Stephen King: POO/OPO

Wonder now what it's like for people just discovering King, or the folk introduced to him via the Dark Tower series. He's gotten WAY too self-referential for me. Wouldn't be as bad if he'd do an unspoken cameo, but when he "acts" in his movies? And writing himself into the Dark Tower series? Meh. Still, with all his great retunings of popular horror themes, he's a classic.

Though the Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite films of all time...

I liked the Stand best then, but Salems Lot, Carrie and the Shining are all better books, I think...

It isn't set in a log cabin near a lake in Maine and none of the key characters are authors.

Anyways, I think I'll have to go with the short story The Raft as my favorite, though The Mist definitely set its patterns in my young[er] brain as well.
Overall I think I prefer King's short stories over his novels, as I don't like his writing style well enough to be able to bear it when he starts going for lengthy descriptions (aka "tries to be literary", as some would put it)

This thread does remin me that I've somehow not read some of his most famous novels, namely Misery, It and The Stand.

I used to read a lot of James Herbert as well. Man, The Dark kept me awake for weeks.

i remember the Tommyknockers and Gerald's Game being a little dragged out, and Carrie and Firestarter being maybe a little slight.

Back in the day I was so addicted to Tommyknockers that I actually got a sore arse reading it. No book has ever given me a sore arse.

Re-read The Long Walk this week. It wins.

Back when I was a teenager I used to cane through his stuff. That said, Tommyknockers went on forever. I don't think I finished it in fact.

yeah, i did the same. i read his latest brick recently (which is like the ultimate stephen king novel in a lot of ways) and i was sad it took almost a whole week

also, i am tempted to take home surplus copies of the last three dark tower books from work. but i feel that would reveal itself as a bad idea very quickly.

Yeah. I'm not quite sure why it gripped me back then. I would have been pre-20 so maybe I just hadn't got out much.

xp Hearing immensely good things about Under the Dome. Tempted. Worth it?

Can't face Dark Tower. Read 1-3 (although not sure if I finished 3) and forgot what happened.

annoyingly, i can mainly remember what happened in iv, which may be his worst book

i was mad into 'under the dome' because the whole high-concept of it, whilst not intrinsically very interesting, is set up to do all the things that make him interesting (the maine stuff) at like 200 proof. smalltown maine as ant farm. apparently it's based on the place he used in 'the mist'; my girlfriend used to stay there as a kid, which i find kind of neat; also she read 'the mist' on a family holiday there and pretty much refused to leave the supermarket.

read until end of four and make up the rest. seriously.

xp!

just read the mist and it was great!

i was mad into 'under the dome' because the whole high-concept of it, whilst not intrinsically very interesting, is set up to do all the things that make him interesting (the maine stuff) at like 200 proof. smalltown maine as ant farm.

There's a comic (now collected as trade paperbacks, I'm sure) called 'Girls' by the Luna Brothers from a couple of years ago, which 'Under the Dome' (which I havenm't read) sounds a lot like: big unbreakable alien dome drops over small US town, but then all these identical nude girls start appearing, and there's a giant sperm in the middle of town, and the townfolk start fighting, things get out of control... Not bad, as I recall.

"Recently, as a fan of GOOD end-of-the-world books, I read Cell"

wait, james, you've read the stand though, right? you must have. just checking!

I have to admit I haven't read The Stand. All my other King experiences have deterred me from reading something that size that promises to have King's usual cop-out supernatural bullshit at the end.

There's a comic (now collected as trade paperbacks, I'm sure) called 'Girls' by the Luna Brothers from a couple of years ago, which 'Under the Dome' (which I havenm't read) sounds a lot like: big unbreakable alien dome drops over small US town, but then all these identical nude girls start appearing, and there's a giant sperm in the middle of town, and the townfolk start fighting, things get out of control... Not bad, as I recall.

some of these things happen in the stephen king novels and some do not

i think its generally agreed that king has a problem w endings - oh no, the boiler has blown up! - but accusing a horror fiction writer of indulging in 'supernatural bullshit' seems a bit point-missing....

altho' the way they've marketed/designed the paperback of 'Under the Dome' in the UK - a set of different photo-realistic illustrations of single characters - again seems to de-emphasise the supernatural bs aspect

i find myself wanting to rationalise/justify king's 'problem with endings', tbh; i think the abruptness is deliberate, and it often works

under the dome's ending works v well for me, as does cell's

the boiler blew up is massively, massively foreshadowed/set up/lampshade hung; if you didn't see that coming then god help you

(also when i see the movie and wossname, duvall? goes down there, i keep thinking it's to set that up, and then that never happens)

also: 'suck my book! suck my book!'

i mean, i encountered that line and thought 'ayup i could write a thesis on this dude'

well yeah, cld see the ending of the shining coming a mile off... but sometimes you want yr expectations confounded? i mean, if the abruptness IS deliberate, then we're already talking abt an author who plays w form + convention... so why affect narrative closure in such a plodding way? (kubrick often gets taken to task for that whole biz of bringing scatman crowthers back to rescue danny only to have him axed off the minute he steps foot in the overlook - but for me that works well precisely because it evades generic/narrative set up + payoff)

James, you have to read it! especially as an end of the world fan. its worth it for the great characters and set pieces. its kinda heartbreaking, that book. haven't read it in a zillion years, but it has stayed with me.

OK! I will take the plunge.

I didn't explain my supernatural bullshit complaint well, I guess. I don't mind supernatural stuff, I just want it to be internally consistent, so that the ending isn't just pulled out of nowhere.

Rage average. Running Man boring. Lack of ebooks (thanks to dickhead publishers/distributors who can't get their shit together) means I'm re-reading Tommyknockers to see if it's any good now that I'm not 16.

When I was 14, 'IT' was brilliant. Not so much when I was 25.

tommyknockers was one of the books that he doesn't remember writing. cuz of the drugs. and it shows.

I have read "Under the Dome". It is good, but not that good. It was good enough to make me think that he probably has written some good books (it is the only one of his I have read), but not so good I would recommend it that much.

tommyknockers was one of the books that he doesn't remember writing. cuz of the drugs. and it shows.

― scott seward, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 00:45 (18 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ugh does it ever. This time around I gave up after 50 pages of nonstop 'omg a thing in the backyard' and very little else.

1/4 into Under the Dome and already skimming chapters. My god this man can waffle.

Oh, come on, no mention of Pet Sematary? I re-read that as an adult and it is perfect in every way.

Misery

...is what I felt reading this book!

j/k. Pretty sure Misery is still the only novel I've ever read straight through without stopping. I was eleven or so, it was presumably summer, what the hell else did I have going on. Good read, though.

150 pages from the end of it, lots of thoughts many positive but i kept thinking this is just something wicked this way comes (top 10 favorite novel btw) blown up to 30 years and 1000 pages, and about 100 pages later i remembered wait this doesn't have the be-careful-what-you-wish-for mechanic of something wicked so never mind, and about 200 pages after that i remembered needful things exists, so this book is basically half of something wicked this way comes, blown up to 30 years, and 1000 pages, and into a metaphor for america

One Great Scene: blood all over the bathroom that your parents don't see

absolutely a+ title, by the way. idk where you expect to go as a horror writer after you write a 1000-page novel called it.

A 2000-page nove called That.

It's amazing how much of King's imagery stick with me. I read It 20+ years ago and I remember the scene you mention vividly.

die at the keyboard composing pg 3495 of climactic dialectical synthesis those

absolutely no idea how i fucked that up

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/72/8d/bf/728dbf6fea94902663edc8502560f803.jpg

It's amazing how much of King's imagery stick with me. I read It 20+ years ago and I remember the scene you mention vividly.

there's probably a few other places where this happens but it's the strongest confluence in the book of what-is-happening in a literal sense/in a psychological sense/in a historical-metaphorical sense, all three of these things are working rly vividly + in tandem for a whole scene, plus gross

the scene where the black kid's dad takes him to see the police station's disused vagrant-torturing chair, which the sheriff describes with glee, strapping the kid in as a demonstration, and on the way home the kid asks his dad "why did you take me there" and his dad says "you'll know when you're older" was really good too i thought. in general my favorite stuff has mostly involved the people who live in this town -- as opposed to the people who are kids/have been gone for 30 years -- the different relationships they have to it, the unspoken, even thoughtless, ways they either fear or serve it, the ways the circumstances of their lives are arranged by it. i wanted a little more of henry bowers' crazy dad, for instance, as a kind of useful idiot.

thought of the cultists in "a shadow over innsmouth" whose secret dedication to evil is explicit and deliberate and involves nighttime meetings -- king's bad townspeople are much improved because their dedication is unconscious, or barely conscious, and the mechanisms that reward them for their service/silence are as obscure/unplaceable as the mechanisms that keep grisly news from leaving the town. there really isn't much about that though. on the other hand that might be why i'm praising it.

(because in contrast there is just a huge amount of extremely detailed italicized stream-of-consciousness about how the one kid's mother is fearful and smothering)

i bought It yesterday but i'm too scared to read it

based on the posts itt

Stephen King's Itt

Don't worry, very few people who've read It have found themselves suddenly trapped within the story, unable to ever return to the world they once knew, knowing that any day could be their last as they imagine hearing the ragged breath of Pennywise approaching from somewhere behind. Chances are very good you'll be one of the lucky ones. At least one in three.

Not loving the first story in Bazaar of Bad Dreams, should I press on? To my surprise, I found his last book of short stories (Full Dark No Stars) one of the best things he's done, and had high hopes for this.

Don't worry, very few people who've read It have found themselves suddenly trapped within the story, unable to ever return to the world they once knew

kinda my experience as the last ~100 pages of this have been so boring and are taking a week and i just want to be done

everything takes so long

climax crosscuts between two identical psychic battles plus famous uh Incident, which i feel like has been like winkingly foreshadowed for hundreds of pages, which is weird because book i thought often squandered other moments when it could have foreshadowed something, just a little somewhere back in there for the kick, instead of, or even in addition to!, pulling the trick for the 839238492th time of using last-second exposition for tension (e.g., between someone opening a door and something jumping out), whereas the famous incident is talismanically telegraphed from what seems like the very beginning like a key part of the pattern

everything takes so long

i did like it's lair, feel like "float" paid off

ready to be done

king's bad townspeople are much improved because their dedication is unconscious, or barely conscious, and the mechanisms that reward them for their service/silence are as obscure/unplaceable as the mechanisms that keep grisly news from leaving the town. there really isn't much about that though.

happily there's been just enough more of this in the home stretch to make me feel like i wasn't making it up.