re: Better Horror Writer: King or Barker

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I like King. I appreciate the way his stories are not really about monsters and things that go bump in the night. I mean they are, of course, but at the root of them most are stories about what it means to be human. They are much bigger.

It is one if my favorites. Sure it is about an evil clown, but it really is about growing up and the things we leave behind as we do.

The one thing he can't do worth a crap sometimes is end the story. He has written some questionable endings to his stories. It, again, for example. The ending seemed so simplistic and literal compared to the rest of the book. I give it a new ending in my head, one that was more satisfying to me. Not much changed in the action, but the nature of the evil was different.

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You and I have the exact same opinion of King, it seems.

King is a better prose stylist than people give him credit for. It's smooth and flows well. It's easy to read and paint your own mental picture to as you flow along.

King's always writing about the human condition at heart. The "horror" is just window dressing to explore themes like growing up, abandonment and isolation, addiction, abuse, relationships, marriage, a lot of childhood issues, etc. As a reader, you're (royal you) either down with that, or not. If not, and you want straight horror instead of horror as a guise to explore people, then King isn't your guy.

King's endings are terrible. I pretty much universally dislike his endings. I too feel like he ends things too simplistically and literally. I think most of the time that endings that are open to some extent with things left unexplained are preferable to King's tendency to dumb things way down all of a sudden and explain everything in one really basic blunt and unsatisfying way. He'll have this big meta mystery going on the whole story, filling you with puzzlement and wonderment, and then end it with "It was all the doings of an evil alien named Jim. Then end."