Prose off: Stephen King hack work in The Atlantic v. Fleming story

Friday 11/13/26

I think Stephen King defines the term "hack." He's also a thief who pilfered from television shows, radio programs, and films that most people don't know, and certainly don't know today, but that he ripped off all the same.

He's embarrassing when he tries to sound "hip" and "young." Once I was reviewing a book of his called Mr. Mercedes for the Boston Globe. It was startlingly bad. The premise was a guy gets in his Mercedes, shows up where crowds are gathered, then runs lots of people over.

"Oh, no, it's Mr. Mercedes!"

Imagine if you had that idea and you were telling it to a friend, and your friend goes, "Um, okay...so what's the name of this book?" and then you reply, "Mr. Mercedes!"

Your friend would think you were an idiot. They wouldn't say, "Wow, that is brilliant." Well, unless they were also an idiot.

It was worse than that, though, because King would make like the clueless boomer who thinks he's just had a big old swig of youth juice and can speak the lingo now. He wrote, for instance, of a woman "covered" in tramp stamps. Talk about "cringe" as the kids say.

There I was reading this, wondering if his editors were as clueless as King was, or they knew better but they also knew that you couldn't say the corpulent, wart-encrusted emperor didn't have any clothes on so they let that (and much else) go.

That's how the Boston Globe treated King. I was told that because of who he was, I couldn't write such a negative review of one of his books.

The Globe is all about this kind of bullshit. I'll share more examples later.

By the way: King wrote two sequels to Mr. Mercedes. So he took a bad idea, a bad book, and spun it into more books.

This morning, having done much work, I figured maybe I'd put up another prose off. You think, "Where to look, where to look..." You can go to any of these places and grab the first thing you see. It's always the same. Awful writing by someone who can't write. It's just a matter of spreading it around, or do you want to make the point that here's who gets a Guggenheim (and needn't even be the only person in that household to receive one that day, if multiple family members are well connected enough), a MacArthur genius grant, Pulitzer, here's someone touted by these liars as the best in the world, whatever the case may be.

I'm an equal opportunity exposer. Very catholic that way.

We've done prose offs in these pages with stories from The Atlantic, but figured I'd take a gander there today. (We've also talked about The Atlantic's Scott Stossel and Ann Hulbert.) Which is when I saw Stephen King's short story, "Dinah's Hat," from the June 2026 print edition of The Atlantic, and thought, yep, this will do.

It's your standard churned-out King hack work. He does the whole "old guy trying to sound young" thing early on. This is the start of the story:

On the day Dinah lost her hat, I was sitting on the top step of my just-right Scamp trailer doing a crossword. I was puzzling over nine-across, “Thai tidbits.” Seven letters. I had A-blank-blank-E-blank-G-S. I was debating whether or not to get my phone and look it up when Morris came out of his cute little Airstream with Dinah’s pushchair in his arms.

From the far end of Hallelujah Avenue, which ends in a boat landing and a lick of beach, I could hear Bob Seger’s “Heavy Music,” an earworm if ever an earworm there was. Adding insult to injury, it seemed to be on terminal repeat.

"...an earworm if ever an earworm there was." It's the "I've-learned-a-new-term-today-and-I-can't-wait-to-use-it" approach to writing.

Then he just dumps the info, which is how the entire story functions for its duration. Tell, tell, tell, tell, tell. There's no nuance. You, the reader, aren't enmeshed in the proceedings. Remember what we said? A great piece of writing makes for a partnership. Author and reader pair. They're in something together. Or I should say, story and characters and reader combine. You, the reader, are a part of this thing.

Which means you're not just being told stuff. You're an active participant. Part of the doing. More from the King story:

My name is Sherry Winfield. That’s Sherry with a y instead of an i at the end, which makes it old-school. I’m in my 70s now, and at plus-200, I’m sort of a truck. These days I’d look mighty silly in a mini, but there was a time, my friend, when I could knock your eyes out. I had moves.

That was then. Now I’m a widow living in the Happy Haven Trailer Park. I knit sweaters, play bridge, and attend the Mystery-Book Club every week, but—like you, reading this—I have a past. In my closet is a T-shirt that says a true thing: I MAY BE OLD BUT I SAW ALL THE GOOD BANDS. That would include Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, by the way, although “Heavy Music” was never one of my favorites. I was more of a “Nutbush City Limits” gal (yes, I know Tina Turner wrote it).

Then we have the, "Time to Google some shit and dump it in" part:

Dinah suffered from some kind of cancer, complicated by a stroke, liver damage, and erythropoietic protoporphyria. That rare malady results in an accumulation of the pigment found in red blood cells. It causes acute sensitivity to sunlight, which was why she was so pale and Morris took her out only on cloudy days. Those days aren’t all that common in Florida, which isn’t nicknamed the Sunshine State for nothing. It’s true that UV can mean a sunburn on cloudy days, but in bright sunshine, even with the shade over her stroller and her floppy RIOT GRRRL hat, Dinah would have cooked like a cheese sandwich in a microwave.

She could have lived a normal life with EPP if not for the cancer. That occasioned the steroids and probably caused the stroke. The liver damage might well have been caused by EPP, or maybe it came with the original equipment and was just waiting for the moment to jump out of its box and play its part in scrambling Dinah’s brains.

Often when I read things by these people, I find myself asking whether they're really trying. I know the answer. It doesn't matter if they try or not, because they aren't any good at this. What you can at least say about King is he writes a lot. Is that a good thing considering its quality? Well, that's a different matter. Most of the publishing system people, though, on the "literary" side, write very little. They're dabbling dilettantes. They come from money usually. Then it's just about playing in this incestuous sandbox of theirs and that world.

They write simply to technically have something that allows them to move about that incestuous subculture. The point of the book is for their fellows to have something to lie about on their behalf in terms of its quality. The point of a story is for Deborah Treisman to slap up into The New Yorker's fiction section because of the name at the top of the first page and what that name represents to such a person and people like her.

Every now and again the writer needs a new work so they can move about the sandbox. That's why they write, when it comes due for them to do so again. That writer can be a publishing system standby for always, if you will, just forever given stuff because that's simply the way it is, like Joyce Carol Oates, or just for that moment depending on what is "in" news cycle-wise.

A bad story like Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" with nothing to it got to be what it got to be with The New Yorker because of the Me Too Movement, which no one cares about now, because very few honestly cared about it then, on account that people only care about themselves and what they can use to make them look good; that is, whatever is morally nearest to hand to aid in their performative posturing.

Go read that story sometime. It's empty. There isn't anything there. You're going to think, "Wait...that's it? What am I missing?" No meat on the bone? There are barely any bones. More like dust from bones. Scrapings. It was pretend. Like everything in this system where nothing is what it is purported to be, touted as being. It wasn't some masterful story or some necessary work of fiction for its period. This is all contrivance.

Then no one calls that out--like, say, the millions of people who now call themselves writers on Reddit and in their Instagram bios, despite writing (and reading) nothing--because no one is serious about any of this. It's not that important to anybody. Virtually no one else even looks into it, never mind straight at the reality of it.

The people who say they want to have fiction in The New Yorker don't even care enough to have ever looked at the fiction they run. This isn't brilliant detective work. All you have to do is read any of this garbage. Glance at the garbage. Put one and one together to get two to see why that person is in those pages. It's all interpersonal.

Of course the people of the system aren't going to call any of this out because they need it to be this way (and they're all in bed together), or else they wouldn't have their bestsellers and their Guggenheims and their MacArthurs and their Pulitzers and their annual story or two (depending on whether it's an even-numbered year) in The New Yorker, and classists like Sigrid Rausing at Granta (Motorollah!) in their corner where talent has never set foot.

The King story in The Atlantic is monochrome, monotone hackery. At no point is there any variation. Any tonal variation, emotional variation. It's just one continuous bowel movement of declarative prose. Until whatever filled the stomach has been gotten out, and then it's "The End."

I can jump in anywhere and it's the same. See?

A blond kid, shirtless, tall, built like a brick outhouse, was the first to see the stroller and the oversize girl in it. He grabbed a beer from one of the coolers and kangaroo-leaped over to us, kicking up sand and shouting, “Hey, baby! Hey, baby!”

Dinah gave her charming (mostly toothless) grin and pointed past him. “Burts! See burts!”

A tubby boy ran up, catching the Nerf football over his shoulder and falling on his knees, spraying sand onto Dinah’s lap. He stared at her as if at an exhibit. “‘Burts’ is right! ‘Burts’ and Ernies! We’re goin’ to Sesame Street!”

The others clustered around, circling the stroller and throwing shade. The smell of beer and pot was strong.

“What’s wrong with her?” one of them asked. He had a cat tattoo on one bicep. “Is she sick, or what?”

“She is quite sick,” Morris said in a lecturely voice. “She has erythropoietic proto—”

“She’s a alien!” another shouted. This one had a mohawk. He bent over, hands on sandy knees. Studied her and said: “A retarded alien. Are you a retarded alien, honey? Need to phone home?”

I think we've seen enough. He never lets it breathe, either. It's just the dump.

This was a letter I wrote this morning:

I think I'm done with "Dead Thomas." Sitting here crying, just wrecked from reading it all the way through. Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's the best thing ever written. That isn't me saying it's better than these other things. You know what I mean. I promised my sister she'd be the first to read it after all these years of work. It's what I "got" her for her birthday. But after that I'll send it to you. [Name redacted]...I honestly can't believe that someone could write this. From the paragraph beginning "The first time my dad..." on page 13 until the final word of the story, there's almost too much life and beauty to bear. To think back on that early, early, early version I sent you way back...my God this is a special book. Anyway. I need to shake this off and return to "If Storm It Was" now. Must crank a piece on the Who, too. 

This was after writing the 2000 words on here about the 1987-88 Boston Bruins, incidentally. I am neither dabbler nor hack. Given what this morning has entailed as stated in the note, that's what we're going with here to complete this prose off.

We sat in the library together sometimes after school, me and Thomas, when Rachel was getting extra help for math so she wouldn’t have to totally deceive her parents about being a devoted student.  

Lately she’d been talking about whether she should lie down under a truck to get closer to Thomas or shoot herself or sit in a car and drink the exhaust. For some reason, Rachel thought exhaust was like a beverage we’d get at Starbucks when one of us had a gift card.

I said, “Fuck no, Rachel, you need to live, your life hasn’t even started yet,” which seemed to confuse her.

“Has yours?” she responded, honestly wanting to know, with me fighting the urge to say it didn’t matter. 

The prevailing wisdom was that once the day was over, you shouldn’t bother Thomas if you happened to still be on school grounds. That would be like knocking on someone’s door when you didn’t have plans. He had to stay put, after all. But I couldn’t help myself and I don’t think he minded.

As Thomas was studying for another of Mr. Margolis’s tests that he was certain to ace, I looked across the table at him and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“I don’t know your dad,” Thomas replied, answering me without needing to hear my words. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”

Thomas didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. At least not about that. He reached out and put his hand over mine. He was able to touch you, but you only felt it at first.  

I thanked him.

“I’d help if I could,” he said.

“I know, man,” I replied, because Thomas was the kind of kid you addressed like an adult you respected and for whom you had gratitude, or I did, because of how he got on with things, no matter how hard.

“What if I marry him under the stairway in the basement after school, when no one is around?” Rachel suggested on the bus the next morning following her latest night of romantic brainstorming, but this felt like it had been her most desperate and painful attempt yet.

“And we’re together in the only-at-school way,” she clarified, “me with my life that you say hasn’t started, and his which did and becomes completed when he leaves us. Would you officiate? Would you say some words? Would you guard the bathroom door and maybe I can give him a hand job in one of the stalls?

“But a sweet one,” she added, which was a very Rachel thing to say.

She hadn’t gotten a ride early to school from her mom that Friday morning because she wanted us to have one of our special talks that we only had with each other. Say her plans aloud, her dreams and desires. Because how can you not if you have them? They’re meant to be spoken more than they’re meant to come true.

So, yeah.

One last thing: Looking at the recent fiction in The Atlantic, I see that there's a story by Curtis Sittenfeld. If you don't know, she's a woman. Anyway, that letter I sent this morning was to someone at whose university Sittenfeld interviewed for a teaching position early in her career.

She had a novel called Prep. As you'd expect, she came from money. Most of these people went to prep school. Most of them went to schools for second grade that you wouldn't be able to afford to send your kids to. She has no imagination whatsoever, so of course this novel was simply a fictionalizing of her own experiences as a privileged person at prep school.

I want you do something. Go look at the cover of that book. Okay? See it? Keep that visual in mind.

She came across poorly during the interview. Vapid. My friend was sitting with one of the people on the interview panel after, this older fellow, who probably--I'd have to ask--isn't with us any longer. This guy was just shaking his head. My friend asked what was up, and the older man said words to the effect that she was utterly vacuous, but was highly connected in New York City publishing, and that someone like her would go far in that world.

Look into her a bit more, and you'll see.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again, because this record is some five million words long. At the conclusion of that interview--and this is why I wanted you to see the cover of that book--she produced a little bag of pink belt tchotchkes and handed them out to the people on the interview panel.

That's what you're dealing with here.