a stephen king poll

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.

ya he's american iirc

Well he is a horror writer first and foremost...

i don't want to go back and check the details, but there's a hideously ugly old crone character in wizard and glass who checks to make sure girls are virgins, and i'm pretty sure at one point she fucks a snake.

i remember the first bit but not the second. huh

all right i looked for it on google books, it's not as detailed as i remembered:

"A little harvest of my own," she said to Ermot, who now came slithering up her leg toward the place where she liked him best. There weren't many men who could do you like Ermot could do you, no indeed. Sitting there with a lapful of snake, Rhea began to laugh.

In Madder Rose, an abused wife is pursued by her crazy sadistic cop husband, who bites a prisoner's dick off along the way. Guess which member of the wedding comes off as more believable.

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

I'm not sure he has been edited for a very long time

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!

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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)