Essayist/raconteur Don Herron is best known ’round these parts for his outstanding Robert E. Howard criticism, which includes essays and editing duties in seminal works like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. Elsewhere he’s also regarded as an expert on the works of renowned mystery and noir writer Dashiell Hammett.

Based on this photo, he also wears a fedora and trenchcoat better than anyone.

But a lesser-known side of Herron’s resume includes his Stephen King criticism. I myself was unaware of Herron’s work as a reviewer of the king of horror until coming across his essay, “King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic” from Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King (1986, NAL/Plume).

Seeing as how I’m writing for The Cimmerian website, whose now defunct print journal was home for many Herron essays, this next statement may make me seem like a suck-up, but that’s fine, I’ll say it anyway: I think Herron’s essay is perhaps the best in Kingdom of Fear. This is no mean feat, given that some of the other contributors to the volume include horror immortals like Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Harlan Ellison.

Whether or not you agree with that assessment, it’s rather indisputable that Herron’s essay is the most provocative of the lot. I first started typing “equal parts criticism and praise,” but upon further review it’s decidedly tipped in favor of the negative. Considering that Kingdom of Fear was published in 1986 — arguably the height of King’s creativity and popularity — Herron’s final analysis of King as a talented but flawed writer is rather ballsy. Herron pulls no punches, neither for King nor his legions of fans and admirers. For example, he rips Douglas Winter’s book Stephen King: The Art of Darkness for containing too much fan-worship and not enough honest appraisal. Writes Herron: “[It] strikes me as remarkable because Winter never once disagrees with a King dictum, he does not suggest that one of the novels under discussion might, just possibly, have a minor flaw or two. In this respect it is typical of most of the new criticism, where the critics, like the audience of teenage girls who buy so many of the King books, find everything to be just wonderful.”

Herron also has doubts whether King’s work contains anything of lasting literary value: “I have profound doubts about the ultimate artistic value of the “sub-text” and even more suspicions regarding the current critical passion for King’s work,” he writes.

Herron also shines a flashlight into the basement of King’s influences, noting that his novels are in many ways derivative. For example, Herron writes that ‘Salem’s Lot is “a grand catalog of every vampire situation and cliché,” and not just of classics like Dracula, but forgettable, grade-B vampire horror flicks like Blacula! He also demonstrates that The Stand draws heavily on J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic-quest story The Lord of the Rings, points out that Pet Sematary is an uninspiring re-hash of the Wendigo myth, popularized by Algernon Blackwood in his short story of the same name, and so on. My brief summation here doesn’t do Herron justice — he is obviously well-read and he paints a fairly convincing picture of King’s lapses of originality (or at least, his tendency to borrow whole scenes and themes from his horror predecessors).

Perhaps Herron’s boldest claim about King is that he doesn’t have the artistic vision as a writer to warrant his popularity. “The underlying philosophy in King’s works often does not seem supportive of his role as a master of horror,” Herron notes.

Here Herron and I part ways. I don’t necessarily disagree with the above statement, I just don’t read King for his underlying philosophy, nor do I harbor any illusions that I’m reading fine literature. Rather, I take joy in King for the simpler pleasures he offers, including the opportunity to be terrified, occasionally moved, but most of all, just entertained. Judged on these criteria, I find that King almost always delivers.

For example, Herron takes King to task for Cycle of the Werewolf, claiming that it’s clichéd and has nothing new to offer. Now, I’m not saying that Cycle of the Werewolf is a masterpiece, or even particularly original, but it is a good example of King’s hallmark strength as a writer, which is terrific storytelling. It’s a fun, gory, compelling tale that pulls you along, season by season, to its silver bullet through the brain conclusion. When I read King, I’m not necessarily struck by the originality of his ideas, but rather the breathless, page-turning way in which they’re told. For all his faults, King is a compulsively readable, terrific tale-spinner — the old King, especially. Herron seems to imply that all horror requires a deeper message — heavy Lovecraftian themes of the heartless indifference of the cold universe, for instance. Can’t horror also just entertain and scare?

Here’s my own simplistic summary of King’s career: His pre-1987 works are a must-read for fans of the horror genre. I think it’s almost impossible to go wrong with his early stuff, which include masterpieces like The Shining, The Stand, Pet Sematary, and three-fourths of Different Seasons (“The Breathing Method” is a dud of a finale in an otherwise brilliant book). Even his “lesser” works during this early period — Christine, Firestarter, Cujo — are the product of a natural storyteller, engaging and effortlessly fun to read if lacking in literary heft. I also think 95% of It is an absolutely brilliant novel.

King-post 1987, however, bears treading warily. For every excellent work like The Green Mile or Bag of Bones, there’s a Dreamcatcher or Dolores Claiborne. King has also suffered the last 20 years from “literary elephantitis” (his own term), books that could use an editor with a merciless scalpel.

But in total, viewing King’s corpus, I have no qualms with joining the chorus of critics and fans that rank him as one of the best horror authors of all-time.

Herron may not agree with that assessment, but he does conclude his essay with Part III, “The Good.” Here he tosses King some bouquets, offering praise for The Dead Zone (“I believe he wrote a great novel,” Herron says) and the dead lady in the bathtub scene of The Shining (“the highpoint of terror in his work to date”. I agree with Herron’s assessment of those works, though his opinion of Different Seasons differs wildly from my own (Herron seems to prefer The Breathing Method over Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, a head-scratcher).

But Herron and I are blood-brothers once again on his spot-on assessment of Apt Pupil:

But what King does in Apt Pupil is worth the added wordage. He goes beyond the mere idea of the gimmick to establish a mythic picture of the mental decay of the American boy, a boy interested in monsters who in due course of time becomes interested in murder, and the parasitic relationship of the Nazi and the monster fan. It is one of the few King stories in which the material he normally presents as sub-text becomes the text: we may become monsters too — here’s how.

While I may not agree with all of its tenets, Herron’s essay is a provocative, interesting piece of criticism, with enough honesty and red meat to make me wish that he’d stayed with King and published more on his career.

On the other hand, given my own views on King’s decline, Herron may very well have gotten out when the getting was good.