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I finished the Outsider a little while ago. And I just have to say outsider? Barely know her
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Jul 3, 2023 00:33
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Continuing a conversation from the last page, but getting picked up by fangoria has really, really ruined the kingcast for me. They went from nerding out with like Bryan Fuller or Mike Flanagan over king to non-stop "rando with a movie coming up stops by to do a promo of their latest release and then talking for 4 minutes about a half remembered king adaptation."
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Jul 3, 2023 02:21
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e: n/m
Ragle Gumm fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 03:13
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joepinetree posted:Continuing a conversation from the last page, but getting picked up by fangoria has really, really ruined the kingcast for me. They went from nerding out with like Bryan Fuller or Mike Flanagan over king to non-stop "rando with a movie coming up stops by to do a promo of their latest release and then talking for 4 minutes about a half remembered king adaptation." yeah, you gotta be real picky with the guests. Matt Fraction is the only one I try to tune into.
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Jul 3, 2023 03:48
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quoting from the "what'd you just finish" thread cause someone there advised that i join you all here:landgrabber posted:oh hey speaking of early stephen king: really liked the almost gothic nature of that book, super emotional and kind of full of dread. i also liked the epistolary stuff-- i read House of Leaves recently and enjoyed the citations/quotations of stuff that doesn't exist in that book, and in Carrie as well. if anyone wants to rec some other stuff, king or otherwise, that's kind of similar, i'm all ears. from what i gather, it seems like Misery and the early richard bachman books are kind of on that same path. other books i like a lot are The Bell Jar and Great Expectations -- i'm in my early 20s "getting back into reading" phase after reading stuff in school kind of made me stop reading for a while. lots of emotion and characterization is a huge thing for me. for a while i've been searching for a good transgressive novel but with women at the center of it-- i got a little bit of that vibe from Carrie, though i kind of imagine that that's not a theme stephen king kept exploring (though i could be wrong!)
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Jul 3, 2023 04:41
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landgrabber posted:quoting from the "what'd you just finish" thread cause someone there advised that i join you all here: Small town shittiness is kind of king's expertise. Though I do have to warn you: King is not the best writer of women, especially early king. In a lot of the stories, the main female character is just the young woman the middle aged writer is banging. So here's a list of recommendations that touches on some of the themes you mention: lovely small town: It Christine Salem's Lot The mist Cycle of the Werewolf lovely parents: It Pet Sematary The Shining Women protagonists: Dolores Claiborne Gerald's Game The Girl who loved Tom Gordon If I had to pick my three favorites, I'd say they are Misery, It and the Long Walk, though only It would have one the themes you've identified. I do have to warn you though, starting to read King late is quite interesting, because in many ways it is very conventional, but because he set the convention. Like, you read salem's lot, look at the publication date, and realize that like half of all the vampire fiction since then is influenced if not outright rips off King. So not a lot of it is going to be transgressive. joepinetree fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 05:27
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landgrabber posted:quoting from the "what'd you just finish" thread cause someone there advised that i join you all here: Pet Sematary. It's more of an investment, but if you get into the Dark Tower series I bet you'd love Wizard and Glass (book 4).
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Jul 3, 2023 05:30
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joepinetree posted:Small town shittiness is kind of king's expertise. Though I do have to warn you: King is not the best writer of women, especially early king. In a lot of the stories, the main female character is just the young woman the middle aged writer is banging. i mean transgressive almost in a tonal sense, acknowledging a lot of lovely things about the world and kind of living in them for a little bit. in the aesthetic or tonal sense like Less Than Zero or Fight Club or something. i kind of picked up on stephen king not being the best writer of women since every time a woman is shown in Carrie he can't help but talk about her breasts. i liked the book a lot regardless of that because the women still have depth and good characterization-- i suspect a lot of people kind of make that same bargain with him, or even if the women are written badly, the thrilling aspect is still excellent, that sort of thing.
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Jul 3, 2023 05:48
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Dr. Faustus posted:I hope you enjoy it. I recall one scene in the novel that made the hairs on my arms stand up, which sticks with me today. Can you post it in spoiler tags? Curious if it's the one I'm thinking of
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Jul 3, 2023 11:58
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joepinetree posted:Small town shittiness is kind of king's expertise. Though I do have to warn you: King is not the best writer of women, especially early king. In a lot of the stories, the main female character is just the young woman the middle aged writer is banging. Rose Madder has a woman protagonist and King tackles themes of domestic violence head on. It's not the greatest but many people consider it a gem for those reasons. I read it when I was on house arrest in rehab and had limited access to books. I don't know if I would have finished it otherwise, it's a little long and seems to lose itself toward the end. Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale.
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Jul 3, 2023 17:40
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King had a sudden interest in feminism around the turn of the 90s, and seemed to be trying to actively reform how he wrote female characters there. Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are the fruit of this, and they're still a bit messy in places but you can see him grappling with stuff. For all its twist is ridiculously silly, I really like Gerald's Game for that. It's essentially a novel about a woman in a quietly abusive relationship getting the chance to realise it. It also has some of the "locked room thriller" elements that make Misery such a good book. IT (the novel, not the subject of the previous sentence!) is also extremely good, maybe King's best novel - despite some late-in-the-game weirdness that is jarringly dissonant with the rest of the book, I think it has the highest concentration of emotional and social realism of anything he's ever written, and it's also a page turner because everything he writes is. You have the right impression of King, though - for every fantastic thing he does, there's something kinda weird, usually. He's such a unique talent that I think most fans take the rough with the smooth. For books by other authors with gritty, transgressive themes that centre women, I'd recommend Kindred by Octavia Butler (a black woman in the 1970s finds herself uncontrollably time travelling to the antebellum south, where she must figure out how to fix history in a time and place that's totally hostile to her), In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (non-fiction about an abusive relationship, harrowing, haunting, excellent) or maybe The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (one of King's own major inspirations - it's from the 1950s, but it's an eerie psychological ghost story that set the template for the modern haunted house story). All different tones, but all masterpieces in their own ways. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 18:30
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Faustian bargains galore: -Pet Sematary -Thinner Scariest: -The Shining -'Salem's Lot Best plotted/crafted ripping yarns novels: -The Dead Zone -Firestarter Short stories: -Night Shift (I defy anyone who likes anything King has written to not enjoy the vast majority of these. Most or maybe even all were written and published before the man became famous and they hit with the power of a young writer at the peak of vision and ability, and hungry to boot. Children of the Corn is also a most extreme version of lovely small town story, too.) A story that is kind of the opposite of Carrie in terms of the protagonist being doomed by wrong parents, wrong setting is Apt Pupil from the Different Seasons novella collection. From what we can tell the kid's parents and home environment were fine, but there's just something wrong with HIM, he's a loving bad seed or something. It might be argued that he was fine but just got lost down the rabbit hole of Nazi atrocity obsession at an unforunate early age, but my feeling is always that he was drawn to those stories because of something already within him.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:15
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Android Blues posted:King had a sudden interest in feminism around the turn of the 90s, and seemed to be trying to actively reform how he wrote female characters there. Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are the fruit of this, and they're still a bit messy in places but you can see him grappling with stuff. I generally have this feeling of King as being the incarnation of "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit!" He generally seems to be on the right side of pretty much everything he's outspoken on, even if he's a bit of a grandpa at times. Also for my list of King novels that I would consider essentially flawless, from start to end, they'd be: Misery, The Shining, Firestarter and The Dead Zone. The Dead Zone in particular is insanely underrated as a great piece of writing. It's weird that it gets so little love and attention. Salem's Lot is good, but it seems to kind of bungle the middle. The vampire takeover suddenly snowballs in almost no time, like King realized he was running close to his maximum page count and needed to hurry things up and kill off as many people as possible to pare the cast down for the ending. IT is... it gets some very fair flak for that loving scene, but outside of that one bungle, I feel like it's a very strong hit. In particular the interludes where Hanlon researches the history of Derry are very strong. Mostly it seems to suffer a bit from King struggling with giving some of his characters a distinct personality and a few dangling threads that feel left over from a first draft. Stan, in particular, feels like he got written out because King wasn't sure where he was going with it, and there's a sudden found and lost thread where someone mentions Victor Criss apparently being afraid of how insane Henry is becoming and seeking out the protagonists for some kind of help, but it never comes up again despite being a potentially interesting thread.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:34
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BiggerBoat posted:Can you post it in spoiler tags? Curious if it's the one I'm thinking of HashtagGirlboss keep away from the spoilers please! I seem to remember one of Edgar's worst nights in Little Pink. No, not The Intruder, which is the chapter with the Perse outside and the dead guy inside with the manacle on his arm (that part I found just now looking through the book and it was damned good on re-read) but instead an earlier night. A bad thunderstorm. Edgar I think had a very bad night that ended with a visit by the two little girls. Perhaps when they wrote "Where our sister" on his canvas, or maybe not. And I think they left sandy footprints in the house. That had me shook in a way The Intruder maybe did or maybe did not, as I don't think that's the memory. It wasn't, as I recall, anything so definite as having the dead guy show up when Edgar flipped on the lights in the house to call Wireman. Again, I didn't remember any of that but instead found it in the book while searching for that stormy night. I scanned the book looking for the scene but failed, and found the other stuff instead. I gave up to come share what I have here and see if anyone can direct me to the bit I reacted so strongly to. I hope it's actually a thing. I'll look for it some more. Dr. Faustus fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 20:42
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PurpleXVI posted:I generally have this feeling of King as being the incarnation of "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit!" He generally seems to be on the right side of pretty much everything he's outspoken on, even if he's a bit of a grandpa at times. Yeah, agreed. His instincts are clearly towards equal rights and against prejudice, he just misses the mark sometimes. He's also clearly writing within the culture of his time. Some of his early work has unexamined racism, the unexamined sexism is a vein that varies in strength over the years, but unlike a lot of his peers in horror fiction he clearly always thinks that women are people. The most egregious outlier I can think of (and wild, given it's a late entry and decades after he first wrote a pretty right-on lesbian character in The Stand) is Doctor Sleep where one of the True Knot is an evil man-hating lesbian who has some inner monologue stuff that implies she's gay because she was sexually assaulted, which is a major black mark on an otherwise pretty good book. quote:IT is... it gets some very fair flak for that loving scene, but outside of that one bungle, I feel like it's a very strong hit. In particular the interludes where Hanlon researches the history of Derry are very strong. Mostly it seems to suffer a bit from King struggling with giving some of his characters a distinct personality and a few dangling threads that feel left over from a first draft. Stan, in particular, feels like he got written out because King wasn't sure where he was going with it, and there's a sudden found and lost thread where someone mentions Victor Criss apparently being afraid of how insane Henry is becoming and seeking out the protagonists for some kind of help, but it never comes up again despite being a potentially interesting thread. I feel like large parts of It are written towards the idea that something terrible and sexual happened in the sewers beneath Derry - there's so much foreshadowing around this, and the repressed memories plotline is clearly echoing Satanic Panic hysteria that would have been all over pop psych when King was writing the book. I think he'd always planned the sex scene, but in the initial planning it was meant to be a terrible thing that the protagonists didn't want to remember. Then at some point he switched tacks - there's a lot of stuff in the climax of the book about, "sex is good, actually, it's a divine union," whereas early on it's all puberty anxiety and sexual horror. There's also a lot of stuff in the first few acts of the book about homosexuality, homophobia and repressed homosexual desire, and there are a couple of moments between Bill and Richie and Bill and Eddie as kids that hint at that. It feels in places like that could be building to something, like maybe the sex scene was meant to involve everyone rather than being all about Bev, but it all drops away later on. I get the feeling he just didn't like the message he was sending about sexuality, or wanted to back off the gay subtext, and switched it around when much of the book was already written, but it comes off as jarringly dissonant because it's a group of children having their Divine Union in a sewer. It also completely alienates Bev by making her the fixture of this Beautiful Sex Ritual and dissolves a lot of the sense of the Losers Club as peers - for most of the book, Bev is one of King's strongest female characters, and then she winds up being a totally dehumanised fertility vessel beaming and gushing about how great it is that everyone hosed her in a sewer. The scene would borderline work if it was meant to be upsetting, and if the narration wasn't constantly hammering home how this nightmare gangbang is the greatest thing ever and the culmination of their unbreakable friendship. Honestly it's just amazing that the rest of the book is good enough to make up for that. It's a real achievement to write a novel so powerful it overcomes the most disastrous fifth act twist in the world.
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Jul 3, 2023 21:06
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PurpleXVI posted:Misery, The Shining, Firestarter and The Dead Zone. I'm so glad there's someone else who loves Firestarter in here. Such a great story and a bit ahead of its time in that the themes of people with special powers being sought by shady organizations for nefarious purposes kind of fit in with all the YA type of books and films that have been so popular the last decade or so. (See also The Fury which was actually made into a very good film that I hope most of you have seen. Very much the same time period and I can't recall if King kind of ripped off The Fury or the other way around, no problem even if King was the thief because Firestarter is so damned good.) It's bothered me that the Drew Barrymore movie was so thoroughly mediocre, and I got all excited when it got remade during this era when special effects could really do right by this story, and then I watch it and it's an even more muddled mess than the older movie. Bleh. I really hope the lovely films haven't turned too many people off reading the book, and haven't closed the door on an actual decent film version being made someday.
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Jul 3, 2023 23:14
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firestarter has one of king’s best endings
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Jul 3, 2023 23:38
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I know King has done a lot of interviews. Has he ever been asked about that scene in IT?
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Jul 4, 2023 00:45
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Found it. From page 280 of the 2008 Scribner 1st Edition hardcover Duma Key, which according to my note in the back cover I read Monday - Thursday, 01/28/2008-01/31/2008. I'm guessing I was working that week when I had lots of time to read at work. It's Chapter 10, The Bubble Reputation, section xix. Ok. No wonder it was so hard to find. It's over in a scant two pages, as Edgar is painting Wireman Looks West: Edgar is painting Wireman to fix his vision, which he lost during a suicide attempt with a .22 pistol to the temple. He's painting and a storm rolls in, and in his frenzy to paint he feels his lost right arm come back to him. The two little girls appear at the bottom of his stairs and, holding hands, they start up the stairs towards him. I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. I thought: Apple, orange. I thought, I win, you win. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and surely Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors. I knew where they had come from. They had crawled out of the shells. They started up the stairs toward me, hand in hand. Thunder exploded a mile overhead. I tried to scream. I couldn't. I thought, I am not seeing this. I thought, I am. "I can do this," one of the girls said. She spoke in the voice of the shells. "It was red," the other girl said. She spoke in the voice of the shells. They were halfway up now. Their heads were little more than skulls with wet hair draggling down the sides. "Sit in the char," they said together, like girls chanting a skip-rope rhyme . . . but they spoke in the voice of the shells. "Sit in the burn." They reached for me with terrible fish-belly fingers. I fainted at the head of the stairs. King musta hit me just right with this. I don't need the gross-out to get shook, just the right hint of it. Kinda like the time I was 14 reading Pet Sematary and was sure Gage was in my kitchen holding a knife so I didn't look over my shoulder for awhile.
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Jul 4, 2023 01:04
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BiggerBoat posted:I know King has done a lot of interviews. Has he ever been asked about that scene in IT? I don't think it has ever come up in interviews like that, since most interviews tend to be PG affairs and so how do you ask about children's orgies? But he did say something through his now inactive message boards: https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/steves-explanation-for-losers-sex-scene.444/
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Jul 4, 2023 01:05
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joepinetree posted:I don't think it has ever come up in interviews like that, since most interviews tend to be PG affairs and so how do you ask about children's orgies? What's crazy is that a couple hours ago I reread the first couple pages of On Writing for the first time in 15 years and he spends the first page talking about how he barely remembers his childhood and his few memories are random blotches in no discernable order.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:01
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And in Danse Macabre he writes that he may have witnessed a childhood friend get hit by a train but has no actual memory of it.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:08
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That’s loving traumatic. I can’t blaine him for not remembering.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:10
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i think in a weird way it's kind of beautiful that he was able to write an entire few novels out of that traumatized subconscious, and have it be coherent. i also have CPTSD so it gives me a bit of hope as an artist personally
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Jul 4, 2023 08:18
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At the risk of over sharing I’ll keep this very high level, but that resonates for me I found It in the library when I was 12 shortly after the death of my own younger brother, not entirely by accident because I had already started reading King at that point, but in a bad place with an awful lot of unprocessed grief, but not really intentionally either, I just pulled it of the shelf and sat on the floor and read the first chapter, and I probably read it a dozen times after that through my teens, although I think I only read that first chapter once, it’s really hard to express how much that book meant to me but to this day the passage where Hanlon and his father cry together over the death of his mother, such a small minor part of the narrative, but reading that part was the first time I let myself cry from months of built up grief I’d been pushing down It’s really hard to explain but that book was one of the most emotionally resonate things I’ve ever read, mainly because of the time and the place I found it, I’m sure, and one of these days I really intend to go back and reread it, but also I’m kind of scared to pick at the old scars so I keep putting it off, it’s funny because thinking about that was why I decided to dip back into King after years of not reading him Anyway and regardless I’ve started Duma Key and so far I’m into it, I’m going to resist the urge to post anymore here until I finish but I’m looking forward to coming back and checking dr faustus’s spoiler Happy fourth thanks for reading 
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Jul 4, 2023 15:17
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I think what King was (clumsily) trying to do was equate losing one's virginity with ascending into adulthood and I doubt much more thought went into it than that. But there were admittedly much better ways that could have been written and it's telling that all the adaptations of IT wisely just pretended that scene doesn't exist. It's not only distasteful and out of place, but you don't even really need it to demonstrate "maturity". Just overcoming your fears, bravely standing up to them and abandoning childhood crutches and security blankets in and of itself is/was more than enough. I GET what he was TRYING to do there, at least in a sense. We all feel like we've turned a page when that magic moment happens and we approach the next day with different kinds of eyes and feel more grown up and adult but, jesus christ, a loving gangbang? Alcohol, man.
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Jul 5, 2023 00:36
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Breadallelogram posted:And in Danse Macabre he writes that he may have witnessed a childhood friend get hit by a train but has no actual memory of it. I know it's basically how creativity works, but I always get a kick out of seeing how these things inform someone's work in later life. I think King's story is one he heard from his mother who said that he came home upset because a boy had been hit by a train, but he was also like 6 years old and has no recollection of it. Obviously it's where THE BODY comes from. Similarly as a child of about the same age David Lynch was playing in the garden with his brother when suddenly there was a naked woman walking past them who was visibly dazed and in distress. Lynch wasn't sure why but he just started crying. And then decades later used the imagery in BLUE VELVET. Finally, a young Wes Craven was going to bed when he looked out his window and saw a man wearing a fedora stood under a streetlight but looking back at him. Craven said he hid for a good 5 or 10 minutes but when he looked back the man was still looking up at his room. Between that and a story he read about African Men from the same place who had been dying in their sleep he created A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.
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Jul 6, 2023 15:55
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It's funny you mention Lynch. I read King's On Writing and Lynch's Catching the Big Fish within a few months of each other and came away with the understanding that both those guys have essentially the same process: come up with one good idea and just start riffing until you have a finished book/movie.
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Jul 7, 2023 03:03
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just finished Rage (because the Bachman books seemed interesting) and uhhhh that was not for me i will try The Long Walk, though, at the very least
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Jul 8, 2023 02:20
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Agreed. Rage is hard to read in todays climate where gun violence has claimed so many young lives. It’s nice to escape the subject with The Long Walk
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Jul 8, 2023 02:27
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Rage also just sucks. Pretty easy my the worst King book I’ve read
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Jul 8, 2023 02:41
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oldpainless posted:Agreed. Rage is hard to read in todays climate where gun violence has claimed so many young lives. It’s nice to escape the subject with The Long Walk the main value i get out it is that it is really interesting just how much it's Carrie's evil twin. carrie has so many feminine motifs and themes (menstruation, her relationship with her mother, who seems to view women as sort of inherently impure) and of course all of the religious stuff and symbolism. since there's telekinesis, it feels a little otherworldly, it's really interesting in that way, there're poetic turns of phrase ("frog among swans", "jezebel fell from the tower and the dogs came and licked up her blood"), and carrie herself is very very innocent. a clear victim of circumstances and having the wrong parent at the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong classmates. her inner monologue, when you get glimpses of it, is very childlike. rage has the weird freud/oedipal thing going on. charlie is as dissociated at 17 as so many adults are after sitting on bad childhoods for decades. in lieu of poetic turns of phrase, he speaks and thinks really crudely. and he's kind of just a guy. he's kind of just "what if a normal loser was crazy?" so it's really interesting to me from that angle, but i don't enjoy it on its own as a work. i was kind of uncomfortable with myself for how much i sympathized with carrie. i can kind of see why she snapped. felt so much like she deserved better, and i saw aspects of my own life in hers for sure. rage made me feel normal being like "oh okay dude. gently caress off"
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Jul 8, 2023 03:09
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I was pretty surprised that Carrie was like, King’s first published novel, it’s kinda on the higher end of what I’ve read of him but I guess it’s a relatively short read where you know from pretty early on in broad strokes how the story goes down so King gave himself an out so he doesn’t just fizzle out at the endgame stretch. Also surprising: Salem’s Lot being one of the earliest ones, I guess the end stretch where most of the remaining cast die pretty quickly is kinda sudden, but even after multiple rereads it still does creeping, gradual horror really well, and even if the deaths themselves are sudden the last stretch where the vampire people become lucid enough to start tricking the handful of humans in town is great.
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Jul 8, 2023 03:18
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landgrabber posted:the main value i get out it is that it is really interesting just how much it's Carrie's evil twin. That's kind of the difference between King and Bachman. His writing in the Bachman books is much more crude and nihilistic. I read Rage a few years ago and could not believe it exists. It's good that he let it go out of print. I've read The Long Walk, Road Work, and The Running Man since. They all have a kind of a similar dirty, grounded tone, but did not leave me shocked and appalled at their existence.
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Jul 8, 2023 05:03
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Seem to recall King saying Rage was one of the earliest stories he wrote, and that he thinks it's pretty much just nihilistic teenage trash now that he's very much not proud of.
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Jul 8, 2023 06:09
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Breadallelogram posted:That's kind of the difference between King and Bachman. His writing in the Bachman books is much more crude and nihilistic. what's interesting to me about it all is that he said he never liked carrie white all that much as a character and called her a proto harris/klebold, and yet that book does feel sympathetic toward her at times, even if he does describe her as a fat toad or whatever. rage feels really forgiving to charlie all things considered, thought maybe that's supposed to be the disturbing aspect. it feels like juvenilia. the bit where the kid rants about the cheap pencils felt like kevin smith dialog.
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Jul 8, 2023 07:32
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Gandalf21 posted:Rage also just sucks. Pretty easy my the worst King book I’ve read Check out this dude right here who never read Cell
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Jul 8, 2023 12:08
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BiggerBoat posted:Check out this dude right here who never read Cell I have read Cell, I stand by Rage being way worse. At least Rage is short though We’ll see how feel whenever I get around the Cell again in my very slow ongoing chronological King read through I started like 6 years ago
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Jul 8, 2023 15:12
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One thing I appreciate about King is his ability to look back on his work and acknowledge when it didn't hit. His feelings about Rage are a good indicator of his character - he thinks it was bad, he doesn't want it to be reprinted, and he describes it as the flawed product of a different cultural moment. Less high stakes, there's a very funny bit in the introduction to one of his short story collections where he talks about Needful Things, and how when he was writing it, he had a real feeling it was gonna be one of his most meaningful and incisive works, a biting satire of American consumerism that also had important things to say about cultural divisions in America, an Important Literary Novel. Then he reread it a couple of years after publication and was like, "man, this actually isn't great". That always tickled me. I can absolutely imagine the feelings he had on both sides of that coin.
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Jul 8, 2023 15:22
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Currently going through Everything's Eventual and I'm enjoying a lot of it. though for all the tension he expertly crafts with the autopsy story, he kills it with that silly "poo poo you'd think of in 6th grade" ending... I did like Ministry of Information too, it started off as white boomer racist describing the vaguely Latin American villains but at least it's vaguely positive about communist guerrillas and anti-contra lol... kinda wonder why the eponymous story hasn't been adapted into a movie, it's kind of like an American Ultra type sitch except better. "Dinky" is just a great name and somehow doesnt deflate the horror of the situation. I'd love to see someone do a Dollar Baby deal for it and just go straight period piece. DINKY MAIL SENT. My friend recommended I read the Dark Tower series next but also that I should skip the first novel as it's kinda ehhh college age King. He said I wouldn't really miss anything. yall agree? I feel like I'm up enough on King lore, I haven't read It but I did read The Stand and I recognized the kind of annoying Derry stuff in 11/22/63. Maybe I should read The Shining next, I heard it isn't actually like 1200 pages. Gonna be bummed out when I run out of King's short stories tbh, think Everything Eventual is my last one. I've always adored Shirley Jackson and can see and appreciate King's admiration for her writing and how much she influenced him, which is why I feel like it's a shame he wasn't like...predominantly a short story writer. Sure, sure, a lot of big (literally) novels wouldn't exist, a lot of movies consequently wouldn't exist, a lot of IP wouldn't exist, but I think I like King BEST when he's putting out this variety of short stories with various tones, often riffing on horror concepts. He has a touch for occasionally nailing the sort of unsettling and unconventional "horror" vibes of Jackson stories that'd stay with you ("The Witch", "The Possibility of Evil"). Sometimes he just has a bizarre and juvenile concept or just gets struck by a pretty simple What If premise, and often he just flies with it and actually gets you invested. Less money and attention in short stories though, of course.
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Jul 8, 2023 16:43
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