I agree with SK having a hard time ending books. He seems to be fond of what I call the “grand anime ending.” He’ll have a perfectly normal horror story - some guy, or some family being hounded by some bogeyman or other - then, at the end of the story, it’s OH NOES! THIS EVIL IS EVOLVING INTO ITS ULTIMATE FORM AND IS GOING TO DESTROY TEH EARTH!!!11!!!1
Well, maybe not quite that overblown, but Dreamcatcher, It, and to a lesser extent Carrie and Firestarter (not dissimilar books themselves) had somewhat out-of-left-field metaphysical endings to them that I, personally, thought was a little jarring.
And this whole conversation reminds me, as all things SK remind me, of this scene from Family Guy.
Overall, I think SK could have benefitted from a good hardnosed editor for the last 12 years or so. His more recent works seem quite awfully bloated compared to his earlier books - Christine, It, etc.
According to The Onion, it seems like it to him, too. Seriously, in his sort-of autobiography On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft, he actually admits to not remembering writing any of Cujo (“I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page”) owing to his alcohol- and cocaine-fed fugue. I guess the onion doesn’t fall far from the…wait a minute, onions are roots. Never mind.
Anyway, King is definitely a hack; like Tom Clancy, he can be a talented hack when he puts some effort into it, but his stories aren’t any deeper than the paper they’re printed on. Nothing wrong with that; he still handles prose effectively, can weave and entertaining tale, and he certainly has never descended to the craptastic level of, say, Robert Ludlum or Dean Koontz, but when you start shatting out 1000+ page contractual obligations instead of novels on spec it’s hard to resist the temptation to repeat the old formulas, espeically if you’re wrung out or perpetually inebriated. Most authors (coughJoseph Hellercough) should stop while they’re at the top of the game, but few learn the lesson. We should probably be thankful that Harper Lee didn’t try to repeat To Kill A Mockingbird.
When you’re reading a novel and you can’t decide whether or not you’ve read this book before, we’re talking hack. Whether it’s a guy in a small town in Maine with supernatural powers that he doesn’t want to use (King), or it’s some insignificant guy who discovered something, and within 30 pages has all the good guys and all the bad guys trying to kill him, (Ludlum) it’s…a…hack!
Stephen King’s written too much good stuff to be a hack (I’m thinking Misery, The Shining, The Stand) and too much bad stuff to be a master of anything, horror or not (and here’s where Dreamcatchers comes in).
He’s a compulsive writer without a filter. I get why someone like lissener wouldn’t enjoy him – he never takes the time to really craft a sentence, or a paragraph, so his writing is rarely enjoyable for its own sake. But he can be a fine writer, and an even better plotsmith, so when he’s on a roll, he’s a good read.
That said, I’m just kind of tired of him. I remember, in high school, reading everything he’d written at least twice. Now I can’t be bothered – I’ve never finished the Dark Tower series (horrid, I think, but I know I’m I minority) or Rose Madder.
Le Carré is a writer trying to be Graham Greene, and doing a reasonably good imiatation. The Tailor of Panama was a fair retooling of Our Man in Havana and The Constant Gardner was a nice updating of The Human Factor with a bit of social relevance.
Ludlum is a writer trying to be Alistair McLean and Ian Fleming and failing miserably. I remember The Bourne Identity as being readable from early adolescence, but I tried reading one of his later ones a couple of years ago–The Apocalypse Watch? The Icarus Agenda? The Scorpio Illusion? I can’t remember–and it was every bit as unreadable as your typical Dirk Pitt[sup]TM[/sup] novel.
To be fair,** ?!**, you haven’t really hit on my dislike.
Yes, he’s highly skilled at manipulating that next page turn: I read ***It ***in a single sitting. And some of his earier books are fun, well crafted pulp: Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Dead Zone. If he’d continued along those lines, I still might enjoy reading him for escape, the way I read Elmore Leonard and Tony Hillerman.
But he just became too soul-suckingly nihilistic for me. Starting with about Cujo, it became more and more apparent (to me) that King created some–most–of his characters simply to indulge a deeply sadistic need to torture them. This sadism is what drives almost everything he’s written since then, and his books have come to seem like pointless exercises in self-loathing. In addition, I find his moral universe to be wildly askew.
So while I’m not a fan of his writing–I think The Stand is one of the most atrociously written piles of dreck I have ever been forced by skillful plotting to wallow through–that’s not really the primary source of my distaste.
Sorry. I was thinking of (and probably reading too much into) what you said in the Chandler vs. Hammett thread:
That said, your problems with King as you describe them here seem to have little to do with him being a hack. One reason I don’t like “hack” as a description for King is that I really do think he’s got a compulsive need to write. He’s not motivated by money, which may sound funny for such a successful author, but that’s the defining characteristic of hackdom.
While I’d agree with you that the first half of his career is stronger than his second, I don’t see the nihilism that you do. (Although maybe I should reread The Colorado Kid with that in mind.)
That, or nihilism towards fictional characters doesn’t bother me overmuch…
And if you think The Stand is atrociously written, you need to read some more unvarnished crap. Just for the perspective. Try a Buffy novelisation sometime.
And then there is the “four childhood friends” thing (I liked it better when it was “Stand By Me”) and the Morgan Freemen ruthlessly enforcing a military quaranteen" business (I liked it better when it was “Outbreak” (not SK) ).
But I’m with Sublight. I thought it was not too bad right up until it went all Shoot the Aliens and crap.
[Family Guy]
(Brian is driving through the woods and hits a guy with a car. He gets out, all concerned)
Brian: Oh my God! I’m so sorry. Are you Stephan King?
Kootz: No, I’m Dean Koontz.
Brian: Oh.
(Brain gets back in the car, backs over Kootz, drives over him again and then drives on).
[/Family Guy]
They even screwed up the part with the apaches in the movie. At least in Apocolypse Now, they were smart enough to use Naplam.
And apparently somebody couldn’t be borthered to note that Hellfires are not anti-personal weapons. They’re meant for blowing up tanks, not individual guys.
Don’t get me wrong; I recognize and deplore his hackdom too. But most hack writers simply fall under my radar. Or rather, their hackdom is their defining characterist (which is to say, they don’t really have a defining characteristic, but they are hacks).
King’s defining characteristic, for me, is his nihilistic self loathing and his sociopathic misanthropy.
Yes, there are worse. Koontz, for example, and Evanovich, and Bear, to name a few that I’ve read.
But The Stand stands nearly alone in the cutout shallowness of its characters and the inanity of its dialogue. I was left agog, page after page, the last time I read it.
You’ve read it more than once? A book with shallow characters and inane dialogue? I don’t understand why people finish books they say they don’t like. There must have been something that kept you involved.
[Family Guy]
[Stephen King is in his publisher’s office]
King: For my next book, a family is menaced by a, uh, lamp monster!
Agent: Sigh. You’re not even trying, are you?
King [waving lamp]: Whoo! Oooh!
Agent: When can I have it?
[/Family Guy]
I never really got into King, and I hated my sophomore year of English in high school, because the teacher was a big Stephen King fan and every chance she got, she stuffed a King story/novel in front of us.
King’s a light frothy souffle of a writer, if he’s got a decent idea (I enjoyed Christine, but that should come as no surprise), but if he doesn’t have a decent idea (as is often the case these days), then he just flounders around. A great writer can provide you an enjoyable read, even if he/she doesn’t have a good idea, simply because of how they can play around with words. King can’t do that, and much of his writing reminds me of Orwell’s line about “proletarian novel writing machines.”
I went through a period about five years ago where I read most of what I could by SK. I even picked up his autobiographical On Writing, which I enjoyed more than any of his fiction. For one thing, he didn’t have to fake the ending like he does in his novels. While there is some damn good advice in there for writers, I found one of the comments he made about his writing process apalling: that he “discovers” his plot, rather like an archeologist digging up a fossilized skeleton, and that sitting down and “figuring out” where a plot is going is artificial and forced.
You know what? I’ve written stories where the plot appeared organically, and I was completely surprised by where the situation and the characters have taken me. It was pretty obvious at the time of writing if it would work out or not. I’d put it down, walk away from it for a day or two and come back. Even in that short amount of time, I could tell if it made sense or not, and half the time, I pitched where that “discovered” plot had taken me because it sucked. “Figuring out” a plot may lead to some contrived, hackneyed conclusions, but that just means you weren’t really figuring it out. You took a shortcut. But even then, you’ve done more work than SK and his “discovered” endings.
Seriously, in his sort-of autobiography 