a stephen king poll

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

its a weird volume, i think, it seems to be 'about' the relation of gender and violence and to be trying to atone somehow for how violence works in previous books

i don't think there is such a thing as straight-up-classic stephen king, i think he is both too bad and too interesting a writer for that. i loved under the dome but i did not love 11.22.63. they seem to both be 'about' him wanting to write naturalistic fiction about small-town america now and then but only being able to achieve that through double-hokey genre stuff. but under the dome had flashes of him at his most sadistic which works better for me, i guess.

doctor sleep had moments of being not atrocious, it was weird how the guy kept thinking about pound's version of 'sumer is icumen in'

maaan the first story in FDNS is weak, weak

Ah, dang! I thought it was SK in his element so hard, writing from his Creepshow roots.

The very beginning of Doctor Sleep was aces (when Dan was a junkie) but then he became standard SK folksy hero while two characters had psychic battles for about 8000 pages, the literary equivalent of computer hacking scenes in movies, so dull.

it was weird how the guy kept thinking about pound's version of 'sumer is icumen in'

ha, king is shameless about putting literary references in the mouths of characters who wouldn't realistically know them; the dark tower series has a 23-year-old heroin addict and an 11-year-old boy who regularly sound like they've swallowed a norton anthology of poetry.

I was ill yesterday and read most of mr mercedes which is what made me post "king is like gross", actually kinda wanted to start that thread but I don't have time to go through all his fiction & find the many many passages that support this but man does this guy have the most fucked up attitude towards sex, it's Nasian but may even go beyond that

I was ill yesterday and read most of mr mercedes which is what made me post "king is like gross", actually kinda wanted to start that thread but I don't have time to go through all his fiction & find the many many passages that support this but man does this guy have the most fucked up attitude towards sex, it's Nasian but may even go beyond that

See also 11/22/63, the main relationship in that one icked me out.

See also EVERYTHING

Like literally every passage in his work that pertains to sexuality is o_0 to some degree

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.

― The Thnig, Thursday, September 11, 2014 11:56 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Duma Key is alright too.

yeah Duma Key got me into that old-school 'O_O holy shit what the eff is even happening' zone that I remembered from his old classic novels.

and this is him off the charlie

I read almost everything up through the Tommyknockers which I never got more than 100 pages into. I really loved Needful Things for some reason, and read a couple of the short story collections after that I think? But otherwise hadn't read anything he's written in 20 years until 11/23/63 a couple weeks ago.

Which I don't know if I actually liked or not. Most of it was okay but it felt like a lot of recognizable bits he's apparently still been using for 20 years (phrases, references, stuff like that). There was a lot about AA and Florida in there that made me think these have become parts of his life in some way.

It's amazing how all these 21st-century characters have the exact same frame of reference his characters gave always had

Hilarious line in the new one from the pov of 15-yr-old, along the lines of "it made him think of those old Betty Boop cartoons you can look at on the YouTubes

"

If I were his editor I'd kick him in the nuts tbrr

what about the bit in under the dome where someone bleeds out listening to lcd soundsystem

i don't know how o_o the stuff about women is; much of it seems standard-order hegomonic misogyny stuff; there are places where he tries to evade that or be smart about it; i think they're interesting failures

haha I've not read it, I'm very into the idea of reading it tho xp

I shouldn't have used the word "attitude" I think, king's attitudes to a lot of things are really shitty in a standard boomer-liberal way - gender, race, whatever (mr mercedes has yet another black character speaking "hilarious" jive, which seriously, I'm his editor, right in the fucking nuts) but thatas isn't really what I meant so much as he just seems to conceive of the sexual act itself in a really weird fucked up way, even when consciously writing about "healthy" sex. I dunno.

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.