stephen king c/d?

ani get your pun

it's been covered

me I'm still holding out for a film version

Bev: guys I have an idea
DISCREET CUT OR MAYBE DISSOLVE
(Awkward zipping up scene)

Everyone: *doesnt speak for 30 years*

― a Brazilian professional footballer (wins), Thursday, March 30, 2017 1:11 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wikipedia so eloquently describes this beautiful passage:

After the battle, the victorious but badly shaken Losers begin to lose cohesion and get lost in the sewers, until Beverly has sex with all the boys to bring unity back to the group.[2] The Losers then swear a blood oath to return to Derry should It return in the future.

Salem's Lot is definitely King's best book, and I love The Stand (the original 70s version, not the bloated reissue); I don't really like his coked-up 80s books, It included. Some of his recent work - Duma Key, Under the Dome, and 11/22/63 - is really solid, too.

We have a couple of really good king poll threads and tbh I'd need to read them to even be sure which of his books I'd put top 5

The one that dare not speak it's name: hearts in Atlantis. Ya i said it. And i liked insomnia.

Duma Key gets legit scary in the middle; Under The Dome is great for about 3/4 but holy shit he whiffs the ending HARD

apropos of nothing I just really need to say

beep beep richie

Oh, and Revival was good, too. I read Mr. Mercedes but didn't like it enough to read either of the two(!) sequels.

I thought Hearts in Atlantis had a few moments, but yeah it ultimately seemed like what it was: some discarded attempts retrieved and stitched together.

I recently finished (finally) Dreamcatcher, discussed on another thread. That one's wretched.

I read Salem's Lot recently and was bit let down. The way he constructs this panoramic view of the town is fantastically executed, but it just wasn't as creepy as I had hoped.

spoilers for under the dome

Under the dome is his bleakest darkest comedy, like a better needful things, and I love the extreme deployment of the standard king "everything blows up" ending and wish he hadn't already played his one-time metatextual copout card with the dark tower because that would have been an amazing and dark substitute for the standard interdimensional lovecraftian copout card

the stand is his best, overall, though it falters toward the end when it becomes super obvious where everything is leading but king insists on dragging every parallel plotline out foreeeeevveeerrrr. it is great too, but i'd put the long walk in 2nd for the reasons mentioned by old lunch. burned a hole in my brain as a teen. hasn't been mentioned much, but the shining ranks up there with it, misery and salem's lot.

gonna get around the catching up w/ the dark tower series one of these days. dug the first book. more streamlined and self-consciously "literary" than anything else he's published under his own name. understand that the later installments are closer to his typical style tho...

Dark Tower is dope, flaws be damned

And i liked insomnia.

re-read that one last year and was surprised how much I enjoyed it this time.

The first Mr. Mercedes sequel is really good, more like his better Bachman work. The plot is kicked into motion by a guy stealing, at gunpoint, all the unpublished works of a reclusive Salinger-esque author.

i spent some time with stephen king a few months ago. my coworker and i drove a bunch of books over to his dressing room before a reading so he could sign them and then like handed him the books one by one in an assembly line fashion. extremely aloof guy.

nice though. nothing like his character IT.

Kind of afraid to read King's other novels because IT was a hugely disappointing colossal trainwreck (despite having some very powerful moments), but I still want to read Salem's Lot, Pet Semetery and Dark Tower.

You guys really love some awful, awful books

Awful is a relative term

James, if you know of another author beyond Stephen King and that dude who wrote the bible, I'd love to check 'em out sometime.

You know who written the bible?

it was that guy with the tablets. robert moses.

Come over to ILB, old lunch

I thought I'd read a fair amount of King but then I look at his bibliography and holy shit he puts out a lot of books

Gwendy's Button Box sounds like steampunk porn

lol, that's a King & son joint right

Richard Chizmar (I have no idea who that is, tbh)

Right, I was thinking of the upcoming novel sleeping beauties, insane synopsis:

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place...

The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Evie a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain?

Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a women's prison, SLEEPING BEAUTIES is a wildly provocative, gloriously absorbing father/son collaboration between Stephen King and Owen King.

Is there a more boring expression of aesthetic values than, "Actually, this thing you like is bad?"

I don't know about you, but I always appreciate when someone steps into a thread and corrects the posters for mistakenly enjoying the subject under discussion. How else would I know what I'm supposed to like?

Haven't read any King since I was a teenager, but the one I remember the most fondly which kinda gets brushed passed (likely because of the movie) is The Shining. Totally sucked me in and scared the crap out of me, even though I'd seen the movie beforehand. I liked IT a lot, but even then I was kinda "Man, this could use some tightening up".

I didn't know Owen was an author too. Joe Hill actually became quite successful before most people knew he was King's son.

Sleeping Beauties could go down a really bad road but it still sounds appealingly crazy.

Some people say Robert McCammon is like a tighter King but I've also heard one of his books completely rips off The Stand.

I think IT is possibly most successful in it's depiction of bullies and the overbearing mother. There are a couple of successful supernatural bits but the more mundane horror was genuinely oppressive at times. Like the horrible father who says "I see no reason that I shouldn't live forever".
Some of the sentimental parts really worked on me too but the book is just so drowning in its flaws that I could never recommend it.

I've also heard one of his books completely rips off The Stand

Swan Song I assume. Yeah it is very similar but I liked it a lot (20+ years ago). I've not read anything else by him.

That's generally considered his best book too.

I think King is often judged harshly because his flaws as a writer are so obvious and so persistent but also because he takes readers places that are much more unpredictable and harrowing than one expects from a genre novelist. Hence the tendency to judge him as if he were offering defective literary fiction. In spite of decades of enormous sales and continuous media attention, I think he's more under- than over-rated, both on the merits of his body of work and on his influence.

His continued productivity is the biggest stumbling block wrt the likelihood of critical reappraisal in his lifetime. It's difficult to argue for the underratedness of a bestselling author.

the grotesque overbearing mother in this book and also every other Stephen King book is one of the reasons "me and the boy are working on a book about women!" is met with an oh boy this'll go well popcorn.gif tbh

anyway liking some awful books I will p much cop to, I can see finding it annoying as I do other things people enjoy as adolescents & then assign inflated importance to later buuut tbf even without kool aid intervention these conversations are quite often mostly about the many ways King is bad because there's no getting around the obvious major flaws but at the same time I feel like the pleasures are also p obvious?

xp I don't think that's an especially fair criticism, there are lots of loving, doting, sacrificing mothers in King's books -- The Shining, Cujo, Firestarter, Dolores Claiborne come immediately to mind. At least as many positive female characters in his work as there are grotesques.

Like he obviously isn't High Art but I don't honestly think King is even that bad. Flawed, for sure, but not bad. Those who pillory King have clearly never tried to hold down their lunch as they fought through something Koontz has written.

I mean, dude isn't striving to join the pantheon of literary greats so it feels more fair to judge him among his genre peers, where he more than holds his own.

or like pattersonbot 3000 xp

I've been plowing through King books this month in a periodic attempt to catch up. I re-read Dead Zone and Night Shift, and read Mr. Mercedes, Revival, Doctor Sleep, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Danse Macabre, The Gunslinger and Drawing of the Three for the first time. Jesus, there's still 27 books I haven't read yet.

James Morrison otm lol, my engagement/enjoyment of Stephen King restricted to brief period in jr. high and my initial exposure to horror fiction. and hatewatching half a season of that James Franco time-travellin Lee Harvey Oswald stalker tv show

oh and his Creepshow segment

Oh you mean that segment that was called 'the entire movie'?

Some weak King-hatin' there, bro.

(And yes, I know you probably mean Tales From the Darkside: The Movie but I'm being willfully obtuse in the face of your hatorade.)

no I literally meant the part where he appears on-screen and gets turned into fungus

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fd12vb6dvkz909q.cloudfront.net%2Fuploads%2Fgalleries%2F32314%2Fcreepshow-1.jpg&f=1

(yes I know he wrote it)

Your engaged critique of an author based on his inadvisable foray into acting and a television show adapted from one of his novels is noted and officially on the record.