Following the recent Robert M. Price podcast, and its musings on the most Lovecraftian of Stephen King’s stories, I listened to the free 90-minute professional audio reading of “Jerusalem’s Lot”. It, and some King I tried in the past, doesn’t make me inclined to plough through the rest of King. It seems to confirm various sentiments I’ve heard to the effect that most of his work is turgid, ersatz, simple, without any real style, hugely over-padded and generally fit only for the more uncritical end of the post-1970s modern horror readership. But I was pleased to find it at least tries to be a neat remix of a number of Lovecraft stories, while sustaining a Lovecraftian feel, tone, and setting throughout. Five marks out of ten for trying, at least.

What it fails to port over from Lovecraft: his close attention to period architectural details; his skill with the dialect of remote rustic types; the deft interweaving of his own autobiographical detail; the use of his deep chorographic topophilia to bring veracity and psychological depth to descriptions of the New England landscape. King’s addition of small touches of ‘the cosmic’ also feel forced and are just tacked on as afterthoughts. If this is really the most cogently Lovecraftian story he can muster, then the rest must be mediocre at best.