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Rightio, well this is a pointless diversion. Aside from Dark Tower stuff, is Ace Merril the character that King has revisited the most? He's in THE BODY, NONA and NEEDFUL THINGS.
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Apr 15, 2017 20:38
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DrVenkman posted:Hmm. One allegation that was completely destroyed, and another where the accuser dropped it. Makes you think. lmao
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Apr 15, 2017 22:03
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DrVenkman posted:Rightio, well this is a pointless diversion. And Ace Merrill's grandfather (I think?) was the antagonist in The Sun Dog. Great story, but goddamn, talk about a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed. It's far too much, even by King standards.
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Apr 16, 2017 05:16
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"Gender Violence" is my alt account name.
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Apr 16, 2017 09:50
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got Doctor Sleep and On Writing paperbacks for 50 cents each at a yard sale today the guy said Doctor Sleep is a good book so I know he is a lying salesman
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Apr 22, 2017 12:27
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Doctor Sleep is a sequel that doesn't live up to its predecessor. It's good, not great.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:40
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good point I'll drive back to the yard sale and tell him that
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Apr 22, 2017 13:02
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I'm about a third of the way through It for the first time and King is reminding me (more than previous books) how weird he is about writing people who are laughing. Uncontrollable laughter fits where people are literally rolling around on the floor? I love his writing (obv) but... ugh. I hope that at the end of the book it's been revealed that Pennywise has been pumping laughing gas into these people's homes or something.
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Apr 22, 2017 17:57
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one time in high school my friends and i were super high and 'in the hall of the mountain king' came on my buddy's itunes shuffle and for some reason that struck all of us as the funniest poo poo ever and led to several of us literally rolling on the floor but that's the only time i've ever seen that happen and like i said we were really high
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Apr 22, 2017 21:31
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ExtraNoise posted:I'm about a third of the way through It for the first time and King is reminding me (more than previous books) how weird he is about writing people who are laughing. Uncontrollable laughter fits where people are literally rolling around on the floor? A spoiler, though not necessarily for It: Dandelo in The Dark Tower makes Roland lose his poo poo laughing, and it's pretty strongly hinted that Dandelo is the same sort of creature as Pennywise. So it's basically magic laughing gas.
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Apr 22, 2017 22:24
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Ein cooler Typ posted:got Doctor Sleep and On Writing paperbacks for 50 cents each at a yard sale today On Writing is by far the better book of the two. And I don't really like books "about" writing.
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Apr 23, 2017 02:19
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Is there no option to read the original versions of The Stand and The Gunslinger other than finding an old used copy? I was hoping for an ebook release, in searching for one it looks like a lot of people want to read the originals. Has King ever commented on a re-release? edit: I see there's also an audiobook of the original gunslinger. Koburn fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 16:34
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Ein cooler Typ posted:got Doctor Sleep and On Writing paperbacks for 50 cents each at a yard sale today DOCTOR SLEEP is fine. At least, any of the Danny parts are. I wish that King just wrote a straight story about Danny trying to make do in the world, because they are by far the best parts of the book. Everything about the True Knot is terrible, not least of all because they're probably King's most ineffectual villains. He just assures us they're really bad people. Koburn posted:Is there no option to read the original versions of The Stand and The Gunslinger other than finding an old used copy? I can't speak to THE GUNSLINGER, but I still like the extended version of THE STAND. Sure there are parts I'd excise, but I think if you read the re-release of that book first you wouldn't really think it was an expanded version.
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Apr 23, 2017 18:27
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The "no great loss" chapter alone is some of King's best writing, and the only place to get it is in the expanded edition.
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Apr 24, 2017 01:32
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Doctor Sleep is odd because it's, like, a couple of solid books jammed together to make a turd. Like, I'd read a book about The True Knot and their weird family and their struggles to keep alive, fed and unnoticed. I'd read an entire book about a hospital porter using his psychic powers to act as a psychopomp. I'd read an entire book about Danny Torrance and his struggles with addiction, anger and The Shining. I wouldn't read a book about Abra, because those bits bored me rigid, but "the difficulties of growing up as a teenage girl who is also a powerful psychic" seems to me like it has YA Fiction Bestseller all over it. And then Stephen King rams it all together and hot drat is it ever a mess. The True Knot turn into gormless villains who pose no threat whatsoever and really really hate Abra for no good reason, Danny's characterisation basically comes down to "he kinda wants a drink and he feels guilty about that time he stole from that chick", Abra is perfect and precocious and never puts a foot wrong, there's a whole Swiss Army Knife of made-up-on-the-fly bullshit powers pulled out of everyone's psychic asses, loving ghosts are beating the poo poo out of people, there's waaaaaaaaaaay the gently caress too many characters just wandering around with 0 time to get fleshed out and that evil hospital porter's whole arc is "jerk --> dead". It really reeked to me of King digging out four or five little story nubs he couldn't quite make work and going "aight fuckit Christmas is coming" and mushing them together. Tell ya what though, I found an old copy of Christine at the local Oxfam and reread it - hot drat that's a good book. I read it when I was 12 or 13 and just remembered it as being a goofy piece of poo poo about WoOoOoO PsYcHiC rOcK & rOlL CaR but man it really is quite an excellent coming of age tale and also a damned good window into a certain era of American history. What what, shitters!
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Apr 24, 2017 04:02
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Koburn posted:Is there no option to read the original versions of The Stand and The Gunslinger other than finding an old used copy? I got a used copy off of ebay just a few months ago for $3 in good condition. It's not as hard to find as I thought it would be.
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Apr 24, 2017 05:39
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Just read THE FLEXIBLE BULLET. It was great, but I wish that there was just a bit more ambiguity to it.
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Apr 24, 2017 17:05
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Dr. Sleep isn't a very good sequel to the Shining from a horror perspective but it is as a dude dealing with alcoholism perspective. Everything dealing with alcoholism in the book is absolutely agonizingly dead-on, especially if you have personal experience with a family member with those issues. The rest is eeeeh
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Apr 24, 2017 22:14
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ImpAtom posted:Dr. Sleep isn't a very good sequel to the Shining from a horror perspective but it is as a dude dealing with alcoholism perspective. Everything dealing with alcoholism in the book is absolutely agonizingly dead-on, especially if you have personal experience with a family member with those issues. The rest is eeeeh I mean, I'll be the weirdo that admits to enjoying the concept of a sexy ageless siren psychic lady in a magic top hat who seduces anyone willing to join her RV convoy.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:19
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yeah it's a fun concept it's just not scary
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Apr 24, 2017 22:26
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I've been listening to the audio book of Christine lately. Stephen King is really good at writing overbearing mothers. I also got a kick out of the fact that the narrator is the dude who played Deke in Maximum Overdrive.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:25
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chernobyl kinsman posted:yeah it's a fun concept it's just not scary Oh it was supposed to be scary? Hahaha, what?
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Apr 24, 2017 22:27
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Franchescanado posted:I mean, I'll be the weirdo that admits to enjoying the concept of a sexy ageless siren psychic lady in a magic top hat who seduces anyone willing to join her RV convoy. I think the biggest issue with them is that King consistently tells us how bad the true knot are, and outside of one very good scene we never see it. It's clear that his real love was writing about Danny to the detriment of anyone else. He could've written a much better book about the knot, but this isn't it. Then you have Abra who is just brilliant at everything and easily sidesteps the one moment she's in real danger. She only ever gets interesting as a character right at the end, and it's for like 5 pages.
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Apr 25, 2017 07:14
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I liked the parts of Doctor Sleep about Danny being an alcoholic. But the salesman told me I would like the ending, so I know he hasn't read it or he was just trying to push the sale. On Writing is a great book; I've read that before. I would have been willing to pay a hole dollar just for that.
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Apr 25, 2017 07:48
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The true knot lived off of a substance that was produced by torturing children to death but nope, not evil at all.
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Apr 26, 2017 04:47
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The true knot lived off of a substance that was produced by torturing children to death but nope, not evil at all. I don't think anyone is disputing that. But they're still borderline ineffectual as villains. King literally just tells you 'These cannisters are full of a child's essence. Aren't these guys bastards'? Before going on to talk about Abra again. And any evilness they have as a troop is undone by how utterly blundering they are.
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Apr 26, 2017 10:45
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DrVenkman posted:Just read THE FLEXIBLE BULLET. It was great, but I wish that there was just a bit more ambiguity to it. Have you read Nona?
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Apr 27, 2017 11:15
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A Typical Goon posted:Have you read Nona? Yeah I just finished SKELETON CREW. I'd read a bunch before but only read NONA for the first time in that one. Interestingly the refrain from NONA (Do you love?) is used again in THE REACH.
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Apr 27, 2017 19:54
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So I am reading Salem's Lot, the first King book I have read in ten years, and I love how it seems to be the prototype for 75 % of his later books. Only difference is that it lacks many of his tics, which became more and more prominent the more popular he got. There's even a section where a kid makes fun of his parents for communicating in folksy cliches, which could just as easily be directed at current day King. I am enjoying it.
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May 1, 2017 16:42
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Red Letter Media discuss The Mist movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1asq06rh2qo tl; dr: Very stylised homage to B-movie horror flicks. Effects don't hold up so well but passable in b&w. Mrs Carmody is too hammy - when many of us in this thread have been saying she's not extreme enough. Dr Sleep only has one good part: the death of the boy. That is authentically chilling. The rest is stale poop. Christine. drat yes! Great fine. Eerie and sad to see Arnie getting so tough and cynical and lose his charm. Allegory of growing up and growing apart from friends. Yes, Regina really is kind of terrible, pathetic, pitiable and infuriating. You can understand how Arnie would grow to resent her, even without Christine's influence. I think King bollocksed up the narration, going 1st person, 3rd person, 1st person. If you remember Tommyknockers he followed Bobbi and Gard in 1st section, looked at the town in the 2nd and combined the town and B + G in the 3rd section. Works really well and it's done in 3rd person. Obviously in Christine King wanted to write some personal stuff from Dennis's p.o.v. about friendship, high school etc but if you think back to Frannie and Larry in The Stand, we get a very good sense of their feelings and interior monologues via 3rd person p.o.v. King really could have done the same with Christine, as he had to do the 2nd part in 3rd person. Should have been 3rd person all the way through. Incidentally, we know King's central characters die very rarely (I can only think of characters in The Stand, Jack in The Shining and Gard in Tommyknockers, but there's a technical limitation. It is almost impossible to kill a 1st person narrator, so some of the tension goes from an action story told 1st person.
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May 1, 2017 22:28
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Incidentally, we know King's central characters die very rarely (I can only think of characters in The Stand, Jack in The Shining and Gard in Tommyknockers, but there's a technical limitation. It is almost impossible to kill a 1st person narrator, so some of the tension goes from an action story told 1st person. There were a couple of central character deaths in 'Salem's Lot. Susan and Jimmy
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May 1, 2017 22:33
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Ornamented Death posted:There were a couple of central character deaths in 'Salem's Lot. Susan and Jimmy I'd also count Father Callahan, since he basically is dead to the story with his defeat; you can say he shows up in DT, but it's irrelevant to the stakes in SL
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May 1, 2017 22:37
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Disagree. I don't think we get inside their heads in the same way as those I listed though I concede that I think the characterisation of Father Callaghan especially is great, but is it really enough to call him a main character?
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May 1, 2017 22:47
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I'd say so. On my first read I thought he'd be the badass who saves the day. It's a good subversion
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May 1, 2017 22:49
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The Dark Tower trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C0A2GpMNP8 idk I don't know what they're doing with this. Trailer doesn't really make me optimistic for a good movie
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May 3, 2017 13:19
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Yeah, I didn't really get warm fuzzies from the trailer. On the plus side, there were shout-outs to the Overlook Hotel and Pennywise in the trailer.
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May 3, 2017 13:21
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I think there's definitely some potential there.
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May 3, 2017 13:30
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There's no chance the dark tower movie will be good, but it might be enjoyable enough i guess. making it a continuation of the books is an interesting take on it at least. Hope the lead actors get some good material to work with. also, roland looks to dapper, not like i envisioned him. movie ruined.
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May 3, 2017 15:15
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Ein cooler Typ posted:The Dark Tower trailer The exposition is clunky but everything else looks good. Roland is just a little more flashy than I'd like, but I don't mind it. McConnahey (spelling?) is probably going to be great as the MiB. I think the key thing to remember is that they're treating this as a different cycle. It's a good way to avoid the pitfalls of most book-to-film adaptations.
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May 3, 2017 15:21
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Ein cooler Typ posted:The Dark Tower trailer I think this looks neat. Considering how off the rails TDT gets in the later books (I gave up in Song), I'm down for a weird adaptation if they make it interesting. I definitely would not want a 1:1 conversion to a movie series anyway.
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May 3, 2017 15:42
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