Volume 42, Number 16 · October 19, 1995
Horror of Horrors
By Michael Wood
Dolores Claiborne
by Stephen King
Signet, 372 pp., $6.99 (paper)
Dolores Claiborne
a film directed by Taylor Hackford
Rose Madder
by Stephen King
Viking, 420 pp., $25.95
Stephen King has become a household name in at least three senses. He is a writer pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world has heard of, if they have heard of writers at all. He is regularly read by many people who don't read many other writers. And, along with Danielle Steel and a few others, he is taken to represent everything that is wrong with contemporary publishing, that engine of junk pushing serious literature out of our minds and our bookstores. The English writer Clive Barker has said, 'There are apparently two books in every American household—one of them is the Bible and the other one is probably by Stephen King.' I don't know what Barker's source is for this claim, but I wonder about the Bible.
Review, 4420 words
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