Why Stephen King Is the Most Underrated Literary Novelist of Our Time

Because he knows exactly what scares you most, and fear is a more important American genre than King's critics think

Andy Friedman
Stephen King once called himself the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. And yeah, that makes a kind of sense to the millions and millions served who have gobbled their way through one of his novels only to head straight back to the bookstore starved for more. But King sells himself short — as do literary critics the world over. What they see is a blood-soaked popular novelist who employs plot and its parent condition, entertainment, a dirty word to them. What they overlook is an author who transcends his genre by channeling our cultural fears better than nearly any American author. Look to the industrial horrors of "Graveyard Shift," the bioterror of The Stand, the cold-war anxiety of The Dead Zone. Anyone who doubts King's chops has simply not read enough of him, not read his O. Henry prize-winning story, "The Man in the Black Suit," his novella The Body, nor his novels The Gunslinger, The Green Mile, Lisey's Story.

His latest, 1,088-page tome, Under the Dome (Scribner, $35), hews to the classic King formula: A community is isolated, a force of horror is introduced. In this case, Chester's Mill, Maine, is sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes and helicopters and cars and birds crash into it. A gardener's hand is severed by it. Bullets whiz off it. So do missiles. No one knows where it came from — whether it is supernatural, a military experiment, or an act of terrorism. The real focus is not the dome, of course, but what happens beneath it, the "orderless, reasonless beast that can arise when frightened people are provoked." King's ability to create a gripping world is so great, his pacing so effortlessly swift, that it can feel as if you're caught in a cat's claws, at once fearful of and delighted by the horrors the next page might bring.

Often that horror is trained on a war vet turned line cook who goes by the nickname Barbie. He is our doorway to 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, waterboarding. Look to contemporary horror movies like Hostel, Saw, Wolf Creek, The Devil's Rejects — all of them spotlighting abduction, rape, torture, dismemberment — and you can understand them as offspring of the war on terror. The world under the dome is born of the same caul, but it's infinitely more sophisticated, because King knows that the biggest danger comes not from the outside — from bombs, from war, from Islam — but from the mob growing within. We are all under the dome.

No, not a Big Mac and fries. A more fitting analogy is country music: The critics never love it, never give it the respect it deserves, yet the genre prospers, constantly evolving and reinventing its sound with the times, always moored to working people — and the fear and anxiety that are as ingrained in American culture as aspiration.


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