d be in reverse.

I bet that the three that I read could be rewritten into a single book, nothing lost.

That makes me think that King benefits from the shorter medium. It makes him move the plot along and keeps him from meandering. The Dark Tower was nothing but meandering, while the novella kept a fairly normal kind of pace to it.

Unfortunately, King is going in the exact opposite direction.

When The Stand was first published, its publisher made Stephen King shorten it… down to 823 pages. The book sold well, got nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and got a TV adaptation. A decade later, a Complete and Uncut Edition was released, with King’s original 150,000 words — around 400 pages — put back in the text, plus other changes and additions.

Based on the Dark Tower, I’d venture to say that the extra novel they put back into The Stand doesn’t have to be there. Were I to set aside the time necessary to read The Stand — and, honestly, descriptions of the book do intrigue me — I would get the “slimmer,” 823-page version.

But I don’t think I’m going to set that time aside. There are lots of other great writers out there and my time among their books is shrinking.

I’m done reading Stephen King. He isn’t for me.