a stephen king poll

entirely possible I was too young to parse wgat happened in the snake bit at the time

I hadn't read anything good in weeks and ws maybe p susceptible at the time but I recently read and rly enjoyed Revival.

i've been meaning to read that, sounds like his best since cell

Actually so far as his recentish books go Cell's the other one I particularly enjoyed, think this one's better tho.

i wasn't kidding!!

REVIVAL is pretty good! Some middle fat in there (enough with the guitar stuff!) but the beginning and end are super.

His two recent mysteries are pretty enjoyable too. Frankly everything looks good after DOCTOR SLEEP.

I didn't think you were! Just yeah I've read both, Revival compares well, etc

About halfway through It now and totally digging it even as every few pages there's something so spammily, definitively King-ish that would make me roll my eyes hard if I wasn't just basically on board with the situation and overall arc. He definitely did not need four hundred-some pages to get me to where I am now in the plot, much as I've enjoyed many moments in that journey. I knocked through The Talisman a few months ago and it was basically the same deal although I remember way more things pissing me off... especially how our hero kept getting saddled with terrible, shrieking sidekicks. The one big standout there was the perfectly-named nightmare rustbelt town of Oatley - that was fantastic.

I wonder how many pages could be cut out of this guy's body of work if someone had just demanded that he delete, say, two out of every five times a character's most prominent trait or characteristic speech pattern/impediment is brought back to our attention. Surely at least a novel's worth, probably more. He really has no faith that you can picture his characters and how they would act or say things without constantly putting it explicitly in front of you. Okay, Richie does voices, Eddie uses an inhaler, Bill stutters, I fucking get it, dude!

And man.... between these two books and Dark Tower, a body could get mighty burned out on people realizing that events, fate, some nameless force has been drawing them to this point, leading them to this destiny.

I wonder how many pages could be cut out of this guy's body of work if someone had just demanded that he delete, say, two out of every five times a character's most prominent trait or characteristic speech pattern/impediment is brought back to our attention. Surely at least a novel's worth, probably more. He really has no faith that you can picture his characters and how they would act or say things without constantly putting it explicitly in front of you. Okay, Richie does voices, Eddie uses an inhaler, Bill stutters, I fucking get it, dude!

-

yeah this is one of my least favourite things. and yet there's no shorthand for it, it's weird. It's terrible in jk Rowling, renders her almost unreadable. did people do this before televisions

w King it isn't present in all of the oeuvre : I think his most hacky tics are things he falls into when he's aware he can't make a thing work in a legit way

But also I guess a curse of fictional scenarios where the same group of people interact over and over

I'm so used to it with King that I've come to accept it as a genre convention, just a thing that always comes attached to a certain character's name, like swift-footed Achilles. You don't go "OK, I get it, he has swift feet, enough already" every time.

otm

i read this book too recently; some thoughts in this revive: Stephen King: POO/OPO

(but carry on using this thread, i love this poll)

thx i put a lot of effort into it

I get the Greek epithet take, but it really adds up over the course of a 1,000 page paperback that I suspect could have gotten 'er done in 600 or less. Sometimes it feels like he gets worried that each element in his fiction is at risk of getting drowned out by the others, so he goes around continuing to add things here, there, realizes that the boomer nostalgia button-presses aren't getting as much page time as the wry comments on getting old, adds some more of the former, and now, crap, what if people get lost in that and forget that Bill's stutter went away after he left town but has come back now that he's returned??? Better add another callback to that. I'm certain he does not write this way at all - you really feel the fingers flying across the typewriter and just cranking this stuff out running straight through the book until it's done, but mannnn it gets ridiculous.

Sorry, post ended up running a little long there, but the old muse is running in the head, isn't it, Doctor? Just below the surface, like Bugs Bunny in a Warner Brothers cartoon, the old Warner Brothers cartoons, long before Speedy Gonzales, when the cartoons came two in a row before the movies and the popcorn still smelled like real butter and not chemicals, and Bugs is picking up speed today, leaving a raised trail of expired thoughts on the surface of the skull, what's up Doc and Howdy Doody Time, sorry to say your life's taken a wrong turn from Albuquerque and up Shit Creek, but what are you gonna do, ask for a refund on your noggin? That's when you realize that this post isn't a dream, wasn't a dream, could never have been a dream because the keys are under your fingers and rapping forward like Liberace's ivories, only the brother George you wish was here is drowned, frozen, yanked away from life but still grinning crazily with blood in his eyes, hanging in front of your eyes and calling up from the drainpipes that we all float down here, oh yes we do. We all float down here.

And then the screams begin.

also re: a group of characters interacting again and again - i feel like there are much more evocative or interesting ways to convey how people interact in fiction, or how they remember/rediscover each other, or how their traits change or don't change. i think of the economy of something like clarissa's reacquaintance with peter walsh in mrs. dalloway: "He had his knife out. That's so like him." so much is contained there, and peter does not have to pull out the knife in every single scene or remember verbatim his dialogue with the shopkeeper the day he bought it, etc. etc. it's like king just either does not trust you to remember anything about anybody, or that the only way he can see to manage a large cast is to give everybody a really big clear signifier, like the artificial hair colors of anime characters. people can have multiple aspects to their selves and still remain coherent as characters.

at his worst, stephen king's characters are all stephen king, with one added driving personality quality and one identity-badge tic. if that was all there was to him i wouldn't keep reading these books, obviously... today i got to the part where bill finds his old bicycle at an antique store and it really socked me in the gut. because he doesn't try to spell out all the feelings this thing would conjure up, because, having spent a good amount of time with this bike in good times and bad, you're feeling them.

I reread It a couple of years ago. Really holds up. I think it's much more his middle period magnum opus than the stand is. He gets all his hobby horses in there but it feels like one organism, the drainage theme is awesome, it's scary as shit...

yeah this is one of my least favourite things. and yet there's no shorthand for it, it's weird. It's terrible in jk Rowling, renders her almost unreadable. did people do this before televisions

Dickens, bro

yeah haha. it feels very much like a serial entertainment thing? and it left the novel for decades (still visible in the popular short story to a degree, i guess) but re-emerged after television got its claws into us

Finished It a while back and still haven't made up my mind on it. The quantity of bulk that could have been edited out only seemed to rise as it went on, and it started to get really distracting as I contemplated the leaner, meaner book I might have finished days before. Clearly there's a plausible version without the "historical flashback to some other really bad shit that once happened in Derry" material, fewer chases with the bullies, maybe even one or two less kids. There are also some just outright clumsy things - all of a sudden, an additional, deeply psycho, bully gets introduced, where it seems kinda obvious he would have appeared or at least been mentioned before.... and then there's the fizzle of the story around Bev's monstrous husband, where you spend half the book dreading his arrival and then whatever he does is mostly off-screen. The lead bully who escapes from the insane asylum is kind of a similar deal - big big buildup and then he's finished almost immediately, without any really satisfying scenes with the leads - feels like Dick Hallorann (who has a cameo here! Jesus!) in Kubrick's film of the Shining. And it's like, man, if anything should be scary and disorienting and gut-wrenching in the story about kids who have now grown up and are facing their childhood demons again, it should be the unexpected reappearance of their onetime tormentor. And on and on...

But man, the weirdest thing of all is what goes on between Bev and the rest of the gang, as kids, after they've seemingly defeated It and before they get out of the sewers. What in the hell was that? King is so weirdly casual about it, in his ka-tet fate-based "they somehow sensed this was the right thing to do, as if the turtle was nudging them" kinda way. It just seems so totally creepy and out of place, like I guess in some way it's plausible for at least some of the characters but such an odd note to strike.

And yet I didn't put it down, and I enjoyed almost all of it, and the coolest parts were really cool, and the fate of Derry was great (even if I thought it was bullshit that they all lose their memories again when it seemed strongly implied that It caused them to forget the first time). There are lots of great scenes and bits, and I agree with dlh (whose posts in the other thread are all great) that the handling of the town at large is very creepy and unsettling. Moreso than any (or most) of the individual breakouts of horror, it's the everyday wrongness that really works here, and in a way the book peaks in its first few dozen pages, when the first deaths we see have all the shock and sickness of Laura Palmer being found in the Twin Peaks pilot.

Oh, I also liked how he wrote the revelation that Eddie's inhaler medicine is a placebo twice, down to spelling out that its name means that it's plain water - once from the narrator near the beginning and once from the pharmacist sitting the boy down for a talking-to. Like, did he just forget he wrote it the other time? Or did he like something about both versions and couldn't let either one go? Really thought it was important that for most of the book we, but not Eddie, know exactly what's going on? It just seems so sloppy.

I did like that It turned out to basically be Lavos, even if the "smokehouse vision" sequence that gives our heroes this information also seemed essentially unnecessary.

The kingian lovecraftian interdimensional copout turned out to be a thing; as far as the umm ahh incident in the sewer at the end, the flippant answer is steve king took a lot of cocaine

My son wants to read IT and I'm shopping around for a copy to buy for him. I gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed with most of the available book covers beyond this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5a/It_cover.jpg

There are some interesting international covers though:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-343ESWN6Fv8/Us10OPF4MLI/AAAAAAAAAvY/rlx_V1-204Y/s1600/P8300155.JPG
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/4d/3c/71/4d3c715da3f226941b348b974c1abb2d.jpg
https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/3286314-M.jpg

my cover's a lil DO U SEE

https://dreadfultalesdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/it.jpg

Ha!

ha, i got stuck with the TV-special-era mass-market size cover:

http://66.media.tumblr.com/8aff9a9cf434fa5aa3a096ce49e79fc7/tumblr_n9snzsrmTv1qkl5tno3_400.jpg

By the author of the dark half...

Odd book to choose

The Dark Half would've been King's most recent novel at the time the miniseries was broadcast

Also, his books are all varying degrees of shit, one title is as good as another

The new Pennywise looks like complete garbage.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/get-your-first-full-creepy-look-at-its-new-pennywise-1785339893

in unrelated news I am re-reading Dead Zone

the Castle Rock Strangler part of the story resolved way quicker than i remember; and I am finding that the politics part of the story is kinda lacking for me, along with the weird sidebar "teaching a kid to read"

Oh shit, this is an I Love Books thread. My mistake. I just looked for the last place anyone was discussing IT.

xxpost I want to see the non-menacing version of Pennywise before I pass judgment. If he's seriously all veiny and brooding throughout the movie, I will concur with your assessment.

was always going to be difficult/impossible to match tim curry pennywise. otoh tim curry's pennywise is literally the only good thing about that adaptation which is p garbage

Awww, I really liked the "teaching a kid to read" stuff - really skimmed past in the movie unfortunately. It seems like a nice touch to really show Johnny as a normal person, with a normal gift - another glimpse of the happy life that should have been his. IIRC King recycles a bit of this later on, probably for Stuttering Bill in It although I already can't remember... the stuff about making a breakthrough by not concentrating on it, working around the problem area, etc.

Castle Rock Strangler also undersold by the movie; I loved the slow build on that although yeah it is kinda yanked out of the picture to clear the stage for the Stillson plot to take over. Genuinely creepy and disturbing serial killer. Cause I'm so SLICK!

jim in Vancouver 100% otm.

the stuff about making a breakthrough by not concentrating on it, working around the problem area, etc.

this sounds like Firestarter to me

I read/re-read everything from Carrie through Different Seasons a couple of years back. Everything held up except Firestarter, which is totally forgettable. I think I was forgetting it as I was reading it. Oh, and Rage, which was dumb and pointless and kinda deserves its deletion from the back catalog.

I haven't read Firestarter since 1988 and a lot of things from it are still kind of lodged in me

I always wanted more stories about The Shop. Did he ever mention them after the late 80s?

(feel like I've asked that question on here before tbh)

Oh, upthread. Duh.

Cool idea but, as demonstrated several times over, King should probably leave the higher concept sci-fi to others.

And writing in general

audiobook of it read by tv's stephen weber was going cheap on audible, been listening at work. I'll always have a fondness for this book but I will also always lol at this ridiculous episode, stephen king is working out some stuff lmao

There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson—in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the ‘needle-nosed’ spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class—and the instructor—agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tall, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics ... culture ... history ... aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean ...” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean ... can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

^^this genuinely reads like the film GODS NOT DEAD but with garbagey fiction in the place of religion

might as well put this here

Bestselling thriller writer James Patterson has cancelled publication of his novel The Murder of Stephen King, belatedly deciding that he did not want to cause King and his family “any discomfort”.

King has dreamed up his fair share of deranged fans, from Misery’s axe-wielding Annie Wilkes who keeps her favourite author writing by chopping off his foot, to Morris Bellamy, the villain in his recent thriller Finders Keepers, who shoots his idol in the head. Patterson’s novel, which was only announced last week for publication in November, promised to feature “all of Stephen King’s greatest villains, rolled into one”.

Why Stephen King's It still terrifies 30 years on
Read more
“Stephen King is facing a nightmare. A stalker is re-enacting the horrors from his novels. And he won’t stop until he kills the master of suspense himself – unless King puts him out of his Misery first,” ran its description, with Patterson stating that the novelist “did not participate in the making of this novel, nor is he affiliated with it in any way”.

“I hope he likes it,” added Patterson last week, describing himself as a fan of the horror novelist - an admiration that does not seem wholly returned. In 2009, King described Patterson as “a terrible writer”.

But on Thursday, less than two weeks after the novel was announced, Patterson announced its cancellation. He added that the decision was taken after the publicity that followed the announcement of The Murder of Stephen King, when he was alerted to the fact that “fans of Stephen King have disrupted the King household in the past”.

“My book is a positive portrayal of a fictional character, and – spoiler alert – the main character is not actually murdered,” he said in a statement from his publisher. “Nevertheless, I do not want to cause Stephen King or his family any discomfort. Out of respect for them, I have decided not to publish The Murder of Stephen King.”

The novel, part of Patterson’s BookShots series of short reads and co-authored with Derek Nikitas, will be replaced with Taking the Titanic, a story in which two thieves posing as newlyweds board the doomed ship to “rob its well-heeled passengers”. “I’m disappointed, yes, but what’s much more important to me is we do right by Stephen King,” wrote Nikitas on Twitter.

According to Associated Press, which saw an early edition of The Murder of Stephen King, the novel features a detective named Jamie Peterson attempting to save King from the man who is trying to murder him.

Patterson told AP last week that King’s remarks dismissing him as a terrible writer were “hyperbole”. “I know I’m not a terrible writer. That’s a little over the top,” said Patterson, adding that if King wrote a novel called The Murder of James Patterson he “would definitely want to read it”.

lol and the missing link between my post and yours = michael chrichton's paedophile character based on a critic who gave him a bad review

finished IT last night and fuck man it's impossible to search ilx or google for discussion. is there an ILX thread just for IT?

i knew for years that there was some kind of fucked up orgy at the end of the book, i assumed it was this huge evil climactic thing with Pennywise, the kids and their parents or something. i'm not exactly sure why that was supposed to scare IT away for 27 years. did i miss that? did the turtle tell beverly to do that? hm