/lit/ - Literature

>>19333275
What I want to know is if the people who say he's bad are just the people who believe horror a priori has to be bad, or if they're actually people with taste who decided King isn't very good.

>>19333300
quaddubs checked!

>>19333300
I started reading Salem's Lot once and all the characters seemed to think about was sex. It kept shifting perspectives and everyone wanted to think about sex. I don't know if that's a plot point but it was kind of weird and coomery. I dropped it after like 40 pages. I remember Running Man being pretty decent though.

>>19333275
His one offs are absolutely better than DT. My personal favourites are Desperation and Revival.

>>19333333
Wasted. Kubrick hated Kang's writings by the way.

>>19333336
>Kubrick hated Kang's writings by the way
He didn't. King hated the shining, there was no animosity on Kubrick's side.

>>19333326
Interesting, my impression is Salem's Lot is considered his best work by "well-read" people who hate him.

>>19333333

>>19333275
I won't even bother finding out4

>>19333300
Having only read his short fiction and Under the Dome and watched the movies, he's no worse than John Steinbeck when it comes to description or dialogue. His stories rely on stock imagery like Satanic Rituals and Hyperdimensional Aliens. There is very little subtlety in characterization or setting. While many readers ascribe deeper meanings to his work, like the sexual undertones in IT, most scholarly analysis considers these to be incidental at best. He himself does not ascribe any intentional symbolism to his stories, although he does claim intention of motivation and inspiration behind certain characters, settings, and motifs.

He is a pro at staying popular, though, and he knows his audience very well. It might be possible that he knows scoffing at literary elitism and making vague references to a past of drug abuse will play well with mainstream readers. It's the kind of softrock boomer rebellion that thrills people who get spooked by inverted Christian imagery and feel clever for spotting Easter Eggs in Marvel movies.

>I've always revered Stephen King
lmao

>>19333275
>All that said, is anything of his worth reading?
Carrie is a legitimately very good book which you can read pretty quickly. I read it in a few hours. His prose is generally nothing special, but Carrie is epistolary, meaning in between the King narrative there are fragments of (fictional) books with names like "A History of Telekinesis" or "I Survived Carrie's Prom." He does a very good job imitating all these different styles; some are very clinical and scientific, some are confessional, some are supposed transcripts of recorded conversations that sound pretty natural.
I have read two Stephen King books in full, Carrie and The Shining. The Shining is dogshit, I have no idea how Kubrick and Johnson were able to polish that turd. I have also attempted to read like a dozen others or so and just never finished them (he's really not that good). Carrie I've reread, it's a very good book

>>19333333
Disappointing check

>>19333275
I can't answer in regards to why he is so successful. Bloom considered a sort of sociological phenomenon

>Like television, motion pictures, and computers, King has replaced reading. Hundreds of thousands of America schoolchildren, who will read nothing else that isn’t assigned, devour King regularly. They turn to King as their parents resort to Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy. I see no point in deploring this, and yet we ought not to deceive ourselves: the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

>Thereis a palpable sincerity to everything that he has done: that testifies to his decency, and to his social benignity. Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.

>Source: Stephen King (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

The problem itself is complex, and it involved following a discussion on the objectivity of aesthetics that would lead the thread of its trail, not the less because of my great stupidity in such matters.
This seems true however: when consuming media for purely entertainment people do not want to be surprised, but to see their expectations confirmed relative to the genre they read. King, while he never will be considered a great writer, is highly successful in hitting the tropes that horror readers want to find in books. He had a keen eye to do this in many novels, and once this popular, his works sell by themselves regarding of its quality.

>All that said, is anything of his worth reading?
Pet Sematary is decent. It is sometimes used in universities to teach new england gothic literature, and has many references to the principal elements in american gothic literature. The main problem the book has is that, in my opinion despite all the potential, it stays at the surface of every complex element it presents.

is that what J.K. rowling looks like? I thought she was uglier than that?

>>19333352
Yeah a lot of people recommended it which is why I picked it up. It wasn't necessarily bad but there was nothing noteworthy about the beginning and I just lost interest. It kind of read like the beginning of a B tier horror movie from the 80s.
>Pretty woman meets man
>SPOOKY MAN moves in next door
>dog is dead! :C what could have happened??

>>19333300
King's only good writings are his short stories.

>>19333326
Sex is front and center in nearly everything he writes, guy is a mega-coomer.

>>19333410
She has access the best make up and plastic surgeries money can buy. Looks more attractive now than when she was young and poor.

I recently read Joyland and enjoyed it quite a bit.

>>19333275
>Trans women are women.
Prove it.

>>19333333
wowza

>>19333275
>is anything of his worth reading?
Some of his pre-1999 books are good. IT, The Stand, the first 4 books of The Dark Tower series.
Post 1999 they're all shit (except for the one where the main character timetravels to save JFK).
The ones he's written in the last 5-6 years are especially shit. My God. Wouldn't even clean my ass with them.

>>19333594
What pisses me off about this issue is the dishonesty of these cunts (lol jk, they don't have them). Calling yourself a "trans woman" means putting the conclusion you want me to reach in the premise. By calling you that I'm already admitting that you're right, that you're indeed a woman. And you're not. You absolutely are NOT. You're a mentally disturbed man who needs to be cured with therapy and drugs, not indulged in his masochistic fantasies.

Future people are going to look back to how we allow trans people to be treated like we look back at lobotomy. At the time it was considered a brilliant practice, many people made money off it, and if you were against it, you were ferociously attacked and slandered. Just like hormone injection and "sex-change" surgeries (another incredibly dishonest name, since you're not changing sex at all, you're just mutilating yourself).

The arrogance with which these cunts push their PERSONAL OPINION on others as if they had a right to force us to agree with them. As if it wasn't an opinion but a fact. Not only it's an opinion, but it's a shitty one, since it's not supported neither by evidence nor by logic and is indeed contradicted by both.

>>19333275
>Just how?
Because he is very, very talented. Is he "great"? Probably not... although only time will rend the final judgment.

>All that said, is anything of his worth reading?
You may not like ANY of it. But 'Salem's Lot is worth a try (see remarks here: >>19333448).

Also:
-The Shining
-Pet Semetary
-The Raft (short story; it will be much more effective if you haven't seen the film version)
-One for the Road (short story; a kind of epilogue to 'Salem's Lot)
-Desperation (doesn't have the ambition of 'Salem's Lot or The Shining, but it really worked for me)
-The Green Mile

>>19333823
You are brave Anon, I respect it.

My brother hated Joyland and said no one would care about Stephen King if he was Bolivian or Ukrainian.
I believe King earned his title thanks to New Hollywood (the end of Hays Code, rise of television and so on). Even today you see horror movies standing their ground against blockbusters and surviving the changes in the media.

>>19333275
The way fucking artists are panderers to such crass bullshit makes me really ponder about artistical integrity and why the fuck even to give money to be led to think wha these fucks want me to

>>19333275
What do we think of Misery? An English professor I know gushes about it all the time.

>>19333505
2002-2008 is peak mouth-nutting

>>19333300
A lot of his writing is just genuinely bad. Like I was baffled that The Mist was even published in that state. Some of his books are written competently though, Pet Sematary is pretty good.

>>19333275
Pet Semetary is pretty good and genuinely moving/disturbing in a lot of ways. I'd recommend It but if you've never read King I recommend you stick to his smaller works. Or not, read whichever you want. A few others worth reading:

The Dead Zone
Green Mile
11/22/6

Stephen King has said often he's the McDonalds of horror but I don't think a big mac every now and then is bad

>>19333347
he hated it enough to practically rewrite the whole thing

>>19333300
Horror a priori is bad.

>>19333505
Is it weird I get very turned on y 2008 and 2016 JK Rowling? I want to give her a sloppy throatfuck and have her lick my ass afterwards

>>19333744
11/22/63 is pretty fucking sad, especially with how it ends

>>19334047
>Stephen King has said often he's the McDonalds of horror
I hear he said in an interview that he regrets saying the Big Mac thing because he didn't meamn it in the sense of quality, but his critics keep using it like that.

>>19334057
Spoken like a true armchair. Do you still believe in the four humors too?

>>19334073
>meamn
*mean

>>19333875
>makes me really ponder about artistical integrity
I quit trying to have a career in art specifically because if this shit. Artists of all ages and genres have zero integrity and know no such thing as doing something you believe in over what makes you popular. It's like they cannot even fathom why would anybody not just chase trends and pander as much as he can. These days you can safely say they're all whores, sometimes non-figuratively so.

>>19333275
Pic related is a good and funny btfo of King and other bestselling writers who churn out ten books per year like Koontz, Patterson, Clancy, Dan Brown etc

>>19333333
Revival's pretty kino

>>19333347
There absolutely was which is why he put King in his place.

>>19334625
>>19334053
Making changes to an adaptation for film does not equal hating the original, delusional kubrickfags as usual

Old dumb boomer will be dead any day now and then we can forget about him.

>>19333275
Stoyvan Kong established his reputation early on with a few notable books, and since then he's been selling trash under the brand he established in the beginning.