Yeah, 1408 was a really creepy story. Some of my other favs are The Mangler and The Jaunt.
Oh, yeah, and what about The Boogeyman? ::Shudder::
“Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!”
Never fails to creep me out.
He is so prolific that he has had many hits and misses. Nobody can crank out that many books and have them all good.
I’m still not convinced the Library Police won’t come and get me if I fail to return my books on time…
Ever read “Etoain Shrdlu” by Fredric Brown?
I used to love him as a teen. I stopped reading sometime in college, maybe after the last Dark Tower book, 1995ish. I can’t pinpoint a specific book that made me tire of him though. Maybe the baseball themed one turned me off a little, I don’t know. Maybe I just got too busy in school, and a little burned out on books working for a bookstore.
Recently my grandma died and I inherited some of her newer SK books. I read Under the Dome and The Colorado Kid and quite enjoyed them. I think I also have Duma Key and the one with Hearts in Atlantis to look forward to. I was happy to hear this week that there is a possible Dark Tower project in the works involving two seasons of TV interspersed with 3 movies.
Wow I felt almost opposite. The Stand was very good for the most part but got muddled towards the end, and was although generally a good read, not comprised of anything all that innovative. Whereas Insomnia was solid through and through, as well as full of intriguing ideas. A thought provoking premise and mythos, and it was also cool to read a book centering around retirees.
Well if they’re King books, you better hope it’s the library police, Og knows what other things might creep into your room late at night to reclaim what’s theirs.
My personal impression is that he’s the world’s most lost writer. He has no idea what story he wants to write, where he wants to take the story, nor how he wants to get there, so he sits down and just churns out pages of description while waiting for his brain to come up with something to throw in that moves the story to somewhere else. He comes back to his desk day after day, continuing to throw in description, some small side-trips for his characters, etc. just throwing out endless pages of literary flying in a holding pattern, until at long last he comes up with an idea for moving it forward. When at last that happens, he throws it in and then goes back to holding-pattern writing.
He’s lucky enough to come up with story elements that more often work than don’t work, but really has no idea how to formulate a story that will work and be consistent with itself. But more-so, he’s lucky that his writing style is sufficiently evocative that it does a good job of establishing a particular mood which his readers like to bask in, even though it’s not going anywhere.
If he actually bothered to plot his stories out ahead of time and added in all his extra description purposefully, instead of as a way to waste time while thinking of ideas, he’d probably be a great writer. Instead, he’s basically just very lucky to have such innate skill that he doesn’t have to try and be good to still get lots of readers and money.
But personally, I can tell that he’s just spinning his wheels because he doesn’t know where he wants to go, so it just annoys me. Reading his books just make me want to slap him and tell him to shape up and put a few minutes effort into it.
Really? I don’t get that idea at all - generally I think he’s a big “idea” writer, not in the SF sense but in the sense of “What if _____ happened to you?” Most of his books seem very directly driven by that concept. “What if you were one of the few survivors of a superplague?” “What if after losing your arm in an accident you found that your missing arm is a hell of a painter?” “What if all the bad stuff that happens in your town happens for a reason?”
As I mentioned above, King wrote that he gets ideas from taking two ideas and putting them together
#1. A high school girl who is the butt of all her classmates jokes gets her first period in the school’s shower.
#2. She also gets the ability to move things with her first period.
#1. A writer of a popular romance series has killed off his heroine and written a serious book.
#2. He has a serious accident and is found by the heroine’s psychotic #1 fan.
#1. A 10 year old girl, dealing with her parents’ divorce, gets lost in the woods.
#2. She developes a high fever and has vivid hallucinations.
Sometimes Stephen king gets his ideas from other stories, whether consciously or not. as i’ve mentioned before, you can sometime tell where it came from.
– There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that his short story The Ten O’Clock People derives from Ray Nelson’s short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning (the basis for the John Carpenter movie they Live). the premise is identical. King’s choice of title , it seems to me, makes it clear that he’s acknowledging the debt. King’s story is a much longer and better read.
–when I read Thinner, I was amazed. I swear that King lifted the basic story from a comic book story “Hugo Barge” that Steve Ditko did for the Marvel comic Journey into Mystery #64 in 1961 (before Thor started running there) – the plot is the same, right down to the offended gypsy curse responsible. Hugo Barge (Journey into Mystery character)
– Robert Sheckley was surprised when he read King’s The Running Man, and had to call Harlan Ellison. He was upset because the plot was plagiaristically similar to Sheckley’s The Prize of Peril, written in 1958 (and actually made into a German TV movie in 1970), long before King wrote The Running Man. They ultimately decided that King had probably read the story and forgotten about it, retaining the basic idea.
Wrong.
Agree with much of what you all have written about him. I like Dogzilla’s explanation for some of SK’s more uneven works in the 80s and 90s. Mainly, I just think the guy badly, badly needs an editor to keep him under control. I would have liked a voting option that accounted for that, and lacking one, came down on the “talented hack” side of the question.
Drawing of the Three is fairly tightly plotted, with IMHO, few “Bullshit!” moments, and the story is stronger for it. Conversely, the less said about Dark Tower 6 and 7, the better. Like Dogzilla, they just about killed my faith in him, and I haven’t bought one of his books since. (Cell and Everything’s Eventual, I rented from the Library.) My favorite one from Everything’s Eventual, is “All that you Love Will Be Carried Away.” Just something about middle-aged despair and broken dreams that resonates with me, I guess.
For a post-coke head story, in Cell, I was saying bullshit, or “Why are they so goddamn stupid?” every 5 pages after the first 75, and that tends to kill my enjoyment of the book. I agree with JohnT that, for a cokehead period tale, the first 1/4 of Tommyknockers dealing with Gard is excellent. I also agree with the praise for Eyes of The Dragon and The Talisman. Part of me would really love to see that universe on film, while the rest of me dreads the inevitability of Hollywood screwing it up. Can we lock Peter Jackson in a room and force him to do it?
The comments comparing him to Twain and Poe are pretty spot-on, IMO. I love SK’s dialogue and social observations. Another story of his with good uses of both, plus a well-written female character, is his short story, Graduation Afternoon. I love the insightful teenage protagonist, who’s wise without sounding like a Juno-esque smart-ass. To keep the mood, I think teenagers should talk and think like teenagers, and for the most part (gangbangs aside), SK’s young adults do.
As far as who the critics/scholars will be talking about 100 years from now, I feel confident in saying that SK will still be critically studied while current darlings like Jonathan Franzen are long forgotten.
Be sure to read Hearts In Atlantis. I really liked that one.
I loved “Insomnia” too, and I was also fascinated by a story revolving around retirees. One thing I took away from the book was the realization of how invisible old people are in our society - we don’t even look at them. And here Stephen King makes them the main characters of a novel, showing them to have feelings and strengths and self-knowledge - just like real people!
This thread and the other two prove that even in a very small group (SK fans) there is still a wide array of opinion.
I enjoy almost all of his books and stories, picking his worst 5 was just as hard as picking his best 5. I am just a huge fan, and can find something good in nearly every book.
Maybe I would have gotten more out of it if I had read some of the Dark Tower books. But all I remember was that it started off pretty good and degenerated into a mess.