The Thread of Stephen King

Oh, 11/22/63 is good as well. And fairy scary at points.

King is hit-or-miss for me, but "Harvey's Dream" is an astounding short story. You should read it if you haven't already.

New book out, and no one cares.

I just finished reading Revival. It's the kind of book Stephen King does sometimes, where the actual story only seems like enough to fill a novella or a longish short story, but it's padded out with lots of incidental moments in the main character's life. However, King has a knack for making even those little moments interesting, more from how he tells it than from anything actually happening.

Hell of a depressing ending, though.

edited 26th Dec '14 9:53:45 PM by RavenWilder

Agreed, that's the biggest Downer Ending he's had in a while. Overall, I thought it was a solid B-tier.

A worser Downer Ending than "The Dark Tower" had? Hmm. Needs to avoids it, we musts. (yeah, inner Gollum coming out there. Sorry.)

To put it simply, yes.

I actually didn't mind the ending to The Dark Tower; it was on the depressing side, sure, but there was still a flicker of hope there. The ending to Revival is one of the most hopeless endings I've ever witnessed.

I like "The Stand" and more recently 11/22/63. My favorite Bachman book is "The Long Walk," a nice dystopian novel I think I'll read again once I find it. My favorite short stories by him (though I haven't read many) are "1922" and definitely "N" (a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, who I could never get into because of his terrible prose).

Given the recent boom in stories about teenagers in a dystopian setting, I wouldn't be surprised if The Long Walk gets a movie option at some point.

Hello everyone, I just finished reading IT and I'm almost done with The Stand. I love King's writing style and, while The Shining was excellent, IT and The Stand have given me a hankering for King's "big cosmic stuff, tiny little setting." That sounds kinda like what happens in Insomnia and I was thinking of reading that next. That or Eyes of the Dragon. (want more Flagg)

Anyway, I found this article when looking up what to read next http://www.denofgeek.us/books-comics/stephen-king/243219/a-reading-guide-to-the-stephen-king-universe

It made me very curious about something.

Are the evil forces, the really evil and powerful forces like IT or Randall Flagg, truly responsible for what they are? I recently tried to get them both removed from the Complete Monster pages due to reasons of lack of agency.

IT, Bob Gray, The Spider, Pennywise, seems to be a creature born of evil and malevolence. While IT apparently thought IT was alone in the multiverse apart from the Turtle and IT had no interest in big cosmic matters, these two have apparently been said to be perfect examples of Purpose vs. Random. (Turtle = Purpose, IT = Random) So wouldn't IT count as a fundamental part of existence? IT was made to be that way and didn't have much choice in the matter.

Flagg is more confusing to me. I understand he actually gets a backstory in other books but in The Stand he's very....confused. A lot of the time he doesn't know what he's doing or why. As Mother Abagail called him he was only "the Devil's imp" and was just a tool. That's why I thought he was another of these pawns of evil who doesn't have much say in any of the vile acts he commits. His reasosn tend to be stuff like "why do I have magic powers? I dunno. What did I do to Nadine? I dunno that either." Especially by the last part of The Stand he's all but lost it and that's because he never truly had it but was being strung along.

In IT, the "Other" forces the Losers to do all sorts of things so why can't it be the same for teh bad guys?

Anyone else read Finders Keepers?

Reading The Shining at a snail's pace. Not helping is the fact the movie (that I haven't seen) has spoiled the ending for me.

The book ending and the movie ending are actually different. Not completely different, but in some pretty key ways.

Thank you, I now feel 25% better.

The movie, apart from Jack Nicholson's performance is largely a waste of film. The mini-series on the other hand is well worth watching.

After about a month of NOT READING, I finally read two more chapters of The Shining. Feels good to progress.

Kubrick's Shining is one of the best horror films of all time.

The miniseries, while faithful, is dull, tedious and lifeless.

Fidelity to source material is not an indicator of quality.

I started it a coupla weeks back but haven't read any more since then. It hasn't grabbed me like Mr. Mercedes did right from the get-go, but that could change.

My favourite Stephen King story is Carrie. The scariest story I read by him was Survivor Type.

edited 10th Nov '15 10:45:24 PM by sabrina_diamond

The adaptation of the first novel in the Dark Tower series, called "The Dark Tower", instead of "The Gunslinger" because Hollywood is stupid, y'all, has left Development Hell and will be reaching cinemas next year. Idris Elba has been cast as Roland Deschain.

http://squeewentthefangirl.tumblr.com/post/137553050219/superheroesincolor-the-dark-tower-officially

I hope they don't fuck this up.

I have a lot of books by him, though I haven't read most of them. I was pretty into Hearts in Atlantis, though I haven't continued on and I am still in Low Men in Yellow Coats. I also read some of The Eyes of The Dragon while my Internet was down, and I really liked it, though I haven't read it a lot since I got it back.

edited 8th Feb '16 8:09:47 PM by DreamCord

Apologies for this TL;DR post. I am still sifting through the rather hefty collection of Stephen King's works, but out of the collections of full-length novels and short stories that I've read so far, I have to say my favorite short story is The Mangler, for its batshit crazy premise of a bloodthirsty washing machine that went on a murder spree because it somehow got loose.

In terms of novels, I just finished Mr. Mercedes, a really cool mystery novel in the vein of the old-school pulp detective novels, with hard-as-nails private eyes, beautiful seemingly femme fatales with tortured pasts and presents, and the scummiest scumbags that ever scummed through society, set within a (reasonably modern) time frame (The novel was released 3 years ago, its events take place two years prior), yet that doesn't hinder the characters from being believable or likable, (or, in the case of the novel's antagonist, believably sickening and deplorable in his motives, motives that, because of the aforementioned trope, become difficult in points of the novel to continue due to the fact that he's written in an utterly convincing way, and, as regurgitated in this lengthy post, and due to the fact that that there's a genuinely interesting cat-and-mouse game going on between the two main characters to the point you don't know who you want to see come out on top.

I'm just starting with Eleven Twenty Two Sixty Three, as well. At first I thought was going to hate it due to the rather dry, monotonistic tone of the main character going through a rather dry "Woe is me" narrative. But then, that bit with the janitor happened, as well as everything else, within the first fourteen mini-chapters, and then I quickly changed my mind.

I finished Finders Keepers a few months back...it took a while to get going but ended up being a pretty good read, on par with Mr. Mercedes.

...aaaaaand I just finished End of Watch, the last in the trilogy. Good read, blew through it in two days.

Edited by Willbyr on May 24th 2022 at 12:42:10 PM