Page 1163 of my edition, Ralph looks at the ball of electricity and shouts “Larry look, The Hand of God!”
Then, in the italics that King is so fond of: The thing in the sky did look like a hand.
I wouldn’t say he sucks,but he’s not my favorite “horror” author by any means. I felt that Lovecraft and Poe actually much better at creating a consistly creepy atmosphere. I’ve read a couple of his books(Misery, The Stand, and the Shining) and liked them, but really don’t feel a great urge to keep on reading him.
Two or three years? You’ve got to be joking. I read the original version for the first time in roughly three days. Granted, that was summer vacation and I had few other demands on my time, but still. It’s never taken me more than ten days to reread it, and I read it once or twice a year, usually in the late spring/ early summer. (And I always seem to get a cold as soon as I pick the thing up. Always.)
Say what you will about King’s plots, because plot’s generally never been Stevie’s strong point. That’s never really been his hook, or at least not his strong hook. His strength is, and has always been, his characters. He creates characters who are real and compelling, and who people care about. It’s a rare writer who can make someone throw a book across the room because their favorite character just died. (I’ve known several people who’ve done just that with The Stand, always at the same point. If you’ve read the book, you probably know exactly the point I’m talking about.) I’d read the new Dark Tower books if the plot summary consisted of “Roland and his ka-tet do their laundry” because I want to know what happens to these people.
Yes, a lot of his books don’t stand up to the standards of literature. I’d dare say most of them don’t, in fact. They don’t hold up under hard-core analysis. But I have to look at it the way Dr.J put it when he was explaining why he’d put a song about infidelity on a mix tape he made me, “Quit overanalyzing it and just enjoy the damn [story].”
You can’t discount King until you’ve read his masterpieces. The Dark Tower series is completely different from his “popular” fiction, and bits and pieces of it are scattered throughout most if not all of his other books.
Stephen King is not just a genre writer; he’s a literary writer. His work has, after all, appeared in the New Yorker – twice. You can’t get more mainstream literary than that.
I’ve read very little King, but what I have read seemed quite good. And literary critics are grudgingly beginning to realize that he is a major American writer, with work that will remain in print for a very long time.
Stephen King is better than all of those writers, by a pretty wide margin.
Sam, I totally agree. I’m just curious – why don’t people complain about those other best-selling authors?
Maybe it’s just that Stephen King is widely read here on the Dope, and those other guys aren’t.
I’ll see you and raise you…
Peter runs over a guy in his car.
Peter: “OMG, are you Stephen King?”
Guy:“No, I’m, Dean R Koontz”
Peter backs up and runs over him again.
Heee!
Remember, all of those people who are telling you that King is the worst sort of “popular” trash are the same ones who get little stiffies when reading A Seperate Peace or A Catcher in the Rye. Honestly, what made these books “American classics”? Rye’s not too bad, but Peace is awful(oooh, he pushed him out of the tree, big whoop), and neither one is even close to being as entertaining as a King book. ANY King book, even Dreamcatcher.
I like Stephen King, but the crux of this kind of argument annoys me. Why should English professors appreciate King as literature? He does not write literature. He writes good, entertaining books. But literature does more than “entertain.” The one thing that tells you King’s books don’t qualify as literature is that you forget them as soon as you read them. He writes lightweight books full of broad characters and dime-store novel dialogue.
It also annoys me how Stephen King himself is so defensive on this debate. He loves to talk and write about how professors must be stupid because they don’t appreciate his work as literature. Why should he care what they think?
Amen! 
Put me in the “hit-or-miss” camp. When he’s good, he’s very good indeed. When he’s bad, he’s the worst sort of dreck. And increasingly he’s both in the same book.
Take “Wolves of the Calla”, for example. There’s some very imaginative storytelling there. But no, it wasn’t enough that he was already bringing in characters from his other books; he had to introduce his own damn books in the same story, including the books about the same characters. That’s not postmodern cleverness, that’s self-cannibalization (which makes a clever short story but a crap writing style).
(BTW, equally prolific author Iain Banks tried the “refer to the book in the book” in his “Walking on Glass”; it didn’t work there either. Only Italo Calvino, IMO, has made this work in “If on a winter’s night a traveller”.)
Can I just state, for the record, that you do not have to be a Lit. Snob to not like Stephen King? At least 3/4 of the books I read in a given year are genre books. Mostly science fiction, a little fantasy, a little horror. Lots of comic books, lately. And I do not like Stephen King. He hasn’t written a good book in close to twenty years. And the main reason I say this is exceedingly poor characterization. I used to have to keep lists of characters while reading his books, just to tell who was who. I can get past almost any other flaw in a writer, if they can give me characters I actually care about. King can’t do that. At least, not any more he can’t.
As for why King gets trashed like this and other popular authors don’t, I’d have to say that it’s because there isn’t anyone willing to step up to the plate and defend Danielle Steele.
I’m aware of that quote. I’m also aware of the full paragraph in between that you omitted. Here’s the relevant part:
“Larry looked up. He saw the ball of fire Flagg had flicked from his finger. It had grown to a tremendous size.”
What detonates the missile looks like a hand if you close one eye and squint, or if you’re religious and in a highly suggestive state, but it isn’t one. (In the TV series it looks exactly like a hand, which is a hamfisted rendition to say the least - excuse pun.)
Flagg is losing control of his powers as he loses control of his followers, and he’s losing control of his followers because Larry and Ralph came to stand as Mother Abagail said they should and put doubt in their minds. In the end, it’s Flagg using his power to keep them that destroys everything he built - the ball of fire was created to kill Whitney Horgan. So it could have been God at work … or it could just have been Ralph fitting his religious beliefs to the situation as evil destroys itself. It’s a mystery, though not in the Sherlock holmes sense.
Moreover, even if you strip away everything remotely allegorical or subtle it’s still not a simple deus ex machina as phoucha makes out. The four men didn’t go out, fight, lose and have the day won by God just like that; instead they earn their victory by choosing to take the hardest path, without knowing if what they do will lead to victory or only their deaths, and they walk it to the end. This is heroism, plain and simple, and anyone who doesn’t understand the struggle that takes place needs to go back to the book and read it.
I read it twice, and I didn’t get that at all. Not that I’m doubting you. It’s been more than ten years since the second time through, but both times I thought it was just a big, pointless deus ex machina and an entirely meaningless death for most of the principle characters. One of King’s worst endings ever, and that’s saying a whole hell of a lot.
And that’s what I thought back when I still liked Stephen King. Can’t imagine what my reaction would be if I read it again today.
King wrote the screenplay (according to IMDB and the credits on the DVD). It seems reasonable to think that if there’s a hand of God in the movie, King wanted it there.
I’m sorry I butted in – I don’t have a dog in this fight, I don’t care whether readers/viewers think it was a hand or not. I only spoke up because the way I read your response to Phouka, it sounded like you were saying there was no mention of a hand of God in the book.
I’m sure I’ve seen a fair amount of Rice-bashing here. Don’t remember about the others, although I suspect many Dopers wouldn’t admit to reading Collins or Steele here.
I think a common experience is that a person who loves horror often starts out reading Stephen King books and because he has such a large collection of books they just keep reading more and more like they are addicted or something and don’t really want to chance reading a book by another author because it isn’t the same style that they have become accustomed too…then when they finally start reading other authors they realize that King isn’t the greatest writer of all time and that there are many other great authors out there. I started out reading King in middle school and I could not stop reading his stuff and didn’t want to try any books by other people but as I began to get bored and read other stuff I stopped holding King in such high esteem…I still believe that he is a really good a what he does though.
On behalf of we who still haven’t read/seen The Stand but were kind of planning on it one day, I just wanna say thanks for mastering the spoiler tag there, sparky.
King is very much hit-or-miss. I read some of his short stories (on audiotape, but unabridged) recently, and I was appalled at how juvenile and trivial they seemed. On the other hand, despite my disagreements with it, I loved From a Buick 8, and I loved much of his early stuff.
I’d dispute whether or not you remember his stuff, and whether it’s feather-light mindless entertainment. King creates complex, believable characters. He has a divine gift for dialogue, I think. And he has fully captured the essence of late 20th century-early 21st century middle-class existence. No one else I’ve read even comes close to his warts-and-all descriptions. For that reason alone I think that a lot of his work deserves to be read far into the future. I predict that there will be a critical re-evaluation of his work down the road, probabnly after he’s dead.
You don’t think so? William Hogarth, in his day, perpetually claimed that his work was among the great artists of his day, and stacked up well against the work of the overpraised “ancients”. His stuff was very accessible to the masses, produced cheaply enough to sell to everyone, and yet the symbolism was often incredibly unsophisticated. The guy was arguably the Normal Rockwell of his day. Today, he is seen as a Great Painter, his stuff is in all the big museums and galleries, and he has stacks of books devoted to himself and his work.
Charles Dickens was dismissed as hopelessly plebian, shamefully manipulative, and had the considerable handicap of being immensely popular in his own day. I don;t think there’s a high scool that doesn’t make you read at least one of his books. And A Christmas Carol id considered Literature and is still immensely popular, long after his death.
I’ve read articles by Harvard profs complaining when students list King among their favorite authors. But, dammit, if they can’t see why, they’re blind. It’s not as if they’re calling his the greatest writer ever, but they’d be lying if they didn’t say they enjoyed his work, or derived several levels of satisfaction from it.
When people tell me King sucks, I always ask “What books of his have you read?” Then they hem and haw and say “Well, I saw the movie and I read one, but I forget the title…”
People think that (a) Stephen King is a horror fiction writer and (b) Horror fiction writing sucks; ergo King sucks. Some of his works are bad, but when he is good, he is brillant! And anyone who calls him a “horror kiction writer” should be boiled in there own ignorance. He does write horror fiction, but also many other genres. He even writes damn good non-fiction; i.e. Danse Macabre (which needs a good updating) and On Writing.
I use the same argument for people who tell me Andrew Lloyd Webber sucks (What works of his do you even know?), but that’s another thread.