When Stephen King was announced as winner of the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2003, the literary establishment reacted with horror, whether it was the great critic Harold Bloom’s condemnation of the novelist as “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis”, or the calls that went up telling King to decline it.

Fifteen years on, the announcement that King will be honoured with the 2018 PEN America literary service award, in contrast, has prompted not a whit of ire. King’s status as a sort of literary national treasure, albeit one steeped in blood and gore, feels pretty assured these days. The PEN award, given to authors including Tom Stoppard, JK Rowling and Salman Rushdie in the past, is for “a critically acclaimed writer whose body of work helps us understand and interpret the human condition, engendering empathy and imagination in even the darkest hours”.

Citing King’s novels as worldwide bestsellers and “cultural hallmarks for generations”, his status as a challenged author, and his free-speech advocacy (including his regular callings out of Trump on Twitter), PEN president Andrew Solomon said that the author “has fearlessly used his bully pulpit as one of our country’s best-loved writers to speak out about the mounting threats to free expression and democracy that are endemic to our times ... He helps us all to confront our demons – whether a dancing clown or a tweeting president.”

Recent responses from King to the latter include: “Trump supporters: how much more of this vile poison do you have to swallow before you finally vomit up this racist excuse for a world leader?” and: “Why would people from Norway want to immigrate here? They have actual healthcare, and longer life expectancy.”

As King’s No 1 fay-unnnn, I’m delighted to see this latest prize for an author I love not so much for the scares (although I do love those) as for his depictions of small, ordinary lives made large by the events forced upon them.

And I’d love to know what Bloom thinks of it: the critic hadn’t changed his opinion of the horror novelist in 2014, when he told the BBC that “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”. But I like to think he might approve of this latest award, which seems geared more towards King’s advocacy than his writing. In a 2002 essay, after all, Bloom couldn’t stop himself attacking King’s writing – “Alexander Pope warned against breaking a butterfly on a wheel, so I will avoid King’s obvious inadequacies: cliche-writing, flat characters who are names upon the page, and in general a remarkable absence of invention” – but acknowledged him as “public-spirited, generous, humane, and an exemplary social citizen”.

Or as Solomon put it: King “has inspired us to stand up to sinister forces through his rich prose, his generous philanthropy, and his outspoken defence of free expression”.