/lit/ - Literature

>>6327043
Stephen King looks like he either has down syndrome, or is a who from some Dr.Seuss shit

So what's the consensus on Stephen King?
IMPORTANT NOTE: this thread is not an invitation for plebs from /tv/ and /mu/ to start browsing this board

I read him a lot when I was in middle and high school and I still view him in a mostly positive light. He is probably better than most of the other airport fiction out there

His early work e.g. The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, Carrie is definitely his strongest. Here he wasn't weighed down by the literary pretensions seen in Lisey's Story or Duma Key and was just interested in telling a good horror story.
It and The Stand are both very entertaining novels with some genuinely thrilling moments, but they have some hilariously bad endings (child orgy? really?) and King really struggles a lot with emotional drama. He cannot write about relationships!
Like his novels, his short stories range from exciting and fun to bloated and corny (Has anybody read The Finger? I thought it was fantastic)
The Dark Tower series is of course trash, even in middle school I couldn't stand it and I fucking loved all that pseudo-middle-earth shit when I was twelve
On Writing is a very strange book since King is rarely noted for the quality of his prose so much as the breadth of his imagination. I think that its success among amateur writers and his receiving of the National Book Award three years after its publication may have something to do with his decline

Admittedly, I haven't read much of him in the past ten years, but these are my thoughts

Am I pretty anon?