From a Buick 8

“As the twig is bent, the bough is shaped, so they say, and my tastes have remained simple and unrefined.”

Stephen King says this about himself in reference to his culinary preferences. I could say the same about myself in reference to my literary preferences, because I love me some Stephen King stories. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading him since the 1980s. Maybe going to college in Maine had something to do with it (my freshman English teacher was a classmate of King’s at UMaine Orono). But for my money, King cranks out consistently solid fare and represents the best of the baby boom generation.

There are critics, amateur and professional, who label his work as junk food. Comparing his prolificness and unmatched global sales to McDonald’s “billions and billions served,” they make the case that quantity and quality necessarily have an inverse correlation. They argue he uses cheap horror tropes: a haunted hotel, a killer clown, or in this case, a car that’s not really a car. I think those arguments are a misplacement of focus. His work doesn’t shine (pun intended) through the description of weird events, it shines through his characters’ reactions to the weird events. Stephen King’s characters are three-dimensional, even his secondary and tertiary characters. And finding out how those fully fleshed out people react to the unwanted intrusions of the bizarre is always a satisfying, page-turning experience. I’ll admit he doesn’t use the most poetic language in doing this, but that’s not what he’s going for. He takes the tone of the guy on the next barstool who is telling you a story you just won’t fucking believe. Not junk food, comfort food.

Is From a Buick 8 King’s best? Probably not. The biggest complaint out there seems to be that you never really know what’s going on. But that’s one of the biggest complaints about life in general. And that’s kind of the point.