From the beginning, King was dismissed as a ‘genre writer’. But really, he is polymorphous. In addition to horror, science fiction and fantasy novels, he has written historical fiction (his recent 11/22/63, in which a man travels back in time to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, won a Los Angeles Times book award and was a New York Times ‘top ten of the year’ pick), Westerns and literary short stories, which he describes as “the way I affirm, at least to myself, the fact that I haven't sold out”.

The curse of popularity

King has always been clear about the inspiration he has drawn from respected literary forebears. His short story The Man in the Black Suit, an homage to Hawthorne about a man who meets the devil on a walk through the woods, won an O Henry award after being published in The New Yorker. His ongoing connection with and affinity to Edgar Allen Poe was first made explicit with his 1975 version of The Tell Tale Heart, retitled Old Dude’s Ticker. HP Lovecraft inspired his 1987 science fiction novel The Tommyknockers, and King’s work also has similarities with the work of inventive literary authors: George Saunders, Karen Russell, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Chabon, to name a few who blur genre boundaries, dabble in fantasy and adopt the conventions of horror and fantasy without losing respect.

But does any of this really mean we should take King seriously? The question is sure to rise again in November with the publication of Revival, a ‘pact with the Devil’ novel featuring a New England-born rocker with addiction issues and yet another diabolical reverend. My answer is a conditional ‘yes’. He keeps millions of readers engaged at a crucial time in the world of books, as technology continues to transform reading in unpredictable ways. King has been one of the first to experiment with new technologies, coming up with online serial novels and the first downloadable e-book, Riding the Bullet.

At his best, King is a masterful storyteller. He is able to create worlds infused with a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. He writes of familiar family crises, fears of the unknown and the yearning to belong. At a time when we are barraged with horrifying events – beheadings, Ebola, serial killers, plane crashes, police shootings, mass murders, cyberbullying – his visceral stories provide a catharsis, sometimes even a sense of order. Some victims can be avenged in fiction, if not in life. King may simplify, but he does it without contempt for his characters or readers. He may write too much, but his best work endures. He may be, at times, sophomoric, but he also can be superbly Gothic.

Canon fodder?

I put the question of King’s literary merit to Yale University’s Harold Bloom, the legendary critic and author of The Western Canon. Bloom issued a stinging rebuke of King in 2003, when King was given the US National Book Foundation’s annual award for ‘distinguished contribution to American letters’. Bloom called the honour “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Is it possible Harold Bloom might have changed his mind over the last tumultuous decade? It seems not. “Stephen King is beneath the notice of any serious reader who has experienced Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Faulkner and all the other masters of the novel,” Bloom tells me.