Writing from the Gut

I'M SICK OF people bashing Stephen King. Any discussion of horror movies or books leads to the inevitable disparagement of King as pop slash-master, ghoulmonger, corpsedragger, goresplasher--as anything but a writer of merit. When Rob Reiner's Stand By Me was released, the deservedly glowing reviews mentioned the story's author in as offhand way as possible--as if it was good despite being written by King.

Well, it's good because of what King wrote. There is not a nuance, an emotional subtlety, a powerful personal impact in Reiner's effort that is not present in the King story.

The most important things are hard to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Does that sound like the Stephen King of the supermarket rack? The man behind Maximum Overdrive, behind Children of the Corn? Doesn't, does it? Well, that is the opening paragraph to "The Body", the autobiographical story on which Reiner's movie was based. Stand By Me actually glosses over the nuance and depth of King's story. It distills and condenses it into the spoon-fed medium of a two-hour flick.

Undeniably, the author of this emotional and penetrating story is also the author of Creepshow. But King is aware of what he's done with his skill, of how he's occasionally bastardized it. As the 12-year-old narrator and his three friends approach the dead body, they begin to get scared: "We all began to nod. We knew about the night shift. I would have laughed then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then I'd parlay all those childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars."

King knows all our secret terrors. His writing is crudely, squalidly effective, but affecting all the same. Witness his description of the narrator's pal finding the first stories he has written:

I wanted him to read them and at the same time I didn't--an uneasy mix of pride and shyness that has never changed in me very much when someone asks to look. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation...for me it always wants to be sex and always falls short--it's always that adolescent handjob in the bathroom with the door locked...Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little, and more and more often that guilty masturbatory pleasure has become associated in my head with the coldly clinical images of artificial insemination: I come according to the rules and regs laid down in my publishing contract. And although no one is ever going to call me the Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as hard as I can every fucking time.

ANYONE WITH THAT much self-awareness absolutely shames 90 percent of the real hacks out there, who pirouette about with pretentions of literary grace. Crude as hell, but damn if you don't know what he means. King grabs you in places that make you squirm, places you'd rather not talk about, but nevertheless he grabs you and WHAM! That's why his writing is so good even when it's dealing with the most ridiculous of subjects: he knows you, knows your culture, knows where to slice and to squeeze.

The point is that Stephen King is an Authentic American Writer. He taps into America as deeply as Elvis Presley did. But where Elvis embodied rollicking good-times sexuality, King sinks his literary teeth into all the insecurity and paranoia of growing up in a world of high school dances and Watergate. Elvis was pop culture; King is its brooding observer: the wallflower with a rapacious imagination. They are different products of the same world--and that same ferocious popular energy has shredded King the way it did Elvis, who sagged into the same commercial black hole Stephen King is edging toward.

SO IF KING is commercial, it is because he is so accurately American. He scares people because he knows the truth about what scares them, knows what we are. He also knows what he is. This, from a piece titled, ironically, "On Becoming a Brand Name":

There is no particular danger in writing what I will call, for want of a better term, 'serious fiction.' In writing popular, commercial fiction, there is nothing but danger. The commercial writer is easy to bribe, easy to subvert, and he knows it. I have felt this much more strongly in the last two or three years than ever before. But if this is true, it also means that the commercial writer who can tell the truth has achieved a great deal more than any 'serious' writer can hope for; he can tell the truth and still keep up with his mortgage payments."

In "The Body" King lays out his most precious, secret feelings; in other stories he hits the vulgar, grotesque surreality inside us right on the head, and still pays his bills. He is vivid, rambunctious, sloppy, true-to-life, occasionally peurile, but always striking. If he's slipped a few times, he still hasn't fallen. There is truth in what he writes, not a lofty truth, but gut-grabbing honesty.

I'll take honesty wherever I can find it.