"I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible"
About this Quote
Anne Rice’s praise lands like a small act of genre solidarity, but it’s also a corrective to a long-running critical habit: treating popular horror as cultural junk until proven otherwise. Calling The Shining “absolutely wonderful” isn’t just fan enthusiasm from one novelist to another. It’s a strategic validation of craft. Rice is defending the idea that dread, when done well, is literature - not a guilty pleasure.
The line “Stephen King reaches all kinds of people” does double duty. On the surface, it’s applause for his mass readership. Underneath, it’s an indictment of gatekeeping: if “all kinds of people” read you, the old literary establishment often assumes you must be simple, commercial, or disposable. Rice flips that bias into evidence of power. Accessibility becomes an artistic achievement, not a compromise.
Her sharpest word is “terrible,” aimed not at critics’ tastes but at their reflex. “Dismissed out of hand” captures how King’s early reception wasn’t an argument about sentences or structure; it was a status judgment. Rice, who spent her career watching “gothic” and “supernatural” fiction get patronized, is speaking from experience. In the broader context of late-20th-century publishing, King’s success forced a reckoning: horror wasn’t merely thriving at the margins; it was shaping mainstream imagination. Rice’s intent is to make sure the record reflects that the snub was never neutral - it was cultural prejudice dressed up as discernment.
The line “Stephen King reaches all kinds of people” does double duty. On the surface, it’s applause for his mass readership. Underneath, it’s an indictment of gatekeeping: if “all kinds of people” read you, the old literary establishment often assumes you must be simple, commercial, or disposable. Rice flips that bias into evidence of power. Accessibility becomes an artistic achievement, not a compromise.
Her sharpest word is “terrible,” aimed not at critics’ tastes but at their reflex. “Dismissed out of hand” captures how King’s early reception wasn’t an argument about sentences or structure; it was a status judgment. Rice, who spent her career watching “gothic” and “supernatural” fiction get patronized, is speaking from experience. In the broader context of late-20th-century publishing, King’s success forced a reckoning: horror wasn’t merely thriving at the margins; it was shaping mainstream imagination. Rice’s intent is to make sure the record reflects that the snub was never neutral - it was cultural prejudice dressed up as discernment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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