Thoughts on Stephen King?

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Part of me is hoping to see an adaptation of Rose Madder. I've always liked that book, even though King himself thinks it's a mess, and it's not very well received by fans. It can get kind of heavy handed at times, and the Greek/Mid-World stuff can be a bit silly, but I still have a soft spot for it.
 
It can't be said enough that he deserves a slap in the back of the head for the ending of The Stand. Deus ex machina to the literal extreme. Blech.
 
Cosmos said:
I'm pretty sure that's Fair Extension! My personal favorite from Full Dark, No Stars is 1922, the one where a farmer murders his wife and is haunted by rats afterwards. A Good Marriage (the one where a woman realizes she is married to a serial killer) is really good, too.

Actually, every novella in the collection is very solid. I like all of them a lot.
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Fair Extension was so mean spirited. I really hated the unadulterated sadism of that one, though the rest were quite good.

King is at his best with short stories and novellas. Like most artists, he only really shines under restriction.
 
Chan Fan said:
Annie not only cut off his foot with an axe but cauterized the wound with a blowtorch, which was horrifying to me. It also really bothered me that she had albums of the people she killed in the hospitals where she worked because it spells Paul's doom that much more. It was proof she could kill and not be caught but also take her time and be really careful (not to mention all the medicine she stole to have the Novril she ends up giving Paul.)

I totally agree about the claustrophobic feel of the book. To me it was upsetting that he didn't know what day or month it was because she never changed the calendar (until she flies into a rage and knocks it off the wall, and even then he still doesn't know.) And the fact that one of the only power plays he seems to have is asking her to turn his typewriter around and she obeys him because she thinks it will help him write. Misery was my first King book and it has stayed with me in a few that few books have
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Oh man, I can't believe I forgot to bring those things up (especially the part with the blowtorch, how did I forget to mention that). I loved the part in the book where Paul finds Annie's serial killer scrapbook. The movie does show it, but since it's a movie we only have time to read the headlines of the articles pasted in the scrapbook. In the novel we actually get to read the articles written about Annie's murders and it really sinks in that yes, Annie Wilkes is a fucking serial killer and Paul is at her mercy. She's the "angel of death" model of serial killer, who murders the elderly people and babies under her care because they're "poor things" who need to be "released." One can only imagine what she plans to do to Paul after he's outlived his usefulness.

And yeah, the feeling of claustrophobia, isolation, and helplessness really elevates the horror of the book. Imo it's one of King's scariest books because of how realistic it is. This is something that could 100% happen in real life.
 
Exigent Circumcisions said:
It can't be said enough that he deserves a slap in the back of the head for the ending of The Stand. Deus ex machina to the literal extreme. Blech.
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I can't help but feel like he'd reached page 900 or whatever in that book, realized he'd written himself into a corner with the nuke and he'd need hundreds more pages to get a proper resolution, then just said "fuck it, GOD stopped it!" and was like, "eh, good enough". It's definitely a wet thud of a "climax"; even by the standards of an author not generally known for great endings, it's really bad.
 
I can't imagine said:
I can't help but feel like he'd reached page 900 or whatever in that book, realized he'd written himself into a corner with the nuke and he'd need hundreds more pages to get a proper resolution, then just said "fuck it, GOD stopped it!" and was like, "eh, good enough". It's definitely a wet thud of a "climax"; even by the standards of an author not generally known for great endings, it's really bad.
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He admitted he wrote himself into a corner at the Settlement. The bomb and everything following it is him trying to wrap up the book.

Also, Frannie annoyed me.
 
Exigent Circumcisions said:
It can't be said enough that he deserves a slap in the back of the head for the ending of The Stand. Deus ex machina to the literal extreme. Blech.
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The ending of The Stand? What about the retarded ending of Desperation?

The middle book of the Mercedes trilogy, the fuck was that?

Dr.Sleep was a huge snore.

Duma Key, now that read like old King. The alcoholic coked out of his mind King. So much so that I think he at least had it drafted and squirreled away somewhere before he published it.
 
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Chan Fan said:
Annie not only cut off his foot with an axe but cauterized the wound with a blowtorch, which was horrifying to me. It also really bothered me that she had albums of the people she killed in the hospitals where she worked because it spells Paul's doom that much more. It was proof she could kill and not be caught but also take her time and be really careful (not to mention all the medicine she stole to have the Novril she ends up giving Paul.)

I totally agree about the claustrophobic feel of the book. To me it was upsetting that he didn't know what day or month it was because she never changed the calendar (until she flies into a rage and knocks it off the wall, and even then he still doesn't know.) And the fact that one of the only power plays he seems to have is asking her to turn his typewriter around and she obeys him because she thinks it will help him write. Misery was my first King book and it has stayed with me in a few that few books have
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Another cool detail in the book left out of the movie is when Paul whacks her over the head with the typewriter, in the book it doesn't kill her right away, just knocked her out and she regained consciousness enough to go for a chainsaw to finish Paul off before finally dying.
 
JohnDoe said:
Fair Extension was so mean spirited. I really hated the unadulterated sadism of that one, though the rest were quite good.

King is at his best with short stories and novellas. Like most artists, he only really shines under restriction.
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I agree with you. I enjoy his short stories moreso than his larger works. My first exposure to him was The Body, the story that the movie Stand By Me was based on. How we wrote about nostalgia and childhood friendships hit me in the deep feels.

Slightly tangential, but he apparently edited his wife Tabitha's book Pearl. There were so many typos and grammatical errors that I'm not convinced that he read past the first two pages.
 
Heartmoth said:
I like when king writes things that are a little more grounded in reality.
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True! I enjoyed Mr. Mercedes quite a bit for that very reason. While I wouldn't exactly call it the peak of 21:st century crime fiction, it's an effective non-supernatural thriller with a deliciously hateable antagonist and a rather exciting finale. It was refreshing to see King trying his hand at something like this, and he did pretty ok I must say. Also, he's a septuagenarian writing a story involving all this newfangled computer and electronics stuff. That could have turned out real ugly, but King actually pulls it off competently. Hat's off to that, old-timer.

Mr. Mercedes is the first book in the "Hodges-trilogy". And of course King just couldn't fucking keep himself from introducing supernatural themes into his "realistic" crime fiction. He did manage to last until the third book, End of Watch, but then you got your telekinesis, you got your mind control,,,
Damn it. It started out good.
 
Also, I don't care if it's an old picture. This should always have been Stephen King's official author portrait.
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Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
He killed John Lennon, and Connor Bible hates him. Those are both pluses in my book.
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Yeah, isn't it crazy that he killed John Lennon?

I believe he did that as a favor to Richard Nixon too, you'd think King wouldn't like Nixon and would like John Lennon more, but he still shot him for some reason.

Your_Fairy_Wish_Prince said:
Duma Key, now that read like old King. The alcoholic coked out of his mind King. So much so that I think he at least had it drafted and squirreled away somewhere before he published it.
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Duma Key is good but also suffers from a lame climax.

The whole thing with the island is revealed to be caused by an evil doll, it's one of those things that didn't need an explanation at all.

The south Florida atmosphere was a great change of pace from his usual Maine settings though.

Dwight Schrute said:
You all remember that one time he directed a movie while hopped up on cocaine in the 80's?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ggWS4tTzs60
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I used to watch that movie all the time as a kid since it played on heavy rotation on TNT, practically every weekend they would play that movie back in the 1990s.

What's funny is I even rented it on VHS once, so I saw it uncut and it was only years later watching the movie as an adult did I noticed there's a scene with a bunch of pornographic magazines pages plastered on the wall in the background of one scene, which went totally over my head as a kid.

The cool thing about Maximum Overdrive is being directed by the man himself it captures the "blue collar" vibe his work often has better than pretty much any other adaption, it almost makes me wish he tried directing more.

Lungmos said:
Also, I don't care if it's an old picture. This should always have been Stephen King's official author portrait.
View attachment 1279336
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STUDY DAMMIT!
 
I think the ending of The Stand is both neat and re.tarded at the same time. On one hand, the "hand of god" or whatever the fuck it was made a LITTLE sense that mystical shit could happen since Flagg himself is mystical in nature. On the other hand, it comes out of nowhere and is so abrupt that you need a moment or two to process it.

Also, Frannie was irritating. Lots of the GEE SHUCKS TEE HEE of the settlement was irritating, especially since this is supposed to be endtimes. Characters like Lloyd or Harold were very interesting, though I think both of them deserved more extended fates than what we got with them.

That said, The Stand is still one of my faves of his. It had some solid world-building and easily King's best villain.
 
The Stand is a lot better as a miniseries than as a book, which isn't the case for a lot of King's stuff, especially whatever screenplays he writes himself. Like, I rented The Tommyknockers as a teen thinking it would be as good as the book (fight me) . Instead I got a weird, bad mess of a TV movie.

King can write, but he's got sort of a tin ear for dialog and it shows whenever something's adapted for TV or movies.
 
By the way, the perfect "theme music" for Stephen King's work is Boadicea by Enya, which was used for the ending of the movie Stephen King movie Sleepwalkers, which is otherwise not a great movie, but they picked a brilliant choice of song that captures the "vibe" of King's work brilliantly.
 
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