Thoughts on Stephen King?

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He should have let that van kill him, his writing - already poor since he stopped drinking and doping - took a nose dive since then.

He's not a good writer even at his best. He copies characterization, dialog, speech patterns, mannerisms, and description from earlier stories until it becomes a running gag.

He excelled at telling a good yarn and especially short stories. He's at his best when he suggests hidden worlds beneath and parallel to our own, but as he gets older he can't leave well enough alone and fills in details and background better left to the readers imagination.

His politics are a parody of a boomer shitlib, and while political beliefs alone do not make a lolcow his unceasing need to insert himself into shit beyond his comprehension makes for a funny read, if a bit sad.

Read Salem's Lot, Dance Macabre, On Writing, and his short stories from before 1994 or thereabouts. The rest is trash.
 
one_time_user said:
it's not amongst my favorite of his and I don't think it's as disturbing as lore has made it to be.
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I suspect it was based more on the premise of various hostage situations that were taking place at the time; simply applied to a school setting due to the fact that King made his wage as a schoolteacher at the time.

I have three facts to back this up, but I bet I could find more:

1972: The Munich Hostage Crisis and subsequent massacre.
1974: Patty Hearst gets kidnapped and joined her kidnappers in committing various crimes. The news coverage from this repeatedly brought up the term Stockholm Syndrome exstensively as the bank robbery that coined the term happened just one year prior.
1975: The famous Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon is released, no doubt also influenced by the above three events I just mentioned. Which, if you think about it for ten seconds is almost literally the exact same plot except in a bank instead of a school.

Rage was released in 1977 as I mentioned earlier. Honestly its a novel about a hostage situation in an environment King was familar with more than it is about school shootings. Its surreal to think how common hostage situations used to be as compared to how common flat-out mass shootings are.
 
I don't know why but I'm on a King binge right now. I ended up buying the Dark Tower box set, but then found a lost of "books you should read before the dark tower" so I'm reading those too. I think a lot of it is I've read everything my favorite authors have put out and am just glad to be reading something new. Even if it is the literary equivalent of being in Super Size Me.
 
one_time_user said:
I tried uploading an epub copy of it to your profile but it didn't show up in preview so I abandoned ship. if you have a throw away email I will send it to you. it's not amongst my favorite of his and I don't think it's as disturbing as lore has made it to be.
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You can just upload files to KF.

Rage is actually pretty good but you have to read it while listening to Nirvana.

e: Stephen King was completely fucked up while he was writing this and it's more about his life rather than anything else

Sanity:

You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is Mrs. Underwood's dying declaration: So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.

I really believe that.

I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It's all logical, it's all sane. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyros. Logic and sanity. Like Coca-Cola, it's the real thing.

But as Warner Brothers, John D. MacDonald, and Long Island Dragway know so well, there's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane. The astronomers call that line between light and dark the terminator.

The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick-or-treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.

No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts it up to one-ten and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stickup. You look at it when you hear your dad talking about slitting your mom's nose.

It's a roulette wheel, but anybody who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principle of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say it's crazy. It's all so cool and sane.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tarpit big enough to hold it.
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I have no idea why my copy wouldn't upload. maybe because I am on my phone? but, i definitely tried. or, maybe it was because it was on their profile? glad you threw a copy out there tho!
 
I wrote about this in another thread but I tried to read The Long Walk and couldn't get into it. The concept was really interesting but the way it was discussed didn't do much for me. I heard nothing but good about this book in reviews so it seemed weird that I didn't enjoy it. The next King book I want to read is Christine but not sure how quickly I'll get to it.
 
Christine is much more traditional King. The Long Walk haunts me but I can definitely see not being able to get into it. I adore Christine though. PETUNIA!
 
Chan Fan said:
The next King book I want to read is Christine but not sure how quickly I'll get to it.
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Christine is...strange. I read not too long ago that King wrote it while high off his balls on cocaine and it makes a lot of sense because structurally it's kind of a mess.

The first part of the story is in first-person, but once the narrator goes to the hospital with a broken bone (arm I think?), it shifts to third person because King realized he couldn't have a proper story when the protagonist is stuck in the hospital but even then you still have scenes with him. Then it goes back to first person for the last part. It's just a weird way to structure the book.

Outside of that the book was fine from what I remember. It's been years since I read it but I remember being entertained.
 
King’s books are commercially viable because they are variegated, weird and not terribly complex. His modus operandi is to get a whacky idea and ravage it until it’s long legs spread as widely as a Hollywood’s darling. The guy knows his audience as well as his own pockets, and I would lie if I said all of his books are shit. 7/10 too much water.
 
The Stand is my favorite Stephen King novel and has been ever since I read it for the first time when I was 13, and given the circumstances of the world right now, it's eerily relevant these days.

Not just with the global pandemic of a novel flu-like illness that's causing the global economy to grind to a halt, but also the sheer level of preexisting government corruption and societal rot that allowed the pandemic to get as bad as it got and some of the absolutism and partisan strife sort of reminds me of the Boulder Free Zone's conflicts, both the war with Randall Flagg's stronghold in Las Vegas during the final act and the internal conflicts and bickering within it.

I mean, any parallels are coincidences, but I think it's time I give it a second read. Even if there wasn't a pandemic, it's a good post-apocalyptic book.

Any other Kiwis planning on reading Stephen King's books or short stories during this pandemic?
 
I read a couple of books by him early-mid teens, I think he's good for those who are younger.
It, Dreamcatcher, The Shining, and I read parts of Gerard's Way. If I did read anything else, it was totally forgettable.
I should've read The Stand when I had the time, my family collected the comic books along with the normal books and the art is really good.

Dreamcatcher was ridiculous, but I can't help but love the combo of an actually re.tarded character and ass blasting aliens. Equal parts horrifying, hilarious, and stupid.
 
ApatheticViewer said:
I've only read Misery. Idk it was alright. He's like the RL Stine for grownups right?
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The Stand is epic (and very apropos ATM) and Needful Things is a masterwork on the banality of evil. Those are 2 good ones to try out if you wanna read further King. As mentioned above, stay far away from anything less than 20 years old. And if there are aliens in it, it's fucking crap.
 
I first stumbled upon King's works as a 12 year old on a ski trip with a broken wrist. The library of the French Alps' small town I was stuck in only had a couple of his books (and not much else), so I read both tomes of IT.
And holy shit, it was terrifying. And that orgy scene... Nonetheless, I liked his brand of horror well enough to pick up other books throughout the following years.

Most of the books by King I read being in French from my middle school days, I'm not sure how the originals compare, nor do I have any desire to reread them to check. From what I remember though, I've had quite a great time reading From a Buick 8, Black House, The Mist, Dreamcatcher, Pet Sematary, the Shining, and Cell as a 12 - 14 year old.
When it comes to his less "supernatural horror" books, I didn't like The Running Man, Carrie or Misery as much as The Body, but please take this opinion with a grain of salt because those were my early teenage impressions. If I had read those books more recently, perhaps I would have a different take on them.

The only King novels I've read as an adult are his Dark Tower series (in English this time). The books are pretty good, even though the adventures of the ka-tet get dull (books 4 - 6). The ending is pretty clever, minus the Crimson King's demise, which was disappointing as fuck.
Overall it's not a bad fantasy series at all, though I do prefer his horror stand-alone books (and yes, I know they all tie into the greater "King-verse", but I chose to treat them as stand-alone, and ignore the references because it annoys me).

Anyways, as most people in this thread, I'll have to agree with the fact that while by no means "genius" or "best writer ever", the bulk of his work is solid and enjoyable literature, with the occasional miss here and there (which, given the amount of novels he's churned out throughout decades, isn't that surprising).
 
Rafal Gan Ganowicz said:
The Stand is epic (and very apropos ATM) and Needful Things is a masterwork on the banality of evil. Those are 2 good ones to try out if you wanna read further King. As mentioned above, stay far away from anything less than 20 years old. And if there are aliens in it, it's fucking crap.
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Yea I watched The Stand movie a while back. Idk

Started out amazing then right when it's at the climax it had the most bullshit cop out ending of all time. The ending seriously made me not want to read another King book. If I read 1000 pages just to get to that.. idk I couldn't live with myself
 
My problem with King is that, well, his stories often start good then take a turn towards the tarded. Take The Stand, a perfectly good post apocalyptic thriller that eventually devolves into an autistic story about old black woman Jesus and her chickens. The ending just felt like a massive letdown after the amazing buildup.

I loved Road Work, tho. Good example of how our government has no qualms about fucking us over. I actually prefer some of his non-horror stories.
 
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