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Fallon posted:Drawing is set for a lot of it in "our" world and doesn't include King's Mid-world "culture" that was in the Gunslinger. Well, if the pseudo-folksy language was what turned him off, then you should at least mention that Roland's interactions with 1980s New York spawn such wonderful phrases as "tooter fish." Honestly, I can only say that it's worth sticking with the series for Waste Lands alone. I felt like Gunslinger was okay if bland, and Drawing was pretty uneven, being either very boring (Eddie and Detta/Odetta) or really interesting (the lobstrosities, Jack Mort). Waste Lands is, for me, the high point, and loads of fun. Everything after that is simply heartbreak.
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May 18, 2009 20:30
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little green jewel posted:Try the short story The Library Policeman. I think it's in Four Past Midnight. The main character, an adult, is forced to confront the fact that a retarded man raped him when he was a little boy. It was relevant to the plot and went a long way toward explaining some of the man's personality quirks and strange fears, but King goes into some uncomfortable loving detail. I'm a poleethman. But yeah, this story is basically IT-lite. What's weird, aside from all the sexual abuse, is how fathers are almost always horrible monsters or assholes. King's dad ran off and left the family when King was a wee baby, so you'd think his handling of fathers-as-characters would be a little more ambiguous. But nope! Basically every father ever is an alcoholic, child-molesting beast. Unless the father is a main character, of course, in which case he's just trying to do the right thing in a crazy world even if it could get him killed or be boring as gently caress (I'm looking at you, Cell).
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Jul 31, 2009 18:48
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Bonus posted:The only read disappointment in the 7th book for me was The Crimson King himself. He was made out to be so cool during the books, and then it turned out that he is literally an angry crazy Santa Claus who is literally stuck on a balcony and has a box of grenades which he throws while shouting EEEEEEEEE!. Don't forget that his hand grenades are actually motherfucking Harry Potter toys.
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Sep 24, 2009 21:14
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3Romeo posted:I'll add something else concerning The Tommyknockers. The book is painful to read. Jim Gardner is one of his best written characters, and that's saying a lot concerning an author whose strength is in characterization. The problem is that Jim is completely despicable in almost every way and reading about what a mess he made his life--and the passive fuckups he makes in the book--is really, really hard. It's well worth reading but it isn't something you, like, pick up again later to read for fun. This was my biggest problem with the book, that and the fact that Jim was constantly having loving headaches and just in general physical pain for like 800 pages. I'm not even a very sensitive reader, but I got tired of hearing about how miserable he was. It's the kind of thing that would be a success in a shorter book, but with something as long as The Tommyknockers I just got sick of it.
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Nov 10, 2009 19:54
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The tale-telling club showed up in Different Seasons for "The Breathing Method" and in Skeleton Crew for "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands". And I agree, I always wanted to see the club show up again in another story or novel, but it never did. (Although fishmech might be right, it might have been in Just After Sunset -- I haven't read that yet.)
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Apr 4, 2010 20:53
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Kakumei posted:Also, I might have glossed over it, but what was with Tony? What was the point there? No explanation was ever given, and it seemed entirely pointless. Does this need spoilers? I'll keep them, anyway. Tony is Danny as a teenager. This is the form his psychic visions take, for whatever logical or scientific reason, which is not really important. What is important is that, in the thematic sense, it allows Danny to see that he is going to grow up and be himself and not a repeat of his father, which is Jack's downfall. Or maybe I'm just a pedantic fuckwit. I happen to have written a 4800-word essay on how The Shining, a Bret Ellis novel, and Hamlet are all tightly linked in how they deal with issues of father/son relationships, because hurf durf academia. 
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May 2, 2010 06:41
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It was totally Lunar Park. It doesn't take a genius (just an English major) to connect those three texts in such a way as to pass an assignment! It helps that Shakespeare and horror fiction are my primary areas of expertise, and as you might imagine, times when I can actually bring those things together into a single topic are few and far between.
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May 3, 2010 04:52
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Re: Koontz Phantoms is his best, in my opinion, and Tick Tock is okay if "completely stupid screwball comedy with voodoo and aliens" sounds like something you might enjoy. Fear Nothing was too off-the-wall even for me, but Seize the Night scared the poo poo out of 13-year-old Shivcraft despite nothing really making sense. The first Odd Thomas book was okay, but the later ones spin out into his crazy hardcore religious nonsensical science-fiction tendencies, and also Odd is supposed to be loving twenty years old why in the holy hell is he so goddamned temperate and sage. Basically Koontz is a workmanlike writer who falls back too often on tropes that are far too divergent to ever coalesce into something worthwhile, be it a statement or a worldview: psychic/superintelligent animals, stolen or lost children, tortured male police officer protagonists, startlingly beautiful female protagonists who have led sheltered lives and do not know how beautiful they are, and in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, strained scientific or naturalistic explanations for phenomena that have been presented as almost uniformly supernatural. Later books show a predisposition to holier-than-thou cultural criticism, a lack of gratuitous sex (which some of his 80s stuff had in spades), and needlessly wacky "humor." But to get the Stephen King train rolling again, I here reiterate my belief that The Shining is probably his best book. It is so good, in fact, that I've managed to get away with slipping it onto the syllabus of a class I'm helping teach in the fall. 
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Jul 15, 2010 18:09
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Loving Life Partner posted:Is that the one with the shapeshifter that kills the whole town? Cause that was a pretty awesome book. Yeah, that's it, and I'm in pretty much the same boat w/r/t the age thing, but it still seems like Phantoms is pulled of with more finesse than is usual for Koontz. I mean, it has some of his old hobby-horses (tortured cop protagonist, missing/dead child) but the pseudoscientific twist actually ends up strengthening the monster-concept and story rather than weakening it, in my opinion. Unfortunately the loving tapeworms eat each other's memories hurrrr factoid it hinges on became something else he revisited until it became loving ridiculous.
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Jul 17, 2010 19:55
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I was really somewhat sheltered growing up, so all I knew about the gritty physical and emotional mechanics of mature relationships was what I gleaned from Stephen King books. It's actually worked out really well so far, except my wife flips out at every available opportunity and every few months our childhood emotional traumas are externalized in some reimagined 1950s B-movie monster that threatens our middle-class lifestyle.
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Jun 4, 2011 02:07
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Kneel Before Zog posted:Having never read a Stephen King novel, what's the verdict for the best one? My personal favorite is The Shining, which is about as tightly plotted as King has ever been, though your opinions on the Kubrick movie may influence your reading. Far and away his best received novel is probably The Stand, but it's kind of an investment for a first read. I second Ornamented Death's rec of 'Salem's Lot if you think 1000 pages of Christian Baby Boomer eschatology is too much too handle, since Lot covers a lot of similar thematic ground.
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Jul 6, 2011 21:49
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Ridonkulous posted:I thought the entire idea behind Doom-bots and sneetches was because they where both built by NCP. Where as Nazi planes and "Hey Jude" was not and is therefore much more subtle. Yeah, I don't have Calla at hand to check, but at one point don't they find an ad or label for the sneetches that basically says that these weapons of war were manufactured by NCP and explicitly modeled on Harry Potter for, like, no obvious reason at all?
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Aug 14, 2011 01:47
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trandorian posted:The lesser vampires aren't even capable of real thoughts. This is true and also largely a Dark Tower-centered retcon. L-O-N is correct in that there's nothing spelled out in Lot that Barlow isn't subject to the rules that govern all the other vampires, at least prior to that point. I remember my very first read-through when the events in question happened, I set the book aside, and just thought about how King had very deliberately kicked over the supernatural chessboard. In terms of the book itself, yeah, it's basically a plot hole. (This does not stop the rest of the book from being pretty much awesome, though.)
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Sep 13, 2011 13:59
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I can't wait for the scene in Doctor Sleep where Danny survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge.
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Sep 30, 2011 16:39
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Local Group Bus posted:
Not to derail, because this isn't The Worst Bentley Little Book Thread, but a warning to the curious: this guy is (unintentionally?) hilarious more often than he is horrific. People don't act like sane human beings (as mentioned), plus supernatural forces function according to no consistent rules at all, and really lurid, deviant sex pops up with I think increasing frequency the more books he writes. At least, maybe that's still happening, I haven't read anything by him in a few years. Anyway what I am saying is that this guy is a modern-day American Garth Marenghi. So yes read him.
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Oct 7, 2011 05:31
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Yes, read Locke & Key, and read 20th Century Ghosts. The former is extremely fun modern Gothic fantasy, and maybe the best thing Hill has written, and 20CG has a lot of echoes of classic King, as has been remarked. A warning about his novels though: they're better plotted/paced than King's, but they also are completely ridiculous and make no sense. The critic ST Joshi rails on King for his supernatural elements being inconsistent and illogical but I think if he ever read a novel by Hill he'd have an aneurysm. I was teaching Heart-Shaped Box to first-year undergrads last fall and even they were calling the book out on its bullshit. But this is not an inaugural post for the thread "Worst Joe Hill Novel" thread so I'll reiterate: read Locke & Key and 20th Century Ghosts. Also an observation: the amount of mean and/or dead fathers in Hill's work starts to look sort of funny, in context, you know.
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Dec 1, 2011 05:38
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MyLightyear posted:Not trying to interrupt King's bad sex discussion but the story in the same book mentioned above about the Maitre D who goes completely homicidal was pretty decent. And to bring it back to bad sex, other than the actual carnage of that story the thing I will always remember is the narrator describing sex with his ex-wife when she "gripped [his] rear end like twin pommels, whispering 'Do me, do me'" or something to that effect. I remember this very clearly because I first heard that story in the Blood & Smoke audio book, read by King himself, so the nasally old nerd voice of Uncle Steve saying those words is forever burned into my memory.
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Dec 28, 2011 04:04
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Max22 posted:Man, you guys complaining about long sex scenes in Stephen King novels must have never read Whispers by Dean Koontz. I read this. I remember it was like sixth grade and we had a state-mandated week of standardized testing, and since we were allowed to free-read I'd grabbed one of my mom's Dean Koontz books. When I asked her what it was about she said "I think there are cockroaches in that one." Well, there are. Among other things. A crazy guy has sex with himself except actually it's his twin, they've been conditioned to think they're the same person, also they are the product of an abusive, incestuous relationship between an old rich dude and his daughter. The guy/these guys rape and murder girls. That's just what I remember off the top of my head. Also, I remember Watchers, wherein a sheltered emotionally abused woman is rescued by the hero and it turns out under her dowdy church clothes she has a banging bod and she finds out she just loves to bone. This all makes Koontz's recent turn to a sort of bizarre libertarian social conservatism all the more strange. Say what you will about King, he's been pretty consistent about his tie-dyed baby-boomer Christianity.
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Dec 30, 2011 01:19
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:I thought King was non-vocally atheist/agnostic. Well The Stand is overtly Christian. His theme of evil constantly undoing itself is also a trope grounded in Christian theology, though that can be chalked up to cultural inheritance more than his specific beliefs. He attacks fundamentalism pretty consistently, and he's obviously pretty liberal politically, but King seems very grounded in a sort of loving, open-arms Christianity in keeping with his demographic. In practice he probably would be better classified as agnostic, but the hints of his sprituality seen in his fiction and in terms of how he constructs his moral universes, he's got some heavy Christian trappings. Also, a popular story King tells involves Kubrick's filming of The Shining. Kubrick calls him at some ungodly hour and asks him if he believes in God; King thinks for a moment before saying yes. Kubrick says he doesn't and hangs up.
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Dec 30, 2011 04:46
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Despite its characteristic Kingisms, a fairly silly underpinning concept (Northern Lights time warps?), and the ridiculous movie, I think The Langoliers was a pretty fantastic Twilight Zone homage, so yeah.
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Jan 8, 2012 21:00
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That cover art really looks like it should be printed on a t-shirt and given to people who participate in a litter clean-up day.
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Jan 11, 2012 15:23
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Ozmaugh posted:I hadn't heard that or at least I don't remember it, but would like to hear more if anyone else can elaborate. Auryn can correct me if the reference is to something else, but in a place or two King explains that The Shining is (unlike most of his books) hemmed in by an overarching plot or concern that he had planned from the beginning. In initial stages it was conceived as a play, specifically a tragedy (Lear is the model that gets thrown around but I've written on its implicit connections to Hamlet), and you'll notice the book itself is still highly structured -- in five books/acts, even! The novel also works like goddamn clockwork, ticking very briskly along to an obvious catastrophe (the boiler) without a lot of the tangled morass King is generally chided for. An original draft of the novel has a few extra little stories called "Before the Play" that act as a sort of prologue and establish the scene/characters (perhaps a bit more than they really need, so it's good they're cut). They were published elsewhere as a sort of standalone novella, in an anthology whose name escapes me and a highly edited version in an issue of TV Guide to tie in with the miniseries.
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Jan 23, 2012 17:12
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:This is a pretty insightful documentary about Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. Unfortunately it devolves into some BUY GOLD NOW crap at the end. Apparently Kubrick was a gold bug of sorts and the creator of this... thing is more so. This guy's film analyses can be pretty great (see his previous work on The Shining in particular, and also his bit on The Thing), so I was sad when this showed up and it turns out he's a bit of a loon. Still, it ranks behind the "The Shining is about how Kubrick helped fake the moon landing" theory.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:43
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Octy posted:So he's pretty much like George R.R. Martin? Worse. Also by far worse than King. Just for comparison, let's take a look at this scene from Turtledove's American Front, which I typed up years ago and have had sitting in a text file ever since because I like being able to bust it out in situations just like this. Harry Turtledove posted:For him to get out of his uniform, a little later, was the work of a few moments. Once naked, he saluted her without using his hands. He took his time about undressing her, pausing to kiss and caress each new bit of flesh revealed. She sighed with relief when, after detaching her stockings from their garters and sliding them down her legs, he finally peeled her out of her steel-stiffened corset. he saluted her without using his hands
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Feb 15, 2012 03:29
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Canuckistan posted:Speaking of King characters, would you consider the Henry character in Black House to be a Mary-Sue? He seems too perfect to be anything but a character. To me "Mary Sue" (despite whatever the internet says) still carries connotations of an authorial self-insert, so I wouldn't apply exactly that label. Unless King or Straub fantasize about being blind voice artist. That said he is incredibly unbelievable as a human being. Back when Black House first came out, I remember a few readers on the SK mailing list I subscribed to (yes really) who claimed they were actually creeped out by Henry's nearly supernatural talent/omnicompotence. Personally, I was just expecting him to be revealed as, like, a literal angel in disguise or something.
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Jul 11, 2012 15:40
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ProfessorProf posted:The Long Walk is probably the best Bachman book (imo), and it's King being a very tight writer, which is significant given most of his body of work. I'd recommend it, though it is a bit grim. Looking at your current list, I'd say you've covered what I would consider essential, except maybe... Pet Sematary? But if you think TLW sounds grim, then hoo-boy. You might also wanna try the novella collection Different Seasons, or some of the other short story collections (Night Shift would be a good one, if you wanna stick with earlier King).
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Jul 13, 2012 20:25
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The Stand has its share of problems, but it is a thoroughly American fantasy epic and captures and comments on the mood and ideas of the country at a specific point in time in a really engaging way. If epics aren't your style, then I can see it wearing thin, but honestly if someone made me pick an American version of Lord of the Rings I'd probably choose The Stand.
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Jul 20, 2012 22:08
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In somewhat related news, this interesting and brief article on The Awl takes a look at King's early days, and his critical interaction/reaction at the beginning of his career.quote:Doubleday bought [Carrie] for $2,500, the equivalent of just under $14,000 today. People in the publishing world loved the novel, and by the time Doubleday was looking to sell paperback rights the price was at $400,000, of which $200,000 went directly into the pockets of the agent-less Mr. King. For those keeping track, that means King cleared what is about a million today on the paperback of his very first novel.
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Aug 4, 2012 19:15
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Vorgen posted:Stephen King's whole schtick is salting his stories with liberal amounts of mundane human wrongness. If he stopped putting in these kinds of intensely personal and mundane evils or went back and edited them out of his books, he wouldn't be Stephen King anymore, he'd be Dean Koontz. Yeah, if he were Dean Koontz then every villain would be a bisexual pedophile whose exploits are perhaps too intently lingered upon before being banished with a helping of superintelligent dogs, Christianist libertarianism and more recently, gross incomprehension of quantum theory.
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Aug 20, 2012 02:57
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Mr.48 posted:Whaaaaa? Since when has Koontz gone all Orson Scott Card? Koontz has always had a tendency to make all his villains perverts. Compare this to King,who often has villains, and then sexual deviants who are villains. There's never a sense that "this guy is gay" or "this guy is a pedophile" is a manifestation of evil in King's stories (at least as I remember them). Even if King plays in stereotypes of deviancy, he seems more interested in making deviance an incidental characteristic of evil. Consider Harold in The Stand, whose sexual frustration is the exploit Flagg and Nadine use to bring down the Free Zone, or the pedophile in "The Library Policeman," who is simply a pedophile but whose image is appropriated by a greater evil force for its own ends. Koontz, on the other hand. generally makes his villains amoral ubermenschen whose sexual deviance is a necessary outgrowth of their evil (think the old tycoon in Whispers or [I think?] the biker gang in Phantoms). Lately he's taken to being more explicit about this sort of thing, especially in eg, The Taking, which is very open about its culture wars stance. The quantum stuff in Koontz's books, likewise, entered his books as it entered the popular lexicon, and it occupies a weird position. I think the best example here is Brother Odd, which is again pretty explicitly religious. Here Koontz seems to selectively and inaccurately invoke quantum mechanics to 'scientifically' reenchant the world in a vaguely supernatural sense (there are more things in heaven and earth) and simultaneously to decry the folly of human beings thinking they can pry into the secrets of the cosmos without repercussion. If you've ever heard Alex Jones rant about the machine elves, that basically seems to be what Koontz is getting at.
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Aug 20, 2012 16:41
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So the cover art for the hardcover of Doctor Sleep has been revealed, and I'm glad to see that all those people who did work for Clive Barker and World of Darkness back in the day can still manage to find employment.
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Mar 2, 2013 01:53
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King also doesn't really believe in the concept of "spoilers." Back when he was writing a column for Entertainment Weekly (does he still do that?) I believe he had a small rant about how he hated the rise of the concept of spoilers among the general reading population, though I don't quite remember his reasoning or the context of the rant.
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Jul 13, 2013 17:33
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ConfusedUs posted:I believe he is right. Me too. Venerable literary scholar and general curmudgeon Stanley Fish stumbled into the same debate last year when he wrote an article on The Hunger Games for the New York Times and dared to discuss the content of the ending of the third book. He was boggled by the fact that so many people would be angry at him for actually talking about the book, and one that at that point had been out for two years to boot. My instinct is that King got onto this topic with, I think, the Harry Potter series? I don't know if that's just me wanting to see symmetry with Fish so I can have two examples of old men bewildered by the very weird way in which most people consume contemporary fiction.
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Jul 13, 2013 18:49
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There's no theater arts subforum so I figure this is as good a place as any to mention that a few nights ago I saw The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the stage musical that King wrote with John Mellencamp, and hoo-boy is it bad. It's in a touring production right now but if it comes anywhere nearby I'd advise you to see it only if you can get a student discount on tickets and you want to see a fascinating stage failure, or if you love Stephen King so much you want to play "spot the Kingism" during the non-musical parts, or you love musicals that have pretty good music but absolutely atrocious lyrics. (For the record, the Kingisms I spotted included: a main character who is a writer, pop cultural cliché phrases repeated ad absurdum, nonsense family baby-talk catchphrases, a single black character who is a (semi)magical God figure, some light misogyny that gets turned up to loving 11 by what I imagine is Mellencamp's input on the libretto, and a bullshit deus ex machina ending with vaguely Christian "God will save us all in the end" overtones.)
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Oct 27, 2013 16:58
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3Romeo posted:It's weird. There's a lot that I admire about that story. Sam's a pretty good Larry Underwood/Eddie Dean type of character, and the thing that Ardelia is, it's terminally creepy. For what it's worth, I read FPM several years after IT and it still seemed like a repeat performance. That said, I enjoyed it for precisely that reason -- you mentioned earlier that it gets very "80s movie" by the end, and in a way it seemed like King was engaging in a sort of gleeful self-plagiarism. The actual content of Sam's trauma, which ends up being pretty horrible in its own right, is the only thing that stops me from saying it was possibly an attempt at self-parody. I wonder if there's anyone out there who actually read "The Library Policeman" before reading IT.
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Nov 22, 2013 22:39
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