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New Yorker: What Stephen King Isn't
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/what-stephen-king-isnt.html
Readers and critics of novels have long prized observation over imagination. That’s not surprising, because observation is respectable, useful, intellectual, and verifiable. Imagination, meanwhile, can seem, and often is, arbitrary, childish, and even tasteless. But if I had to say which side of King I value most, the unflinching observer or the visionary fantasist, I’d have to choose the latter. There are lots of writers who tell it like it is, but only a few who, with such commitment and intensity, tell it like it isn’t. King takes the weird and gives it weight. And yet, at the same time, his novels retain a lightness, a playfulness. They show us horrible things, but they also glow, I think, with King’s joy—with his pleasure and exhilaration in imagining.
Readers and critics of novels have long prized observation over imagination. That’s not surprising, because observation is respectable, useful, intellectual, and verifiable. Imagination, meanwhile, can seem, and often is, arbitrary, childish, and even tasteless. But if I had to say which side of King I value most, the unflinching observer or the visionary fantasist, I’d have to choose the latter. There are lots of writers who tell it like it is, but only a few who, with such commitment and intensity, tell it like it isn’t. King takes the weird and gives it weight. And yet, at the same time, his novels retain a lightness, a playfulness. They show us horrible things, but they also glow, I think, with King’s joy—with his pleasure and exhilaration in imagining.