What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly...

>What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.


What's John Green's fucking Problem?

When you read Harry Potter, you are trained to read Stephen King
When you read John Green, you are trained to read ?????

THERE SHOULDN'T BE SPACES BEFORE AND AFTER DASH

Unironically, David Foster Wallace.

DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, YOU'RE NOT MY DAD

this

What an embarassing t shirt

My son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

>What's John Green's fucking Problem?

Impenetrably deep self-loathing projected onto the Western world.

Agreed, but ironically

king is shit

Did he actually say that? Pretty based if so.

>Did he actually say that?
no

Fake and gay
John Green would never use the word "whom"

using whom is just good grammar so you might be retarded.

Also king IS shit. I can't believe anyone actually thinks The dark tower series is good. The guy had no fucking clue what he was doing with it. Although I hear that his short stories are his best writing and I haven't really gone through them.

Vogue, Cosmo

Why are you all acting as if Stephen King needs to be defended?

>his short stories are his best writing

Yeah, the less Stephen King you read, the better.

And what does supposedly make King a shit writer?

It's ironic that people interested in literature -- supposed to be about human nature and empathizing with others -- often seem more cynical and bitter and less compassionate and friendly than average Joes or even intellectuals more STEM-minded. I mean, the critic here (who isn't John Green) is right, but he just sounds extremely petty and cynical.

>we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil

But this is completely absurd, there are millions of people who are quite clearly not "nice and good". There are people who are just spiteful, cruel or selfish and who need to be dealt with severely so they don't fuck over everybody else.

>When you read John Green, you are trained to read ?????

tumblr reblog comment chains.

The Greeks

It makes people think they aren't pseuds