Lunch at the Gotham Cafe: that's another weird one. It's not his greatest, but I've read it a few times because I was drawn to the utter WTF-ness. It's a pretty decent slice of life, and slice of mentally ill life. I disagree with King's own commentary about the protagonist being psycho as the wife though. He wanted a second crack at his marriage and he was rightly incensed at his wife's nastiness and lack of gratefulness.
That one I liked pretty good, it was chosen to be depicted on the hard cover of the book, which was gorgeous, I still vividly remember spotting it in my local Waldenbooks when it first came out and it really captured your interest.
I don't know who the artist was, but the same artist did the hard covers for Everything's Eventual (which I think was the first), From a Buick 8, Cell and finally Duma Key (which was an instance of the cover being better than the book), sadly that was it, but it's an interesting example of a cultural connection between 2002 and 2008.
These might not be his worse, but his stories from the anthology Night Visions 6 - Sneakers, Dedication, and The Reploids are the first time I realized as a kid that maybe Stephen King didn't hit a home run everytime he went out. What made these particular stories stand out in my mind was that Dan Simmons and George R.R. Martin had stories in the same anthology that were head and shoulders above King stories. They were so much better I actually felt embarrassed for Stephen King.
Other than that, I really hated Insomnia, Rose Madder, Under the Dome, and the last few Dark Tower books. He seems to have gotten some of his mojo back recently. I really enjoyed both 11/22/63 and Revival.
Sneakers is another real meh one, it's something about haunted shoes in a public toilet or a ghost in a toilet stall?
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon destroyed what little interest I had left in King after the Regulators/Desperation duology of suck. His short stories were some of my favorites before that though the many misses stood out for all the wrong reasons. Popsy was just wtf why.
Dedication was hilariously fucked up! Shitty people making good authors, fine, but racist cum gobbling ("it was a compulsion cumpulsion, she said") was one of the most insane things he ever wrote. Honestly, the entire character of Susannah in the Dark Tower was pure cringe too. Nightmares & Dreamscapes was more misses than hits. The bit about Cora flashing a kid in It Grows On You was pretty weird as well.
I did like Insomnia, Firestarter, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Needful Things, the first half of The Stand and even the opening of Cell was promising. The Wolves of the Calla was by far my favorite of the Dark Tower books because it made a good stand-alone story even if you weren't bogged down by the lore. And while the getting there was extremely rough, the actual ending of the Dark Tower was IMO King's best and the only way it really could have ended wrt Roland.
His more human, less supernatural shorts always stood out to me more, like Rage, The Last Rung on the Ladder, the Long Walk and the Ledge. Agree though that 1408 as both a short and a movie adaptation were good. The Mist was a good story and decent movie up til the stupid ending. Different Seasons was pretty solid though really, Apt Pupil is a messed up concept and the movie held no interest for me. I stopped reading him entirely after Everything's Eventual.
The Wolves of the Calla was my least favorite one, I just found it a tedious slog, things have progressed too far in the story by book 5 to so slow things down, but it did have some moments and the illustrations were cool at least.
I quite liked the flashbacks that form the bulk of Wizard and Glass. To me, the problem is the rest of it: it all reads like some muddled, washed up, has-been actor desperately ad-libing his lines while being fed a rough draft of that episode's script through an earpiece with poor reception a la Johnny Depp.
I found the flashback in Wizard and Glass tedious as well, I know people really love that one and yeah, it was good, but for me I just found it tedious to stop the story dead cold for a side story, I found the wraparound story more interesting, the characters finding themselves in the world of The Stand? (or at least one like it), whoa! Then King proceeds to do nothing with that concept.
I wouldn't trust Werner Heisenburg to run a zoo nor would I trust Kierkengaard to repair my roof.
Just because someone is brilliant in one thing does not mean they'll also be brilliant in another category. Sadly, politics is one of those subjects that intelligent people think they have keen insight by default due to being smart. Religion has a similar effect as well.
He's always been a basic bitch Democrat when it comes to politics, now he has to kowtow to Woke because that's just something you're expected to do if you don't want to be canceled, it takes no time at all to write a dumb Tweet while on the can, it's not like sitting down to write an actual novel or story.
Which is part of why it's dumb that we let Twitter be Big Brother, we really want everything to be ruled by people's thoughts when taking a shit?
Still, it's weird to be such a fan of someone only to continue being a fan, but realize they're also kind of retarded, oh well...
