a stephen king poll

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.

i think i preferred skeleton crew alright. i'll go for that one i think

Just plowed through all of the Early Singles + The Stand (unedited and commercial-free edition). Good value, but I'm winded after that last one (and feeling pretty decisively that it peaks early, i.e. around the point that the old world is officially over). Looking forward to more but I need a breather.

tried taking a run at it, didn't get very far. been wanting to read the unedited stand but I think I may have lost my appetite for big king.

Just finished Hearts in Atlantis, picked up in a thrift store for a vacation read. The first, lengthy segment is King in the bicycles, baseball, bullies and boogeymen nostalgia mode of It, and I'll always enjoy him in that mode even when it's not his best (the Low Men in Yellow Coats are kind of wtf villains, and then he just abandons them anyway.) And I did like how he threaded the following stories into this one.

Potential spoler alert, but I don't think so:

King tosses in offhand references here to what I believe are books of his I haven't read: regulators, breakers, a dark tower, beams, Crimson King... yes? (I read The Gunslinger and disliked it enough to not follow up.)

Knocked through The Dead Zone over the last few days. Found it super compelling right up until Johnny discovers "the laughing tiger" and then it seemed to oddly lose steam going into the climax, which I found kinda disappointing after all the buildup of the bad guy - seems like there would have been more mileage to get out of him, pure evil motherfucker with his goons and his power, should have cottoned onto Johnny and fucked with him some, or at least enough that it becomes clear why our hero has no choice but to do what he does. But I loved everything else, and after reading Night Shift (mostly fantastic) the week before, it was cool to see him expand back into the novel space, with room to linger on things that really would be creepy and disorienting about coming out of a coma, even without everything else that's happening. That was cool. Also love the basic bait and switch, where surely you figure this STEPHEN KING novel about a DEAD ZONE will be about journeys into zombie land or ghosts coming back or whatever.

i saw someone read that on the train the other day; it seems an odd one to be reading, right now, for some reason. it's also one of the ones i haven't, so i have little to say. debating whether i want to read mr mercedes on any of my forthcoming train/plane journeys; probably a decision best made at a train station or airport, though

thomp do you live in NYC? I see... a train, tall buildings. They're near water. They're....no, the rest is gone.

My friend gave me The Talisman, insisting it's one of her all time favorites. I'd never even heard of it before, and the brick-like 2000s paperback with horribly generic cover art made me think it was some recent, bad thing - but there it is in the Imperial Phase, guess she probably knows her business...

The Talisman is great fun.

is that one of the ones with straub? i have avoided those for whatever reason. no, because i read 'danse macabre' at 14 or so and king really booms 'ghost story' and when i read it i did not feel it. fwiw i am the person who voted for 'then as now the late style ...' and rate 'under the dome' and 'cell' as kind of top-of-his-game king. should have revived this thread when i got around to 'full dark no stars' earlier this year

i do not live in nyc but i have been there once, mb twice

Straub is one of the oddest writers ever to be sold in supermarkets. I count myself a fan but god damn are his novels bizarrely formed

otm. I do like him, but he's definitely an odd duck. Pre-Talisman output is pretty good, I really dug Ghost Story

Koko is really great.

i read every one of these goddamn books up to needful things when i was in high school but i haven't touched them since. i wonder how they would hold up. Not enough to read them, just enough to wonder.

Stephen king is like gross

SK is having a great late period, I think:

Under the Dome - Tons of fun for Stand fans
Full Dark, No Stars - Really good, the first novella is one of the best things he's ever written
11/22/63 - Straight-up classic King
Joyland - Slight lark, but pretty winning
Doctor Sleep - Atrocious, avoid at all costs
Mr. Mercedes - Wholly enjoyable, fairly tense crime novel
Revival - One of his darkest books, pretty ballsy in parts

All comments about his folksy bullshit and inability to end books are true, though. He's long said how he never outlines, which sounds cool and all, but maybe if he outlined he'd stop painting himself into corners he can't plot himself out of.

maaan the first story in FDNS is weak, weak

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.