The New York Review of Books

“That was when he felt his entire structure of organized thought begin to slide slowly toward some dark abyss.”

—Stephen King, The Langoliers

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.

Do we know what popular literature is? When is it not junk? Is it ever (just) junk? Who is to say? What is the alternative to popular literature? Serious, highbrow, literary, or merely…unpopular literature? Stephen King responded with eloquent anger in an argument over these issues conducted in the PEN newsletter in 1991. He thought best-selling authors came in all kinds. He said he found James Michener, Robert Ludlum, John le Carré, and Frederick Forsyth “unreadable,” but enjoyed (among others) Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Jonathan Kellerman, and Joyce Carol Oates. This seems sound enough to me, although I have to confess to liking Ludlum and le Carré as well. “Some of these,” King continued, “are writers whose work I think of as sometimes or often literary, and all are writers who can be counted on to tell a good story, one that takes me away from the humdrum passages of life…and enriches my leisure time as well. Such work has always seemed honorable to me, even noble.”

What had made King angry was the term “better” fiction, which Ursula Perrin had used in an open letter to PEN (“I am a writer of ‘better’ fiction, by which I mean that I don’t write romance or horror or mystery”) complaining about the profusion of worse fiction in the bookstores—”this rising sea of trash” were her words. “Ursula Perrin’s prissy use of the word ‘better,’ ” King says, “which she keeps putting in quotation marks, makes me feel like baying at the moon.” Perrin’s examples of writers of “better” fiction were John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Alice Hoffman.

But King was wrong, I think, to assume that Perrin’s argument could rest only on snobbery, and he himself owes his success not to some all-purpose skill in entertainment but to his skill in a particular genre, and to his readers’ expectations of that genre. There is a real difficulty with the rigidity and exclusivity of our literary categories; but it is no solution to say that exclusivity is the problem. What …