Time to settle this matter once and for all: How does Veeky Forums feel about Stephen King?

What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

By bestowing rewards on writing that is not all that good, has not the literary establishment lowered standards and pushed even further to the margins writing that is actually good and beautiful? If you ask me whether it is worth your while to read Stephen King instead of (or even in addition to) scores of other better contemporary writers you may have never read (and should hurry up and read before you die), I would say no, unless you are maybe fifteen and have made it clear to your teachers and everybody else that you aren’t going to touch that literary “David Copperfield kind of crap” with a ten-foot pole.

My son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

Guy with okay ideas that can't write a fucking ending worth a shit if his life depended on it.

He wrote one good book. All the rest are shit tier.

what's the good one?

It's weird, because when I first read him, I could tell there was something about the prose that wasn't good, I just couldn't put my finger on what. But I read on anyway, because I was enjoying it despite myself.

He writes decent entertainment. He's not a great literary writer though.

What are his best works?

I quite enjoyed The Gunslinger. He actually tried with his prose in that book. It's not bad.

He's my favorite New York Times Bestselling Author^TM.

Many children don't comprehend how good their lives really are and seek to escape into other worlds. Some do know, and just like the feeling of immersion. Others do so out of a natural urge to explore fantastical elements.

I don't care if Borges or Joyce or Lewis write better or worse than King, as long as I can tell the differences and critically evaluate what's going on, all books are fair. Even self-help, textbooks, pamphlets, and the "trashy airport genrefic" everyone seems to love hating on.

>TL;DR people hate because they hate, loathe as many are to admit horror is a subtype of fiction, which is literature. Is it all immaculate-quality compared to canon, no; it's still literature, by definition.
>The people who try to discriminate never come up with pure reasoning or objective logic, just a bunch of subjective or academic bullshit that tells you they're pseuds trying to feel superior by their limited claim(s) to "muh high-brow culture."

I'll continue to read and laugh at Chicken Soup for the Shitter while on the throne, genrefic interspersed throughout the day's waits, self-help and how-to guides after dinner, and formal literature/canon/philosophy/politics before bed. And I'll likely continue shitposting on Veeky Forums in my dreams, long after I'm dead.
>spooks out

He's entertaining enough in his better books. Probably better than a lot of bestsellers. I don't know what people expect. Even he compares his writing to a Big Mac and fries.

...

I enjoyed his introduction to Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, but I have never read anything else from him. Just can't get into the idea of reading 1000+ page horror novels.

he's a bad writer but not as bad as Veeky Forums makes him out to be.