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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 10 |
 sums up the TV work of horrormeister Stephen King |
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MR. KING! |
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Horrormeister King says
he may abdicate his crown
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
On the late newscast after the final episode of ABC's
"Rose Red" miniseries, my local ABC station teased
us with a little story saying Stephen King may be giving up the
horror genre in the very near future to do other things.
Sure. Right after Walt Disney Studios goes into the porn business.
Steve King, the world's foremost horrormeister, also is one of America's leading teasemeisters. He knows how to tantalize us and he'll not only be doing it until he goes to his grave, but also long after he rises from his grave to knock out just one more horror story.
But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. For King to give up horror, I mean. At least for awhile.
After watching all six hours of King's "Rose Red," his latest original miniseries for ABC television, I've decided King really needs to stop himself before it's too late. Like so many of King's most popular works, "Rose Red" started out pretty well, then ran out of gas. The finale was a giant letdown. My long-held opinion is that King comes up with great ideas, but seldom pays them off very well. Among his TV miniseries, for instance, I think of "The Stand" and "IT"--two very good television productions until it came time for King to give us the big finish. Fizzle, fizzle, poof!
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were impressive, "Rose Red" was low-grade King. |
Before "Rose Red" premiered, King told everyone he wanted to create the greatest haunted house movie of all time. "Rose Red" didn't make it--for good reason: He borrowed too much from other haunted house stories and from his own earlier works. The miniseries ended up being Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" with a telekenetic girl like "Carrie" thrown in for good measure. Nothing new or exciting in all six hours. Boo!
Before you jump to conclusions about my attitude toward Stephen King, though, let me state a couple of things for the record:
First, I'm not a personal friend of Stephen King. Many of you know that King and I used to write fiction for the same line of magazines in the early 1970s, but we never met until he was a huge success and I was a syndicated television columnist who covered the TV versions of his books. We've spoken to each other at many TV events, but never developed any sort of relationship, friendly or otherwise.
For that reason, my opinions about King are impartial. In general, my opinion of him is very good. I think Stephen King is a great writer of popular fiction. Beyond that, I think nobody else in ALL of American fiction distills American pop culture better than Stephen King. But he writes too much and puts out too many books that aren't worthy of him.
His biggest problem may be his restless mind and relentless need to keep writing something new before he's really polished the last thing he finished. We have that in common, although I think it's rather obvious it hasn't been much of a handicap to King in terms of staying rich and famous. I just think it's what keeps King from being as truly great as he could be.
Here's why I think King should give horror a rest for awhile: His reputation will diminish if he keeps turning out derivative and creatively barren projects like "Rose Red." He has shown so often in recent years that he's ready to write something truly magnificent in the fiction realm--if he's willing to withdraw from the limiting genre where he has no new worlds to conquer.
Example: His short 1999 novel "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." This is a tight and rich little gem of a novel that's not so much about horror as it is about the mind of a 9-year-old American girl of the late 1990s. It's even better than "Cujo," the best of King's early novels, which found him keeping his eye on the ball page after page instead of digressing for no good reason as he usually does.
Another Example: "The Green Mile," which King wrote as a serial, published in little dribs and drabs to be sold on supermarket counters, in emulation of the great writers of the 19th century. This is a book that showed King at his very best. It didn't give me a single shudder, but it left me sobbing out loud like an elderly infant over an old man and his very, very old pet mouse. Go figure.
King's giant, bloated horror novels no longer appeal to me. I love his deftly-crafted odd works like "Gerald's Game," about a woman handcuffed to a bedpost in a remote vacation cabin, or "Dolores Claiborne," which leaves us inside the head of a woman who has done something awful that we don't feel all that bad about her doing.
But it's the big books that sell the most and are most likely to attract the interest of television, which has become one of King's most profitable marketplaces during the past 20 years. (I'm happy that "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" is about to be filmed for the movies, but perhaps not so happy that George "Living Dead" Romero is the director involved.)
Though King has expressed the opinion that the television miniseries format has been a great venue for him because he can tell his stories in full, my personal opinion is that only one of his books has ever really produced a classic TV miniseries: "Salem's Lot," the very first of them to be filmed for television. "Salem's Lot" was a fast-paced, taut horror novel. TV told all that was necessary to tell. King would be better off NOT to have his stories told in full.
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based on King's "Salem's Lot" is still the best of all the King TV shows. |
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The best of the recent King miniseries has been the ABC remake of "The Shining," which King adapted for television himself in order to make up for the Stanley Kubrick theatrical movie version that King never really liked. It did a much better job of reminding us that "The Shining" has a rich subtext about the impact of an alcoholic father on his family, which the Kubrick film kissed off pretty much altogether.
However, even "The
Shining" miniseries suffered from bloat. It ran on too long
for what's essentially a thin story with few characters to sustain
interest over six hours of prime time.
King's first TV miniseries, "Salem's Lot," was only
a two-parter, so the story about a small New England town dominated
by a vampire nest was brisk and exciting. It also was directed
by Tobe Hooper ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Poltergeist")
and had a first-rate cast, including James Mason, Bonnie Bedelia,
Lew Ayres--and in the leading roles, David Soul and young Lance
Kerwin.
But some of the many King
television productions were just plain awful. I think especially
of "The Langoliers," which was ridiculous even on paper;
"The Tommyknockers," which had a paint-by-the-numbers
finish, and "Sometimes They Come Back," a two-hour
movie that was amazingly banal.
One series-style TV project that had real promise until CBS crumpled
the ending and never let us see a finale was "Stephen King's
'Golden Years,'" which dealt with a secret government project
involving the aging process. King is now working with ABC to
develop another series-style project, this time about a haunted
hospital.
Here's my advice to Mr. King: Take a real breather and try writing something that uses all his skills as a distiller of American life and his superb descriptive powers, but put it into the context of a story that's really about his life and the world he inhabits away from the cobwebs and broomsticks.
King has a great American novel lurking within him, but it won't come out if he's trying to make it long enough to get six hours of prime time out of it.
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The photos of Stephen King are from his official website and
the photo from "Rose Red" from the official ABC website.
The "Salem's Lot" DVD cover is © 1979 by Warner
Bros. The caricature of Ron Miller is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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