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It absolutely is a religious apocalypse story; it's just that this religious apocalypse story doesn't explicitly say, "God did it. The end," even though it's a take on exactly the kinds of stories where that would happen. What you have instead is the story dancing around that idea, as the narrative focalizes around characters wondering oh my god what the gently caress is this poo poo. "Gotta make sure you do what God says!" is a boring theme for King. (Because it's barely a theme; it's a moral.) By contrast, "Hey, what if a bunch of people were plausibly being directed by God but couldn't quite be sure?" is more his jam.
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Oct 2, 2016 22:06
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Robot Wendigo posted:I enjoy King very much, but bounced hard off The Gunslinger. I never knew he tied DT into his other works. It makes me want to go back and give the series another shot. The Dark Tower series is I think the only thing I haven't read of his, primarily because I heard so much backlash about the payoff. To invest that much time in so many books and have it poo poo the bed at the end is something I don't feel like doing. Then again, I like a lot of King's work that others seem to poo poo on so I don't know. What would you guys say are the series' strongest points? Or what's the best comparison to his other work?
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Oct 2, 2016 22:42
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BiggerBoat posted:The Dark Tower series is I think the only thing I haven't read of his, primarily because I heard so much backlash about the payoff. To invest that much time in so many books and have it poo poo the bed at the end is something I don't feel like doing. Then again, I like a lot of King's work that others seem to poo poo on so I don't know. The Dark Tower is everything good and bad about King's career circa late 70's to the early 00's, so it pretty much encompasses all his strengths, faults, and evolutions as a writer. The characters in the story are incredibly strong - especially Eddie Dean, who's up there with Jack Torrance, Larry Underwood, and Jim Gardner as King's best. After characters, I'd say the setting is certainly a strong point, because it doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense at all and it doesn't even have to. It's like being in a Dali painting. There's Western Seas where you go north up the beach with the water on your right, giant robot bears, literal crazy trains, the Emerald Palace of Oz, America in three different decades, a sort of post-post-apocalyptic Mexico, a college campus in the middle of a blasted wasteland - it's loving nuts, is what it is. It's compelling just because of that. Undistilled imagination. There's really isn't anything to compare it to, honestly. There's similar themes to a lot of his better known books and sometimes the settings bleed into each other but a straight comparison is pretty hard. Asbury fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 2, 2016 |
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Oct 2, 2016 23:09
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3Romeo posted:The Dark Tower is everything good and bad about King's career circa late 70's to the early 00's, so it pretty much encompasses all his strengths, faults, and evolutions as a writer. The characters in the story are incredibly strong - especially Eddie Dean, who's up there with Jack Torrance, Larry Underwood, and Jim Gardner as King's best. After characters, I'd say the setting is certainly a strong point, because it doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense at all and it doesn't even have to. It's like being in a Dali painting. There's Western Seas where you go north up the beach with the water on your right, giant robot bears, literal crazy trains, the Emerald Palace of Oz, America in three different decades, a sort of post-post-apocalyptic Mexico, a college campus in the middle of a blasted wasteland - it's loving nuts, is what it is. It's compelling just because of that. Undistilled imagination. This may be the most accurate description of why I have such a love/hate relationship with the series. Because for all the things I really can't stand (EEEEEEEE, come-commala, loving chap chap chap over and over) there is still something so incredibly compelling about it. Thank you for articulating it so much better than I ever could.
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Oct 2, 2016 23:36
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BiggerBoat posted:The Dark Tower series is I think the only thing I haven't read of his, primarily because I heard so much backlash about the payoff. To invest that much time in so many books and have it poo poo the bed at the end is something I don't feel like doing. Then again, I like a lot of King's work that others seem to poo poo on so I don't know. It's about the journey not the destination. That's something King says to the reader before the ending of the last Dark Tower book. I think because he realized he hosed up. But yeah, for 4 books it's a fantastic journey with characters as compelling as King ever wrote with an incredible setting. (Lord of the Rings mixed with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly mixed with King craziness like demon sex and giant robot bears and talking trains) I don't regret reading it even though I didn't like the last three books. The payoff of DT is not any worse than the payoff to IT being a kid orgy or the Hand of God wiping out the bad guys.
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Oct 2, 2016 23:39
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3Romeo posted:The Dark Tower is everything good and bad about King's career circa late 70's to the early 00's, so it pretty much encompasses all his strengths, faults, and evolutions as a writer. The characters in the story are incredibly strong - especially Eddie Dean, who's up there with Jack Torrance, Larry Underwood, and Jim Gardner as King's best. After characters, I'd say the setting is certainly a strong point, because it doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense at all and it doesn't even have to. It's like being in a Dali painting. There's Western Seas where you go north up the beach with the water on your right, giant robot bears, literal crazy trains, the Emerald Palace of Oz, America in three different decades, a sort of post-post-apocalyptic Mexico, a college campus in the middle of a blasted wasteland - it's loving nuts, is what it is. It's compelling just because of that. Undistilled imagination. Well put. If you're still up in the air, Bigger Boat, I'll say that I've read through the entire 7 books twice and while I have dismay and outrage at a few things, it's because the series is crazy imaginative and compelling, and it made me care about what I feel are stylistic missteps. I think you should read it just because when you get to the end, you'll be richer for the experience.
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Oct 3, 2016 00:01
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The only one of the DT books I haven't read more than once is the one about Suzanna. Other than that completely extraneous book the series is a must-read, IMO, for any die-hard King fan. It kind of distills a lot of his other work into one crazy melange and is entertaining as hell when it's not irritating with some of the stuff previously mentioned. As far as The Stand, this is like the third time in this thread that someone has said "it's literally the hand of god, there's literally no other possible way to interpret it". That's literally the dumbest argument I've ever heard.
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Oct 3, 2016 03:08
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Pheeets posted:As far as The Stand, this is like the third time in this thread that someone has said "it's literally the hand of god, there's literally no other possible way to interpret it". That's literally the dumbest argument I've ever heard. The weird part to me, since this derail started when A Typical Goon responded to my post, is that I never even dispute that. I just said that the ending was a draw since Flagg is still alive. Whether or not it's literally God stepping in is irrelevant to my argument.
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Oct 3, 2016 03:18
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So, I’m currently reading ‘It’ for the first time, and goddamn if it isn’t an amazing novel. I always assumed that it was just this this boogyman story, but really the monster kind of comes secondary: I think that It mostly represents the massive ugliness just beneath the surface in Anytown USA, and the story certainly hits you over the head with that theme over and over again. A psychic, shape-shiftering, Lovecraftian horror is barely necessary when you’ve got a world of damaged, abusive adults pretending that they know how to raise a generation of babyboomer kids and failing horrifyingly. The various descriptions of the monster are really evocative too. I also really liked the way we were introduced to the Hanlon family. Reading about the horrible racist bullshit that they had to go through *as* the way that you learn that they’re black people (well after their introduction) really worked. Why...it's almost as if they're regular folks, just like you or me!? Just living on a farm and trying to get by. Thought that was a great way to portray racism in Anytown USA. It’s also kind of surprising that a novel written back in the 80’s opens with a horrifying gay-bashing, and that that’s explicitly portrayed as a *very* bad thing. You can see all of the prejudices with the townsfolk (like the cops being all like ‘I don’t approve of no fruits, but you know…’) but I thought it was pretty clear that King was portraying all the homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, casual domestic violence, torture of criminals, and extra-judicial killings that’s an ugly part of American history (and America now) as inexcusably bad, shameful, and horrifying. The super-intense scenes where the children first encounter and evade It are amasing too (the mummy, the bird, the teenage werewolf, Paul Bunyan, the poor kid getting his head ripped off by the creature from the black lagoon…wow.) And I liked how he managed to even write some character arcs for some of the character’s introductions (the germ-phobic guy realizing what was up with his wife/mother, who can’t help but be afraid. And Beverly and her abusive husband.) On the down side some of King’s giant weaknesses as a writer have just started to show at the halfway point of It. Damnit Stephen, you don’t need to explain absolutely every loving detail of everything! Learn to just imply stuff! I didn’t need the full story of how Ben lost all of his weight, right there along with the drawn out story of Richie getting a vasectomy. That could have all just been a couple of paragraphs; why does there have to be pages and pages of this bullshit?
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Oct 3, 2016 05:44
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IT is still really good, but I can't help but feel it could have been pretty amazing with some competent editing. There are a couple times where we don't really need to follow every single character (after they leave the library and all go on their own immediately comes to mind), Stanley Uris as a character could have been cut completely, kid orgy ect
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Oct 3, 2016 06:47
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Wizard and glass alone is enough to make the dark tower a must read. That is easily one of his top books
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Oct 3, 2016 07:31
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Blastedhellscape posted:but really the monster kind of comes secondary: I think that It mostly represents the massive ugliness just beneath the surface in Anytown USA, and the story certainly hits you over the head with that theme over and over again. I think King is really excellent at portraying this particular concept. Nobody really talks too much about Needful Things, but the rotten small town thing was done well there too. I'd guess a majority of his stories include some variation on that theme. DT4 even highlights our own obsession with the minutiae of other people's petty cruelties.
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Oct 3, 2016 07:36
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Inspector 34 posted:I think King is really excellent at portraying this particular concept. Nobody really talks too much about Needful Things, but the rotten small town thing was done well there too. I'd guess a majority of his stories include some variation on that theme. King is just good at small communities, period. In 11/22/63 he makes a nice small town, and it's just as full of little details as any of his rotten towns. I've long felt that his greatest strength as a writer was his ability to paint a character in just a few words. At least once or twice a book I think "I know someone just like that!" The busybody, the overly-pious spinster, the nervous wreck, the shifty uncle...I've met them all. So have you. Nevermind that, on the surface, they're rarely more than caricatures; each of those characters has a level realism and honesty that many authors can't capture in an entire novel. Hell, sometimes there are authors who can't capture that depth in a ten-book series. King can do it in a paragraph. Consistently. He's a master at it. On top of that, King is equally deft at weaving those quick characters together into a community, where each plays off the others to build the world in which the main narrative thrives. In many novels, the bit characters are the pins to the pro/antagonists' bowling balls, thrown and tossed around in direct response to the main characters' actions. King often flips that around, where the main characters get knocked off their feet (sometimes literally) by the bit players. This makes those bit players seem more human, more real. Their actions directly influence the course of the main narrative, for reasons outside that story, because each of them has their own story.
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Oct 3, 2016 07:55
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Just two words: officious prick. That's all I need to know and since I read The Shining I've met many officious pricks. Maybe it's just hindsight, but I'm pretty sure my officious prick radar went bing and I'm also pretty sure it was right every time. Every time I saw or thought of those guys I was always thinking "officious prick." This is a tiny way in which King has crept into my moment-to-moment living of my own life. VV And that is one very great example. VV Dr. Faustus fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Oct 3, 2016 |
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Oct 3, 2016 08:47
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Dr. Faustus posted:Just two words: officious prick. When Andy said the warden was being "obtuse." That guy was one hell of an officious prick.
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Oct 3, 2016 09:11
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joepinetree posted:Wizard and glass alone is enough to make the dark tower a must read. That is easily one of his top books I agree. Since it's mostly a flashback, I wish it was it's own book outside of the series so I could recommend it as a stand alone. This is why Wizard and Glass being a TV series http://www.ew.com/article/2016/09/21/dark-tower-tv-series-stephen-king-wizard-glass and the rest of Dark Tower being films is going to be perfect. Great writeup on IT, Blasted hellscape. Atmosphere and history of Derry is where the IT TV series really dropped the ball. They turned IT into a generic horror movie.
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Oct 3, 2016 15:47
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A Typical Goon posted:IT is still really good, but I can't help but feel it could have been pretty amazing with some competent editing. There are a couple times where we don't really need to follow every single character (after they leave the library and all go on their own immediately comes to mind), Stanley Uris as a character could have been cut completely, kid orgy ect For Stanley, you needed a weak character to strengthen the villain. In retrospect, seeing that IT actually got one of them via their weakness, and weakening the circle really put the outcome into question.
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Oct 3, 2016 20:16
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Darko posted:For Stanley, you needed a weak character to strengthen the villain. In retrospect, seeing that IT actually got one of them via their weakness, and weakening the circle really put the outcome into question. Agreed, plus for me it put a creepy foreboding quality to any scenes with him as a kid. Even when they're just hanging out and having fun, we've already seen how this ends for Stan.
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Oct 3, 2016 20:39
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The big reveal in Wolves of the Calla is stupid and sucks
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Oct 3, 2016 20:43
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corn in the bible posted:The big reveal in Wolves of the Calla is stupid and sucks looooooool. I'm torn two ways about it. One way, yeah, it's real dumb, and the back half of the series would be a lot better without that in it. The other way to look at it is a little more interesting, though. In "The Road to the Dark Tower," (a sort of concordance), there's a section about how one of King's very very early stories was about a gunslinger who rides into town and saves the day. One of the lines in the story was about how the gunslinger always seemed to arrive in time, and the gunslinger says, "Yes ma'am, Steve King always makes sure I do." Or something like that. Still pretty stupid, right? But knowing what happened to King puts that whole thing into perspective. He wrote books 5 6 and 7 just after his accident, doped up for the first time in twenty years, suffering ptsd from his pain and his brush with death. So what's he do? He decides to cap off his career (remember, he was talking of retirement then) by reaching back to the very beginning. Which, I mean, given the theme of the books, makes sense. He was trying to summarize his life's work using the Dark Tower to do it. It's about as magnum as a magnum opus can get. Anyway, that's what's cool about the series, using it as a way to look at the life and career of one of the most popular authors in the late 20 and early 21st century. It's a unique experiment that isn't always good but it's sure plenty interesting. But back on the first hand, metafiction is hard to make work without coming off like a twat, and I can't say King was entirely successful. Asbury fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Oct 3, 2016 |
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Oct 3, 2016 21:06
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Wolves of the Calla has a lot of stupid bullshit but I still love that it's basically Magnificent Seven woven into the main plot. The stupid bullshit weighs it down, but I didn't start feeling weary of DT until Song of Susannah.
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Oct 4, 2016 00:49
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I think the series would have flowed better had King made the Father Callahan flashback stuff a separate novella, the combined Wolves and Song and cut out a lot of the useless bullshit from the latter.
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Oct 4, 2016 00:56
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I hadn't read any of the Harry Potter books before I read all the DT books, so none of that meta stuff bothered me at all since I had no idea what most of it was. And I'm sure I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed the self-insert, especially since it intersected with and encompassed his accident. It was a ballsy move, and his decision to include it was probably at least partly a result of the post-accident meds he was on at the time, but think it worked. That was a major life event for him, so including it in the series really says a lot about how bound up his life is in his writing, whether you think that's good or not. He not only reflects the times he's lived in, he reflects his own life, which is difficult and brave and honest, in my opinion. So what, he took a risk, a writer of his experience and stature is entitled to it. And, I might add, he's not the first writer to do so.
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Oct 4, 2016 02:29
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Just finished Misery. I'd forgotten much. Overall, it was better than I'd remembered. Still some awful shuck n jive poo poo in the Misey's Return pages. Surprised to see he placed the novel's start date on my 13th birthday (9/23/1984). Does time fly? My friends, I think it does.
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Oct 4, 2016 09:25
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I reread Wolves, and it was fluffy, but fine. It was annoying when it came out, though, because there was little plot progression and there were only 3 books left. Even the "real world fiction" stuff is fine since it makes sense in the DT world.
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Oct 4, 2016 18:59
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DT probably could have been done in 6 books.
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Oct 4, 2016 19:39
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I think the word you meant to use was "should" I'm just about done with Wizard and Glass in my reread. I had been kind of dreading the Reap Festival but he really sort of just glossed over it and made it a lot less gruesome than it could have been. Now they've just got their ruby slippers and I really wish we knew more about how Marten/Walter/RF's (I forget which of these are the same person) magic works. How do you go about conjuring up some ruby slippers? I'm sure it's better not knowing, but it really nags at my curiosity. Not sure if I'll move straight onto Wolves of the Calla or maybe cleanse my pallet on something else first. I liked Wolves well enough when it came out, but man I absolutely did not enjoy Song of Susannah at all. I'm not sure I've read DT6 or 7 since they first came out though so it'll be interesting to see what I think of them now.
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Oct 5, 2016 04:06
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How did this get here? I am not good at computers!!
Dr. Faustus fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Oct 5, 2016 |
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Oct 5, 2016 04:34
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Dr. Faustus posted:Haha. I love the Crown Vic.
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Oct 5, 2016 04:36
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On Writing is such a lovely book. A great, informative read.
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Oct 5, 2016 12:17
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I was just a kid when I read it. Averse to scary movies, even. I admit I understood precious little of it, but I really enjoyed his words on The Amityville Horror. It was too adult for me to really understand but I got the basics. Being young I was more interested in things like the mythology behind it and hadn't thought of the possible allegory or metaphor that King assigned to it. Neat book. I should re-read it now.
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Oct 5, 2016 21:50
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I'm reading Salem's Lot right now, which for some bizarre reason I've never read before. I have no idea how that happened, since I love both King and vampires. What are everyone's thoughts on the two TV movies? I've heard the more recent one hews closer to King's book but really falls kind of flat. I don't know much about the first one with David Soul, except their version of Barlow was horrifying.
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Oct 5, 2016 22:08
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MrMojok posted:I'm reading Salem's Lot right now, which for some bizarre reason I've never read before. I have no idea how that happened, since I love both King and vampires. I really like the original. That said I was in 2nd grade when I originally watched it during its original air date in 1979. It really hosed me up. Not only did I make crosses to put in my windows with tinker toys and Lincoln logs (I'm sure I told that story on here before), I used safety pins to ensure my curtains stayed shut. It is my most read book (I've lost count) also.
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Oct 6, 2016 00:29
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I turned 8 late in 1979 and I remember scooting away from the TV when I heard about Salem's Lot. I hid from that, The Exorcist (now one of my favorite books/movies), Halloween, etc. I was more scarred by Tarantula, actually.
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Oct 6, 2016 01:17
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Don't know if Joe Hill should go on another thread, but I am about 90% of the way through the fireman. It is good, but not great, and has too many references to the stand. It is also very, very predictable. Is NOS4A2 like that?
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Oct 6, 2016 06:54
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I haven't watched this yet, but when I saw what it is, I had to run here to post it first thing, as I know the goons love some Long Walk. http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13176308/stephen-king-the-long-walk-fan-art-animation-adriano-gazza ETA: Holy shitballs, it's good. April fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 23:49
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joepinetree posted:. Is NOS4A2 like that? Yes, except instead of The Stand it's David Mitchell books and Dr. Sleep.
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Oct 7, 2016 11:55
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The Fireman is Joe Hill's worst novel by far and even then it's not bad, it's just forgettable.
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Oct 7, 2016 12:31
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Robot Wendigo posted:I enjoy King very much, but bounced hard off The Gunslinger. I never knew he tied DT into his other works. It makes me want to go back and give the series another shot. gunslinger (unrevised) is one of the his better books. it's only downhill from there.
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Oct 7, 2016 13:27
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Lemon posted:The Fireman is Joe Hill's worst novel by far and even then it's not bad, it's just forgettable. My exact thoughts.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:47
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