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I've read almost all of King's older books, but I never got around to most of his stuff from the last 10-15 years. Seems like Dreamcatcher and Duma Key are two of the books with the most mixed reviews in this thread, so I thought I'd give them both a shot. I'm halfway through Dreamcatcher right now. It's not terrible, but the pacing is so goddamn weird. Already half the main characters are dead, one's captured, the aliens were blown up and the last guy is trapped in his own brain and now there's this long-rear end chase sequence going on, so it feels like the climax of the story should be approaching, but I've got 170 pages left. It's like he shoved the plot of a normal book into the first half of this one, and I have a feeling it's all downhill from here. Is it worth finishing? (Also, my vote goes to Gerald's Game and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I hated The Regulators so much that I didn't finish it, so I can't really say how bad it is.)
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Mar 28, 2011 20:54
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titus androgynous posted:I've read almost all of King's older books, but I never got around to most of his stuff from the last 10-15 years. Seems like Dreamcatcher and Duma Key are two of the books with the most mixed reviews in this thread, so I thought I'd give them both a shot. What do you not like about Tom Gordon
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Mar 28, 2011 21:07
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Ridonkulous posted:What do you not like about Tom Gordon The only good thing about that book was how short it was. I love survival stories, always have, and I'm amazed that one of my favorite authors took one of my favorite subjects and made it so dull that I had to force myself to finish the book. I was bored to tears the first time around, and when I reread it as an adult it still felt like 200 pages of "here's what the woods in Maine look like" with some C-grade supernatural stuff thrown in here and there. In my opinion he was trying too hard to straddle the gap between horror and realism and the result is a bad novel no matter which way you interpret it. Also, nine-year-olds just don't think like that. It's been years, so I couldn't give you specific examples, but I remember the main character using all kinds of phrases and cultural references that seemed way out of place. A small detail, I guess, but it really irritated me. I do give it points for missing some King cliches though (like someone earlier said, there's not a retard in sight).
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Mar 29, 2011 00:26
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titus androgynous posted:The only good thing about that book was how short it was. I'm pretty sure the best thing about that book is that they made it into a pop-up book. That book sucked as did Gerald's Game. I feel I am somewhat of an authority on the matter as I own like 30 Stephen King books.
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Mar 29, 2011 12:12
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I enjoyed Tom Gordon. It's been about 10 years since I read it, but I remember it being light and fast and not overly boring. Of course, I also enjoyed the hell out of Duma Key. The Long Walk will always be my favorite Stephen King book. I couldn't finish Lisey's Story so that one will be my contribution to this thread.
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Mar 29, 2011 14:19
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juliuspringle posted:I feel I am somewhat of an authority on the matter as I own like 30 Stephen King books. Either an authority or a tremendous sucker  .
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Mar 29, 2011 15:21
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Ornamented Death posted:Either an authority or a tremendous sucker Most of them I got for free at this place I help out at.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:15
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I guess that makes me a big sucker too since I own every published work he's written. Contribution for worst: Dreamcatcher. Just a forgettable book in my opinion. It would have been cooler if he had tied it to It more, or made it more than just poo poo monster, but whatever.
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Mar 31, 2011 00:28
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rendicil posted:I guess that makes me a big sucker too since I own every published work he's written. Just out of curiosity, is that only the stuff from major publishers, or are you a super-hardcore (and rich) fan that owns all the limited edition stuff he's done? And yes, Dreamcatcher is the worst.
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Mar 31, 2011 04:51
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At least I can remember what happens in Dreamcatcher. I vote Dolores Claiborne for worst King novel. I know I read it but I don't remember anything about it.
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Apr 1, 2011 04:52
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rendicil posted:I guess that makes me a big sucker too since I own every published work he's written. Stephen King is an amazing author, who's extremely good at what he does. There are many kinds of writing; not every writer has to be Milan Kundera. Quoting someone smarter than me: Ezra Pound, in ABC of Reading posted:A great deal of critical rancour has been wasted through a failure to distinguish between two totally different kinds of writing.
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Apr 1, 2011 06:22
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Stephen King was an amazing author. Since he got hit by that van, there has been a very noticeable drop in the overall quality of his work. He still has good ideas, but he loses focus when he tries to make every novel a thousand-page monster, and the story suffers. His short fiction hasn't suffered as much, but it's impossible to deny that his first two collections are vastly superior to his latest two. I'm not saying King's recent work is bad, I'm just saying that for a variety of reasons, his work is simply different from what he was doing 15+ years ago, and a lot of people prefer the older stuff because it had a certain magic that is lacking from his more recent work.
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Apr 1, 2011 13:20
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Saxon X. Seaworthy posted:Stephen King is an amazing author, who's extremely good at what he does. There are many kinds of writing; not every writer has to be Milan Kundera. Quoting someone smarter than me: Sol Stein makes the same argument in Stein on Writing, except he separated works into literature and what he called "transient fiction." The thing is, a lot of stuff that was originally "transient" ended up becoming literature (Dickens comes quickly to mind). Should they be studied as such? I guess that seems off topic, but it really isn't, because I think that King will end up the same way. No one will ever read Dreamcatcher for an English course--at least Christ, I hope not--but some of his better stuff will be read for a long time.
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Apr 1, 2011 13:31
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Ornamented Death posted:Stephen King was an amazing author. Since he got hit by that van, there has been a very noticeable drop in the overall quality of his work. He still has good ideas, but he loses focus when he tries to make every novel a thousand-page monster, and the story suffers. His short fiction hasn't suffered as much, but it's impossible to deny that his first two collections are vastly superior to his latest two. Pretty sure the reason his stuff isn't as good as the early stuff is that he isn't tripping balls when he writes anymore.
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Apr 1, 2011 13:32
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3Romeo posted:I guess that seems off topic, but it really isn't, because I think that King will end up the same way. No one will ever read Dreamcatcher for an English course--at least Christ, I hope not--but some of his better stuff will be read for a long time. We had to read Breathing Method for one of my middle school english classes. I had already read some King books by that time so I was the  -est kid in class. I find Breathing Method boring as hell, but it is in the same book as Apt Pupil at least.
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Apr 1, 2011 13:37
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Ornamented Death posted:Stephen King was an amazing author. Since he got hit by that van, there has been a very noticeable drop in the overall quality of his work. He still has good ideas, but he loses focus when he tries to make every novel a thousand-page monster, and the story suffers. His short fiction hasn't suffered as much, but it's impossible to deny that his first two collections are vastly superior to his latest two. I thought Under The Dome was a great novel. It held my interest throughout its 1000+ pages.
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Apr 1, 2011 14:43
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Whargoul posted:I thought Under The Dome was a great novel. It held my interest throughout its 1000+ pages.
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Apr 1, 2011 16:05
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ZoDiAC_ posted:Man, I just finished Christine and I forgot what a loving downer this book ends on. She shows up in IT, gives a guy a lift. He doesn't explicitly say it's Christine but the description fits and there are bottles of the same beer the HS jerks drink (Texas Driver, I think) in Christine sitting in the car. If I remember correctly she's being controlled by Pennywise, sort of.
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Apr 2, 2011 05:40
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I seem to remember her being in The Stand also, at least the expanded version but don't remember the circumstances.
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Apr 2, 2011 06:22
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Der Untergang posted:At least I can remember what happens in Dreamcatcher. I was gonna get up in arms because even though I haven't read King in... 8 years or so I still vividly remember many details from that book. And then I looked it up on Wiki and found out the book I was thinking of is Rose Madder. I remember absolutely nothing about Dolores Claiborne.
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Apr 2, 2011 16:05
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Tikifire posted:She shows up in IT, gives a guy a lift. He doesn't explicitly say it's Christine but the description fits and there are bottles of the same beer the HS jerks drink (Texas Driver, I think) in Christine sitting in the car. If I remember correctly she's being controlled by Pennywise, sort of.  Texas Driver is not beer, it's a fortified wine!
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Apr 2, 2011 21:35
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Der Untergang posted:At least I can remember what happens in Dreamcatcher. I tried reading that when I was 13. It was immediately after Carrie and before I really knew much about Stephen King. I didn't make it more than fifty pages or so, but I distinctly remember reading aloud a passage to my friends. I think it had something to do with feces covering the walls in a room. Or maybe that was another terrible novel...
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Apr 3, 2011 06:32
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The Langoliers and The Stand are currently streamable on Netflix. I'm not sure what else though. Eyes of a Dragon or whatever is pretty lovely.
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Apr 3, 2011 13:22
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I finished From a Buick 8 last night. I thought it was pretty good, and was going to say it hearkened back to pre-accident King, but then I read the author's note at the end and it turns out it was the last story he wrote before the accident and most of the work he did after was focused on getting the details about how state troopers operate correct. I was very pleased that the nature of the car was left largely unexplained outside of a few guesses (educated or otherwise) made by the characters - I think King's best horror is that in which nothing is really explained and interpretation is left up to the reader's imagination.
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Apr 5, 2011 14:22
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I'm going to have to say while I have liked a LOT of Stephen King's stuff, I was so psyched about him making progress on the Dark tower series, but as the series wore on. it was like  What the HELL IS THIS?!?!?! I'm sorry but the whole thing with the spidery offspring of Roland, the uber progeny of demons and the last gunslinger, being A: a total puss and B: the biggest non-climax ever. I did however, find the ending appropriate but after Wizard and Glass the series seemed to do a complete shift into WTF land. Apparently a new Dark Tower novel is coming out in 2012, supposedly happening in between books 4 and 5. I'm still not sure if I would read it, as pretty much everything I have read by King recently smacks of bad hollywood movies.
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Apr 5, 2011 15:27
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Ornamented Death posted:I was very pleased that the nature of the car was left largely unexplained outside of a few guesses (educated or otherwise) made by the characters - I think King's best horror is that in which nothing is really explained and interpretation is left up to the reader's imagination. He admitted as much in the author's note for 'The Moving Finger' at the end of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Or at least he admitted that trying to explain stuff (using 'Firestarter' as an example) just turned out wonky.
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Apr 6, 2011 04:14
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juliuspringle posted:The Langoliers and The Stand are currently streamable on Netflix. I'm not sure what else though. Eyes of a Dragon or whatever is pretty lovely. Most of King's stories really don't translate well to the screen. (Got to say I haven't seen those in particular though). As to people wondering to what was due the decline in his work, personally I'm inclined to think (that besides stopping drugs), it's due to his success and the money he made from his works, which made his life better to the point where his brain stopped needing to lose itself in fantasy to escape all the poo poo around him. The van accident was the only 'bad thing' which happened to him in a long while, so no wonder that for a time it, and fantasies about it, came through in his writing. Saxon X. Seaworthy fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Apr 8, 2011 |
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Apr 8, 2011 06:34
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Saxon X. Seaworthy posted:Most of King's stories really don't translate well to the screen. (Got to say I haven't seen those in particular though). The Langoliers is one of those films you just have to watch for the sheer crapness of it. Anyone trying to describe it in writing would just fail spectacularly. Case in point: 
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Apr 8, 2011 11:13
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Saxon X. Seaworthy posted:As to people wondering to what was due the decline in his work, personally I'm inclined to think (that besides stopping drugs), it's due to his success and the money he made from his works, which made his life better to the point where his brain stopped needing to lose itself in fantasy to escape all the poo poo around him. That's probably a very large part of it. Personally, though, I think it was a combination of several things. 1)King himself became a brand name (you can always tell authors this has happened to: their name is larger than the title on the cover of the book). In the forward to one of his novels--I can't remember which one--he comments that people call him "America's schlock-meister." In his later books (like Dreamcatcher) he almost comically played to that expectation. In short, he became kind of a victim of his own success. 2) He's lost whatever sense of self-doubt he had as a young writer. Again, you can't really doubt yourself when you know you that, no matter what you write, people will scarf it up. (Note in the afterword to Wizard and Glass he comments that he doesn't even know if the book was any good, having lost perspective on it somewhere around page 450). 3) His accident, which of course made him really go balls-out. His writing, instead of staying a walk or a hike (where you can look at the scenery around you) became a sprint. 4) Also, the dude is getting old. He's sixty-three. Yeah, I know sixty is the new forty and all that to baby boomers, but still. I think he writes now because he has no reason not to. 5) His writing has changed (of course it has; it can't stay the same over forty years), and even if the plots to his novels can be entirely different, a lot of his themes are the same. A lot of his later books recycle them. On the other hand, King is admirable for his tenacity. He became rich enough with his first book that he'd never have to write again, but that didn't stop him. He ended up being banned from high school libraries, and neither did that. Or all the hideous reviews he's gotten over the years (or, conversely, the grudging respect of a lot of academics). Dude's a writer, and he'll do it until he dies.
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Apr 8, 2011 13:27
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Holy hell, I'd forgotten about Eyes of the Dragon until I started reading this thread. That book came out in '87. Considering all the hits King had made before this (and IT had just been released), Eyes of the Dragon must be in a records book somewhere as being the most purchased unread book.
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Apr 10, 2011 05:07
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nthalp posted:Apparently a new Dark Tower novel is coming out in 2012, supposedly happening in between books 4 and 5. I'm still not sure if I would read it, as pretty much everything I have read by King recently smacks of bad hollywood movies. This is a stupid idea. King absolutely ruined the Dark Tower series by finishing the whole thing in a manic, "I just had a brush with my own mortality" fugue state. Never was there more of a case of a good book editor needing to go to battle against an author's ego than with the last two books of the Dark Tower series. The author breaks the fourth wall, turns a major villain into a screeching madman who is erased to death by a magic pencil, etc. etc. Just let it go, Steve. Never return to that world again. Gan compels you.
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Apr 11, 2011 19:29
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Actually maybe since he's now had 8 years or so to get over his mad rush to finish the series and the fact that the last three books kind of blended together, I'm hoping that this new one will have a different tone and less ridiculous stuff than the last three.
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Apr 11, 2011 20:03
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Chairman Capone posted:Actually maybe since he's now had 8 years or so to get over his mad rush to finish the series and the fact that the last three books kind of blended together, I'm hoping that this new one will have a different tone and less ridiculous stuff than the last three. This is my hope as well. I imagine King is well aware of the tepid response to the last three DT books and this new one is something of a mea culpa to the fans.
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Apr 11, 2011 20:37
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Wikipedia page for The Gunslinger shows changes in the revised edition. This one sticks out "Wikipedia posted:In the early edition Roland's father is Roland the Elder, but is changed to Steven Proof King has stopped trying.
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Apr 11, 2011 20:55
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That's pretty weak proof when there are so many better examples.
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Apr 11, 2011 21:04
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Ornamented Death posted:That's pretty weak proof when there are so many better examples. But it is new to me.
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Apr 12, 2011 05:42
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Well bear in mind that the change was actually made in Wizard and Glass and the 2003 version of The Gunslinger was just King trying to make his story more coherent.
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Apr 12, 2011 13:54
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I'm finally streaking towards the end of Under the Dome. I actually had to stop for about a week when I started reading the Town Meeting and Andrea Granell and the old hippie's girlfriend both get shot while Junior is simultaneously closing in on Barbie and Rusty in the jail. It was just too much. The firestorm was pretty insane though. Reminded me a bit of the thunderstorm that destroyed Derry at the end of IT, except I still have another four hours of audiobook left
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Apr 15, 2011 16:05
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I've read most of King's books by now, and I'd have to say the one that I had most trouble going through was Hearts in Atlantis. The first story was great, but the rest were just too.. 'normal'.
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Apr 23, 2011 18:19
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Jacket art for 11-23-63's been released: FIRST LADY ALSO OK! cracks me up for some reason.
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Apr 23, 2011 19:24
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