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Jealous Cow posted:Have any of you been watching Hulu's "The Booth at the End"? I want to talk to someone about the most recent episode.  Sporadic posted:Is that actually any good? I was completely turned off by the fact it looked like it took the genius diner scene from Mulholland Drive and turned it into a short series.
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Aug 16, 2012 22:30
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Locus posted:I wasn't being 100% serious about wanting them edited, and it was more a jab at King's old writing and all Sorry, poking fun at an author's gross opinions and habit of re-editing his books is POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD!  You make me sick, good sir.
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Aug 17, 2012 01:32
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Locus posted:I'm not talking about gay villains dude, I'm talking about parts of Stephen King books (The Talisman being one of the big ones, a line in Needfull Things was more ambiguous, but reminded me of it) which implies that gay people in general want to molest children. It's a symptom of a time period where pop culture didn't really understand that there was really a difference between say, gay people, pedophiles, transvestites, transsexuals, etc, and had lumped them all into a "sketchy deviant" category. I think your point is valid, I just don't think any edits are necessary. If he put out a book today with those statements in it I'd be appalled, but as you yourself say, it's a symptom of the time. Also, I know he's done a few edits to his books but not enough to be called a "habit". I doubt he'd ever go back and revisit a story just to avoid stepping on a few toes of people in the gay community. That's tantamount to censorship, and it's repulsive. Since those books you mention he has changed his tune and is better about fairly portraying gay characters. I don't see why not wanting to censor literature makes me the bad guy.
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Aug 17, 2012 06:53
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Mr.Drf posted:I don't see why not wanting to censor literature makes me the bad guy. Your weirdly reactionary reply on the last page to a joke post doesn't make you a bad guy, it makes you a guy goons give a hard time to. There's no need to flip the gently caress out and post "God your post makes me sick" unless someone is doing an in-depth description of that scene in IT. Locus wasn't talking about burning every book that puts gay people in a bad light, he was making a joke about books like The Stand and The Gunslinger that King has already changed on his own.
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Aug 17, 2012 07:11
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Chef Bromden posted:I just finished "Thinner" it was weird, and really only had one creepy bit in it. What really creeped me out was the main character talking about his daughter. He kept talking about his daughters legs, and how you could see just a little bit of underwear because she had outgrown her jean shorts or something. He brings it up multiple times, Christine was like that too, both the father and the son noticing the daughter is entering puberty, and tickling and kissing her. Really uncomfortable scenes. I wonder how his daughter felt if/when she read that.
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Aug 17, 2012 07:17
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Greggy posted:Your weirdly reactionary reply on the last page to a joke post doesn't make you a bad guy, it makes you a guy goons give a hard time to. There's no need to flip the gently caress out and post "God your post makes me sick" unless someone is doing an in-depth description of that scene in IT. Locus wasn't talking about burning every book that puts gay people in a bad light, he was making a joke about books like The Stand and The Gunslinger that King has already changed on his own. Fair enough. It just seems like the idea of political correctness and minority rights has become such a huge topic on SA. I wasn't aware anyone was still joking about it.
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Aug 17, 2012 08:09
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Pheeets posted:Christine was like that too, both the father and the son noticing the daughter is entering puberty, and tickling and kissing her. Really uncomfortable scenes. I wonder how his daughter felt if/when she read that. I feel like King unintentionally puts a lot of himself into his writing, and it isn't always pretty, or healthy.
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Aug 17, 2012 08:14
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He treats the gays guys at the opening of It very sympathetic. He makes a point of showing how the gayys are the best customers, because they are polite and low kwy, with lots if disposable income. He even pokes fun of all the crazy rumors the HillBillies have about the place. After Adrian gets, the cops dont care that he's gay. This was early 80s, so not all his portrails of gays back were so bad.
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Aug 17, 2012 22:10
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Your Gay Uncle posted:He treats the gays guys at the opening of It very sympathetic. He makes a point of showing how the gayys are the best customers, because they are polite and low kwy, with lots if disposable income. He even pokes fun of all the crazy rumors the HillBillies have about the place. After Adrian gets, the cops dont care that he's gay. This was early 80s, so not all his portrails of gays back were so bad. it's cool guys, my gay uncle said it was okay
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Aug 19, 2012 06:16
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Stephen King's whole schtick is salting his stories with liberal amounts of mundane human wrongness. If he stopped putting in these kinds of intensely personal and mundane evils or went back and edited them out of his books, he wouldn't be Stephen King anymore, he'd be Dean Koontz.
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Aug 20, 2012 02:24
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Vorgen posted:Stephen King's whole schtick is salting his stories with liberal amounts of mundane human wrongness. If he stopped putting in these kinds of intensely personal and mundane evils or went back and edited them out of his books, he wouldn't be Stephen King anymore, he'd be Dean Koontz. Yeah, if he were Dean Koontz then every villain would be a bisexual pedophile whose exploits are perhaps too intently lingered upon before being banished with a helping of superintelligent dogs, Christianist libertarianism and more recently, gross incomprehension of quantum theory.
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Aug 20, 2012 02:57
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H.P. Shivcraft posted:Yeah, if he were Dean Koontz then every villain would be a bisexual pedophile whose exploits are perhaps too intently lingered upon before being banished with a helping of superintelligent dogs, Christianist libertarianism and more recently, gross incomprehension of quantum theory. Whaaaaa? Since when has Koontz gone all Orson Scott Card?
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Aug 20, 2012 10:11
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Pheeets posted:Christine was like that too, both the father and the son noticing the daughter is entering puberty, and tickling and kissing her. Really uncomfortable scenes. I wonder how his daughter felt if/when she read that. I think this sort of thing is way more about injecting a general sense of creepy wrongness to the stories than it is about the author. All these little details push you into a state of creeped-outness, which affects the way the big horror scenes work on you.
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Aug 20, 2012 11:32
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So I haven't read IT, but I saw a scene in the movie recently where the dad walks into the bathroom with the young girl who had just had a nose explode blood all over her face. The father is stroking her face with blood all over it in a really creepy way and I couldn't understand why he reacted that way. Glancing over the crazy scenes throughout the movie and watching the reaction of the parents, can someone please explain the obvious 'wrongness' of all adult reactions to the children being attacked? It's almost like the actions of the adults are perceptions of a reaction rather than a reality. Or is there some other theme going on there?
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Aug 20, 2012 13:01
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Lascivious Sloth posted:So I haven't read IT, but I saw a scene in the movie recently where the dad walks into the bathroom with the young girl who had just had a nose explode blood all over her face. The father is stroking her face with blood all over it in a really creepy way and I couldn't understand why he reacted that way. Glancing over the crazy scenes throughout the movie and watching the reaction of the parents, can someone please explain the obvious 'wrongness' of all adult reactions to the children being attacked? It's almost like the actions of the adults are perceptions of a reaction rather than a reality. Or is there some other theme going on there? Most people can't see the things It does. Usually only the people being attacked can see It or any of It's manifestations, like the blood and balloons, and It usually just attacks the kids. Even people who do see It usually rationalise it away as something normal. But in that particular scene, only the kids can see the blood. Bev's dad can't see it at all. It's still entirely real, but he thinks she's just freaking out for no reason. And yeah, he's creepy and (emotionally, not physically) abusive and that's a theme in the book. Edit: apart from the above, people in Derry often don't notice/accept terrible things. Bad poo poo happens all the time, and it's mostly ignored. It's never explicitly said "that's It's influence doing that", but it's heavily implied. It is my favorite Stephen King book. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Aug 20, 2012 |
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Aug 20, 2012 15:01
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IT is the spiritual heart of Darry. The evil force that is IT permeates the entire town and its history, and an effect of this is sort of subconscious acceptance of the town's evil by the adult populace. Darry has something like three times the missing kid rate of similarly sized towns, and yet it never makes the news. When Bev is being chased by Henry Bowers, an old lady sees whats occurring and walks inside and closes her door rather then help. Paying IT in periodic blood offerings in exchange for the town's existence is something almost all of the adults in the town are semi-consciously guilty of.
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Aug 20, 2012 16:02
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Mr.48 posted:Whaaaaa? Since when has Koontz gone all Orson Scott Card? Koontz has always had a tendency to make all his villains perverts. Compare this to King,who often has villains, and then sexual deviants who are villains. There's never a sense that "this guy is gay" or "this guy is a pedophile" is a manifestation of evil in King's stories (at least as I remember them). Even if King plays in stereotypes of deviancy, he seems more interested in making deviance an incidental characteristic of evil. Consider Harold in The Stand, whose sexual frustration is the exploit Flagg and Nadine use to bring down the Free Zone, or the pedophile in "The Library Policeman," who is simply a pedophile but whose image is appropriated by a greater evil force for its own ends. Koontz, on the other hand. generally makes his villains amoral ubermenschen whose sexual deviance is a necessary outgrowth of their evil (think the old tycoon in Whispers or [I think?] the biker gang in Phantoms). Lately he's taken to being more explicit about this sort of thing, especially in eg, The Taking, which is very open about its culture wars stance. The quantum stuff in Koontz's books, likewise, entered his books as it entered the popular lexicon, and it occupies a weird position. I think the best example here is Brother Odd, which is again pretty explicitly religious. Here Koontz seems to selectively and inaccurately invoke quantum mechanics to 'scientifically' reenchant the world in a vaguely supernatural sense (there are more things in heaven and earth) and simultaneously to decry the folly of human beings thinking they can pry into the secrets of the cosmos without repercussion. If you've ever heard Alex Jones rant about the machine elves, that basically seems to be what Koontz is getting at.
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Aug 20, 2012 16:41
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Lascivious Sloth posted:So I haven't read IT, but I saw a scene in the movie recently where the dad walks into the bathroom with the young girl who had just had a nose explode blood all over her face. The father is stroking her face with blood all over it in a really creepy way and I couldn't understand why he reacted that way. Glancing over the crazy scenes throughout the movie and watching the reaction of the parents, can someone please explain the obvious 'wrongness' of all adult reactions to the children being attacked? It's almost like the actions of the adults are perceptions of a reaction rather than a reality. Or is there some other theme going on there? You should read the book because the movie really is quite awful (except for Tim Curry) and has aged even worse. This kept me from reading the book which was a huge mistake because now that I'm about 3/4 of the way through it I rank it up there with The Stand out of his epic novels.
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Aug 23, 2012 03:57
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Just started reading Tommyknockers, is there a point to talking about Andersons period or is it just King being weird as usual? It just annoys me when he picks something to focus on like that.
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Aug 23, 2012 15:36
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The ship in the earth causes massive physical changes, and that's one of the first. As a side effect of that section, you get a lot of characterization concerning Bobbi and info about the time period (ie, conflating her opinion with the Orson Welles commercial shows that she uses sarcasm to deal with potentially dangerous problems, and you know the book takes place in the late seventies or early eighties, when Welles was a spokesman for the Paul Masson Vineyards). I mean, yeah, King's talking about a hosed up menstrual cycle, but it's a conceit that sets the tone, sets the era, proves the ship is dangerous, and gets us in the head of Bobbi Anderson. Not a bad haul, and that's even before any symbolism you want to associate with it. Asbury fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Aug 24, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 15:52
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King really does a great job with stories where he chronicles a character's mental degeneration. Survivor Type of course, but The End of the Whole Mess is also pretty chilling. I need to find my copy of Just After Sunset and reread N. Also just finished Full Dark, No Stars. Pretty good novellas on the whole. Fair Extension kind of reminded me of the section of The Stand where he chronicles the misadventures and deaths of the random flu survivors - that black humor of things just flat out going wrong and people getting hosed over in ludicrous ways.
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Aug 24, 2012 04:50
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Has anyone read "Batman and Robin have an Altercation" yet? I read it today-- it's pretty different than most of King's stuff, and is written much more sparingly than he usually writes. It's interesting, but not great, personally.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:14
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So, was 'Wind Through the Keyhole' worth reading? I skipped over pretty much all of the flashback section of Wizard and Glass.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:17
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Aatrek posted:So, was 'Wind Through the Keyhole' worth reading? I skipped over pretty much all of the flashback section of Wizard and Glass. It was a stand-alone story that Roland told to Eddie, Jake and Detta while they were hunkered down in an abandoned building waiting for a storm to pass. It was really charming and engaging, more of a fairy-tale than anything else, with slender ties to the larger Dark Tower story. It's worth reading, even if you've never read any of the Dark Tower books.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:23
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Oh, I've read them all, and 95% of King's other books. I was just hoping it wasn't another 'Roland as a kid' book.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:25
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Aatrek posted:Oh, I've read them all, and 95% of King's other books. I was just hoping it wasn't another 'Roland as a kid' book. Actually, it's a story in a story in a story - Roland tells of going to catch some bad guys when he's younger and during that time he has to take care of a boy, so he tells him this story to keep him calm. I found both the story he told the kid and the framing story of him hunting the bad guys refreshingly different from the Wizard and Glass stuff, meaning not nearly as dark and very original. It's kind of a fairy tale wrapped in a western wrapped in the Dark Tower.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:31
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Johnny Fab posted:Has anyone read "Batman and Robin have an Altercation" yet? I read it today-- it's pretty different than most of King's stuff, and is written much more sparingly than he usually writes. It's interesting, but not great, personally. I haven't read it yet, but I picked up a year subscription to Harper's so I could. A little bummed to hear you say this, but I'll post what I think of it after I read it. Hopefully I'll get around to it today.
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Aug 27, 2012 06:33
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Aatrek posted:Oh, I've read them all, and 95% of King's other books. I was just hoping it wasn't another 'Roland as a kid' book. If what you don't like about Wizard and Glass is just the fact that Roland is younger and that Susannah and Jake and Eddie aren't there for most of it, then you probably won't like Wind in the Keyhole. If what you didn't like about Wizard and Glass was all the stalling and boring teenagers in love and wanting to yell at Roland to stop being dumb and just loving do something, then you'll probably like Wind in the Keyhole. It has a younger Roland in it in parts, but like others have said, it's mostly a Midworld fairy tale. If you're still not sure, just don't read it! You don't have to read every Stephen King book if you don't want to.
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Aug 27, 2012 16:22
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I say read it because it's only 330 pages; you can knock the whole thing out in one good rainy weekend. I'm pretty ambivalent about the DT parts of the story (they really don't add anything except bulk), but Tim's story was great stuff. Rather than a bunch of books with dubious Dark Tower tie-ins like Keyhole, I'd rather see one big "Tales of Mid World" book and give us a set of short novellas, something like Four Past Midnight. Man, there's so many micro-stories I want to read. Give me 200 pages about Rhea's childhood, or show me what the world was like on the day Shardik was released. Tell me what happened to the Waste Lands. Gimme a day in the life at North Central Positronics - was it like working at Hogwarts, or more like FoxConn? So many things he can write about, if he chooses to.
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Aug 27, 2012 22:10
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Ha: 
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Aug 27, 2012 22:17
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I like the lego guys. So I just read the new short story in Harper's, Baton and Robin have an altercation. I was a little worried cause Johnny Fab didn't seem to like it but I gotta say that I enjoyed it. A shorter story for sure, but I felt that the characters were pretty well done. Really feel sorry for both the dad and the son, and the ending was seriously surprising. Not really sure if that's a spoiler, but better safe than sorry I suppose. I would say that it was worth subscribing to the magazine for a year. $16 isn't all that much and the magazine itself seems interesting. *edit* I really hate the autocorrect on my cellphone.
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Aug 28, 2012 22:39
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jackpot posted:Rather than a bunch of books with dubious Dark Tower tie-ins like Keyhole, I'd rather see one big "Tales of Mid World" book and give us a set of short novellas, something like Four Past Midnight. Man, there's so many micro-stories I want to read. Give me 200 pages about Rhea's childhood, or show me what the world was like on the day Shardik was released. Tell me what happened to the Waste Lands. Gimme a day in the life at North Central Positronics - was it like working at Hogwarts, or more like FoxConn? So many things he can write about, if he chooses to. This. I would kill for a book like this to become a reality.
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Aug 29, 2012 07:42
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It's been a long time since I read The Long Walk so can someone refresh my memory as to whether the participants are volunteers or are forced into the walk?
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Sep 3, 2012 12:29
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An Cat Dubh posted:It's been a long time since I read The Long Walk so can someone refresh my memory as to whether the participants are volunteers or are forced into the walk? iostream.h fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Sep 3, 2012 |
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Sep 3, 2012 15:02
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What? No, it was purely voluntary. They went into a recruitment centre and signed up. I remember one fellow going in on a lark and putting in joke answers for everything yet he still got selected. They had up to 24 hours before the Walk to excuse themselves.
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Sep 3, 2012 15:34
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Volunteers, but the local government seems to have been modeled after the one in 1984. So there may have been some pressure on them.
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Sep 3, 2012 15:49
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An Cat Dubh posted:It's been a long time since I read The Long Walk so can someone refresh my memory as to whether the participants are volunteers or are forced into the walk? It's voluntary and treated almost as a reward/prize. You actually have to be chosen if I recall. They seem to depend on the idea that everyone involved will think they're the one who will survive.
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Sep 4, 2012 19:56
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Just started reading The Desperation. Can anyone tell me how it's supposed to sort of tie in with The Regulators? (spoiler free) All I know is, King sort of wrote them at the same time and they're basically sister novels (but not sequels/prequels)
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Sep 11, 2012 14:55
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Ineffiable posted:Just started reading The Desperation. The antagonist is the same in both books, and some of the same characters are used in both books except not really. The dad from Desperation is a kid in Regulators, for example, but then some characters like Seth, Tom and Cynthia are the same in both books. Other than that, they're totally unrelated. The Regulators is as weird as Hell and I mostly remember endless chapters of people hiding behind couches while what was basically Bucky O'Hare shot their houses to poo poo.
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Sep 11, 2012 15:37
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jfjnpxmy posted:The antagonist is the same in both books, and some of the same characters are used in both books except not really. The dad from Desperation is a kid in Regulators, for example, but then some characters like Seth, Tom and Cynthia are the same in both books. The most I heard when I was trying to research this without spoilers was they were supposed to be parallel universes of each other. I thought it'd be interesting in a 'what if so and so happened or something didn't happen' kind of way.
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Sep 11, 2012 18:25
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