Bert Brussen Discusses: ‘How Stephen King Defined Literature’

For columnist Bert Brussen, as a novice reader, the fantastic and scarily realistic stories of Stephen King defined exactly what literature was supposed to be: the endless possibility of creating new worlds.

It took a long while before I actually started reading Stephen King. The displayed covers at the [Dutch Warehouse chain] Makro were certainly so attractive that I felt the urge to glance through the books and fantasize about the undoubtedly fantastic content, but the thickness and especially the fact that these were real books for “big people” still created a hurdle. And who knew if I would have nightmares because of it.

The day I did start reading them was the day that a film of Stephen King was aired, undoubtedly on [Dutch TV channel] Veronica. It must have been 1983’s “Christine,” directed by John Carpenter, pretty decent adaptation of King’s novel about a Chevrolet with magical powers. It could also have been “Maximum Overdrive,” an extremely bad movie directed by King himself (who, by the way, makes it a habit to make a cameo in all his movies), which, except for the music of AC/DC, is based on the nice but ultra short story “Trucks.” In any case, after seeing those movies I was sure: I would start reading Stephen King.

Maine

My first King novel was “The Monkey,” a bundle of two stories, “The Monkey” and “The Mist.” “The Mist” was a particularly direct hit. Everything that makes Stephen King Stephen King is in it. It is set in Maine — as are all his stories — the place where King grew up. It is about unknown monsters (they are normally only in nightmares) and an intelligent man — writer, handsome, white, American — who has to stand by and watch how an entirely new dimension, possibly caused by the army and the government, thoroughly destroys his life.

Typical King: the personification of the American man; a family man with a big love for cars, rock music and baseball; the ultimate middle-class guy dreaming of the American dream, inexplicably ending up in a nightmare — a nightmare that involves touches of reality in general (King’s books “Christine” and “Cujo” coincided with reality when he was hit by a pickup truck driven by a redneck who overlooked King because he was petting his dog) and American society in particular. But King’s books always contain deeply developed characters who are seldom completely normal. In every character that Stephen King brings to life, insanity lives only one floor below reason.

By the way, “The Mist” has an open ending, something I am always a big fan of in horror and fantasy stories. Because an open ending is possibly even worse than the horror itself; what possibly happened to the main characters will haunt you forever. Those open endings are actually forbidden in Stephen King movies, because Americans always want everything to end well. At the end of “The Mist,” the reader does not know whether the mist or the monsters will ever disappear, while the movie (don’t watch it — it’s too bad) leaves not a single doubt.

Library

After the collection “The Monkey,” I didn’t hold back. The books that were so invitingly on display at the Makro, with their attractive covers, were thankfully also available in the library. They were easily recognizable by the childish icon on the cover of every library book, a little ghost on every horror book. (We’re talking about a Dutch library here, and of course, we wouldn’t want a clueless library book borrower to come home with a book whose content is unexpectedly and unnecessarily hurtful. Therefore, the library has overcome this by clearly providing each book with a fitting icon: a little ghost for horror, pistol for thriller, capital L for literature and so on and so on. Even the illiterate could go to the library.)

Unfortunately, as things go in the world of The Only True Literature, Stephen King quickly turned out to be called “non-literature.” Too trite, too much fiction, too plastic or too cruel. Whoever knows where the line between reading material and literature is may speak up. In any event, King by no means agreed with that and has, in prefaces and his biographical “King on King,” repeatedly complained about his critics, who consistently attack his wordiness, and about the fact that he, as an English literature academic, always gets set aside as cheap entertainment.

New Worlds

Sales figures are obviously no measure of what defines literature. To the contrary, mega-sales of Harry Potter or E.L. James’ “50 Shades of Grey” still do not make it literature (please do not claim otherwise). But for me, as a novice reader, King’s fantastic and simultaneously frighteningly-realistic stories defined exactly what literature was supposed to be: the endless possibility of creating new worlds; the possibility of conjuring up a mood that is nowhere to be found in reality, or is so recognizable that it is oppressing, freeing or comforting; the possibility of telling a story and, with that, temporarily elevating people above conscious existence. Without the apparent prerequisites that “literature” needs to fulfill, King’s writing is evidently capable of leading literally millions of people to an entirely new dimension that can only exist in books.

Either way, King succeeded in winning me over to literature and, for what it’s worth, his work stimulated my development in both reading and writing. For a writer who writes solely “reading material,” his is a superb achievement.