Thoughts on Stephen King and his works?

In terms of quality and content, what are your thoughts towards Steven King, if any? If so, what aspects of his novels have lead to your opinion about them? What are some aspects King's works you enjoy, and what are some you dislike? Would you recommend King to anyone?

 

There's a thread about that here already: Tell Me About Your Favorite Stephen King Books. No sense making another one when we can just keep adding to that one.

 

What inspired this post was the subreddit r/menwritingwomen. For those unfamiliar, it's basically a feminist sub dedicated to lampooning and dissing overly sexual descriptions of women in literature. About a third of the sub's posts pertained to King. Particularly passages from It, the Shinning, the Stand, and others I cannot recall right now. I know I'm opening a can of worms with sharing my opinion on anything that even touches a controversial societal issues, but I personally don't really care for r/menwritingwomen myself.

To me, it so repetitious in its' posts. As mentioned, about a third of the submissions are just the same few King quotes (especially that infamous sewer orgy in It) over and over again, another 10% are about Heinlein, George R. R. Martin's ASOIAF, the Witcher, and the Dresden Files, and the rest are bashing works of long dead authors. Which brings me to another issue that I take with the sub. The frequency of users there raking authors who have been dead for decades, centuries, or even thousands of years, over the coals gets a bit grating and feels really petty to me. I'm sure Homer is trembling in shame in the afterlife, after seeing some redditors decry his overly descriptive description of breasts as sexist, a thousand years after he departed from this world.

I don't have much personal thoughts on King's works themselves, as I've never really read any of them. One opinion I do have, based on anecdotes I've heard and from online plot summaries, is that they appear to be overly formulaic to an extent. Just about every protagonist of his is a struggling writer (and an obvious author avatar for King himself), there is an overly violent and bigoted bully that inconveniences that protagonist somehow, some caricature of a religious fundamentalist inserted in one way or the other, and the antagonistic force tend to be what Tv Tropes calls "Attack of the Killer Whatever" (often mutated or possessed household appliances and common pets that tend to be a stable of old b horror and sci films).

 

Sorry, I didn't see that thread before post. Should have searched for discussions about King, but oh well. This forum doesn't allow OPs to delete their own posts and threads, so what is done has been done. I will try to search for similar recent topics, before submitting my post next time.

 

Wants to start thread on Stephen King

Hasn't read any King

Sounds legit

 

I've skimmed through copies of It at my local book stores. Does that count, lol?

 

Katy Bates doesn't think so.

 

I saw at least one of the Stephen King posts on r/menwritingwomen and the issue I had was that it appeared to be describing a male character seeing a specific woman for the first time. If that's the way that character first sees women, I don't think it's necessarily male chauvinism. If the entire book just focused on women's appearances and negative stereotypes, then I could see the issues.

That sub really worries me that any description of a woman from a male perspective, no matter how honest it is for that character, is going to be derided on that sub.

 

... and where's the balance? Is there a subreddit about women writing about men?

 

Forty some years ago I read everything he put out. I have not read any of his more recent works. To this day I carry two pieces of advice that he put out in an interview he did in the late 70s. Writers write, this was in response to someone asking him what it took to succeed as a writer. The next piece of advice that I followed was his suggestion that if you were not really afraid of the dark, you should fine an abandon house, go upstairs in the middle of the night, and just sit. I did just that. A block away from where I lived was a empty house, 100 plus years old, empty for as long as I could remember. The widows were all broken out of it, the curtains flapped back and fourth in the breeze. The siding was so old and faded, that you could not tell what color it had ever been. The door was open, kids have been in and out of this house for years, me included. The floor boards were missing in spots, the stairs still solid. I brought a flashlight, so I wouldn't fall through the floor. It was a cool fall night in October, when I decided to try this. I entered the house, shined the flashlight all around, not sure what was looking for. I knew where the stairs were and made my way slowly to the top. In one of the empty rooms there was an old wooden chair, the kind with the old cane weave that was mostly gone from either mice or old age. I had not thought about what I was going to do when I got there, but thought it better to sit, than stand or lean against the wall. I found an old plate and put that where the cane in the seat used to be, turned off the light and just sat. The curtains moved in the wind, branches rubbed up against the outside of the house. I got cold pretty quick, I was not dressed for just sitting. I sat for about a half an hour. The house was dark, and made all sorts of noises, yet my breathing could still be heard. I waited for some feeling to hit me, something that made me nervous or scared. Nothing! I was cold and shivering when I turned on my light and headed down the stairs, I felt a little disappointed that this had not been more dramatic. When I made my way through the door on the bottom floor, it occurred to me that I could never really write horror, I lacked the imagination that created boggy men and scary things out of nothing.

You can really only write what you know, Stephen King taught me that through his interview 40 some years ago. Putting both forms of his advice into practice has served me well.

 

There is actually, but it is far dwarfed by the “men writing women” sub.

 

Yep, that's the way the winds are blowing these days.

 

'Salem's Lot was the scariest damn book I ever read. Loaned it to a friend who finished it and brought it back to me about 11:30 p.m., saying she didn't even want to sleep in the same house with it. Remember thinking what a good book The Stand would've been had Mr. King been able to resist graphic descriptions of every gross body excretion available. I read at least part of several other books, but nothing stands out in my mind about any of them.

Men should write as women, women should write as men, black folks should write as Asians, white folks should write as ungulates, and American Indians should write as New Zealanders living under a bridge in Oslo. Every writer should write in every voice he or she hears in his or her mind.

 

He's alright. I'd consider myself a fan but I also see many, many flaws in his writing from a literary perspective. But also, he's writing to entertain too, so he's never been bothered by that (mind he gets a bit salty over it in On Writing). Honestly, I think his earlier stuff is his best (this is not nostalgia, I was born in the 90s) because he was writing for the love of it. Recently (especially since he gone off the drugs) he's been more literary but less fun. It seems more and more like a compulsion or habit - he's capable of some really great literary writing but he's either not interested in doing that, or too stuck in his own ways. Understandable, though.

It's not an even split, though. Drug King and post-drug King. Tommyknockers, which is very clearly about addiction, and there's something in there about nuclear power too, is I still think one of the worst novels I've ever read. Cell is also really really bad. However I really respect Lisey's Story, and The Shining, which is also about drug addiction, is really good. 'Salem's Lot too, which is the only book that's every given me a chill of fear, is one I remember so fondly I never want to go back and find out I was wrong.

It's hard to have punchy, simple opinions on a writer whose career has gone over five decades, now into the sixth. He's gone through many moods, tried many different things, some things he's a lot better at than others and he knows it. He's a great writer, but not one of the greats.

 

Well said. I remember being fascinated by little bits and pieces of it but getting pissed off a lot.

Also, a lot of the best artists in any medium seem to be the obsessed ones just doing what they love to do.

 

See, now there’s a thread we need to start: a discussion on how film adaptations alter dynamics of different genres, and how we need to adapt our characters to take advantage of that expansion. Kathy Bates redefined the horror movie antagonist with her portrayal of Annie Wilks. Up until then the standard was Freddy Kruger, Jason, Leather Face, the figure in the dark kind of thing. At that point, with a few notable exceptions, slasher films and horror films were almost the same thing.

 

True, but Bates sort of just took it back to where it was before the 80's came along. The 80's was an extremely materialistic decade. Before that it was a lot more psychological, at least some movies. I mean look at The Shining, poised right at the crux point between 70's and 80's. In the 80's action movies actors got replaced with bodybuilders and models, and acting abilities just weren't considered important. It was a lot more about effects and charisma. Shallow. Then the 90's everything turned green and dark and gritty. These trends were so destructive, it was only the rare project that came along with more humanism like the way movies used to be made.

 

I am not into horror or paranormal. But Stephen King's descriptions of people and places--how his characters come alive on the page--and his writing style, especially in his early works, is admirable. Even Carrie, that is about telekinesis and teenager stereotypes, is rather complex in his perception of subtleties of human behavior. Not to mention his extensive vocabulary . . . wait, wasn't he a high school janitor at some point? He knows a lot of words one can live without knowing, there are ways to describe the same thing without knowing the specific word, because one might not use them on an everyday basis, but as a writer it is a different story.

I find curious the trend of women in their 40s writing about adolescent gay male love. Is that a woman's gaze only?

 

Seriously, he said that? And wrote that stuff? And doesn't mind looking like an idiot as long as he's making good money and keeping fans happy?

Guess I'll go clean the rust off my Glock 17 revolver and then hit the street to see if I can find me some of those illegal hollow points in silver since I have some werewolves to kill.

 

Words fail me.

 

120 rd Banana clip? Would the end of the magazine block the barell?