wow i thought pet semetary was terrible...not one of his better ones imo. its been years since i've read it but i remember not enjoying it. IT is definitely up there as well.

from a literary standpoint, I find King's The Shining to be his best. From a pure enjoyment factor, I'd have to say Salem's Lot scared the crap out of me.

Oh, and I tried reading a King book last week for the time in about twenty years - Lise's Story, I think it was called. This guy seriously needs an editor to tell him "WE DON'T ****ING CARE" to read 30 pages about how someone's office is decorated.

It was fairly unreadable.

I had a decent poker score this weekend, so when my gf suggested going to B&N I was pretty excited. I picked up T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I had wanted for 4-5 years ever since I saw the first movie. For whatever reason, I had never purchased it prior to this weekend, so I snapped at the chance.

So I put down The Mystery of Capital for a while, to pick this one up. So far through the first two chapters I really like his narrative tone, and I think it's pretty interesting he started out his story by relating the fact that homosexuality was pretty common amongst his troops.

Definitely agreed on the latter.

Long ago, King said his favorite was Salem's Lot. It's mine too. I think it held together best. The Shining was wonderful, but the first 60 pages or so kind of flop around and are a mess. I know a lot of people who put the book down before getting to where it, er, shines.

The Stand was one of the worst novels I've ever read by anybody.

Interesting...Why do you feel so strongly?

I usually rank The Stand at the top, with Salems Lot closely behind, then The Shining. Then again, I'm a sucker for those "impending apocalypse" or "last man on Earth" stories, so that can be chalked up to personal resonance, but The Stand seems to be the book that even King detractors seem to appreciate.

I also enjoyed Needful Things quite a bit.

I remember enjoying The Stand quite a lot.....of course I was about 20 when I read it.

I actually liked his short story collections the best....especially Night Shift. there's some seriously twisted and scary stories in that one.

Because I think the characterization was uninteresting, corny, and lacked insight. Saying it was merely flat would be sweeping a lot of fair criticism under the rug. The flatness of the characters was made more insufferable by the interminable length you had to hang around them while they declined to do anything. King's self-indulgence was atrocious in this book, nearly awe-inspiring in a perverse way. He created long scenes peopled by dull, corny characters in which nothing of interest happened, eventually piling up enough of them that he had over a thousand pages, more than half of which could have been cut without harming the book. Doing so would actually improve it.

When an author is as drastically off the mark as King was in The Stand, I think you've got a book that basically didn't deserve to get published. Some of my objections to King's self-indulgent, disinterested style of writing and the abyss it can lead his works into are detailed in the posts I started this thread with, about his book On Writing. When King is hitting on all cylinders, he is wonderful. He has written before of liking "muscular writers." But he can be one of the flabbiest writers out there.

Night Shift was very good. Even the silliest premises in those stories were fleshed out with a kind of wonderful wicked glee. And some of them, like Quitters, Inc., cast a very disturbing eye on human nature that can be applied well beyond a horror story.

quite a few movies have come from his short stories, too. Of course, they're usually pretty bad.

Yeah, Nightshift had a whole mess of stories turned into movies. His "The Rats in the Walls" story in that one, a Lovecraft homage, has since been included in countless short story collections.

Unfortunately, horror movies are usually somewhere between mediocre and bad. But boy are they great when done well.

I couldn't read more than a few hundred pages of the stand. I tried getting through the unabridged version, and wowsers. Like who give a ****.

I like his later works best, such as "From a Buick 8," "Hearts of Atlantis" (chapter 1 scared the **** out of me, the only book to ever do so). "Tommyknockers," "The Dark Half" and "Needful Things" are books that I will always remember enjoying during my teenage years.

Stephen King is either hit or miss. Try reading "Cell" or "Delores Claiborne." Yech.

I personally think 'It' is his masterwork, closely followed by the first 3 novellas in Different Seasons. Shawshank is beautifully written, imo.

King's self described Magnum Opus is his Dark Tower series. That was probably my all-time favorite book series in any genre... and fortunately that series pretty much spans all of them.

Any King fan who hasn't read The Long Walk is doing themselves a disfavor. It's one of the Bachman Books. The Running Man is also excellent IMO, though quite different from the movie.

Agree


The Long Walk is a great work


Rage is also very interesting given what's happened since publication

Am I the only one to have never read a Stephen King novel? Haven't seen any movies either. I just don't like being scared.

I haven't either. The only time I've ever read any Stephen King was
in a Newsweek article talking about his house. Never saw a movie
of his, either, more than a promo.

Not into it, I guess.

True. I tend to prefer his short stories for just that reason. But, as you say, when he's on, his novels can be joyfully immersible.

Not to spend too much time with an impassioned defense of The Stand, because I think it's mostly just a big, ol' fun book about the end of civilization. I don't know that deeper character dimension would have added to the fun. I don't think of it as a literary masterpiece as much as a "popcorn" epic.

That said, I frankly thought the characterization of the four primary figures was pretty well fleshed out. No more or less, to my mind, than the primary characters in The Shining or Salem's Lot. But those books had far fewer characters. The Stand's sheer volume of "supporting characters" lends itself to a more cartoonish method of overall characterization. Also, the book is no different than any other book that has pretensions of being "Biblical" in scope. As in the Bible, most of the characters are, to better serve the epic conceits of the storyline, binary; either good or evil. Deeper character exploration is there, but only in a few instances (King David, maybe, or Simon Peter). Anything else would be a distraction.

In the case of The Shining, when you're able to focus the entire book on basically four people, and you're not involved in some "good vs. evil" storyline on a grand, macro-scale, you'll have a more focused novel with more depth of character.

To be fair, I read and thoroughly enjoyed the book years ago, before the longer version came out, so I was predisposed to liking the longer version. Had I tried to read the later, longer version first, I very well may have agreed with your opinion. But because I had benefit of familiarity, the "fat" was more entertaining to me than it probably would have been otherwise. Kind of like looking at a director's cut or deleted scenes from a favorite movie, even though the original piece was more coherent. I certainly see where you and davet would be put off by the indulgence of the longer work, but, then again, King warns of that indulgence in the preface.

As to On Writing, I read it and remember almost nothing about it. I don't know if it has been mentioned in this thread, but Ray Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing is the book that should be picked up instead of On Writing. It seems not just more practical, but far more enjoyable and inspiring.

I read the shorter version of The Stand.

I just got Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing last week and have read the first couple of chapters. Ray can be a little childlike and "wonderment" addled, so I have to take him in small doses. But it did get off to a pretty fun start, although the rage he describes at seeing pictures of poor people in foreign countries in Harpers kind of makes him sound idiotic. Ray is an odd bird to be sure.

Yeah, but it's real, not an affectation. The further you go in the book, the less "gee whiz" it seems to be. Still, small doses may indeed be the best way to read it.

Incidentally, although I've read a few Bradbury things, I was never a real fan of his. I should probably revisit the man's work at some point...

Yeah, I know that's how he really is. I've seen him come off like that before. He's a goofy, gee whiz! kinda guy. I think I'll enjoy the book, but anticipate plenty of eye exercise from rolling them about in my skull when reading.

I've never read his fiction myself, besides a short story or two ages ago.

I tried to read The Stand and made it through about fifty pages before I gave up. I did read an essay he wrote about the Maine Little League Championship, though, that was wonderful--even if it was about seventy-five pages. BTW, I was in Maine one weekend and saw the game King wrote about. A kid who looked to be about 6'3", 220 pounds was playing first base. Yep, King's son.

Man, no love for The Stand at all on this thread.

Supposedly, there is a graphic novel on the way. I know nothing about graphic novels, but I'm guessing it will be about a GAJILLION PAGES LONG...

My top 10 favorite King novels in no order: The Stand, It, Different Seasons (this is a collection of novellas but whatever), the first four Dark Tower books (I count these as one book; the last three in the series were so horrible though IMO), Firestarter, The Green Mile, Salems Lot, The Shining, The Eyes of the Dragon, and The Talisman. My favorite of the short story collections is Night Shift, but my favorite of King's short stories is The Jaunt, which is a really wacky science fiction tale that was released in King's Skeleton Crew collection.

On books about writing, I also picked up Lawrence Block's book Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, and it's interesting and more practical than many such books. It's a collection of columns he wrote for Writers Digest over a period of years that he slightly reworked into book form. It's nicely matter of fact and practical, which helps clean some of the Bradbury out of my system.