NEW KING ARTICLE
SMH.COM tells us The Horrible Truth About Stephen King

Starting out with tales of telekinetic teens (Carrie), rabid St Bernards (Cujo) and towns overrun by vampires (Salem's Lot), King may have moved closer to mainstream respectability over time, but there's still a knee-jerk elitism at work excluding him from serious "literary" consideration. This is absurd: if he's good enough for Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg, he should be good enough for just about anyone. At least five King films (Kubrick's The Shining, Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, Carrie, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption) are nothing short of contemporary classics; many of the others are way above average in terms of genre fare.

What makes King a mainstay on our cinema screens isn't necessarily the same thing that keeps him on top of the book charts. His best novels don't always make the best movies; conversely, The Shining and Brian DePalma's Carrie both manage to improve on their source material.