stephen king c/d?

Darragh otm

You think? I'm no expert, but which books do you think are better than their (good) movie counterparts?

I haven't seen all that many but I would say that Dead Zone the film is good, and not as good as Dead Zone the book.

i dont feel like thats the comparison tho

kings best book is better than the best movie adaptation, not necessarily of that book tho

It's telling that many of the best adaptations have been of the short stories or novellas, imo/iirc.

The comparison gets a little thrown off by the presence of a couple of ringer adaptations that are kind of major movies in their own right (Carrie and The Shining) - kinda hard for me to really say that King really has a single book that's as good of a book as The Shining is of a movie, but they're also going for really different kinds of things and are good/significant for different ways. Take those off the table and you're really dealing with the huge huge collection of "Stephen King movies" as I think of them. The best of the books trounce the best of those easy.

poll!

Hmm. I'm not well versed enough in King books, but these are the movies I could defend as pretty great (to different degrees/qualities of greatness):

Carrie
The Shining
Creepshow (maybe? it's fun and minor but memorable)
Dead Zone
Stand By Me
Running Man
Misery
Shawshank
Dolores Claiborne
The Mist

There are a few more that are OK, like Christine and 1408, iirc.

I think I've had a knack for seeing the ones like Maximum Overdrive, Graveyard Shift, and Silver Bullet, where you can't shake this vague sense of a pretty-good TV movie: competently-told, some good locations and occasionally some good creature work and stuff, but ultimately just a sort of normal story, shot in a naturalistic way that doesn't convey a real sense of things being out-of-the-ordinary or supernatural or, well, all that scary. I wouldn't change the channel on any of those, mind you. Running Man is a higher level of Saturday-afternoon comfort entertainment, thanks to Arnold and the production values, but a pretty silly production.

I completely forgot about Shawshank, which doesn't have a great reputation on ILX but imho also counts as one of the best ones.

You can't compare the Running Man film with the book, imo, they are too different. Certainly the motive for running was completely changed, which made the film feel like a cash-in.

surprising to see so many people recommending Night Shift itt, I didn't know it was that popular.

Is that the one that starts with the Lovecraft-y story? I started that a few years ago just to see if King could be fun in adulthood, but I didn't get past that first one. Not that it was particularly BAD, but it just wasn't doing anything for me.

Really don't think I'll read this guy again, but still love him for getting me into horror and books and such as a kid.

Sounds super condescending but it is kinda hard going backwards from legit literature to this for me. IDK, no judgment on anyone else who still enjoys it.

I dunno man, I kinda feel like indulging in the 50 shades between high- and low-brow kinda gives life extra flavor, but I recognize that ymmv.

I get that and I enjoy a lot of trash movies/TV/whatever, but reading books takes a little more investment and time, ya know?

depends on the book. took me 4 months to read Infinite Jest and 1 month to read It, ya know?

(got a lot more out of IJ tho personally)

me too, but reading It was a lot more satisfying to me than watching a trashy horror movie. I read most of It on a long plane ride, SK & PKD are great for travel.

New It trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8DyNLtImCE

god i hope this movie is good. i can't tell if i like that trailer or not. is this for sure rated R?

it feels p great, tone/style wise

yeah tone is cool!

it's funny how i instinctively want to compare a lot of the style/editing choices to stranger things given the latter's reference points. very funny but not necessarily deal-breaking to think of the "kid" times in IT now being - not inappropriately, kind of around the time the original book or at least the TV movie came out. i'm not quite getting "1986" vibes from those kids, but it'd be very tidy to have it be on a thirty-year clock, and coming out more or less thirty years after the book came out.

maybe a narcissism of small differences but i've never felt like my nostalgia for aspects of 80s childhood compares remotely to boomer nostalgia for 50s childhood. or maybe it's just that the 50s seem so utterly, totally different from the 80s in a way that the 80s don't really versus now. i dunno, these aren't crucial themes for the book but clearly some generational sense of "where have we all ended up? what did we really make of ourselves after all that?" was occupying king when he wrote the book.

also just remembered how annoying the end to IT was, them forgetting everything all over again. makes no sense and cheats them all of any growth from the experience or even just the joy of reconnecting with each other over chinese. :(

I know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! brutal

Finished reading The Talisman this weekend. Its a book that never clicked with me when I was a teenager and devouring all things King. Still quite a slog this time around. Not sure if its an effect of the collaboration with Straub, or maybe I'm just not into the fantasy side of King's stuff. I'm not crazy about The Dark Tower either, though parts of it are pretty great.

opposite of that for me

Talisman for me alternated between parts that totally scratched my Dark Tower creepy adventure itch (kid on the road on a quest, the terror of the bar gig in Oatley, the whole Sunlight juvenile prison thing) and parts where I wanted to throw the book across the room. Need for an editor really starts to come in around that time, there are just so many straight up redundant passages where you can't imagine either author really read back over it, or they'd have realized "oh wait I think we've established enough that he misses his mom" or "I think we've established enough that he's approaching the big bad evil fortress place" or "I think we've established enough that he was traumatized by his encounter with the dude who looks like Randolph Scott" etc. etc. And god, his two worthless sidekicks!

have ye read black house

its great imo. maybe...... maybe his best idk

big fuckin train big fuckin train

Yeah Oatley and Sunlight Home were the definite highlights for me.

yeah black house was great

I've heard rumours they're working on a third book? Maybe that's an old rumor tho, idk

Catching up:

Zelda in the Pet Sematary movie -- SO SCARY
Red dye puke in Cujo -- TRAUMATIC
Creepshow -- AN ACTUAL GREAT MOVIE THAT 100% NAILS WHAT IT SET OUT TO DO

I think, if I'm being really honest with myself, Creepshow is probably one of my all-time top five movies. Because, yes, in terms of the realization of its intentions, it is perfect.

how many of y'all have read The Eyes of the Dragon? just remembered I have a sweet looking paperback of that sitting in the basement - worth reading? i'm up to my neck in SK books but I've never read any of his fantasy stuff.

Yeah, it's good stuff. The straightest fantasy thing he's written, a little fluffy but a quick read.

And yet another book featuring our favorite Walkin' Dude as the antagonist.

It's crazy no one ever made EYES OF THE DRAGON into a movie. Seems like money in the bank.

oh is there a tie-in to The Dark Tower in there? I tried reading the first one as a kid and couldn't get through more than 20 pages, boring af at the time.

Dude, there's probably 15 non-Dark Tower SK books that tie into the Dark Tower.

minimum

xp all things serve the Beam

i know, but i thought for some reason that all came later post car accident.

one of the best things about king is the thread running through pretty much all of his work no matter how old, new, fantasy, contemporary and shite.

The later Dark Tower books are really aggressive at retroactively turning earlier books into Dark Tower tie-ins - I think it's in VI that the priest from Salem's Lot that was defeated by the vampires in a moment of lapsed faith (awesome scene) suddenly turns up as like, a bartender in a ghost town in another dimension or something. In hindsight, I'm shocked only that he didn't pull up to our heroes in a certain eerily familiar 1958 Plymouth Fury...

Although to be fair he then has his characters notice that the bad guys are ripping everything off of popular genre fiction, with Doctor Doom robots wielding tricked-out Golden Snitches as deadly weapons (IIRC), so maybe he was aware of just how fanficcy it was all getting.

i like to charitably imagine that he wasnt aware of fuck all for books five onwards tbph

I think Eyes of the Dragon was where he began the shared universe thing in earnest - as opposed to retconning characters into the narrative as in the case of Salem's Lot and The Stand (although both The Gunslinger and The Stand stemmed from his desire to create an American version of Lord of The Rings, so he may already have been mulling over the connection)

i get a post-vancian kinda wolfe-y vibe from the first Dark Tower book but I don't suppose those were actual influences (did book of the new sun come out after the first dark tower anyway...?)

I'm sure I've read King talking about Vance before (and I'd be surprised if he wasn't a fan tbh)

Wolfe idk

not necessarily wolfe imo but certainly that dried out twilight seventies dusty scifi/fantasy feel

i have been thinking recently about the character and feel of US fantasy vs UK fantasy and that feel, the difference between mesa and countryside, between technology/concept focus and adventure/story focus looms large-ish imo

mostly the covers on the us stuff is angular and has horrible colours like yellow and purple and the uk stuff is loamy and leafy or whatever

king may have set out for lotr but he never got there, i dont think, nor even close. wizard of oz maybe.