stephen king c/d?

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I bought Alex Marwood's Darkest Secret after Sarah Weinman recommended it. It is not good. Like Gillian Flynn with even more awkward prose.

I like to imagine Stephen King as the most easily-scared man in America, constantly jumpy and uttering little yelps as his imagination reveals itself on the page.

http://ew.com/article/2008/03/20/stephen-king-art-blurb/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrDQ18P9x4

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Btw I didn’t read the same Richard Russo as VG did but yeah it had that goes down easy while actually being pretty damn good that I usually rely on genre fic for.

I read the EW article years ago and didn't care for that Filthy Critic that he links.

Love the Elvis Cole books mentioned upthread.

Also enjoyed The Force but not sure I'd go quite as far as this:

Don Winslow's THE FORCE (coming in June) is mesmerizing, a triumph. Think THE GODFATHER, only with cops. It's that good.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) February 24, 2017

Oh, and Gerald's Game seems to be getting very good reviews

i really liked It - is this the only place ilx is discussing it? not much chatter...

it probably got lost in the whole recent Stephen King onslaught, and probably just in the fact that Netflix has new product out there every single day now. also it's not really a flashy, fanboy-type Stephen King story. it's more Misery than IT.

I think Mordy means It, not "it"

Mike Flanagan is a great horror director, not surprised to hear he did a good job.

sorry Mordy, it gets confusing

i didn't really think gerald's game worked at all and i'm a bit surprised other responses are so positive : i'll write it up tomorrow if i remember, i've been travelling all day today

sorry Mordy, it gets confusing

I thought it was pretty easy to follow actually, it's your basic clown in the sewer setup

hey now!

winsy tozier gets off a good one

Beep beep winsy

🤓

here you go: notes on GERALD'S GAME

Note: being super-careful here about SPOILERS (I hope) -- so be wary unless you've seen it (but i don't think i'm giving anything away except at the structural level)
More urgent warning: long post

i: these weren’t really people I took much pleasure in spending time with: they disliked each other; this is bcz they were dislikable. The only primary or secondary character I much warmed to was the spooky dog.
ii: the backstory for why one of them was dislikable was (I felt) glib and simplistic — “people are entertaining company unless something terrible has happened to them” — and its stylisation (‘is this a flashback or a dream? is the narrative unreliable?”) was uninteresting and half-hearted (sun-cast shadows out of sync with the sun, you felt because no one had noticed; if deliberate, tepidly realised).
iii: obviously “some cartoon monsters are also extremely real” is very much king’s wheelhouse — and I guess I shd note here that I’ve read no king and only half-watched most of his films (the shining excepted, lol). So possibly this match-up (me and him) just wasn’t meant to be.
iv: in fact I quite enjoyed (technically speaking) the early swerves between distinct types of micro-genre in the first half and more — the almost-erotic psycho-sexual thriller, the getting-out-of-a-predicament thriller, the classic supernatural-something-in-the-woods thriller, the dark-monsters-of-yr-mind thriller… This slippery mash-up wasn’t undertaken as pastiche or meta-exercise (which I actually wouldn’t mind in principle, tho I know many more committed horror stans have come to dislike it) but as the framing and telling of the story right here before us
v: … and underlying this, which I had more problems with “politically” (and was therefore suspending judgment to see where the film went with it), was what gave the film some of its tension — the possibility that it would swerve over-casually towards something (in present or in backstory) that was unwatchably nasty.
vi: if I’m suspending judgment, then they’re creating tension! So full marks there — there weren’t too many points where I was “ugh I knew that was going to happen, it was signalled miles out”). My disappointment really comes down to the fact that this particular suspense I’d created for myself never had a pay-off: the film just carried on swerving, and its climax and dénouement left my own tensions unaddressed (which is to say, as form, the swerving was never really integrated into anything but the functionality of top-level storytelling)
vii: to reiterate, it did its immediate thrills and surprises well. And within this there were a number of small but nice conceits, including a (slight) reversal conceit right at the end which I really liked.
viii: Anyway, instead of the unwatchably nasty stuff I was expecting and gearing up to (and not really wanting) it went unwatchably horrible in an entirely different sense. This is where — somewhat self-protectively probably — I started laughing rather than cringeing or jumping.
ix: … and unfortunately from then the film hurtled in three directions at once towards its conclusion (employing alongside tale-unfolding-in-linear time two faintly absurd parallel narrative devices, one of them — of all things you never see any more in cinema, with good reason IMO — the Explanatory Epilogue).
x: I didn’t think it was a mess, exactly — but I do think it was a frustratingly failed experiment, perhaps through sticking too closely to the original story, which I don’t know at all (but one of my co-watchers had read).

i watched this last night. i have to say at first i really enjoyed watching something made for popular consumption that was for the most part as small in setting as a stage play. that might have carried it to a place it didn't deserve to be. it'd be cool to see more "tv play' type stuff.

it got worse as it went on and the end was fucking terrible tho - when she was driving through the woods and saw the eclipse i thought she was in hell or something, i think that would have been a better outcome than this utterly absurd shit with the actual killer, which was hurriedly explained and totally ridiculous. and i dunno what the design of how the moonlight man looked was meant to do but who honestly wouldn't burst out laughing at the final reveals and the court scene?

the whole epilogue was just out of place with the rest of the show - i thought some of the dream/memory sequences were let off the leash too much too. the actual idea of space and restriction at the beginning was done really well, big drama with tiny things like the glass of water etc. it started to unravel along the way, the more it deviated from that.

i agree the characters weren't amazingly well-developed - it's not really enough to just explain away someone's character with "abuse" - but i thought the husband was well-played and some of the scenes with him were good.

the scene with the piece of glass and the handcuff genuinely made me have to cover my eyes. feel like these serial tv shows/netflix have upped the number of genuinely horrible or barely watchable scenes.

it was ed gein with acromegaly all along

(note to thread: lol i am no longer bothering to keep up the fiction of dodging spoilers)

lol ed gein came into my mind even in the split-second they spent establishing that.

viagra won't be happy to have been inserted into the remake as cause of a cardiac arrest.

the reverse conceit i nevertheless quite liked at that moment was when big-face ed said her words back at her: as if, mirror-fashion, she had also been a strange haunting dream-figure for him in their encounters

winsy tozier gets off a good one

― how's life, Monday, October 2, 2017 7:18 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Beep beep winsy

― harbinger of failure (Jon not Jon), Monday, October 2, 2017 7:33 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Belated response, but thanks for both of these lols. They were chuckalicious, as Wins would say.

all these criticisms of GG do seem to be the same issues as the book

lol ok now that's i've read all the comments in the thread re gerald's game the book -- plus mordy's "i liked it" (= "i liked cap-I It" of course) -- and see that i cd have saved myself some work carefully (and without spoilering) laying out its faults, as literally no one cares for the book in the first place

who is giving it good reviews tho?

dummies

That's not fair since I haven't seen it but the book is the first one I ever chose to put down and not finish so I can't imagine liking an adaptation of it.

ST Joshi wrote a big King overview once (which missed out the Dark Tower series if I remember correctly) and was mostly negative. He can be needlessly cruel but I have to admit I got a lot of pleasure out of him completely trashing IT (which I think has several good things going on). But oddly he really liked Gerald's Game, Dark Half and a bunch of others that generally aren't favourites.

wait, do ppl take ST Joshi seriously? I haven't read very much -- mostly his intros to Lovecraft collections -- and based on them I've always taken him for an idiot.

Sometimes, there's certainly a backlash against him happening. I disagree with a lot of his opinions (some of which are very odd), but he deserves a ton of credit for the writers he's helped (living and dead), I think he helped build a scene and sometimes he's one of the only honest prominent voices in the scene. Sometimes he's very on the money.
What's he said idiotic in those intros?

it's ages since i read them, i remember my scornful response better than anything i was responding to

I should also say he deserves a bit of the backlash, but I just hope people don't try to push him out.

Joshi's criticisms of King (at least the ones I've read) are incoherent, and seem mostly a reaction to his bestsellerdom

He put King's "Night Surf" in American Supernatural Tales.

They only thing I've read by Joshi is his introduction to the Arthur Machen collection he edited for Penguin, which was fine as far as it went (he clearly knows a lot about gothic/supernatural literature), though the collection itself weirdly omits Machen's best-known story, The Great God Pan. However, Joshi's reaction to the HP Lovecraft awards controversy was definitely the height of idiocy:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/hp-lovecraft-biographer-rages-against-ditching-of-author-as-fantasy-prize-emblem

yes i just reread joshi's intro to the penguin "call of cthulhu" collection: ward's "fine as far as it goes" and "clearly knows a lot" are precisely fair, though his actual written style persistently irritates me -- with great knowledge comes great comic-book-guy is part of the problem, but he's also sometimes weirdly tin-eared as a critic. for example, he describes "the shunned house" as nostalgic -- i know what he's getting at, that the setting for HPL’s subject matter switched from where he used to live (Providence) to where he now lived, New York (“The Horror at Red Hook” etc), but he’d moved BACK to providence w/in literal months of writing “Red Hook", and, well, "nostalgic" is just so un-reread as a word to use of "The Shunned House" even if you can explain why he chose it.

he then goes on to make a pompous meal of HPL's "philosophy" (the universe is big and the gods are bad: none of them care a fig for humankind) in the context of the prior history of faiths. he is very much NOT qualified to be the comic-book-guy of comparative religion…

more to the point, somewhere else i'm p sure i read him dissing m.r.james -- he omits him from his pantheon in this intro -- and that is quite likely what first riled me tbh

Holy crap... I had never heard of HPL’s ‘on the creation of n___s’ poem before. Jesus fucking Christ, fuck him.

Ward- it gets so much worse than that, but let's take this over to the Speculative Fiction thread.

yes, apologies for minor threadjack

Saw Gerald's game & pretty much agree 100% with LG's take. I thought the setup was really well done; there was an effective rising anxiety going on, the performances were good and you got a real sense of the space. As soon as the hallucinations & memories started it went way downhill and I remembered what was so bad & silly about the book (which it turns out I had kinda conflated in my mind with a short & nasty story I read around the same time - not by king I think - about a woman who is trapped underneath an overweight dead lover for several days)

& yeah the end is so so embarrassingly terrible. It's pretty much intact from the novel if I remember right, in fact the whole thing is pretty faithful except I think the figures taunting/helping Jessie were just voices in her head and there were more of them including a sassy straight-talking former roommate?

Oh also the wrist thing was appropriately excruciating but maybe less so than her THROWING AWAY the remaining water in the glass like a FUCKING idiot

just fucking drink it it takes two seconds and you are literally dying of fucking thirst you dickhead

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them? The ones I've seen have been, like Treeship said upthread, really innocuous. Like, Mr. Rodgers-levels of subdued. I thought that was his brand—geek who shares dutiful, uncontroversial opinions about music in a soft-spoken voice.

oops wrong thread

Stephen King shouts his reviews on music