stephen king c/d?

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.

Okay, I'm done being Captain Obnoxious Save-A-King. For the moment.

I don't really hate him or anything - he's not objectively awful in the way certain other mega-popular authors are - I just find the flaws in his stuff usually outweigh the strengths, and I don't find his recurring obsessions/tropes interesting, so I find his stature/success odd. (fwiw in the aforementioned period I read The Shining, Night Shift, Cujo, and I tried to read It but never finished. I remember my favorite piece of his writing was "Quitters, Inc.") And obviously some great films have been made of his material, along w a ton of crap.

I'm just more of a Lovecraft/Poe/Chambers type of guy when it comes to horror writing, I guess.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes is a lovely little today across his range

Foray

I have room in my heart for the Lovecrafts and the Kings (although, yes, I love Lovecraft's craft more).

I just find the flaws in his stuff usually outweigh the strengths, and I don't find his recurring obsessions/tropes interesting, so I find his stature/success odd

This is how I feel about Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, et al.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes has a story wrote originally for a Lovecraft tribute anthology!

I like his Creepshow performance too. It's like he's trying to transform into a Jack Davis drawing.

Even among horror authors of his generation, guys like Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, his buddy Peter Straub and a few others are generally considered better. But Campbell's short fiction is valued much higher than his novels, Etchison didn't write many novels.
But that whole era that prioritized the bloated novel is not aging well.

I think Revival was supposed to be kind of a Lovecraft thing too.

This is how I feel about Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, et al.

don't get me started on these clowns

Based on what I've read, '1408' is King's most successful attempt at Lovecraft's brand of uncanny existential terror.

"Crouch End" was okay.

What's the story with the guy who sees a finger coming out of his bathroom sink drain?

Slightly different generation but Clive Barker's reputation has fared much much better (although some of his recent stuff hasn't been so well received).

I guess he started writing a little later, but isn't he actually older than King?

hm just 5 years apart

T.E.D. Klein is probably the horror writer of King's generation with the best rep, but he only put out 2 books

Was just thinking about Klein. Some imperfect elements in his work but the four stories in the Dark Gods collection are all to one degree or another perfect nightmare fuel. "Petey" in particular but "Nadelman's God" might be the best of the four.

Klein recently started getting back to work on a novel he started in the 80s.

Keyes- there's Reassuring Tales too, but it's supposed to be mostly lesser work, odds and ends.