• Cinema.Andrés Muschietti: "Stephen King is my hero"

Stephen King's hallmarks are his striking ideas, his fanciful arguments, a glass dome that encloses a city, a hotel in winter season with ghost children, a guy who looks for a tower where all the universes converge, a kid who he obsesses with the evil spirit that lives in an old car, a family that lives near a cemetery and has the ability to return the life to those who bury there, a sadistic fan to whom fortune smiles putting his writer at his fingertips favorite, a storage room that contains a hole that will give directly to the 50s ... and dozens of other occurrences that have reported the fame that undoubtedly deserves and the label of genre writer that undoubtedly lowers his excellence .

Because what makes Stephen King great - like any narrator - is not his unusual stories, which, in fact, in his weakest moments he plays bad times because his own energy tends to accumulation, his own facility can cause some fatigue , but for his formidable ability to create complex, memorable, delicately made characters not through narrator judgments or psychological reports, but with facts.

Made full of details, of feeling of truth. Almost all of King's characters have their own name , however brief their appearance, and a hint of history. We are told something about them. Sometimes banal, that his wife can not stand to be late for dinner and therefore can not attend the protagonist, and then leaves, rides in a car that tells us the brand, and also tells us what song plays in the radio when you start the engine. In that, in the ability to give reality and liveliness to his stories, Stephen King's ability can be measured with that of any great narrator.

He himself, in his essay books - for example Macabre Dance , a sensational journey through horror literature in whose tradition he inscribes his own work, or While I write , an irregular book, wonderful when he narrates his autobiography and quite predictable when he theorizes - has given Many clues about his methods, but methods and claims - says Stephen King himself - are just wet paper.

It must be recognized that sometimes Stephen King likes to make it very difficult for himself - for example, The Dome , (Plaza & Janés) a novel with splendid scenes but that finally overwhelms with its excessive pagination and the repetition of tricks - and others, In spite of how difficult it is, he manages to give us a masterpiece - for example, with 11/22/63 (Plaza & Janés), one of the best, if not the best, travel time novel that one has read .

King is pure paradox: he happens to be the great master of terror but his novels firmly hold on to reality

Another of Stephen King's hallmarks is his unlikely productivity : for many years he managed to publish three novels a year. It would be nothing more than an effective fact to indicate his gift and his ability to work, but it seems to me that it also has to do with something typical of his narratives: naturalness. King is an artisan writer, aware that there is no better teacher than tradition, and that he does not seek in his stories the formal somersaults he admires in other authors whom he considers artists. It is that naturalness that allows him, in a few pages - another brand of the house - to get you fully into a story that he will then develop and expand with the concurrence of a cavalcade of characters.

His latest novel, El instituto (also published by Plaza & Janés) has just appeared in Spanish, coinciding with the premiere in cinemas of the second part of It . It will be enough for anyone to read the first 15 pages to be involved in a story that begins in a full plane in which the crew offers money to those who leave their seat free, and that will take us to a strange place where gifted kids live that have been kidnapped by an organization that exploits them - this of the gifted kids who are kidnapped for dark purposes comes from an earlier novel of his.

As in other novels King pays special attention - and is another of his hallmarks - to children, adolescents and young people. His is a world of adolescent essence - even when there is no trace of them as in Misery , one of his best novels: the protagonist's fanaticism marks his terrifying teenage condition.

In It, the children are the heroes who, grouped as losers, decide to hunt one of their best-known characters: the That to which the children refer and is nothing more than an inexplicable creature that can take the form of what panic most give your victim, be it a leper, a doberman, a dancing clown, or a shark - in homage to Steven Spielberg. I confess that, read 30 years ago, I barely remember some details of the novel - the persecutions of the sewer, the terrible bully that compacts its victims and gives them strength, because there is nothing more than one to have the same enemy, the orgy most shameful in the world - but what I do remember is how easily one drank those pages. For many of his fans, It (Debolsillo) is King's masterpiece . I prefer the more mature King, who controls his tools more effectively, and manages not only to surprise or bewitch the main character's paths - almost always fragile, devoured by fear and yet forced to recover, get up, follow- but also to thrill, as happens in that wonderful novel entitled Joyland , (Random) in which - and this is also a very King trait - someone decides to reveal in flashback events buried in the pages of events (the repetition is mine).

Under the fireworks of his tireless imagination he shows us that the truly unusual thing is to live

Stephen King is, I think, pure paradox. He happens to be the most famous genre novelist - terror, if any, although he also cultivates the thriller and the fantasy novel - but all his novels firmly hold on to reality. If you talk about a small lost town, the names of the motels you mention correspond to real places, if you describe a small hill next to a secondary road from any place, be assured that the trees there are as Stephen describes them King, if the father of one of his children lost in the strangeness of living died in a certain episode of the Korean war, the story of that episode could go perfectly to a history book because there will be no invention in it.

He happens to be a genre writer without artistic ambitions, but has produced some of the best pages of American literature. It happens to be an entertainment novelist - and there is no one who is more - and a social history of America could be gleaned by choosing well among his novels. It happens to be one of the most tirelessly imaginative minds on the planet, a true factory of creatures and paranormal or inexplicable facts, and it sure is - and the genre cinema owes him many hours of footage - but what makes his novels keep The vividness and vertigo with which he writes them is nevertheless his ability to grab life in its most shuddering details: a boy who remembers how his mother dipped cookies in his cup of milk, a girl who, from a certain moment, He knows that things will no longer be the same, an old man who remembers a child who died when he was a child.

Under the fireworks of his tireless imagination, sometimes excessively spectacular, Stephen King shows us in his best novels that the strange, the extraordinary, the truly unusual, is to live .

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