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DrRimbaud posted:"I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar." - Stephen King Yeah, it's been said before but reading On Writing is really revealing in that it shows that King's greatest criticism (stories that start off strong but go on way too long and have disappointing endings) is a result of him not planning things out anymore. I imagine back when he wasn't so famous/best-selling that he was actually worried about a story not being published he went to a little more effort planning things out, hence why his older books don't have the problem as much.
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Jun 1, 2009 04:44
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fishmech posted:I never really saw anything really wrong with books 5-7 of the Dark Tower series. Some little things were kinda bad but on the whole they were good books. Me too. Then again I read through them all one after the other in a 6-month period rather than waiting half my life for them to trickle out every few years, so it could be my expectations weren't as high.
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Sep 24, 2009 19:30
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xdrquinnx posted:There are shovels but they're haunted. Haunted by the ghost of a magical negro who can only be kept at bay by a psychic retard. From Maine.
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Oct 16, 2009 00:36
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JnnyThndrs posted:King's self-characterizing isn't really that bad. Agreed. If anything I loved how everybody so openly loathed him, both as a fat druggie in the 70s and as a healthier but still procrastinating man in the 90s.
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Nov 7, 2009 05:52
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kosherpickle posted:I cannot explain why I enjoy his boring drivel so much. There is a scene in Bag of Bones where Noonan is simply sitting in front of his dead wife's belongings and he eats a mouse-shaped chocolate covered marshmallow and I just lap scenes like that up. If Stephen King wrote a book about mid-life crises/divorce/disfigurement/growing old that didn't have a horror or supernatural element I would buy it in an instant. Bag of Bones and Duma Key I greatly preferred the "lonely old man puttering around his vacation home trying piece together his identity and find meaning" so much that I was almost dreading whenever the next ghost handjob/ghost ship scene would pop up because then it would be another 100 pages of supernatural stuff.
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Nov 8, 2009 19:55
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Kid Awesome posted:Questions for the King fans: It would be pretty hard to read just a wikipedia summary of two books by any author and not come away thinking they lacked subtlety. I mean, the general theme of his books like Under the Dome and The Stand are "a group of people work together to stop some incomprehensible supernatural evil". Conservationism is the polar opposite of that, where the strong survive and the weak are allowed to be brought down. If it's any consolation the overwhelming majority of horror fiction is overtly conservative, where fearing the "other" is a virtue and people who "deserve it" are killed off.
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Nov 10, 2009 00:38
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Automatic Jack posted:(What was that one King short story about the kid who was obsessed with Nazis? That one had some good moments, but the ending didn't feel like it had anything to do with the rest of the story.) It's funny, because while the movie adaptation was kind of weak I liked the ending it used: When the counselor confronts Todd after realizing that Dussander is not his grandfather and was the Nazi prisoner of war in the newspaper, Todd scares him into keeping it quiet by implying that the counselor was a pedophile (his attention to Todd, giving him his home phone number, etc all letting Todd make it look like his interest was beyond being a consummate professional and his response being shocked enough to imply there was some truth to it) and that if he goes to the press he'll tell them as much. I liked it because Todd is introduced as cold and calculating, getting a dozen prints before even approaching Dussander, that him just snapping and going on a rampage at the end didn't seem to fit him even if he was a violent psychopath, plus the idea that a Nazi-worshipper who killed hobos and blackmailed an old man to the point of near-death from stress got away scott-free and would go on to live a successful, influential adulthood is way creepier.
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Aug 12, 2010 05:28
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SploogeDood84 posted:Cell or Under the Dome. Under the Dome was great for the first couple hundred pages and just went off track and never came back. All of his novels since the accident have sucked rear end, but he's managed to write decent short stories. Duma Key would like a word with you, muchacho. 
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Sep 19, 2010 02:50
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Ninja_Orca posted:This. King protagonists usually have to go through hell to earn their happy endings. See The Stand, Misery, IT, and probably others that don't immediately come to mind. And IT doesn't even really have a truly happy ending, if Dreamcatcher is to be believed. Also The Green Mile: Man is "blessed" with incredible longevity but has to live with the fact that he killed a person of immeasurable goodness and potential to change the world, also outlives everyone he ever loved and is doomed to spend decades alone in a retirement home. And Hearts In Atlantis had almost no happy endings: Bobby was too much of a coward to stand up to the Low Men and wound up a delinquent, Peter Riley passed his classes and avoided the draft but grew old with the disappointment of never living up to all the noise about peace and love he had made in school, the veterans were all incurably broken or dead, and Brautigan is abducted by the Low Men and forced into servitude destroying all known creation with his psychic powers. A few of them had silver linings but in the end everybody was hosed, although considering it's King's melancholic look back at the 60s it's not that surprising. ...of SCIENCE! fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Nov 13, 2010 |
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Nov 13, 2010 02:01
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cheerfullydrab posted:Bad adaptations of Stephen King: I thought that 1408 was pretty decent aside from some mis-steps (the fake-out where he thinks he made it out of the room, tiny Samuel L. Jackson in the refrigerator). The short story would have been over in about 5 minutes if adapted directly, they did a pretty good job building tension and mindfucking the audience over the course of the movie instead of just resorting to jump scares. It wasn't amazing but that fact that it tried the Jacob's Ladder approach to horror in the age of Saw made it a nice break. I do find it ironic that, despite his reputation as a supernatural horror writer, some of King's best adaptations (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption) are period dramas with no supernatural elements or really any overt horror.
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Jan 15, 2011 04:43
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clarabelle posted:Well thanks to that revelation, my Stephen King boycott is remaining firmly in place. Does that not count as some kind of child pornography? It's words on paper, I promise you no children were harmed in its creation.
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Jan 30, 2011 21:02
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Duma Key. I was the exact opposite. I really didn't care about the lamp monster, I wanted more elderly retirees struggling with crippling disabilities and piecing together their ruined lives.
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May 5, 2011 07:19
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Quantify! posted:Are we talking about Insomnia here? I meant Duma Key, aside from a few nightmares and flashbacks the first 80% of the book is about Edgar Freemantle trying to piece together his life and finding meaning through a talent in art he's suppressed his whole life. Then in the very end it's like he realized he needed a villain so an evil I did like Insomnia too, though. Nearly every book King writes has a protagonist that's roughly the same age as he was when he wrote it and is often a writer to boot, so him going out of his way to make the protagonist and elderly retiree added a little something different.
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May 7, 2011 03:36
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There's a reason it's called Under the Dome and not Escape From the Dome Raunchy posted:I hated The Girl Who Loves Tom Gordon The Guy Who Hates The Girl Who Loves Tom Gordon 
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May 13, 2011 03:49
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I never understood the Buick 8 hate, it's like the book was tailor-written to go against most of his usual writing crutches: It doesn't explain everything or have a terrible ending, it isn't set in Maine, and the main character isn't a middle-aged writer. Especially compared to something like Under the Dome where everybody acts like an idiot for no reason, it was refreshing to see a group of small-town people that respond to inexpiable otherworldly horror in a calm and rational way even though they're in completely over their heads. On that note, I finally got around to reading Thinner and good lord I cannot believe that Richard Bachman didn't get outed sooner. Every single King-ism, from hearing a click in your throat when you swallow to arc-sodium streetlamps to Bangor, Maine is used so much that it almost feels like self-parody.
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Apr 23, 2013 01:21
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notZaar posted:I've been listen to my Dark Tower audiobooks again, it's such a shame what happened to the narrator who did books 2-4. He was fantastic. The guy who did the last three was good, but nowhere near the same level. I was surprised that King read Wind Through the Keyhole by himself though, he wasn't half bad. The only problem I have with King doing Keyhole was his Susanna voice, but now I'm listening to Rose Madder on audiobook and the bits that King reads work way too well for the same reason; he reads when the perspective is from a psychopathic racist cop and his awful attempts at doing a "black" voice actually work for a character who views them all as gross subhuman caricatures.
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Apr 23, 2013 16:35
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syscall girl posted:If it makes you feel better, I don't remember it and I read the book when I was a pre-teen. That's how bad the preteen sewer gangbang is, it's an evil that (much like IT itself) your young mind forced you to forget for your own protection.
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Apr 26, 2013 01:00
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A drop of water gathered at the lip of the shiny chromium faucet. It grew fat. Grew pregnant, you might say. It sparkled. It dropped. Plink. He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written four words on the blue tiles above the tub, written them in huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the last letter of this final word — his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark — his final impression on the world— as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her: BEN HANSCOM'S BIG DICK Another drop fell into the tub. Plink. That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband’s dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.
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Apr 26, 2013 01:38
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I'm about 3/4s of the way through right now and I'm enjoying it, but then again I've enjoyed the other two woman-in-trouble books of his that I've read (Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game) even though they're generally panned when it comes to the King canon.
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Apr 28, 2013 05:02
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2uo posted:It can't get worse than "UR", the Amazon-Kindle-commercial. Don't forget how using the Kindle makes his estranged ex suddenly like him again because Kindle owners are just so hip and modern and attractive.  And then the Dark Tower stuff at the end is beyond self-parody.His Entertainment Weekly column, The Pop of King, was pretty good. I liked when he praised The Hunger Games while giving a nudge-wink acknowledgment that it was probably influenced by The Long Walk. In some ways I actually liked it more than Danse Macabre because DM had a sort of hot-headed, anti-critic, me-against-the-world attitude while his column was more reserved.
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Apr 29, 2013 22:02
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Junkenstein posted:Nos4r2 I spent like a minute trying to figure out what Stephen King book this was an acronym for 
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May 9, 2013 22:21
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iostream.h posted:I just read that book and the dude wasn't a pedophile, he was gay and head over heels for the main guy who had owned the hotel who was bi-sexual (and apparently just depraved as all hell), I'll grab my copy and check but if I recall he wasn't after Danny sexually, he was trying to grab him during the ending moments where the hotel was at nearly full power and EVERYONE was present and after him. Yeah, I didn't get pedo from it at all. He was just a submissive proto-furry with a humiliation fetish, so having his "master" order him to do tricks and make a fool of himself in a dog costume while not being allowed to speak was just a grand ol' time for him.
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May 24, 2013 20:10
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Lascivious Sloth posted:What's a good Steven King book for a 12 year old girl? Has to be appropriate as well.. Depending on how mature she is for her age Carrie might be a good read since it's basically about what she herself is probably going through in becoming a teenager.
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Jun 24, 2013 17:37
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Attitude Indicator posted:In regards to the book, this is typical of King. The evils of Small Town, America. Several of his book has had the theme of small communities destroying themselves, ignoring bad stuff happening or similar when faced with unusual circumstances. Salem's Lot, IT, etc. It also helps to remember that King really, really hated the Bush administration and Under the Dome is basically him venting about it as it drew to a close. It's a parable about how Dick Cheney used a catastrophe to seize power and in the process only hosed things up even more for everybody involved rather than a realistic depiction of how average people would react in that situation. It's always fun to find (presumably unintentional) hints or references to the ideas that King is kicking around for his next book, and Duma Key has this one tangent where King spends a few pages having the main character read a book about the War in Iraq and muse about how Bush Lied and People Died. Knowing now that he had Under the Dome in the works you can practically hear his mind kicking the ideas around.
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Jul 5, 2013 08:08
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nate fisher posted:I agree 100%. The book hosed up my young mind back in the 80's. The bit in Insomnia where the other two fates rig a magic trap into his arm by jamming a huge fuckoff pair of scissors into his arm and snip from the inside of his elbow to his wrist in one cut gave me a visceral reaction that I almost never get from books. Lazarus Long posted:I know pretty much everyone, this thread included, have been hating on Gerald's Game. It is really the only King book I have ever read to elicit a physical response in me. I couldn't really say if it was as terrible as everyone keeps making it out to be because my mind was unable to cope while reading it. I remember cursing out loud at it and also throwing the book across the room at one point. If I even think of the word "degloving" my mind recoils. I've lost count of how many times King has written sexual abuse from the perspective of the kid being molested, but it's always just awful. RoeCocoa posted:Keep in mind that there are a lot of SK books I haven't read, but the denouement of The Breathing Method (fourth segment of Different Seasons) kept me up all night the first time I read it, and gave me shivers whenever I thought about it for years after. Dunno how popular an opinion it is, but I thought that Breathing Method was pretty weak and made even weaker by the three preceding stories being some of King's best. The frame story was fantastic, though, and I'm glad he re-used it.
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Jul 27, 2013 18:05
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bad day posted:After finishing 11/22/63 i have a big question. A running theme in King's works is that there are places that are evil. Sometimes he tries to justify that with monsters like Pennywise or Dark Tower reality-bending, but there are also places like the Micmac burial ground in Pet Sematary and the Overlook Hotel that are just plain wrong; some characters attribute it to being a native american burial ground but usually they come to the conclusion that it's just always been a place of dark power and the natives were just the earliest ones to be ensnared by it. I figure that Dallas, and especially the book depository, were places like this. Though, fitting enough for a book about time travel, there almost seems to be a paradox at work where the place is innately evil because it's where the president is killed, but its evilness is also was subconsciously attracted Oswald.
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Jul 31, 2013 06:16
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Having recently finished Joyland, I wonder if King is going to be able to shoehorn at least one out-of-place passage about how Dick Cheney is evil into every book he writes from here on out.Ornamented Death posted:I would buy Dark Tower rewrites without hesitation. Almost everything King wrote in the first few years after the accident is kind of bad, but he's come back around and I'd like to see what he can do with the series now that he isn't scared he's going to die tomorrow. I might even go so far as to say that King is in the middle of a new renaissance in his career, where being old and wizened had given him the edge that was once given to him by drugs. His stretch in the 90s and early 00s where he was sober/recovering from the car accident were forgettable at best but from Duma Key onward he's been hitting home runs. WattsvilleBlues posted:Hey goons, just wanted to ask opinions on 11.22.63 - worth reading or not? It's really great. It's one of those books that just flies by despite being so long; I read it on my Kindle and was legitimately shocked when I realized I was already almost a quarter of the way through and the main story hadn't even really started, he had only completed his little experiment with the life of his janitor friend. It's also one of the few baby boomer nostalgia pieces about the 60s that I've been able to enjoy because a good amount of the book is about how lovely things were in general at the time, how for every idyllic small town you had an entire countryside of monstrous racism and hate bubbling up from beneath the surface in unpredictable, obscene ways. DirtyRobot posted:What I got with Flagg's death, and specifically its ignobility, was a kind of view into Flagg's subjectivity, but not necessarily for the purposes of sympathy. Flagg's existence across the various worlds of King's fiction is as this Anton Chigurh-like force of chaos. He comes out of nowhere and stirs poo poo up until things fall apart. (Incidentally, related to your point below about King's dual career direction, the whole idea of Flagg as a specifically evil force is actually very conservative: anyone who stirs up dissatisfaction in the masses must be evil!) But part of the point is that Flagg's still just a dude -- y'know, a walkin' dude. He stands in for all those regular assholes that can come in and stir poo poo up at just the wrong time. And he'll never accomplish much beyond that. Mordred, by contrast, is actually more a being of destiny, created by fate and fated to go up against his father. So at the end of the day, for all his mysteriousness, Flagg's just a piece of regular, scummy poo poo, and up against a being like Mordred, he's screwed. Not to mention the entirety of The Stand was about how Flagg was underwhelming. He was good at being mysterious and imposing to individuals but he was a lovely leader and Las Vegas was plagued with all kinds of problems and unrest simply because he wasn't nearly as clever or competent as he wanted people to think. While in the end it was divine intervention that actually killed him, his own cruelty and callousness towards his allies was enough to irreparably cripple him and his army, what with a slighted Trashcan Man sabotaging his airforce and destroying his irreplaceable pilots.
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Aug 10, 2013 06:58
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rypakal posted:Are you saying that Joe is hooked on cocaine? Obviously introduced to and enabled by his dad in the name of making sure his kid is the best writer he can be 
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Aug 15, 2013 21:35
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Plus for every mildly talented/physical guy you get someone like Gard from Tommyknockers, Jack from The Shining, or Marinville from Desperation who are lovely and worthless people who at best get to have some last-minute redemption but are still treated as loathsome and weak by the story rather than awesome author self-inserts.
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Aug 22, 2013 22:23
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EmmyOk posted:To put something like DT onscreen I think you'd need something like The Shining's approach. Where you take the core elements and base a story on that. The series as it is wouldn't translate well at all to the screen, in my opinion. I was just thinking that if King is still pissy about The Shining all these years later he's probably going to have a conniption about his magnum opus being changed in any way to actually be, you know, filmable.
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Sep 20, 2013 21:56
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In Bag of Bones he even goes off on a weird aside about Angry Little Fat Folk (his term). Not to mention the bitchy sister in Tommyknockers.
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Sep 27, 2013 23:45
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Pendergast posted:I looked at Doctor Sleep in Wal-Mart but it was 30 dollars for the drat book. Man, it was so rad when Amazon and Wal-Mart's dick-waving contest meant that Under the Dome retailed for $10 hardcover when it came out. I almost never buy books, let alone hardcover ones, but I was all over that poo poo.
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Oct 2, 2013 23:59
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Working through Doctor Sleep, one thing I love is that it's (mostly) set in modern times after nearly half a decade of period pieces from King. The way that King captures the eras his books are written in is one of my favorite little things to look for, and seeing references to The Avengers, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and Sons of Anarchy makes it feel very "now". Compare that to Under the Dome, which had a fictional Lost sequel and his awkward old man impersonation of what teenagers think is cool.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:14
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Jazerus posted:I agree. Edgar's life was the interesting part - the inevitable King supernatural nonsense killed the last 1/5 of the book for me. This seems to be something that characterizes this stage of King's writing, for better or worse. Even when he (mostly) ditches supernatural elements you get something like Joyland that was marketed as a hard-boiled mystery novel but was actually a coming-of-age story/period piece with a murder mystery tacked on the end. Count Chocula posted:King was in Sons of Anarchy, so it makes sense he'd know about it. I think it's a chicken/egg thing where he was already a fan of the show. quote:The short form is I had a chance to act on Sons of Anarchy (known simply to those of us who watch on FX as Sons or SOA), and I jumped at the chance. I like to act—not that I’m much good at it, but I suspect most writers do—and a number of factors came together. I was in Los Angeles, where SOA films, to accept a library award; creator Kurt Sutter assured me that he’d write me a suitably nasty part (in various films I’ve been stuck playing a series of mentally challenged country bumpkins); most important of all, he said he’d put me on a bitchin Harley. How could I say no?
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Nov 12, 2013 01:40
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Dolores Claiborne feels like a weaker version of The Shawshank Redemption in that it's about a nice old lady getting shat on by the universe for most of her life but overcoming it through cleverness and determination and winding up on top in the end. For better or worse it's the most grounded and consistent of King's weird 90s grrrl power books, it's not as  -worthy as Gerald's Game and it doesn't have the tacked-on supernatural elements of Rose Madder.
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Nov 22, 2013 23:13
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Man, I wish I could have read The Talisman as a kid. Things are a bit better now that Young Adult fiction is in a boom and reading stories about children bloodily murdering each other is commonplace, but as a kid who grew up on Animorphs it would have rocked my poo poo.
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Nov 27, 2013 00:46
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I'm a King superfan and I couldn't even finish The Regulators. It and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon are the only two books of his that have that honor.
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Nov 27, 2013 14:02
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Christine is so great. It totally captures that feeling of you and your best childhood friend growing apart as you become adults, only you're growing apart because of an evil mind-controlling car that kills people.
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Dec 27, 2013 13:00
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Pheeets posted:Or pocket handkerchiefs. Everybody, young and old, carries a clean white one. They need it for the crescents their nails dug into their palms.
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Jan 1, 2014 08:19
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Joose Caboose posted:I recently read The Dead Zone and just now saw the movie is on tv which I didn't know existed. I definitely did not picture Johnny as anything like Christopher Walken. Is this movie any good by standards of King adaptations? It's mid-tier Cronenberg and is nowhere as good as the book but it's not a bad movie. Some of his visions (the burning apartment, the kids falling through the ice) are pretty striking and it has Walken at that point where he was weird without descending into full-on self-parody; I seriously can't imagine anybody else delivering lines like "THE ICE...IS GONNA BREAK!" in quite the same way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLhFIwkbtJI
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Jan 12, 2014 03:17
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