Article: Still conjuring dark forces ; (1) BOOK OF THE WEEK (2) He may have been slammed for dumbing down cultural life, but Stephen King's latest book is a distinguished contribution

Duma Key Stephen King

HOW good is Stephen King really? In 2003, when he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King made a punchy speech arguing that popular fiction in general deserved much greater critical recognition.

The pompous Yale professor Harold Bloom was infuriated. He denounced the award as a terrible mistake, "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life". It was too kind even to call King "a writer of penny dreadfuls", Bloom continued. "He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-byparagraph, book-by-book basis." So ...

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