Books: Master of Postliterate Prose

Stephen King packs pop images into scary bestsellers

Horror has been frightfully good to Author Stephen King. He expects to earn about $2 million this year, mostly as a result of making people's flesh crawl. The number of his books in print (predominantly paperbacks) climbs toward 40 million. Indeed, his pot currently boileth over. Creepshow, an original King screenplay directed by George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), will be released in October; a $6.95 comicbook version of the script has just been published by New American Library as part of the promotional hoopla. An adaptation of Firestarter, the sixth of King's seven novels, is being filmed in Michigan, where local residents have eagerly offered to sell their homes for use in the movie's incendiary conclusion. And King's tenth book in eight years, with a hard-cover 200,000 first printing, began topping bestseller lists weeks before its official publication date.

Those who have already rushed out to buy Different Seasons (Viking; 527 pages; $16.95) may be a trifle shocked by what they have brought home: a collection of four novellas, only one of which offers the chills that have become King's trademark. The Breathing Method is an eerie account of a terribly unnatural childbirth. But the other three, though sporadically gruesome, come without King's customary trimmings. Gone are varieties of telekinesis (Carrie, Firestarter) and precognition (The Shining, The Dead Zone). There are no vampires ('Salem's Lot), apocalyptic plagues (The Stand) or satanically rabid Saint Bernards (Cujo). The only reader likely to find these long tales truly frightening is an old-fashioned book lover: they are spooky examples of what can be called postliterate prose.

The genre is new, its methods still in the formative stage, but King is its popular master. Different Seasons offers a dazzling display of how writing can appeal to people who do not ordinarily like to read. King uses language the same way the baseball fan seated behind the home-team dugout uses placards: to remind those present of what they have already seen. In Apt Pupil, for example, a 13-year-old boy tracks down a Nazi war criminal hiding out in his own Southern California suburb. When he confronts the fugitive, the youth is disappointed by the old man's accent: "It didn't sound . . . well, authentic. Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes sounded more like a Nazi than Dussander did." Perhaps a teen-ager might find a TV sitcom more vividly real than a phenome non that predated his birth. But members of his immediate family are judged in the same way: "Dick Bowden, Todd's father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named Lloyd Bochner." When Todd finds himself in a dilemma, he mentally goes to the movies: "He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head."