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I've misplaced my copy of Night Shift but I definitely want to reread the stories in it; been a long time for a lot of them (pretty sure The Bogeyman is from that collection?).
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Sep 2, 2023 17:50
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Finished The Shining, and I think it's one of my favorite Stephen King books. Ironically, the book has a happier ending than the film; Hallorann lives and Jack has a moment of redemption (I interpret the Jack Torrance-thing turning the croque mallet on itself as a final act of penance on Jack's part). One thing I don't like about the film is that it sets up a great character with Scatman Crothers only for him to immediately get axed in the back as soon as he steps foot inside the Overlook. yeah i liked the books ending. i am always mixed on how king writes his monsters and The Shining. like i think pet sematary does it but i don't hate the personalized monsters with gaunt from needful things. on The Shining i am sorta mixed. i like that idea that the hotel is sorta of gestalt hive mind of assholes and debauchery who just want to keep the party rolling forever. i also like that its clear danny wasnt the first shining kid it tried to absorb(i believe the book says that at least one of gradys kids was shined too and tried to fight back) while its never very scary, i do like that hotel jack at the end isnt "scary" to danny. danny is afraid that his father will hurt him, not a bunch of lecherious rich ghouls wearing his dad as skin coat, i like that the ghouls also can't really process that and just keep making the jack puppet say random poo poo his memory in some vain hope that danny is afraid of it. idk. its dumb but i like it. i also finally read libarary policeman and like its interesting. i like the build up more then any of the payoffs.
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Sep 4, 2023 21:13
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah i liked the books ending. i am always mixed on how king writes his monsters and The Shining. like i think pet sematary does it but i don't hate the personalized monsters with gaunt from needful things. on The Shining i am sorta mixed. i like that idea that the hotel is sorta of gestalt hive mind of assholes and debauchery who just want to keep the party rolling forever. i also like that its clear danny wasnt the first shining kid it tried to absorb(i believe the book says that at least one of gradys kids was shined too and tried to fight back) while its never very scary, i do like that hotel jack at the end isnt "scary" to danny. danny is afraid that his father will hurt him, not a bunch of lecherious rich ghouls wearing his dad as skin coat, i like that the ghouls also can't really process that and just keep making the jack puppet say random poo poo his memory in some vain hope that danny is afraid of it. idk. its dumb but i like it. The way Book Jack has a final, loving (if obviously horrifying and painful) moment with his son before destroying his own face and "killing himself" so Danny knows it isn't his father who's trying to kill him, is unforgettable for me. The Shining was the first King book I ever read and it's still one of my favorites. The audiobook is phenomenal, by the way. Would recommend. In fact, I might re-listen to it.
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Sep 4, 2023 21:32
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NikkolasKing posted:The way Book Jack has a final, loving (if obviously horrifying and painful) moment with his son before destroying his own face and "killing himself" so Danny knows it isn't his father who's trying to kill him, is unforgettable for me. yeah thats parts great. my first king book was pet sematary.
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Sep 4, 2023 21:46
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My first King book was when my mom felt like "It" was a good bedtime story for me as a kid. She did edit out some of the horny stuff, but welcome to something that defined my childhood nightmares.
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Sep 4, 2023 23:15
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Oh, god, apparently there is a Pet Sematary prequel going straight to streaming next month, starring david duchony. I wonder if it will manage to be worse than the firestarter remake.
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Sep 5, 2023 00:09
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PurpleXVI posted:My first King book was when my mom felt like "It" was a good bedtime story for me as a kid. She did edit out some of the horny stuff, but welcome to something that defined my childhood nightmares. Mine was The Dark Half which I read for a 7th grade book report. It seems nuts but I was a freak reader when I was young, I was reading stuff like Chronicles of Narnia and Dragonlance/Forgotten Realms stuff when I was in second grade (after skipping first grade) Ahhhh back when everyone thought I was gonna do something successful with my life. I sure showed them!
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Sep 5, 2023 00:17
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PurpleXVI posted:My first King book was when my mom felt like "It" was a good bedtime story for me as a kid. She did edit out some of the horny stuff, but welcome to something that defined my childhood nightmares. I was in fifth grade and asked my mom for a Stephen King book, and my first King was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I haven't read it since then, and don't remember anything of it, anyways.
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Sep 5, 2023 00:36
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I got everything I could out of my middle school's library and the local public library when I got into King. I don't remember what was first, but firestarter, cujo, it, the shining, and needful things were all amongst them. I put off the gunslinger for a while until I had read basically everything else I could get, then got the first three books from there. I remember my parents giving me nightmares and dreamscapes for Christmas around then, and then my uncle sent me wizard and glass (which was freshly out in paperback) because my library didn't have it yet.
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Sep 5, 2023 00:48
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NikkolasKing posted:The way Book Jack has a final, loving (if obviously horrifying and painful) moment with his son before destroying his own face and "killing himself" so Danny knows it isn't his father who's trying to kill him, is unforgettable for me. Yeah, I'm slowly re-reading it for the first time but would highly recommend the audiobook as well. That and The Stand and IT are all great audiobooks.
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Sep 5, 2023 02:33
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joepinetree posted:Oh, god, apparently there is a Pet Sematary prequel going straight to streaming next month, starring david duchony. I wonder if it will manage to be worse than
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Sep 5, 2023 02:33
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah i liked the books ending. i am always mixed on how king writes his monsters and The Shining. like i think pet sematary does it but i don't hate the personalized monsters with gaunt from needful things. on The Shining i am sorta mixed. i like that idea that the hotel is sorta of gestalt hive mind of assholes and debauchery who just want to keep the party rolling forever. i also like that its clear danny wasnt the first shining kid it tried to absorb(i believe the book says that at least one of gradys kids was shined too and tried to fight back) while its never very scary, i do like that hotel jack at the end isnt "scary" to danny. danny is afraid that his father will hurt him, not a bunch of lecherious rich ghouls wearing his dad as skin coat, i like that the ghouls also can't really process that and just keep making the jack puppet say random poo poo his memory in some vain hope that danny is afraid of it. idk. its dumb but i like it. I'm not sure if this is more of an analysis of the film or book, but there's a suggestion that one reason Jack might have been receptive to the gestalt of rich assholes was that he may have shone as a younger kid. But because of the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father, Jack lost his shine. That's another thing I really like about the book: the underlying theme of how abuse and alcohol addiction perpetuate a cycle of misery. Jack's father was a miserable alcoholic; Jack in a lot of ways became his father and made many of the same mistakes with Danny and Wendy. One last subtlety I noticed in the book: in the epilogue, there isn't any indication that Danny is still shining. Maybe that was an oversight by King, but I like to think that the trauma from what Danny experienced at the Overlook may have dampened his ability to shine in the same way as he had before..
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Sep 5, 2023 15:35
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I'm not sure if this is more of an analysis of the film or book, but there's a suggestion that one reason Jack might have been receptive to the gestalt of rich assholes was that he may have shone as a younger kid. But because of the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father, Jack lost his shine. That's another thing I really like about the book: the underlying theme of how abuse and alcohol addiction perpetuate a cycle of misery. Jack's father was a miserable alcoholic; Jack in a lot of ways became his father and made many of the same mistakes with Danny and Wendy. That's a pretty interesting take on Jack that I hadn't really considered. The epilogue point through is incorrect, if you want to take Dr. Sleep into account as while Danny loses the strength of his shine just due to aging, he still becomes an alcoholic trying to keep the shine muted . Man -- the Danny parts of that book are so good, it sucks that the rest of it isn't.
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Sep 5, 2023 15:50
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I really like the idea of the villains in Doctor Sleep, particularly because they're a sort of redemptive take on the prejudiced "evil magical travellers" trope (one that King used himself back in Thinner). They roam around snatching up children, casting hexes, and subjecting them to awful rituals, but instead of being racialised outsider figures, they're wealthy middle-class retirees who look like incredibly mundane white people. I think the really weak parts are the evil lesbian character, and of course when the book devolves into a gunfight between our rootin' tootin' heroes and the supernatural monsters, as so many otherwise pretty good latter day King books do in the climax. The opening chapters with Danny growing up and getting sober are really strong.
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Sep 5, 2023 15:55
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Android Blues posted:I really like the idea of the villains in Doctor Sleep, particularly because they're a sort of redemptive take on the prejudiced "evil magical travellers" trope (one that King used himself back in Thinner). They roam around snatching up children, casting hexes, and subjecting them to awful rituals, but instead of being racialised outsider figures, they're wealthy middle-class retirees who look like incredibly mundane white people. I think the really weak parts are the evil lesbian character, and of course when the book devolves into a gunfight between our rootin' tootin' heroes and the supernatural monsters, as so many otherwise pretty good latter day King books do in the climax. The opening chapters with Danny growing up and getting sober are really strong. The idea of the Knot is great, and I would have loved them as villains in a separate book, just not as a sequel to The Shining. As much as I love King's stuff, his broader mythos of shining people/breakers/psychic vampires/dark tower stuff weakens some of his earlier books. Flagg, for instance, is a much scarier villain in The Stand than he ends up being after King decided to merge him with Marten. Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 16:03
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I'm not sure if this is more of an analysis of the film or book, but there's a suggestion that one reason Jack might have been receptive to the gestalt of rich assholes was that he may have shone as a younger kid. But because of the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father, Jack lost his shine. That's another thing I really like about the book: the underlying theme of how abuse and alcohol addiction perpetuate a cycle of misery. Jack's father was a miserable alcoholic; Jack in a lot of ways became his father and made many of the same mistakes with Danny and Wendy. maybe. i feel like the hotel tries to use "weak" or at least unfufilled folks as its avatars. it knows that jack wants to be king poo poo author and it wants to uses his various inadiqueses like him being pissed at the dickhead manager of the hotel and the school throwing him under the bus and his dad. i think its more the latter then the former id say read pet sematary next. its probably my favorite. that or needful things. needful things isn't his best but i sorta like how its just a lovely small town getting imploded by some monster. but then again. i am very big sucker for the "deal with the devil" trope
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Sep 5, 2023 19:25
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Eason the Fifth posted:The idea of the Knot is great, and I would have loved them as villains in a separate book, just not as a sequel to The Shining. As much as I love King's stuff, his broader mythos of shining people/breakers/psychic vampires/dark tower stuff weakens some of his earlier books. Flagg, for instance, is a much scarier villain in The Stand than he ends up being after King decided to merge him with Marten. Dr. Sleep was an OK read (haven't seen the movie) but I agree that the True Knot doesn't really fit at all even though they're decent enough villians.
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Sep 6, 2023 11:30
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Dapper_Swindler posted:needful things isn't his best but i sorta like how its just a lovely small town getting imploded by some monster. but then again. i am very big sucker for the "deal with the devil" trope The best version of Needful Things is a short story by Matheson called 'The Distributor'.
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Sep 6, 2023 12:04
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Khizan posted:The best version of Needful Things is a short story by Matheson called 'The Distributor'. What's the elevator pitch? Because I would love a version of Needful Things that didn't suck.
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Sep 6, 2023 13:04
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PurpleXVI posted:What's the elevator pitch? Because I would love a version of Needful Things that didn't suck. this. i wouldnt say it sucked but i kinda went on for too long and it kinda didnt have an interesting ending. i don't hate that gaunt just wanted the town to murder itself joker style and i like that he started breaking character more and more but like ehh i will say the movie version is loving awful and it just doesnt work and the ending is stupidly sorkin ish.
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Sep 6, 2023 13:19
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Dapper_Swindler posted:this. i wouldnt say it sucked but i kinda went on for too long and it kinda didnt have an interesting ending. i don't hate that gaunt just wanted the town to murder itself joker style and i like that he started breaking character more and more but like ehh i will say the movie version is loving awful and it just doesnt work and the ending is stupidly sorkin ish. My issue with Needful Things is that for a story about "demon man gives you things you want" to be interesting, it needs to rely on the demon man technically telling the truth. But then it turns out that either A) you didn't really consider what you wanted("what, you're telling me that when I'm irresistible to women, the women I turn down will become desperate and try to kill me because if they can't have me, no one can? that isn't what I wanted!"), B) you didn't read the fine print("ah, yes, I will make you immortal, but you never asked for eternal youth, have fun being locked in your own immobile, unsensing corpse forever, fool!") or C) you thought the price would be worth paying at first, but it turned out not to be. Gaunt is just going "hee hoo hee hoo I'm scamming you lmao" by giving people things that aren't even what they appear to be, he's literally just giving them rotten trash that looks like it's worth something. The good part of Needful Things is the price tag on what he sells, which dovetails very nicely with C in the "I thought the price was minor, but oh gently caress I did not consider the potential ramifications of what I was doing." Some of them are almost there, too, like the guy who gets the perfect gambling predictor. You could easily have his secrecy and need to keep gambling drive him insane and perhaps cause him to commit a murder or two to keep the secret, rather than just quietly getting rich and paying all his debts.
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Sep 6, 2023 13:47
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PurpleXVI posted:My issue with Needful Things is that for a story about "demon man gives you things you want" to be interesting, it needs to rely on the demon man technically telling the truth. Yeah, the cultural idea of what Needful Things is (a shop that sells Faustian bargains packaged up as bric-a-brac) is more interesting than what actual Needful Things is (Satan uses enchanted garbage to mind control people into being evil for 500 pages). King wanted it to be a metaphor for American consumerism - you're trading your life away for material knick-knacks that seem important, but actually they're worthless garbage - and it kinda hits that, but even he acknowledges that the metaphor isn't super incisive in practise.
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Sep 6, 2023 13:59
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PurpleXVI posted:My issue with Needful Things is that for a story about "demon man gives you things you want" to be interesting, it needs to rely on the demon man technically telling the truth. yeah i agree with that. Gaunt feels more like daemon joker trying to pull "one bad day" bullshit on a town rather then some Gaunter o dimm type who plays the very long game with tons of different people.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:56
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The US Amazon page for Holly is getting review-bombed by angry Trumpers irate about how their hero takes a bashing in the book apparently (have not read it yet but it fits with King's worldview and is hardly surprising for a book set during Covid times in America).
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Sep 6, 2023 18:29
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Drimble Wedge posted:The US Amazon page for Holly is getting review-bombed by angry Trumpers irate about how their hero takes a bashing in the book apparently (have not read it yet but it fits with King's worldview and is hardly surprising for a book set during Covid times in America). King's one of those novelists where he's so wildly popular that there's gotta be a tonne of right wing people who love him even though his views have been basically liberal the whole time. Strange to think about. Maybe comes from an era where people made politics less of their identity.
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Sep 6, 2023 18:43
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Android Blues posted:King's one of those novelists where he's so wildly popular that there's gotta be a tonne of right wing people who love him even though his views have been basically liberal the whole time. Strange to think about. Maybe comes from an era where people made politics less of their identity. God, remember Under The Dome which was basically "Republicans are corrupt rear end in a top hat racist morons: the book"? How can anyone have read that and not caught on yet?
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Sep 6, 2023 19:06
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Android Blues posted:King's one of those novelists where he's so wildly popular that there's gotta be a tonne of right wing people who love him even though his views have been basically liberal the whole time. Strange to think about. Maybe comes from an era where people made politics less of their identity. yeah poo poo like that is funny. his books poo poo all over the reagan era moral majority types in often very harsh ways. those are the people who probably tried to ban his books so yeah lol. PurpleXVI posted:God, remember Under The Dome which was basically "Republicans are corrupt rear end in a top hat racist morons: the book"? How can anyone have read that and not caught on yet? is that any good? i remember reading the twist and while its not bad, i kinda find it dumb.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:17
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Dapper_Swindler posted:is that any good? i remember reading the twist and while its not bad, i kinda find it dumb. It has good parts. Where it comes apart a bit is A) King's politics, while sympathetic and generally pretty correct, are never anything but insanely hamfisted and obvious, and sometimes it gets a bit much even if you agree with him and B) the ending. It's one of those King endings where things come to a happy close for (some) people just because they wish for it really hard. Which I've always felt was one of his worse habits as a writer. EDIT: Oh and I almost forgot, it has some sexual violence in it which I can absolutely see some people not wanting to read.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:19
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah poo poo like that is funny. his books poo poo all over the reagan era moral majority types in often very harsh ways. those are the people who probably tried to ban his books so yeah lol. It started off really good and then kinda went downhill. I haven’t read it in like 10 years but I’d say it’s worth a read.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:20
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PurpleXVI posted:It has good parts. I dont hate the idea if i remember correctly, the dome is created by a bunch of alien/godling/Q type kids who were bored and lovely but one feels bad and a lady begs for them to undo the poo poo, so it does. i like that ideas espcially as someone who was in the shittier part of the net when he was younger and feels bad about it. but also ehh.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:23
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I dont hate the idea if i remember correctly, the dome is created by a bunch of alien/godling/Q type kids who were bored and lovely but one feels bad and a lady begs for them to undo the poo poo, so it does. i like that ideas espcially as someone who was in the shittier part of the net when he was younger and feels bad about it. but also ehh. That is the ending, yes. I fuckin' loved Under the Dome. It's one of my fave King novels. I rambled my thoughts on it like a year ago now or something as I went through it for the first time. I thought it was great from beginning to end. We were talking about like "King eras." IIRC and how a lot of his most famous/beloved work comes from before he got sober and before his accident. Some people suggested his post-accident work as being among his best and brought up Under the Dome. I thought it was just as good as anything he wrote in his youth/while high as a kite. I'm glad it got recommended to me. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 19:29
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I dont hate the idea if i remember correctly, the dome is created by a bunch of alien/godling/Q type kids who were bored and lovely but one feels bad and a lady begs for them to undo the poo poo, so it does. i like that ideas espcially as someone who was in the shittier part of the net when he was younger and feels bad about it. but also ehh. The problem is that it's a very much "surprise at the end of the book"-sort of thing. Yeah, the aliens are hinted at earlier, but the complete lack of build-up just makes it a big fat whiff for me.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:31
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NikkolasKing posted:That is the ending, yes. I like it too. It's a bit too long (not The Stand long, but probably could be shortened by...I dunno, a couple hundred pages?) but a good story. I was fascinated by the [spoiler]subplot of the churchgoing going who started smoking meth at WCIK[spoiler]; it was like a train wreck.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:51
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My favorite part of Under the Dome is that they took the creepy kid who locked up his crush as a sex slave and turned him into one of the main protagonists in the TV show even though he still did that part.
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Sep 7, 2023 00:38
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Medullah posted:My favorite part of Under the Dome is that they took the creepy kid who locked up his crush as a sex slave and turned him into one of the main protagonists in the TV show even though he still did that part. Man I... remember none of that. Did I miss that part? Is there an extended edition of the book which features that?
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Sep 7, 2023 00:42
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PurpleXVI posted:Man I... remember none of that. Did I miss that part? Is there an extended edition of the book which features that? in the book junior kills two girls at the beginning and keeps their corpses in a basement and i think has sex with them
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Sep 7, 2023 00:49
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PurpleXVI posted:Man I... remember none of that. Did I miss that part? Is there an extended edition of the book which features that? Well I don't think he explicitly assaulted her but that he still locked her down and he had it for her
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Sep 7, 2023 00:50
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scary ghost dog posted:in the book junior kills two girls at the beginning and keeps their corpses in a basement and i think has sex with them Oh, yeah, I remember that part but like. I generally don't refer to a corpse as a "slave" on account of it being, you know, dead.
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Sep 7, 2023 00:55
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Am I missing a ton with Holly if I didn’t read The Outsider, or If It Bleeds? It didn’t occur to me that King had done more with the character since End of Watch.
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Sep 7, 2023 01:00
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, I remember that part but like. I generally don't refer to a corpse as a "slave" on account of it being, you know, dead. yes medullah is allowing the show to affect his memory of the book, an absolute travesty
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Sep 7, 2023 01:02
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