Pet Sematary has one of King’s best endings - aankh, you might want to make room in your freezer now.
For those of you who enjoyed The Stand, you may enjoy this thread I started awhile back.
I just finished Blaze, written by Richard Bachman.* It was okay, bu not one I’ll pick up again, probably.
King has a new book coming out next year called Duma Key.
*King’s pseudonym.
I am another who agrees that he simply can’t end a book. And I only liked the first half of the Stand… Once it started getting mystical I hated it. Wasn’t it enough that it was a really well-written post-apocolyptic story? Did we need to include the whole God/devil thing? I hated the ending of It, too.
But Pet Sematary is also one of my favorites.
On Buick 8 - yeah, it was a seriously flawed book, but there was some good creepy stuff in there. I always find something to like about his books, even the ones that are on the whole not very good.
I would argue that those are excellent reasons for publishing it. A novel that grabs you and won’t let you go is doing something right.
I’m not much of a horror genre reader, or a popular author reader, but Stephen King always grabs me and keeps me enthralled. I think part of it is that he is an excellent writer of characters; when he describes a character and has them speak, they come to life in my mind so vividly.
I agree with you completely, RickJay - I think he might be the best short story writer alive. He admits himself that he has a problem with bloat, and I’d say a problem with endings, too. Short stories seem to avoid these pitfalls for him and let him shine at what he excels at - characterization and scaring the crap out of people. I think “1408” might be one of the scariest stories I have ever read.
(My response to the idea of a “The Mist” movie - “Oh, crap. That’s going to be scary.”)
One of my favorite parts of the “expanded” version of *The Stand * is his little vignettes. The people sick with the flu are dead or dying, and there’s a “second wave” of deaths, call them death by misadventure…everything from a man overdosing on pure heroin to a little boy falling into a well and dying of thirst to a woman accidentally locking herself in a defunct walk-in freezer. (“It was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve.” That always gives me chills.) Some of them are merely one sentence, but they convey the horror of the after effects of the Superflu superbly.
Well, some of my impatience might have been related to other stuff.
Part of what makes King work (when he does) is ordinary people in horrifying situations. The question of many of his books is, what would you do if you were confronted with vampires invading your town/you had a haunted car/the Unpopular Girl in School had psychokinetic powers/etc. But, for this to work, the ordinary people have to react in an ordinary way. If they suddenly begin to behave in a way that is not commonplace, it breaks the spell.
[spoiler]
In Buick 8, the cops involved did not do this. They reacted to the invasion of the Demon Car from Another Dimension by keeping it a secret. There is no plausible reason (in the parts I read) for them to do this. But they formulate a conspiracy to hush it up, even after it kills some of them. Why on earth would they do that?
They are cops. Their job is to clear up mysteries and problems, and report back on them. But every single one of them, including their SI team, agrees without hesitation to join in keeping this public menace a secret from anyone who might understand it. And, unlike every other conspiracy from the grassy knoll to the Illuminati, nobody blabs, even when new folks come in and old ones leave.
Yes, there is some passing reference to “this is ours, let’s keep it a secret”, but it is just baldly stated, and no reason to find it believable is ever given.
And there is this son figure, who they get mad at every time he asks a perfectly reasonable question that would reveal the Big Secret before King has padded the book out a couple of hundred more pages.
Not realistic, IMO. [/spoiler]So the darn book doesn’t work, at least for me.
Regards,
Shodan
I am not sure where I read this, but I believe *Pet Sematary * was written as an allegorical reaction to King’s son almost getting hit by a truck. King thought about what would have happened, how he would have reacted if his son hadn’t been pulled from the road at the last minute (in the book, when the protagonist almost but not quite grabs the kid… that’s almost what really happened, except King made it there in time). He wrote PS as a way of exploring that, and coping with his own distress at what nearly happened to him and his family. The inability to let go of the dead person, of keeping them alive, sort of zombified, in your memory, and letting that destroy you… that’s what the book is about, and that’s why it’s so creepy IMO.
I think King does this a lot, actually, takes real life feelings and reactions to horrible but mundane things and turns them into stories that take a supernatural turn, as a way of highlighting or making larger the very true human responses to everyday tragedy and horror. For instance, the events of *The Shining * are a metaphor about an alcoholic man with a rage problem self-destructing. The Overlook Hotel, with its ghosts and its pressurized boiler, are symbols for the haunting bad memories of Jack and his bad temper overcoming him.
The stuff about King’s son/Pet Sematary is in his intro to my copy of the book. In it he says something like “I have told this story before, but I guess I can tell it again.”
To be even fairer, it wasn’t a spider at all in It. It was an alien that manifested itself as a spider 'cause one of the kids had a spider/bug phobia. But I could just be picking nits. Or spiders. 
That’s an interesting look at that book.
It’s also why King books so often don’t work on the screen; I think those thematic elements usually get lost in the translation.
That’s his look at the book! (Sometimes I feel like no one reads my posts around here.) All of that was in his preamble.
I agree that Pet Sematary was one of his best/worst; it scared the bejeebies outta me!!
I think it also bears repeating that the same man wrote “Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption”.
Even though he IS a prick (met him twice) he IS a great storyteller.
Why do you say that?
From what I understand, he’s very shy and guards his family’s privacy very very carefully.
Actually, it’s because that particular image was the closest their minds could come to its actual appearance. As the book says, “It didn’t dress at home.”
He was rude, and snotty and completely dismissive, not just of me but to everyone who approached him on those occasions.
I understand having celebrity and having to be “on” all the time but come the fuck on!
You are the not the first to say that. But I’m gonna do it anyway! I have to know if Roland makes it. I have to know if the entire ka-tet is with him at the end. I have to know if Jake is Stephen King’s Kenny. I have to know how his childhood friends and family met their fates, or if they are there waiting.
It’s a sickness. I’m getting help. In the form of Dark Tower 5, 6, and 7!
Good choice. With respect to the poster above who suggested to stop, it is a great series overall, and the whole story is well worth the read. Keep reading!
How could you not love a book that opens, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”?
Were these occasions where he was making an appearance, such as a book signing, or did you just happen to bump into him at a restaurant?
Trust me. I know how you feel. I waited, what, more than a decade for the last several to come out. They will not cure your sickness.. The rest of the story that you make in your head? It’s better. Way better.