My
enthusiasm over Stephen King’s new book, The
Wind Through the Keyhole, added one more file to the very tall stack of
books I’ll most likely never write…but if I lived on an island….
It’s this
wonderful tale within a tale within a tale, on one level about storytelling and
why we need it. There are reasons within reasons here, but in all practical
terms, the stories are used to keep spirits up while a terrible ice twister of
a storm, called a starkblast, rages outside. The Wind Through the Keyhole is also this much welcome dip back
into the warm colloquialisms of Mid-World, a post-apocalyptic universe parallel
to that universe in which all of the rest of his fiction takes place, that one
that looks almost just like our own. When I finished the Dark Tower series, the first time
(if I’m lucky, I’ll visit again), more than anything, I knew I was going to
miss that voice, that palaver of gunslingers, billy-bumblers, the Beams that
tenuously hold everything together, and that ornery old myth of the Man Jesus.
That Mid-World slang always reminds me of a
complaint King shared with Amy Tan in his book On Writing—they commiserated over the fact that interviewers never asked them about the
love of language that drove them to write. Proof of that love of language is all over the Dark Tower books, just as unquestionable as it is in the work of one of the writers who inspired him, J.R.R. Tolkien.
But that’s just one of many things
people don’t talk about when they cover Stephen King. Some people write concordances
to Stephen King’s work and others write about how his childhood shaped his
writing, but what I haven’t seen (with one notable exception in an essay by Sarah Langan) is someone tackle his significance in the
context of the past 40 years of popular culture, much less the relatively brief
life of modern literature. From my perspective, he’s a singular character, not
only constantly redefining the boundaries of my favorite genre of storytelling
but also keeping the very potential of literature alive for a great cross
section of the public not reached by most literature. He does all of this
while maintaining a balancing act I learned from my greatest writing mentor—he
reaches for the widest possible audience without ever talking beneath the smartest reader.
King seems to me a uniquely
important torchbearer for the pop culture explosion in the 1960s. Whatever
political naivete some may see in him, both his lack of privilege growing up
and the ongoing perspective of a horror writer keeps him focused on the
contradiction to any ideal. He entertains few of the self-serving Great White
Man/Lone Ranger illusions that plague the vision of his contemporary, Steven
Spielberg, or constantly hang like an
albatross over another contemporary, Bruce Springsteen.
Since the relationship between vampire
hunters Ben and Mark in Salem's Lot first echoed and affirmed my own double-vision living with
my newly single father,
I’ve been aware of the centrality of relationships in King’s work. In a society
filled with individualistic delusion, King’s characters triumph (when they triumph) through their
need for one another. Though the Dark Tower’s Roland Deschain, the gunslinger,
is doomed to be alone, his greatest successes only come with the help of his
band of travelers, his ka-tet. I have
always thought The Stand was not so
much his greatest book as his greatest over-reach, but I loved the sense of
community he cobbles together. It’s a community that probably comes from Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (i.e., it’s of the
genre, which shows how genre writing has been an asset to his approach), but in King’s world, it’s a community foreshadowed by the family that comes
together with Dick Holloran in The Shining
and is echoed time and again, among the kids in It, the bands of fighters in those A and B-side books, Desperation and The Regulators, and all of those other rag-tag bands in Derry and Castle
Rock who inevitably face off their greatest fears together. Not coincidentally, those groups tend to include
a writer and a cast of characters not unlike the great cross-section of
America he knows reads the books. I don’t see that as contrivance or solipsism. I see
that as evidence of a supremely self-aware artist (an author who wrote one of
the best books of non-fiction about his genre at the height of his early career)
who writes as an act of faith— if not in the supernatural, in his need for
others (give or take Misery's Annie Wilkes).
All of my former students can
testify that I talk about Stephen King more often than any other writer. The
most obvious reason for that is that he’s just about the only author I can
mention whom they’ll know at least a little something about. But a secondary
reason goes hand in hand with that one—I know that most of them will not
perceive him as a “legitimate” writer, and most who like him will only
acknowledge him as a guilty pleasure. If there’s one lesson Stephen King taught
me (hand in hand with rock and roll and hip hop and every form of music that
feeds them and every form of music fed by them), it’s that the legitimacy of my
passions should never be in question. What matters is how I use those passions
to weather the starkblast--both for me and my community, both (whether we own it or not) all the richer for this man’s work.
