We need to talk about Stephen - a review of Horror: 100 Best Books, ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

 I've stopped reading Stephen King. But it was still striking to read such a master of the horror genre as Graham Masterton take King to task in a way that put my own feelings so eloquently.

Consider the following:

The horror novels one reads these days are so often written in King-lish: which amounts to reams of unedited stream-of-word-processorese - pompous, self-regarding and profane. 

Masterton is reviewing The Lurker at the Threshold, a story drafted by HP Lovecraft and finished by his acolyte August Derleth. Contrasting said King-lish with the Lovecraft/Derleth style, Masterton continues:

Here, there is no concern for what the reader thinks of the writers: only an out-and-out devotion to being scary, expressed with a professionalism and a half-mocking eloquence that today's horror writers would do well to study.

As you might see from the quality of the prose, Horror: 100 Best Books is no uber-listicle. It is a collection of short reviews by 100 horror novelists, each profiling one of their favourite works, covering a range from Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr Faustus (1592) to the late 1980s: the end of a decade when some great horror novels had to compete with an unprecedented volume of dross that in less feverish times would have been lucky to remain on the slush pile. So a guide like this is doubly welcome for its guide to that decade's gems alone, and has proved so popular since the first edition in 1987 that a revised and updated edition, wih all essays touched up, was released in 1998.

During this decade King's wordcounts would creep on towards the astronomical, but this is not why I no longer read his books, although I think his editor should have been more liberal with his blue pencil.

I stopped reading King when I finally got around to reading It, when the film version was released in 2017, thirty-one years years after the book came out. I threw the book away when I discovered it contained a very detailed sex scene involving children, where several young boys take turns on a little girl, which is explicit enough to constitute child pronography. I haven't bought anything written by King, or filmed from one of his books or stories since. 

Compare Robert McCammon's Swan Song, which was released in 1987, the year after It came out, and is reviewed by Edward C Benton. In McCammon's past-apocalyptic wasteland there is a point where, the author hints, a young teenage child-soldier is going to be initiated into the company of a (grown-up) prostitute. The author draws over a discreet veil by switching to another scene, trusting his readers to figure out what happened. And, crucially, no little girl was involved in any scene written in such high definition as to be of interest to the inmates of special cells.

If, like me, you feel it's time to review the richest fruits of horror beyond Stephen King, or are starting to feel it's time to do so, Horror: 100 Best Books is a great place to start. The editors end the volume with a lovingly-compiled list of recommended reading for the years covered in the volume, then as if that weren't enough, add autobiographical notes on the contributors featuring details of their keynote works. A foreword by Ramsey Campbell kicking things off is a sublime touch.

And if you're not yet ready to give King up. two of his works are included; Salem's Lot reviewed by Al Sarrantonio, and The Shining reviewed by Peter Straub. It's worth noting that both of these works were published some years before It - perhaps King's fellow horror writers were realising that they needed to talk about Stephen?