I suspected King would have a strong showing in this thread. I still like his stuff, even some fairly recent things, like the story “1408”. I just don’t like it as much as I once did.
Heinlein is similar, except I read everything of his I could find, including some really bad late stuff (even then, in the bloom of bored, solitary, fandom I never finished I Will Fear No Evil). I can still enjoy some of his books. Tropes he relied on now grate, like the one size fits all Midwest accents, the Old Man figure, and clumsy/suave flirting, even in some of his best work. I never had a problem with any of that when I was a teenage RAH fan.
There was a time when I found Jim Thompson, a pulp writer possibly best known for The Grifters, almost a compulsion. I lost a night’s sleep reading his autobiography. On reflection, I’d like that sleep back. It’s not that Thompson got worse, it’s that I lost my appetite for pulp noir.
It may look like I’m just listing some favorites from when I was young that I’ve cooled on, but there are some others (Chandler, Seuss, and Hemingway come to mind) that haven’t dimmed.
Ian Fleming comes to mind as well, partly because of the racism that I didn’t fully notice when I first read the Bond books as a kid. I came to find the idea of Bond with his custom cigarettes and comic book antagonists more than a bit silly. That didn’t help.
I’m still disappointed with what happened with cyberpunk. Gibson and Stephenson wrote a killer novel each and then books that could be politely described as “interesting”. So maybe my problem (and it is my problem, not the writers, they did pretty damn well for themselves) is with passing interests in genres more than the flaws of authors.
I wish they’d bag the ‘mythology’ in the Pendergast books and get back to some good old fashioned murder/monster potboilers (with or without him), like Still Life With Crows, Riptide and The Ice Limit.
I’ve also fallen out of love with Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George and (tragically) Peter Straub, whose most recent book was hilariously terrible (and I do mean Son of Rosemary, by Ira Levin-level awful).
This is who I came in to say. I loved The Belgariad when I was a teenager, and as the next five books came out I couldn’t wait to get each one. I reread them about five years ago, and they were just childish and totally predictable.
Ha, I started to quote everyone who said “Piers Anthony”, but it turned out to be so many posts that it would have been ridiculous to include them all.
I was just recently trying to explain Piers Anthony to a friend who’d never heard of him, and said that many, many geeky folks went through a phase at around 12-15 years old where they read and loved Piers Anthony novels…but that most of us are pretty embarrassed about this now. I don’t know how many times I’ve had the “Oh man, I used to love Piers Anthony too! God, what were we thinking?” conversation.
Looks like I’m the first to mention Dan Brown. I really enjoyed The Da Vinci Code and have read everything but The Lost Symbol. I lost interest once I found out how outrageously inaccurate many of his “facts” were.
I’m on the second book of the Dark Tower series, borrowed from the library, because I never read it (it wasn’t finished when I was on my big King kick when I was a teen). I have to say I may not read as far the third. It’s really dreary so far.
Has he ever written a single book where he doesn’t describe how some character’s genitals are reacting in various situations? Egads, the man has a one track mind. I don’t think that much about my OWN crotch, much less fictional ones.
I don’t understand this one. You’re saying that Heinlein writes everybody with the same accent and you dislike that? Or that he uses such an accent to “characterize”? I come from a literary tradition where most accents are barely hinted at, so the fact that in English most authors transcribe speech “phonetically” (according to their own notion of phonics, of course) took a long time to get used to - if someone’s characters always speak the same way, it’s fine with me.
Ditto on Laurel Hamilton, Orson Card, and Stephen King.
I gave up on Anne Rice when she found God again. Nothing against finding God. But her Jesus books I didn’t even bother with… her last couple of vampire books weren’t up to par.
Lawrence Block (Scudder series) and James Lee Burke basically write the same story over and over just the names have been changed. I know when you are writing a character series the character will encounter similar events but it became boringly repetitive.
Paul Theroux - just lost interest.
Stephen Hunter - His Character of Bob Lee Swagger was getting a bit too old to pull off some of the things he did in the books. Now Bob Lee has found a son (the third generation of Swagger gunmen) he didn’t know he had and the series can continue, may give it another try.
Julian May only wrote one series that I could read.
I enjoyed the Xanth books, the Incarnations of Immortality (except for the one about God), Mode, some of his standalones, and the first two Geodyssey books, then sort of fell away, when I was around 18.
Then I happened to see the fourth Geodyssey book in the book store (this was around 2001, so it’d been out for a bit apparently), and remembered I’d liked the earlier ones.
Couldn’t get past the Aztec section.
‘Eating a penis’ should only be treated as seductive when it’s not literal.
I agree with the previous posters about Stephen King, though I don’t personally think his writing has changed that much, it is just that after reading a certain number of his books it becomes formulaic. I still think he is a great writer though and I continue to read him.
**Jenaroph **is right about the genital thing. My own complaint is King using sex as a weapon (e.g. Roland’s sex with the giant spider in Dark Tower) or underage/coercive sex (the pre-teen gang bang scene in IT). Seems like he really gets his jolllies out of these.
Ludlum. Just hate him now. Same story over and over. And the occupational stereotypes really grate. I con’t remember which book it was, but in one the female lead was an economist and every other sentence out of her mouth had to remind us of that…
Certain stock characters of Heinlein’s speak the same way. He might be the captain of a starship, the oldest man in the universe, or the head of a top secret spy ring, but corny ass phrases like “root hog or starve” or “middlin’ proud” will fall out of his mouth. He could do slang pretty well, IMO. I don’t mind how The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was narrated, although I’ve run into people who did.
But, as other folks have been implying – and I’ll come right out and say – if he’d stopped with A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON instead of running the series into the ground, and likewise stopped with ON A PALE HORSE and SPLIT INFINITY, I figure we’d all be having conversations lamenting how the guy could’ve done so much more.
He can write books that aren’t embarrassing – but apparently decided, hey, why bother when I can half-assedly author four or five of these a year?
Another vote for King. I havent really cared for any of his work since The Green Mile, even though I have read most everything he has written. The Dark Tower series, Under The Dome, and 11/23/63 being the ones I skipped.
Laurel Hamilton. I liked her books up to Obsidian Butterfly. After that her focus shifted to sex with the plot being an afterthoughr if that. I gave up on her Anita Blake series after what should habe been the two biggest fights of the series got just a few pages each. Dont get me wrong, I have no problem with sex in a book, but dont make it the primary story of the series when the first ten books or so barely have any.
Simon Green. His last few books have seemed a bit to preachy to me.
I’d read every word Ruth Rendell ever put down on paper (long pre-internet, when I searched the library and used book stores). My favorite author EVER! But she wrote a book (can’t remember the name) with a bit too much S&M, and it unduly disturbed me, and I haven’t caught up with anything written after that. She’s good at sick and twisted - maybe too good!
I’ve always loved “Salem’s Lot”, “The Shining”, and “The Stand”. I’ve dipped into Stephen King on and off over the years, but other than these three, can’t say I’ve enjoyed his writing since. Even he admits he wrote a few ludicrously convoluted doorstops while wacked out of his mind on coke.
Interesting you say that. I stopped reading around the time when the Dark Tower series began in the 80s. I was really into the first one, and the second one too IIRC. I got bogged down his never ending description of pushing Odetta(?) in a wheel chair through the sand. I didn’t read too much of his stuff after that. I just looked at his bibliographyand see that I’ve read 15 of his books; none of them past 1990.
Nice to see that I wasn’t the only one who thought the Dark Tower series was “meh.” People talk about this series like it’s the finest bit of literature since Shakespeare, but I mostly found it boring. There were some good parts, but the first book was so dreadfully dull that it took me three tries to get through it (and I only made it because I found an audiobook). The middle ones were okay, and the last two were ugh. I think Stephen King’s “ugh” period coincided with the stretch when he was recovering (physically but mostly emotionally) from his near-death hit and run accident. I feel for what he went through, but I was getting really tired of reading books about his string of various author characters recovering from trauma (and in the DT series it was literally him).
Lately I think he’s been much better–loved “Under the Dome” and “11/22/63.”
