Stephen King is a genius with plot concepts, but I can't stand his style. He can't seem to create characters the reader cares about.

Having said that, IT looks absolutely terrifying. Can't wait to see it and never sleep again.

M.C. Swag said:

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Stephen King is a genius with plot concepts, but I can't stand his style. He can't seem to create characters the reader cares about.

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False

haha i've read it along with IT, Cell and the Dark Tower. Didn't find any beyond tolerable. I will give him credit in his consistency. His books are very "Stephen King"-esque. So if you like 1 of his books, odds are you'll like most. You can tell he knows how to tell a story and is def talented. Just not my cup of tea.

M.C. Swag said:

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Stephen King is a genius with plot concepts, but I can't stand his style. He can't seem to create characters the reader cares about.

Having said that, IT looks absolutely terrifying. Can't wait to see it and never sleep again.

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Interesting opinion. Usually, the common gripe about him is the exact opposite.

You didn't like Andy Dufrense or the kids from stand by me?

Try reading 11/22/63. That was the most recent King book I was reading before I quit halfway through.

M.C. Swag said:

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Try reading 11/22/63. That was the most recent King book I was reading before I quit halfway through.

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I think its fair to say his books just aren't your thing. I'd say 11/23/63 is probably my favorite one of his books. My problem with him is the exact opposite of what you said. I think he can spend too much time on character development and I get bored with it sometimes.

Fair enough. I do enjoy the story premises though. They make for terrific movie adaptations.

Super excited about the trailer. Looks very faithful to the book so far. The projector scene isn't but the book has moments of moving pictures in a scrapbook so this works. It seems as if they will delve more into Derry's sordid past (burning of the black spot, the assault of Mellon etc.), and I hope they flesh out the characters more like in the book (Bev's cycle of abuse, for example). Apparently the house on Niebolt street, the leper, the werewolf etc all look like they will appear.

And whoever says Pennywise appears "off" even at the first glance is mostly correct...when Georgie first sees him he notices his creepy yellow eyes. But then Pennywise lures him in with balloons and smells of the circus and suddenly Georgie sees his eyes are blue and happy and wonders how he was mistaken before.

Looks good.
In terms, if remakes I'm excited about this one.

NICU Dad said:

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Please tell me I'm not the only one that laughed when the kid bonked his head on the caution sign in the beginning of the trailer.

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At first I thought it was a parody trailer when I saw that.

But man, I remember this movie as a kid. My cousin who was a year younger than me was afraid to go anywhere near the sewers or even sit on the toilet as a kid. I'm really hoping it doesn't suck and it scares a whole new generation of kids like it did mine.

Re-reading the novel (and forcing the gf to watch the miniseries at the same time), and came upon one of my favorite parts of the book -- when King describes Stanley Uris' character (boy scout as a child, accountant as an adult) and basically foreshadows why he couldn't handle things. I love the use of the word "offended" in such an extreme way:

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Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that god had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about 12 minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where those Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: "Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead." You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.

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Awesome book. Definitely feeling King's writing. On to The Shining...

Noblemen06 said:

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Awesome book. Definitely feeling King's writing. On to The Shining...

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Probably my all-time favorite. One of his few epics that he manages to stick the landing.

I'm assuming you've seen the movie -- the biggest thing you'll discover is just how miscast Shelly Duvall was... She wasn't anything like Wendy Torrance was supposed to be.

How many of y'all read/liked The Dark Tower series?

I tried to read it a while back and just could not get into it. I got to a part where the man in black spits in a guy's face and starts like... flipping over a dude's body? And I kind of zoomed out and was like "what the hell am I reading right now?" Is there an ideal Stephen King starting book or am I just to accept the general "what the hell is this"-ness?

I liked it. It's not a personal favorite or anything, but I don't remember anything that was too much for me to handle either. It's pretty par with intensity of most of his books I think.

The Dark Tower definitely isn't the place to start for King... even ignoring that you'd miss all the references to his other stories, it's a story that started when he was 19 years old and still hadn't honed his writing skills.

It's revered by many because of it's character development and scope... It's certainly not without it's flaws and takes some getting into (I read the Gunslinger when I was a freshman in college, took me another 3 years to finally make it through Drawing of the Three -- then finished the next 5 books within a year)... But I don't know many people who started The Wastelands or Wizard and Glass and was able to put it down (at least until Song of Sussanah).

jtstanley4621 said:

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How many of y'all read/liked The Dark Tower series?

I tried to read it a while back and just could not get into it. I got to a part where the man in black spits in a guy's face and starts like... flipping over a dude's body? And I kind of zoomed out and was like "what the hell am I reading right now?" Is there an ideal Stephen King starting book or am I just to accept the general "what the hell is this"-ness?

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I felt the same way about the Dark Tower as well. I've read a lot of his books and powered through the Dark Tower to either book 4 or 5, when it became a story within a story. Just couldn't go on any more. Now if I were just starting out I would go with Salem's Lot or the Shining. If you like those, then I'd go to the Stand. While a lot of people complain about the ending, I still think it's a good read in spite of that. Surprisingly, I read IT for the first time last year and didn't really like it.

I've enjoyed a lot of King works - it, green mile, four seasons (shawshank redemption, the body, apt pupil), and others.

I think the Dark Tower series is so incredibly overrated.

I recommend his nonfiction work "On Writing". Very good book. Just read it last year.

I just want to know why the main is obsessed with the state of Maine

Love the first 4 dark tower books, got through the last 3... amazing ending though.

Presley OBannons Sword said:

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Noblemen06 said:

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Reading It for the first time now. I'm not usually a big fiction reader, so I can't faithfully compare it to much but I am loving his storytelling. Tough to put it down!

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the first time I read it was in high school, over a rainy weekend at my family's deer lease. I damn near read it straight through.

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I did pretty much the same. I picked it up in hard cover when it was first released late in the summer of 86, read maybe a couple hundred pages, then I started my 3rd semester at A&M and pretty much forgot about the book until Christmas Eve later that year, where I stayed up all night and finished that huge book. Scared the crap out of me.

RPM said:

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jokershady said:

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I just want to know why the main is obsessed with the state of Maine

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Being raised in main obviously left an impression on him. Not really any different than Larry McMurtry writing most of his novels set against a Texas backdrop.

I respect his usage of Maine for a setting. Maine is sort of stuck up there in the Northeast and is known for very little when compared to other states. Stephen King has brought a certain amount of notoriety to the state.

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He still lives in Bangor. They say write what you know and he knows Maine. My wife is from central Maine and it makes a good setting for a lot of his stories. It's often remote and insular. Most people don't think about Maine. Even folks who live on the coast in Maine don't spend much time in the interior of the state.

Coastal Maine is northern Massachusetts...a m******* extension...truly two different states in one...not unlike this state I live in...

I am a recent King fan, past year or so. I did read The Dark Tower series. I felt like I had really accomplished something when I finished them(7000ish pages??). They are long, but the story is great. It's funny, complicated, ridiculous, detailed, but the ending is perfect! It is the most anti-climactic and absurdly simple ending to any book I've ever read, but it is genius! Lots of people hated it.

I just finished IT and thought it was decent, but as many of King's book, including The Dark Tower, too long.
I am looking forward to the new movie version.

Dr. Watson said:

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RPM said:

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jokershady said:

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I just want to know why the main is obsessed with the state of Maine

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Being raised in main obviously left an impression on him. Not really any different than Larry McMurtry writing most of his novels set against a Texas backdrop.

I respect his usage of Maine for a setting. Maine is sort of stuck up there in the Northeast and is known for very little when compared to other states. Stephen King has brought a certain amount of notoriety to the state.

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He still lives in Bangor. They say write what you know and he knows Maine. My wife is from central Maine and it makes a good setting for a lot of his stories. It's often remote and insular. Most people don't think about Maine. Even folks who live on the coast in Maine don't spend much time in the interior of the state.

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and for anyone that hasn't caught on yet, Derry = Bangor