The Brouhaha Over Stephen King's NBA

When the National Book Foundation presented Stephen King with a National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the bespectacled 56-year-old horror writer accepted the award with humble grace. "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." He then announced that the Foundation could keep the prize money so they could continue to promote literacy. The medal, he would be proud to keep for himself.

The complaints began rolling in almost immediately. Literary critic Harold Bloom declared that "[t]he publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow" such an award on King. He went on to say that King's books "sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat." Bloom then went on to rant about J. K. Rowling, universities, and the state of the book industry in general.

The melee, when broken down, is less likely about King's specific work or talent and more likely about the attitude of many critics and some readers toward genre fiction. There's a stereotype that horror or science fiction novels are less important than other fiction. The subtext is that genre novels are merely to entertain and have little or no social significance.

Suppose that were true (which it isn't) - that genre fiction does little more than entertain. How many kids have become avid readers after reading the fantasy novel "Harry Potter"? How many adults today will admit that the first book they read and enjoyed as children was "The Shining", or "Christine"? If Stephen King lures millions of children and adults to literacy with his scary tales - some of whom may go on to write books of their own - then it can be argued that this fact alone gives his books some social importance.

One thing that the "literary elite" misses is that good horror and sci-fi novels are good stories first, genre stories second. After all, a horror novel, like any other novel, is a story, complete with a plot, characters, conflict, denouement. How well-told the tale is has everything to do with the author and nothing to do with the label slapped on the book by publishers. There are mediocre horror writers, just as there are mediocre novelists and short story authors in every genre. Rather than pigeonholing an author by topics he chooses, some critics would need to remove the blinders of their existing biases and actually examine the story a given author has written.

One of the greatest American writer's of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut, had some trouble getting his early writing taken seriously because critics wrote him off as a "sci-fi" author. Vonnegut famously said the following, "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."* If science fiction is the mistaken for a urinal, I shudder to think what some critics mistake horror for. It would be quite a stretch to compare Kurt Vonnegut's contribution to literature to that of Steven King, but they do share a parallel treatment by critics unwilling to look beyond publishing house labels.

Stephen King is an exceptional writer. His characters inspire sympathy, his monsters are often complex, and his portrayals of childhood heartbreakingly true. Not everything King's written is genius. He tends to repeat themes, and he gets lazy with some of his characters. That said, what nearly everyone who has picked up "The Shining" or "It" will readily admit is that Stephen King's novels keep you reading. The stories suck the reader in so that they can't put the book down. King is a first-class storyteller - and storytelling is the purpose of fiction.

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Chabon said of Stephen King: "I think he's a force for good in the world. People like writers to stay in the boxes. The 20th century was supposedly about breaking down those barriers between high art and popular culture and yet it still feels like there's some kind of transgression when Stephen King gets a National Book Award medal."

Hopefully, Stephen King's National Book Award will strike a strong blow against the, to paraphrase Vonnegut, urinal-ifictation of "genre" fiction - and one step closer to talented horror writers receiving the respect they deserve.

Sources: The Star-Telegram, The Union-Tribune

*Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922), U.S. novelist. "Science Fiction," Wampeters, Foma and Granfallons (1974).