a stephen king poll

EARLY SINGLES, 1974-1978
Carrie 1974
'Salem's Lot 1975
The Shining 1977
Rage 1977 as Richard Bachman
Night Shift 1978

I HONESTLY THINK, ETC., 1978-1982
The Stand 1978
The Long Walk 1979 as Richard Bachman
The Dead Zone 1979
Firestarter 1980
Roadwork 1981 as Richard Bachman
Danse Macabre 1981
Cujo 1981
The Running Man 1982 as Richard Bachman

IMPERIAL PHASE, 1982-1987
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger 1982
Creepshow 1982 illustrated by Bernie Wrightson
Different Seasons 1982
Christine 1983
Pet Sematary 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf 1983 novel Illustrated by Bernie Wrightson
The Talisman 1984 with Peter Straub
Thinner 1984 as Richard Bachman
Skeleton Crew 1985
It 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon 1987
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three 1987
Misery 1987

EVERY GREAT ARTIST HAS THEIR ‘NEW JERSEY’, 1987-1998
The Tommyknockers 1987
Nightmares in the Sky 1988
The Dark Half 1989
The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition 1990
Four Past Midnight 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands 1991
Needful Things 1991
Gerald's Game 1992
Dolores Claiborne 1992
Nightmares & Dreamscapes 1993
Insomnia 1994
Rose Madder 1995
The Green Mile 1996
Desperation 1996
The Regulators 1996 as Richard Bachman
Six Stories 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass 1997
Bag of Bones 1998

(SOME SORT OF DANIEL LANOIS AND/OR RICK RUBIN REFERENCE HERE), 1999-2004
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 1999
The New Lieutenant's Rap 1999
Hearts in Atlantis 1999
Blood and Smoke 1999
On Writing 2000
Secret Windows 2000
The Plant 2000 unfinished
Dreamcatcher 2001
Black House 2001 with Peter Straub
Everything's Eventual 2002
From a Buick 8 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla 2003
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah 2004
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower 2004

THEN AS NOW MANY READERS FOUND THE LATE STYLE DIFFICULT, 2004-date
Faithful 2004 with Stewart O'Nan
The Colorado Kid 2005
Cell 2006 novel 355 X
Lisey's Story 2006
Blaze 2007 as Richard Bachman
Duma Key 2008
Just After Sunset 2008
Ur 2009
Under the Dome 2009
Blockade Billy 2010
Full Dark, No Stars 2010
Mile 81 2011
11/22/63 2011

I'll have to go with 'imperial phase'. Some of my favorites are obvs missing, but goddamn that's a good run. Massive bonus points for the Creepshow comic.

I had to look up what "imperial phase" meant w/r/t music, but yeah, that. It, the first two (and best) Dark Tower books, Different Seasons...

Fuck, I'd like to extend it through 1990 or so though. Plus Skeleton Crew is largely from other periods.

there's at least one book in each i really love. i wanna play punk and go early singles but instead ill go imperial cause of the stand.

dark half and regulators might be the ONLY even halfway good books of the ones i read during the long slog period and i guess it says something that dark half was gonna be a bachman book before he got outed.

whoops i meant "sgt. peppers" not "imperial"

Imperial Phase for me. I stopped reading everything he wrote when The Tommyknockers came out and only occasionally get back on.

voting early singles cuz the only one there i have no interest in rereading is out of print anyway.

Sgt. Pepper it is.

tbh haven't even read anything beyond the New Jersey phase

imperial phase = ABBA ref?

imperial phase but there's good stuff in the cracks of the new jersey plates

bag of bones misplaced imo

jesus, the dates-of-output up there are pretty humbling

@ drugs a. money, it seems to primarily be a Pep Shop Boys reference.

Just so hard

Torn between Imperial and Sgt Pepper... It/Different Seasons vs. Dead Zone/The Stand. Read everything up to Rose Madder in my King loving youth and maybe half dozen that came after. Need to read more of the late period because 11/22/63, Full Dark, and Under the Dome were all good to great and I haven't read any others.

Hate King so much (folksy bullshit + can't write endings + illogical plot holes just to squeeze in gore), but really enjoyed the style of the poll!

that's a v reasonable critique of the old testament right there

Voted Sgt. Peppers -- anchored by The Stand of course, but I think Firestarter and Dead Zone are really underappreciated and show him trying to understand how to write something really scary without scary monsters in it -- life coach / mind-control dude ./ "pusher" n Firestarter remains one of SK's most memorable creations.

I want to go back and re-read Firestarter. There was a brief reference to The Shop in The Mist, which I re-read a few years ago. I'd be happy to read more about those guys from him.

i can't stand the stand

firestarter was the first one i read, as a kid, and i accidentally skipped one of the sections and it was this weird bizarre reading experience, like i thought it was this deliberate and hyperbolic ellipsis (n.b. i didn't literally phrase it to myself 'deliberate and hyperbolic ellipsis)

the bachman books do a lot to raise the tone of that period

it occurs to me that i can't imagine wanting to read any individual book of these but i'd love to read any seven-book run

and i still can't get over:

Misery 1987
The Tommyknockers 1987

^thats absurd. The Tommyknockers finished me off. Got about a third of the way through and couldn't whatever I needed to do. Misery v good tho.

I was pretty bored by both back when I first read them, although I finished Misery and not Tommyknockers. I've re-read Tommyknockers in the last few years and liked it well enough, even though it's not one of my favorites. Misery just seems like boring subject matter to me. Nothing supernatural going on, right?

misery's actually really kind of hateful, i guess when you remember that it makes more sense

voted early singles tho obv that option should've been called the first four years

plus I don't get how the stand is not a part of that, for me it's the first four books and then declining returns (exempting the short story collections which are always welcome)

the first four years

haha yeah sorry, i gave up a little on that one. err i can see how the stand fits but i was curious how periodizing it this way would affect things. also i honestly think the stand a pretty awkward and bad book, though this might be affected by having read the long and not the short vers.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I haven't read anything past Four Past Midnight, is there anything worth reading in the 2000's? I loved reading him in Junior high, before I accidentally found a copy of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer. I kind of missed being scared by a book.

I have gone on board for The Cell. Some people think it has a typical King shitty ending, but I enjoyed it through and through.

I started reading 11/??/63 a few weeks ago, but haven't picked it up again after the first chapter. I keep meaning to get back to it, because it's been praised a lot on this board, but it seemed kinda week at the outset.

Is the Cell the same as the JLO movie?

no

No, it is sort-of King's entry into zombie fiction. Not living dead zombies, but mind-controlled murderer zombies. As with a lot of zombie fiction, a huge part of the appeal is in watching how different people react under the circumstances, and I feel King gets pretty close to the top of his game in terms of sympathetic characters.

I might just be picking up a King novel again, that sounds good!

On November 11, 2009, Stephen King announced at a book signing in Dundalk, Maryland that he had finished a screenplay. He stated that he had complaints with the ending of the book and it was redone for the screenplay.[8]

lol. fuck.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

you ppl are insane

nah that's ok

Based on what I've read, that seems about right. That looooong stretch of time with no votes doesn't bode well for tbis chronological read-through I'm currently engaged in.

I read nearly everything up to 3/4 of the way thru the imperial phase, that's when I gave up

early singles got hobbled misery-style by loss of the stand but I guess I'm an unrepentant first four stan

Well, then, you have some catching up to do because that latter 1/4 of Imperial Phase is effing great.

Having just finished all of the Early Singles, I echo your stannage (for everything but Rage, which is kind of a pointless trifle).

didn't he write rage when he was a teenager?

dont make me quote death of the artist here

why u threaten artist with death

gf hasn't read any king, and i think she'd dig a collection of his short stories/novellas.

which is best iyo

Night Shift

EIther that or Skeleton Key. They're both classic King. Just After Sunset is also very, very good, but is a much newer collection of stories.

Skeleton Crew, that is. I don't remember much about Nightmares and Dreamscapes or Everything's Eventual, but I liked the former better than the latter.

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

Apart from discussion here, there's definitely a fair amount of bits and bobs on the long stephen king thread, which was just active recently but which I now cannot find even with Google...

I think the orgy is solely something that enables their escape, after they've wounded IT. I remember it seeming like the sex actually teleported them out of the catacombs when they were done but I might be misremembering. Anyway, I don't think it's supposed to directly affect IT.

stephen king c/d?

It recentres their chakras maaan

Then as now, kudos on the poll options itt

I randomly opened the book for the first time in years and opened straight to this quote:

She heard the familiar chimes from the living room—chimes that had always sounded to her like a Chinese name: Ching-Chong!

It was a different time

lol that is classic king

that "he had always thought" or "it had always seemed to her that" is very characteristic kingism (not that other people don't do it, I just think he notably does a lot of it)

the passage I quoted above is slaying me all over again btw, so good/bad

This guy is totally back right? traffic over 2 threads, like 5 big films in production... 80s babies exercising their purchasing power

yeah it's weird, i've seen several articles & talk in SK fan communities about his sudden cultural resurgence (as if he ever went away), but I think you can chalk it all up to the success of Stranger Things and two of his most beloved novels (IT & Dark Tower) getting made into movies this year.

I think wins is right about purchasing power. Also the demographics of who's In Charge and making decisions to greenlight things.

thought I would take a break from SK after finishing IT, but I picked up Cujo and I'm totally sucked in. It's a nice companion piece to IT, same idea really, and the prose is wild, makes sense that he wrote it in a total coke/alcohol blackout. really vicious, already so much better than Firestarter (boring! not enough fire starting).

The most effectively-horrifying element of the Cujo novel which is lost in the movie is the presentation of the dog's perspective. I found King's primitive presentation of this well-meaning creature's slow descent into a madness that it doesn't understand really affecting upon re-reading it a few years ago.

Like, something about the knowledge that Cujo just wants to be the same good dog he was before his sickness makes the entire tableau about 100x more awful for me.

King also does good dog perspective in Gerald's Game (which is otherwise fairly rubbish but I am kind of intrigued to see how they pull off the forthcoming adaptation for Netflix)

Like, something about the knowledge that Cujo just wants to be the same good dog he was before his sickness makes the entire tableau about 100x more awful for me.

― Break the meat into the pineapples and pat them (Old Lunch), Monday, April 17, 2017 2:57 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pretty sure 12 year old me had no capacity to appreciate this angle, must reread

Well I guess he should write a whole book from the POV of a dog. Why the hell not? It'd probably still have all the same SK tics. The dog would refer to people as "that Johnson woman," etc.

Dog would tell unfunny jokes to other dogs, be annoyingly folksy. Would at least justify the end of the book being a feeble shaggy dog story. Plus dogs come in a range of colours, so the inevitable Magical Negro could instead be red or spotty or brindled instead of black.

lol

The twist would be in the dog version of CUJO, where the dog would be played by a human.