The importance of Stephen King

I would have never imagined till a few years back that I would become a Stephen King fan. I was never that keen on horror fiction or horror movies initially and it was only after I landed in Singapore that I got access to many of the great writers who have dabbled in horror. But I do remember seeing a copy of Cujo in a friend's house in the early 1980s - it must have been just released at that time. That was my first look at a Stephen King book. I think it was the 1990s movies based on King's stories (especially The Green Mile) which really made me curious about this particular writer.
And, boy, once I started reading King, it was the start of a real love affair. I finished the major King works in a couple of years' time and I was amazed at his sheer imagination and the multiple worlds he had created. Of course, King never struck me as the finest writer I had ever read (even his fellow horror writers like Robert Bloch or Ira Levin arguably write far better than King) but, as a storyteller, King is beyond compare. This guy was born to write - prolific, prodigious, versatile ... all these adjectives fit King perfectly. One can never fail to be impressed by the sheer love he has for the craft of writing and that, to me, is the main reason why King is a great author.
I have no hesitation in saying that King's earliest works are by far his best ones - while many readers regard The Stand or IT as his all-time best creations, I would put Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary and his early short stories as being equally great. These were all books written in the mid- to late-1970s when King was churning out one great story after another effortlessly. Even the books that were written in the mid-1980s when King was addicted to drugs and alcohol - like Cujo and even the much-maligned The Tommyknockers - had memorable passages and great characters.
It is when we come to the early 1990s that we feel that King is no longer the force he once was. Of course, there is no question of writer's block with him but the quality of his fiction starts to decline at this stage of his career - books like Insomnia and Rose Madder are just plain weird and, in most cases, unreadable except for the most loyal of his "Constant Readers". There were a few saving graces during this period - like the haunting Dolores Claiborne, the serial novel The Green Mile and the non-fiction memoir On Writing - but, for the most part, King had evolved into a journeyman writer. (Dreamcatcher and Cell were just plain atrocious, in my opinion). But did any of this affect the sales of his books? No way! By this time, King was a publishing phenomenon and, as someone put it, even if he had published his shopping list, there would be eager buyers for it ... after all, King is one of the few authors whose names are printed bigger than the book titles on the book covers!
But King's influence on literature remains enormous. He almost singlehandedly made horror fiction a respectable and lucrative genre. And yet, to pigeonhole King as a straightforward horror writer is quite unfair. Though he made his name initially with horror fiction, many of King's best writings have nothing to do with horror - read the first three novellas in the collection Different Seasons (all made into notable movies); none of them have anything to do with horror and yet, they are all compelling masterpieces. King has shown he can write all sorts of fiction and also that he can move between genres (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, crime, drama and even social commentary, to mention just a few) seamlessly. Now and then he writes non-fiction also and while these can't be compared with the best of his stories, they still are enough to prove that he can write on any topic he wants to. King himself has never described himself as a "horror writer"; instead he has always gone on record saying that he is an "American writer". And that is exactly what he is: a writer par excellence who happens to be an American ... It was a sad moment when some of America's high-brow "literary authors" objected to King being awarded a National Book Award in 2003. They felt he didn't deserve that honour.
The other main criticism against King is that many of his books are overwritten and way too long. After all, this was the guy who added 500 pages to the early edition of The Stand which was already a hefty 800 pages long! King's stories are notorious for being longwinded and unnecessarily lengthy. Some readers feel that many of King's stories could be cut down and thereby made even more effective. But where is the editor who dares to cut down a Stephen King manuscript? And so, King continues on his wordy and undisciplined ways. But it can also be argued that some of the magic of a trademark King work comes from the multi-layered narratives and long-winded storylines ... imagine how limp IT would have been if it had been cut down to a third of its present length!
What I have found more alarming is how King rehashes his own plots these days. Childhood bullying, the precocious child with supernatural gifts, the alien being in the woods, evil coming to a small town, a group of good people banding together to fight an other-worldly villain - these are just five motifs that King has repeated over and over in his stories. Maybe the human brain, however creative, just runs out of new ideas after a while ... that is probably the problem with King currently. To King's credit, he has tried various innovative formats - like e-publishing, the serial novel and crime noir - and some newer topics (cellphones) to bring freshness to his stories but somehow none of it works as well as some of his earlier creations (like the killer clown, the possessed car, the rabid dog or the crazed fan).
Nowadays, the main interest for King fans seem to be following the multiple treatments of his works in other media like movies, TV and audiobooks. His stories, being vivid and extremely visual, lends itself easily to cinematic adaptations, though some of the latter are laughably bad (think Children of the Corn!). So King continues to reign as the ultimate best-selling author, even though his best days are well behind him.