I’ll be a contrarian and say that I enjoyed Lisey’s Story. I read it 13 years ago, a few months after getting married. I’m thinking about reading it again to see if it hits any different now that I’ve been married 13 plus years.
This says what I feel really well. I hated Christine and didn’t really read anything of his since then. And that was decades ago. I just feel that King isn’t the writer for me.
I gave up on King many years ago. Of the ones I did read, I disliked Misery all the way through.
As epbrown said above, The Stand was way too bloated. I thought the first third about the virus and how it spread was terrific. (Early COVID days almost made me want to reread it.) But then it got all metaphysical and preachy and went on and on and on. I told a friend at the time that what King needed was an editor with a good pair of scissors who wasn’t afraid to use them.
So of course they then came out with a new version that was even longer.
And it was also half-heartedly updated to use a few references from the '80s which just made it even more awkward.
Yes, Wizard and Glass (Book IV of the Dark Tower) was mostly a flashback to when Roland was a teenager. It’s my least favorite DT book, because there isn’t a lot of suspense since we know that the main character will survive.
This! King is likely carrying an entire publishing house (or was in his heyday) and that seems to mean he is allowed to publish unedited manuscripts. This doesn’t just suck for the readers; there’s a reason some of the greatest writers had close relationships with their editors - they know it isn’t someone trying to censor them, but help them. (Who the hell would let that scene in IT go by unremarked? It adds nothing to the story!) Mountain roads need guard rails, writers need editors, King more than most.
A few of his books are acclaimed - a ton of his short fiction is highly regarded and has made quality film works. Less of his writing goes farther, even when it’s just him doing the cutting.
I recently finished an entire easily-available fiction re-read of King’s stuff minus the most recent few as I read them during my reread and I have to say, with them alllllll fresh-ish in my mind it’s gotta be Tommyknockers, Cell, and Gerald’s Game. There are things I do like about all three of them, like the magician kid or how Cell starts out, but as entire novels they make me bananas. I had a particularly hard time reading Cell because the geography of the town the dude lives in was just absolutely ridiculously wrong I spent the whole time shouting at my iPad… and then I read a local piece where they gave details about how the road they walked on was physically moved before I was born and if you place them on the old road, it actually works out. Which makes sense as King lived there during some summers with an aunt and uncle, prior to the rerouting of the road. So my bad, Steve-o. Still don’t like Cell very much, though.
And while those 3 are my least favorite, it’s not like I loved every beat of every other novel. Those just for me are the most tedious.
I enjoy doing a reread from time time. You can see his growth as an author and where his fame eclipsed editing. It used to be a lot easier to do a complete reread in the 90s. Could pound that out in a month or two. Now I don’t read as much AND there are so many more. So many. It’s really amazing how much he puts out. I’m grateful for it all and 3 total clunkers for me with what… 65 google tells me… 65 full novels and then a bunch of collections? That’s a batting average he could have done a chapter on in Faithful
I’ve been a King fan since I was in single-digit age, but there are a few of his books I’m not a big fan of.
Number 1 with a bullet is Sleeping Beauties. Ugh, I barely made it fifty pages in. I’m sorry, Stephen, but I don’t like your son Owen’s writing style at all.
I’m not fond of the Dark Tower series. The first one was so boring I eventually had to listen to it on audiobook to get through it, and I didn’t care for the rest of them much more.
Lisey’s Story was another snoozer for me. Plus, I hate the way he gets obsessed with some made-up word (“smucking,” in this case) and pounds it into the ground.
Bag of Bones was the opposite of the first Dark Tower book for me. I tried it as an audiobook (read by the author) but King is a lousy narrator. His mouth noises grossed me out so bad I had to quit. I read it as a book and it was much better.
Insomnia was pretty boring, IIRC, and had way too many Dark Tower references.
I couldn’t finish Gerald’s Game because the scene at the end grossed me out too much. And I am hard to gross out.
Hearts in Atlantis was another one that relied too much on the Dark Tower.
I only made it halfway through Fairy Tale before giving up. I loved the beginning, but when the kid got to the fantasy world, it lost me.
I prefer my King to be straightforward horror, mostly (though I loved The Green Mile).
Oh my gosh! [Stumbling backward to my chair] To me, that’s his best or second best. I won’t argue, but I’d be interested to hear why you feel that way.
I think I read everything up to Dreamcatcher. I’ve pretty much read nothing after that. I don’t know how anyone can say it wasn’t a horrible book. I gave him a pass because it was his first book after the accident. It did have a vivid description of the accident from a character’s point of view. Everything else was muddled and forgettable. King’s biggest strength in my opinion is creating characters that are vivid and that you care about. Dreamcatcher had several characters that I couldn’t tell apart and didn’t care about at all.
The Stand was by far my favorite and I would have loved it if it was twice as long.
Fairy Tale was an awful slog. And all of the people I lent it to agreed
I mean, The Jaunt and Home Delivery are both pretty good.
Up until UNDER THE DOME I was one of Stephen King’s constant readers. The last three King books I enjoyed were WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE, DOCTOR SLEEP and LATER. I love all of The DARK TOWER books. The STAND is also one of my favorites and I enjoyed The TOMMYKNOCKERS, and yes, Stephen King sucks at endings. Although I thought The Dark Tower series ended perfectly, Ka is a wheel, after all.
I remember reading Misery. I remember putting it down at the end and thinking, “That book pretty much sucked.” But I don’t remember much about the book or why I disliked it.
Injured protagonist defeats bad guy with nursery rhyme.
Under the Dome is my pick for this reason, along with the characters who make boneheaded decisions at every turn, and a villain so cartoonishly evil, he could offer a master class in mustache twirling. And it didn’t help that said villain didn’t even get a proper comeuppance.
That reminds me of seeing Out of the Blue (1980). I just could not accept that Linda Manz was supposed to be that into Elvis.
As for SK, me being handed Misery was me being allowed to read a book for grown-ups for the first time, which was so exciting. So I was a big fan up to approximately Gerald’s Game, at which point the love was beginning to die. “Wow, I am so grown up!” was turning into “That thing that just happened, that was kind of gross and unpleasant, really.” Maybe already somewhat with Needful Things. It took further steps into dying with Desperation and then The Regulators, and Wizard and Glass kind of finished me. Plus the internet now existing, so there’s more to do than read books.
Occasionally in years since, I’ve prodded at an SK book now and then, but in a way that you feel like having an adult-eyes look at anything from your childhood, and it’s not something that has rekindled.
I was an oddity of a '90s kid and only listened to classic rock, so the references didn’t bother me as a teenager, but as I’ve aged I’ve come to find his incessant Boomer pop culture references grating. It more or less reached its apex of annoyingness in the title story of Hearts In Atlantis, which felt like about 350 pages of just “You know, I was in college in the '60s”.
He should’ve ditched the whole idea behind that book and just made Low Men in Yellow Coats novel length.
All of them.
I like Poe, and Lovecraft, but not King.
Personal taste, only.
Nearly every good writer has areas of strength and areas of weakness. Michael Crichton has brilliant concept ideas and good plot structure but the dialog is pretty awful. Peter Benchley builds great mood and suspenseful tension but I don’t tend to warm to any of his characters.
Stephen King’s writing — paragraph by paragraph and page by page — can be astonishingly good. He ruins some of it with didoes and shitweasels and smucking, and with taking a character’s mildly offputting behavioral nuance and underlining it seventeen times in dark red to the point that it’s annoying as hell, yeah sure, but he has a talent for putting you inside the mind of a character in a way that pulls you straight in, you believe the character and see the story’s world through that character’s eyes. His description of unfolding events and physical settings is quite good, too. His primary weakness is, as so many people here have noted, is that he doesn’t know where his storyline is going and so his stories wander off into the desert and die of neglect instead of coming to a satisfying resolution.
Bosda just mentioned Poe and Lovecraft. I like them, too, but they have different weaknesses than King does. Both of them had this tendency to “And then dear reader, the most appalling thing did happen, it was so macabre that the marrow of my bones shall never be the same, it was unutterable” and would have benefitted greatly from a triple tablespoon of King’s skill at putting you, the reader, into that and eliciting that reaction from you natively instead of describing to you how you’d feel if you’d been there.