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oldpainless posted:I’m about 200 pages in on “The Outsider” and liking it so far. Good setup and a good mystery to figure out. I’ve read around 40 King books and nothing has led me to believe this book will end with an unsatisfying conclusion after an enjoyable opening. Oh boy! This one is absolutely maddening for how it spends the first half acting like a detective story, while King constantly references locked room mysteries, his favourite detective writers, and the art of crafting compelling mysteries, and then it turns out the resolution to the mystery is "it was an evil shapeshifter that's a force of Manichean darkness that our protagonists must travel underground to destroy at the source". It's not a twist so much as an absolute default on credit tendered.
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Jul 2, 2023 14:54
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 10:19 |
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Highly related, I just read Desperation and that book is the epitome of this. You can see the first two hundred pages are where King's sketching a cool horror story premise, and then the last three hundred are him backfilling towards a resolution while contradicting parts of the premise because he can't figure out how to make it work within his plot structure.
Android Blues fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jul 2, 2023 |
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Jul 2, 2023 14:58
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scary ghost dog posted:i think in “on writing” king says that he doesnt really write outlines, he just starts with a premise and writes until hes done. also, the best dean koontz book is “phantoms” but i also like the “moonlight bay” and “odd thomas” books. Yeah, sometimes this works great for him and other times you can see the stitchmarks. Desperation starts out as an imaginative sort of pastiche of like, "Dracula as Nevada highway patrol officer" but by the back half the villain has like three different motivations and only one of them sorta makes sense with the way it acts in the front half. What really bugs me most is like - all the tension of the front half is derived from this monstrous authority figure being recognisably halfway between a cop doing his job and a demon from Hell. You get a sense of Entragian's personality influencing how the thing controlling him behaves - part of him needs to stay acting "like a cop" so that he has a pretext to abduct people, which is where the dramatic tension and most of the creepiness of the opening comes from. He's obviously malevolent, but he has a recognisable personality that's based on the person the evil force has hollowed out. There's a push and pull between the things Collie Entragian would have cared about (DARE, gangs of kids stealing license plates, writing people up for speeding) and the things Tak cares about (random violence, goofy grand guignol monstrosity). Then when Tak possesses Ellen Carver it's just blargh argh argh, I'm the boogeyman, I'm gonna chase the heroes around like a Hammer Horror villain - her personality has zero influence on how Tak acts at all, and Tak pretty much does what it wants. Which retroactively makes all the cop stuff in the opening not work at all! There's a little snippet where King seems to realise this and has the protagonists say, "hey, why'd he do that cop stuff when he was an evil demon who could have just abducted us without needing an excuse?" and the answer is kind of a mealy-mouthed, "guess we'll never know". Plus, what Tak even wants is really not clear. It kills people, it possesses people (and is like, I must keep alive these people to possess, even as it's killing people it could have possessed), it "corrupts" people with goofy statues, none of which seems to be driving towards any recognisable end. If the book was better crafted it would come off as a chaotic entity just making completely random plans - there's a line in there about evil being stupid and burning itself out - but it's as often written as a clever schemer being thwarted by God, because of, again, that stitched together feel.
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Jul 2, 2023 18:54
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PurpleXVI posted:This reminds me a lot of "Needful Things." It's such a common beat when King does "evil force corrupts someone" and doesn't quite nail it. It often starts out based on something that's true about the character, or with a temptation narrative that's dramatically interesting, and then becomes "the character does evil and stupid things because the monster put a mind whammy on them". Totally agree that Needful Things is like this - there's no cruel irony or "be careful what you wish for" to it, just Satan mind controlling people into carrying around objects that melt their brains. The pop culture interpretation of what that book's about is so much more interesting than what it's actually about. Then the rest of the time it works really well! Everything Pennywise does in It, just giving already bad people a little push here and there, works as cultural commentary. The Shining is basically just this, done well. Just feels like sometimes he's written this exact beat so much that he starts skipping the stuff that makes it feel resonant.
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Jul 2, 2023 21:28
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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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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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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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escape artist posted:I thought Rage had a stunning prescience to it. It was not wholly an enjoyable read but I'll be damned if he didn't capture a feeling that seems to have taken over a lot of kids in the nation. I feel this way about Harold Lauder in The Stand. Dude is a pitch-perfect portrait of a incel written decades before that word meant anything. I mean, guys like that have clearly always been around, but Harold is so familiar to anyone who's seen modern misogynistic nerds that it's eerie.
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Jul 10, 2023 12:41
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Eason the Fifth posted:I think Misery is low-key one of King's best books. I'd put it top 3 even, above Pet Sematary, Salem's Lot, and pretty much anything post-sobriety. On a first read it's absolutely terrifying and sickening, but on a second read with a little distance I think it's one of the best books there is about writing fiction, even better than On Writing. And it doesn't waste any words at all, which for King is really saying something. Agreed. There are a couple of bits I think kinda cheapen it ("suck my book" being the goofiest one) but it's an excellent meditation on writing and a gripping psychological thriller that takes place mostly in one room. On a textual level Paul is wrestling with Annie Wilkes, but subtextually, it's a writer wrestling with readers, with process, with who he's writing towards and what he's writing for. It's really fantastic. I'd personally put it at #2, next to It, but depending on how I'm feeling it takes the #1 spot. I've always kinda hated the Misery movie adaptation because it doesn't do any of the stuff about writing, because the hobbling is far less viscerally upsetting than the amputation in the book, and because it dilutes the locked room thriller aspect by cutting away to the cops every fifteen minutes. Really weakens the tension.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:29
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It's one of King's best and scariest stories. It's also an obvious prototype for It - the monster is definitely a proto-Pennywise, and you have similar themes of adults betraying children under its influence.
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Sep 1, 2023 10:25
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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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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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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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Casimir Radon posted: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. I've only read The Outsider, and though Holly is a major character in it, she doesn't have a super big arc. She just shows up and is nervous but competent and then faces down the villain.
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Sep 7, 2023 07:45
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Bachman is men with guns, men suffering, hard men making hard decisions. If it was released under that name as planned, Misery would have been the best Bachman book by a country mile, because it has the pathos and humanity that a lot (not all) of the other Bachman stuff lacks.
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Sep 13, 2023 13:41
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People are always talking about the hand of God in The Stand and not understanding that it's a metaphor. Flagg is undone by someone who believes his dogma more than he does, bringing it back home to roost. I think it's Ralph who sees the hand of God in that, but Ralph's a religious guy, so of course he does.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:33
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I think in the text we're meant to think that a force of Manichean good ensured this outcome, but not that a literal zappy hand came down and blew up Vegas. The "hand" is a ball of electricity Flagg summons and can't control, just like Trash is a fanatic he created and can't control. It's about evil destroying itself in its venality and greed, and God lining up his little soldiers to set a stage where that can happen, but God isn't reaching down from the heavens to bop Flagg. The force of Manichean good in The Stand is pacifistic and humble, so it sets Flagg up to bop himself.
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Oct 4, 2023 15:33
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IT is one of the best horror novels ever written. Enjoy it!
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Oct 26, 2023 23:47
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MNIMWA posted:Yeah, the recurring feelings of guilt he had for those acts was kinda out of step with how mild they were, but I guess that kinda underscores how decent of a kid he is. I liked The Institute well enough too, but I think it feels that way because a lot of its ideas don't really connect that well. There's a lot of stuff in the first 50% of the book about the social dynamics of Front Half that never leads anywhere before it's dropped in the back. The climax involving a plucky small town coming together to defeat the conspiracy with the power of the Second Amendment is really weak and feels like King indulging his desire to end his story with a heroic shootout. But it's still enjoyable! Feels like a weird mixture of a lot of his best books, and it's less than the sum of its parts, but still tots up to a pretty high number.
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Oct 29, 2023 12:11
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PriorMarcus posted:How do people feel about One for the Road? I think it's a great short story, but it really twist the nail on the ending of 'Salem's Lot by making it clear that Ben didn't really accomplish poo poo in the end. Unless it's meant to take place before Ben burns the town down at the end? I don't think that can be the case though? I love it, but I'm also not a big fan of Salem's Lot. It's too early King for me - hokey prose, full of unreconstructed sexism. One for the Road is just a good solid horror story.
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Dec 18, 2023 18:03
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Digs, The Smoke Child, Excursion, Bots, Late Checkout, Sideswipe. Knifepoint's real, real, real good but its style is slow and meditative eerieness for the most part, and it loves an ending that keeps you wondering. Digs is one of the best short horror stories I've ever experienced, though, and many of those are up there, although not all of them are straight horror.
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Jan 3, 2024 23:04
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I like the little trick King pulls in Thinner of making you think Billy Halleck is a down-on-his-luck schmuck just by surrounding him with marginally worse people than he is, then reminding you that no, he actually sucked all along in the ending.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:12
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I love Gerald's Game. I don't love the twist in the end, it's the goofiest part of the book, but the story is intense, upsetting, terrifying and psychologically fascinating for the most part. It's a lot like Misery pacing-wise. I also like King engaging some with feminism and earnestly trying to write about women in a more holistic way, which is a repeated theme in his early 90s work. Of the ones I've read from that period, Gerald's Game is the strongest example of King taking a shot at a feminist story - along with its sister novel Dolores Claiborne, which I don't like as much but which is solid and hits those themes from a different angle.
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Apr 1, 2024 23:49
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