So, Steven King sucks, right?

Cafe Society
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I grew up on Steven King. My mother loved, and still loves him. I suppose that’s where I got it. I began at a young age, reading him. I read all his early works and loved them.

But lately here all I’ve seen is how horrible he is.

Is he horrible because I was a kid when I read him, and is therefore a “child/teen author”, or is he horrible in general? I for one love his early stuff. The Shining, for one, scared the tar out of me… I was in high school at the time. And I don’t really like his current stuff, just the older books.

But lately I think the Dope has affected me. I am reading Everything’s Eventual, a book of short stories, and sometimes I laugh at his metaphors. Is that what you guys mean? Seriously, I’m curious. What exactly is bad about Steven King?

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An earlier thread on the subject in which I wax pompous.

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Well Thera I’ve read a lot of different authors and I have always enjoyed Stephen King . Some sections of his books I don’t like and think they could be greatly improved upon but for the most part I find them easy to read and entertaining. Some of course are better than others and I am usually greatly disappointed in the movies made from his books. The Green Mile being the exception.
There are probably many people who don’t like his books or his style of writing but there are also many who do. Read what you like and don’t worry what other people’s literary tastes are.

4

Stephen King has written some great books (I’d even lump Dark Tower into Great Books, uppercase) and some complete, utter, writing-just-for-money crap. I think he’s even said as much.

Some people like to think writing is all about being Pure and True to the Muse, so his Sellout Years offend them.

Some people just don’t like genre fiction, so he’s a Genre Author, cursed with the mark of Cain (-2 to Literary Greatness, +2 to Bestseller).

Some people just read a bad book of his and have decided they don’t like him.

Some people have read a LOT of his books and figure the crap outweighs the good stuff.

Some people don’t like that he tends to repeat himself and doesn’t seem to strive for originality.

Some people don’t like his rather workmanlike writing style. King isn’t going to wow you with his elaborate metaphors. I’d put him with R.A. Salvatore: Just decent enough to move the story along, most of the time.

Some people think reading a book–any book–should be a Deep Life-Changing Deeply Moving Experience and find no joy in your basic potboilers, decent beach reads, and books that have no literary value whatsoever but are fun to read anyway. One wonders what these people do for cookbooks. (“Add a cup of flour…which never liked its mother anyway and sat on the floor crying while she yelled at his daddy, Pinch of Salt.”).

On a personal level, I haven’t read too much of his writing: Salem’s Lost, Eyes of the Dragon, The Stand, Thinner, The Talisman, Black House and the Dark Tower books are all the fiction of his I can remember reading. I enjoyed all of them and think Dark Tower is magnificent. I respect him a lot for even trying something like bringing all these characters from his other works into his “magnificent octopus,” and admit there’s a canniness in bringing characters from other books into this one, since I just had to find out all about Salem’s Lot, once I spent some time with Father Callahan. I also found On Writing to be a great, great book and he had a whole lot to say for a crappy pulp writer. To sum up: I’ve enjoyed most of his books, respects that he admits to being a hack, and think he’s a whole lot smarter than people give him credit for.

I also think when the English majors of the future are going to be trying to figure out our culture, King’s who they’re going to turn to, not a writer with only 200 copies of one book in print that all the critics love.

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I disagree

He’s hit or miss, but when he hits, he’s amazing. I like his early short story collections, The Stand, the *Dark Tower * series, Pet Sematary, Carrie, etc. I like his colloquial style, and he always takes you on a fun ride, even when you groan at the end of the book.

He’s worth reading and definitely has more than enough moments of greatness to exonerate him fully from the label “sucks.” Be advised that if you read his entire canon, you will hit some serious clunkers, but his body of work is large enough to make up for it.

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Now, I’m reading Hunter’s thread (which I didn’t see before, sorry) and it seems to support my theory that teens love his work. And that I should have searched a bit more.

But in the interest of my thread not dying, I’ll say…

I think Lovecraft is crap.

I have read him (specifically a book of short stories) and I predicted every ending before I got go the third page. Lame.

Should I start a Lovecraft thread?

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And thanks GMRyujin for your input, it was very helpful. :slight_smile:

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Go right ahead. But remember: (a) Lovecraft really isn’t about the plots; and (b) at the time he was writing, he was pretty original.

Oh, and have you read this Lovecraft thread?

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King is not a great writer, he is a great storyteller. (For the most part he is a good writer) This offends some people because they expect their literature to be “art.” King writes entertainment. Sometimes it is art. Sometimes it is just entertaining. Of course with all entertainment there is always someone who will not like it. English profs are the worse about not appreciating writng that is just for entertainment. They are also bad about equating abtuse with good and unsympathetic characters with great art. I have recently read "Sound and the Fury’ and all I wanted to do is slap all of the characters upside the head with a two by four. And a boot to the head of Faulkner for inflicting a whole family of people I wouldn’t give the time to in real life. Was it well written? Yes. But, almost everything that King has written is more fun to read. (Even the bad stuff.)

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Since nobody brought it up, let’s not forget about Richard Bachman. :smiley:

Wildly entertaining stuff.

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I was once a huge fan of Stephen King’s – although I still do not get the appeal of the Dark Tower series. But from Carrie on I bought pretty much everything of King’s I could get my hands on – I got worst scare ever reading Pet Semetary and just adored his short story collections.

Then I went to college in 1990. I don’t know if it was my maturing reading tastes or King’s increasing penchant for verbosity in his books or what – but by the time I started reading these next few books

The Dark Half (1989)

The Stand (1990)

Needful Things (1991)

Dolores Claiborne (1992)

Well, let’s just say my appetite for King’s brand of horror went to Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman and never went back.

I skipped the next few King books. Finally got around to reading my cousin’s copy of (the frankly GAWDAWFUL) INSOMNIA on a whim, which, sad to say was my last King novel. Much as I enjoyed The Green Mile as a movie, I have not read anything “new” by King in about 10 years.

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He’s not a Writer of Serious Literature. Get over it and appreciate his stuff on other terms. I think On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a wonderful book for anyone who’s ever been intimidated by the writing process. King’s approach? Knuckle down and DO IT. A very healthy message.

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Make your own Stephen King novel!

Main Character(s): An author/Band of adults who used to hang out of kids/Group of dissimilar people brought together by chance

Setting: Derry/Castle Rock

1st Monster: Awesome supernatural being that turns out to be a poorly conceived alien/House

2nd Monster: Person possessed by 1st monster.

Bonus points for having a storyline that centres on the love that can only be achieved through growing up with a group of people!

Okay, okay… That was a little too cynical. Many of his novels don’t fall into those categories. But give or take a bit, you could describe the storyline to many of his works though that. IT, Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers and Needful Things are the main offenders. Even the Shining, Rose Red and Desperation fit when you ignore the ‘Setting’ tag.

As you can probably see, I read a lot of King’s work when I was younger, and ended up disillusioned with his repetition. It’s his more unusual books that really stand out to me, such as The Green Mile, Christine and The Shining (okay, it fit in above, but its still pretty unorthodox for King). I even enjoyed Hearts in Atlantis, the idea of having a few separate stories with subtle links was nice – especially the way the first links back to the last. Why anybody would want to make a movie using only the first part completely baffles me.

There’s a lot of his work left unread, and maybe I happened to pick up a bunch of overly similar books. But there are many other authors I want to work through before returning to King, I can assure you.

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Here’s my insight into King-bashing from someone who’s never read any of his novels: when I was a teen, King’s fans turned me against him as a writer.

His books were hugely popular among teenagers when I was a high school student. I remember in my freshman English class we were assigned to do four book reports over the course of the year, and the teacher actually had a rule that only one of these reports could be on a Stephen King novel. He explained to us that he’d made this rule because he knew from experience that otherwise he’d get a lot of students writing about (and reading) nothing but Stephen King novels. And I’m sure this was true. I had plenty of classmates who apparently never voluntarily read anything but Stephen King novels. As someone who loved to read and had varied tastes, this was appalling to me.

What was even worse was the way some of these classmates were unable to participate in a classroom discussion on any work of literature without referring back to King. They also seemed to consider finishing a Stephen King novel some sort of major intellectual accomplishment. “I read a whole book! For grown-ups! And look, it has a lot of pages!” They acted like they’d made it through Crime and Punishment or something. As the sort of miserable, pretentious little git who actually was reading Crime and Punishment (in my own time, purely for fun!) in high school, I made the extremely mature and fair-minded decision that only complete morons liked Stephen King and all his work must be absolute rubbish.

To this day I have never read as much as a page of any of his novels. I have, however, read excerpts from On Writing and thought they were quite good, so I suspect his fiction can’t be entirely without merit. Had I first heard of him from fans who treated him as simply a good writer of entertaining books and not The Bestest Writer Ever or A Great Writer of Serious and Important Literature I probably would have given him a chance. From what I know of his books I don’t think I’d have cared for them anyway, which is why I still haven’t read one, but I wouldn’t have been quite so prejudiced against them had my peers treated them more objectively. (And had I been less of a miserable, pretentious little git, but that’s another story.) I suspect there are others out there who became similarly prejudiced, and even those who did give King a chance may have been underwhelmed enough not to re-evaluate their opinion.

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I suspect at least part of it may have to do with the fact that he used to top himself, every time out.

I discovered his work with Carrie, then ran out and got The Shining, Salem’s Lot, and The Stand, and thought they all were fantastic. He just kept topping himself, every time out.

Then he sort of entered an “I found wealth and lost my talent” phase, and he’s still kind of picking his way through that. Several of his more recent books have frankly kind of stunk, and people even disagree about some of those. *The Girl Who Loved * Tom Gordon was sort of interesting – perhaps the shortest book he’s ever written – but a lot of people hated it. EVERYONE seems to have hated Dreamcatcher. I thought Insomnia was pretty good, but a lot of people hated that one, too.

The bottom line is that he’s not the crowd-pleaser he used to be, although I’d still put him several notches above a great many other guys on the bestseller lists.

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I hope this question isn’t viewed as a hijack, but why don’t other popular writers get “they suck” threads? Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Anne Rice – gotta be some suckitude there.

Why is King the one that gets knocked about? Is it because he’s the one that most everyone has read, so everyone has an opinion?

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I’ve always unashamedly found Stephen King’s books very entertaining. Even the ones that suck.

I think he has great storytelling talent, though some of his ideas aren’t so hot.

He’s said himself that critics accuse him of publishing his laundry list. Well, if he published it, it would be an entertaining read.

No great literature here, just entertainment.

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Because everyone’s heard of him, most people have read him, and EVERYONE has an opinion on him. Here we have the critical mass of fans, people who’ve read him, and snobs who like to curl their lips and sneer at what the proles read.

Bonus Family Guy quote…

Stewie Griffin: How deliciously evil. It’s like something out of Stephen King.
[flashback]
Stephen King: Now for my 300th novel, a couple… is attacked… by a giant lamp monster. Oooooh!
Editor: You’re not even trying anymore are you?

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I didn’t read Stphen King until late in college, so I missed out on the rabid teenage fan attitude. Some of his books I’ve really enjoyed. Some of them, I read and though “meh”. I recently picked up a copy of On Writing and loved it. There, his ability to relate characters and anecdotes in a laid back yet creepy way really shines. One bit of his advice - get rid of adverbs - has helped my writing enormously.

In On Writing, he mentions that he doesn’t trust plot. He likes story. My guess is that the way he looks at it, plot is contrived; story is organic. He likened it to uncovering a fossil by meticulously clearing away all the extraneous matter. He doesn’t know how the story will end until he gets there.

That explains a lot. Like, for example, why so many of his stories turn to crap at the very end. I’m sorry, but the hand of God comes down and detonates an atomic bomb, taking out all the baddies in Las Vegas? That’s just insulting to the reader and the characters.

Yes, some plots are contrived. You can see formulaic plot twists coming up half a mile away. That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t exert some control over what happens in the story, try to find some symmetry, some consistent, believable punchline to the story. I think if he could solve that one problem, he would be a truly Great Writer. In the meantime, he writes some fun, entertaining stuff. He revived a genre and made it monstrously profitable. And he’s a decent human being to boot. Good enough for me.

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I think you mean “the viewers”. Come back when you’ve actually read the book. Since it’s quite long, this should take you two or three years.