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Writing bestselling horror fiction

19 June 2017

‘It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck ... Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre...

It's more respected now. I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. I'm not trying to be conceited or anything. Raymond Chandler elevated the detective genre. People who have done wonderful work really blur the line...

Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me...

Early in my career, The Village Voice did a caricature of me that hurts even today when I think about it. It was a picture of me eating money. I had this big, bloated face. It was this assumption that if fiction was selling a lot of copies, it was bad. If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. And that's elitist. I don't buy it.'

Stephen King, author of Carrie, Sleeping Beauty and many other novels in an interview in Rolling Stone