stephen king c/d?

That vomiting scene was the one that stuck with me the most as a kid, too.

I've never read The Rage but quite a number of people consider it among his best.

omg this book sounds crazy xp

Decades later, I still am reticent about going back to Pet Sematary. Reading that book shortly after your sibling dies and your whole family is deep in the throes of grief is not recommended.

I liked Rage a lot, but I read it young. Never had a desire to go back to it, unlike The Long Walk and Thinner.

i used to watch Pet Sematary the movie at sleepovers i remember it really creeped me out

Oh my god, Dan, that's awful. Yeah, I can't imagine that book being anything but traumatic under those circumstances.

My general takeaway was that all of the supernatural stuff was really, really stupid and the meltdown at the funeral was way too real.

The paradox of Stephen King is that he's often at his best the least supernatural he is ... unless the books are supernatural, in which case I find the non-supernatural stuff kind of stiff and draggy. And yet, love him or hate him, "On Writing" may be the best book, well, on writing ever written, and even though I am not a huge fan of King - I think many of his books are several hundred pages too long, which is why I gravitated toward his short stories - I will always respect him for that book.

I want to say I've seen more King movies than read books, though. A quick count and ... yeah, maybe I've seen 23 or so? It's amazing how many of them are truly great movies, and how many of them are utterly risible garbage, which I suppose is fitting.

xp Yup, and I'd argue Cujo has a better ratio of real life domestic horror vs. supernatural abstractions.

The Stand is another great example. Humanity succumbing to an unstoppable disease and the breakdown and subsequent attempts at rebuilding society, compelling stuff. Mystical and ill-defined battles between supernatural forces, not so much.

A lot of his best work (Misery, The Long Walk) contains nothing at all supernatural. And some of his other best work has supernatural elements that are easily ignorable (e.g. the notion that Cujo is the reincarnation of the serial killer from The Dead Zone).

Oh shoot, I forgot about the Dodd link. That was idiotic.

I'll assume that was a briefly-sober King attempting to tamp down a coke frenzy that had been serving him perfectly well.

I HAVE THE BEST IDEA

The Stand is another great example. Humanity succumbing to an unstoppable disease and the breakdown and subsequent attempts at rebuilding society, compelling stuff. Mystical and ill-defined battles between supernatural forces, not so much.

i read the first few hundred pages of the stand (the first stephen king i'd ever read in adulthood) in basically one sitting on a long flight a few years ago and was totally enraptured

on the flight home it started veering hardcore into the psychic grandma / good vs evil stuff and i was like 'nope, i'm out'

Yeah, I mostly remember good things about all the societal collapse stuff and felt that the later chapters were a bit of a trudge, but I'm going to try to stick it out to the end.

i used to watch Pet Sematary the movie at sleepovers i remember it really creeped me out

Same here. The scene with Zelda was legitimately the most disturbing thing I'd ever seen. I'm still beyond creeped out by it

xp I remember the original, edited edition of The Stand as being significantly less bad in its second half than the "Complete and Uncut Edition," which restores about 150,000 words (!) from his original manuscript.

i used to watch Pet Sematary the movie at sleepovers i remember it really creeped me out

― surm, Thursday, May 4, 2017 9:19 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Movie terrified me as a child to the point where I had regular nightmares about several characters (Zelda, obvs, but also Paxcow--and yes I know he was a 'good guy'--and the kid in the flashback scene who they had to burn alive in the house). I watched it as an adult quite a few years ago, with my gf, who had never seen it. I gave her the obligatory disclaimer: no, seriously, this movie, is really, really scary.

But we laughed right through it. The acting in that film (which I didn't notice as a child, obviously) is truly some sub-soap opera shit (Fred Gwynne being the exception that proves the rule). I know she is a child actor and low hanging fruit and all but the daughter in this film really does give one of the all-time worst performances in a film I have ever seen.

Yeah same experience last time I watched it. It's become super campy, but to me I'm fine with that. The entertainment value is still there. And Zelda still unnerves the shit out of me, not so much because of effects anymore, but because of the narrative of guilt and tragedy surrounding her

http://hotteahotbooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/zelda.jpeg

http://nypdecider.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/zelda-feeding.png?w=642&h=428&crop=1

ok, yeah, you're right, those scenes are still pretty disturbing. The one in the dream where she actually gets up form the bed and approaches...egads

wow, kellyanne conway's looking great xp

I've said it before, possibly itt, but the scene where gage gets run over is genuinely one of the funniest things I've ever seen

racheeeeeeeellllllllllll

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view7/4878102/pet-semetary-zelda-o.gif

xpost A kid getting hit by a car is one of the most genuinely horrifying things I can imagine witnessing, but I find a similar scene from Twilight Zone: the Movie to be one of the funniest things I'VE ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3033DQeYfY

I've told the story before, but I read that recent time travel one that got made into the Franco miniseries. I thought it was OK, but yeah, maybe 200/300 pages too long? Anyway, it was the first King book I'd read in maybe 30 years, and it occurred to me that I had never read The Stand before, so I start into that one. And I just can't do it. I hate the dialog, I hate the writing, everything. And then I noticed I'm reading the director's cut or whatever, which is some 400 pages longer than as it was published, and I think, man, if no one complained about the book being too short when it came out, let alone that it felt like an entire other book's length too short, then ... it probably didn't need those 400 pages put back in.

That said, I used to watch Maximum Overdrive on cable all the time, so what do I know.

I can't imagine being any kind of King fan and not liking The Stand, that just doesn't compute for me. That said, like many King books it's overlong. I've read it twice, original and update, and didn't care for the re-do.

oh ffs stephen

The twenty-fourth floor was taken up by the executive offices of a Japanese camera company. Larry walked up and down the halls for almost twenty minutes, looking forhis mother and feeling like a horse’s ass. There were plenty of Occidental executives, but enough of them were Japanese to make him feel, at six-feet-two, like a very tall horse’s ass. The small men and women with the upslanted eyes looked at his caked forehead and bloody jacket sleeve with unsettling Oriental blandness.

eurgh

wow that's a long tweet

Between mouthfuls of mu shu pork, a samurai attempted to dispense ancient Chinese secrets about how to get the bloodstains out of his jacket. He gingerly stepped over the tiny businesspeople as they took off their suit jackets in preparation for their afternoon kabuki performance and managed to sidle out the door just as the sound of a gong signaled the beginning of their Tet celebrations.

lol

When you open the book there's a microchip embedded on the page that makes a loud "goooooooong" sound.

tbf to stephen, larry is (iirc) a total asshole so maybe this is just king supplying yet more supporting material for his asshole case file?

reaching pretty far for that one tho

I've been listening to that consequence of sound podcast at the gym - I appreciate their enthusiasm, it's a nice counterpoint to the haters podcast I listen to, but they are way too forgiving imo and they really bend over backwards to excuse pretty blatant racism like the above (they also need to watch their levels; I think I have permanent ear damage from all the times that woman bellowed into the mic). I like that they devote like 40 minutes per episode to taking king to task for his gross and horrible descriptions of women's bodies & whatever he thinks sex is, not so much that they devote a whole hour to *reads generic anti-trump tweet* "pretty good zinger there mr King"

Yeah, the tweets section is pretty intolerable. I also noticed that they would really go in on him over his sexism, but for the most part haven't touched on much racism. They did spend a few minutes on the "negroid lips" remark from Sometimes They Come Back iirc.

that they devote like 40 minutes per episode to taking king to task for his gross and horrible descriptions of women's bodies & whatever he thinks sex is

this does not sound remotely appealing in any way

It's p fun tbh; most of the segment is just them reading out passages and loling, no additional commentary needed

He fumbled with his viscous turkey leg and, with a gibbering moan, wedged it between her squamous hamhocks. The sensation was not unlike that of cramming a fistful of pizza dough into a public toilet. They thrashed their supple, ashen bodies against one another like two frightened ponies who've been tied together and thrown out of a plane.

Even when I was years away from knowing anything about sex, I strongly suspected that SK's sex scenes were somewhat off.

I'm sure you'll find my post somewhere upthread about his discomforting habit of sticking in broadly, loud-and-proud racist characters, whose cartoonish lack of characterization often just seems like an excuse to drop N-bombs.

xp So, a "takedown" of the most famous author of all time that anachronistically pokes fun at books nearly half a century old by ignoring context and LOLing at fictional characters' failure to take 2017 liberal politics into account. Sounds delightful

I'm sure you'll find my post somewhere upthread about his discomforting habit of sticking in broadly, loud-and-proud racist characters, whose cartoonish lack of characterization often just seems like an excuse to drop N-bombs.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, May 4, 2017 2:57 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw Tarantino is the king of this

I would just like to point out that Old Lunch has quoted three of the most amazing sentences ever written

No, no. I mean - they're godawful descriptions even for their time. I think the CoS people contextualize it pretty well.

xxp

I don't think that's an actual quote. At least, I hope not.

I thought Old Lunch was writing those himself as a parody!