stephen king c/d?

Dude, did you see my post upthread?

I stopped caring before the first chapter of Delores Claiborne ended (tho that movie was good).

Short stories: great. Dark Tower also good in principle (the first one was only good enough to get me vaguely interested in the seond one, which was great), but if it turns out that I'd have to read all his other books to understand the next volume, I'll be pissed off.

You have to reckon he's jumped the shark when he starts making TV miniseries of all his longer stories, including The Shining. Apparently the film was fine, but not what he was looking for.

And Christine to thread!

1. The Shining
2. The Strand was good as I recall though the middle 500 pages dragged a bit
3. He wrote some book about dragons. I forget what it was called but dragons are so awesome.
4. His short stories I think are generally excellent, and much different from his fiction. They're published in the New Yorker and other such magazines quite often. He had an excellent one about highway restroom graffiti.
5. Also he got hit by a truck, which is so crazy. Then he wrote lots of memoirs about being hit by a truck. The one celebrity we have in the whole state of Maine gets mauled by a drunk driver. I thought we should have put his giant creepy head on our state quarter, but apparently that wasn't taken into consideration.

>Anyway, 4mph isn't very fast

True. This is the beauty of the contest. The 100 starters can go on for quite a while before the 1st person is shot, which is obviously a sobering event for the remaining 99. Only after about 48 hours things start to go a bit crazy. People start to freak out, as one would expect. Dunno why that story stuck with me for so long - it's a disturbing concept.

-- s1ocki

Stephen King signing on to the Kingdom remake is the only thing that got it made; it's been in and out of production for years, so I assume they're tagging it with his name because they aren't confident in it except as a King vehicle (whereas a Johnny Depp movie is a Johnny Depp movie, and you really don't need the Inspector 13 tag.

I haven't seen Dreamcatcher and don't know if I will, but coming so soon after the extended discussion of "trunk novels" in Bag of Bones (which, love it or hate it, is considerably different in scope, tone, and approach), and King's subsequent accident and public difficulties with returning to writing, I half-assumed it was a trunk novel itself. It certainly reads like one.

(xpost)

No, we have Dean Koontz for that.

i mean the thing with stephen king is he's really good at writing really readable stuff, and he has some neat ideas, but man oh man does he repeat himself. which is kind of interesting in a way, i guess. it's like he applies whatever good idea he has to the basic mold of "writer in maine" and lets it rip.

(obviously that applies more to the novels)

Me?

I like him. I haven't read the new Dark Tower book yet, though. I've neglected literary pursuits quite badly of late. The revised version of the first volume is a big improvement, BTW.

(There goes my resolution not to post. Ego can be terrible.)

Except Rose Madder and Gerald's Game.

While on a v. short enforced vacation a couple of years ago, I tore through a couple of his early novels. Firestarter was much better than I was expecting, Carrie was OK and then Dreamcatcher was awful.

his short stories are, of course, the bomb. his novels usually have the equivalent of two or three short stories crammed in there by way of exposition or introduction. those parts are great too.

gotta agree on the endings, though. tacky! and he does have a bit of a tendency to repeat himself, both in and between works.

(I just started A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last night and the first 50 pages are making me ill, so I need something new.)

"I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson is a good post apocalyptic story and possibly an influence on The Stand.

The Stephen King novel that I think holds up well is "The Dead Zone", I have read that one a couple of times. "Misery" is also pretty good, but the writer's novel part may get a bit long.

cera gets beaten up for a reasonable % of scott pilgrim fwiw

i’ve been rereading “IT” over the holidays, mostly enjoying but also disassociate through the racist & fatphobic parts

underrated section: Part 4, Chapter 16 - the whole run from when Eddie finds out his asthma medication is a “PLA CEE BO” and Bowers breaks Eddie’s arm, to him in hospital confronting his Mom about letting his friends hang around.

It’s really moving! The stuff w Mr Keen the pharmacist & ruminating on how Adults Are The Real Monsters, i think it’s mostly really beautifully written and just feels so grounded and well-observed.

And Eddie is so brave standing up to his Mom!

anyway, to the sewers. onward. etc.

oh and Patrick Hockstetter’s flying leech refrigerator nightmare is so gross & creepy & scary!

Having been a shy, bullied kid myself I related to Ben’s sanctuary being the library, and his love note to Bev - I actually wrote a similar one when I was in elementary school. He’s so good at the sappy coming of age stuff, without flying leeches.

It would be a huge challenge for me to read “It” again - I think I read it twice around the age of 14 and found the experience harrowing each time, as an almost 50 year old man this may be impossible to handle again

(I’m a King fan but there’s a lot of his stuff I’ve never read cuz I have a hard time with horror)

I am intrigued by that scene though VG

My 14-year-old was pleading with me to let him read more Stephen King after Eyes of the Dragon, so I let him pick out a book and he chose Pet Sematary. He read it in about two days and then emerged from his room after he finished, with a thousand yard stare, and just saying “wow ok”

Next step he gets to read The Stand.

After he watched JFK (hiding under a blanket for the autopsy and Zapruder parts), he was really interested in reading 11/23/63, but I was wondering how inappropriate it got…

I'd say 11/23/63 is one of the tamer King books

I was going to recommend Different Seasons as the book that got me into King as a teen but then I remembered "Apt Pupil"

Watching the movie Apt Pupil would actually be safer; there's some pretty raw sexual stuff in the story.

yeah that was my point

it's very dark stuff

there is some sex in 11/23/63 but it's extremely mild

I think he’d heard about IT via the teen cultural discourse around Stranger Things but I steered him clear of that for the time being.

11/23/63 Is borderline wholesome but kind of a middle-aged person’s book imo. It’s one of his best, though.

the Talisman and, much later, Black House were written as YA books iirc.

Salem’s Lot! Good yarn

The uncut Stand has some fairly intense sex stuff from memory.... copy and paste from a web summary: "The Kid soon collapses on the bed in a drunken stupor and Trash quietly sneaks into the adjoining room to sleep. However, The Kid slips into bed with him and sodomizes Trash with the barrel of one of his pistols, forcing Trash to pleasure him as well, again threatening him with death if he tries to resist or leave."

I would think Salem's Lot would actually be a great next step.

Saying all this, I read all these when i was 13/14 and turned out relatively okay?

The talisman is YAish but black house is about a paedophile serial killer inspired by Albert Fish

I'd put the youths on Night Shift and Skeleton Crew given the chance.

I might need to re-read those this year.

Thx jamie, i had remembered maybe some dicey stuff with Nadine, or maybe Larry and companion from the early stages of his journey, but didn’t remember that.

Salem’s Lot seems like it could be good. He has a copy of firestarter as well, I thought maybe that would be OK, he was interested in that one.

I'd put the youths on Night Shift and Skeleton Crew given the chance

Good shout

Cujo maybe? idk it’s been a while

Another thing that stood out for me in IT:

in the Patrick Hoffstetter chapter, King having established this kid’s sociopathic bona fides, at the time of his death Pennywise doesn’t settle on a final (terrifying) form. To quote: “…He saw its face was running like wax. Sometimes it began to harden and look like something - or someone - and then it would start to run again, as if it couldnt make up its mind who or what it wanted to be…”

The implication (to me) being that because Hoffstetter was not afraid of anything, and was so disassociated from reality/unreality already, he disrupted Pennywise appearing as anything other than an amorphous malevolent entity.

Anyway I dug that detail.