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Oy mistrustfully looked at Eddie, then mistrustfully looked at Suzannah, who spoke some racially dubious bullshit, and Oy mistrustfully pissed on Roland's dust-dirty boots mistrustfully, the gunslinger's gray-blue eyes scanning the horizon for more piss, aye say thankee big-big sai, he's trig that one! The Dark Tower language wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't reduced to a small stockpile of phrases spread over 7 usually huge novels.
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May 17, 2009 13:24
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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. The story parts in Roland's world are basically Roland alone, or Roland with a few other characters, on a beach. There is no immersion in Mid-World via lovely ka-speak or whatever, it's a fun action book.
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May 18, 2009 19:20
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Local Group Bus posted:I liked knowing how things were going to be in Pet Sematary. It just spiralled down into complete poo poo for everyone and I think that added to it. I re-read Dolan's Cadillac and only really remembered the main twist of the story and forgot about the bad things that befall the main characer After he buries Dolan alive in the desert: The guy fucks his spine up, he concedes he'll never have another woman after Elizabeth, he gets creeping paranoia about Dolan coming to get him and being buried alive, he's clearly left disturbed by the whole ordeal. I forgot all that part and it made the story more of a downer than I thought.
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Dec 29, 2010 14:52
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Philo posted:All this talk about movie adaptations, but I haven't seen anybody mention Misery yet. I've never actually watched the movie, but Misery is one of my all time favorite King books. It's one of those books that has actually disturbed me in different ways each time I read it/ as I grow older. I'm reading Misery for the first time in years and it's shocking just how well plotted, paced and sensitively it's done. The best part I've found so far is when he opens up Annie's 'Memory Lane' book about all the obituraries of her victims. Compared to the famous "hobbling" scene (which is waaaaaaaaaay worse in the book than film) it's just outright psychological horror, and it's genuinely disturbing stuff.
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Jan 22, 2011 21:26
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Ensign_Ricky posted:Walter O'dim/Marten Broadcloak/Maerlyn, yeah. There's an argument to be made that he's also John Farson though it's less clear and fairly disputable
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Feb 1, 2011 13:33
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fishmech posted:I thought he manipulated John Farson by being his advisor or something. Yes, this happened. But you also have stuff like: "The real Wizard steps forward. It's Roland's ancient nemesis, Marten Broadcloak, known in some worlds as Randall Flagg, in others as Richard Fannin, in others as John Farson (the Good Man)." From Wizard and Glass. And the foreword to Wolves of the Calla says it outright. But Dark Tower VII implies they're not the same, and the comics just retcon it to always being different people. Maybe King just changed his mind? Or maybe in-universe they were confused for one another, despite being seperate.
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Feb 2, 2011 22:47
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Soul Glo posted:Just finished the extended edition of The Stand. Anybody mind telling me what's added to the original edition? It's set in 1978 or something. As said above The Kid is missing completely. The awesome chapter about random people dying in stupid ways is missing. Fran's fight with her mother is missing. It starts with Campion crashing into the gas pump; the lead up to it is missing. There's less Nick Andros (Nick is AWESOME!) and as said above the epilogue with Flagg isn't there. I think that's it . . .
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Feb 11, 2011 21:01
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So I'm re-reading Christine at the moment. I'm up to the part where Arnie gets arrested for trafficking cigarettes. It's a pretty good book so far. I first read it well over ten years ago when I was a teenager, and most of the tedious bits I wasn't looking forward to seem to actually have been drawn from the John Carpenter adaptation. I vaguely remember the ending and it's not awful as King's bad endings go. Surprised it's a much more solid book than I thought.
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Feb 16, 2011 12:39
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Man, I just finished Christine and I forgot what a loving downer this book ends on. Arnie and his parents all die, Leigh and Dennis date for a bit but LeBay memories haunt their relationship and they split up, and stay in contact. Dennis never gets over Leigh, who remarries. He never gets over Arnie either, though he kind of gets to say goodbye in his hallucination. Dennis's leg is hosed a little for the rest of his life. The detective who crushes Christine goes silent, and in the epilogue four years on the last of Buddy's friends who got away gets killed by a crazy hit and run driver. It's implied Christine is back, and killed the detective, then Buddy's friend, and might be working her way across the country, just as Leigh implies to Dennis in a postcard that she's forgotten or buried Christine in her memory. It definitely seemed like LeBay was evil and kinda possessed / influenced the car though. Towards the end it's not so much "the car is evil!" but "this guy is evil and killed people and caused his wife to suicide and his rage and evil even infected the car as some kind of talisman of his rage". I see it as Arnie is haunted, not Christine. Arnie is haunted and carries on the weird symbiosis of LeBay's will and evil into Christine. The John Carpenter film made it seem like the car was evil. It's less goofy King's way. Not non-goofy. Just less. This has shades of the Shining (I think there's a reference to back this up - it mentions a school caretaker who left his job under bizarre circumstances) in that there's a malevolent evil kind of "infecting" things. And LeBay is this evil or influenced by evil (his brother tells Dennis he was "swapped with a changeling"). LeBay's spite and hate alienates him from his family, and he just drives around in his car, and it isn't as much of a stretch to think his rage just kind of seeped into the car he loved so much. Though there's definitely elements of Christine being somewhat sentient from this process - jealousy of Leigh, who LeBay also lusts for. (Arnie is basically replaced by him.) But I'd prefer to think Christine is still just an object, guided (unconsciously or ritually, the book implies) by LeBay's evil - for example, it's not that Christine can regenerate as such. Time actually moves backwards in and around her; the radio, traffic lights, roads, to reverse her back into mint condition, and LeBay's ghost does this also, from a skull, to a rotting corpse, to a young man (usually Arnie's form but sometimes Dennis just sees LeBay and no trace of Arnie.) This definitely cut down the level of goof I expected going in. It's not just "lol haunted car". It's "lol this dude is evil and hosed" and his hate radiates into everything he does, and he loved a car more than his family, and spent more time with it as Arnie does. I like the term Dennis uses of Christine just being the object of "love gone rancid". The sad part is Dennis's memories of Arnie, just a page of him reeling out memories, man, there's one thing King can do and it's write characters, and this was just a bummer. I'd say Christine, a Plymouth Fury, is definitely back because it ends: His unending fury. Isn't the car mentioned in a few later novels? Man, so many words for a book most people would poo poo on 
ZoDiAC_ fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Mar 4, 2011 |
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Mar 4, 2011 17:05
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Best short story? I vote for Dolan's Cadillac. Or The Jaunt.
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Mar 6, 2011 03:01
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End of the Whole Mess was good too. What's the one with the guy who walks outside the edge of a building? I liked that one though it wasn't very surprising. All That You Love Will Be Carried Away is great too though, Everything's Eventual had some good stories including the title story.
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Mar 6, 2011 14:40
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Undead Unicorn posted:My favorite is The Running Man. Though I'm a King fan I guess, I can't believe he wrote something that good. I refuse to. That's more of a novella. If we're going to talk novellas, Shawkshank Redemption and The Body are the tippy-top toppest of tip-top stuff.
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Mar 7, 2011 15:58
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Another thing I hate in King books is sometimes he blunts the impact of character death scenes by having prior chapter with stuff like: "That was the last time that she saw Eddie Dean alive."
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Mar 9, 2011 19:35
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This was announced in March. Totally missed it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11/22/63 It sounds like a recycling of quite a lot of sci fi ideas ..
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Mar 10, 2011 00:04
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it wasn't that bad
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Apr 27, 2011 12:48
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Insomnia is awesome
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May 6, 2011 20:43
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Things I Wouldn't Need In That Predicament
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May 14, 2011 00:03
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I read the Langoliers this weekend while I've been sick, it's pretty good although the needing to be asleep to go back plot twist kind of kills the pacing Think I'm going to go back to his short stories for a while though. Maybe another novella (not read any of Bachman's books in a while, nor The Body).
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May 30, 2011 20:08
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Apart from the fact kids refer to sex as "IT" and it's a big scary monster when you're growing up I guess
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Jun 7, 2011 10:48
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using the word "mistrustfully". Especially in the Dark Tower. Especially Oy
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Jun 8, 2011 17:25
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Local Group Bus posted:Excerpt from 11/22/63 is here if anyone wants a sneak peek. I wouldn't think so, as he describes Christine as all-red, and this is two-tone. Man using a spoiler tag for that
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Jun 9, 2011 15:34
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Stephen King's main strength is characterization and by the same token, when he writes about communities, I always find it a high point because of this. Salem's Lot without that, well it wouldn't be Stephen King, and it would not be an improvement at all.
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Aug 1, 2011 10:18
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:This right here. I appreciate the balance he strikes in trying to write a believable female character. Big Driver and A Good Marriage from Full Dark were good for the same reasons. I find it a bit dull overall but Dolores Claiborne of . . well, guess, is a very well rounded character.
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Aug 3, 2011 15:40
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Mister Kingdom posted:Has anyone seen the filmed version of "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe"? No, it seems obscure. Hope it surfaces and is awesome. It's not his best story but the maitre'd is weird and amusing as gently caress http://www.bevvincent.com/gotham.html
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Aug 4, 2011 16:32
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juliuspringle posted:He should do a massive rewrite on everything after book 4. I mean come on, Golden Snitches, lightsabers and Doctor Doom robots anyone? He was using pop culture references and or poo poo from other fiction before Calla. Book 4's Wizard of Oz poo poo for example. Waste Land's "Velcro Fly". "Hey Jude" in Tull. . .
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Aug 12, 2011 22:10
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Locus posted:That's kind of like the difference between the use of theology in early seasons of Battlestar Galactica (ambiguous and kind of neat) compared with the last season (the worst poo poo ever). Oh I'm not suggesting the two eras of doing this are equal in value - I cringed like many others at the later attempts at it. I'm just saying it at least was a theme he continued (albeit horribly) as opposed to some new element he shoehorned in.
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Aug 12, 2011 23:12
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scary ghost dog posted:Holy moly, this could be a huge return to form for Demme. I'm excited. Assuming the book is good. The book as in the Stand? Barring the usual King caveats (ending), it has some of his best work.
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Aug 16, 2011 00:12
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Ahh my bad, sorry. 11/22/63 sounds pretty cool though.
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Aug 16, 2011 23:36
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Wasn't King going to tinker with Drawing and Waste Lands the same way he did with Gunslinger, or did that fall by the wayside?
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Aug 17, 2011 11:12
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Yeah, I get it. I've read both. In fact I started on Wizard and Glass, but read Gunslinger before the revised edition. The Gunslinger was basically a bunch of shorter stories anyway from some sci fi magazine or something, it seems to be its own absolute book just fine . . . but the revised edition has edits to revise plot points that didn't gel with the rest of the books, which is both good and bad. I prefer the original.
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Aug 18, 2011 18:38
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Ridonkulous posted:King states he wrote The Gunslinger as a whole and a Publisher split it into a series of short stories. Odd. These are the publication dates of the "stories": "The Gunslinger" (October 1978) "The Way Station" (April 1980) "The Oracle and the Mountains" (February 1981) "The Slow Mutants" (July 1981) "The Gunslinger and the Dark Man" (November 1981) I guess it's possible, but Wiki (and I know the usual Wiki caveat) lists each of these as a seperate novella, but that could well mean the publisher split the whole up (but weird to me to think they essentially sat on the full thing for like three years, and they published it as a whole in 1982 . . . why not publish it as a whole right away? I guess to milk it and make the most profit.)
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Aug 19, 2011 16:15
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trandorian posted:It was written specifically for his then 13-14 year old daughter since she didn't like his horror books I hope he didn't make his kids read IT
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Aug 23, 2011 00:43
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Hedrigall posted:Also, this is pretty loving awful: No part of this isn't awful. The chrome effect on his name. The title being in a digital style font. With lensflare behind it. The trite photo of JFK with wacky perspective warping The terrible tagline
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Aug 23, 2011 10:37
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Kentucky Shark posted:King uses the annoying "omniscient narrator tells us a character is going to die several paragraphs before they actually do" about 3 times, which really undercuts whatever tension he could have built in those scenes. I wish he'd knock this off. I HATE when King does this above all other quirks. He telegraphs or outright states when someone is about to die with phrases like "and that's the last time she saw Character alive" and it wrecks all suspense.
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Sep 6, 2011 16:56
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ConfusedUs posted:I don't remember the Christine cameo in It, and I thought I had caught everything. When Pennywise gets Henry Bowers out of Juniper Hill, she's implied to be his ride
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Sep 11, 2011 18:26
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What shall I re-read next for good old scary 70s/80s King? Just done with the Shining Salem's Lot? Pet Semetary?
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Sep 14, 2011 23:26
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IT is a bit heavy for a re-read, I tried a few months ago and just got tired of it. Ditto The Stand, really, those two are just timesinks. I think Salem's Lot is next, I've not read that in years. I read The Boogeyman last night, I found a neat part is the main character muses that maybe the Boogeyman only exists because he started to believe in it. There's even a line "maybe when kids go missing, it's because they imagined a Frankenstein's monster or wolfman made real" or something. Made me think of IT a little.
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Sep 15, 2011 17:40
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That comes up every few pages, there is some flimsy metaphor behind it I guess They're kids making the transition into adulthood and sex is another big bad "it" to be scared of that defines the difference between childhood and adulthood, so they confront "it" as a group I think though it's very very heavy handed a method to convey that. It's not necessarily worse to me than Patrick jerking Henry off and offering to suck him too while Beverly secretly watches as you can't really attach any kind of meaning to that. (Unless you want to argue that homosexuality is another "it" to be afraid of in the book and it sure as hell scares Henry, who likes to call Eddie a fag and the like but no thanks)
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Sep 16, 2011 11:49
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Yeah, that was earlier in the book and less crazy. (Not "not crazy" though.") IT is peppered with weird sex stuff though. Sex, like with everything else, seems to ramp up the weirdness factor the deeper you get. I worry about Stephen King, I worry a lot.
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Sep 16, 2011 19:20
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1,142 pages in IT and all you guys talk about is the 2 pages with the child gang bang
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Sep 18, 2011 12:10
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