The only writer who told more “explicit” horror stories than Stephen King: “I’ve been surpassed”
Without a shadow of a doubt, Stephen King is the most famous horror writer of the modern era. Some would say all time, and even for those who disagree, he’s definitely sold more books than the rest.
Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Richard Matheson, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Junji Ito are all titans of terrifying literature, but they can’t hold a candle to King’s legacy. That’s not to say he’s unequivocally the best ever to put pen to paper and scare readers shitless, but he’s made the biggest impact on popular culture.
Yes, there have been innumerable adaptations of Stoker, Lovecraft, Matheson, Poe, and Jackson over the years, but none of them have seen as many of their works brought to the screen as King. He’s been Hollywood’s go-to guy for 50 years, and even the lesser entries in his bibliography have been chewed up, spat out, and occasionally remade and rebooted for a new generation.
He’s become synonymous with horror, and with good reason, but he’s never been regarded as the most graphic, gruesome, or stomach-churning of the bunch. Of course, many of his novels, novellas, and short stories feature some gnarly shit going down, but it’s never pushed the envelope of bad taste to an insane degree.
Some of his earlier writing feels relatively quaint compared to the gut-punching, dread-inducing, and luxuriously worded brutality to emerge in the years after he became a household name, but if there’s one scene from any of his stories that anyone unfortunate enough to have seen the movie wishes had never been filmed, it’s that fucking degloving scene from Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game. Jesus Christ.
It was bad enough on the page, but in live-action, it’s enough to make your teeth water. In a 1992 appearance on Fresh Air, shortly after the supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book was published, King was asked if he felt responsible for taking the horror novel to a “more physically explicit place” than ever before.
While he initially answered in the affirmative, he quickly pivoted to naming somebody else as having taken things at least one step further, if not many more. “Yeah, I think that, to some degree, I did do that,” he acknowledged. “I think, probably, I’ve been surpassed in that arena by some of the people who’ve come after me. I’m thinking mostly of Clive Barker.”
When Barker’s Books of Blood was first published, it carried a quote on the front cover from none other than Stephen King, who declared: “I have seen the future of horror, and his name is Clive Barker.” Violence, the supernatural, and the psychosexual were key hallmarks of his prose, both literally and thematically, and he wasn’t one for tiptoeing his way around the graphic side of writing.
Of course, Barker wasn’t simply a shock-and-awe scribe who bashed out stories with the express intention of shocking people; it just happened to come naturally. Like King, he quickly became a favourite among studio executives, not that there are many similarities between them beyond the odd movie adaptation and the shared genre in which they made their names.
He may not have surpassed King in terms of fame, book sales, or personal wealth, but he was the only one mentioned by name as having surpassed him in taking things down a darker path.
