Thoughts on Stephen King?

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Read Duma Key recently and thought I might share some of my takes on it.

The first third of the novel might be some of the best and most subtle writing King has ever produced in a novel. It's melancholy, deliberate and terse in a way that ewokes Hemingway. A guy (Edgar) has a terrible accident and has to deal with disability, pathological anger issues and an imploded marriage. His old life has derailed, so he moves on his own to a desolate peninsula in Florida and picks up painting to find some peace of mind. A vague horror element enters the story at this point; Edgar has some mildly weird experiences in his new home, but it's all ambiguous and wonderfully atmospheric.

In the middle third, Edgar achieves some local success with his art and makes a few colorful friends. This is where the machinery of the novel slowly starts to grind and get that unmistakable King-bloat feel.

The last third is fucking horrendous. There is a very definite point where this novel goes to shit, and if you have read it you'll know exactly what I'm talking about (it's a certain scene in the kitchen). It's like King said to himself "Wait. Holy shit, I'm supposed to be writing a Stephen King novel here. Time to pull out the usual shit".

And so

Three guys bro together and go on a heroic trip across the wilds of Duma Key to vanquish the extremely powerful (but somehow easily defeatable) force of evil that is now all out in the open and therefore not the least bit scary. Because King just loved to ruin that tremendous, subtle atmosphere of wrongness and creeping unease he managed to conjure earlier in the novel. It's a jolly old trek that involves wacky 2D-garden gnomes, a cringy and incredibly stupid ventriloquist act and a tiny sentient statue that'll bite you real bad.

3/5
 
Lungmos said:
Read Duma Key recently and thought I might share some of my takes on it.

The first third of the novel might be some of the best and most subtle writing King has ever produced in a novel. It's melancholy, deliberate and terse in a way that ewokes Hemingway. A guy (Edgar) has a terrible accident and has to deal with disability, pathological anger issues and an imploded marriage. His old life has derailed, so he moves on his own to a desolate peninsula in Florida and picks up painting to find some peace of mind. A vague horror element enters the story at this point; Edgar has some mildly weird experiences in his new home, but it's all ambiguous and wonderfully atmospheric.

In the middle third, Edgar achieves some local success with his art and makes a few colorful friends. This is where the machinery of the novel slowly starts to grind and get that unmistakable King-bloat feel.

The last third is fucking horrendous. There is a very definite point where this novel goes to shit, and if you have read it you'll know exactly what I'm talking about (it's a certain scene in the kitchen). It's like King said to himself "Wait. Holy shit, I'm supposed to be writing a Stephen King novel here. Time to pull out the usual shit".

And so

Three guys bro together and go on a heroic trip across the wilds of Duma Key to vanquish the extremely powerful (but somehow easily defeatable) force of evil that is now all out in the open and therefore not the least bit scary. Because King just loved to ruin that tremendous, subtle atmosphere of wrongness and creeping unease he managed to conjure earlier in the novel. It's a jolly old trek that involves wacky 2D-garden gnomes, a cringy and incredibly stupid ventriloquist act and a tiny sentient statue that'll bite you real bad.

3/5
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The scathing part of your analysis is similar to my experience reading the Bachman novel The Regulators.
 
Lungmos said:
Read Duma Key recently and thought I might share some of my takes on it.

The first third of the novel might be some of the best and most subtle writing King has ever produced in a novel. It's melancholy, deliberate and terse in a way that ewokes Hemingway. A guy (Edgar) has a terrible accident and has to deal with disability, pathological anger issues and an imploded marriage. His old life has derailed, so he moves on his own to a desolate peninsula in Florida and picks up painting to find some peace of mind. A vague horror element enters the story at this point; Edgar has some mildly weird experiences in his new home, but it's all ambiguous and wonderfully atmospheric.

In the middle third, Edgar achieves some local success with his art and makes a few colorful friends. This is where the machinery of the novel slowly starts to grind and get that unmistakable King-bloat feel.

The last third is fucking horrendous. There is a very definite point where this novel goes to shit, and if you have read it you'll know exactly what I'm talking about (it's a certain scene in the kitchen). It's like King said to himself "Wait. Holy shit, I'm supposed to be writing a Stephen King novel here. Time to pull out the usual shit".

And so

Three guys bro together and go on a heroic trip across the wilds of Duma Key to vanquish the extremely powerful (but somehow easily defeatable) force of evil that is now all out in the open and therefore not the least bit scary. Because King just loved to ruin that tremendous, subtle atmosphere of wrongness and creeping unease he managed to conjure earlier in the novel. It's a jolly old trek that involves wacky 2D-garden gnomes, a cringy and incredibly stupid ventriloquist act and a tiny sentient statue that'll bite you real bad.

3/5
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Let's be real here, even at his best, Stephen King can't write a good ending to save himself.

His best endings tend to be "not great, but decent enough" at the absolute best, even during his prime years.

On an unrelated note, I've recently begun re-reading the first Dark Tower novel and it hit me that the most recent Stephen King book I actually read was Cell, released almost two decades ago.

I've heard good things about the "Mr. Mercedes" trilogy of books but I'm honestly a bit hesitant to read any newer King works.
 
Sorry to bring back this thread from the dead but the guys of American Thinker posted a blog post about Stephen King newest book.

September 11, 2023

Book review: Stephen King’s latest is a grotesque political polemic​

By Wolf Howling

Stephen King just published his most recent horror novel, Holly. Disappointing does not begin to describe it. Do not purchase Stephen King’s Holly if your goal is to be entertained. This book is a poisonous political diatribe from beginning to end.
King, America’s premier storyteller of the past 50 years, has never hidden his left-wing political bias. But before the mess that is Holly, King kept himself in check, never making politics central to his story nor demonizing those who do not share his ideology by using fact patterns unmoored from any sort of reality.

With Holly, King has jumped the shark. His book is a post-modernist fever dream. It reads as if it was written using the combined efforts of Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, and Rachel Maddow during a three-day cocaine-fueled bender.
For instance, according to King, COVID nursing home deaths were all because an orderly refused to get an mRNA “vaccine” because it was developed using cells from aborted fetuses. The Democrat governors who committed murder on an industrial scale by forcing COVID patients into nursing homes go without the least mention.

Trump is painted throughout the book as evil and boorish, as are any who support him. Moreover, it is Trump supporters who almost uniformly refuse to get vaccinated. Holly, who we are told rejoiced at the outcome of the 2020 election and who cried on January 6, greets almost everyone she meets by telling them her mRNA vaccination and booster status.
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Everything was better in the 80’s, including Stephen King. I guess he belongs to a generation that isn’t willing to give up on certain equalitarian and globalist ideals regardless of just how awful they are after being put into practice. The TDS has pretty much ravaged his brain and I’ve no doubt it will impact on his story telling, which it seems it has with his new book.

He did write some good short stories. There was word processor of the gods that was adapted to TV and the raft.
 
So I was thinking about some things last night and I noticed something.

In Stephen King's universe, telepaths are common and these people are being enslaved to be used on a project somewhere. These enslaved people are known as Breakers. They use their telepathy to break these Beams that are holding up reality. What interests me here is the interaction between the mind, the object, and reality.

Charles Sanders Peirce is a philosopher known primarily for his work in semiotics (the theory of signs) and did have an interest in telepathy. Peirce's inquiries into telepathy were part of his broader exploration of various phenomena, including his studies in logic, signs, and metaphysics.

If we assume Charles Sanders Peirce's perspective on the theory of semiology and apply it to Stephen King's concept of the Breakers in "The Dark Tower" series, an intriguing interpretation appears.

In Peirce's semiotics, signs consist of a triadic relationship between the sign itself (the Sign), the object it represents (the Signified), and the interpreter (the signifier) which is the understanding agent interpreting meaning derived from the sign. If we view telepathy through this lens, the mental images, thoughts, or feelings transmitted telepathically are the "signs." The mind of the telepath (the Breaker, in this context) is the Signifier, the actual contained content of the telepathic message is the Signified, and the understanding or reaction of the recipient is the signifier Interpretant.

In "The Dark Tower," Breakers use their telepathic abilities to break the Beams that support the Dark Tower. Applying Peirce's model, the Breakers' telepathic efforts could be seen as a complex process of generating 'mental signs.' These signs are just mere thoughts or messages but are substantial enough to interact with the very fabric of reality (the Beams). This is truly a profound and metaphysical understanding of semiotics. The Breakers' minds (Signifiers) project these 'mental signs' onto the Beams (Signified), with the intent (Interpretant) of disrupting their structural integrity. It's not merely a display of raw psychic power but a sophisticated manipulation of the fundamental 'signs' that constitute reality itself.
 
Deeply dislike his work. His prose is an overinflated mess that massively pads out his books. His concepts on Cosmic Horror are sophomoric and boring. His naming conventions are on par with an edgy teenagers, his inability to write an ending is lampshaded when it should be frowned upon, he takes potshots at writers that he wholeheartedly apes like Lovecraft, while offering nothing of similar value.

He writes a lot, he doesn't write well and I think people confuse the two. A good portion of his concepts border retardation due to his inability to handle his opium abuse while writing back in the day and those books are just sort of ignored.
He's like a comedian that manages to land one of every ten jokes and everyone sucks his cock for it.
 
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Reading Salem's Lot now. I like it except:

Ben Mears and Susan Norton. Goddamn these two irritate me. I've bitched a blue streak in the other thread about King writing about writers. Same navel gazing Gary Stu horseshit here with the Mears character. It's like Mears is King's Gary Stu self insert and it's so awful, it's distracting from an otherwise gripping story.
Then you have this infantilized whore Susan Norton who (I shit you not) according to the way King writes this, INSTANTLY loves Ben Mears. Fucks him almost immediately, but lives at home with mom and dad.
As I kept reading, I actually side with Mrs. Norton, which I don't think King intended. But he's made both these characters so fucking insufferable that the mother is actually right--except for the fact that both Nortons have infantilized their daughter.

I even sympathize with Floyd Tibbets. I know NOTHING at fucking all about him, other than Susan Norton was dating him before Gary Stu rocked up. But King seems to insist I should not like this guy.

The schoolteacher Mr. Burke is a good character except for his inexplicable instant liking of Ben Mears. I think King should've made Mr. Burke the protagonist in this one.

Still trying to figure out... So Chappelwaite is... the Marsten House?

What's this fascination with fucking Regulators and conduits? He does it here and he did it in From a Buick 8. It's like his fascination with magical niggers and magical retards.
 
He needs to get back on coke, booze and Borkum Riff. (For the record, Swedish men like other Swedish men.)
 

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He is talented enough, though I’m not a fan. I liked Carrie, but the ending felt rushed. Stephen King’s best was Apt Pupil, a short story that appeared in a collection called Different Seasons. (Iirc, Stand By Me also was included in this anthology.) Apt Pupil was great, a high school kid who’d recently studied the holocaust, recognizes his neighbor as a wanted nazi war criminal. Blackmail ensues, & a weird shooting. This was pre-Columbine massacre, so school shooters, or in this case highway shooters, weren’t every day things. It was an interesting psychological horror story. When I say he’s talented enough, I mean it. He’s also an obnoxious idiot on social media.

I remember King used to be obsessed with the Harry Potter series, he was so obsessed that he asked JK Rowling for permission to write the series over from Draco Malfoy’s perspective, she said “no.” Afterwords, it was speculated that King went on to release his version anyway, on a fanfiction site, (the popular fanfic site at that time was /fanfiction.net, though it’s never been confirmed that Kings version was released, so who knows if it exists?) Fast forward a few years later. King has been making a spectacle of himself on social media, & piles on JK Rowling for not sucking troon dick.

He became another hypocrite artist who shoves his politics down everyone’s throats, like Neil Gaimen. Gross. I can separate the art from the artist, no problem. Sometimes the well gets really poisoned still, & Stephen King is a good example of that. He does decent enough work, is an annoying douche, and that’s that. It’s common enough for various artists and others to puke out their dumb opinions as if they were gospel, and I hope that trend stops soon. It won’t. Oh well.
 
I thought Roadwork was okay. It was different from what I expected. It was just like Falling Down in that I'd heard it played up as being this tale of some man's heroic last stand against injustice in his society and instead it's a very thoughtful tragedy about an unstable person being driven (by their own inability to process the world) to destroy themselves. The writing was decent. I think it sometimes was a little too playful for its subject matter, would undermine its own tone, but it was interesting and most of the time it worked quite well. I loved how it both bluntly and indirectly kept referencing the character's alcoholism/downward spiral by constantly referring to him making a drink. Just a sad story about someone broken inside. I don't think I appreciated it as much as I would have if I'd read it over several days instead of with big breaks in between, but I liked it.
 
DrNow said:
Everything was better in the 80’s, including Stephen King. I guess he belongs to a generation that isn’t willing to give up on certain equalitarian and globalist ideals regardless of just how awful they are after being put into practice. The TDS has pretty much ravaged his brain and I’ve no doubt it will impact on his story telling, which it seems it has with his new book.

He did write some good short stories. There was word processor of the gods that was adapted to TV and the raft.
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What kind of globalist ideals you refer to? DEI?
 
Stephen King is a fun read if you want light entertainment. My biggest beef with him as a writer is how he's constantly chucking contemporary references to TV shows and films into his stories. It's a solid ploy for drawing the reader into the moment and making the horror feel more "real," but it's also a cheap editorial tactic that heavily detracts from the potential longevity of any of his work, because in 100 years nobody is going to remember "Friends" or Ted Koppel or whoever the hell else King references in order to be as ephemeral as possible.

I suppose you could just remove all those references in future editions, but would the stories still hold up as well?
 
Apustajan apustaja said:
He needs to get back on coke, booze and Borkum Riff.
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He had to have an intervention towards the end of writing his best book (imo) - The Tommyknockers (1987). Most everything since has been garbage.

I feel like maybe that's what ended up breaking him - knowing he does his best work yakked out of his mind. Or maybe he did so much blow he wrecked his mind?
Either way, he's insufferable today.

ChampFantana said:
I'm referring specifically to The Mist and Shawshank of course.
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Don't forget The Green Mile.
 
Optimum Cockbag said:
He had to have an intervention towards the end of writing his best book (imo) - The Tommyknockers (1987). Most everything since has been garbage.

I feel like maybe that's what ended up breaking him - knowing he does his best work yakked out of his mind. Or maybe he did so much blow he wrecked his mind?
Either way, he's insufferable today.


Don't forget The Green Mile.
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I’ve always said his writing took a hit after he stopped the booze and nose candy. I’d say Needful Things was his last truly good book. He had a few decent ones after that, but the well was starting to run dry by the time he got hit by the truck and practically completely tapped out by the mid 2000s at latest.
 
Jason Wynn said:
I’ve always said his writing took a hit after he stopped the booze and nose candy. I’d say Needful Things was his last truly good book. He had a few decent ones after that, but the well was starting to run dry by the time he got hit by the truck and practically completely tapped out by the mid 2000s at latest.
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I'd read everything he wrote up until Dolores Claiborne (1992), which I wasn't able to finish. Needful Things was 1991, so that pretty much mirrors my experience too.

Looking at a chronological listing, that's also about the time he started "churning," which I remember he said he felt "guilty" about in an interview. I'd always thought he meant his whole career, but it looks like he spent a LOT more time with each book in the 70's and 80's.
 
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