The Stephen King Master Thread

[BladeRunner2007]

The Shining is way overrated. Most of the book is boring. The story doesn't really start until the very end. It feels like at least 2/3 is just introduction stuff. The horror aspects don't work at all for me. Kubrick just took the foundations of the story and made them work so much better and way more effective imo when he adapted the story for the big screen.

[Dr. Seymour Love]

I'm bout halfway thru The Outsider, loving it so far.

[MichelleB675]

I love Stephen King. I think my favorite SK book will always be The Stand.

The supernatural and horror aspects used to scare me when I was younger. As I get older I feel like the humans in the books are the real horrors.

[ceeece]

Originally Posted by kdawq

Just bought my first SK book today (Pet Semetery) looking forward to starting it, I've only read biographies up to this point. I've seen the movie a few times and still find it scary, is the book a scarier read?

Pet Sematary was the book that started it all for me. It hooked me. It's still one of his scariest books to date. I've not got almost all of his books (don't have Faithful, Danse Macabre, Hearts in Suspension) and read most of his published work. There's no way to read it all. I even went through a period I thought I might stop reading him but I couldn't find another author I latched onto like King. Now I'm a collector of his of sorts. I've got some limited signed editions and even had my copy of Misery inscribed to me (sent it to his office in the early 90's, he signed it and returned it). I started to try to get some of the early first editions or at least BCE with reproduction covers.

My top favorites are IT, Eyes of the Dragon, Salem's Lot, The Shining, Misery, 11/22/63.

[jthefrank]

I think I've read about 35 different King books throughout my life. Most of them when I was younger, some of them when I was very young. Here the rough queue of stuff I have on hand but have never read:

1 - Everything's Eventual (current)
2 - The Green Mile
3 - The Dark Tower 4-7 (trying to finish Song of Ice and Fire first)
4 - Roadwork
5 - The Dark Half
6 - Bag of Bones
7 - The Talisman
8 - Black House


Any other older book I've already read. Aside from Rage.

Favorites would be Misery, IT, Pet Semetary, The Stand, and Eyes of the Dragon. Except I read all of those 20-25 years ago, so I'm basing that on very old (and very young) memories. So who knows how valid that still is. But of what I've read in the last decade I'd put Under the Dome and 11/22/63 at the top.

[Dr. Seymour Love]

coming in Sept

In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

[TheSpruceMoose]

I was given an order of detention for a week in about the 9th grade. After the 1st day I knew I needed something to occupy my week, and so I headed to the library and picked up a copy of Misery. The rest is history and I've read about 20 or so of his works. I'll never forget how I used to buy up his books at a used book store for really cheap, I just love those old illustrated covers, they don't make em like that anymore.

[wildhoney66]

i remember when Insomina came out waay back in (1994) i had an ISS i believe it's called i've been out of school for a long time so i'm not sure if they are still called that?

anyways, well i think i had it for a week once i don't remember why at all but i remember reading that for like a week straight during my lunch which is when i would take mine, now do i remember when i would actually eat no i honestly don't.

[VictoryAtNight]

I bought my first Stephen King book over the weekend. It is Doctor Sleep.

[Dr. Seymour Love]

coming May 2020

From #1 New York Times bestselling author, legendary storyteller, and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary collection of four new and compelling novellas—Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, The Life of Chuck, Rat, and the title story If It Bleeds—each pulling you into intriguing and frightening places.

The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, including “The Body” (Stand By Me) and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (Shawshank Redemption). Like Four Past Midnight, Different Seasons, and most recently Full Dark, No Stars, If It Bleeds is a uniquely satisfying collection of longer short fiction by an incomparably gifted writer.

[VictoryAtNight]

Finished Doctor Sleep, which is a huge accomplishment for me. I dedicated a lot of time reading this book, a total of 11 days.


Job well done.

[dallywhitty]

It occurred to me that I don't actually own an individual copy of The Tommyknockers (I've got it as a hefty hardback that bundles it with Carrie), so I took to eBay and ordered a first edition.

[VictoryAtNight]

I have completed about 1/3 of The Shining.

I now know the backstory of the lady in the bathtub in Room 217.

[joshman150]

Recently finished The Institute and felt it was a fun story, but the entire conflict really doesn't work in a world where the characters are geniuses with access to the internet. Still really enjoyed it though!

[LeftHandedGuitarist]

My friend and I have had the crazy notion to begin reading through all of Stephen King's works in 2020. I don't think we understand what we're getting in to.

[SlayersCouncil]

I've been looking but can't seem to find hi res covers of his novels (especially original cover art). I have this urge to make custom Blu-ray covers for my Stephen King Blu-ray collection using the original art from the first editions. I think it would be cool to get an extra large Blu-ray case and put all 3 It movies in there. I'd also like to put The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and Stand By Me in one case with the Different Seasons cover art (adding The Breathing Method as soon as they adapt that one; which, as I have read, already has a script).

Anybody here know where to find hi res scans of these covers?

[LeftHandedGuitarist]

Two novels in to the Kingathon...

Carrie:
I loved this one. I first read Carrie somewhere between 15-20 years ago, given it at as gift by a friend. I remember not being all that impressed by it. Now I'm wondering if I was just too young to appreciate it. This re-read was an almost revelatory experience.

It's a quick read at only 200 pages, and a far easier proposition than the door stops he usually produces. Most impressive is how fresh it still feels even more than 40 years after it was first published. What's interesting is that I'm not sure I would really classify it as a horror book. It's never really scary, and feels like more of a tragedy.

King has a strong handle on characters here. He's particularly good at writing people who are utterly loathsome. Chrissie and Billy manage to be both hateful and terrifying, and the writing actually managed to put me on edge when I was reading scenes with them. Billy especially feels like a personal capable of genuine evil.

Carrie herself is subjected to a level of bullying which seems obscene and it's so easy to be on her side when she finally reacts. At the same time, King drives home the impact her revenge has on the people of the town, making this a conflicting reading experience. I'm glad the character of Sue Snell is present, because through her we really are able to get a different view of things. No scene here feels unwarranted or out of place, and every moment moves things forward to a disaster that is hinted out from the early pages.

Salem's Lot:
I was hoping the rambling, overlong Stephen King I know so well wasn't going to appear for a while, but here he is fully formed in only his second novel. 'Salem's Lot is a fun read, but it's pacing makes it tough to get through at times. King wants to paint a picture of an entire Small Town, USA and he does manage to do that very effectively. But it means that the novel is full of far too many characters, most of whom appear in very little of the story. King's affection for flowery descriptions using obscure Americana references is in full force here.

This is offset by having a memorable core group of main characters. Father Callahan and Matt Burke are given strong personalities and feel distinct from everyone around them. The main point-of-view, Ben Mears, is the only character that we really get any deep information about but the people he draws around him make for a good team.

Being a vampire novel means that we are subjected to all of the clichés and stereotypes surrounding them - reading this in 2020 means that some of the novel's impact is likely lost on me given that I've seen vampire stories endlessly played out in various iterations. Still, the vampires here are vicious and intimidating and the story becomes extremely bleak.

King also describes his female characters based on how attractive they are (or how attractive they used to be) which is always uncomfortable to read. There's some really dark stuff in this book which you would expect (and even welcome) in a vampire story, but the really nasty stuff has nothing to do with that. I can only imagine that it's here to paint a picture of how abhorrent the residents of 'Salem's Lot already are before the corrupting evil even arrives.

[LeftHandedGuitarist]

Read a few more over the past few months:

Rage: Hmm, not impressed. A very weird book, probably only made more notorious for the fact that King decided to put it out of print after it was associated with a couple of school shootings. I honestly couldn't really get my head around this one and didn't enjoy reading it much. The characters were bizarre to say the least.

Night Shift: A decent short story collection with a handful of standouts but also a fair bit of forgettable material. Here's how I ranked them:
GREAT: The Mangler, Battleground, Trucks, The Ledge, Quitters, Inc.
GOOD: Graveyard Shift, The Boogeyman, Gray Matter, Sometimes They Come Back, I Know What You Need, The Last Rung on the Ladder
MEH/OKAY: Jerusalem's Lot, I Am The Doorway, The Lawnmower Man, One For The Road
BAD: Night Surf, Strawberry Spring, Children of the Corn, The Man Who Loved Flowers, The Woman in the Room

The Long Walk: A short, direct and extremely powerful story. The Long Walk is The Hunger Games or Battle Royale written years before those tales. The characters are the focus and most of them manage to leap off the page here. I found myself rooting for the developing friendship between Garraty and McVries and feeling sad to see the end of people as either their bodies or minds gave up, all with the inevitable knowledge that there can be only one winner left at the end. It's extremely bleak and seems to want to remind us of the futility of, well, everything. That no matter what we do we are always walking closer and closer towards our own end. The racism kind of came out of nowhere and King REALLY liked describing women based on their breasts (I think this happened on the first page!).

[LeftHandedGuitarist]

Another one down for the King reading project...

The Dead Zone:
Maybe my favourite King book so far (from this 2020 reading project - I've read other things by him in the past which I would rate higher). The Dead Zone is the most emotional thing I've read by him, and the whole thing has a real sense of loss to it. It contains his most likable lead character so far in Johnny Smith and lets us more or less just hang out with him for a while.

I often get annoyed with how unnecessarily long King's books can be, as I feel that they can be cut down without losing anything important. Here, the book flourishes from its length. I found myself just wanting to get back to reading and seeing what Johnny was up to. Significant parts of the book just deal with him trying to live his life after his accident, and how the relationships he had have now changed (one moment that particularly got me was when he sees his parents for the first time after waking up, and from his perspective they are suddenly older). Unlike many other characters from the author, Johnny is a good person who gets on well with his family and friends, so seeing the strains he now has in dealing with all of them makes for an emotional read.

If I can criticise the book, it's that the main plot really takes a backseat to all this. However, I didn't find that to be a major hindrance here. There's is a fairly jarring change of mood between the first and last halves of the book, and I think it's somewhere around page 400 before the real crux of the story takes hold and Johnny finally encounters the book's real antagonist.

I also enjoyed this book as a trip through the decade of the 1970s with a lot of references to (American) news events of the time. Additionally, there's a new layer of horror added to this tale when reading it in a post-Trump world with the book's character of Greg Stillson.

[ChainsawJedi]

Originally Posted by LeftHandedGuitarist

Another one down for the King reading project...

The Dead Zone:
Maybe my favourite King book so far (from this 2020 reading project - I've read other things by him in the past which I would rate higher). The Dead Zone is the most emotional thing I've read by him, and the whole thing has a real sense of loss to it. It contains his most likable lead character so far in Johnny Smith and lets us more or less just hang out with him for a while.

I often get annoyed with how unnecessarily long King's books can be, as I feel that they can be cut down without losing anything important. Here, the book flourishes from its length. I found myself just wanting to get back to reading and seeing what Johnny was up to. Significant parts of the book just deal with him trying to live his life after his accident, and how the relationships he had have now changed (one moment that particularly got me was when he sees his parents for the first time after waking up, and from his perspective they are suddenly older). Unlike many other characters from the author, Johnny is a good person who gets on well with his family and friends, so seeing the strains he now has in dealing with all of them makes for an emotional read.

If I can criticise the book, it's that the main plot really takes a backseat to all this. However, I didn't find that to be a major hindrance here. There's is a fairly jarring change of mood between the first and last halves of the book, and I think it's somewhere around page 400 before the real crux of the story takes hold and Johnny finally encounters the book's real antagonist.

I also enjoyed this book as a trip through the decade of the 1970s with a lot of references to (American) news events of the time. Additionally, there's a new layer of horror added to this tale when reading it in a post-Trump world with the book's character of Greg Stillson.

I must read this book. I remember thinking the film was excellent - I don't usually enjoy Cronenberg films.