stephen king c/d?

Stuggling to get into 11/22/63 - worth persevering? The Talisman sounds interesting tho'.

I should revisit the Talisman, read it in my teens along with just about every other King novel but thought it was a real slog.

don't forget Black House - the sequel that was written 17 years later

And was fuckin good!

Stuggling to get into 11/22/63 - worth persevering?

It takes a while to get going, then it gets going, then it gets stuck in another plot/book for a few hundred pages, then it rushes to a predictably ironic time-travel dystopia conclusion. I honestly can't remember how it end-ends.

i loved it start to finish so

Keep at it -def picks up

Stephen King in The Atlantic on opening lines and why they are so bad and hated important/

Stephen King on ending books, and why your conclusion is apparently nowhere near as important as your opening line.

Huh, "[A.E. Van Vogt's] book Slan was actually the basis of the Alien films -- they basically stole them to do that, and ended up paying his estate some money -- but he was just a terrible, terrible writer."
Never knew this -- is it true? I cannot recall any resemblance, though it's been close to twenty years since i read it. Was there a particular scene or something?
As I recall it, the book was about these superhuman dudes who could read minds and were hunted and killed by some bunch of assholes.

King is getting it mixed up with Voyage of the Space Beagle (and more specifically with "The Black Destroyer" story from that novel), but yeah, there was a lawsuit by Van Vogt that was settled out of court.

Hrm, looked around a bit.
Found this claim at least:
"(T)he original literary source, perhaps, (...) for ALIEN itself. It is a 1939 short story by A.E. van Vogt entitled Black Destroyer (later assembled into a part of a fix-up novel entitled The Voyage Of The Space Beagle)."

That led me to the wikipedia article on the novel, which references this BBC My Science Fiction Life article:
"(The Voyage of the Space Beagle) was a clear influence on Star Trek and Alien - in fact, van Vogt started a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox as the events of Alien closely mirrored a chapter of Space Beagle. Fox settled out of court."

Also, van Vogt was Canadian, not German, though according to Wiki, "Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home."

100 pages into a paperback of the 80s the stand (SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY GEORGE A. ROMERO). excited!

Ha, Romero. I thought for a second that you meant he was directing a new version of it. There's this on the wiki, though:

"In January 2011, it was announced that Warner Bros. and CBS Films will be developing a feature-length film adaptation of The Stand.[11] There is currently no official release date. In July 2011, it was reported that the film may be a trilogy, and that David Yates is considering directing.[12] On August 10, Warner Bros. finalized the deal for Yates and Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves to re-team for a multi-movie version of The Stand.[13] However, in October 2011, it was reported that both Yates and Kloves had left the project, due to Yates feeling the project would work better as a miniseries, and that actor/director Ben Affleck was Warner Bros.' new choice for the project.[14]"

The Romero script used to float around a bit. I did see this:

Read the George Romero script for his cancelled early 80s film adaptation. It’s a great read for anyone who wants to see how it SHOULDN’T be done.

Anyone still watching Under The Dome? Total trash but it's insanely watchable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stephen-kings-family-business.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp

He named his son Joe iirc

Classic

When you met him you could be like "you MUST be... Stephen kings son"

His son goes by Joe Hill.

Which I always wonder if it's supposed to evoke the old Paul Robeson song 'I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as youuuu or meeeee...'

Nope! His name is Joseph Hillstrom King.

Tryin' my best, real hard, to distance myself from dad ...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Joehillgfdl.PNG/200px-Joehillgfdl.PNG

He looks more like Trey Anastasio.

Huh, didn't Stephen King have a big black beard when he was younger?

http://charnelhouse.tripod.com/mainpageking.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Joehillgfdl.PNG/200px-Joehillgfdl.PNG

"I hope you rot in HELL!"

< / Creepshow reference >

weirdly i read one of joe hill's books last weekend and i only realized when this thread popped up who he was. it was... ok

Horns was really good. I haven't read the other two because the ideas behind them (haunted rock star, evil car takes kids to Nightmareland) sounded really fucking corny.

horns was the one i read

I was in Bangor on the weekend... took the obligatory pic in front of his house. He wasn't home.

Joe Hill's "Locke & Key" comic series is absolutely terrific. I've also read some great short stories of his in various anthologies. There's a really good story called "Best New Horror," and another called "Last Breath."

Just posted this in ILBooks, don't know how many read that thread so:

Just finished Hearts in Atlantis, picked up in a thrift store for a vacation read. The first, lengthy segment is King in the bicycles, baseball, bullies and boogeymen nostalgia mode of It, and I'll always enjoy him in that mode even when it's not his best (the Low Men in Yellow Coats are kind of wtf villains, and then he just abandons them anyway.) And I did like how he threaded the following stories into this one.

Potential spoiler alert, but I don't think so:

King tosses in offhand references here to what I believe are books of his I haven't read: regulators, breakers, a dark tower, beams, Crimson King... yes? (I read The Gunslinger and disliked it enough to not follow up.)

yes

i really liked hearts in atlantis, and i'd consider it one a core gunslinger books too tbh

you should prob read the next dark tower book tbh- the first three are very different to each other in style and delivery iirc but it builds to quite something

course, it trails off into a total mess but i dont begrudge having read them i don't think- it just coulda been so much better if the SK of the talisman r bleak house had shown up to bat as opposed to the SK of eh well of the last three dark tower books

> the SK of the talisman r bleak house

what the dickens?!

sry keyboard perched on a pile of paper clips atm

what the dickens?!

LOL. Okay, I've spent the last half hour Wiki-ing Dark Tower, and Robert Browning, The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is pretty much exactly why I stopped after book one. I know he considers this his magnum opus, but I really don't have the interest or patience to read about Maerlyn's Grapefruit...

dark tower rules, inspite of its flaws (of which there are a great many)

from the Drawing Of The Three through to Wizard And Glass it's AMAZING. everything else....not so much.

Yeah, there are individual scenes of greatness in each of the remaining ones, but they get lost in a sea of "Huh?"

> I've spent the last half hour Wiki-ing Dark Tower, and Robert Browning, The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

oz books too.

Just finished On Writing...top stuff. I found Misery in the street a while back, worth a go? I've not read ANY of his fiction.

Misery's probably my favorite (haven't read it since age 18-19) because it's all psychological and no supernatural.

Misery is great

I re-read Misery a few years ago while proctoring exams at a local college. I was on the edge of my seat (literally!), despite already knowing the story.

misery always kind of bored me tbh, even the movie

book and movie objectively great, but like dolores claiborne i just wasnt drawn. not supernatural enough for me i guess

The movie version of Misery is definitely a Rob Reiner movie, for worse and worse. The book, though, is top 5.

I can now talk a little more freely about DOCTOR SLEEP. It's a real letdown, folks. It has a fantastic opening that dives right into the Overlook aftermath, and then jets ahead to Danny as a shiftless drunkard adult -- great stuff because of how heartbreaking it is to see Danny that way. And then, man oh man, does the book turn into mush. Basically Danny becomes the typical SK earthy-yet-perfect protagonist and the action is relegated to two characters duking it out physically, which is about as interesting on the page as computer hacking is on screen. The are virtually no stakes. After a string of very good books from SK, this is big clunker.

a shame to hear that