… other than the obvious one, of course. I’ll start us off with this one:
Anne is (from what I have read of her) herself a “dark” person.
Steve can be “dark”, but in RL I think he is fun-loving and “winks” at the horror he creates. In other words, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that is why I like him as a person as well as a writer.
I can’t see me sitting down with Anne and having a light conversation about anything.
Feel free to agree or disagree.
Thanks
Q
I know next to nothing about eiither author, so I can only really go on what comes through in their work.
I think you’re basically right. Rice comes across as suffering a chronic case of taking herself seriously. She seems to have issues with her religious upbringing, the unfairness and tragedy of life, her own mortality and a range of other issues. Worse still she appears to want someone to blame for this (God, her parents, authority figures) but can’t quite reconcile this with her lack of faith in their ability to actually affect any real changes. It looked in ‘Memnoch’ like she might be coming out of this a bit and reconciling herself to the way things are, but her latest stuff has backslid.
King seems to be far more easygoing. None of his work shows signs of raging against the world. Tragedies are unfortunate and unavoidable, but as much as he may want to change them he seems to accept that he can’t.
Probably the most interesting comparison is the reaction of their charcters to deaths of children in ‘Pet Sematary’ and ‘Interview…’. Very different persectives of the same event.
King is fun to read because he clearly enjoys what he’s doing. His books are often big sloppy hot-fudge sundaes that you feel slightly guilty about enjoying.
Rice on the other hand comes across like somebody trying to come across as a dark tormented soul, but can’t resist spoiling the effect by lapsing into melodrama, or stopping to peek at you through her fingers to see how you are taking it. I enjoyed some of her early stuff, but she quickly started coming across too pretentious for my tastes.
… is that Stephen King doesn’t bore me to tears. 
Sheri
Because King can write charaters who can actually pass for real.
Well, the obvious difference is that Anne Rice is a much better writer. Oops! – that belongs in Great Debates!
As to Anne Rice’s being a “dark” person, I think that depends on how you define “dark.” I don’t think she’s evil or a satanist or anything like that. If by “dark,” you mean “troubled,” then I guess you could make a case for that.
I think the real fundamental difference between the two authors is one you see in many authors who practise in the horror genre. In King’s work, normal characters are threatened by the monsters, which they defeat. The social order remains intact (well, not in THE STAND, where a new social order arises), and the result is that despite the thrills and chills, the books are ultimately meant to be comforting. You breathe a sigh of relive and know that all is right with the world, no matter how horrible the journey was.
Works by people like Anne Rice are more subversive in that they ask you to identify with the monsters. There is seldom a “return to normality” in which everything is set right. The effect is ultimately more disturbing because the evil is made out to be fascinating.
As for taking herself seriously, I would argue that that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s perfeclty acceptable to take on big, weighty themes in popular novels. However, I would tend to agree that she’s grown somewhat more heavy handed over the last decade – since the publication of THE VAMPIRE COMPANION by Karthryn Ramsland. I suspect that Rice has felt some kind of obligation to live up to all the analysis that Ramsland lavishes on her work.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
Based on stuff I’ve heard her say at book signings and during interviews, it’s my opinion that Anne Rice believes in Lestat as a real thing, not just a literary character. That whole spech of hers at the beginning of the Interview With a Vampire movie gave me the creeps.
Anne Rice scares me.
Anne Rice’s books take longer to write than they do to read.
You’ll probably laugh at me…
But Stephen King is a much better writer than people give him credit for. Seriously. Simply put, he tells a good story. The kind that keep you up at night even though you really need your sleep because you WANT to find out what happens next.
His characters are incredible-the Loser’s Club was awesome-I wanted to be a part of it. He has a knack for describing what things are like when you’re a kid-he doesn’t sugar coat it, or make it seem horrible. His characters ARE real.
He also is great at creating bullies-he worked as a high school teacher prior to writing. I think what bothered me so much about Carrie wasn’t the horror she caused-but the horror that was done to HER. I was ROOTING for HER. And she was the BAD one!
His descriptions and metaphors and the way he describes things kick ass. Also, he uses tons of swearing and profanity…but not in a way that shocks you. It just works-it comes across as very natural, and matter of fact, and you don’t think anything of it.
Plus, as sad, he’s a hell of a nice guy, he enjoys what he does, and it really shows. His books are works of love-as corny as that sounds.
I like Anne Rice’s Witches Trilogy better than the Vampire books. But let’s face it, the woman needs to lighten up a bit! Stephen King is so much, well, happier-even after his accident, I think.
I love the guy-I’d give anything to meet him.
BTW, who was it who said she read Carrie when it first came out and wrote in her diary how much she liked it and hoped that King would write more books?
I agree. The quality of the Mayfair Witch series is perhaps her highest. The quantity of research into historical European witchcraft, genetics and dolls alone is impressive.
Personally I think that a hundred years from now Stephen King will be remembered as a sort of Edgar Allen Poe, or Jules Verne: Classic because they were entertaining, but not they necessarily contributed to the understanding of human condition (of course I have the benefit of us all being dead by then, so I don’t have to worry about being proven wrong :D).
Rice on the other hand? I’m sorry, the movie version of Interview with the Vampire was better than the book, only because the movie was over in an hour and a half. The book just dragged on for years (or at least it felt that way).
Guin- I’m not laughing! Well, what I mean to say is, I think he is a good writer. Some of this writing really connects with people, and his characters are so true to life.
I’ve read Interview, parts of Lestat…as for the SK side, I’ve read nearly twenty of his books. It’s easier for me to finish SK books. He does take himself less seriously, and maybe this is just personal opinion, but Anne Rice’s do seem a bit fraught in melodrama. In his prologues and introductions, Stephen King often seems to ally himself with the reader (i.e, that whole intro to the new version of The Stand…I love how the guy goes out of his way to tell the reader this isn’t a new book, and not to be scammed into buying it if they’ve already read the other version). And again, my personal opnion, but his characters feel more real.
Anyways, Most of the time, SK does write from the point of view of normal mortals- his vampire book, 'Salem’s Lot, was very different from the way Anne Rice portrays her vampires. Oh, and SK’s characters could probably hold their own in a drinking contest against Rice’s characters.
How about similarities? Both were given traditionally male names. 
How’s that for esoteric knowledge?
Yeah, Stephen King is not the master of words or anything; he doesn’t think up good sentences or phrases too often. But every once in a while he hits one out of the park and it holds the whole thing together-Shawshank Redemption and Rita Hayworth being a good example of this… ‘Andy Dufresne waded through a river of shit and came out clean.’ That’s the heart of the novella, and its a great peice of prose.
But even when the writing is about what anyone could get if they wrote diligently and practiced a lot, what he builds with it is amazing. I was having bad week, I picked up Different Seasons today. Shawshank left me in a great mood; its manipulative and the coincidences are silly but it worked. And then I stupidly kept reading into Apt Pupil and now I feel sick; because ridiculous ‘dark serendipity’ aside, he knows how to activate people’s emotions.
I haven’t read enough Rice to comment on her prose; on the subject matter I can say something, I think. Both authors use. at least, sometime, a coherent fictional world. But King’s is suggested and unexplained, so he doesn’t have to top himself. Rice has created a heirarchy and system that mean she has to keep raising the stakes. (no pun intended) And once you have characters that can destroy the Universe, its hard to take a story seriously.
–John
Well… sort of… but pick up the short stories some time. I don’t know how many of the stories in Skeleton Crew or Graveyard Shift end up with all the main characters dead. In a novel, people invest a lot into the characters that are around for so long, and killing them would betray the reader. Even so, in 'Salem’s Lot, only two of the six vampire hunters live through it, and the whole town is destroyed. And in the Green Mile they execute John Coffey when he’s innocent, and Paul feels like his longevity is a curse from God for killing something so pure.
What you describe is certainly a part of what King does, but the other half is, people die. Horribly. Not necessarily from vampires and boogeymen, but cancer and car wrecks and plane crashes, with absolutely no resolution. Almost no one knows it happened, and the people who do know can’t explain it. There’s a relief in those stories too, but its the relief that it wasn’t us, that we’re dodging all the invisible bullets that fly around us.
–John
This is true if you don’t consider a lot of his short stories. And Cujo and Pet Semetary. Or Carrie, Christine and The Green Mile.
I like Anne Rice. Interview with The Vampire bored the heck out of me, but I enjoyed Lestat through The Tale of the Body Thief. After that it just became too. . . much. I especially enjoyed The Mummy. When she’s not building her own mythologies her take on the past and the occult can be quite engrossing.
I think King’s Everyman is a lot more versatile than Rice’s God’s.
I like them both, but I prefer Anne Rice. Perhaps thet is because I read some of her books first.
Anne Rice’s vampires were much better than King’s. Hers were more “creepier”. She does seem to be a darker person than King, but that is what makes her books so good. It is like she believes what she writes is true, ant that the fear she writes is like hers. It seems so genuine. Some of her books can be boring in parts but so can King’s (the writer’s speech in Bag Of Bones). I also like the “historical” aspect of her works too.
I never really understood how Rice got her “dark” reputation in the first place. Interview with the Vampire was kinda dark, I guess, in a dull sort of way, but since then? Lestat, immortal vampire enters modern society and becomes . . . a ROCK STAR! Yeah! In our next episode, he has to fight . . . a super-villaness who wants to wipe out 9 tenths of the male population! Gasp! Then he goes on to fight crime in New Orleans. Kinda like Bubble Gum Crisis, but no one calls that “dark.” Then he meets God (sorta), like that episode of Voltron where they all die but then come back.
Never seemed to get even as dark as, say, the considerably more entertaining Moorcock, and even he was more pulpy than anything else.
And for the record, all of Rice’s endings that I recall (And it’s been a long long time, so I might be misremembering) were very Hollywood. Lestat has a big concert and a cliffhanger. Queen of the Damned has the vampires all go back to their former unlives, crisis averted, with a nice “war is bad” message. Body Thief had a downright happy ending, with all the good vampires riding off into a moonset. Memnoch (current winner of the E. Gary Gygax memorial ‘worst book I’ve actually finished’ award) had “And then he woke up.” (“So, the rather dull cosmology I’ve been reading about for four hundred pages was probably a lie?” “Right” “And the characters may or may not have done what they think they have?” “Right.” “So, I’d know just as much if I’d never picked it up in the first place?” “Uh, right.”) The Mummy had the traditional 50’s horror movie sequel teaser. Exit to Eden had . . . uh, I mean, I wouldn’t know, because I would, uh, never read such filth.
I’ve just blown any chance of getting anywhere with a goth chick, haven’t I? Ah well. Probably wasn’t going to happen, anyway . . .
–
“This is how a woman becomes an ogre . . .”
Two differences jump out at me – first, Stephen King is much better at that old writer’s axiom “show, don’t tell.” He can describe a place, person, or event, and it is the reader who draws the conclusion that it is creepy, wonderful, scary, or exciting. When I read Anne Rice, I feel that she is always telling me “ok, that guy is evil.”
Second, and I realize this is an issue of personal taste, I don’t very much care for Rice’s construction of a very elaborate hierarchy with intricate rules and regulations. Especially in King’s early work, there was often a feeling of “we don’t know exactly why this is happening, but now we’ve got a bunch of characters dealing with it.” To me, that is a much more interesting book. Some of Rice’s books read like a Dungeons and Dragons manual … you have to slog through pages and pages of set up to get to any actual plot movement.
I am not completely cranky about Anne Rice. I think she creates very believable historical settings, and there is something downright enchanting about the world in which she places her characters. Why oh why has she never written a sequel to The Mummy? I think this is one of her best books.
You’ve caught me in an oversimplification.
Yes, people die in Stephen King’s stories, but that’s part of what I was referring to when I said that the endings generally leave you feeling that “all is right with the world, no matter how horrible the journey was.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said “all is right with the world.” Perhaps I should have said that “we breathe a sigh of relief because usually someone survives to pick up the pieces and carry on.”
But I think my essential idea still stands. In King, the horror element is mean to be horrifying – something that makes you squirm and want to look away. In Rice, the horror element is meant to be fascinating – something that makes you lean in and look closer.
Certainly, the line between Good and Evil is much more shadowy and ephemeral in the work of Anne Rice. I know you can site examples in the work of Stephen King where the reader identifies with the (for lack of a better word) “monster,” but look at the difference between something like THE STAND and QUEEN OF THE DAMNED. You could argue that the people who allign with Randall Flagg in THE STAND are not necessarily all evil, but the immortal characters who make the moral decision to oppose Akasha in
QUEEN are still vampires who live by killing humans for their blood.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
I haven’t read much of either author for a few years. One of the reasons is that King was using a standardized set of characters for a while: the kid, the bully, the mom, the everyman, the monster. Good eventually triumphs over evil but takes a serious hit near the end.
I picked up Green Mile a couple years ago. Around the third chapter or so I figured that Coffey was going to cure the cancer lady (can’t remember her name), the rest of the book was just how are they going to get the two of them together.
Echo the comments on Anne Rice’s hierarchies. Queen of the Damned was way over-the-top with Lestat flying around like superman and able to withstand sunlight.I found Memnoch to be not only boring but insulting to my intellect, with the trip to heaven, etc. I did like the witches series a little more. Body Theif was just goth-gay soft porn IMO.
Maybe if I read some of King’s more recent works I’d find them more interesting.