stephen king c/d?

Yeah, there are individual scenes of greatness in each of the remaining ones, but they get lost in a sea of "Huh?"

> I've spent the last half hour Wiki-ing Dark Tower, and Robert Browning, The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

oz books too.

Just finished On Writing...top stuff. I found Misery in the street a while back, worth a go? I've not read ANY of his fiction.

Misery's probably my favorite (haven't read it since age 18-19) because it's all psychological and no supernatural.

Misery is great

I re-read Misery a few years ago while proctoring exams at a local college. I was on the edge of my seat (literally!), despite already knowing the story.

misery always kind of bored me tbh, even the movie

book and movie objectively great, but like dolores claiborne i just wasnt drawn. not supernatural enough for me i guess

The movie version of Misery is definitely a Rob Reiner movie, for worse and worse. The book, though, is top 5.

I can now talk a little more freely about DOCTOR SLEEP. It's a real letdown, folks. It has a fantastic opening that dives right into the Overlook aftermath, and then jets ahead to Danny as a shiftless drunkard adult -- great stuff because of how heartbreaking it is to see Danny that way. And then, man oh man, does the book turn into mush. Basically Danny becomes the typical SK earthy-yet-perfect protagonist and the action is relegated to two characters duking it out physically, which is about as interesting on the page as computer hacking is on screen. The are virtually no stakes. After a string of very good books from SK, this is big clunker.

a shame to hear that

glad to hear you can talk freely about it tho

Crap. They don't duke it out *physically*, they duke it out *psychically*. Big difference.

Does anyone else think that Joe Hill's Locke & Key employs a shitloada the same tropes his father used to great effect, only with Joe's own spin?

AV Club is right on about Doc Sleep.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/stephen-king-doctor-sleep,103172/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=Default:1:Default

I was recently re-reading The Dark Half, which I probably haven't read in 20 years or more, and noticed the clever (or "clever") trick he pulls in the opening chapter. He gets all the exposition/back story out of the way by having the main character in the book you are reading read a magazine article about himself.

Currently reading Under The Dome and it's fairly entertaining as long haul King epics go, but his occasional attempts to speak directly to the reader and guide him to the next part of the story are jarring and terrible and have no place in this book.

"Let us go then, you and I, while the evening spreads out against the sky."
"We'll stop for a quick check on Barbie and Rusty shall we?"
"Let us float through certain half-deserted streets..."

He even goes so far as to tell us we are invisible and the people we drift past will only feel a faint draft from us. Awful stuff.

The first of those is T.S. Eliot.

Still, the conceit of the readers floating around invisibly sounds pretty terrible.

Last, too

(xp obv)

Is it? Like a tribute or homage or a direct lift?

I remember reading a Terry Pratchett book that employed the same "let us float over" technique and hated it then too. I'm generally opposed to any "dear reader" breaking of walls.

Also jarring and off-putting "One fisted hand is pressed between the scant nubs of her breasts as she looks at that pink freak of a moon." - do we, dear readers, really need to know the size of this 13-year-old girl's breasts?

Oh lord no.

Like a tribute or homage or a direct lift?

nm found it
(i should read more poetry and I'd spot such things straight off)

http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

Rooty toot.

would be awesome if "We'll stop for a quick check on Barbie and Rusty shall we?" was in Prufrock too

http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/cannes-stephen-king-novel-geralds-game-to-be-adapted-by-oculus-helmer-mike-flanagan-and-intrepid-pictures/

Loved Absentia. Missed Oculus in theaters, but will pick it up the second it's available in a home format. Never read Gerald's Game, but from what I gather, it's more hated than loved.

ughhh i hate gerald's game so much. i wish i could unread it

Am I the only one silly enough to be reading Doctor Sleep? Can't decide if it's decent entertainment or complete garbage.

I read Doctor Sleep. Its def second or maybe third tier King, but was entertaining enough. I wish he hadn't associated it with The Shining.

I just recently got Insomnia from the library. Wow, did that suck.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/12/behold-the-stephen-king-cinematic-universe/full-post/

Bc of that site name I excitedly thought for a moment it was gonna be a round up of the film scores for all the SK films over the years.

(Maybe I'll do that)

If they managed to actually pull this off, I'd be totally into it. My guess, though, is that the rights for the various works lie in different hands. And that any attempt to actually pull this off would be ham-fisted and awful.

That's a lot of potentially awful movies/series to greenlight. But I am living for the idea of Stu Redman played by Scoot McNairy.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/rereading-stephen-king

it's weird that I loved horror novels/short stories so much as a teen but could not abide horror movies at all unless they were pitched as "science fiction" or "psychological thriller" or "action movie"; something about the connection of the concept "horror" to actual visuals short-circuits something in my brain and stampedes directly to an unpleasant place in my brain

― DARING PRINCESS (DJP), Monday, September 10, 2012 10:48 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES

I read the bookstop version of "The Stand" in 2001, ravenous. Some of the incidental end-of-days shit from that book haunts me even now.

Did anyone else give Mister Mercedes a go? I did the audiobook version - the ending was meh but everything building up to it was so gripping (and so well read by Will Patton) that I didn't listen to anything else for a few days.

I've been reading the kindle version on my phone. It's entertaining. King at his airport-thriller breeziest.

OK, reading the various plot summaries from that Consequence of Sound post: people will eat up any old ludicrous shit King puts out, won't they?

Mister Mercedes struck as something that might have been a leftover from the Richard Bachman days, but overall I liked it.

i gave up on mr mercedes v early

i know its supposed to be couched in hard-boiled cliches but i found it almost intolerably cliched from the beginning

idk. maybe i was just in a bad mood

Mr. Mercedes -- a nice, kind of humble everyday detective story. It's the start of a series -- two more are coming.

Revival is pretty good, despite a mid-book 200 pages or so that was, like, so unnecessary, but in SK fashion, readable anyway.

Revival has its share of typical SK lapses -- some poor editing, odd pacing, and laughable OTTness -- but overall I enjoyed it. Usually I expect his books to start strong and fall apart in the last act, but this was the opposite ... the first chapter or two are so wholesome and bucolic I was tempted to bail, until some gore was splattered; the final chapters, while derivative, are intense, creepy, and ultra-dark.

I enjoyed those Guardian posts linked upthread but was sad the writer stopped with Gerald's Game ... it's the books after that I'd like more help to sift through.

11/22/63 so far is really good!! The show, haven't read the book.

The ending of Revival scared the bejeezus out of me. It's the first time in quite a while I genuinely regretted finishing a book before lights out. For a while there it actually really upset me, until I just thought, "Well, of course that doesn't happen". I think SK tapped into a certain fear really effectively there.

http://www.avclub.com/article/idris-elba-and-matthew-mcconaughey-confirmed-star--233053

Enjoying mr Mercedes

any word on who will play Stephen King in the Dark Tower film? presumably won't play himself but who do you even cast to play him...might have to get Johnny Depp or something...

also mr mercedes and the sequel are great, if you like stupid hard boiled detective novels, not exactly King's wheelhouse but he's pretty good at it