stephen king c/d?

Has anyone seen the Nightmares and Dreamscapes miniseries? I'm curious, as I feel like King's short stories are some of his stronger work, but I fear that it might be as crap as everything else of his that's been adapted for television.

I watched a recent haunted house mini-series. Bloody Tiffany or something like that. Really depressingly bad, like "damn, House 2 was pretty decent" bad.
"The Mist" is by far the King I have the fondest memories of. That was some exciting stuff for a wee lad.

Err, should've googled that BEFORE posting. The series in question was "Rose Red".

If you can call the summer before 6th grade middle school.

Okay, this is freaking me out totally since my son is going into 6th grade this year!

http://chud.com/articles/content_images/NICK/DUMB/aug09/jacobpappe.jpg

i re-read a bunch of the shorts recently and they were better than i thought they'd be with time ("survivor type"!) but not half as scary as when i first read them as a wee thing obviously ("survivor type" :(). dude really is incapable of pulling back and reconsidering when the opportunity to go o-t-t (as regards the prose or characterizations) presents itself. yeah yeah genre fiction and yeah yeah covert biography but did the guy really have to be a raging asshole junk-head who hates his father for the baldest embarrassed-child-of-immigrants reasons? also, for a horror writer (at least in the early days), pacing is *not* the man's forte.

kinda afeared to revisit any of the novels. and i think even at 11 or 12, when i barely had my head around the concept of sex period, i was unsettled by the gang bang starring the little rascals.

I remember The Library Policeman has a pretty graphic depiction of a little boy getting raped out back.

nb: wound up at the It wiki from the Dreamcatcher wiki because a friend texted me that she might have "pooped out a Dreamcatcher alien." (Budweiser in a can, it does a body good)

Is anyone reading Under the Dome ?

Is that porn?

still muddling through the last short story collection

I downloaded his entire oeuvre. Woohoo. Mainly interested in his seventies work.

that last story in just after sunset. oh my god

Man, I have no memories of posting to this thread over the years.

Still, just finished the Tommyknockers for the first time. Why does it seem that every King book needs a massively high body count, and a climax involving the hero suffering some massive injury described in high detail?

messiah figures?

I just recommended the shining to one of my esl students cause it's you know, interesting, but hen he showed me the first page and I had no idea he is relatively idiosyncratic as a writer (for an esl student anyway)

Lunch at the Gotham Cafe is dumb, but I did enjoy the description of the maitre d

Stephen King On Writing was very good. I've never been that big of a fan of his, but have always been interested in how the dude sits at a typewriter and constantly churns out four novels a year. Sure cocaine's a helluva drug, but to retain focus and a narrative through all of that is impressive.

He goes through step-by-step how to do it. It's not easy, it doesn't sound fun, but it makes sense. Spend three hours a day writing. Do that every day for three months. When you're done, don't read it for another month or two. Then spend another three months editing it.

He goes into more detail about the process, including where he thinks your desk should be in the room, how to find an agent, staying away from Tom Swifties. But it was a very plain-spoken how-to manual.

I'm just too lazy to sit around, imagining what a rat's tail snapping about in the nest of my throat would feel like and being bothered to sit down and put it in words from 4 - 7 am every day for a winter.

'On Writing' was an excellent read, either as biography or as manual (and I've no intention of ever writing tbh, it's and interesting sunject though)

^ this is why i've no intention of ever writing

yeah, i love his writing about writing. it's what made me want to go back and read some of his stuff. my mom was a big fan (she always says her favorite people her age are david letterman, the clintons and stephen king, lol) and i read and enjoyed a lot of his stuff as a youth. i don't think his short stories are for me, tbh.

I can name television hosts and politicians my age, but I can't think of one popular author.

S/he's probably spending three hours a day on a messageboard somewhere.

Thought this was revived because of this:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/09/universal-nbc-stephen-king-the-dark-tower-ron-howard-brian-grazer.html

More hoohah:

http://www.deadline.com/2010/09/universal-lands-stephen-kings-the-dark-tower-and-plans-unprecedented-featurenetwork-tv-adaptation/

Looking back, the last Ron Howard movie I've seen was Willow. What does this portend?

Val Kilmer as Roland, obv.

Loved the first three Dark Towers, found the fourth a snooze and haven't read any of the others. Maybe I'll be arsed one day, but I think it would involve ploughing through the first four again. Or I could just wait for the films!

i don't think his short stories are for me, tbh.

I think a lot of his best writing is in novella/short story format. Maybe that's because his long stories all have, well, ridiculous mcguffins. Many of his short stories are similarly batshit horror, but there's real skill and change of pace in a lot of them too.

Yeah, I'd say that maybe 3 out of 4 times, King can really nail a short story.

my husband, a book reviewer among other things, is a serious SK fan (from youth, mostly) and he just had the chance to review SK's latest book of novellas. acc to him it's REALLY good. i didn't read it yet.

the short stories in night shift and skeleton key, and the novellas in different seasons are incredibly classic. i haven't read one of his novels since Needful Things (about which I remember nothing) and never got past book 3 of the dark tower. looking forward to films of it though. I suppose one day when I'm old and bored I'll go read all the rest of his crap.

i think nightmares and dreamscapes has a good mix, myself.

I also haven't read a new novel of his since Needful Things, but there's been a lot of talk elsewhere on here about Under the Dome.

i admire the dude's discipline and rod serling-esque endless fountain of ideas. they may not all be well executed, but he sure has a lot of ideas.

that's more than i can say for people who spend their entire careers writing novels about rich people's family problems.

! different spheres tbf

i may be the only person on the planet who was not disappointed with insomnia, but maybe since then his novels haven't rocked my world (tho now i think about hearts in atlantis had some great and poignant moments)

yeah, i know, i guess i prefer imagination to a microscope
or at least i do today

favourite stephen king shrt story nomination thread and poll y/n

quickest second thoughts ever actually. sod that for work

i found a 25 cent hardcover copy of "it" this weekend at a yard sale. i haven't read it since i was a kid; no idea what spurred me to pick it up (other than the price point was right). somehow i imagine myself reading this thing in about four days, despite it being one billion pages long, and still feeling like i got swindled give when i remember about his TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE ENDINGS. though having read about 150 pages so far, in a short burst yesterday afternoon, i will say the man knows how to keep those pages turning. it's kinda fun to read something so breezy (if that's even the right word for a book about a child-dismembering ick slumbering beneath middle america) for a change, even if king's prose is sometimes O_o'ingly bad.

given WHAT i remember about his endings.

classic of teenage classics, tho

that's more than i can say for people who spend their entire careers writing novels about rich people's family problems.

― The Great Jumanji, (La Lechera), Thursday, September 9, 2010 7:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

amen

yeah! i remember reading IT in high school and being freaked out and disappointed at the turtle/universe ending

i actually kind of liked the mystical weirdness. the pre-teen gang bang was pretty O_O though, of course.

it was kind of exciting to read something known for being O_O scary. I remember the school librarian told me I was brave, that it gave him nightmares and I walked away thinking, "Ha ha, what a baby."

and it was awesome when my parent's friends would come over and say "What are you reading?" and I'd show them and they'd give me that "Um, you're not right in the head" look...or flip out at how big the book was.

I was okay with the ending. It made more sense once I read the Dark Tower stuff later down the line.

xp

ah thats the point of it he's on some magical innocence or prepuberty/puberty trip the whole book tbf

not sure *anything* made more sense to me once i'd finished the dark tower tbh

ha ha...yeah, I guess 'sense' is the wrong word. But all that turtle/universe stuff sort of tied it back to IT and other stuff and it was fun fitting all the parts together.

But he is definitely one for just going 'ah fuck it I don't know how to end this' and making up some weird alien thing/mystical thing that leaves you going, okay what just happened.

haha yeah i totally stole "it" from my mom's stash of "adult books" when i was 12ish or so.

stephen king certainly never shied away from depicting a wife-beating, i will say that.