stephen king c/d?

Holy shit. I'm not even going to call this a spoiler, because this is fucking stupid and any writer should know better, especially a writer who had ample opportunity to leave this out, but, well ...

The expanded edition follows this with a brief coda called "The Circle Closes", which leaves a darker impression and fits in with King’s ongoing "wheel of ka" theme. An amnesia-stricken Flagg wakes up on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific, having somehow escaped the atomic blast in Vegas by using his dark magic. There he begins recruiting adherents among a preliterate, dark-skinned people, who worship him as a deity.

Fuck this book, just going to listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUPbQi78WHI

sofatruck, Just After Sunset is superb.

loved danse macabre. the "horror/terror/revulsion" breakdown still helps organize my thoughts about the genre. also made me feel inadequate about my page rate.

i use that breakdown ALL THE TIME when explaining how horror works to peeps that dont watch 11 horror flicks a week like me.

also i really dug 11/22/63 and highly recommend it. lots of nice nods to his little universe w/o getting obnoxious, only real criticism was that the ending (like often/always) was lame.

ohhhh, THAT coda to The Stand! So stupid I had completely purged it from my memory. Yet another reason the origial was just fine as was.

omg I had no idea he did that coda

that's insane

srsly anyone ITT who hasn't read the original Stand -- go, now, READ IT IMMEDIATELY

purge this terrible revisionism from your brainholes

^^^^^

like, there's parts of the original that are still kinda bad and cringey...but at least it's somewhat innocent and of its time rather than being updated with even WORSE moments by someone you'd expect to know better

actually strike that

I don't expect him to know better :)

SK was on a legitimate hot-streak with Just After Sunset, Under the Dome, Full Dark No Stars, and 11/22/63. But Joyland ain't no great shakes and Doc Sleep, well.

I just bought Joyland from the supermarket cause of this thread

He doesn't have the reservoir (or rails of coke) to sustain a good long streak like the old days

That's seriously awesome that you bought Joyland from a supermarket! How it should be bought. It's not bad, it's just the essence of inessential.

it was £3.85

it's kinda sweet the belief that king has in these corny images: taking your "girl" to the "fair" in your "ride"

listening to "rock n roll" on the "radio"

Those are many of the reasons Christine works so well for me; he's totally into that corn.

the coda to the extended version of The Stand never bothered me for some reason, partially I think because Flagg was leaving a situation where he was being revered as a god so the colonial dickishness was somewhat undercut for me

and also, the biblical plague had to have been global, right? and you don't know how much time has elapsed. idk I'm making excuses for him but it never struck me as being that bad either, at least compared to some of the other shit he's got away with

Does the short vers of the stand include the rmde wtf sequence where a bunch of naked black military guys are executing dozens of ppl on tv? That seems like the epitome of the better-left-out.

I believe so, yes.

i read the expanded version of 'the stand' during a two week journey across ireland twenty years ago. i should probably have spent more time relishing my first opportunity to be served alcohol in a bar free from the shackles of amerikkkan law but oh well.

the stand is absolutely incredible during the plague chapters, thoroughly horrifying and grim stuff. as per usual i wasn't down as much w/king's simpletons and overweight flopsweat crazies and rednecks. my favorite character is probably lloyd henreid, iirc.

I like the "second plague" passages where he describes all the immune people who died as a result of their own stupidity or of accidents.

Yes, those are great. Similar to the passages in IT where people get wiped out by the big storm.

ya thats what i remember most

i think i'm totally w/king's style when he stays grounded, it's when he gets a bit 'pentecostal' that his flaws become more apparent to me.

Have we ever done a thread on the Stand miniseries? Man, the casting in that thing was all over the frigging map.

Not that I've seen her in much ("Don't Shoot Me") but Laura San Giacomo will always be Nadine to me.

jamey sheridan was an unusual choice in a lot of ways but pretty excellent. and miguel ferrer, ray walston, shawnee smith, all good picks!

the simpleton from TV's 'coach'! great typecasting.

Shawnee Smith was great! Gary Sinise was good, both Ringwald and Nemec were TERRIBLE.

Wish they hadn't eliminated the Larry/Rita storyline, or Larry's whole thing with Joe/Leo.

so many people I know love that mini-series but I have a hard time watching it -- everyone but Tom (aka the voice of Patrick from Spongebob <3) are just kinda facepalm and awkward to me

i was happier with how they looked in my head

Yeah, as is generally the case. I was a huge Molly stan, so even though she's not how I pictured Frannie, I didn't think she was terrible. Haven't seen it since it's original airing, though, so time may not be kind.

IIRC I was super excited and, as the miniseries went on, the anticipatory grin on my face slowly morphed into an incredulous reality-denying "no really, it's just on the verge of getting good" rictus as a tear rolled slowly down my left cheek

Parker Lewis pretty good though IIRC

yeah I forgot he was in it -- he was good

but it just felt like wall-to-wall hasbeens, especially when it came out.

same with IT, when they did that. Like, I dig John ritter generally, and JohnBoy Walton's fine and all but that whole thing felt kinda lame, especially hearing them say some of the lines out loud

My memory of Parker Lewis is that he was terrible, and also saddled with badly rendered TV-zits.

I think The Stand, It and even Shining miniseries are satisfactory for what they are; an attempt to rein in extremely sprawling novels for mass market television, none of which come close to the "joys" I got from the books. Maybe I'm just easily pleased!

so three years ago the wikipedia description of the "climax" (hiyo) of It was

They finally come upon Its lair, where it resides in the form of a giant spider, and, in what appears to be the Ritual of Chüd, Bill injures It and It flees. Lost in the sewers, the Losers realize that they have lost their purpose as a group, their common enemy, and as a way to bring them together again so they can escape, Beverly has sexual intercourse with the boys.

according to me upthread. today it's:

They finally come upon Its lair, where it resides in the form of a giant spider, and, in what appears to be the Ritual of Chüd, the Losers encounter It and its natural enemy, The Turtle. Bill defeats It with some advice from The Turtle and It flees deeper into Its lair. The Losers then gradually realize that they are lost in the sewers, and that with their common enemy having fled they have lost their purpose as a group, and begin to succumb to panic. In order to stop the group from panicking, Beverly has sexual intercourse with each of the boys.

a subtle difference

"Boys, boys! You're losing it! Here, break off a piece of my magic punani."

good old bev

winter spring summer or fall
all you've got to do is call

"Boys, boys! You're losing it! Here...

Seeeeeeerious at work hysterics!

My heart burns there too.

Lool VG

My memory of Parker Lewis is that he was terrible, and also saddled with badly rendered TV-zits.

― The Thnig, Wednesday, July 10, 2013 4:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes and yes.

the stand miniseries was awful imo, there were a few good performances (sinise - his first high profile role iirc after his big success w/ grapes of wrath on stage, ferrer)(here's where i rep for the night flier as a decent enough b-movie that does better as a king adaptation than alot of other movies). it's have to be period piece imo and i know i've heard of it being in the works various times but a cable network, preferably hbo, doing a long miniseries w/ the stand would be a way to tap into zombie fever w/o actually blatantly doing another zombie show). was curious about that comics adaptation they did a few years back - is it finished? was it good? a decompressed comics take on the stand has serious potential. have always wanted to re-read the stand but never have cuz of the stupid updates plus that book really didn't need to be longer. got on a kick a year or so ago (?) where i read some recent king - loved the jfk one, enjoyed full moon, dirty hearts pretty much (not as crazy as the first novella in there as some though), started under the dome and quit about a third (maybe halfway) through (lasted longer w/ the book than the miniseries). the only other king i've read in the past twenty or so years was a reread of it several summers back - still effective (maybe more effective - children being killed obv packs a punch when you're reading it as a child but it's maybe more horrifying as an adult)(just thinking of that one kid grasping at it's back for a zipper he's certain is there when it appears as the creature from the black lagoon and obv 'we all float down here') his writing of the kids was amazing, the adults not so much, meant to reread another old one last year but never narrowed it down to which one and then got busy w/ other things. i'm thinking salem's lot or pet semetary? think the racism in king's characters is usually just a quick and easy way to highlight they're evil or they're old/complicated, almost always the former though. king's racism comes out in liberal hack writer way, magical negros, black characters ennobled to the point of dehumanization, real stanley kramer shit. king's an odd writer in that it's difficult to rate him, dfw and others rating him as literachuh always provoked a 'now let's just wait a minute' from me (there was a time in the late 90s when he pandered to this revisionism also - pieces for the new yorker, bag of bones and hearts of atlantis getting treated seriously by literary reviews, very possible wrong but i think that book award harold bloom scoffed at came around this time), at the same time dismissing him as garbage is clearly wrong to me also, there's a gulf between him and most of his sales peers.

i read it last year (only king i've read besides night shift) and the thing i wasn't expecting was that it was kinduva big sprawling social novel! all the kids who grow into boomer archetypes of one kind or another; the not always clumsy reckoning w America's Demons; the very long (but cyclical) timeframe and all the historical nightmares it includes (and the way it attributes them all to the same darkness, underneath us, with our sewage). was tom wolfe aware? i mean it was certainly a better book than bonfire.