Why is Stephen King so popular?

The past summer has seen a whole host of Stephen King adaptations. In his seventieth year, he still turns out books and remains the first port of call for horror readers. What is it about King’s books that make them so popular for readers, keeping them coming back to the master of fear?

It should be said that, technically, King is not a great writer. He has often been denigrated by more serious critics for the almost-pulp nature of his prose, but all that means is that his text is easily digestible. He can write stories that are accessible to all, and this has seen his works mocked as ‘popular’ or, horror of horrors, ‘lowbrow’ (not to mention that they are frequently horror stories, a genre that has been sneered at since its inception). King himself said that his writing was ‘the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries’, commonplace, and for everybody.

It is easy to lose yourself in a King narrative, in a way that more literary writers struggle to achieve

This simple style in no way restricts the stories King wants to tell. For, although he may not be a great writer per se, he is a master storyteller. He spins enthralling, epic and frightening tales, sucking in the reader until the final page is finished. It is easy to lose yourself in a King narrative, in a way that more literary writers struggle to achieve.

Take a story like It, one of the many adaptations scaring viewers in cinemas throughout the world. King effortlessly creates a sense of time and place (in this case, 1950s Maine), and continues with a complex and terrifying story. One reason he can hold onto his readers is because he is brilliant at crafting characters, making them seem three-dimensional and real. Gone are the perfect, bland writer proxies, with their zero faults. King’s characters are flawed and quintessentially human. He knows which details to include to build a real picture, meaning that he can get inside a character’s head.

King has a knack for finding the terror in real life

When writing horror, the genre with which he is most associated, it also helps that his books are as scary as they come. Returning to It, the book opens – spoiler warning, although it is chapter one – with the death of our lead character’s brother, a six-year-old boy. The reader is immediately aware that nobody is safe, and that makes it all the more frightening. He has a knack for finding the terror in real life, be it the protector of the family becoming its hunter (The Shining), obsessive fandom (Misery), weight loss (Thinner) or the oppressed finding they have the power to stand up (Carrie). He has made cars (Christine), dogs (Cujo) and even laundry presses (The Mangler) into monsters. To add to this, he’s brilliant at posing those hypothetical questions which ask readers to consider whether they could stop JFK being assassinated. What if you could save your dead child from his premature grave (Pet Sematary, one of only two stories ever to give me nightmares)?

It would be unfair to cast King solely as a horror writer, though. His experiments in other genres have been similar successes due to his strength in creating characters. He has written suspense, westerns, thrillers, and dramas. One of the most successful is his short story, ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,’ from the book Different Seasons. It also featured ‘The Body,’ which would later become the hit film Stand By Me.

I’m happy to lose myself in King’s books, spending time with compelling characters

One point to take away from this is King’s power of imagination. His first book, Carrie, was published in 1974. Since then, he has published more than 50 novels and almost 200 short stories, and he’s still going! King said that he was put on this earth to write, and he is certainly doing that. Not all of his books are great but, looking at his clunker-to-hit ratio, he’s not doing poorly at all. King’s taken a bit of a bad rap because it appears that being productive and popular with readers is a bad think. Meanwhile, I’m happy to lose myself in King’s books, spending time with compelling characters and giving myself goose bumps.