Worst of Stephen King - Worst books or stories

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As for King.... erm, haven't thought about him recently except I wound up watching the classic Nostalgia Critic review of The Langoliers. The comments on the video claim that the creatures in the book are more disturbing and surreal than the.... CGI meatballs with teeth you see in in the movie.

Behind him the two ball-shapes sped up, closing the gap with effortless, happy speed. They crisscrossed twice, just a pair of daffy showoffs in a dead world, leaving spiky lines of blackness behind them. They rolled after Craig about seven inches apart, creating what looked like negative ski-tracks behind their weird, shimmering bodies. They caught him twenty feet from the luggage conveyor belt and chewed off his feet in a millisecond. At one moment his briskly scampering feet were there. At the next, Craig was three inches shorter; his feet, along with his expensive Bally loafers, had simply ceased to exist. There was no blood; the wounds were cauterized instantly in the langoliers' scorching passage.

Craig didn't know his feet had ceased to exist. He scampered on the stumps of his ankles, and as the first pain began to sizzle up his legs, the langoliers banked in a tight turn and came back, rolling up the pavement side by side. Their trails crossed twice this time, creating a crescent of cement bordered in black, like a depiction of the moon in a child's coloring book. Only this crescent began to sink, not into the earth - for there appeared to be no earth beneath the surface - but into nowhere at all.

This time the langoliers bounced upward in perfect tandem and clipped Craig off at the knees. He came down, still trying to run, and then fell sprawling, waving his stumps. His scampering days were over.

'No!' he screamed. 'No, Daddy! No! I'll be good! Please make them go away! I'll be good, I SWEAR I'LL BE GOOD FROM NOW ON IF YOU JUST MAKE THEM GO AW -'

Then they rushed at him again, gibbering yammering buzzing whining, and he saw the frozen machine blur of their gnashing teeth and felt the hot bellows of their frantic, blind vitality in the half-instant before they began to cut him apart in random chunks.

His last thought was: How can their little legs be fast? They have no le

e: langoliers is pretty bad but it has its good moments, and also it was heavily influenced by Alien and Aliens and whatever drugs he was taking at the time.

 

[Jalal-Ibn-Jalal]

The Green Mile, hands down. Felt too bloated and drawn out, despite being one of his shorter books. I think this is mainly due to serialization of the novel, though.

 

[LateNightMuffin]

Just today in Sleeping Beauties I read where he wrote that some "trees had been burned by fire." Really? Burned by fire, as opposed to being burned by ice or fog?

 

[The Taco Santo!]

I find that he uses a lot of awkward phrases and inept descriptions in his sentence structuring. Sometimes it's as jarring as his homosexual rape fetish, sometimes my eyes don't pick it up.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

Revival (to me) was his last good book. It's a pretty fun Cthulhu type story and wasn't that bloated for a King book. It was also pre-TDS.

Also, I liked The Jaunt. Good world building and a fun ending. King's short stories in the 80s were often quite good

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

King was also pretty 'good buddies' with Richard Laymon, a dead horror author who wrote 45 horror novels for adults (also some children's books, but I'm not familiar with those). Almost all of the ones I tried reading, which was about 6 or 7 of them, featured a blonde cheerleader and / or babysitter getting raped, and / or murdered. It was very clearly his sexual fetish, and he also included a self-insert where a bunch of his teen girl characters talk about having interviewed him for their school paper, and how's he actually not a 'creepazoid' at all. And then they go stay in an isolated rural house to get raped and murdered.

It's admittedly unsettling to me how authors can get away with putting their very depraved fetishes in a book and get away with it by waving it off as "it's fiction!" It takes a really sick mind to think of something like this. George RR Martin is another example; no one writes about this kind of content in such graphic detail unless it turns you on. Not even as a joke. People like this need help.

King is obviously an educated man ("Now I really hate him.") who went to university and shit. He knows how fucking stupid and backwards rurals and even small-town folk are. So they are obviously going to be the villains in the story. Sometimes it's by choice like with all the incest-rape stuff above and sometimes it's just that C'thulhu made them do it. Or Satan. Or aliens. Doesn't really matter. It's believable to him because these backward hicks would do that shit. Or it's evil government people with room-temperature IQs trying to play god.

People from rich northern blue states, especially urbanites, generally tend to HATE American southerners so much it's not funny. They think those "dumb inbred hicks" deserve what they get whenever something bad happens, or they think "typical!" when they do something remotely illegal or immoral.

 

[Illumithotty]

Most of my fondness for Stephen King is purely nostalgia by this point - those were the first 'adult' books I got to read back when everything had a schlocky cover when it was released in paperback. But King as the loudmouthed liberal is a more recent thing. Recent-ish. I don't know where you'd draw the line given the guy is in his seventies. I'm not his biographer but even if there's some exaggeration in his own autobiographical parts of 'On Writing,' he grew up as a dumb hick. Inbreeding status unknown, but details of his early life sound pretty typical for a small town, kicked around, uncertain finances background.

And from the characters I remember, the dumb hicks are represented fairly well. Stu Redman from 'The Stand' is the stereotypical good old boy, and not even a token since Ralph is pretty much close to the 'magical southerner' rather than magical retard is there to round out the cast; I can't remember the name because it's been years since I read that book, but he was fairly important. And beyond that, there're a lot of side characters across the whole selection of works - Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, Needful Things, the Green Mile, From A Buick 8 - that're just dumb hicks who either aren't that dumb or just fundamentally decent and resourceful when need be.

Of course there're also dumb hicks that're violent scumbags, but since he's not writing inspirational protestant tracts that's to be expected. If there's a class I can think of that is always, unerringly and consistently portrayed as evil and vicious, it'd be anyone making the kind of money that Stephen King does now. I can't remember a single corporate executive, politician, or businessman character that wasn't okay with the devil if not directly in league with them.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

And from the characters I remember, the dumb hicks are represented fairly well. Stu Redman from 'The Stand' is the stereotypical good old boy, and not even a token since Ralph is pretty much close to the 'magical southerner' rather than magical retard is there to round out the cast; I can't remember the name because it's been years since I read that book, but he was fairly important. And beyond that, there're a lot of side characters across the whole selection of works - Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, Needful Things, the Green Mile, From A Buick 8 - that're just dumb hicks who either aren't that dumb or just fundamentally decent and resourceful when need be.

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm thinking more of Henry Bowers and his neo-nazi father in It who are portrayed in such an over the top way to make the reader hate them that it just gets grating very quickly. The Bowers family in that book is such a comic exaggeration of a northern urbanite's generalizations of rural folk that you can say "There are stereotypes, and then there's... THIS."

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm thinking more of Henry Bowers and his neo-nazi father in It who are portrayed in such an over the top way to make the reader hate them that it just gets grating very quickly. The Bowers family in that book is such a comic exaggeration of a northern urbanite's generalizations of rural folk that you can say "There are stereotypes, and then there's... THIS."

White peril?

 

[Pedophobe]

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm thinking more of Henry Bowers and his neo-nazi father in It who are portrayed in such an over the top way to make the reader hate them that it just gets grating very quickly. The Bowers family in that book is such a comic exaggeration of a northern urbanite's generalizations of rural folk that you can say "There are stereotypes, and then there's... THIS."

The family in Cujo gives them a run for their money.

 

[Mola Ram]

The family in Cujo gives them a run for their money.

Both of them feature King's asshole hippie sensibilities when it comes to veterans, too. (Bowers is WW2; Joe Camber isn't a vet but his drinking buddy is, I think from Vietnam.) Violent, dishonest, abusive, not so much broken by combat as ripening into the scumbags they always were thanks to their experiences. It used to make me uncomfortable even as a politically unaware kid.

 

[Internet War Criminal]

Nearing my second go through the Dark Towers cycle (I went through all of the books relevant to the plot first) and as I’m getting towards the end, two thoughts come to mind:

1) The whole Roland universe, with all of its flaws, is still the best thing King did and I can hardly thing of any author in the last 50-70 years who built such a strong universe with so much potential as far as fantasy-horror goes. I’m not talking about the quality of the writing as much as the world-building. I’d go as far as saying that world-building wise, it’s better than ASOIF. At least, more interesting. I just don’t give a shit about Aragon’s tax policies.

2) The ending. I don‘t see any other way to end this except the way he ended it. It’s one of the rare times where King doesn’t fuck It up royally (or even slightly) and it’s about just as perfect thematically as it gets.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

The original Gunslinger was the best thing he ever wrote, especially before he later edited it to take out anachronistic details. like Roland casually reading a magazine in that town he massacred, before King decided paper was rare and valuable in that world.

The Running Man either ties it or is just slightly behind because of the goofy environmental stuff, which does have a certain charm to it.

 

[Godchu]

On the Langoliers:

The book was a decent read from what I remember. An real interesting premise and genuienly unique take on time travel, and somewhat decent buildup, that just falls flat in the execution.

Really, most of the character work was kinda weak. Barely memorable. Like at one point in the story the villain kills a guy and util I re-read it I genuienly could not remember who it was. Everyone is so one-note (if even that), and we barely spend much time with them as they interact with this world.

Worst character is easily the Stephen King stand-in, because he couldn't be assed to find some other way for the characters to figure out how this world works, so he just comes in an explains it away. Maybe it's also cause it's a novella?

The Langoliers themselves are purely ridiculous. Literally described as looking like fucking pac-man I think. Quite a shame because I liked how they were build up, with all the characters trapped at the airport, slowly being able hear them coming as the world around them fades into gray darkness.

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In contrast the movie (does it still count?) Was fucking terrible. Oh my god how the hell did they manage to fuck it up so bad?

It tries to be "faithful" to the original. Every scene shot as the book describes it. Every line of dialogue lifted from the book, and sometimes internal monolgue spoken outloud by the characters.

But what you end up with is a bland adaptation of the book, without any of the Stephen King wit that made the work enjoyable (if a bit silly).

Course, that's not getting into how horrible the acting is, but that one speaks for itself. Honestly never thought how out-of-place the main villain's actions were until I watched that movie.

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TL;DR: Interesting ideas, but bad story. Movie is far worse than the book, don't ever watch it.

Highly worthy of being rebooted or reimagined though, especially as nostalgia has become so popular as of late. If not a deconstruction, at least something that makes the Langoliers into Lovecraftian monsters rather than bad pac-man clones.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

Anyone gonna talk about his new book? The whole thing, Holly, is apparently woke vomit. Anyone who denies at this point that TDS and Democrat political tribalism has fried his mind is either ignorant or in deep denial or sympathizes with it.

 

[Mola Ram]

Anyone gonna talk about his new book? The whole thing, Holly, is apparently woke vomit. Anyone who denies at this point that TDS and Democrat political tribalism has fried his mind is either ignorant or in deep denial or sympathizes with it.

I've only read excerpts, but they're pretty hilarious. I don't know if there's any context that could salvage stuff like this:

 

[WhiskeyJack]

Weird how King is suddenly all concerned with racist depictions of "Indians" in headdresses, when back when he still had some talent he was writing stuff like "Old Chief Wood'nhead" for Creepshow 2. Seems to me that having a wooden Indian cigar advertisement scalp a white guy pretending to be an indian is a lot more racist than any an old campsite sign.

I miss the Stephen King from the 80's. He never should've stopped doing coke.

 

[TVB]

I miss the Stephen King from the 80's. He never should've stopped doing coke.

The 80s was the final decent decade for King. He lost his mind by the 90s and is getting worse since then.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

Weird how King is suddenly all concerned with racist depictions of "Indians" in headdresses, when back when he still had some talent he was writing stuff like "Old Chief Wood'nhead" for Creepshow 2. Seems to me that having a wooden Indian cigar advertisement scalp a white guy pretending to be an indian is a lot more racist than any an old campsite sign.

I miss the Stephen King from the 80's. He never should've stopped doing coke.

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Makes me wonder about all of the times he's dropped the gamer word in various books. I feel like he feels like the left wing overtones in his decades of past work overshadow any race jokes he's put into his books.

 

[innocent jogger]

It would have been good but secret window, secret garden sucked.

I've heard that from a lot of people. I've never read it but the movie version is one of my favorite King adaptions.