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3Romeo posted:Naw she punched out last year. Which isn't bad, since she was ancient in Robin Hood and that was 25 years ago I figured. She really would be perfect especially for how she was described in the latter parts of Wizard & Glass. The patchy hair and everything, when I read the books she's what I had in mind.
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Sep 22, 2016 19:25
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It's cool that you guys are talking about 11/22/63 just now, since I finished it two weeks ago. I really liked it. My one complaint, which is a minor one, is that he didn't need to throw in the unraveling aspect of the world, with it's external-style-evil of the earthquakes and whatever. He could just as easily have had it be a significantly shittier future than the "original" one, and that would have been enough. It was annoying to me that he's having the world end when all the non-world-endy stuff is way more believable and compelling. Thinking that by averting a tragedy, you end up allowing dozens of other, worse tragedies to occur would have been better on its own. It's the one of the few King endings where I didn't feel he wrote himself into a corner and had to deus ex machina to resolve things, though. Pretty sweet.
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Sep 22, 2016 21:50
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Murphy Brownback posted:I guess it would depend on who they got to play young Roland and Susan. Michael B. Jordan for young Roland. Let's do this.
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Sep 23, 2016 03:02
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:Michael B. Jordan for young Roland. Let's do this. I could see that, if they are trying to be consistent with the movie version and not just as a standalone thing. Only downside is it would reignite the "why is he black" racist whining all over again, particularly if they make Susan white. Alternative idea: Jaden Smith.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:34
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dirksteadfast posted:Finally got around to reading Just After Sunset after having it for years. Only managed to get through 5 of the shorter stories in there so far, but man...for a collection that is introduced with King talking about keeping the short story muscle alive in his brain, he certainly seems to be struggling on some of these. "N" is one of his scariest stories and one that I reread often.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:54
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Murphy Brownback posted:Alternative idea: Jaden Smith. No.
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Sep 23, 2016 09:52
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Murphy Brownback posted:Could be great, probably will be mediocre at best. Since TV series tend to try to assume no prior knowledge of the source material I can see them toning down the parts that made it a Dark Tower book and we'd get a standard western love story. I guess it would depend on who they got to play young Roland and Susan. Is that lady who played the witch in the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner still around? She'd make the perfect Rhea. Well it's supposed to come out after the movie and actually have the bookend stuff with Idris Elba so it would be a safe assumption that the people watching it would have seen the movie.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:48
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syscall girl posted:I liked Joyland pretty well. Because of the cover I was expecting hardboiled detective fiction but it had some spooky stuff too. I like the touch that it's essentially a ghost story but the main character never sees the ghost.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:56
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navyjack posted:"N" is one of his scariest stories and one that I reread often. Why did he think naming a book this was a good idea? What drugs were his editors and publisher on that they let him? How do you go about finding out about or purchasing this novel electronically? I write software, and when someone names a variable 'i' for any reason besides a 6 line example, we kick their rear end so fast for the same reason. Searching for this is impossible.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:32
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It's a short story in Just After Sunset. Calm the hell down.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:00
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Blasphemeral posted:Why did he think naming a book this was a good idea? How do you handle trying to look up "IT"?
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Sep 23, 2016 18:27
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Dr. Faustus posted:On what planet? most people know it as a movie first and kathy bates is amazing in the movie.
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Sep 23, 2016 18:31
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BiggerBoat posted:How do you handle trying to look up "IT"? I don't know, but it works. Serously, 'i' followed by 't' is a much, much less common occurrence than the sixth most common letter in English by itself. Don't believe me? When I went to Amazon.com, typed in two searches. Check the attached screencaps. It wasn't until I specified books that "Steven King's N" even showed up on the first page, and even then it was the graphic novel, not the collection that contained the novella. [EDIT] Ack, my attachment got screwed up. Sec... ... Ok, how do I change my attachment? Well, in any case, IT's entire search page was correct.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:29
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Blasphemeral posted:I don't know, but it works. I believe you. Boy, do I ever. I can tell this is really bugging you. I guess write a letter to King and ask him to not do that anymore?
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Sep 23, 2016 20:02
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Go back in time and get a headache trying to stop him from naming it "N".
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Sep 23, 2016 20:06
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I get the complaint that searching for a story within a collection doesn't always return results that include that collection, but it's a bit ridiculous to complain that your search for the letter N did not return what you wanted.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:16
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N
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Sep 23, 2016 20:49
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There. Now I'm gonna search the forums for my post.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:50
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Blasphemeral posted:Searching for this is impossible. 
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Sep 23, 2016 21:07
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navyjack posted:"N" is one of his scariest stories and one that I reread often.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:08
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Blasphemeral posted:I don't know, but it works.
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Sep 23, 2016 22:04
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navyjack posted:"N" is one of his scariest stories and one that I reread often. Thanks for letting me know. I wasn't ever going to give up on the collection entirely, but now ill at least be a bit more excited going back into it.
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Sep 24, 2016 02:45
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I've read most of Just After Sunset, but I somehow managed to skip over N. Went back and read it last night. I liked it a lot. Nice Lovecraftian vibe. But, man, it reminded me so much of an episode from a crappy early '00s horror anthology series called Night Visions. The episode was called "Patterns" and the plot was reeeally similar: A man (Malcolm McDowell) suffers from an extreme form of obsessive compulsive disorder. He is brought in to see a psychiatrist. He explains that his daily rituals have completely taken over his life, ruining his career and tearing his family apart. He wants to stop, but he can’t because he believes that if he does the entire world will literally fall apart. In the end it turns out to be true, and the burden of performing these constant daily rituals gets passed on to the psychiatrist. Vastarien fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 08:47
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Stephen has gotten better with age, but man some of his works just have major problems 11/22/63 Pro : Time travel without cheese or hokey awfulness, clever pacing tricks to lull you in Con : that ending with the collapsing parallel universes Under The Dome : Pro : clever concept, well-researched non-fiction elements Con : aliens did it, we saved the day by the power of love or w/e Doctor Sleep Pro : Danny Torrence is a great tragic character, psychic vampires Con : unnecessary sequel, might have worked better as a stand-alone Dark Tower Pro : single greatest meta-fiction he's done. Con : awful self-insert and references to Star Wars and Harry Potter as part of this meta-verse IT Pro : seriously creepy, great characters Con : underage gangbang and so on. Still a great literary force with a large readership who is constantly reinventing and trying new things.
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Sep 24, 2016 14:35
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darth_pizza posted:Doctor Sleep Hmmm. You've given me a bit to think about there. I'll get back to you. Content: I am only posting in this thread because I am avoiding the 970 unread posts in the David Foster Wallace thread. I know they are all smart, witty, wry and full fibre but, man, 970..... and that's not counting the footnotes.
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Sep 24, 2016 15:20
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I typed 'Stephen King N' into Amazon and it was the first result so whatever.
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Sep 24, 2016 15:57
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So what was the original ending of Hex?
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Sep 24, 2016 16:58
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Phanatic posted:So what was the original ending of Hex? I mentioned it earlier in the thread somewhere. It's essentially the same ending. This is a comment I found from a Dutch reader: But skipping to the end of the ending: it turns into an orgy of torture like an Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell. This is, of course, imagery we are all more or less familiar with over here, since the guy was Dutch and we all learned about him in school. Nice echo of the 'just a village like all those you know so well'-horror trope. The dad is led through all these horrors and recognizes each of them as a mirror image of things the villagers did to the witch (I thought this was a bit far fetched at times, your mileage may vary). In the end, he realises that he must choose the thing he loves most. He runs between dozens of pot holes filled with people while it rains burning coals, carrying a single pot hole cover, finds wife + youngest son but jumps in the seemingly empty hole next to them, because we've know which son he would choose since chapter two or so. He then wakes up in his own house to someone thumping the front door, and doesn't open it, because he knows that even if it is the person he wants it to be, it wouldn't end well. And then the author apologizes for throwing us into a pit of despair. I'm assuming the fate of one character in particular may have been cleared up in the original version, but it seems that maybe a lot of the imagery used might've only made sense to Dutch/European readers so it was nixed in favour of the Church ending we got.
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Sep 24, 2016 21:35
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My problem with Under the Dome is that everything takes place in about a week and too much of the tension is ramped up artificially because of a couple of rear end in a top hat characters who are just caricatures.
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Sep 25, 2016 21:15
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I'm about 50 pages into Misery and I'm loving it already. I've never seen the movie either so I'm looking forward to watching it after my read.
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Sep 27, 2016 14:46
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Sep 27, 2016 16:26
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I've been a big Stephen King fan for a long time but about a month ago I decided to take the plunge and start in on Dark Tower. Book 1 was OK, and a good character study, but storywise it didn't do too much for me. I took a break and read something unrelated in between and now I'm about halfway through book 2 and I'm waaaaaay into it. I know (vaguely, from reading this thread) about all the weird meta stuff I'm in for, but I've been told that there are a few Stephen King books I should read before I get too deep into the DT series so I'm looking for recommendations to that end. Short version: Which of his other books will be most likely to enrich my dark tower experience? e: RCarr posted:I'm about 50 pages into Misery and I'm loving it already. I've never seen the movie either so I'm looking forward to watching it after my read. That movie is easily the most straightforward, no loving around with the source material feature film adaptation of any of his work. Kathy Bates and James Caan are both loving blowaway awesome. I haven't read the book on almost twenty years so I may have to cram that into my SK binge too. Karmine fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 14:29
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Only ever read his short stories and novellas and most of them were as a kid. Browsing the meagre horror/sci-fi shelf in the local WHSmiths here and saw IT and decided to take the plunge. Got a few more on my list thanks to this thread too, so cheers, Book Barn. xx
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Sep 28, 2016 14:54
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darth_pizza posted:IT You could be talking about 16 year olds and it would still be really weird, but 11 year olds.... What was King thinking as he was writing that? Was he putting himself into the mind of his characters and thinking of it from their perspective imagining himself in a 11 year old gangbang? It wasn't even a short thing. It went on for pages and pages. Still his best book though.
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Sep 28, 2016 16:11
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Karmine posted:
This is off the top of my head, so I may be missing some (and I'm sure you've already read a number of these), but the major ones - which introduce some characters and settings - are: The Stand, Salem's Lot, The Talisman/Black House (Black House more), Insomnia, Low Men in Yellow Coats (in Hearts in Atlantis), and The Little Sisters of Eluria and Everything's Eventual (in Everything's Eventual). A lot of his other works have references to the DT mythos, but they're often just little nods. I'm probably missing a few. VVVV Guess I wasn't far off the mark!
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Sep 28, 2016 16:23
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Karmine posted:Short version: Which of his other books will be most likely to enrich my dark tower experience? 'Salem's Lot, to get more backstory on Father Callahan The short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria" which is explicitly a Dark Tower story (it's about a young Roland soon after he starts his journey), but you'll have to track it down in in Everything's Eventual The novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats" which, again, is explicitly a DT story collected in Hearts in Atlantis The Talisman and Black House - the former is a better book, but the latter is a much more direct tie-in to the Dark Tower Those are the ones I'd say would enrich your reading experience. Some people will recommend Insomnia, which is also a very direct tie-in novel, but I didn't read it prior to finishing the DT series and I don't feel I missed anything, even after going back and reading it. A number of his other books have minor connections to the Dark Tower, such as The Stand and IT, but, again, they are not even remotely necessary to enjoying the DT. Likewise, a lot of his short stories can be argued to have connections to the DT, but are not necessary (though you should probably read them, as King is a much better writer when constrained by the limits of a short story or novella).
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Sep 28, 2016 16:23
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Thanks everyone! I skipped Little Sisters of Eluria when I went through Everything's Eventual because I knew it was a dark tower thing and I'd be totally lost. I'll have to check that one out soon enough. But I think once I finish DT2 I'm gonna (finally) read 'Salem's Lot.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:11
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Insomnia is only really important to the final DT book. There are a couple characters who we meet in Insomnia that end up being a big deal, but for the most part the book just introduces some concepts that seem really cool (IMO) but are never ever addressed in any other DT book. I personally liked it, but I think you can get away without Insomnia.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:20
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Inspector 34 posted:I personally liked it, but I think you can get away without Insomnia. Good point. IIRC, King retcons the living poo poo out of it by (tagged to be polite to Karmine) having the Tet Corporation say it's his subconscious talking gibberish, even though it introduces - poo poo, announces - Patrick Danville as the deus ex machina. King is my favorite author for a lot of reasons, but his approach to continuity is a such a hot mess it might as well be goddamned planned parenthood dumpster fire.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:35
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When would be a good point to read Little Sisters of Eluria? I'm in the middle of The Drawing of the Three. I feel like a jackass because I bought the first two books in Viking hardcover a few years back, and then the prices on books 3&4 in the same format shot up to ridiculous levels. My books have to look right, maaaaan.
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Sep 28, 2016 19:39
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