YMMV / Stephen King

• Archive Panic: He believes in trying to get at least one book a year out, and it shows. He's been writing for decades, and still putting out books today. Said books are well-known to be Door Stoppers on their own. Anyone who wants to read, or even collect all of his works will find their work cut out for them.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Evil Is Cool: While King has actually been reported to hate this idea, a few of his villains have still managed to obtain more than a few fans. Randall Flagg, Pennywise, Carrie White (although she counts more as an Anti-Villain), Kurt Barlow, Leland Gaunt, Christine, and Rose the Hat are ones who particularly stand out, in spite of (or possibly because of) their hideous crimes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Danse Macabre, he describes A New Hope as "an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT."
• Magnificent Bastard: Andre Linoge, Dwight Renfield and Robinson.
• Mis-blamed:
  • More like not given credit when he should. To this day there are people who refuse to believe he wrote the stories that Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption were based on, for the simple reason that they're not horror and actually pretty heartwarming. They'll "prove" it by taking a cursory glance at his bibliography and saying "See, not there!", since both of them were from a collection called Different Seasons and both of them had their names changed when translated to film. (The Green Mile often elicits the same response, but at least that does show up on his bibliography more obviously since it's based on a novel of the same name.)
  • According to King, this even happened to his face. Upon finding out that he was that Stephen King, a woman scolded him soundly about his awful scary books...and then asked him why he didn't tell more uplifting stories, like that nice movie The Shawshank Redemption. When King told her that he did write that nice story, the woman refused to believe him.
  • Part of the reason he created the Richard Bachman Pen Name was due to the fact that nobody would believe the "Bachman Books" (largely non-supernatural thrillers) weren't just horror novels if he'd written them under his own name.
    • To this day, expect to see any new Stephen King novel nominated for the Goodreads Readers' Choice Award in the Horror category for that year, even if thematically it fits better under Science Fiction or Mystery & Thriller.
• Narm:
  • Many of King's works contain this. Even some scenes that were intended to be scary or heartwarming can come off this way.
  • His movies really bring this to light. Scenes that might even have been scary in the books turn out to be pure narm on camera.
• Narm Charm: That said, some people feel that this is part of the fun. Others even suggest that much, or at least some of the narm is intentional, a hearkening back to B-movies that intended to scare but provoked laughs instead.
• Once Original, Now Common: This trope could have been called "Stephen King is Not Scary". King's works have been hugely influential for the last two generations of horror writers, and many of the cliches of the genre were originally invented, or at least popularized by King.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Tends to happen a lot with his novels, which are heavy on contemporary cultural and political references that don't always age well. He himself has said he's sometimes "too much a writer of the moment."
  • There's some of this in Danse Macabre, King's 1981 nonfiction overview of the horror genre from 1950-1980. For just one example, King writes, "If you have seen one film by Wes Craven, it is safe, I think, to skip the others." Obviously, this was before Craven made such classics as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream.

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