Master of Postliterate Prose

By Paul Gray

Stephen King packs pop images into scary bestsellers

Horror has been frightfully good to Author Stephen King. He expects to earn about $2 million this year, mostly as a result of making people's flesh crawl. The number of his books in print (predominantly paperbacks) climbs toward 40 million. Indeed, his pot currently boileth over. Creepshow, an original King screenplay directed by George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), will be released in October; a $6.95 comicbook version of the script has just been published by New American Library as part of the promotional hoopla. An adaptation of Firestarter, the sixth of King's seven novels, is being filmed in Michigan, where local residents have eagerly offered to sell their homes for use in the movie's incendiary conclusion. And King's tenth book in eight years, with a hard-cover 200,000 first printing, began topping bestseller lists weeks before its official publication date.

Those who have already rushed out to buy Different Seasons (Viking; 527 pages; $16.95) may be a trifle shocked by what they have brought home: a collection of four novellas, only one of which offers the chills that have become King's trademark. The Breathing Method is an eerie account of a terribly unnatural childbirth. But the other three, though sporadically gruesome, come without King's customary trimmings. Gone are varieties of telekinesis (Carrie, Firestarter) and precognition (The Shining, The Dead Zone). There are no vampires ('Salem's Lot), apocalyptic plagues (The Stand) or satanically rabid Saint Bernards (Cujo). The only reader likely to find these long tales truly frightening is an old-fashioned book lover: they are spooky examples of what can be called postliterate prose.

The genre is new, its methods still in the formative stage, but King is its popular master. Different Seasons offers a dazzling display of how writing can appeal to people who do not ordinarily like to read. King uses language the same way the baseball fan seated behind the home-team dugout uses placards: to remind those present of what they have already seen. In Apt Pupil, for example, a 13-year-old boy tracks down a Nazi war criminal hiding out in his own Southern California suburb. When he confronts the fugitive, the youth is disappointed by the old man's accent: "It didn't sound . . . well, authentic. Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes sounded more like a Nazi than Dussander did." Perhaps a teen-ager might find a TV sitcom more vividly real than a phenome non that predated his birth. But members of his immediate family are judged in the same way: "Dick Bowden, Todd's father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named Lloyd Bochner." When Todd finds himself in a dilemma, he mentally goes to the movies: "He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head."

Such perceptions spare readers the task of puzzling them out. They short-circuit thought, plugging directly into prefabricated images. And they are by no means limited to young characters. The narrator of The Body, Gordon Lachance, shares King's age, 34, and occupation: he is a "bestselling novelist who is more apt to have his paperback contracts reviewed than his books." He tells of an adventure he had in 1960, when he was twelve; he and three friends set out to discover the body of a boy who has been reported missing from a neighboring town in southwestern Maine. He gives his story a sound track at appropriate moments: "Scary violin music started to play in my head." He is crossing a railroad bridge over a river when a train materializes: "The freight's electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comicbook or one of your own daydreams fly apart, letting you know what both the heroes and the cowards really heard when death flew at them: WHHHHHHHONNNNNNK!" He describes a hailstorm in a forest: "Instead of whispering or talking, the woods now seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums." At last they find the body, and Lachance speculates about how they must appear to the corpse, if it could see: "Like pallbearers in a horror movie."

Even King's elderly characters talk as if they had spent their lives at Saturday kiddie matinees. In The Breathing Method, an old physician sits in an exclusive Manhattan club, spinning a long-ago yarn. He recalls the terror he once saw on the face of an ambulance driver, "His eyes widening until it seemed they must slip from their orbits and simply dangle from their optic nerves like grotesque seeing yo-yos."

In postliterate prose, reality is at its most intense when it can be expressed as an animated drawing.

King is not the first to turn his fiction over to the echo chamber of pop culture. Writers as dissimilar as Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme have toyed for years with the mass-produced icons that have invaded the communal memory. But King takes them dead seriously, and so, evidently, do his millions of readers. A devoted child of the audiovisual age, the millionaire author still likes to get up in the morning and switch on rock 'n' roll. King, his wife Tabitha and their three children alternate between an airy modern house in a Maine village and a 23-room Victorian extravaganza in Bangor. Wherever he happens to be, King compulsively churns out 1,500 words a day, just as he has done since the late 1960s, when he was an English major at the University of Maine. "I'll always write because that's what I do best," he says. "There are people who go to psychoanalysts for 20 years to try to understand why they have certain interests and feelings. I just indulge them."

He is both pleased by the popular response to his writing and irked by charges that he is cynically exploiting a lucrative market: "I'm as serious as I know how to be when I sit down to the typewriter." Different Seasons is, in fact, his bid to be recognized as something other than a writer in a fright wig: "I've worked on it harder than anything I've ever done." The book may not win him critical respect, but it does suggest that horror, after all, has been incidental to his stunning success. For every scare he has given his readers, he has provided more than enough reassurance. Life is stock footage; ancient history means The Flintstones.

--By Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.