 It's October, the month of Halloween, processed sugar, ghosts, skeletons, and other spooky stuff. In fact, I'm sending this message forward through time so that everyone can watch it on Halloween itself. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I wanted to spend some time talking about horror, and after I made that overlong explanation about why people like H.P. Lovecraft, it'll be fun to examine the most popular horror author alive today. I don't need to introduce him, you already know who it is. I want to call Stephen King prolific, but that would be like calling a tornado a bit of wind. It's accurate, sure, but it undersells the sort of impact he's had. The man's published over 80 books and has written more that aren't published. He's sold around 350 million copies and had literally dozens of movie and television adaptations made off his work over the past 45 years. It's almost impossible to have completely escaped him, even if you've never picked up any of his books. It has gotten two successful adaptations that have made three generations scared of clowns. The Shining is regarded as one of the greatest horror films of all time. The Dark Tower introduced us to shared universes before those became commonplace. Kujo was a good boy, and that's all I'll say on the subject. The Tommyknockers is... What got Stephen King here? How is it that he pumps out one or two mammoth door stops a year and still sells? Normally you'd expect these sorts of stories to be enjoyed by a niche, not the mainstream. How did he manage to make a short story about an industrial laundry press being possessed by a demon good? This calls for a numbered list full of spoilers. Number one. The first thing to note about King is his insane work schedule. By his own admission, he writes every day and tries to get out six pages every day. That's over 3,000 words a day, which adds up to around 360 pages in two months. And according to him, he makes the writing pretty clean, too. This isn't just some half-cocked, rough draft that he craps out. Anyone who's ever written anything, which should be all of you, should know how difficult this is. In the same interview where King said this, George Double R. Martin said that he's lucky to get in 350 words in a day. Keep in mind, this is POST cocaine Stephen King. He's also said before that he's very much a discovery writer. For the unaware, that means he writes without an outline and comes up with stuff as he goes. Still, it's an insane level of dedication that he has and an insane level of practice that he gets. Whenever someone criticizes writing by saying, a skilled author could make it work, they're just telling you that you're not skilled enough to pull it off yet. It's usually used for something bizarre that came across as bizarre and or stupid rather than good. Stephen King's experience gives him a way of making totally crazy things seem reasonable, if abnormal. This translates to making things that are normally only a little unsettling or very mundane seem terrifying. Think about Stan's death scene in It. He hears that the killer clown from his childhood is back and is so overwhelmed with fear that he slits his wrists in the tub, scrawling the word It in his blood before he dies. On paper that sounds kind of silly, he was so afraid of a clown that he killed once already that he committed suicide? Well, when you actually read it, it just sort of works. It's difficult to explain, but Stephen King can narrate someone's thoughts and experiences so well that we can clearly follow the escalation to every one of their actions. When we see Stan go through the experience of almost being killed by a shape-shifting demon clown that knows all his worst fears, forgetting about it completely, then remembering it and being forced to confront it all at once, we can't help but understand why he'd go to drastic lengths to make the fear stop. Another good example is the trash can man from the stand. He's a schizophrenic who survives the Captain Trip's plague and escapes from his mental institution. When we follow him, we can understand how tenuous his grasp on reality is. His memory has been wrecked by electroshock therapy and he's got no loved ones to anchor him either. The world around him is constantly in flux, nothing is permanent enough to stick in his mind. So when a magical demigod comes along and offers him stability and purpose, he latches on tight. When he becomes so loyal to Flag that he gives himself lethal radiation poisoning to help his mission of conquest, it just makes sense. King's books are filled with literally hundreds of examples like this, from main characters to villains to people that are only around for half a page, and it just isn't something that a less skilled author can pull off. I could have labeled it as he's great at making characters, but that's very generic and kind of misses the point. He doesn't just make great characters, he's a good enough writer that he can make us understand them, even when they're pure evil. And this extends into other aspects of his writing too, like how the Stephen King universe was created by a turtle or whatever the hell Randall Flag is. No matter how odd things get, they make perfect sense after you read. In this manner, King can put fantasy elements in his work even when the target audience doesn't like fantasy. Number two, something that draws just about everyone to King's stories, even people that aren't horror fans, is just how weird they can be. Not just the details, but the setups to the plots themselves. Take the Langoliers for instance. The setup is that a couple of passengers on a plane fall asleep and when they wake up, everyone else on the plane has disappeared. They manage to land the plane only to find that everyone else in the world has disappeared too, and a large static sound is approaching from the distance. How can you read that and not be invested in what's going on? How can you hear about everyone in the world disappearing except a couple of plane passengers and not want to know what happened? The TV miniseries is a bit silly, but even though things like the acting in the opening bothered me, I was still engrossed in what was going on after the plot got going. As it goes on, it gets even sillier, and the payoff in the end is a tad underwhelming, but the desire to know what's going on and what's going to happen is a huge motivator to turn the next page in just about every King story. I mentioned Mangler earlier, and that's a story about a laundry press that gets possessed by a demon. That sounds stupid at first, but actually reading it makes you forget that. In the story, a series of accidents with a laundry press prompts investigators to take a look at it. Everything about the machine seems fine, but people keep dying. Summoning a demon requires a couple ingredients, belladonna, horse hooves, and virgin's blood. Slowly we learn that some medicine with belladonna as an active ingredient was dropped into the machine by accident, as was some gelatin. Then a worker, who just happened to be a virgin, cut herself and got some blood on it. Then voila, a demon possessed it. This one was definitely written by, in the midst of cocaine, Stephen King. Whether you like it or not, this is a bizarre story. The publishing world has been oversaturated for decades now, full of samey bullshit that we gloss over. Something that stands out in any way will get noticed by more people. If you don't believe me, just take a walk down the aisle of a Barnes and Noble. Whatever your preferred genres, there will be hundreds of things that your eyes just gloss over before you see something that peaks your interest. How about Under the Dome? It follows the same plot as the Simpsons movie, which sounds just silly enough to make you curious and pick it up. And as you go along, you wonder what created the dome and why it was put there. The silly premise pulls you in and the writing makes you keep going. There's no such thing as bad press. Number three, he pulls no punches. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Reading a king's story can be a trial sometimes. There's gratuitous amounts of murder, torture, abuse, sexual exploitation, and other horrible things in them. Horror is supposed to be, well, horrifying. You're supposed to be at least a little uncomfortable when reading, and afterwards, for that matter. Adding in things like that can help to make you uncomfortable. For those blissfully unaware, there's a scene in It's where after the kids kill Pennywise for the first time, they get lost in the sewers. The only way for them to escape is for all the boys to run a train on Beverly. I'm not explaining beyond that. That feeling of grime on your soul that you have right now, that means you're still human. Be proud. Now, I'm not saying that just throwing in a bunch of sex and torture makes a story great automatically. In fact, just throwing that in there with no reason is going to come across as edgy or exploitative. But when done right, it turns good stories into great ones. Obviously, you have to do it right, and it would take hours for me to go into how to do that. Even then, there'd be hundreds of people disagreeing and arguing over the minutiae, so I'll just have to be vague when I say that King is very good at putting in dark stuff that fits. Because when everything is explained and fits together, which all of his work does, murder and rape just makes sense. Hope no one decides to take that line out of context. Number four. This might sound weird, but his works don't translate very well. Some of his movie adaptations have been pretty good. Many more of them have been garbage. Scaring the little girl! There are a multitude of reasons for this, the biggest one being that films can't jump around the way books can. When things are written, you can jump between someone's thoughts and what's going on around them without confusing the reader too much. King uses this technique all the time to introduce characters and give their backstory at the same time. Film can't do that. Flipping back and forth in the middle of a scene will just be confusing for your audience. It's a different art form with a different set of techniques that'll work. And with that handicap, they miss out on the biggest strength that King possesses. They're forced to rely on standard filmmaking techniques, which can be fine for standard horror stories, but kings are usually too weird for that to work. I already brought up Stan's suicide scene in It. Both film versions have included this scene and both failed. Adaptations of his work that were unable to get the point across also include the Dark Tower and the stand. At the end of the ladder, a spectral hand comes down to kill all the bad guys and in the book it's called the Hand of God, but it's left ambiguous whether or not it was really God. In the adaptation, there's no ambiguity to be had. God came down and saved everyone. The adaptations that seem to work the best are those that are somewhat mundane and deal with things like insanity. Misery and the shining both come to mind. Misery is just about a crazy obsessed person, which isn't that hard to get right on camera. The shining, while it does have supernatural elements, has Jack as the primary antagonist. The film doesn't have to go into detail about the strange elements and it actually manages to use the mystery to enhance the horror. The only weird one I can think of that managed to get the message of the book right is, ironically, an adaptation of one of his worst books, The Tommyknockers, which is all about King's struggle with alcohol and drugs. An alien ship made everyone in Haven, Maine smarter and more creative while also sucking away their life. It's pretty easy to translate to film, so even without his writing, it works pretty well. But this is the exception, not the rule, and even King himself thinks it's a bad book, though I personally feel that it's decent. So without being able to get King's stories in other mediums, anyone who wants to experience his work has to read them. This might not be a direct result of his actions, but it's a factor in his success. A huge factor. Number five. His crappy endings means everyone talks about him more. As prolific as King is, most everyone can agree that his endings suck. Hell, it chapter two made a joke about it during King's obligatory cameo. It's generally agreed that this happens because his discovery writing style and how he keeps going until the spark of inspiration leaves him. So the endings aren't properly built up to, they just sort of happen. If I had to put it into words, most of his books stop rather than end. They're almost universally disappointing, one of the worst aspects of otherwise solid books. But when people are upset or disappointed in something, they tend to talk about it, which spreads the word, which makes people curious about what's going on, which boosts sales. It's definitely odd that a negative aspect of the story could wind up making it more popular and it probably doesn't make a huge difference. Still, all press is good press when you're trying to sell something. But James, some of you are saying, if all the readers are hearing about is the bad stuff, why would that help sales? To them, I say Twilight. And don't worry, I'll talk about that more during nostalgia November. Number six. He has a formula. Sort of. Think of examples of the following tropes in Stephen King books. An alcoholic, marital infidelity, bullying, a crazy religious person, the aforementioned person being revealed as a hypocrite, aliens, a minor human villain being driven crazy by the supernatural villain, a major character being a writer, angry ghosts, and the story taking place in Maine. If any of these sound familiar, it's because he uses them all the time. Even different types of plots are often made up of these same couple of pieces. Here's the thing, though. Every work of art ever created can be boiled down to its components like that. Everything looks derivative when you go deep enough. Calling all King stories the same because they're made of the same parts is like saying everything made with Legos is the same. It's not the pieces, it's how they come together. I said King has a formula, that's not the proper term for it, though. When you read James Patterson or watch a Marvel movie, you know what's going to happen, to an extent. You're familiar with them, you know that they'll be at least somewhat enjoyable, they're comfortable. Those have formulas because they're all more or less the same thing. King writes more diverse stories, but the pieces are familiar. They can be a sort of shorthand for establishing the characters and the world, allowing the horror to take center stage. There's variety and familiarity all at once, allowing him to attract new fans without alienating the old ones. Is he doing this consciously? It's impossible to say for sure, but I don't think so. I think that he just writes whatever he wants and winds up falling back onto old patterns. At the same time, he wants to do something different and so he rearranges things. And so, by complete accident, King creates books that are comfortable and strange at the same time. Now obviously there are plenty more factors that explain Stephen King's rise to prominence. Someone more knowledgeable than me could probably go into the social situation or the way he promoted his early works or the way his publishers have worked with him over the years. I'd rather focus on his work specifically here because at the end of the day, it's very good. And while it's not perfect, it hits the correct notes to appeal to the masses while simultaneously appealing to horror buffs. Let this be a lesson. The success of artistic work in a money-driven system isn't driven by quality, but it helps. Thanks a bunch to Appo Savilainen, Abaraj Singh, Christopher Hawkins, David Martinez, Joseph Pendergraft, Melanie Austin, and the rest of my patrons listed here. They voted for this spook-tacular video essay, and if the rest of you want to get in on that action, then go to my page and donate. 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