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Local Group Bus posted:
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Aug 10, 2010 20:27
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Ninja_Orca posted:
I enjoyed it, except every so often King would come along with the most heavyhanded foreshadowing and pull me right out of a story that had, up until then, somehow pulled me in even though it was moving along fairly slowly. Though, oddly enough, I don't really remember much about the book aside from the last third or so. It's all blended together.
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Nov 13, 2010 03:29
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Octy posted:Yeah, I mentioned that before. It comes up about three times in Pet Sematary. I think Duma Key was worse about this with [/spoiler]the daughter[/spoiler] (do we need to use spoilers in this thread? Ah well, I'll do it anyway). It seemed to come up every single chapter. He really needed an editor on that book. I enjoyed it, but there was a fair bit of dumb bullshit like that, or him writing the one-armed protagonist doing things with both arms that was just frustrating. Definitely really interesting, though. I'd like to see King try writing mysteries one of these days, since he's really good at making central questions to a plot.
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Mar 12, 2011 21:21
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Adonis Gunther posted:To me the worst from what I've read is Under the Dome. Why? Because it's too goddamn slow. I haven't even finished that monster of a book and whenever I pick it up again, I can only read it for a couple of days before I get tired and put it down again. Really? I read through it in a weekend or so. I did almost say "gently caress it" and stop out of rage whenever things went too well for Big Jim, though. He'a the most hateable villain in any of King's books.
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Jun 19, 2011 20:39
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JammyLammy posted:I've been thinking about Pet Semetary for some reason lately. The trip through the woods, and he would drop hints about the crazy poo poo he could barely make out in the distance off the trail, not sure why I liked that part so much. I had to stop and put the book down for a bit when I got to that part. I've never been that creeped the gently caress out by a book before, it was amazing.
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Jul 25, 2011 00:38
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I realized today I've never been able to get through Road Work. It always loses me partway through, which is pretty dissapointing since I love the other Bachman Books I've read. Does it get better towards the end or am I not missing anything?
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Aug 7, 2011 22:04
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trandorian posted:Yeah, I think it's just that people somehow forgot that it's just as implausible that Beatles songs are folk songs in one part of the fantasy world and that Nazi airplanes and ZZ Top tapes show up in another as that an evil overlord would model their weapons after Harry Potter stuff. For the songs, it's a matter of contrast- Velcro Fly and Hey Jude were elements of our world in a completely alien one and gave it some mystery/creep factor. "Was it our world in the far future?", for instance. When it's "Here come the doombots with the harry potter bombs!" and no subtlety at all it comes across as ridiculous.
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Aug 13, 2011 19:17
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Mister Kingdom posted:Same goes for the oil fields and gas station remains. They'd obviously been in Roland's world for centuries and nobody knows how to explain them. Yeah, it was all things that made sense, and gave it an apocalyptic vibe. It had logic to it. I'm having a hard time picturing someone making Doombots and Snitches as weapons and taking it seriously. That's the biggest problem right there- I couldn't take it seriously, so there wasn't even any goddamn menace.
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Aug 13, 2011 22:27
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Locus posted:Yeah, the "no obvious reason at all" part is what gets me. It's fine if a robotics company owned by an ineffectual satan figure makes killer robots and flying explodo-drones, but it was just really jarring for them to be pop-culture references. Even an uncanny resemblance type thing might have been cool, in a "bleeding between worlds" type thing but it had to be literally Dr Doom and golden snitches. gently caress that noise. I even liked the last three books but that poo poo was just loving dumb. It annoyed me the whole time it was there.
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Aug 14, 2011 02:41
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trandorian posted:Eyes of the dragon was too, for that matter. It should've stayed that way.  Really don't like that book, even though it wasn't his worst. Cell i s pretty infurating- it was awesome at the beginning, but then when they started flocking together and becoming psychic poo poo got real dumb quick.
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Aug 21, 2011 16:13
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RC and Moon Pie posted:What's the consensus on The Dark Half? I rarely see it mentioned. I read it last year and thought it was OK, but thought he gave away too much too soon. Stark shouldn't have been revealed as the real killer so early (which really isn't a spoiler but I'm staying on the safe side). That one was weird. I remember it alternated between being really goddamn great and pretty boring with no real rhyme or reason. It wasn't like "oh, chapter about Thad, all aboard the train to dullsville!" or anything like that, it'd just hit some sort of snag in the momentum or something. I would totally read one of the George Stark books if King ever wrote one, though.
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Aug 23, 2011 12:34
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Darko posted:I still like that better than Gerald's Game, and I read them back to back so it was a direct comparison. Holy poo poo, how bad is Gerald's Game? It's the only King novel I haven't read but it'd have to be loving horrid to be worse than Rose Madder.
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Sep 9, 2011 18:53
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Ridonkulous posted:
Bag of Bones is wicked underrated. It took me a bit of time to get into but it's one of my favorite books of his. There was something about all the characters (especially the villains) that really clicked for me.
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Sep 13, 2011 03:15
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ConfusedUs posted:The Running Man is still my favorite of the Bachman Books. By a long shot. The Running Man starts good, then turns  right quick. It's more short-burst intensity compared to the Long Walk's slow burn, but I like them both equally. I love how they both drop hints of how hosed up and different the world is, without spilling too much. It's like a non-supernatural Gunslinger like that.
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Sep 16, 2011 03:06
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Quad posted:Yeah, he seems to be telling a story in this book; in Under the Dome it seemed like he was trying to do a character study of an entire city, which was just not interesting at all, because none of the characters were interesting. Halfway through 11/12/63, doesn't even feel like I've been reading all day. I'm halfway through it myself, and holy poo poo, it's loving good! He even does the foreshadowing in a way that makes sense narratively and is effective at making me anticipate things! I can't put it down.
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Nov 9, 2011 05:48
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Just finished it. I'd put it up there with The Shining. It's definitely top five, and the best thing he's written in at least 20 years. And the ending is his best ever. I know that's not saying much, but it's really, really well done. I could barely put the book down.
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Nov 10, 2011 01:41
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Cityinthesea posted:Finished it, I actually didn't like the ending until after I had thought about it for a while, but it's definitely a great ending, and more thoughtful than what he usually does. Ultimately this is going to be in the top 10 for me, maybe top 5. I really liked it at first, but the more I thought about it the better it was. I realized that the only thing he struggled for in the past and got to keep was his love for Sadie. Sure, she ended up never knowing about it, thanks to the reset, but it's still real to him. He lost her either way, whether or not things were reset, so in the end, he still got to have his time with her and also see that she lived happily, for a long time. It was really bittersweet and fairly subtle.
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Nov 11, 2011 04:38
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spixxor posted:Same here, and I was pretty impressed that it felt natural and not shoehorned in like the self insertion in Dark Tower, given that I figured he was going to do something of the sort and was mentally cringing a bit as soon as I realized the time frame that he was visiting Derry in. It just somehow made perfect sense. It fit with the timeline, and fit with the characters, and his goal fit. It was dark. He was literally trying to figure out the best way to murder someone. By asking children. But, if you've read It, you knew who the kids were. If you didn't, it worked. They'd know who the victims were, with a reason, and a reason for Jake to stop. gently caress the loop dark tower stuff. When it comes to journey over destination, 11/22/63 was way better.
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Nov 13, 2011 07:34
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I was thinking, 11/22/63 has a lot of stuff that was in the Dark Tower series, but more subtle. Wicked crazy DT/11/22/63 spoilers ahead: The insanity by the card men reminds me a lot of what happened to Roland when he had conflicting timelines in his head, and those were created/remedied by, as in the new book, doors to a different time period. The loop stuff was there, too. Jake does resets to get things right a few times. And how does it end? He goes through the door one last time and does what Roland didn't do- lets go, and it's like the rest of the book didn't happen. I wonder if King was thinking about the DT series when he wrote it. Maybe, what with the It kids, but it's the same themes better realized, in my opinion. Really liked it.
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Nov 17, 2011 06:33
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Bug Bill Murray posted:
He didn't want to risk popping somebody he didn't absolutely know was responsible. He even felt guilty shooting the janitor's dad the second time, compared to the first. There's a big difference between getting someone in the act and gunning them down in cold blood, which was fully demonstrated in the first third of the book. I mean, really, would you be able to kill someone like that? Plus, the residue. Who knows what repurcussions actions in the past like that have.
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Nov 19, 2011 07:06
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Roydrowsy posted:
I wanted to savor every page too, but it's one of those books where you start at nine in the evening, then the next thing you know it's three, you're halfway done, and gently caress, I have work tomorrow, don't I? That was my experience, at least.
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Nov 20, 2011 17:47
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My big problem with dreamcatcher is that towards the end I had no idea what the gently caress was even happening. That book was really scattered and all-over-the-place.
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Nov 23, 2011 04:30
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"11/22/63 is holyshitwow/Cujo was written in a blackout discussion".
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Nov 24, 2011 04:08
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Roydrowsy posted:Except it wasn't the fact that Kennedy was alive that really ruined everything, but the fact that it was a result of time being meddled with. I rather enjoyed how instead of "Oh no, The future is ruined because Kennedy turned out to be Hitler 2!", but that the worst repercussions were due to the actual tampering of the time stream. Most of that was directed at the whole "why not just shoot Oswald right away" thing, the repercussions was an afterthought. Plus, according to the new card guy, there is some sort of lasting damage from using the time travel.
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Nov 25, 2011 16:09
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NosmoKing posted:Got a gift card for my birthday and went to B&N and among the stuff I picked up was 11/22/63. There were way, way more positive reactions than negative. Pretty much everyone I've spoken to offline has loved it, as well, and I'd put it up there with The Shining, myself. Book's awesome, I couldn't put it down and read it in around a day.
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Dec 13, 2011 01:01
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UltimoDragonQuest posted:And he hand waved away the plot line of the card men in charge of keeping idiots from wrecking everything. I dunno, given what happens whenever someone tries to explain anything about time travel in any piece of fiction, ever, I felt it was better to leave them as weird and mysterious than go and have the story absolutely poo poo the bed. More explanation would leave way more space for weird plot holes and all that.
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Dec 18, 2011 19:41
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Whargoul posted:I think I was too young when I first read Pet Sematary because it scared the poo poo out of me. I was around 8 years old and I had an anxiety attack when I was done because that was the first time I took my mortality into consideration. I was 16 when i read it and still had to put it down at several places because i was too freaked out. The scene walking to the cemetary towards the end was freaky as poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2012 03:13
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ZoDiAC_ posted:How did King decide what stories were Bachman ones? Given those stories are by and large pretty decent and have a similar tone sometimes, I'm not inclined to think he just arbitrarily decided some random story was going to be published as a Bachman one... The Bachman ones seemed very much up-front about anti-authority type stuff (I dunno about Thinner, since I never did read it, but all the others, definitely).
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Mar 25, 2012 00:22
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:And they aren't really stories of the supernatural either. I don't think Bachman did anything with psychic uberkinders except maybe Regulators? I don't count Regulators or Blaze as Bachman books since they came out after it was revealed as a pseudonym. I also don't think Regulators lived up to the Bachman name in terms of quality. I personally see The Long Walk as on par with other dystopian big L literature, so maybe that's just me.
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Mar 25, 2012 03:17
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Darko posted:It wasn't conceived as a Dark Tower tie in, but has a lot of similar ideas in it. I would say it's where the dark tower stuff started creeping into the other books, but it'a also when it was at its' best... I also really had an amazing time with the characters of Black House, so shut the gently caress up. That book was oddly amazing. I blame Henry...
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Jun 28, 2012 06:57
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Man, I just did my yearly re-read of The Long Walk yesterday afternoon. It's so good, and it really highlights everything I hate about The Hunger Games. I like how naturally you learn about the characters and how the world of the book is given in a slow, steady drip, and there's enough left out you end up filling in the missing details with things from reality. Plus, you know, the fact it's actually written competently. Alas, I can't get any of my friends who gush all over that...other book... to read it.
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Apr 9, 2013 16:17
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Crunch Bucket posted:To this day I find myself on a walk or on the treadmill and thinking about how long I would last at an endless 4.0 mph pace. Oh, good, I'm not the only one. That book has a way of really sticking with you. I looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently it's the first book King ever wrote too. He wrote that as a freshman in college for poo poo's sake, when I was that age I was lucky to crank out a term paper that wasn't total poo poo.
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Apr 11, 2013 08:13
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Canuckistan posted:
I would say mine are The Stand, The Long Walk (probably the most re-read by a large margin) and The Running Man. They all have this sense of intrigue with the setting, where you want to keep learning more and more about it (the first four DT books had this for me as well). The Bachman Books dystopian style really piques my interest, though.
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Apr 18, 2013 21:13
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Mister Kingdom posted:Nope. The first 75% of Cell was okay. 75 is a bit generous. I would say 50 percent. There's a sharp downturn in quality once they blow up the herd.
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Apr 18, 2013 23:14
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:It especially pissed me off in Bag of Bones. There is no need to kill off a character with an undiagnosed brain tumor when it would be just as easy to have them be hit by a car instead. That one was an aneurysm, which I actually liked- of all the ways to go, it's the one you'll never see coming, and you'll never have any way to avoid it. She was just walking around one day and dropped dead on the spot.
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Jul 21, 2013 07:06
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RC and Moon Pie posted:The Long Walk. The answer is always The Long Walk. These are pretty much Peak King. His best characters by far, and The Long Walk and Misery both evoke this wonderful feeling of being completely, utterly, trapped. The Dead Zone has more of a feeling of loss to it that also works really well. Doesn't hurt they're all rather short (for King, at least) and have zero bloat. I can't really think of anything I'd cut from those books.
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Aug 6, 2013 07:35
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syscall girl posted:I think I've finally solved the riddle. It isn't "write what you know" it's that Tabitha is keeping Steve in Maine for dark, eerie, possibly squamous purposes. His first book, The Long Walk, had a protagonist from Maine and started in Maine. So there. Also, learning that he wrote that book as a freshman in college was a big  moment for me. I was happy to write a ten page paper when I was a freshman.
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Aug 15, 2013 05:20
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rypakal posted:I had a recent massive turnaround in my understanding of The Shining. Earlier I was with King's interpretation, that Jack is a basically good guy corrupted by his addiction and then later by the Overlook. King himself was heavily into drink at this time, so this seems a natural interpretation. But after I had kids I saw Jack in an entirely new light. Now I see him as a basically abusive guy, and all the liquor or hotel do is unlease the shackles on the monster within. (Incidentally, I think this was Kubrick's interpretation, or at least the one he presented in the film.) Some Doctor Sleep stuff, so I'm gonna spoil it just in case since the book is so new. King seems to have come around to this interpretation as well. Dan fights having the exact same thing happen to him, and also ends up being a violent shithead when he's drinking. Learning to stay off the sauce and keep the leash on that darker part of him is a pretty big part of his character development, but it's still there even when he's sober. He's only let it out once so far in the first half, though. I'm about halfway through Doctor Sleep, and it's really good. I saw it got a C- at the AV Club, so I was worried, but even though it's really different from the original it feels like a natural continuation, especially for Dan. Kinda getting some Dead Zone-ish vibes from the story, actually.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:54
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You know how it wouldn't be a Stephen King book without some kind of weird thing about guns that somebody didn't fact check? Like in The Stand, the guy with shooting someone with a fully automatic recoiless rifle firing "gas tipped slugs" in a recording booth? Pleased to say that Doctor Sleep keeps this proud tradition alive. Not quite the mistake conga line that was in The Stand, but within a few pages of each other, someone talks about having a fully automatic Colt .45 from WW II, and someone else has a .22 Glock Pistol. . I don't want to sound like I'm nitpicking, though, at this point looking for his weird gun stuff is like a tradition for me. Also, fairly early in the book, the scene where he helps the leukemia patient pass on was so goddamn good. There was something about the little snippets of his life that Dan saw that hit me right in the gut. It managed to be both sad and...joyful? at the same time without being sappy. ProfessorProf posted:There was also some major event that happened on October 19, 1999, but I forget what it was. Dick Hallorann's death
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Sep 27, 2013 03:42
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iostream.h posted:You left out the part where he ran EVERYWHERE he went. Boy ran his rear end off and yeah, doing that while eating an assload of salad will make you lose a tom of weight, not sure what the rolleyes were for. And that eating a shitload of salad was his way of getting around his mother's mental hangups about making sure he had enough to eat. I think. I haven't read It in a while. Just finished Doctor Sleep. I really, really liked it. The plot was pretty thin (until the end and the showdown at the Overlook. Holy poo poo, Dan and Abra were goddamn tricky on that one, though I could have gone for another surprise like the ghost ambush), but I really would have read 440 pages of Dan and Abra. The character stuff was some of King's best in a longass while, and I really enjoyed Dan's character growth toward the beginning. Sure, it's King basically writing about himself, but that's what made it the perfect sequel to The Shining, really, and I don't think it would have been possible without that nearly 40 year gap.
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Sep 27, 2013 21:05
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