Stephen King has chosen to believe in God, which is fine. You can believe whatever you want, especially if you’re worth billions of dollars. But I find myself annoyed when he tries to stake his beliefs on bad evidence and stereotypes about atheists.
I choose to believe it, yeah. I think that – I think that that’s – I mean there’s no downside to that, and the downside – if you say, well, OK, I don’t believe in God, there’s no evidence of God, then you’re missing the stars in the sky, and you’re missing the sunrises and sunsets, and you’re missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together at the same time.
Nope, not missing them at all. Stephen King, on the other hand, is missing 14 billion years of physical history, a grand series of exploding stars and galaxies, the marvelous way light interacts with matter, optical physics, ecology, and co-evolution. Scientists see more deeply than the goofy façade theology paints over reality — that we tear down the cheap canvas backdrop of the bible, with its stars painted on and tricky illusions, to see the true glory of giant spheres of hot plasma exploding in ongoing thermonuclear reactions does not diminish us, but it does mean you’ve failed to see something important.
Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But at the same time there’s a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, well, if this is God’s plan, it’s very peculiar. And you have to wonder about that guy’s personality, the big guy’s personality. The thing is, like, I may have told you last time that I believe in God. What I’m saying now is I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts.
Intelligent Design isn’t an explanation, it’s a cop-out, and if you’re reduced to speculating about the personality of the “big guy”, who happens to be an omnipotent super-being who transcends space and time, then you’re already guilty of shrinking your explanation for everything down to the size of your mommy and daddy.
I can forgive the willing suspension of disbelief by someone who makes a living writing about vampires, ghosts, and sewer-dwelling clown-spiders, but come on, it’s like your books: don’t pretend that there is reasonable evidence for these phenomena. Chalk it all up to someone trying to tell a best-selling story.
But if you’re going to persist in this Intelligent Design nonsense, I recommend reading Percy Shelley’s Refutation of Deism. It smacks down all that mucky sentimental nonsense about flowers and sunsets being the domain of god-wallopers hard.
King is Pennywise and pound foolish.
I see you couldn’t quite bring yourself to consign him to Comic Sans hell…
Oh well. His opinion on this topic may be poorly reasoned, but his books are still great.
Hmm, I always assumed that he was a believer. There’s so much religion-inspired supernatural stuff in his books that I just presumed he must believe in it.
I see this as ironic, since it was Stephen King novels that showed me a lot of nasty Christian characters. People like Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone and the mother of the eponymous Carrie made an impression on me, before I started noticing that there really were people like that.
Yeah I read the whole interview and he seems to be saying that he’s slightly more agnostic than previously. He’s saying he’s less sure than in his youth and organized religion is a scam.
But I’ll continue to enjoy his good books and ignore his bad ones.
I see this as ironic, since it was Stephen King novels that showed me a lot of nasty Christian characters. People like Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone and the mother of the eponymous Carrie made an impression on me, before I started noticing that there really were people like that.
I didn’t know he was Christian, but I’ve always known he was liberal. Look at the portrayal of Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome (the novel as opposed to the TV series). Hell, the central message of the novel is “stick together, liberals!” (a sentiment I heartily agree with).
F that guy anyway. Who is he? A guy who writes books. He’s no more an authority on reality than my dog, and I don’t have a dog.
Wee! Pascal’s wager, god of the gaps, and argument from personal incredulity…all in one sentence! That guy must be a professional.
I would ask Mr. King if his god could make a rock so big that his god couldn’t move it. D’ya think his head would explode or that he’d cop out with a “god would never do that”?
Harlon Ellison is a better, crankier author anyway.
Translation: I know it’s bullshit, but i’m too lazy to learn the facts so the story with the giant bearded man in the sky will do.
“I didn’t know he was Christian, but I’ve always known he was liberal.”
Actually he’s more than that, he’s a bit of a lefty. If I remember correctly he named his son after the old ” Wobblies” song writer Joe Hill.
I remember that he and Stanley Kubrick had disagreed over the idea of an afterlife inspiring hope. Kubrick thought that ghost stories were inherently hopeful because they pointed to a life after death and King disagreed. That was only one of their creative differences.
I wonder how that conversation would go today.
Other than that, I don’t care what King believes in. I hope he’s happy and that he cranks out some more scary stories for me to enjoy. When I was younger I LOVED Christine, Carrie, The Gunslinger novels, The Shining, etc. I haven’t picked up one of his books in years, but there is a warm spot in my heart for them anyway. He helped warp my little mind and make me the person I am today.
“What I’m saying now is I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts.”
aka “I am afraid of my mortality and want to keep my foot in the pearly gates just in case.”
If Mr. King thinks that the pollination of flowers tells us about the personality of the “big guy,” then he needs to read up on pseudcopulation and then get back to us.
Childhood Leukemia.
That’s not “peculiar”. It doesn’t just make me “wonder about that guy’s personality”.
When your kid has leukemia their life consists of weeks of torture, interspersed with trying to catch up with his schoolmates, followed by being horribly ill, followed by more weeks of torture. If you’re lucky, they live. If not – you fight this battle for years and then they die before they ever get to have a life. And the costs to the family: financial, emotional, the other children whose every need becomes subservient to the sick one…
That’s not “peculiar”. Any god who did such a thing would be unambiguously evil.
I find this “choose to believe” concept rather puzzling. I have to confess that this is something I have in common with some fundamentalists: I don’t “choose to believe” anything. Fundamentalists most likely believe because of some emotional response to the accidental or intentional tampering with the brain’s circuits due to external stimuli. I, on the other hand, believe what I am convinced of by the preponderance of evidence. Sure, on some level I’d love to believe that there’s a grand external purpose to my life and that by the grace of my having been born into the right culture I’ll get an eternity of paradise rather than simply ceasing to be at the end of my life, but I can’t “choose” to believe that, because the evidence and my reason has convinced me otherwise. I could no more choose to believe in god in the face of all the evidence than I can choose to believe I can fly.
Yeah, definitely. The Holocaust: very peculiar. Sums it up perfectly. Truly, he’s a master of words.
Also, the Spanish Inquisition: unexpectedly peculiar.
For some reason in my mind I read that “Stephen Hawking”…
Jesus, I was flabbergasted for a moment there.
Not a surprise, really. Anyone who has ever read his arguably best novel “The Stand” can tell you how it ends — a great, mysterious hand comes out of the sky and smites the evil doers in Las Vegas. Now, that was a disappointment that still rankles (I read it the summer of ’76). Along the way “god” or something very much like it communicates with some of the protagonists through an old black woman (that tiresome magical negro trope again). While on the other side a character who is clearly Satan rules over the assorted scum of the earth who have survived the plague. What should have been a straight forward sci-fi, post-apocalyptic novel gets turned into a twisted hodgepodge of Christian End Time themes. Too bad, too, because that beginning is one of the classics of the genre. It had me hooked.
So, from a still fucking pissed off reader, I say this to you Mr. King : Stop reading the Bible in those long Maine winters. Go back to college (a good one, please) and sit in on a few science courses. You may still learn something about the universe in your dotage.
How can anyone choose not to believe in god when we can see how he can converts food into pop and pee? But then Jesus is a step ahead of his dad (and I mean his real dad) with converting water to wine before god makes it into pee again. No wonder he has more followers than his dad.
When I read or hear something like that, I always make a mental substitution of “chose to believe” to “am actually undecided but I hope that this is true”. Beliefs are not chosen.
So wait, he’s a ‘well it doesn’t hurt anything if it’s true/ better safe then sorry god believers’?
Hideous worldwide child poverty and starvation…. oh that wacky god!
I never forgave him for continuing the Dark Tower series after the forth one which he had promised would be the end.
I can easily read this as King speculating about God as a character in his fiction, and as such, he might find an intelligent designer to be a more interesting character than some of the alternatives for the kind of fiction he writes. Trying to reconcile the contradictions (internal as well as with reality) on the page can produce some thought-provoking story-telling and provide some good arguments against intelligent design or theism in general.
If King has to do some novelistic sleight of hand in order to get the intelligent designer to work in his story without breaking our suspenders of disbelief, then it’s an easy matter to cut them ourselves.
He was raised by a staunch Christian mother. I’ve never been completely convinced he’s a progressive. Some of the homophobia in his early books is just repugnant.
Doesn’t seem like too much of a surprise… there’s a pretty christian sounding god in a bunch of his old books complete with pointless sadism, pointless sacrifice, opaque and irresistable demands, etc.
I remember having the same reaction when this interview was published six months ago as well…odd that it’s just popping up now.
I don’t know if that explains some of the awful stuff he writes, but it might. Seems like his novels start out with a great idea and plot, but his characters are increasingly cardboard, and too many of his novels degenerate into a sloppy if formulaic mess by the end.
Like many other commenters on this thread, I find this attitude very strange. When one lists the acts of this supposedly benign god, one can go through sunrises, pollination, salt spray on your face and meadows waving in the breeze, but sooner or later you run into cancer, ebola, AIDs and birth defects, not to mention the heinous bigotry, slavery, mass murder and all manner of other forms of injustice and oppression perpetrated by the followers of this deity and endorsed by what is claimed to be the god-approved holy book.
God, certainly as described by judeo-christian and islamic religious traditions, is a misogynistic, homophobic, bloodlthirsty, genocidal sociopath who demands absolute, unthinking obedience and imposes its will through such heideously unethical means as mass torture and collective punishment, and pairs all this with being a devious trickster who makes loki look like an amateur and delights in manipulating its victims into the position where they break one or other of its self-contradictory and arbitrary rules so that it can condemn then to burn for eternity. It is the single most vile and cruel character ever described in fiction, effortlessly beating out even the nastiest of King’s own villains to win the prize of No. 1 expression of evil incarnate in literature.
I would call those attributes rather more than ‘peculiar’ when applied to the allegedly ‘benign’ deity that is supposed to be the wellspring of all morality.
The horror… the horror…
As I’ve mentioned approximately a thousand and a half times, I used to be very religious. I know from religious experiences and the mental/emotional rush they provide. And I can truthfully say that I’ve had just as intensely joyful and meaningful experiences staring through a microscope as I ever did in a religious fervor.
Also, for fun, check out the Epic Rap Battle between Poe and King. (mildly NSFW language)
“then you’re missing the stars in the sky”
–
Oh fuck..Who’s gonna tell Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Wasn’t this from a while ago? Oh, yup. http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2013/05/29/stephen-king-on-god/
“You’re missing the sunrises, sunsets, and stars;
You’re missing the crops, and the bees.”
You’re missing the point, Stephen King, if you think
That we’re missing the moments like these
The natural world is a beautiful place
And I find it a little bit odd
That the thing that you see when you look at the world
Is the thing you can’t see at all—God.
“I choose to believe, because everything works
In a way that suggests it’s designed.”
But the thing is that science knows better than this;
The suggestion is all in your mind.
Once the gods moved the heavens, the moon and the stars
And to some, maybe that’s how it looks
It’s fun to pretend that such forces exist
But life isn’t one of your books
“God’s plan is peculiar; there’s stuff that seems strange;
And you know, I’m beginning to doubt.”
Keep thinking; keep doubting; keep reading; keep on,
And you’ll probably figure it out.
There’s much that we know; there’s much you can read
(Though most of it isn’t in rhyme)
And maybe… a sunrise, a sunset, a star,
You could see for the very first time.
#7 – It’s Harlan, and he’s kind of a prick.
#17 – Yes, way too many of his books end up with deus ex machina endings. The end of Under the Dome may as well have been God doing it instead of others.
#14 / Gussnarp – I’ve never understood the ‘choose to belive’ concept, either. I guess other folks have had different paths, but when my mom asked me at age 7 if I wanted to keep going to church I realized I didn’t believe in it and that was that. Maybe other folks can operate at a level of remove from their beliefs and actually make the decision, but I don’t think I could choose to believe (for example) that eating meat is ethical. More information or changed circumstances might change my belief, but that’s something different.
Stephen,
In addition, I don’t believe in evil supernatural clowns.
That interview bugged me too, but then King often does these days, largely thanks to Twitter. (I’m a fan, I have been for 23 years, and I don’t think a book will ever come along that, when it’s time for me to go, I’ll have read as many times as IT. In fact, if I find I actually regret having to go, that will probably have a lot to do with not being able to read it again and again anymore.)
Even before I became the militant atheist I am today, how much of a believer he sometimes sounded like would never cease to amaze me. He often had some really perceptive, wise insights to sneak in here and there, and I couldn’t square that with religious belief (my bad).
In his last… pile of books, it’s been obvious how much thought he’s giving to the idea there’s nothing beyond this life other than a universe that doesn’t give a damn, period, and often, it’s actually a likable character (once it was a female priest) who’s come to that conclusion. The first time it happened, I was almost ecstatic, but I’ve since settled down. As someone who considers King one of their very first teachers, I hope I’ll live to see the day he crosses over to the side of those who don’t tell scientists they are missing something about their area of expertise, but I’m resigned to the possibility that might never happen.
(The fact that in his June 2014 book, it’s the antagonist who’s certain there’s neither a god, nor an afterlife, certainly helped that process along. It doesn’t HAVE to mean anything about the (d)evolution of King’s views, but I choose to believe it does. :-D I suspect the November book will provide some reveals. Apparently, it’s all about a priest.)
Oh wow! Those movies he always pops up in [he cameos in every movie based on one of his books] always mislead me that he is an anti-religion non-believer. All his books ARE about supernatural demons and magix and stuff, so he aint a realist, but religion always seems to be a point of contention in all those movies [I refuse to READ King ;-( ] E.G. The Mist: a scene in the store where a bible thumper starts ranting about “retribution” and “Gawd’s Wrath” etc. etc. His main character orders a minor character to throw her out of the store, “Her Gawd will protect her if she is right, and if not, she deserves to die for causing all the panic she’s stirring…” And in the current Under the Dome, it seems big sections are arguments between Science and Religion (with Religion losing). But there is something creepy behind the story: that BOTH Science and Religion are wrong and gots to work TOGETHER.
Anyway… enough critique of King movies: It’s not too surprising to learn that King is an ID “believer”; at least he ain’t in politics writing laws and rejecting bills on ad hominem fallaciousness. [to a get Bill to NOT pass, just put “Obama” on it anywhere, and the Congress will just toss it into the circular file.] So King can write all the nonsense he wants, as long as Libraries always put them in the “Fiction” category.
Grrr, comments are closed on the NPR article…
Tony, did you really find the interview surprising enough to be worth a comment (as opposed to “SOMEBODY’S WRONG ON THE INTERNET!” syndrome, to which I sometimes succumb myself)? It seems to me to be a fairly mild statement that probably matches what a whole bunch of people who call themselves ‘spiritual’ would agree with. I mean, of course it’s wrong, but my reaction some months ago when it was published was more ‘Oh, that’s a shame’ than anything else.
Derek @35:
Surprising, no.
I did feel a desire to comment, as I often do on other news sites when an article is run that I am interested in. I frequently share my views, even if they run counter to the comments. I want to put my thoughts out there, which I do by commenting here, on my blog, on Facebook, and yes, in the comments sections of online news sites.
ragdish @32:
Yeah, but do you believe in Killer Klowns from Outer Space?
Tony,
Not to spoil anybody who hasn’t read IT, but since Pennywise (the sewer-dwelling supernatural clown) came from space back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (possibly earlier), ragdish has already got KKfOS covered.
(Btw, if anyone ever feels like a delightfully odd, occasionally chilling British horror movie about a homicidal jester, I recommend Funnyman. The IMDB rating is extremely uncharitable, btw.)
jijoya @39:
I haven’t read IT in years (and given it’s length, I’m not likely to do so anytime soon) so I’d forgotten that fact. Thanks for the reminder.
Stephen King:
Sir David Attenborough:
For fuck’s sake, Prof, leave the guilt trip out of the equation, alright? Ridicule King’s beliefs by all means, but leave guilt aside for where it belongs: as, when someone is deliberately hurting someone or being crassly callous. Not for condemning peoples’ ideas about the Cosmos, however silly you may consider them.
I admit, when King describes his alleged God’s alleged plan as “peculiar” he may well qualify for a guilt trip on the second count — and all like-minded Christians along with him — for obvious reasons already profusely illustrated in comments above; but if that’s what you really have in mind then say so. That is not what you say here. So, have you decided anthropomorphism should be shunned, on the grounds that it’s a sin?
David Chapman, what’s the problem supposed to be?
Having shitty epistemology, not to mention accusing us of “missing” all manner of things about the world (on the basis of his “silly” ideas about the “Cosmos” with a capital C), is not ethically neutral. If you think he can’t stand such criticism, then you ought to think he shouldn’t be leveling it at us in the first place. Anyway, if you say dishonest, ignorant shit; then you are “guilty” of saying that dishonest, ignorant shit. It’s not a sin, because there are no sins. But it is bad.
Thanks for the answer, Tony – in retrospect, if you’re not aware of that xkcd cartoon, my question could have read a lot more sarcastically than I meant it.
And re: KKfOS. You’re giving me a flashback to college, watching late night Cinemax in the late 80s…
Derek @44:
I am completely in the dark on the xkcd reference…
You know what? That was way too nice of me.
“Oh heavens, won’t anyone think of the the poor, decrepit old multi-millionaire who says I can’t enjoy a fucking sunset because I don’t believe his idiotic garbage?”
Fuck you, David Chapman.
David Chapman:
FFS, asshole, try to comprehend the context in which the word guilty was used. Another example: David Chapman, you are guilty of using an invalid argument in an attempt to guilt-trip PZ.
Chapman, you really are constantly demonstrating that you aren’t intelligent enough to comment here. Wise up or go away.
twas brillig @ 34
We’re capable of writing things that do not reflect our personal beliefs. Whatever King’s personal beliefs, habits, personality quirks, etc, are do not need to be defined by his writing. Terry Pratchett writes about “magix and stuff” too and yet is an atheist.
This is a really weird and annoying thing I keep running into with people. Yes, some authors tend to be very autobiographical and if you suspect King is being autobiographical in those elements, then say that specifically. Otherwise, just because we write about the supernatural doesn’t mean we believe in it.
Mr. King has been in thrall to the cult of Alcoholics Anonymous for a while now, which is explicitly theistic, implicitly Christian, so I can’t say this is surprising at all.
Tony: http://xkcd.com/386/
It’s a really great cartoon, as well as his What If blog.
twas brillig:
This is a remarkably stupid thing to say. A lot of authors write about fantasy, and are also firmly planted in reality, like the rest of us. You need to think before you write.
Todd Ferguson:
How about you don’t pull this shit? A lot of atheists have been helped by AA, and they weren’t forced to believe in a god.
Seriously? Everything works together? How does the predator “work together” with its prey? How does ebola work together with its host? How does BRCA1 work together with the rest of the genome? Heck, how does Rh- work together with reproduction? Biology is full of crap that doesn’t work well, has contradictory needs, or flat out does not work.
twas brillig @34:
Even if that were true (what about Misery?), his books also deal with the impact of these forces on very real human beings.
Actually, come to think of it, I think you’re wrong. I don’t think King’s book are *about* supernatural demons and magix and stuff. I think they’re about real human themes that utilized supernatural elements to convey their meaning.
I don’t know. Reading the whole thing, it seems more like he chooses to believe there is a God (as in, would like to think there is), but he isn’t completely sure, because just above the part quoted in the OP, there’s this:
The part quoted, however, shows poor thinking on King’s part.
The last one of his books I read, The Stand, really pissed me off when instead of a reasonable rational explanation for all the weird shit that happened, he copped out with magic. It was as bad as “god didit”.
Doubting Thomas @ 56:
I take it you don’t read much fantasy. If you’re going to get all upset about magic in a fantasy based book, you might want to spend a few minutes looking an author up, rather than reading the book and getting all pissy about it.
Gotta say, it really is entertaining that the creator of Pennywise is essentially cribbing an argument from the Insane Clown Posse.
Apparently magic and the supernatural in fiction tales are goddist territory now? Lovecraft? Poe?
Anteprepro:
Apparently so. I will say that I don’t mind gods at all in fantasy books, after all, they are creatures of fantasy. I thought N.K. Jemisin did a fantastic job with gods in The Hundred Thousand Broken Kingdoms, and I’m seriously enjoying Max Gladstone’s three books, set in a world that had gods, then humans went to war with gods, and now there are just a few gods, deathless kings, and those in the craft. Good fun.
Jeez, from the title of this post, I thought maybe King had been outed as a sexual harasser or MRA. He believes in God and has intellectual cop-out reasons for it? I’ve known that for years. Sigh of relief over here.
(Even though I stopped reading him after he inserted himself into the Dark Tower stories.)
The Stand‘s issue wasn’t magic, it was the deus ex machina. Not all that unexpected given the way the story had thus far unfolded, but the whole Christian mythological framework is going to make for boring stories and resolutions by the very nature of the 3O god at the head of it all.
Heh, except for knowing Stephen King was religious for years, I have to second Rey Fox :
Rey:
Yep. It is a good thing when someone gets criticism right. I enjoyed The Stand for the most part, but expected to be bored with the xian framework. It would have been so much better with a more creative god framework.
King’s god belief is written right into The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, possibly other books as well, I’m not really a King-ologist. And I’m sure I read it straight from him as well, probably in his memoir-y thing On Writing.
Of course, plenty of writers have made plenty of hay with angels and demons and the like, but once you bring the Big Guy into the mix, it’s pretty much a drama-killer, unless you’re deconstructing.
I would have to imagine that speculative fiction has a higher proportion of non-goddist authors than most other genres.
There’s one of those things SF/F writers muse about sometimes, over drinks in the hotel bar after midnight, like college freshmen wondering if we’re all just brains in vats: Are we the god of our characters? Hypothesize that the neurons of your brain constitute a reality you’ve invented, and all your characters are real and have something like free will (the “my characters do what they want” school of writerliness). And you create a world and let them run around in it, and you can poke at them and change things. Each revision pass is an alternate timeline of the original universe you created. And so are we all characters in a novel written by someone else?
Bullshit, of course, but fun to talk about. And at least as old as Lewis Carroll writing about Alice being part of the White King’s dream and she’ll go poof if she wakes him up.
Apologies all, for my faulty attitude about King. As I said, parenthetically, I haven’t read King, just watched those movies they make from his books. I now understand that his books are not about supernatural beings; he just uses them, as a plot device, to tell very human stories (that’s what my previous remarks were intended to convey, sorry).
.
I’m fraid I’m heading down the ad hominem trail: hating his books as lousy cuz King has lousy attitudes about atheists, ID, etc.
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Sorry I posted that garbage there ;-(
People familiar with the work of Robert Bloch (and many other 19th and early 20th century horror writers) have never been very impressed with King. Plagiarism may not be the right word for his output, but pastiche certainly is.
And he’s just as unoriginal in his opinions about atheists. How unsurprising.
left0ver1under:
I enjoyed a number of his early works, but lost interest sometime after Misery. Some years back, I came across Duma Key at a thrift store, and thought I would be okay reading it. My one recurrent thought on that trainwreck was that King really needs an editor who isn’t afraid to edit. That book could have easily lost 200 pages, and been the better for it.
twas brillig @ 68, thank you. I appreciate you coming back with that.
Iyéska @ 70
This is the sad fate of so many successful authors. They start believing their own hype, view editors as gatekeeping enemies, and end up crawling up their own asses.
One of the 2 directors he tends to usually work with when he’s actually involved with the adaptation – either Mick Garris or Craig Baxley, I forget – once said that to him, King’s books aren’t about the monsters hiding in the closet, but about the people who own the closet. It was more elegantly stated, but certainly something to that effect. Sadly, when his books go on to become movies, this lovely feature gets lost more often than it doesn’t, along with the very King-specific way he goes about language. My point being, twas, give him a shot. TV and the big screen just… rarely do him justice.
About The Stand, I read somewhere that he got writer’s block, and it just wasn’t going away, and because nothing was coming to him in terms of development, we all got stuck with the “Good vs Evil according to the Bible” cliche taking over everything. And with that ending, of course. Sure, I’d already read so many of his books I was used to endings almost never measuring up to how he got me there. Nevertheless, I still haven’t managed to make myself read The Stand again, and that’s largely due to The Hand of The Big Guy literally coming down from heaven to provide King with a resolution. I can’t agree it’s his best work, though it certainly could have been, in better circumstances.
I also didn’t like the turn, and I was well aware of King’s other work.
The Stand begins as science fiction, not fantasy. I have the same criticisms of Lost and Battlestar Galactica, which both follow the same patterns: one, they begin as hard-core science fiction and end as fantasy; and two, they are both critically acclaimed at the beginning but lose their adoration by the end (and people hate the last scene).
The reasons I enjoyed The Stand were the complex and thought-provoking human reactions to the collapse of society, not the simplified Good vs. Evil morality play. We can say the problem is the Deus ex Machina, but remember that the “God from the Machine” is literally supernatural. When we set up a god, everything is possible, and nothing is impossible, and you lower the stakes. The question is not “How will the good guys win?” or even “Will they win?” but “WHEN will they win?”
jijoya @ 72:
Interesting. I can easily see this happening, and it’s a shame, because there were seriously good elements to The Stand, and it could have been a great book if it hadn’t gotten stuck in same old good vs evil land.
King not getting edited down’s been a problem for a while, yeah. He can do clean and tight, but when he’s in the mood for a door stop, it’s the size of a building. I’ve been known to only read him for the language (when the book is underwhelming in every other way), but over the past 8 years it’s been getting harder and harder to put myself into that mindset. There’s just too much fodder. (Duma Key was a notable source of frustration of the „Somebody please hand King’s editor an axe!“ variety. Under The Dome was another. Not to mention Black House.)
It’s ego, I imagine. Evidently, he did actually have an editor in the 70s who knew how to put his or her foot down because The Stand had shed some 500+ pages of the original manuscript. Seems King didn’t like that because in the 90s, he went and had an „uncut“ edition published where he put every page back in (and even wrote some brand new ones). People who own the first edition say it’s considerably better than the bloated one I’ve read, so I went and bought myself a copy. Now I have to actually discipline myself into digging in.
Several random/not-so-random King thoughts:
I was a huge fan of his but stopped reading him not long after Black House. While I loved the good/evil thing in my younger years, now it comes across way too simple/obvious.
I assumed he was an atheist based on his mention of the Turtle in IT (and Dark Tower?) As in, turtles, all the way down. Though I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that he is a tentative believer given how many of his books are premised on some sort of positive supernatural force that saves the day. Heck, the hero of The Green Mile was John Coffey…JC…obvious Christ figure.
Oh well. He can still spin a good yarn (or could.) The Shining, IT, The Stand, Green Mile, Rose Madder, Talisman, Long Walk, Insomnia etc., were great reads at the time and I’ll always treasure the enjoyment I got in readin them, even if I would probably find them significantly lacking nowadays.
How can we be talking about crappy magic endings and nobody has mentioned Needfull Things? Such a stupid ending to an otherwise amazing book.
But yeah, agree with the OP on the ridiculousness of his reasoning and ID-curious tone. Blech.
He’s mentioned before that he’s superstitious, and so I figured it wouldn’t be surprising if he was one of the “spiritual not religious” types who believes in God but doesn’t participate in any religion in particular.
I think his “fantasy” stuff is only “good” at best, even if I did like a lot about The Stand, Drawing of the Three, and The Wastelands. King’s at his best when he’s writing concise horror that is deeply personal and small in scale, which is why I think his best books (by far) are The Shining and Pet Sematary. Not coincidentally, they have some inspired-by-true-Stephen-King-behavior elements in them.
Another accomplished author, Terry Pratchett, can provide a rebuttal to this quote. In Unseen Academicals, Lord Vetinari had this to say about the beauty of nature:
“I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight on the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
The story about The Stand is true – if I’m not mistaken, it’s in On Writing that he mentions it. He got stuck and blocked and walked one of his walkies and the idea of the bomb in the closet that kills off many peripheral characters and sets the core group of (male, of course) protagonists on their pilgramage to confront the Big Evil in Las Vegas.
Interestingly enough, Randall Flagg often appears in his books as a villain or a villain’s “god”/master, although seldom by that name. He does always go by the initials RF though.
I love some of King’s work. IT, particularly. And my favourite story of ALL time is Shawshank Redemption (Just to mention again, I have a degree in Literature so it’s not that I’m choosing from a biased sample of King Only or not widely read). That said, some of his books are plain shit. I’m looking at Under the Dome, Girl who Loved Tom Gorden (gawd, what a snore fest), Tommyknockers and many others.
I blame his fluctuating quality on his refusal to plot – he’s a full out pantser (as in write by the seat of your pants). Which could be fine for a first draft, but then you have to start tightening the plot lines and getting RID of shit like Dei ex Machinae.
So yeah. I have to say that except for The Stand, I’ve never seen the full-blown God Worship or whatever in his books – he’s much more likely to challenge religion and its adherence. I guess that’s his way of confronting his confusion regarding belief and believers. But maybe that’s just me.
I,J @73-
“I have the same criticisms of Lost and Battlestar Galactica, which both follow the same patterns: one, they begin as hard-core science fiction and end as fantasy”
Wait one second here- when the plane crashed on the island, what exactly about John Locke being healed of a spinal injury that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair made you believe that LOST was going to be a “hard core science fiction” story? (Revealed in the 4th episode)
And what was “hard core science fiction” about Jack seeing (and following) the apparition of his dead father to a fresh water source? (the events of the fifth episode)
Look, I get being dissatisfied with LOST for whatever reason, but this excuse of “they tricked me into thinking it was one kind of story when it was another kind all along!” is just bullshit. LOST was a fantasy epic from the opening scene, regardless of the wishes of any of its viewers.
Damn.. I could have sworn I read somewhere that he was an atheist.