From the very beginning of his writing career, Stephen King displayed an uncanny ability to anticipate the demands of the public. In the forty years since his first novel, Carrie, he has published more than fifty books, all of them a huge commercial success around the world.
Shortly after Carrie was published, American director Brian de Palma made a bloody horror film of the same name based on the novel. King’s 1977 novel The Shining, set at a ski resort where the main characters – a boy with a special gift and his half-mad father – are based, was another testament to his talent as a psychological thriller. In 1980, after the film adaptation of this novel by American director Stanley Kubrick, a real Stephen King industry was created. His work has been the basis of more than a hundred films and television shows, and he is clearly not going to stop there – because hordes of his fans around the world are looking forward to his favorite author of new books.
However, colleagues on the literary scene have never been particularly unhappy with King. For years, the question of whether he was a serious writer, there was an adamant “no”, backed by data on book sales, film releases, the amount of revenue, and just the pace of work. Commercial success is no indicator of the artistic value of a work, and the word “bestseller” in art is almost a dirty word.
From the beginning King was considered a “genre writer,” but in fact his work is very diverse. In addition to thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, he writes historical fiction novels, westerns and short stories, with which King, in his own words, can “prove, at least to myself, that I have not yet dried up.
The curse of popularity.
King has always honestly admitted that he takes inspiration from the works of honored writers of the past. For example, his story The Man in the Black Suit, first published in The New Yorker magazine and winner of the O. Henry Award, is a tribute to the 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a short story about a young man’s encounter with the devil in the woods. King’s spiritual kinship with Edgar Allan Poe was first evident in the story “The Old Man’s Heart,” written in 1975 and based on Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” King’s 1987 sci-fi novel The Tomminocers was inspired by the works of his compatriot Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
King’s work has also been influenced by other distinctive writers, including George Saunders, Karen Russell, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Sheibon, and a host of others who cross genre boundaries, not shunning fantasy, adopting the canons of horror literature without losing their dignity.