by George Beahm
“I was the last dinosaur to paint for movies,” Struzan says. “Nobody does it anymore.” Talking about the current crop of Hollywood film executives who have grown up in a wired computerized environment, Drew laments, “They don’t understand it. They haven’t grown up with it. They don’t appreciate it. And they don’t think it translates.”
In point of fact, it “translates” very well indeed—if only one has a smidgen of imagination. The rich, illustrative heritage that suffuses Struzan’s visual storytelling heralds from multiple sources: turn-of-the-century illustrated books, full-color Sunday funnies in newspapers, eye-popping color comic books, and most especially oversized movie posters dating all the way back to the thirties.
Drawing on all of these enchanting sources of visual inspiration, Struzan creates unique images of movie magic, posters imbued with life and animation.
As I sat in his studio, Struzan drew my attention to a 27-by-40-inch acrylic painting used as the DVD cover art for Bladerunner. It is, simply, gorgeous. It’s a work of art. “You can see the artist in this work,” he says. “An original piece of art is about the person who made it, and that’s what becomes part of its value and importance. It’s the real thing.”
And so, too, is Drew, whose work not only touches but, more significantly, illuminates the human heart.
PART SEVEN
THE CRITICS’ CORNER
In the early eighties, when books about King first began appearing, the earliest were critical books published by a specialty press, Ted Dikty’s Starmont House, which issued a series of themed books by Michael Collings, then an English professor at Pepperdine University, and an issue of Starmont Reader’s Guide (number 16), Stephen King (1982), by Douglas E. Winter, a prefatory exploration to the more ambitious and mainstream study, Stephen King: The Art of Darkness.
Since then there’s been a veritable explosion of books about every facet of King’s universe, especially academic books, the best of which have been written by Collings and his colleague at the University of Vermont, Tony Magistrale; their books are careful, loving works of scholarship.
And then there’s Maine’s one-man book factory, Sanford Phippen, a friend of the Kings, and a professor in the English department at UMO, whose books are also highly regarded.
On the pop culture side, Stephen Spignesi and Rocky Wood have written reference books that aid students and scholars when researching King’s fiction.
Spignesi’s concordance in The Stephen King Encyclopedia and his ranking of King’s works in The Essential Stephen King come to mind, as does Wood’s bibliographies on King’s fiction and non-fiction.
Taken as a whole, their periodical essays and books contribute much to our understanding and appreciation of King’s impressive literary output, which will serve as the catalyst for more books in the years to come.
120
STEPHEN SPIGNESI: AN INTERVIEW
BY GEORGE BEAHM
A king-sized book about Stephen King was published by Popular Culture Ink in 1991. Titled The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, Spignesi’s book is 780 pages and mostly a concordance (80 percent); the remainder is companion-style material, with exclusive interviews, including those with David King (the only one he’s ever given), Shirley Sonderegger (a former King secretary), and Chris Chesley (one of only two interviews he ever gave). Authorized by Stephen King, who allowed access to his staff, family, and friends, Spignesi’s timing for King’s assistance was on the beam.
Entertainment Weekly, in its review of his tombstone-sized book, proclaimed Spignesi to be the Stephen King expert, and he went on to publish several more books about King’s work, including two quiz books (from New American Library), The Lost Work of Stephen King and The Essential Stephen King.
A prolific author who has written on numerous pop culture subjects, from the sinking of the Titanic to the Beatles and Woody Allen, Spignesi is a careful, thoughtful writer, a baby boomer whose love for pop culture is second to none. He’s also a New Englander who’s as reclusive as H. P. Lovecraft.
GB: You are known for writing pop culture, and your King encyclopedia was the first of several books you’ve written about him. Given the level of detail in your encyclopedia, it’s obviously a labor of love. What was the first King book you read, and was it the impetus to write your encyclopedia? Or did the idea of doing the encyclopedia come to you after reading several of his books?
Spignesi: The first King book I read was The Shining, but that wasn’t the catalyst for my decision to chronicle (obsessively chronicle, some may say) the people, places, and things in King’s work. After The Shining, I went back and read Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot and, within a couple of years, Night Shift, The Stand, and The Dead Zone came along. I realized that Stephen King’s narrative power and meticulously created characters and worlds were something incredible, and I felt a desire to do something with his work. I then got the idea to do with King’s work what I had already done with The Andy Griffith Show. My first book, which had just sold but wasn’t out yet, was Mayberry, My Hometown, and in that, I chronicled the people, places, and things of the Mayberry universe. It wasn’t too big a leap to extend that idea to King’s work. Little did I realize what doing that would entail and that it would take me five years—with an assistant—to complete the encyclopedia.
GB: King is not the same writer he was when he published Carrie in 1974. It’s been, as you’ve pointed out, forty years down the road. A lifetime as a writer. What do you see as the essential difference between who he was in the Carrie days, and who he is now as the author of Revival, which is admittedly one of his darkest novels?
Spignesi: The truth is, in my opinion, he’s still there. The Stephen King narrative voice, philosophical concerns, and extraordinary accessibility are present in everything he’s ever written, including Revival. As a writer and an artist, I never judge any other artist’s body of work. I don’t like that word. I discuss, describe, assess, and offer informed opinion, but I am not in the school of those who say, “Oh, early King was better than post-accident King” or “After It, King went downhill,” et cetera. It’s like saying one Beatles album is better than another Beatles album. They’re different, yes, but “better”? I love the Beatles. This means I love everything the artists who are the Beatles do. I want their artistic interpretation of the world. I may not enjoy some stuff as much as others, but art is a subjective experience for everyone.
It’s the same with King. I love his work. This means I welcome everything that the artist who is Stephen King creates. Again, I may not enjoy some stuff as much as others, but I have found an artist who I relate to and appreciate, so I am eager for more of what he has to say. Can we say late Picasso isn’t “as good” as early Picasso? If you’re a pompous, arrogant, “art know-it-all,” you can. But it’s a futile exercise and, I feel, ultimately irrelevant. Analysis is one thing; negative criticism based on personal taste is quite another. And the twain shouldn’t meet.
Mike Lewis and I discussed this in depth when writing our book on the top hundred Beatles songs. And we made it very clear in the introduction that we weren’t ranking the songs based on our personal taste. We used criteria: songwriting, musicianship, production, and lyrics, all of which have measurable criteria, standards established and agreed upon by experts in each field. And as fans who have studied the Beatles’ work, we could offer informed opinion.
It’s the same with Stephen King. Just because someone didn’t enjoy It, for example, does not negate its brilliance as a novel. (Some people cannot read two lines of Shakespeare without recoiling in horror. Does this mean Shakespeare sucks? How dumb is that question?) There are assessable standards we can look to in order to appraise art in a way that is relevant and educational. That’s why we have English and music teachers. Simply liking or disliking something is not an intelligent use of our skills. And being able to answer “why” It is brilliant is a sign of cognizance of the art, the artist, and their work.
; I don’t think King is a different writer now. I think his focus has changed, and it changed because he and his life changed. And that’s what artists do: they respond to their world. This kind of relates to something Richard Christian Matheson told me when I interviewed him for the Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia. I asked him what he thought about writer’s block. He said he thought writer’s block was simply a change of mood. Makes sense.
GB: Why do you think King will stand the test of time as a writer?
Spignesi: King’s legacy will be epic. He changed horror and dark fiction in ways no one had previously done. That’s why I call my Stephen King course at the University of New Haven “The New Gothic Horror of Stephen King.” His influences are the greats, from Stoker and Poe to Dickens and Bradbury. His writing voice is one of the most accessible and engaging to ever grace the landscape of American letters. In my Essential Stephen King, Michael Collings said, “William Shakespeare was the Stephen King of his time.” Think about that. That speaks an encyclopedia of insight and import in one simple declarative sentence. And it speaks directly to your question: Yes, I think Stephen King will stand the test of time as a writer. I think it’s a given. After all, H. P. Lovecraft—who didn’t have half the talent of King—is still being read, studied, and adapted a century later.
GB: You’re a big movie watcher. I’d be interested in knowing what you think are his top three films, and why.
Spignesi: Although most would probably answer The Shawshank Redemption as number one to this question, I wouldn’t. I loved the movie when I first saw it, but it is not a perennial favorite for me. And that fact alone eliminates it from my highest spot (and even the top three, truth be told). I think his top three films are The Green Mile, Misery, and The Dead Zone. Those three are flawless adaptations of the novels. I always remember what King said about adapting novels to the screen: It’s like shoving a book through a funnel, he said. This is why I sometimes cringe when I hear about movie deals for the big books: sometimes miniseries can do the job, but most of the time they do not. I am not a serious fan of King film adaptation in general. Maybe there are ten in the whole bunch that I can tolerate. The short films are fun, though, and I always recommend to people Jay Holben’s Paranoid as an example of a genuinely unique adaptation of King. The script is the hundred-line poem “Paranoid: A Chant.” And the visuals are amazing. Ultimately, I’m a bit of a Stephen King purist. He’s a writer. Thus, I want his writing, not some screenwriter’s interpretation of how to show onscreen what King put so perfectly on the page.
GB: Is there anything, or any subject matter, that you feel King hasn’t written about, that you’d like to see him tackle? In other words, are there any new grounds he should be breaking? I’m thinking of how he wrote The Eyes of the Dragon and never again went back to write a children’s fantasy.
Spignesi: I’d like to see him revisit the death penalty. Green Mile was about it, sort of, but not really. And assisted suicide. And I’d be really thrilled if he did more science fiction. I’d also like him to do an updated edition of Danse Macabre, as well as more commentary on the literary greats. King reviewed a Raymond Carver biography and a Carver short story collection for The New York Times, and they were extraordinarily insightful assessments of Carver and his genius. King reads widely. Very widely. I’d love more nonfiction from him about writers like Updike, Cheever, Bellow, Oates … even David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Donna Tartt, and so forth. He thinks Hemingway sucks. Fine. But please tell us why. There’s no doubt that I enjoy King’s “teacher-mode” writing.
The tombstone-sized Popular Culture Ink edition of Spignesi’s The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia.
121
STEPHEN KING AND THE CRITICS:
A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
BY MICHAEL COLLINGS
The writings of Michael Collings can be found throughout this book, especially in the write-ups on King’s books, for which I excerpted select paragraphs from his full-length reviews, originally published in the second edition of this book (1995).
I wanted to add a critical piece by him about Stephen King and academia and thought of this one, which also ran in my 1995 edition. In it, Collings uses as a springboard for his discussion an anecdote relayed to him by his son, then in high school.
Collings is now retired from full-time teaching and has moved from California to Idaho, where he continues to write literary criticism with unflagging enthusiasm and perception.
Times have changed, but attitudes about King’s value as a writer, as judged by those in academia and by “real” writers, are still slow to change. Michael Collings was one of the first whose professional credentials as an English professor lent credibility to King’s fiction by taking it seriously.
Years later, Joyce Carol Oates, among others, praised King’s fiction. She introduced him at a public talk on April 16, 1997, at Princeton University, and said:
Like all great writers of Gothic horror, Stephen King is both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory and would seem to spring from a collective, unconscious and thorough domestic-American soil. His fellow writers admire him for his commitment to the craft of fiction and the generosity of his involvement in the literary community. And he has written with insight and eloquence and a rare sort of humility about his craft.
Several weeks ago, my teenage son came home from high school chuckling—itself an odd enough circumstance to merit remembering. But the reason for his laughter was even more intriguing than the fact of it, particularly as it bore directly on my own efforts in science fiction, fantasy, and horror criticism.
His junior English class is preparing to face the great unmentionable, the horror of the year—the dreaded TERM PAPER. His teacher had handed out a long list of possible topics, all American authors, and the students were required to submit proposals for a paper that would discuss at least three works by a single author, or one work by three authors, combining the students’ perceptions with relevant outside sources.
During the discussion, one student noted that Stephen King, his favorite author, was not included on the list. No, the teacher answered solemnly, King was not included. Another student noted that several other contemporary popular authors were also missing from the list and asked why.
In response the teacher said that such writers were only of interest to readers unable to handle the sophisticated expression of the “classics.”
“In other words,” the second student shot back, defending himself and his friends who read King and others, “we read them because we’re too stupid to understand the classics?”
“Uh, no,” the teacher answered, obviously backpedaling. She continued to talk in generalities about the lack of sophistication in contemporary popular writers, noting in passing that most students hadn’t even considered using King as a topic for the paper until a few years before, when a professor from Pepperdine began publishing books about him.
At this point, my son sat up and began paying more attention.
Then, the teacher continued, the professor made things worse by holding discussion groups at the local library, actually talking with groups of high school students about King and his works, as if they had literary merit. Now my son was really paying attention, wondering if he should raise his hand and say “That’s my father,” or wait it out and see what else the teacher would say.
He decided to wait it out.
And discovered that in spite of such odd behavior (fortunately isolated) in a college professor, there really wasn’t enough criticism on Stephen King or writers like him to merit including them on the list of possibilities for the TERM PAPER.
End of discussion.
When my son reported this experience—grinning the whole while and (I’m sure) wondering how I would take this implied slur on my reputation (such as it is)—I was struck again by the short-sightedness of academic establishments that continue to exclude King, Koontz, an
d others like them from the lists of “approved” materials.
While Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter, Melville and Moby-Dick, and Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities are certainly central literary achievements in our culture, even fascinating topics for further research and discussion by adult readers, I am even less convinced now than I was as a high school student that they are necessarily appropriate for freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in high school, many of whom are barely beyond being functionally literate, many of whom lack even the barest backgrounds or historical perspectives for assessing such novels, and many of whom are explicitly more interested in Poe, Bradbury, and King. Yet instructors are forced in turn to force high school students to read works that probably even most teachers would be unlikely to read for pleasure.
On the other hand, the opposite approach seems to be requiring texts that are themselves less literary than exercises in political correctness, sociological conditioning, and artificially induced diversity. Either way, the established programs often simply ignore the fact that kids like to read (and watch) things by Stephen King.
There are, of course, strong arguments against allowing King into curriculums, even as tangentially as letting students use his work for an out-of-class term paper.
His writing is often violent. It is often gross and explicit, both sexually and linguistically. It is often fantastic. It is often highly critical of accepted institutions, including home, family, politics, and education.
But the kids read him. Based on my experiences leading discussion groups about his books, high-school-age readers often devour his books, memorize his books, know more about what he has written than I do. And then they are told by teachers that he is too unsophisticated, too peripheral to what is really important in the universe, too common for students to waste their time on, when it would seem that teachers would welcome the opportunity to confront a writer who perhaps more than any other is molding the imaginations and minds of contemporary adolescents. After all, if so many students read him, and he is so awful, so damaging to the social fabric, so utterly without redeeming social value, it would seem even more important to discover what it is that draws young readers to him. To refer back to my son’s experience, the teacher stated to the class that anyone who read more than two or three King novels had to be warped, perverted, highly disturbed. At that point my son couldn’t help laughing out loud—and was tempted to put the teacher even more on the spot by noting that he had read about thirty King novels and that his father had read everything that King had published. If two or three relegated a reader to warp-dom, where would thirty, forty, or fifty books put someone? Perhaps wisely, my son restrained his impulse, and the teacher was free to continue her defense of the status quo reading list.
