It's hard to believe that Stephen King is still, even in his alleged retirement, managing to drive the publishing world into a frenzy with the aid of his seven-book "The Dark Tower" series. Let's face it: King is so last millenium. He's just not scary anymore--Hell, our president is scarier than he is. How do you sell horror stories when "The Stand" starts to look like a transcript of a Congressional subcommittee in comparison to the real world's horror/action movie plot?
You have to admire his work ethic; King has churned out nearly as much pulp as Issac Asimov did in his lifetime, and a lot of it sold very well. But he has become something of a domesticated pet in the last few years--there was that horrible accident in which he was run down by a drunk driver, and the long recovery, but I doubt his injuries have had anything to do with the decline of his stock as a writer. He's up against the evening news these days, and the evening news is winning.
The definitive moment for me in Stephen King's conversion into a vest-pocket member of the literary pet set was when he started doing a column for Entertainment Weekly. While his columns have been somewhat entertaining, they don't shed a whole lot of new light on anything.
But somehow, he retains his grip on the publishing world, and his seven-book opus is being pumped off the presses at a decent clip. It's like one of his early short stories--the printing presses have come alive, and they're bent on destroying mankind by drowning them in a sea of Stephen King novels.