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blue squares posted:I saw IT and I thought it was great and very scary. I now want to read another SK book. It's been a while. I could re-read IT, or try something new. I'm gonna list all of the SK books I have read roughly in order of preference. You should read the gently caress out of 'Salem's Lot, Firestarter, The Dead Zone and The Shining. You read some good ones in your list but not his best IMO.
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Sep 12, 2017 07:22
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BiggerBoat posted:You guys should go see "IT". The most correct take. Well directed and shot. Scary. Kid actor cast are excellent. The first appearance of Pennywise (in the gutter, with Georgie) is completely nailed and makes the movie.
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Sep 12, 2017 07:32
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Tom Guycot posted:I think what I vaguely remember enjoying about it when I heard it as a kid, was that he wasn't like some devil selling cursed items, all he was doing giving people slight nudges and then letting them act as they will. Like setting up some giant human rube Goldberg contraption That is where all of the fun of the novel comes from, definitely. If that's what you liked it'll still hold up. Though be prepared for things to get both super hosed up and also cartoonishly chaotic. I think King realized how insane things were getting and just ramped it up even more. Also I just realized what a testament it is to King's writing of small towns that I read Needful Things six years ago and just recently read Dead Zone and somehow managed to picture the Castle Rock police station exactly the same both times without realizing it. Same interior, same exterior, same location.
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Sep 12, 2017 09:56
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I am re-reading IT and realized something. Stephen King is a TERRIBLE writer. Like, his prose his embarrassingly sloppy and barely sounds a step above a freshman comp class. That being said, his flow is remarkable. He manages to hit a tone that makes it easy to burn through 50 pages without realizing.
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Sep 12, 2017 13:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am re-reading IT and realized something. that means that he is a good writer
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Sep 12, 2017 15:12
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scary ghost dog posted:that means that he is a good writer No, it means he is a good story teller
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Sep 12, 2017 15:13
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Mel Mudkiper posted:No, it means he is a good story teller an arbitrary distinction
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Sep 12, 2017 15:14
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scary ghost dog posted:an arbitrary distinction To a dullard perhaps
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Sep 12, 2017 15:16
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real bad posts in the stephen king thread lately
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Sep 12, 2017 15:17
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I agree, ghost dog should apologize
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Sep 12, 2017 15:19
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blue squares posted:I saw IT and I thought it was great and very scary. I now want to read another SK book. It's been a while. I could re-read IT, or try something new. I'm gonna list all of the SK books I have read roughly in order of preference. I'd say read The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and 'Salem's Lot. Firestarter was the dumbest premise until I read it, and it left a strong impression on me. It's like King tried to write a Pynchon plot; it's weird and good. I'm also with Mel on King being a mediocre writer but a good story-teller. There's been a few books that hit strong strides with prose, like everyone's favorite chapter in The Stand (Uncut), some moments in 'Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary, and Misery, but in general it's his characters, scenarios, and pacing (until the ending) that make his stories memorable.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:38
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Mel Mudkiper posted:To a dullard perhaps perhaps
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Sep 12, 2017 15:40
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The 'Is King a good writer' argument is impossible to have without sounding wankery and everyone suddenly deciding they're prose experts. Anway, they've just announced a movie deal to produce SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN which...well not only is it an incredibly short story, but it also has an ending I can't see anyone trying to replicate.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:35
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DrVenkman posted:The 'Is King a good writer' argument is impossible to have without sounding wankery and everyone suddenly deciding they're prose experts. Or it's a legitimate critique that can promote a discussion that you don't have to be involved with.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:45
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Like I will botl the gently caress out of IT if it's what it takes Don't test me
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Sep 12, 2017 18:48
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504 posted:So swap out the name, setting, plot, point of view and creatures and its the same? So is The sound of music! half-life was directly inspired by the mist. its original title was quiver (after the arrowhead project). when i was younger i read the mist at some cottage my parents were renting and they had a bunch of old king (i read salem's lot and a few others that week too). i remember thinking hmmm this sounds sorta like half-life and googled it when i got home and sure enough it was. the film "IT" was not scary at all so i don't know why several of you have said that (the kids were fantastic tho). tho maybe you don't watch many scary movies? mel mudkiper is right stephen king is not a particularly skilled writer. his dialogue is oftentimes embarrassing. he has the annoying habit of telling you someone is gonna die chapters early. he has the problem of not knowing that half of good writing is knowing what to leave out. most of his books are twice as long as they should be - even IT is overly long and much of the history would've been more effective if you had to piece it together yourself instead of having full on flashbacks. the turtle was dumb it's cooler when there's just this evil cosmic thing and they beat it themselves. speaking of IT are there any books with a similar premise? a lot of my issue with king is he's fantastic with premises but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. last king i read was revival and the beginning and end are great but even for a shorter book of his the middle drags. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 19:05
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Groovelord Neato posted:speaking of IT are there any books with a similar premise? Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. I thought it was excruciatingly boring, but a lot of other people seem to really like it.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:36
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Groovelord Neato posted:speaking of IT are there any books with a similar premise? a lot of my issue with king is he's fantastic with premises but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. last king i read was revival and the beginning and end are great but even for a shorter book of his the middle drags. Which aspect do you want? A coming-of-age story? A small-town life story? A story about monsters terrorizing a town? A story about friendship? It's safe to assume you want Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Boy's Life by Robert McCammon get's touted as IT's spiritual successor often. If you get more specific, I could probably throw one or two more your way.
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Sep 12, 2017 21:04
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Franchescanado posted:Or it's a legitimate critique that can promote a discussion that you don't have to be involved with. he's good
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Sep 13, 2017 02:33
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Just letting people know the bad movie podcast did the IT miniseries this week. They had done a bunch of Stephen King movies as well.
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Sep 13, 2017 03:36
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I'm reading the Dark Tower for the first time, but I did listen to all the audiobooks first. Just about to finish The Wastelands, and goddamn do I love these books? Are there more materials out there related to the universe I can read. The Great Old Ones, Lud, Blaine and mid-world in general are so awesome.
henpod fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 16:45
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henpod posted:I'm reading the Dark Tower for the first time, but I did listen to all the audiobooks first. Just about to finish The Wastelands, and goddamn do I love these books? Are there more materials out there related to the universe I can read. The Great Old Ones, Lud, Blaine and mid-world in general are so awesome. The various Dark Tower comic series had a lot of stuff that further fleshed out the setting. However, it was written by Robin Furth, not King, though I think King signed off on it all. There's also Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance, also by Furth, and The Dark Tower Companion, by Bev Vincent.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:03
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Vastarien posted:Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. I thought it was excruciatingly boring, but a lot of other people seem to really like it. I loved Summer of Night just as much as IT. Summer of Night (to me) is IT without the adult stuff. Edit: Is all fairness I don't think I've read Summer of Night since the 90's. I read IT back in the late 80's and last year. I need to give Summer of Night a re-read.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:05
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henpod posted:I'm reading the Dark Tower for the first time, but I did listen to all the audiobooks first. Just about to finish The Wastelands, and goddamn do I love these books? Are there more materials out there related to the universe I can read. The Great Old Ones, Lud, Blaine and mid-world in general are so awesome. Wind Through the Keyhole and Little Sisters of Eluria (short story) i think is the only other works King has written set in the DT universe, you know, beyond all the references and hints in other books.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:26
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blue squares posted:Obvious missing ones are Shining, Salem's Lot, and Carrie. I don't want to read Carrie and don't think I'd like the Shining all that much since what I love about King is when he writes about a large cast of characters in a town. Maybe I'll reread Under the Dome, since I gobbled that one down in about 2 days. Needful Things, all day erry day.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:45
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am re-reading IT and realized something. Holy poo poo. I couldn't disagree with this more aside from the "flow" comment. I think he's a fantastic writer and really good with prose. Some of his stuff is better than others, of course, but I can't remember ever reading a King novel and thinking "man, that writing was poo poo." It's usually a pacing or a plot issue when he sits the bed. Sometimes dialogue. To me, Koontz and Kellerman are what I'd call lovely writers - where the low quality actually detracts from the experience - often to the point that I can't even finish their books.
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Sep 13, 2017 18:35
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Here I will pick a few choice excerpts from It when I get home to prove my point
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Sep 13, 2017 18:39
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Ok, here is one particular scene that irritated mequote:There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings—Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell. I will forgive King for breaking the old axiom of never describe something by pointing to pop culture. The fundamental issue with using the explicit comparison to Bozo and Clarabell is that it is redundant. Why compare it to a pop culture figure and THEN describe its appearance. The sentences in Italics could just have easily been removed from the paragraph and not meaningfully affected the description at all. Alternatively, the description of the clown could have been removed and the same result would have been accomplished. He is describing the same thing twice in two different ways without a significant reason for doing so. Where I really got annoyed was this less than 30 pages later. quote:The clown, Hagarty said, looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and that old TV clown, Bozo—or so he thought at first. It was the wild tufts of orange hair that brought such comparisons to mind. But later consideration had caused him to think the clown really looked like neither. Here is where the previous passage becomes even more frustrating. First, it has the exact same problem with redundancy the first excerpt had. He even goes so far to make a redundant description and then go "oh wait actually thats not a good description anyways." Second, he is using a different character to make the exact same comparison with the exact same phrasing. This might be forgiven if it were considerably later in the text and the reader needed to be reminded. Like "hey, remember that clown?" However, this is arguably within the same sitting for a reader. The reader is going to freshly remember "oh right, the clown looked like Bozo." There is no point to repeating the exact same description. I considered it might be an attempt at a joke. He says in the previous excerpt "if it were later, he would think he looked like Ronald McDonald" and then now has a guy later say "He looked like Ronald McDonald." However, if so, the timing in the joke punch-line is off. It really just reads like he forgot he already said it a chapter earlier.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:12
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Surely there are better things to spend your time on buddy.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:15
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RCarr posted:Surely there are better things to spend your time on buddy. shame on me for talking about a writer in the thread about the writer in a subforum for talking about writers
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Sep 13, 2017 19:17
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RCarr posted:Surely there are better things to spend your time on buddy. There are more than a dozen pages of this thread just for posts about "King-isms". Why would you take issue with someone critically defending their argument when people just posted for them to back up their arguments? It's not like he's trying to say "King is poo poo, don't read King", he's saying that he's a good story-teller but his prose is lacking. King equates his own writing to that of a Big Mac. You can like a writer and still think their prose isn't great. Comparing King to other worse writers in a genre rife with terrible prose doesn't necessarily make him good, it just shows he's comparatively not the worst. To say that King's writing could use editing, especially for redundancy, isn't even that controversial, it's a legitimate complaint among his fans, especially in this thread, which began with people talking about how terrible King was (and which of his books were the worst) but liking him anyway.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:39
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Mel Mudkiper posted:shame on me for talking about a writer in the thread about the writer in a subforum for talking about writers It was a good post. You could argue the comparison to other clowns is there to show the scene better from georges view point. Those clowns are known to him and are benevolent and silly, so it makes more sense why he wouldn't run screaming from pennywise in the drain.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:45
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Those two quotes are clearly from different points of view. The second clown description is not for our benefit as an understanding of the clown, it's to develop the character providing the description and to underline the steadfastness of clown imagery. This is especially important in a book that explicitly deals with the lasting socio- and psychological impact of pop culture.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:10
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Those two quotes are clearly from different points of view. The second clown description is not for our benefit as an understanding of the clown, it's to develop the character providing the description and to underline the steadfastness of clown imagery. This is especially important in a book that explicitly deals with the lasting socio- and psychological impact of pop culture. If he wanted to show that the imagery is ubiquitous amongst different personalities why would he use the exact same description with the exact same phrasing? The image is supposed to be universal, not the language.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:13
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I'm not saying King can't get clunky on occasion or veer off course somewhat, even with his prose, but by and large I find him very strong. I also agree that he can be redundant sometimes. He writes a LOT though so, to me, it's kind of like a very prolific songwriter like Zappa or Prince occasionally offering up a clunker rather than a blanket judgement that he's a "bad writer". I wouldn't call those two examples I cited "bad musicians" by any stretch. Like I said, I never finished one of King's books that I wound up disliking where my main issue with it was the thing being written poorly. To state outright that "he's a bad writer" is something I'd certainly take exception with.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If he wanted to show that the imagery is ubiquitous amongst different personalities why would he use the exact same description with the exact same phrasing? The image is supposed to be universal, not the language. The image and the language are linked, which is half the point. Even the title of the book is a linguistic joke.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Ok, here is one particular scene that irritated me To George, It looks like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, that's his perception/interpretation. But this is a book released in 1986, when Bozo was a niche character at best and Clarabell hadn't been a thing for over 20 years. King's both showing George's interpretation of what he's seeing (the bit about George not being sure of Clarabell's gender being a clear indication of that), *and* describing it to the reader who might have no loving idea what Clarabell looks like. quote:" There is no point to repeating the exact same description. But...it's not the exact same description. It's different. The hair isn't red anymore, it's orange. The whole point of this is to illustrate that It's appearance is malleable, open to interpretation based on the observer's associations. George doesn't interpret it as Ronald because it doesn't *look* like Ronald because Ronald doesn't exist in George's mind. To George, it's Bozo. To this other guy, who is familiar with Ronald but probably not with Clarabell, it looks like Ronald. I'd agree with you that King has his share of shortcomings as a writer, but this is a pretty bad example of them. It certainly at least servers a purpose and has a point.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:20
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Phanatic posted:To George, It looks like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, that's his perception/interpretation. But this is a book released in 1986, when Bozo was a niche character at best and Clarabell hadn't been a thing for over 20 years. King's both showing George's interpretation of what he's seeing (the bit about George not being sure of Clarabell's gender being a clear indication of that), *and* describing it to the reader who might have no loving idea what Clarabell looks like. When have you ever looked at a clown and consciously thought "wow, this clown looks exactly like a cross between these two other clowns?" Clowns look like Clowns. Even a six year old child would not look at a clown and go "wow this looks like these two particular widely understood pop culture clowns" the child would go "Oh its a clown." And even if you want to try and say that its totally normal for a child to do that, why would an adult man 30 years later still go "wow, it looks like a cross between Bozo and Ronald" quote:But...it's not the exact same description. It's different. The hair isn't red anymore, it's orange. The whole point of this is to illustrate that It's appearance is malleable, open to interpretation based on the observer's associations. George doesn't interpret it as Ronald because it doesn't *look* like Ronald because Ronald doesn't exist in George's mind. To George, it's Bozo. To this other guy, who is familiar with Ronald but probably not with Clarabell, it looks like Ronald. Even if we granted him all of that, its still exceptionally clumsy. If he wanted the reader to grasp that the clown can take different appearances based on the observer, why would he focus on red/orange hair. Red and orange hair are practically synonyms. Hell, orange hair is often conventionally referred to as red hair in general. Why make the crux of the focus on the malleability something that most readers would not even notice as malleable. And you're missing the point of the why the Ronald thing is redundant. King already said in the original description that if George knew who Ronald was he might compare him to Ronald. It serves no point to have a later character than compare him to Ronald because it doesn't tell us anything we weren't told in the earlier description.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:54
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Mel Mudkiper posted:When have you ever looked at a clown and consciously thought "wow, this clown looks exactly like a cross between these two other clowns?"  So... now.
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Sep 13, 2017 21:29
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fishmech posted:
Not really?   Bozo's hair sure, but that's about it. I'm glad you think of those clowns when you see Tim Curry's clown make-up, still doesn't really justify the flaws in the passages mentioned.
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Sep 13, 2017 21:36
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