Thank Goodness Stephen King Is Making Backbreaking, Indulgent Doorstops Again

Stephen King: Later this year, he will make a welcome return to writing doorstops set in Maine towns with serious difficulties. Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Stephen King is a writer who's easy to both overestimate and underestimate.

He's easy to overestimate because he's sold something like 300 million books, and because his books regularly become high-profile movies, and because if you ask an American who doesn't really envision himself as a big reader who his favorite novelist is, you have a fairly decent chance of getting the answer, "Stephen King."

He's easy to underestimate because if you remember that he wrote Christine and Cujo and that short story where the guy eats his own foot, you might forget that he also wrote Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption and Misery and a lot of other things that are really...pretty good, and are barely, if at all, "horror" fiction.

(Okay, the one where the guy eats his own foot is also pretty good.)

But if you enjoy King's writing, you eventually have to decide how you feel about the doorstops.

The next doorstop, after the jump...

It and The Stand are both more than 1100 pages long in paperback. (The Shining, by comparison, comes in at a petite 528.) In hardback, they are doorstops, imposing and unsuited for being taken on vacation, unless you are traveling with a steamer trunk.

Both are absorbing books, really scary in their own ways. Both are overreaching, both are enormously self-indulgent at times, both are prone to preciousness of a peculiarly ponderous sort, and both are at their best as surprisingly affecting stories about individual characters, rather than their respective conceits (The Return Of The Evil Clown in one case; The Sniffle Plague in the other). But both are, at heart, doorstops. You commit or you don't. There are other doorstops, too, but those are the most notorious.

And now, he's finished the new one, ready for publication later this year: Under The Dome, one of only a couple of novels he's written since he was hit by a van in 1999, is -- according to King's description of it -- more than 1000 pages long and features more than 100 characters, in a tale of a Maine town (King fans sarcastically mutter, "There is a shock") that winds up cut off from the rest of the world. A classic King doorstop.

It might be a very good thing for him to put out a book like this -- a book that could be written by no one else -- because right now, the greatest exposure to him you're likely to get otherwise is in his Entertainment Weekly column, which he refers to himself as "Uncle Stevie" and speaks insufferably about things that are not matters of intense public concern, such as the contents and behavior of his individual iPod.

So back to the Maine towns, I say -- back to the large casts isolated and cut off, back to forcing people to turn against each other and create new power structures. More doorstops! And less Uncle Stevie.