>>24853333 (OP)
I only sporadically come on to /lit/ for a few week span every couple months but for me it's the fact that he's dogshit at horror because he just badly apes lovecraft without any of the art or understanding how and why Lovecraft did what he did, and he marries it with the godawful "Americana Grunge" of putting things in some dusty or wet shithole town full of cardboard cutouts. Reading his horror works are like being rolled through dirt slowly for an entire dull hour, and the dirt smells faintly of animal feces. Soulless, vapid, and just has nothing of value because his prose is flat, his plots are meandering slop, and his characters aren't compelling.
And yet, and YET, it doesn't have to be this way. he can write well. He can conjure wonder or complex stories with actual meaning or purpose. He just only does it when he writes a fantasy story taking place in a world that isn't "the miserable asshole of some random american small town".
I see this same phenomena with McCarthy, actually. His work was similarly terrible and empty garbage, except when he wrote horror, for some reason, McCarthy had an amazing talent for horror and really anything to do with mysticism.
I've long thought that there are some authors who exist as cosmic fucking jokes, their talent is truly suited to writing one genre, but for some godfuckawful reason known only to jews and baboons, they insist on writing absolute fucking slop in another genre for almost their entire careers. It's just that King and McCarthy are the only ones I can 100% point to where this is the case because I know of where they're the only ones prolific enough who have done 180s into a single different genre once or twice that just blows the entire rest of their bibliography away.
