The title of this piece refers to a comment by a regular commentator to Dark Sport, John Malone, that Stephen King has lost his mojo. To which I replied, He lost it a long time ago.

Stephen King is an interesting case. Here we see a man who cozies up to a political faction (the Left Wing) in order to get points with the body that controls the Arts in general. He has all the talking points of the Traditional Left mastered. But does he really believe in all that?

Back to that in a moment. First, let’s discuss his mojo depletion claims.

King had a stellar first several years in the publishing business, publishing breakthrough novels on a wide range of topics, especially the supernatural and horror and fantasy. But you could argue his last half-decent book was Misery, published in 1987. The fact that we’re still talking about him at all is a tribute to the strength of his early works.

Readers have abandoned him in droves, but many continue to have hope that a new book by King would signal a return to earlier days of Quality. But the mojo is gone, long gone. Even before the accident with the van, King was fucking around with his fiction, producing crap like Desperation and The Regulators. The “man with no face” was a boring read, with long passages of nothingburger content. Sometimes he would come back and write a tolerable book, like Rose Madder. But in the end, even that was shorn of its interestingness partly by an attempt to get political.

King seems to think that writing about chick characters is the way to get recognized as being “literary.” His early work, Dolores Claiborne, testifies to that. He made sure to have a two-word name title, rather than a one-worder like “Carrie.” He had the main character say things like “Gorry, men can be so stupid!”

King doesn’t understand literary fiction or how it works. He has written that it is university professors writing about cheating on their wives.

What is Stephen King, and what has he always been? He is a bright workingman’s representative. The kind of man who goes to work in a sawmill and reads pulp fiction over his lunch break — that’s King in a nutshell. Such a man could never aspire to literary greatness. Occasionally, he stumbles across truths in the course of writing about ordinary people — for this they have given him Arts awards medals (and in grateful recognition of the reading pleasure he has given them, the awards givers). But King is solidly from Maine. His is a lowbrow existence dominated by television and classic rock music.

He doesn’t get out of the house anymore to interact with real people. His excursions are limited to his regular walks. He has run out of things to say, and is mixing and combining the things he sees on TV into “new” novels. He is intellectually bankrupt and socially adrift.

Back to King’s political orientation. (Note that I am neither left wing nor right wing.) King kisses ass of the fuckos on the Left. He has always recognized that they are the kingmakers (pun intended) in the general Arts community. You have to get with the Left. Even John Grisham, traditional Southerner, writes black and woman main characters in getting with the Left. It is impossible to avoid the Left’s many tentacles if you want to participate in the Arts field.

King’s book Holly has a gay Latino victim at the start of the book. He makes the Latino out to be super-American. Talk about checking all the (liberal) boxes! King’s newest book Never Flinch is all about women and women politicians and women heroines (Holly). King didn’t used to be so blatant about his politics. Now it has seeped into his every crevice as he strives with greater and greater vigor to get a National Book Award for a specific book, not just a general Arts medal, which still leaves him dissatisfied.

To return to the initial question, Is King a true believer? I don’t think so. He parrots the line too perfectly. A real human being with his own set of opinions is idiosyncratic to some degree, an individual, a standout who doesn’t closely hew to any one ideological set — unless he convinces himself total immersion is necessary, as with Communism, as with Nazism — as with modern-day Liberalism.

King’s problem? He got fat, intellectually speaking. He got rich. He no longer had to write to please the People. (No public figure who is a mainstream entertainer should be in politics, either.) Stephen King’s descent into irrelevance began in the Eighties and has continued for long, long years. Dreamcatcher? Insomnia? Holly? Never Flinch? Pah! Throw the books into the raging fires of the fireplace.

King has betrayed the trust of the reading public. I applaud all those people who have stopped buying his books. He can only get worse from here on in.