See, I would never ever want to say, "I told you so." Or suggest I was ahead of the curve. But. . . now that Revival is out, people are starting to note that King makes a lot of connections to other masters of the craft. In particular, H.P. Lovecraft. Why does this matter to me? Because I put a book out this Summer (before Revival came out) discussing King and the enduring nature of his work as serious literature. I also discussed connections between King and Lovecraft.
Note this article posted at oregonlive.com. Before diving in to King's use of Lovecraft in Revival, the writer says, "He seems to be trying to make sure his own pop fiction lasts by going even darker than he has before, into the realm of earlier horror masters Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft."
What Douglas Perry (the author of the article) totally misses is that King didn't just wake up and decide to start shadowing some of these people. He didn't just decide to get more serious with Revival. King's work has been consistently serious literature; it's just the critics who have been reading him wrong. It's time they gave the Stephen King library another read.
Perry nicely summarizes some recent reviews of Revival:
The New Statesman calls "Revival," King's 58th novel, a "serious book by a major writer," insisting that it "reads like a populist sequel to Sinclair Lewis's evangelical satire 'Elmer Gantry.'"
The New York Times calls it "a well-built book that unfolds on a big canvas." The paper adds, teasingly, scarily, that the novel "winds up with the idea that to be human, you must know what it is to be inhuman."
That sounds like Shelley's influence, but The Guardian says "it is Lovecraft, and the quote 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons, even death may die,' that reverberate throughout the book."
King, 67, happily admits he's been influenced by "everything" Lovecraft has ever written.
In chapter 1 of Stephen King, A Face Among The Masters, I included a portion titled, "The eyes of H.P. Lovecraft." I noted not only similarities in their writing, but biography as well. I also looked at how the two are very different.
King’s Lovecraftian stories include such titles as Jerusalem’s Lot, I am the Doorway, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, N, and Crouch End. In the documentary, Fear of the Unknown, Peter Straub compared The Mist to Lovecraft. “Tentacle things break in from another dimension, that’s just pure Lovecraft.”
Gardner, Brighton (2014-05-04). Stephen King A Face Among The Masters
What I find in Revival isn't a brand new Stephen King. This King was with us in Full Dark, No Stars. He was there in the pages of The Dark Half and especially Desperation. The depressing tone of the book mirrors very much the narrative style of the novella 1922.
So to put it simply, I'm excited. I'm so glad that King's novel, Revival, is being taken as serious literature. Because I think it will force some others to look back at the work of Stephen King. All along King has been giving us serious literature; we were just having so much fun reading it, we didn't realize how great it was. I believe someday, future generations will study Stephen King the way we study Lovecraft, Dickens, Poe, Twin and Shelly.
There's an interesting element King borrows from Lovecraft (this is something discussed with Bryant and Bryan) is the use of unreliable narrators.
ReplyDeleteIn his other Lovecraft influenced stories like N and Crouch End, King frames in such a way that we're left wondering whether these accounts of the other-worldly can be trusted.
This actually is different from the way King frames a story like It or Desperation. In those books the narration and events are objective-omniscient, and the audience rarely has opportunity to doubt the proceedings. With his more Lovecraft work, that's much less the case.
If you're still on Revival, I won't say anything, however I will note that I found at least two stories where Lovecraft actually went third-person omniscient instead unreliable first person, and these are in two stories dealing with the character of Randolph Carter.
The stories are "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath" (a title that both does and doesn't need work, somehow), and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". Both are told objectively, instead of his usual subjective paranoia style.
ChrisC