Is Stephen King trash?

Trump doesn't read.

i've read the dead zone, carrie, a book of short stories, and tried to read another one i dont remember the name, all of them were pure trash. a hack for sure.

I've never found his work to be engaging. Dull, boring, yawn. To each his own.

His writing is drip drop dialogues line by line with very formal grade school punctuation and very bland vocabulary. He overpowers his editors and spends 100s of pages on fluff. He has put out so much content over the years and maybe 5/300 works of writing are "good", except not really as see first criticism.

His ideas, especially when on cocaine and about 5 glasses of whisky in 1979 are quite good, and when you give his screenplays to people like Kubrick they shine. Even the Pet Semetary movie was 1000000x better than the book.

But whenever someone drops IT or 'Salems Lot (300 pages too long) or The Shining (not much bad to say about it), I would point out that there are The Tommy Knockers, Rose Madder, and Dolores Claiborne, which are fucking terrible.

IMO his best works are Gunslinger 1, Misery, and Different Seasons. Cujo is trash, Carrie is a one trick pony, the talisman and the deadzone are whatever. Honestly if you read real books you lose interest in him right quick unless you are into spiritual pedo gangbangs.

t. someone who grew up in a house with only stephen king available.

I'd argue Kubrick's Shining is garbage, but fine, whatevs. You do seem to know your King tho, how the fuck did you only have his books in your house?

Because some anons think that if they shit on a popular author, that somehow makes them better than him. I don't follow the logic either.

To be fair to the anons King is shit. To be fair to King, he's not as shit as them.

>inb4 someone posts the gay pedo rape scene with the library cop

Never read any SK but his film adaptations have been mostly entertaining. Instead, I read:

>Lovecraft
>Robert E Howard
>Lord Dunsany
>Clark Ashton Smith
>Arthur Machen
>Ligotti
>MR James
>Algernon Blackwood
>Charles Beaumont

You're welcome.

King is extremely good at what he does, which is writing good, honest stories. He puts style second to story, but there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of people who say he's bad seem to be the kind who read a handful of how to books and are pissed that he doesn't follow all these author's made up rules. They need to understand that there is more than one way to write, and that there are many kinds of good writing. Stephen King is a great author.

The only one I haven't read is MR James (?) but of all those the only one that resemble King is Beaumont (and even then), the others aren't a real really a fitting comparison, they have completely different subject matters or style. It's like arguing between steak and apples.

It's the same with all writers who strike gold and courted by the movie biz. Imagination is directly tied to the lack of stimulation in life. It's why so many great writers grew up poor; they had nothing to do with themselves but imagine fanciful little tales.

Now Steven King has no need to push himself to stand out now that he is a famous author.

They all write in the horror genre.

I'm defending him but I'll concede I haven't read anything he has written in like 15 years. It can't have changed that much though unless he has other people writing for him or his brain is growing old. He was once a master at least, I know that for sure.

To each his own I guess but his books need an editor with a chainsaw. There's fluff and baggage the size of a normal sized novel in a King one.

And? Did you really read them or pick them out of Wikipedia? They're not remotely similar to King.

That's a side effect of growing the story organically, but as far as I'm concerned it gives richer results than outliners who stick closely to X point structures and throw away everything that stray even a little from it. It's the whole roman-fleuve thing and it makes it seem like things happen in a real universe (again, in my opinion). It's just a different kind of writing; some people might not personally like it, but that doesn't make it bad.

It tries one's patience like a mother fucker tho. Brevity is the soul of wit user.

I had that phase. I prefer to be concise if my own writing, but that's as far as I remember, King's sentences really don't have that many superfluous words but what do I know, ESL, lol. He writes well. He might not make his stories skeletal, but it would be pretty boring if all authors did that. In his case, it would also make his books much worse (if you want the proof, look at some of the film adaptations who tried to pare his story down, that didn't always go so well). His books need to be seen as complete wholes. Some parts might not directly take you from point A to point B, bit they still contribute to creating and make more real the world the books are set in, which makes the rest of the story, work, etc.

Just finished IT, I found it excellent but clearly imperfect. Really loved it though, smart in terms of characters and themes in a way that makes it hard to dismiss King as an author.

I think IT is a great book because you can tell which parts he wrote right after doing a bump of cocaine.

Kek, yes you do

That like 10 pages of rambling about his bike really stuck with me.

Why do women love him though?

Pretty accessible and the stories tend to be character focused.

I don't remember thing one about it. His style is so lacking personality.

But he reads Hitler speeches before bedtime, right?
>t. liberal media

Gotta say, I enjoyed the 1922 novella a lot. Very different from his work I read before. If you haven't read it, the movie releases on Netflix tomorrow.

My mother only read his books and romances during my formative period. Looking at Google's list of his books I read all of them up to Dolores Claiborne.

No, he doesn't read. I don't think he has the attention or, frankly, the capacity to read and understand an NSDAP speech by any of its members.

read this lol

thehill.com/policy/national-security/355749-fbi-uncovered-russian-bribery-plot-before-obama-administration

Yep, can't write an ending to save his life, it's why everyone recommends only reading the first 3 books of the Dark Tower series because it just goes downhill

Really liked the building tension in the stand, the scenes of the survivors walking through abandoned cities was really cool to me

>IMO his best works are Gunslinger 1, Misery, and Different Seasons.
No complaints here.

But his short story collections are all worth reading. I have them all as audiobooks and often listen to them repeatedly when doing tedious work.

I like the nostalgic 1950s vibe he paints and other comfy vibes, for example in 11/22/63, Hearts in Atlantis, Insomnia, etc.

He knows his stuff and is not simply a Danielle Steele or whatever hack. His success means editors don't prune his manuscripts (afraid to kill the golden goose I suppose). This results in bloated, meandering novels, but if it's a good novel I am forgiving of verbosity, that doesn't bother me too much.

He's basically one of the most popular and accessible authors out there, so obviously he is going to get a lot of flak. The "controversy" about the ritual of Chud in It and the Library Policeman rape scene is just ridiculous to me - don't read if you don't want to be offended or provoked.

This question is meaningless. He is Stephen King. You may think his work is trash, that doesn’t make his work trash. It is simply the work of Stephen King.

I used to like king, but the more I read of him the less I like him.

Yeah, he has written a few really great things, but the vast majority of his stuff is complete garbage. I used to love IT, but i recently re-read it and noticed just how badly written it is, it's a great idea sure, but after the glow of that first reading wore off, I noticed a lot of terrible flaws in it.

I also just read Misery, which is a brilliant idea, but it's a terrible book. Badly written, the character of Annie in the book is basically like some sort of murderous loony tunes character, and half of the book is the mc just drifting into pointless stories about his past that have no relevance to the story.

He has really good ideas, but he rarely executes them well. All the successful movies that came out of his writing just took his idea and cut out all his bullshit, and actually executed the core story well.

>which is a brilliant idea, but it's a terrible book
/thread

>mc just drifting into pointless stories about his past that have no relevance to the story.
You must be retarded if you think they are irrelevant to the story.

> I used to love IT, but i recently re-read it and noticed just how badly written it is, it's a great idea sure, but after the glow of that first reading wore off, I noticed a lot of terrible flaws in it.
Provide some examples? I am curious about what flaws you noticed.

President Donny has the best tweets

I'm about 600 pages into IT and I'm enjoying it. In invokes feelings of nostalgia, and allows one to reflect on their own transition from child to adult and the feelings around it.

The movie pales in comparison, missing entire themes & points. But I understand, it's hard to capture deep thoughts and portray it on the screen.

Outside of his writing I'm not a big fan of his politics.

he's pulp trash

>Provide some examples? I am curious about what flaws you noticed.

Do you really need to be told? It's excessively long, there's long drifts of thought in the story that goes on for pages and pages, that have nothing to do with anything. Like for example, the 6 page description of one of the characters on a plane, along with a description of the stewardesses and other passengers, before the character starts remembering his childhood and actually gets to the plot of the story. This scene has no payoff whatsoever, and is boring and wordy. King does this repeatedly in the book, like when Ben goes into a bar and starts drinking, or a lot of the police scenes in the begining. There's tons of scenes in it that have nothing to do with the plot, and aren't even interesting in their own right. The book seriously needed an editor who could slap his dick across King's lips.

You could seriously cut at least 300 pages out of the book, and not effect the main story at all.

The character of Richie is annoying as fuck. It seems like King sets him up to be the comic relief, but then King realized he's a painfully unfunny person (another overall flaw of his I've noticed in other books). King seems to realize this, and just sort of makes up the excuse that nobody in the book thinks he's funny either, but it doesn't stop him from constantly trying to make the character funny. I noticed this the first time I read the book too, and thought if King could have got this character working, it would be a much stronger book. The movie, by the way, recognized this and made Richie the best character in it, which was one of the few things it did right.

The book also isn't very scary at all. It's scariest, funny enough, when it's being minimalist and vague about It and It's effect on the town. The only scenes that creep me out are the adult Mike interviewing and investigating the history of IT. When IT actually shows up it's kind of cartoonish and silly. Or even when king just vaguely implies that Bev got diddled is way creepier than any mummy or werewolf clown.

Overall it's a cool idea, but it's bogged down by a ton of shit. You're constantly skimming through trash, then finding a good part, then barely paying attention again as you wade through 30 more pages of trash, then a few good parts, etc...

I'm almost done with the book and can 100% confirm.

>This scene has no payoff whatsoever,
Stick to abbreviated Cracked.com articles, my millennial friend.

But he's fucking right. There are so many scenes that have mountains of backstory about characters that never appear again nor have any impact on the plot. It's all fluff.

And you don't really need fluff in would would be at least a 700 page story without it.

Something that bothered me was the excessive detail of how Bev escaped her husband and made it to Derry. Wasn't interesting at all, and was really long.

Then there's even more detail about how her husband tracked her down to the town. There's probably like 50 pages in all this right there. You could have seriously just left it to, "oh, well she made the mistake of saying the name of the town in their first fight," and left it at that, but no it's just got to drag on.

Then the husband shows up, kidnaps tits, and immediately dies and has no further impact on the plot. It's like goddamn, that was a long way to go for that payoff, almost like a capable editor could have told him to just get rid of that character altogether.

>The movie, by the way, recognized this and made Richie the best character in it, which was one of the few things it did right.
I honestly thought the movie was pretty solid. It seemed to understand how to preserve the core of the story and translate it into a movie. Lots got cut, obviously, and there's problems, but overall I thought the most important elements were well represented.

>It's scariest, funny enough, when it's being minimalist and vague about It and It's effect on the town. The only scenes that creep me out are the adult Mike interviewing and investigating the history of IT
I agree. I really liked that, and the whole part where Stan's suicide is built up and then revealed. His death wasn't spoilered to me so that whole chapter actually kept me tense.

King always seemed to me too square to even look at drugs.

Why did he become a massive chemical abuser again? Death of someone?

I think he was a druggie his whole life basically. I think both his parents were drunks. He was an alcoholic for most his adult life, and towards the end he discovered the wonders of drugs, and that if you mix stuff like coke with your booze you drink a hell of a lot more.

I'm one of those people who decided to pick up IT after watching the recent movie adaptation and I've been enjoying it so far. The fluff can be pretty fucking annoying, no doubt, but the seven main characters have been keeping me going.
Are any of his other books actually worth checking out, though?

I genuinely have no idea if you're talking about soda or cocaine.

He used to drink mouthwash.

What lol why

Honestly I really enjoyed it too. It's flawed but all the filler/fluff parts didn't seem to bother me nearly as much as it does other people. Don't know why.

For the alcohol. But I don't know why, because at that time he had money and was also drinking beer and doing coke. Maybe an old habit? In his book, "On Writing", he describes this addictive phase of his life and says his wife used to joke, "what are you doing, drinking the stuff?" when they'd have to buy more mouthwash.

I also enjoy the so-called fluff. I like meandering stories that are dense - that's life. Life and the stories that comprise it are not parsimonious, succinct, and perfectly wrapped up. If the story is particularly good, I want it to be as long as possible.

cocaine idiot.

Once you get a decade or two of heavy boozing under your belt, your tolerance goes so high that you have to ingest insane amounts of booze to get wasted. This also makes you sloppy as hell, and you end up blacking out and passing out all the time.

But, lots of drunks figure out if you do a few lines of coke while you're drinking, you stay alert and don't black or pass out and can drink like you're 18 again.

Hunter S Thompson did the same thing with coke and booze too, except I think he did that his entire life.

I agree. Some of the fluff I didn't like but most of it I thought fleshed out several things about the story and characters, especially when it came to Derry's history and backgroud on certain events that have taken place in it.

had*

But I don't know why

It was because he would run out of booze. It's common for drunks to be so wasted that they just flat out forget to stock up on booze while the stores are open, next thing they know it's 3 am and they're totally empty, so that's when he'd drink mouthwash.

Still a little weird though, yeah. When I was in boot camp I remember kids would drink mouthwash there because it was the only booze you could get your hands on. I never did, but I heard you could get decently fucked up after 2 bottles or so.

I don't know exactly what people would remove from It. The parts about Derry's history are clearly important.

>The parts about Derry's history are clearly important.

True, but they're talking about the hundreds of transition scenes that go absolutely nowhere and take pages to get to what they're transitioning to.

I guess I'm just not an impatient reader and enjoy the unravelling of a story, not jumping from critical scene to critical scene.

There's tons of side stories and plot throughout the book that I like, lots of backstory of the town, IT affected and killing people who aren't really in the main story, all that I like and have no problem with.

I have a problem with scenes like have already been mentioned, like ben in the bar, or ben on the plane, or Bev's entire goddamn story about how she got to the town and how her husband followed her, etc. They're just not good for one, and they don't even need to be in the book. If you got rid of all this you'd still have a 7-800 page book.

Ben in the bar was appealing to me: the whole lemon juice thing was a nice touch and we see the loneliness of Ben as well as his humility despite his success, etc. It emphasizes the point that, despite their successes, there was a void in all of their lives and they were tied to a cosmic plan. They were ostensibly successful, but really had no ties to the world (save Bill and his wife). Bev's story was important because we see that she essentially married her father, which many people do, but in her case it added an important piece to the cosmic plan.

The Dark Tower series definitely went overboard with a lot of these back/side stories though.

You know...I don't really give a which specific ones you liked.

There's tons of scenes like this is the point. Plus any point they made was already implied or said in some other part of the story much more succinctly and effectively. We fucking get bev married her dad, and how he tracked her back to derry without having to go through every boring and excruciating detail.

I liked the inessential backstories. It helped with the main plot since it established just how long It's been around, and I found the history of Derry interesting. I didn't even mind all the excruciating details of what the inside of a place looked like.

What always took me out of the book was when Richie cracked a stupid joke, and the other characters started rolling around on the floor laughing for ten minutes, vomiting due to how hard they were laughing. I was just like, "Dafuq?"

>We fucking get bev married her dad, and how he tracked her back to derry without having to go through every boring and excruciating detail.
How was it in excruciating detail? We learned a bit about Tom's mother issues, he visited Bev's friend and beat her to find where Bev was, then he went to Derry.

I agree that Stephen King needs an editor with a spine, but the strong aversion to It's lateral stories is unfounded.

That's so... deep... damn..

You literally read and defend Stephen fucking King, you can't act as if you have the intellectual higher ground.

I can guarantee that, by virtually all metrics, I am intellectually superior to you. Not to mention you are simply shitting on King because he is popular - I grew out of the contrarian phase when I was 17.

>How was it in excruciating detail? We learned a bit about Tom's mother issues, he visited Bev's friend and beat her to find where Bev was, then he went to Derry.

This is all stuff that's implied in the story, and no explanation is necessary. It's also painfully boring and uninteresting.

dude I know right.

If someone writes one really great book and 20 bad ones, should the quality of the one good book suffer?

Rare for Veeky Forums

You can distill any great painting to a doodle too, who needs all these brush strokes

Dreamcatcher remains one of the worst books I've read in my life. It's offensively bad and doesn't have the decency to be short with it. It's a double slap in the face when you get to the author's note and King mentions that he didn't even want to publish it because he thought it was garbage, it was his wife who goaded him into doing it.

Some of his earlier short stories are fine.

>t. someone who grew up in a house with only stephen king available.
I'm sorry for your loss. Spending time at my grandma's house was also like that, except there were also romances and shitty beach reader crime books. I had to load up an entire backpack full of books when I went to stay over otherwise I'd be stuck rotting my brains out with heaving bosoms and hard-boiled bullshit.

We aren't talking about the one """""""""""""good""""""""""""" book. We're talking about Stephen King, the author, and the quality of his collective works.

>Hunter S Thompson
>Did just about every drug under the sun, drank heavily for decades
>Admitted that he never expected to make it to his thirties with his lifestyle
>Lived for over three decades past that and ultimately had to put himself out of his misery
Man had the constitution of a freight train, I tell you what.

I just got a ligotti book from the library because of this post and I read the first story and it was insanely tryhard and lacking in anything that would make it worthwhile. The story itself was okay but mostly just pointless. Is horror supposed to be like that?

Which book?

That's not quite a good analogy. Stephen King novels aren't intricate paintings. They are slapdash paintings with half the paint spilled on the floor.

the last 10 years of his life weren't very pretty, but yeah. His son wrote a good book, Stories I tell myself, that described this in great detail.

Only contrarians and brainlets hate on King due to being popular. Surely you've written works that equal his then? No, you're not published? Ohh...

>Even the Pet Semetary movie was 1000000x better than the book.

Wat? The movie was shit. The book is one of maybe half a dozen novels that has a credible claim to being a great horror novel.

It goes much deeper than Salems Lot, The Shining, or any other of the dozen-odd King books I've read (admittedly, I haven't read them all).

The 2010 revised version of Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

The Long Walk was pretty good

Best King book and it's not even a contest.

Is it possible to petition the american president to review more media? he has a very snappy, funny "new york" style

is Donald jewish?

>Ywn see a universe where Trump continued his comfy youtube review series into old age and never felt the need to step into politics
He's too good for this world

youtube.com/watch?v=Ddvk4aWNS50