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I really hope he one day writes a (intentionally bad) story involving a lamp monster. Kind of like if someone watched The Brave Little Toaster while high on acid or something.
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Oct 5, 2010 19:39
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fishmech posted:Stationary Bike is a novella length excuse to his wife for why Stephen King wants to not exercise as much as she says he should and also have some donuts and poo poo. Honestly I'm surprised George R R Martin didn't write it. That's a lie, I'm never surprised that George R R Martin doesn't write things
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Oct 5, 2010 22:55
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Quad posted:I saw the audiobook of that a while back.... most "LAMP MONSTER" cover ever. I eagerly await the sequel, Stephen King's STUDENT DESK
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Oct 5, 2010 23:58
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OMG JC a Bomb! posted:I know, but none of the stories were very engaging. I had the same problem with "Everything's Eventual". Ah, that makes more sense. King will always be better at short fiction, but even there you can see a definite decline in quality through the various collections he's put out. I'd recommend going back and reading "N", though, because it's a rare return to form for King.
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Oct 6, 2010 01:25
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N was loving scary as hell, it was great.
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Oct 6, 2010 02:14
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A few pages ago people were talking about the increasing wordiness of SK's books, quoting his hatred of adverbs and speculating on whether he actually followed his own advice or not. I'm a numbers guy, so I used a POS tagger to identify adverbs in the first six Dark Tower books. I also identified just ly-adverbs (removing "only", "really", and "probably"). I computed the rate of words per adverb. Here's a graph that shows in these books at least, adverbs are not becoming more common (and that ly-adverbs are actually becoming less common). I've only read about six SK books, but I can't imagine too many being worse than Thinner.
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Oct 6, 2010 09:45
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dokmo posted:I've only read about six SK books, but I can't imagine too many being worse than Thinner. The impact was probably diluted by all the BS with the Mafia guy too.
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Oct 6, 2010 19:44
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dokmo posted:I used a POS tagger vvv Thanks! ** cracks knuckles and starts opening text files ** onionradish fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Oct 7, 2010 |
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Oct 7, 2010 00:35
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onionradish posted:Very cool. What tagger did you use? Ciarán Ó Duibhín's front end for Helmut Schmid's TreeTagger.
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Oct 7, 2010 00:50
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Is Duma Key any good? The hardcover is only $7 bucks at B&N and I know nothing about it.
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Oct 10, 2010 05:56
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Rudy Riot posted:Is Duma Key any good? The hardcover is only $7 bucks at B&N and I know nothing about it. Ehhh, its not exactly horrible but its the story of a rich guy trying to deal with life after an accident. So, you know, it depends on how much of that you can stomach.
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Oct 10, 2010 06:28
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It's in Florida though, not Maine! Actually I liked it and thought it was refreshing and actually fairly solid overall. I did hear the audiobook version while drawing though, so that might be slightly different.
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Oct 10, 2010 07:00
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I ended up buying it. I'm interested in seeing how he handles someplace other than Maine.
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Oct 10, 2010 20:13
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Rudy Riot posted:I ended up buying it. I'm interested in seeing how he handles someplace other than Maine. You should be happy. Most people in this thread gave it pretty high marks. (I read the whole thread recently  )
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Oct 10, 2010 20:14
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Rudy Riot posted:I ended up buying it. I'm interested in seeing how he handles someplace other than Maine. Ya know why he wrote a book about Florida? Because he's done the snowbird thing the past few (several) years with his wife, with a place in FL for his winter stop. My father drove limo in his retirement (because he's the sort of guy who can't sit at home) and once had the NEXT GUY sent out to get Steve-O from the airport to take him to his home on the coast. I told him to tell the guy that his son is a big fan if he ever gets him in the limo. It never happened in the 5 years that dad drove the limo and transitioned into nearly full time golf. 
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Oct 12, 2010 01:10
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NosmoKing posted:Ya know why he wrote a book about Florida? Because he's done the snowbird thing the past few (several) years with his wife, with a place in FL for his winter stop. This is also the same kind of reason why The Shining and a large chunk of The Stand are set in Colorado (temporary move out that way and all).
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Oct 12, 2010 05:55
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My least favourite novel of King's would have to be Tommyknockers, though Christine (the first one I read) is sort of bad when I look back on it. At the time, I thought it was awesome. Then again, I was 13. Anyone here remember Bentley Little? For the longest time, I thought he was Stephen King. There were a few common elements, one I remember about some sort of 'crimson king' at the end of 'The Store'. He always had that little quote from King at the top of his novels, "A Master of the Macabre". I get that if a guy like King says something positive about your stuff, you want to put it anywhere you can, it just seemed weird that almost every one of his novels was titled "The _____" and seemed to follow the same plot, and they ALL had that quote at the top of the cover. Also, while King set mostly everything in Maine, Little put all of his stuff in Arizona. There were a bunch of other things I was noticing, but there's no way I could remember them now. I figured it was King just screwing around. EDIT: Just for clarification, I know he's not King. Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Oct 13, 2010 |
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Oct 13, 2010 05:02
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I thought that the only problem King had with adverbs was using them to qualify how a person said a line of dialogue because it should be obvious from the words they say. For instance, saying "He said, shyly" should be unnecessary. He didn't say that a person just should never use adverbs when writing, including action, did he?
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Oct 17, 2010 22:19
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The Dark Tower series, by the end I was actually hoping that all of the protagonists would die in horrible ways. I had bought the whole series and actually stopped reading in the middle of the second to last book. It is the only series of books to date that I have not finished and I've read a lot of bad ones. An author writing themselves as a character in their books is a new low, I actually groaned out load when I read that part. He must have been killed and replaced by some horrible lamp monster doppleganger, because there is no way the same person who wrote "The Stand" wrote that poo poo.
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Oct 26, 2010 08:00
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Agile Sumo posted:The Dark Tower series, by the end I was actually hoping that all of the protagonists would die in horrible ways. I had bought the whole series and actually stopped reading in the middle of the second to last book. It is the only series of books to date that I have not finished and I've read a lot of bad ones. An author writing themselves as a character in their books is a new low, I actually groaned out load when I read that part. Actually, "The Stand" is the book that put me off King's long fiction until I read The Gunslinger on a dull night shift. And then "Song of Susannah" put me off it again.
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Oct 27, 2010 04:30
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Anybody picked up Full Dark, No Stars yet? My copy just showed up in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to start it.
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Nov 11, 2010 01:03
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Aatrek posted:Anybody picked up Full Dark, No Stars yet? My copy just showed up in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to start it. I may wait for the paperback on this one. Too many books to read at the moment.
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Nov 11, 2010 01:09
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Aatrek posted:Anybody picked up Full Dark, No Stars yet? My copy just showed up in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to start it. My copy came Monday but it went immediately to my pile of books to read. The premise sounds interesting, at least, and the stories are novella length, which means King doesn't have hundreds of pages with which to gently caress up a good idea, so I'm optimistic.
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Nov 11, 2010 01:38
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Aatrek posted:Anybody picked up Full Dark, No Stars yet? My copy just showed up in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to start it. got it yesterday, it's next on my list to read. im excited. the afterword at the end by king suggests that the stories are a bit more brutal than his usual stuff... can't wait to check it out
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Nov 12, 2010 01:06
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ornamented death posted:My copy came Monday but it went immediately to my pile of books to read. The premise sounds interesting, at least, and the stories are novella length, which means King doesn't have hundreds of pages with which to gently caress up a good idea, so I'm optimistic. Stephen King in any story posted:Everything was really bad and the good guy was going to be eaten/killed by something really evil. All of a sudden something really powerful and good (the coming of the WHITE!!!) shows up and everything was all better again
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Nov 12, 2010 01:20
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I impulse-bought the audiobook for "Full Dark, No Stars". I've only gotten a little ways into the second story, but I thought the first was ok. I did sort of want something "more" from it, but that would be deviating from the type of story it was. No impressions of the second so far, except the voice actor choice is just... bizarre. Jessica Hecht is talented and all, but for a story about rape/survival, you don't necessarily want EVERY SENTENCE to be plucky or cutesy-sardonic like she's reading a heartwarming children's story.  *edit* WHOA, this is unrealistic as hell. Someone in the book just used the "Bing" search engine instead of Google. HUSKY DILF posted:Everything was really bad and the good guy was going to be eaten/killed by something really evil. All of a sudden something really powerful and good (the coming of the WHITE!!!) shows up and everything was all better again That sounds more like Koontz. King has a shitload of awful stories where everything goes wrong and ends wrong. Locus fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Nov 12, 2010 |
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Nov 12, 2010 01:32
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Locus posted:That sounds more like Koontz. idk...Needful Things (one of my favorites, I'm surprised it doesn't get mentioned more) the Stand, of course, also that random imprisoned artist with magic drawings at the end of the dark tower series. just to name the first couple off the top of my head...
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Nov 12, 2010 01:35
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HUSKY DILF posted:idk...Needful Things (one of my favorites, I'm surprised it doesn't get mentioned more) the Stand, of course, also that random imprisoned artist with magic drawings at the end of the dark tower series. just to name the first couple off the top of my head... I really liked Needful Things. He write either huge ensemble books or shorter single (1-3) character books. Needful Things felt like a shorter ensemble book. Which I liked.
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Nov 12, 2010 01:38
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HUSKY DILF posted:idk...Needful Things (one of my favorites, I'm surprised it doesn't get mentioned more) the Stand, of course, also that random imprisoned artist with magic drawings at the end of the dark tower series. just to name the first couple off the top of my head... Sure, but I mean, Pet Semetary, The Raft, The Mist, The Shining, Carrie, The Dead Zone, Duma Key, Children of the Corn, Cujo, etc. King has his many formulas, but my point is that "Stephen King in any story" is not "good guys win via Deus Ex Machina". *edit* Those kind of endings DO usually piss me off though.
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Nov 12, 2010 01:39
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Sure its common for good to just barely win at the end of a King story. But usually it's one guy standing in the blood and flame blasted remains of a former town or neighborhood, and maybe one or two of his friends. It ain't sunshine and unicorn farts.
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Nov 12, 2010 01:48
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fishmech posted:Sure its common for good to just barely win at the end of a King story. This. King protagonists usually have to go through hell to earn their happy endings. See The Stand, Misery, IT, and probably others that don't immediately come to mind. And IT doesn't even really have a truly happy ending, if Dreamcatcher is to be believed. Pennywise Lives
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Nov 13, 2010 01:36
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Ninja_Orca posted:This. King protagonists usually have to go through hell to earn their happy endings. See The Stand, Misery, IT, and probably others that don't immediately come to mind. And IT doesn't even really have a truly happy ending, if Dreamcatcher is to be believed. Also The Green Mile: Man is "blessed" with incredible longevity but has to live with the fact that he killed a person of immeasurable goodness and potential to change the world, also outlives everyone he ever loved and is doomed to spend decades alone in a retirement home. And Hearts In Atlantis had almost no happy endings: Bobby was too much of a coward to stand up to the Low Men and wound up a delinquent, Peter Riley passed his classes and avoided the draft but grew old with the disappointment of never living up to all the noise about peace and love he had made in school, the veterans were all incurably broken or dead, and Brautigan is abducted by the Low Men and forced into servitude destroying all known creation with his psychic powers. A few of them had silver linings but in the end everybody was hosed, although considering it's King's melancholic look back at the 60s it's not that surprising. ...of SCIENCE! fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Nov 13, 2010 |
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Nov 13, 2010 02:01
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...of SCIENCE! posted:Also The Green Mile: Man is "blessed" with incredible longevity but has to live with the fact that he killed a person of immeasurable goodness and potential to change the world, also outlives everyone he ever loved and is doomed to spend decades alone in a retirement home. I forgot about The Green Mile. And I'd say that Carol had the worst of it in Hearts In Atlantis, considering that people died because she let good ol' Randall Flagg convince her to go ahead and bomb a building, so she had to let people think she died so she wouldn't get chased down. At least that's how I remember it. Anyways, to actually contribute to the point of the thread, my least favorite King book would have to be Duma Key. For me, it just seemed like he was trying too hard to tie things back into The Dark Tower series. Also, he needs to move past having an author or other creative person as a protagonist. That being said, my favorite works of his are The Gunslinger, IT, and The Stand.
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Nov 13, 2010 02:35
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Ninja_Orca posted:
I enjoyed it, except every so often King would come along with the most heavyhanded foreshadowing and pull me right out of a story that had, up until then, somehow pulled me in even though it was moving along fairly slowly. Though, oddly enough, I don't really remember much about the book aside from the last third or so. It's all blended together.
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Nov 13, 2010 03:29
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Ninja_Orca posted:Anyways, to actually contribute to the point of the thread, my least favorite King book would have to be Duma Key. For me, it just seemed like he was trying too hard to tie things back into The Dark Tower series. Also, he needs to move past having an author or other creative person as a protagonist. Wait, Duma Key? I didn't know there were any Dark Tower references in that one.  *edit* Yeah Wikipedia is saying the only references were like "lol 19" and some of his paintings having roses in them, so yeah, not really a DT-heavy book.
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Nov 13, 2010 06:04
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Locus posted:Wait, Duma Key? I didn't know there were any Dark Tower references in that one. There was also that red-robed figure, which I took as being like the Crimson King.
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Nov 13, 2010 06:38
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Ninja_Orca posted:There was also that red-robed figure, which I took as being like the Crimson King. Well, that was more or less Persephone, the Greek goddess of the underworld, who is generally represented as a robed figure. I dunno. Like I said, I didn't notice any Dark Tower references when I read it.
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Nov 13, 2010 06:52
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Locus posted:Well, that was more or less Persephone, the Greek goddess of the underworld, who is generally represented as a robed figure. Eh, and maybe I was seeing some where there weren't really any. Now I'm going to have to go re-read it, and see if they really were there or if my being jaded by the ending of the DT series made me see them. Oh well.
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Nov 13, 2010 06:59
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To be fair, King has stated that every one of his books exists within the Dark Tower universe or whatever, so I'm sure there are some references. It's just that a lot of his other books seem more in line with the mythology and themes of the DT series than Duma Key, which is why I was confused. *edit* Back on topic again, The worst Stephen King novel was the last Dark Tower book because of the reader-punishing and ridiculously condescending ending. Plus the standard "ultimate bad guy" anticlimaxes we got a preview of in The Stand. Locus fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Nov 13, 2010 |
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Nov 13, 2010 07:04
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Lisey's Story was the only SK book I couldn't get past the first few chapters, and I tried a few times.
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Nov 13, 2010 20:40
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