What do you think about this man?

He's aight.

Their Wiki page sounds like Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums got together to edit it.

Not a great author but at least he admits he writes shitty books just to make money, which is better than a lot of writers today

I read the first Gunslinger and thought he might be the future. Then I read the second and never read anything by him again.

>INTERVIEWER
>The use of brand names in your novels especially seems to irk some critics.

>KING
>I always knew people would have a problem with that. But I also knew that I was never going to stop doing it, and nobody was ever going to convince me that I was wrong to do it. Because every time I did it, what I felt inside was this little bang! like I nailed it dead square—like Michael Jordan on a fade-away jump shot. Sometimes the brand name is the perfect word, and it will crystallize a scene for me. When Jack Torrance is pumping down that Excedrin in The Shining, you know just what that is. I always want to ask these critics—some are novelists, some of them college literature professors—What the fuck do you do? Open your medicine cabinet and see empty gray bottles? Do you see generic shampoo, generic aspirin? When you go to the store and you get a six-pack, does it just say beer? When you go down and you open your garage door, what’s parked in there? A car? Just a car?
>And then I say to myself, I bet they do. Some of these guys, the college professors—the guy, say, whose idea of literature really stopped with Henry James, but he’ll get kind of a frozen smile on his face if you talk about Faulkner or Steinbeck—they’re stupid about American fiction and they’ve turned their stupidity into a virtue. They don’t know who Calder Willingham was. They don’t know who Sloan Wilson was. They don’t know who Grace Metalious was. They don’t know who any of these people are, and they’re fucking proud of it. And when they open their medicine cabinet door, I think maybe they do see generic bottles, and that’s a failure of observation. And I think one of the things that I’m supposed to do is to say, It’s a Pepsi, OK? It’s not a soda. It’s a Pepsi. It’s a specific thing. Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

Is he right?

He might be right about the brand specifying things but he is retarded blaming the professors for not reading trash.

Anybody find it weird that movies based on Stephen King novels are always super highly praised / really great?

Considering Stephen King is pretty low on the rungs of literature, I find it interesting that directors translate him so well.

Harold Bloom said it's because he writes for visual information or something.

Isn't he leftwing lunatic?

As a writer he is ok

do be honest he has written so much stuff , purely by probability there is bound to be some gems and there is bound to be some shit. His short stories are GODLY. Skeleton crew is pretty great. The Jaunt and Nona are among some of my favorite short stories ever.

What are his gems?
I've read carrie, gerald's game, mysery, and needful things.
Mysery was the best out of those, needful things was the worst simply because of the ending.

There are so many random shit King movies
He has so many stories you only know the well adapted ones

The Moving Finger and The Man in the Black Suit are both excellent weird fiction stories and more or less justify his mostly mediocre career IMO

I read the Tommyknockers as a kid and I feel like I need to reread it one day.

Bought his JFK time travel novel a couple weeks ago out of nostalgia since I used to like his books a lot and The Dark Tower. The last thing I read from him was The Wind Through the Keyhole and I was surprised by how on par the quality was with the old Dark Tower books. I stopped reading new King completely after Liseys story came out but I remember hearing about his JFK novel around 2007ish but I'd like to know how it ranks with his classic material from the 80s?

Not as bad as lit thinks but not as good as the entry level middleschooler thinks either.

His older stories have some heart.

I've only read Pet Semetary and It.

Pet Semetary was alright, but I thought It was fantastic. It is probably 200 pages too long, but aside from that, it's still very good shit. Very meta, very creepy at some points.

I would recommend it for October reading familia.

No, he is wrong. Trying to paint a "realistic" portrait of the modern world by indulging its worst features would be like Chaucer trying to paint a "realistic" portrait of the medieval world by going into great detail about the lice and skin diseases of his protagonists. Literature is not just an invisible movie; consequently some things don't belong in literature, but hacks like King obviously do not understand this. Literature is a way OUT of the meaningless, not merely a window into it.

No I do not want to hear about Ellis, Tao Lin, et al.

11/22/63 is his best book

So they're the Chuck Norris of conspiracy theories.

>When Jack Torrance is pumping down that Excedrin in The Shining, you know just what that is.
I don't, actually. I bet you do, though, Steve.