Last week, I read Stephen King’s newest book, Full Dark, No Stars. Those of you who know much about me know that I’m a hopeless Stephen King fan. Stephen King (along with J. D. Salinger—I read The Catcher in the Rye in middle school and I still remember thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know authors were allowed to write the way people actually talk!”) is one of the authors who really got me into reading when I was young. I checked out The Bachman Books from the library when I was a kid—it was probably the first book I ever checked out from the adult section—and I’ve been an avid fan ever since.

This is in spite of the fact that, the older I got and the more I studied literature and writing (a B.A. in English followed by an MFA in creative writing, and several publications and a published book behind me now), the more I began to understand why so many literary types—you know, not the average reading public, but the people with advanced English degrees and subscriptions to literary journals and Poets and Writers—consider Stephen King sort of a hack. I don’t think he’s a hack, mind you . . . but I understand why other people do.

He has published a lot of crap. For every one really good Stephen King book or story, there’s at least one that you wonder how it could have possibly been deemed publishable by the editors. Full Dark, No Stars, then, was kind of a gamble. Overall, I ended up really enjoying the book, with the definite exception of the horrible story, “Fair Extension,” which is so unoriginal and boring I feel almost irritated that the publisher wasted my time by allowing it to be in the book. Without it, the book would have been much better, and they could also, then, have called it a collection of novellas, since every story except that one is of novella length.

The three novellas, however, were pretty good. The first one, “1922,” was by far my least favorite of the novellas, but it definitely felt worth reading. “Big Driver” was my second favorite; it had me engaged enough throughout the story that I was willing to overlook the phoned-in, incredibly contrived, and poorly paced ending. But the final novella in the book, “A Good Marriage,” I really, really enjoyed. More on that in a minute.

In the Afterword—King’s obligatory note to the “Constant Reader”—King discusses, briefly, the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, as he sees it (although he refers to genre fiction as “story-fiction,” an interesting shift in emphasis, I think). “I have no quarrel with literary fiction,” King says, “which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations.”

I don’t agree at all with King’s definition of literary fiction. In fact, I would argue that most genre fiction is about extraordinary people in extraordinary situations, while most literary fiction is about ordinary people in ordinary situations, although literary fiction has certainly been known to put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. What good literary fiction doesn’t do, in my opinion, is deal with unrealistic characters. King’s view of his own work, though—that he’s focusing on ordinary people, putting them into unusual situations, and then letting them react as real people would—does seem a fair assessment of what the better of his pieces are doing, although I believe that’s what separates Stephen King from other genre writers. Much of King’s work, I would argue, is actually literary fiction. Dark literary fiction, but literary fiction, nonetheless.

My favorite piece in Full Dark, No Stars is a good example of this. I would certainly not classify “A Good Marriage” as genre fiction, even though there are some very horror-like elements to it. But this story, at its core, is about a character, an ordinary woman who discovers a very dark secret about her husband, and is struggling with what to do about this new knowledge. The novella is not driven by events, but by the slow unfurling of her daily life following the discovery, as she battles with both her husband’s and her own inner demons. Seems pretty literary to me.

“A Good Marriage” actually reminded me of David Crouse’s literary fiction story, “Torture Me,” which is the final story in his award winning collection The Man Back There. Both stories deal with ordinary characters dealing with the same sort of “extraordinary situation”: a happily married man who is haunted by his own sadistic sexual desires, and who has been keeping those desires a secret from his wife. In “Torture Me,” the main character is the man himself, putting the readers uncomfortably close to understanding a person we would always have told ourselves we could never understand. In “A Good Marriage,” the main character is the wife, who discovers the secret and doesn’t really know, anymore, how to feel about the man she’s been married to and loved for twenty-seven years.

Now certainly, in “A Good Marriage,” the husband’s secret is far more grim and extreme than the main character’s secret in “Torture Me.” “Torture Me” could arguably fall into the category of ordinary people in ordinary situations; whereas “A Good Marriage” definitely does fall under the “ordinary people in extraordinary situations” umbrella, like King says. Still, I would probably group both in that same second category, and I would say that, while in “Torture Me,” we’re close to the husband and in “A Good Marriage,” we’re close to the wife, both stories are about character. Both stories focus not on events and extraordinary plot points, but on believable characters who are struggling in very believable ways with their believable lives.

Which is what makes both pieces literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned. My definition of literary fiction goes something like this: Literary fiction focuses on character. The characters have to feel real, and they have to react to their circumstances the way they would if these things actually happened; the plot, although it should be present and it should be compelling, is of secondary importance. In genre fiction, I believe, plot is more important than character, and when you make plot more important than character, the result is often that the characters are forced to follow along with the plot. The story ends up feeling contrived, and the characters’ actions feel phony.

Stephen King does write some genre fiction—those pieces that I think aren’t any good—but “A Good Marriage,” and many of his other stories and books, I would say, are character, not plot, based, and therefore should be classified as literary fiction (whether King likes it or not). And for the record, Full Dark, No Stars is worth a read, even if only for “A Good Marriage.”