I think he’s said on more than one occasion that he loves the big ending, and he’s done that in most of his work. If you look at The Stephen King Universe, though, you’ll see what all the symbolism at the end of these books really means. In other words, the gross-out, slam-bang ending is one thing, entertaining on one level, but there’s a reason for it all.
Two of his common themes is the conflict between good and evil and that between the Random and the Purpose. So personally, I’m not sure he’s just throwing in those seemingly bizarre endings because he’s not sure how to end the book; he’s doing so for a definite reason.
It’s a departure from his earlier works and I am not a fan of the “gross-out, slam-bang ending.” What that means is, I no longer buy Stephen King in hardcover. I’m sure he’s rich enough not to care if this Gentle Reader and former Number One fan thinks his current work is terrible, but I am proving my distaste in the only manner available to the public, with my wallet.
Do you mean that the slam-bang ending is a departure from his earlier works? If you’ll recall, Carrie had that ending. So did Salem’s Lot, so did Cujo, even.
I opened this thread solely to mention Insomnia, which took me forever to read just because it got so boring, but now that I think about it, I also hated Tommyknockers and Gerald’s Game.
[q]One of the things I really liked about early Stephen King novels was his realism, which seems like an odd thing to say about horror novels. [/q]
Very astute observation. You are exactly right… up until the end of the 1980’s, the characters in King’s novel always ended the stories having to deal with the consequences of their actions in this world. I think his best ending was in Misery, where Paul Sheldon finally realizes there can be joy after horror… I nearly wept the first time I read that.
The only time he violated this precept was in The Talisman, where he gave his protagonists the ability to jump between realities. Unfortunately, it seems he liked this idea. I enjoyed Black House up until the very end, when the protagonist gets saved from a wrenching situation by such machinations. Or in Rose Madder, where they escape in some sort of freakin’ painting.
To be quite honest, I am having difficulty remembering a lot of the 1990’s books, even though I bought and read every single one in hardback. I remember reading Dark Half and thinking “didn’t we do this before?”, but I don’t remember how it ends (and there is no need to remind me, if I cared, I’d reach over and pull it from my bookshelves). I remember thinking “what the hell is this” when he pulled the Red King stuff out of Insomnia (I liked everything about Insomnia except the plot - I thought the characters were great.)
But… uh oh. Baby is awake and crying. I’ll finish this later…
Yes! She fell back asleep! Gotta type quickly though…
But he has lost touch with what I thought made him special - his awareness of the small things of everyday life, the minor twitches and turns of phrase that made every character unique. It’s like he is trying to create a new horror/fantasy genre, but it isn’t coming off too well.
[digression] This “real world” emphasis is why I am one of the few who liked Buffy season 6. These kids do live in our world and they do have to pay the bills, and I’m glad that Whedon understands that.[/digression]
It might also be that America has passed Steven King by. Face it: he has a better understanding of the common man’s world as it existed in 1976 than as it existed in 1996.
Having a feel for the common man isn’t his only quality. He’s also gifted at imagery. The worlds of the Dark Tower series are vividly drawn out. They may read like Westerns, but they’re supposed to.
Also, if you read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, it’s a great understanding of the everyday person - in this case, a little girl lost in the woods. Let’s face it, SK is not a little girl, so presumably it wasn’t easy to write the book. But I thought it felt honest and true.
I find a lot of his longer stuff is losing me sooner and sooner now. I am getting freakishly tired of constantly hearing about the damn Crimson King, but I definitely saw something like it coming. A lot of his books have always had the common threads throughout. I have to say, I am still enjoying most of his short story collections.
I really enjoyed The Talisman, one of my favorite books, and not just Stephen King either, which was one fo the reason why I really DIDN’T like Black House. I digress, here’s my list -
Books I read again and again -
It
The Talisman
Herats In Atlantis (At least the stories “low men in yellow coats” and “Hearts in Atlantis”)
The Green Mile
Four Past Midnight
Different Seasons
Skeleton Crew
The Running Man
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
The Drawing of the Three
The Wastelands
Everything’s Eventual
Liked quite a bit -
Carrie
Salem’s Lot
The Shining
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
The Gunslinger
Pet Sematary
Cycle of The Werewolf
Take Em or Leave Em -
The Stand
Needful Things
Misery
Gerald’s Game
Insomnia
The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon
Desperation
Regulators
Cujo
The Dark Half
Did not Like -
Black house
Wizards and Glass
Most of The Bachman Books
Books I Haven’t Read -
Christine
Tommyknockers
Dolores Claiborne
Bag of Bones
Rose Madder
Dreamcatcher (although I own it)
Storm of the Century
Insomnia is the only SK book I started and couldn’y finish. Apparently it was written as a cure for its title. I haven’t read the majority of his stuff written in the past 10 years. I really enjoyed the first three parts of The Dark Tower, though. Part four was fair, but I don’t really care for the Roland history lesson. I’d rather just get little snippets of his past rather than detailed stories.
I thought both Carrie and Salem’s Lot had great “realistic” endings for the plots of the book. Carrie was telekenetic and blew up the school, nothing surreal like walking through a painting or the “deadlights.” Salem’s Lot ended with with the good guys burning the town, I’m not sure how that could be considered “over the top and out there” like a giant turtle that you reached by playing the Game of Chud.
(forgive me if I don’t remember the exact ending of Cujo)
Like I said earlier, it’s very hard to put into words about how I feel about recent Stephen King writing (well, except for Dreamcatcher which I simply loathed).
To me, there’s a difference between a “slam bam” ending like Firestarter where Charlie destroyed the research facility with a lot of pyrotechnics and the ending to Insomnia with all that going under the tree and putting on a ring and magically being on a plane with Ed and Ralph’s knitting mother appearing on the plane and the Court of the Crimson King…
I just get terribly exasperated when a perfectly nice plot dissolves into surreal gobbildy gook.
Well, that’s reasonable - there is a difference between a denoument rooted in realism/our world and one that uses a deus ex machina effect. I understand that (the ending of Cujo was just the climactic battle with the dog); I just think that his supernatural endings, although not completely realistic, are rooted in some bit of plausibility.
His big theme, carried over most of his work, is simply Good versus Evil. The Stand showchased this theme more obviously than some, but IT (kids versus IT/Spider/Pennywise), Salem’s Lot (nonzombies versus Barlow), Needful Things (sheriff versus Leland Gaunt), and others portrayed it as well. And of course, there’s the whole Dark Tower series. (Heck, if you’re ever looking for links between his books, look no further than Randall Flagg, who’s the Number One Bad Guy in The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon, and makes appearances in a few others.)
Some of his very best were written early on: The Shining, Carrie. Had some greats among scattered in his later works, e.g., Misery, Pet Sematary. But it is hard to think about King without thinking about the author in The Shining and the author in Misery, authors who engage in eventually unsuccessful attempts to write immense grandiose works with meaningful implications on dozens of levels, and who spend time contemplating themselves and their attempts to do these things in metaphorical terms; and, in the case of Misery, eventually finding his solace in his ability to write great entertaining “hacks”, and to heck with the “great works” heavy stuff that would make the critics rock back on their heels and say “genius”.
With both The Stand and It, there was a point in the stories where the simple linear fiction tale was becoming just a frontal façade and the real story was something more universal about good and evil and human nature. And in both cases after setting this up, he kind of meandered around awhile and then went back to telling plain old fiction (old lady representing good walks off into desert and comes back and says very little and dies; bad guys off themselves with a nuke; no ultimate truths about good or evil get reconciled // the evil underlying the American small town and the childhood of the 1950s, although briefly appearing to be something manifested in the kids’ parents and in the metaphorical, not just physical, plumbing of the town, turns out to be a spider from another galaxy).
[hijack]
This is not a problem unique to Stephen King. That Jack Nicholson film where he turns into a werewolf was downright fascinating until it muddled off into good werewolf versus bad werewolf and lost all metaphorical impact pertaining to civilization and savagery and whatnot. And in the Pullman trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) [spoiler:]…
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…the author backs off from implying that this tale is going to recap the original Genesis / Garden of Eden story, possibly casting the original (and the original God) as an evil being, definitely casting the main character as “Eve” and as protagonist, posing the original Genesis incident as representing a failure on the part of the previous “Eve” and most likely having the outcome be different this time around – instead, the author makes the original God an irrelevant doddering old fool, slinks past the Eve thing by letting the main character make a change that only has implications for life after death, avoids additional details about the original Eve conflict, and generally backs off from trying to write something supremely meaningful and retreats to writing fantasy/science fiction that disappoints because of the retreat.
Not new and not necessarily horror, and not as well-known, but here are a few who share some of the same qualities:
Joe Lansdale
John Shirley
Simon Clark
Graham Masterton (yes, that Graham Masterton)
Jack Cady
James Disch
George R. R. Martin
Peter Straub (okay, he’s well-known, but generally because of his connection to King)
The Tommyknockers; simply awful. Why did my stupid brother tell me to read that? King should, seriously, not attempt science fiction.
I thought the collaboration behind The Talisman brought out the worst in both King and Peter Straub.
And yet I like Stephen King; I really enjoyed reading his recent memoir, On Writing. (Not surprising to find that he wrote The Tommynknockers while doing so much cocaine he thought his heart would explode.) He just needs a hard-assed editor who’ll tell him when something is stupid.
