I started reading King in seventh grade because everybody else was reading him to, and he dominated my list for about a year. The first few books I remember as being quite good. Misery is one of the scariest I’ve ever read, and I also like Pet Cemetary and Night Shift. But the more I read, the more annoying and disturbing things I noticed. The last straw came during a drip to Europe with my parents, when the only English-language book I had was the long version of The Stand. That book is just a world of pain.
Look, here’s the big problem. In any King book, whenever you see a kid who
Gets good grades and is interested in academics or
Doesn’t have sex on a regular basis or
Doesn’t get drunk on a regular basis
then you know that that kid is not only weak, maladjusted, and mean-spirited, but that they will also end up as an agent of the supreme evil. Now I could only tolerate this so many times before I needed to quit. Is the guy repeating some sort of revenge fantasy based on past experiences? Does he think to himself, “Horny teenagers want to read about nerds getting abused, so that’s what I’ll give them”? What’s the deal?
Weird–I didn’t know that it was once fashionable to dislike King. In re Jackson, Simmons, and Gaiman, I’ve only read a couple of stories by Jackson and have never read anything by Simmons or Gaiman. (Yes, I live in a cave.) The list of authors I posted consisted only of the ones I came up with off the top of my head.
I don’t follow you. The King novels that I read needed a lot of cutting down. If King has an editor, he or she is doing a pretty lousy job, and IMO prose like that should not see publication. At the other end of the scale you have somebody like Dunsany, who wrote world-class prose in a single draft using a quill pen.
<shrug> Okay, this may just be another personal-taste issue.
Okay, thanks for the recommendations. (Of course, my to-be-read pile takes up about ten feet of shelf space, so lord knows when I’ll get to them.)
Oh, I know full well how Lovecraft was in love with the thesaurus. But like you say, you have to accept the bad with the good. On the other hand, IME King’s faults outweighed the good aspects of the stories of his that I’d read.
Incidentally, I think Dunsany was easily better at atmosphere than Lovecraft was, as were Blackwood, Machen, and Hodgson if they were having a good day.
Maybe so, but I really just saw no reason why he should be so popular, and many reasons why he should be forgotten. In contrast, for example, I can’t stand Atwood’s work, but I wouldn’t start a thread like this about her books, because I can see why she’s regarded as a good writer.
Not knocking anyone who enjoys King’s work, but - I just don’t get it. I’m famous for plowing through long books and loving it, but I’ve never made it through a King item. (long or short). His writing annoys or bores me. I’d say it was just a matter of taste, but lately he’s been getting recognition as a Writer & I just don’t understand that.
Yeah, I know that a (TV) movie doesn’t always do justice to a written work, but for so many vomitous bombs to be so consistently splewed into film/video form tells me that the source can’t be any good.
Not true. I read an article about Anne Rice that said she refuses to allow an editor to touch her work. Her reasoning was that if she should know how to write by now. I thought that was incredibly weak, because as a writer myself I know that it’s easy to overlook the obvious. You are correct that everyone needs an editor, though.
Now, I don’t know if King is in the same situation, but I’ve had this suspicion for a while: popular writers sell on name alone (God knows I buy Dean Koontz books without even knowing what the subject matter is), so it makes sense from the publisher’s perspective to not waste the time and money editing too much.
I find King uneven, but can be good - I quite liked the Dark Tower series (though I thought he bogged down in book #4) – it seemed very good to me, and not at all trashy - just plain good, if not great.
I also liked novella “The Shawshank Redemption”.
That being said, I couldn’t get through some of his other stuff.
I think what is annoying some people about King, is that he is a genuinely good writer who does not always write well.
…
Oh, and someone mentioned Olaf Stapelton’s “Star Maker”. Great stuff.
I’ve only read four King works: Carrie, Misery, The Bachman series, and On Writing.
As someone whose literally tastes normally tend towards more high-brow stuff (especially Eastern European/Russian), I have to say that Stephen King actually is, for me, an enjoyable writer and quite skilled.
Perhaps his storytelling is uneven at times, but I went into King with great prejudice against him, but found his work surprisingly literate and tightly written. Granted, I haven’t read any of his longer works, but the works I have read did not seem to meander much, and were full of intelligent commentary, literary in-jokes, and a warped sense of humor, sometimes self-referential, that I found far smarter than any of King’s best-selling contemporaries.
The man is a born writer. He writes enjoyable stories which capture the imagination of a mass audience, and he writes them well. And the kind of volume he produces? Wow. I am in awe of how much he can write and the relative quality of that output. Anybody who can do that gets my respect.
Not for all fifteen year olds! I was about that age when I read my first King novel (I was 8th grade - I know because my 8th grade English teacher - whom I adored - loved King) and I hated it. I think Salem’s Lot was the first one I read. HATED it. After that I decided that I should try a novel that a movie I enjoyed was based on and read Carrie. Hated it too. I read The Shining (which is the only movie that has ever effectively scared the crap out of me), The Dead Zone and I think one other that escapes me. Disliked them all. I was about 100 pages into Christine when I decided to give up King.
The thing about King is that I have enjoyed many movies based on his stories (either novels or short), but for the life of me I just can not stand the way he writes.
My entire SK reading experience was readding about 20 pages of Firestarter. I thought it was incredibly simple-minded and dull writing. And I was in 6th grade at the time.
What Miller said pretty much goes for me. I first read The Shining as a kid, and it made me want to be a writer. I hung with King pretty much steadily from then on (skipping over the Dark Tower stuff, which just seemed bizarre to me) until I got to the one-two punch of Tommyknockers (does everyone hate this book?) and The Dark Half. Once a famous novelist starts populating his books with famous novelists, it’s time to put the word processor away for a year and get a job painting houses or flipping burgers. In addition, like Miller and some other posters, I became less fixed on story and more on character, and King lost whatever juice he had in this department; I simply could no longer give a shit about the people he was writing about.
That said, here’s one recommendation I’d like to make to the OP: Pet Sematary. This remains one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read; if it hadn’t come out under the Stephen King brand name, you could easily mistake it for an underground classic salvaged from the attic of some reclusive basket case. It really feels—and I mean no disparagement to King here—like the product of a sick mind; everything about it is fetid and rotten and perverse. If you ever feel like giving King one more chance, I’d urgently suggest you try that book.
I’m honestly puzzled (and slightly amused) here. You’ve never read King, yet you dismiss his writings based on the movies made from his books? Whahuh? That’s like saying you’ve never tried lobster, but based on a picture you’ve seen of the things they must taste bad.
For the OP: Try some of King’s non-horror stuff. On Writing, as previously mentioned, is excellent non-fiction fare. The Green Mile deals with some supernatural stuff, but it isn’t horror. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a good character study, and The Body is a very evocative trip into the world of 1960s-era pre-teen boys.
I dunno. I like King, for the most part, because of the characterization he manages to put into almost every work. He’s done stuff like Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers that would make one want to yank one’s eyeballs out in an effort to never read a printed word again, but when he’s on, he’s among the best.
All opinion, of course, and completely subjective.
That’s not the point. Of course, all writers need an editor. The point is, King doesn’t have one. Or rather, he’s used his fame and popularity to insure that he has an editor who would never dare to change one word of anything he’s written. I saw King give a lecture years back, in conjunction with the release of the unabridged version of The Stand, and he was quite explicit in this regard: he doesn’t like editors, and was highly pleased that he’d become powerful enough in the publishing industry that he can afford to ignore them.
Well, I admit I might have been low-balling that one. I read it back in highschool, when I was a monster King fan. Most of the stuff I read back then, I can look back on and realize that I was reading crap, but there are a couple novels that I still have good memories of, including The Shining. Still, there was a point in my life when I thought It was the better novel, so I generally distrust my opinions from back then.
That’s really just about the worst standard I’ve ever heard for judging the merit of an author. For one thing, 99% of authors have no control over what movies based on their books will look like on the big screen. King maybe be in that lucky 1%, but the problem there is, writing good books has nothing to do with making good movies. You might as well conclude that King is a bad writer based on how well he plays guitar, or worse, how someone else entirely plays guitar.
Of course, the real irony here is that there are a handful of superb movies based on King’s work: The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Misery, Carrie, and Stand By Me are all first-rate movies. Most of these are the work of artist who are far, far more talented in their field than King is in his, and it shows. I can think of an easy dozen writers who are vastly superior to King on the written page who have yet to be treated half so well on the big screen.
Despite being a card-carying elitist, I’m pretty comfortable with genre and popular entertainment and have shelves full of the stuff. Yet I’ve never understood the King juggernaut. I’ve read half a dozen or so: The Shining was pretty good, Misery wimpered out at the end. But I don’t understand what the big deal is. People say he’s a good storyteller or solid writer and entertainer, but I don’t even see that. Putting aside literary pretentions, to me he doesn’t even succeed as the McDonald’s of literature, as there are plenty of genre and popular writers far better than him. He’s managed to establish himself as a brand name, and that’s pretty much it, and his fans will always prefer him despite the Gaimans and Blaylocks and Simmonses that churn out superior popular works.
And the idea that King ranks with Dickens is a stunning piece of anti-intellectual preposterousness which seems to be popping up frequently. Yes, popular writers can produce great work, but it doesn’t follow that because a writer is popular his work is great. Just the kind of logical fallacy I’d expect from King fans.
I think the answer is simple: the people who read King in their formative years, whose love of reading often germinated in King’s books, are getting old enough to become the new arbiters of taste and literary merit.
Per the recommendations for his earlier work, I’m now about two-thirds of the way through Night Shift.
I’m still thoroughly underwhelmed. Though I suspect that his writing comes across better if you’re blissfully ignorant of the fact that other writers did the same thing better several decades earlier than King.
You didn’t care for “Jerusalem’s Lot,” eh. Ah well. The 19th-century epistolary format is fairly ambitious for King; part of the reason I may remember it so fondly.
If you don’t dig “Children of the Corn,” though, you’re right, you probably shouldn’t waste your time reading him anymore. Quintessential!
btw, HH, I assume you’ve read Edith Wharton’s ghost stories? “Afterward” has to be one of my favorite traditional ghost stories of all time. And no, SK couldn’t have written it if you had a .357 aimed at his genitals.
I avoided King like the proverbial plague in my teen years - I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading that stuff. I was a teen literature snob. [Sounds like the title of a “true confessions” comic from the '50s, no? ]
I first read King on a recommendation when I was much older - having seen The Shawshank Redemption, liked it, and having been told (to my amazement) that it was based on a King novella.
I then had The Dark Tower recommended to me, on these terms: “try it - it’s different, not like his usual stuff”. I did, and damn me, it was good. Very good.
The fact is, if I picked up The Dark Tower series and did not know it was King, I would have thought he was a very good writer indeed. Why should I have a different opinion, knowing that he also wrote popular stuff that is schlocky?
I have never read any of his books. I watched GOLDEN YEARS, it wasn’t bad. Barely qualified as sci-fi.
I don’t do horror tho a lot of so called sci-fi is actually horror. Tho I consider FRANKENSTEIN to be the first sci-fi novel, it is uaually portrayed as horror.
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