stephen king c/d?

! 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.

the one thing i've totally loved about the book so far -- even if they're also overwritten, as per -- is the little "derry" interludes, presented as being taken from book about the town that one of the characters was writing. it really manages to get across this sense of unease about some basic evil running through a town's history without the overloaded sentiment of the actual narrative sections. like lovecraft but, you know, tighter. ("tighter" being something you could only say about king in comparison with lovecraft.)

pre-teen gang bang

http://s.ytimg.com/vi/hKUBTX9kKEo/0.jpg

somehow i imagine myself reading this thing in about four days

That's what I did when I first read it, during a few sick days from school. It's a page-turner, that's for sure, although after re-reading the unexpurgated "Stand" recently I went back and tried to re-read "It" and just kinda lost interest. Still love it, though; King has a way with that coming-of-age nostalgia stuff, like "Stand By Me" and "Christine," that works better for me than some of his other terrain.

Yeah he always seemed to write kids really well

i thought this was the thread where i went on about under the dome but i guess it isn't

I took It to the beach, found a comfortable spot to read, looked up a few hundred pages later and realized I had the worst sunburn of my life.

Sounds like It hurt!

would have been totally worth it if the ending were better

Yeah, ending of "It" is pretty much univerally derided. Also (unless you want to avoid spoilers of all sorts) the Wiki entry for the book has a hyper-detailed synopsis that had me LOLing at just how crazy MUCH plot he crammed into it.

Best parts of IT were all the historical digressions - the Fire at the Black Spot, the Kitchener Ironworks Disaster, all that - and then the scenes of mayhem in the outside world as the kids are down in the sewers, like the shopping mall getting destroyed and the standpipe falling over, etc.

One of my friends did an extra credit project in 8th grade English where he made an annotated timeline of the history of Derry, ME as depicted in the book IT. He got like a bazillion points of extra credit, to the point where I think he was able to skip an entire unit of the class and still get an A+.

I still think The Tommyknockers is his worst ending ever ans Needful Things is actually his best.

lol the tommyknockers was the king book where, after gorging on his shit from 11 to 13 or so, i was finally like "fuck this"

xp: Where the guy just *poof* turns into a goblin at the end.

"Caveat emptor! Gree-hee-hee!"

Tommyknockers & Gerald's Game were two I definitely hated. Never gave up on him fully though.

Those were the two that made me give up on reading his books.

i read under the dome!

it was long

tommyknockers would be a good name for a strip club, tbh

I take that back -- The Dark Half came out after the Tommyknockers, and that was the final straw.

xxp

I liked the Dome, except for the weird "where did the dome come from" explanation which was just more of SK in his most baffling, dude why - mode. Duma Key was pretty good too, nice n creepy.

the dome started great but it never built to a fun enough climax.

i like when i see people still reading king books (new or old) on the train. i have to imagine even the worst ones are better than girl w/ dragon hoo-hah or the bodice-rippers that became true blood through some brand of hbo alchemy.

tears of the dragon ppl, tears of the dragon. his purest effort at fantasy, very good.

maybe it's eyes of the dragon, ppl, eyes of the dragon

i really like the anti-fun of under the dome's ending! also cell, that one too

Duma Key was a lot better than I expected.

About 400 pages into Dome currently, digging it so far - I've not read any of his books for years, had forgotten how easy his stuff is to slip into. I'm only reading it on my 20 min return bus ride and am still just panelling through it.

(wld be great if any full on "this is the actual ending" spoilers could be avoided? thanks!)

Spoiler free zone, Bill, pinkyswear :)

Eyes of the Dragon is great. I loved loved Talisman, and The Black House too.

General question for everyone: what was the first SK book you read, and how old were you, etc?

Mine was Skeleton Crew, I think I was 12 (7th grade). It felt like a major discovery, like omg what IS this. 'Survivor Type' maybe my alltime favorite story of his, just for the pure nostalgia of it. I didn't even know what heroin was, lol.

I think it was Firestarter at age 11...?

xp - I've avoided the thread for UtD, precisely because I assume it will be rich with (justified) spoilerage, so thanks for keeping things at least vague here :)

First SK? I've a strong suspicion it was It, appropriate given strongo's revive. We had a family holiday to see my Grandma who lived in Italy and there was a copy on her shelves - I would have been 13/14 I think. I remember reading the whole thing in about two days, and then my brother (who was 12) did the same and then we argued about who could read it *again* first. Absolutely loved it.

I loved loved Talisman, and The Black House too.

oh yeah! king should be forced to work with peter straub

otm

I stopped reading him due to Gerald's Game which was also the first book I never finished.

I think his scariest, most upsetting books are The Stand, IT, 'Salems Lot and Cujo (HM to Misery). Pet Sematary was weird in that the most upsetting portion had nothing to do with the graveyard/supernatural horror stuff; it was the fallout from the funeral.

i think mine was little bits and pieces of "it" and "the dark half," swiped from my mom's not-for-kids reading pile, as mentioned, when i was around 11 or so.

first s.k. story that really got to me, though, was survivor type around 12 or so. (think i mentioned this in a previous revive.) probably the most horrific concept i'd come across at that point.