Quote:
Originally Posted by Aladyleyna
[W]hat I really liked about the book was that the characters were pretty much like you or me. . . . Unfortunately, they were too believable, and I started rooting for them, and then the situation got so bad that I really didn't want to continue reading because I was afraid that something bad would happen to them.
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You've just summed up one of the three basic reasons King is so successful.
The first is his characterization. He really did absorb from Dickens the idea that characters should be likable. He also grew up in the days of rock and roll and perhaps matured in the days of punk, which meant he had to reject the stock types from Dickens -- "flat characters," as Forster called them -- and draw from people he observed and knew, as well as resonant performances in films. (He often takes details not from the screenplay but from the actors -- their gestures and idiosyncrasies, the little things they do, which Poe taught us all to notice.)
The second reason is his technique of making cultural, even generation-specific details sinister, and common childhood memories terrifying.
To be one of the first modern horror writers to do that, he had to look into himself and find the things that terrified him personally -- all of the toys that affected him in the wrong way during childhood. The scratchy records in gra'ma's living room, the creepy shade of green paint used for the too-new house next door occupied by strangers. The black and white pictures in the 60s gym teacher's office as he threatened humiliation to the student who didn't seem to try. The disturbing shoes the principal always wore, that made a squishy sound as he turned to notice some culprit.
The last reason is his specifically American sense of catharsis, which I trace to Melville's Moby Dick, in which the repressed unconscious desire and anger of the main character breaks the surface of the water like an immense Freudian phallus. The whale's a metaphor for Melville's homosexuality as well, but it's is also symbol of the way we repress our desires and anger only to have them rupture the surface of our decorous façades.
We Americans tend to bury our grim histories and keep a pleasant expression until the moment that ancient anger or desire rips through to take us over. It's the consequence, perhaps, of the decisions of the first British Americans, some of whom were Calvinists, to erase the supposed corruption of their European cultural past: To cleanse the memory and start all over again.
Yet we can never erase the provenance of the present.
King's way of showing that catharsis, which has as much to do with Rebel without a Cause as it does with Edgar Allen Poe, influenced everything after him, including films by David Lynch.
The funny thing is that I find his characters a little too likable (I feel King trying to make me like them) and have never cared for his plots or his style (which for me lacks a certain precision and music). But I'd be a jerk if I didn't admit that the things he deems most important, he does very well.
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Certain horror novels are easy for people to read despite the carnage because the characters seem expendable: They're too thinly drawn. But King wants the fates of his characters to worry and upset you, the reader. He wants anxiety to hook you until you've finished the book.
70s hack writers had that down to a sexist formula, you know: Make the wife or girlfriend lovable, then show her being abducted by the end of the second chapter. It's right up there with the other chestnut of potboilers: Always reference a corpse, a murder, crime or sex in the first paragraph if not the first sentence.
The difference is that King wants you to feel that the experience of reading the book was meaningful, hence the warmth of his use of ordinary characters. Hence, too, his use of ordinary prophets: spiritual characters, who are usually poor and sometimes illiterate, to conjure universal resonances and depths.