Thoughts on Stephen King?

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Listened to some of his talks. He speaks very rational but I think he suffers from the intellectual's vice. He doesn't like the idea of proving himself wrong and in some level (and to be fair, he kinda has a good noggin) he believes to be much smarter than most people. His twitter spergs are all evidence necesary. That's why he can be so repellent when his "nice author guy" mask comes off while he's online.
 
I think his ability to build a story is much better than his ability to satisfyingly end them.

Which is apparently such a popular opinion that he had to add a reference to it in IT: Part II.

Not saying I don't enjoy his writings, but nobody's perfect.
 
Someone in a Tree said:
I have a tendency to think that he’s great at setting things up, but I’m usually left underwhelmed by the reveal. I would have been far more satisfied with Bag of Bones and Under the Dome had he not revealed a lot of the details behind the mysteries. That being said, I really enjoyed some of his shorter, more intimate novels. Carrie and Misery are really great character studies. And though I ultimately think The Dark Tower series is undone by self-indulgence, Wizard and Glass so captivated me that I read the entire thing in 36 hours, foregoing sleep to finish it. That has never happened to me before and it hasn’t happened since.
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I feel like this about tommyknockers. The premise and set up is so good, stumbling over a piece of metal in the woods, only to dig closer and find it's just a tiny exposed part of a massive alien space ship. The following few hundred pages completely fail to execute however and you're left with the sense it could have been so much better.
 
He's highly overrated. His stuff is okay if you can get past his weird fetish stuff he inserts into his works like child orgies or extended bondage and rape. Overall though he writes relatively entertaining stuff, with a few outliers like Misery that are particularly amazing. He writes so much and he has been at it so long that he has several really big, really entertaining works that everyone remembers over his mediocre or outright bad stuff.

Overall like 7/10 author maybe. Above average but imo overrated and not deserving of the special status he has.
 
I tend to like his characters. Right now I’m reading The Bazaar of Bad Dreams and it’s frankly surprising how aware he is of what kids today are interested in.

On the subject of It, I read it start to finish. It was weird, very long, and had a lot of great stuff that wasn’t in either movie adaptation (the mummy on the ice for one). Also the ending was frustrating as all hell.

His stuff is either over or underwritten, but in general I like him.
 
Someone in a Tree said:
Likewise, I really like how King builds up It as a really threatening, nigh omnipotent presence, and then it just ends up as a giant spider. I don’t pretend to think that I would know a better way to handle the material, but I can’t pretend like I wasn’t disappointed by it.
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IT isn't just a spider. IT is a giant female preg spider that eats the souls of children.
I think that IT is meant to be the same species as Ungoliant, and you remember what she did.
 
He can't write kids for shit. They all talk like mini adults.

...But I really like The Stand.
 
His best book is "On Writing", followed by the Bachman stuff he wrote before getting sober.

I have a soft spot for The Wastelands. That was some fantastic scifi.

W00K #17 said:
I feel like this about tommyknockers. The premise and set up is so good, stumbling over a piece of metal in the woods, only to dig closer and find it's just a tiny exposed part of a massive alien space ship. The following few hundred pages completely fail to execute however and you're left with the sense it could have been so much better.
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TommyKnockers is supposedly about his coke addiction, like how it made him do certain shit really well but at the cost of his humanity. It's funny that the book itself is a good idea shoddily executed, if that's not the definition of a cocaine project I don't know what is.
 
Alto said:
He can't write kids for shit. They all talk like mini adults.

...But I really like The Stand.
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I find his most annoying characters are the ones that are supposed to be funny. Richie Tozier and Eddie Dean are unbearable when they are trying to be funny.
 
I went through a huge Stephen King phase as a teen, culminating in 2009 reading IT, the entire Dark Tower series and a whole bunch of others all in the same year.

After that though I dropped off hard, I've still read most of his new releases in this decade, but haven't read anything older in years.

So I'm not as big of a fan as I used to be, especially with his political sperging in most recent years, but I still like him a lot, there's no denying he has genuine talent even if he's inconsistent.

In most recent years I've really enjoyed 11/22/63 and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
 
Alto said:
He can't write kids for shit. They all talk like mini adults.

...But I really like The Stand.
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I never understood the point of all the protagonists trekking to Las Vegas if it’s the Trashman who brings the bomb there, and it’s the literal hand of god that sets it off. Then again, I read the book in middle school so there may have been some deeper symbolism that I missed.
 
The dude is lost in his own head half the time and the other half of the time he expects you to understand his story based on the meta reality all his stories inhabit.

There is a reason the man views the Dark Tower as his magnum opus. It's his effort to try and explain the meta reality that all his stories live in. It fails incidentally. The only man who can understand Stephen King is Stephen King, but you can get why he can never stick the landing by reading dark tower. When Roland finally reaches the end the hands of fate grab him and drag him back to the beginning.

Why dont Kings novels end well? Because they cant. The hero's of the story are still trapped in the time loop and the demons are still loose in the world and the lines of creation unravel. he even alludes to this at the end, urging you to stop reading and think up your own happy ending for roland after he enters the tower. Everyone keeps reading though and are there when the first paragraph of the first book is repeated

Only with a subtle difference.
 
Stephen King books are like comfort food to me. My mom is a huge fan and she got me into them when I was pretty young. I even enjoy some of the weaker books to a certain extent just because the voice is very familiar to me and there are usually atleast a couple of interesting ideas and scares in there.

His short stories and novellas are definitely his strongest writing in my opinion. Those are the stories that really stick with me and the writing is just so much cleaner. Sometimes I think how much better some of his novels could have been if they'd been short stories instead. Desperation comes to mind.

I also thought On Writing was a really enjoyable and informative book. Sometimes when I'm reading something and I either really love it or really hate it I think back to some of the advice he had about writing and I can pinpoint what makes a work succeed or fail for me. It also made me really sensitive to adverbs though, and it always puts me off when I'm reading an author who overuses them.
 
Someone in a Tree said:
Likewise, I really like how King builds up It as a really threatening, nigh omnipotent presence, and then it just ends up as a giant spider. I don’t pretend to think that I would know a better way to handle the material, but I can’t pretend like I wasn’t disappointed by it.
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I remember watching the original mini series at a friend's house. It's really long, and halfway through it was getting late, so I had to drive my other buddy home.

The whole ride to his parent's house all we did was talk about how excited we were to see the end.

The next night we got to finish it, and we were all super pissed at that cheap looking spider muppet. It's like getting an eternal case of movie blueballs.
 
Honestly as a child I grew up reading his books. My first stephen king book and my most favorite was IT. Truth be told his stories are actually really good but most of his movies are not. Most of king's movies are awful except for the mini series IT, the mist and the shining.

The shinning was one of the most famous and best movies of all time but king had a fit and hated the movie because the movie was not of his image in the book with the same name. This is the same man who made a seen with underage kids having a fucking orgy to defeat a giant carnivorous lightbulb in the form of a clown. What I think of king is this, King is an excellent writer but there some problems king need to adress within most his stories. Especially the child orgy scene. God that fucked me up.

That's it.
 
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