stephen king c/d?

and also, the biblical plague had to have been global, right? and you don't know how much time has elapsed. idk I'm making excuses for him but it never struck me as being that bad either, at least compared to some of the other shit he's got away with

Does the short vers of the stand include the rmde wtf sequence where a bunch of naked black military guys are executing dozens of ppl on tv? That seems like the epitome of the better-left-out.

I believe so, yes.

i read the expanded version of 'the stand' during a two week journey across ireland twenty years ago. i should probably have spent more time relishing my first opportunity to be served alcohol in a bar free from the shackles of amerikkkan law but oh well.

the stand is absolutely incredible during the plague chapters, thoroughly horrifying and grim stuff. as per usual i wasn't down as much w/king's simpletons and overweight flopsweat crazies and rednecks. my favorite character is probably lloyd henreid, iirc.

I like the "second plague" passages where he describes all the immune people who died as a result of their own stupidity or of accidents.

Yes, those are great. Similar to the passages in IT where people get wiped out by the big storm.

ya thats what i remember most

i think i'm totally w/king's style when he stays grounded, it's when he gets a bit 'pentecostal' that his flaws become more apparent to me.

Have we ever done a thread on the Stand miniseries? Man, the casting in that thing was all over the frigging map.

Not that I've seen her in much ("Don't Shoot Me") but Laura San Giacomo will always be Nadine to me.

jamey sheridan was an unusual choice in a lot of ways but pretty excellent. and miguel ferrer, ray walston, shawnee smith, all good picks!

the simpleton from TV's 'coach'! great typecasting.

Shawnee Smith was great! Gary Sinise was good, both Ringwald and Nemec were TERRIBLE.

Wish they hadn't eliminated the Larry/Rita storyline, or Larry's whole thing with Joe/Leo.

so many people I know love that mini-series but I have a hard time watching it -- everyone but Tom (aka the voice of Patrick from Spongebob <3) are just kinda facepalm and awkward to me

i was happier with how they looked in my head

Yeah, as is generally the case. I was a huge Molly stan, so even though she's not how I pictured Frannie, I didn't think she was terrible. Haven't seen it since it's original airing, though, so time may not be kind.

IIRC I was super excited and, as the miniseries went on, the anticipatory grin on my face slowly morphed into an incredulous reality-denying "no really, it's just on the verge of getting good" rictus as a tear rolled slowly down my left cheek

Parker Lewis pretty good though IIRC

yeah I forgot he was in it -- he was good

but it just felt like wall-to-wall hasbeens, especially when it came out.

same with IT, when they did that. Like, I dig John ritter generally, and JohnBoy Walton's fine and all but that whole thing felt kinda lame, especially hearing them say some of the lines out loud

My memory of Parker Lewis is that he was terrible, and also saddled with badly rendered TV-zits.

I think The Stand, It and even Shining miniseries are satisfactory for what they are; an attempt to rein in extremely sprawling novels for mass market television, none of which come close to the "joys" I got from the books. Maybe I'm just easily pleased!

so three years ago the wikipedia description of the "climax" (hiyo) of It was

They finally come upon Its lair, where it resides in the form of a giant spider, and, in what appears to be the Ritual of Chüd, Bill injures It and It flees. Lost in the sewers, the Losers realize that they have lost their purpose as a group, their common enemy, and as a way to bring them together again so they can escape, Beverly has sexual intercourse with the boys.

according to me upthread. today it's:

They finally come upon Its lair, where it resides in the form of a giant spider, and, in what appears to be the Ritual of Chüd, the Losers encounter It and its natural enemy, The Turtle. Bill defeats It with some advice from The Turtle and It flees deeper into Its lair. The Losers then gradually realize that they are lost in the sewers, and that with their common enemy having fled they have lost their purpose as a group, and begin to succumb to panic. In order to stop the group from panicking, Beverly has sexual intercourse with each of the boys.

a subtle difference

"Boys, boys! You're losing it! Here, break off a piece of my magic punani."

good old bev

winter spring summer or fall
all you've got to do is call

"Boys, boys! You're losing it! Here...

Seeeeeeerious at work hysterics!

My heart burns there too.

Lool VG

My memory of Parker Lewis is that he was terrible, and also saddled with badly rendered TV-zits.

― The Thnig, Wednesday, July 10, 2013 4:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes and yes.

the stand miniseries was awful imo, there were a few good performances (sinise - his first high profile role iirc after his big success w/ grapes of wrath on stage, ferrer)(here's where i rep for the night flier as a decent enough b-movie that does better as a king adaptation than alot of other movies). it's have to be period piece imo and i know i've heard of it being in the works various times but a cable network, preferably hbo, doing a long miniseries w/ the stand would be a way to tap into zombie fever w/o actually blatantly doing another zombie show). was curious about that comics adaptation they did a few years back - is it finished? was it good? a decompressed comics take on the stand has serious potential. have always wanted to re-read the stand but never have cuz of the stupid updates plus that book really didn't need to be longer. got on a kick a year or so ago (?) where i read some recent king - loved the jfk one, enjoyed full moon, dirty hearts pretty much (not as crazy as the first novella in there as some though), started under the dome and quit about a third (maybe halfway) through (lasted longer w/ the book than the miniseries). the only other king i've read in the past twenty or so years was a reread of it several summers back - still effective (maybe more effective - children being killed obv packs a punch when you're reading it as a child but it's maybe more horrifying as an adult)(just thinking of that one kid grasping at it's back for a zipper he's certain is there when it appears as the creature from the black lagoon and obv 'we all float down here') his writing of the kids was amazing, the adults not so much, meant to reread another old one last year but never narrowed it down to which one and then got busy w/ other things. i'm thinking salem's lot or pet semetary? think the racism in king's characters is usually just a quick and easy way to highlight they're evil or they're old/complicated, almost always the former though. king's racism comes out in liberal hack writer way, magical negros, black characters ennobled to the point of dehumanization, real stanley kramer shit. king's an odd writer in that it's difficult to rate him, dfw and others rating him as literachuh always provoked a 'now let's just wait a minute' from me (there was a time in the late 90s when he pandered to this revisionism also - pieces for the new yorker, bag of bones and hearts of atlantis getting treated seriously by literary reviews, very possible wrong but i think that book award harold bloom scoffed at came around this time), at the same time dismissing him as garbage is clearly wrong to me also, there's a gulf between him and most of his sales peers.

i read it last year (only king i've read besides night shift) and the thing i wasn't expecting was that it was kinduva big sprawling social novel! all the kids who grow into boomer archetypes of one kind or another; the not always clumsy reckoning w America's Demons; the very long (but cyclical) timeframe and all the historical nightmares it includes (and the way it attributes them all to the same darkness, underneath us, with our sewage). was tom wolfe aware? i mean it was certainly a better book than bonfire.

balls, you are one of my favorite all-time, but dude, you gotta go out and get you one of these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKSJN3WWR3E

^ based on one of the shorts from Night Shift.

IT is really great, on any number of levels. the monsters are probably the weak aspect tbh

king's an odd writer in that it's difficult to rate him, dfw and others rating him as literachuh always provoked a 'now let's just wait a minute' from me

― balls

He IS hard to rate. Oddly enough, I was talking to a friend about that a couple hours ago. King's writing is lurid, largely confined to genre, easily accessible and hugely popular. It's populated by stock character types with fairly simple (or at least transparent) motives. The protagonists may be deeply flawed, but we always know where the lines are drawn and where they stand relative. Evil, meanwhile, looms yonder, clearly marked. There's nothing terribly challenging about any of it, nothing we have to bring to the table in order to earn the promised treat. King's narrative voice doesn't ask interesting questions or show us the world through fresh eyes. His work lacks mystery, subtlety and elegance. In all these ways, it seems awfully far removed from that which we typically celebrate as literary brilliance.

Thing is, he's a natural. Reading Stephen King's better books, it's almost impossible to resist emotional investment in the struggles of those "transparent" characters. His sense of the tone, texture and pace of life is impeccable. He knows exactly which details will resonate. The evil really does seem dreadful, and the suspense never falters. As a result, we're flung breathlessly from event to event in a state of near desperation, hardly aware of the words on the page. The central struggles around which these fantastical tales are pitched may be mythically or pulpily heightened, but they're nonetheless located in something very like the world we know, a sad tangle of contradiction and compromise. Without ever seeming pretentious about it, he wrestles with the presence of history, culture and politics in the everyday (not my idea, and friend mentioned It in suggesting this - spooky).

Most of all, he's true to his voice. King's constructions may sometimes feel awkward, but even when they do, you'll almost never catch him faking it. He's like a movie star. We see acting most clearly when commitment falters and performance drops into an embarrassing struggle to seem. Whether or not we respect their work, the biggest movie stars rarely seem to be trying. We get the sense while watching that their characters are real people who just happen to be hanging out up there on the screen. When Stephen King's on, he's like that. He fucking nails the character.

nice

I finished reading _The Wind Through the Keyhole_ tonight and now have finished reading all of the Dark Tower novels. I liked this one better than some (_Song of Susannah_ is the most entirely unmemorable thing I have read this year).

Two reasons I thought it worked better than some of the other books in the series: 1. in terms of the series, it comes before the annoying part where he writes himself in as a character and 2. I liked the structure of a story within a story tucked into the main story.

Repeating myself, but only to make a point, I read his short stories a lot as a kid, but what novels of his I read probably came after seeing the movies: Carrie, Salem's Lot, Christine. I never read The Shining, but I did read Pet Sematary. Anyway what continues to throw me for a loop is On Writing, which is simply one of the best books about writing ever written. Stephen King may or may not be a good writer, but he is undoubtedly good at writing, maybe even great at writing. There are crap bestseller writers out the ass, but most never come close to King, despite all his flaws. Which is so weird, because I really don't think, again, that he is a good writer. Just really good at churning them out, but thanks to hard work rather than strict hack work, No cynical hack would ever cross the 400 page mark as much as this dude does.

Reminds me, loosely, of Upton Sinclair. When There Will Be Blood came out, I recall looking into Sinclair, thinking, huh, I know The Jungle and nothing else, let alone Oil! It turns out that Sinclair wrote something like 90 books, and many of them were bestsellers! And yet, a century later, most people can only name one of them. King, I imagine, will fare a lot better than that, though I have no idea under what auspices. Certainly as a gateway to genre, or a teen/tween slightly less than transgressive talisman/tamizdat, passed down from sibling and peer to sibling and peer.

the annoying part where he writes himself in as a character

This is seriously the worst thing he ever did in forty years of writing novels, and I've read

Insomnia

meant to italicize that not quote it obviously

Agree with all above on the important point that Full Dark No Stars is an entirely unexpected late-period masterpiece, his best book post-1980 I think

^ will read, as i've been out of touch for far too long

No cynical hack would ever cross the 400 page mark as much as this dude does.

george r.r. martin begs to differ

nah, that's cruel

but like every lousy "epic fantasy" hack to thread

i dunno, maybe terry brooks is an unsung master

Donaldson, erikson

donaldson seems to get his due, erikson i know nothing about, sounds intriguing

I've been re-reading a lot of King over the last year. Currently tackling The Tommyknockers.

Cujo was much better and less slight than I remembered it to be. The Talisman is still great, and I would love someone to really adapt it as a miniseries on cable. It would need to be a period piece set in the 80s, because like so much of King's work it just FEELS very much of its time. He is (or was) such a keen chronicler of the brand-name laden specifics of a certain kind of American life that his novels take on the character of the decade they come from.

Fantasy dudes don't count as hacks, because they pretty much deal in volume. By hack I'm thinking more of folks like, dunno, Dan Brown, who seems to be an objectively bad writer. Or ... Dean Koontz? Who is the dude who hires other people to write his books?

god?