/lit/ - Literature

>>6913375
good SK:

first 4 DT novels
Green Mile
Everything's Eventual was pretty good
The Stand

>>6913375
stephen king writes books, not literature.

know the difference.

The Green Mile shilled my jimmies when i was around fourteen.

Gerald's Game, the based answer.

Rose Madder (still haven't finished it because I'm spooked)

(Not) The Stand

Under Bachman: The Regulators (still haven't finished it because I'm spooked)

>>6913406
Also I should add that King is the god of female characters

The Long Walk, maybe

That child, sewer gangbang was pretty damn good. Cranked it more than twice to that shit.

>>6913375
his short story collections are based. night shift and the one with the mist and the jaunt are god-tier

>>6913423

skeleton crew is great

>>6913406
I should also add that Gerald's Game first turned me on to sex. Unfortunately, my awareness was only arising during the opening sequence when Gerald was alive, and it officially burst forth during the descriptions of her father or stepfather's frequent rapes, which were somehow delicately sensual and had something like womanly pride. Show me another author who flipped rape on its head like that.

>>6913436
You don't read much, do you

>>6913444
Show me.

>>6913444
Trips confirmed

>>6913375
his head seems ridiculously small

>>6913475
That's because he's half-ape, how else do you think he manages such primitive, visceral zeal in his action sequences?

>>6913375
No, he's a horror flavored Dickens type. He'll be read for that in 200 years and regarded as good even if flawed. /lit/ shits on him because they have aesthetic standards based in modernist, post-modernist, and contemporary literature.

>>6913518
Kinda like Lovecraft?

>>6913531
Lovecraft is good but he's too narrow in his theme to be comparable to Dickens or other major 19th century novels. I think Lovecraft is a minor writer, but I mean minor with a capital m. King deals with a lot of different types of people, and has a real interest in the human heart. There is also a sort of lyricism, often sentimental, dead and not melancholy or joyful like Dickens, that shows itself in King's writing.

>>6913375

King has actually been on a real roll recently. 11/22/63 is an astounding time travel book, that does it better than almost any other time travel story I've read. it really brings out the creepiness of living in a past time.

And with Revival, published last year, the conclusion is masterful and genuinely horrifying.

I think he has real skill as a writer and has this way of stating things in a blunt way, so they hit with much force. He hardly sentimentalizes or gives false emotion. He lets events speak for themselves. I remember when reading On Writing, he's telling the story of how he got hit by a car, and before he was taking a piss in the woods. And he writes "It was two months before I was able to take another leak standing up." To me that's really his style: being able to explain events with big impact while not overstating what happened.

>>6913581
Revival is god-tier, put it down for the moment to read more directly inspirational stuff but it has the quality of being able to be read in spurts, which I admire.

King is in the same tier as Dan Brown and John Grisham but his fans are edgy in your face types who will spend all day talking about he's as good as joyce and quality is subjective.

>>6913375
YA-level pap for teenagers.

I dont know if he's that great, but this is one of my favorite metaphors:

>It was the furthest thing in the world from the rosy-fingered dawn of poetry and old Technicolor movies; this was an anti-dawn, damp and as pale as the cheek of a day-old corpse.

>>6913675
Confirm?

Dan brown tier?

His short stories are great. The Shining, Pet Semetary and Misery are good and genuinely unsettling horror novels. The first few Dark Tower books are a good read in an unusual and interesting post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. He's also quite decent at doing long stories about people slowly losing it in a survival situation, like The Stand and Under the Dome.

Downsides are his weak endings, reliance on stock characters and tropes, and the fact that his writing is often beach/airport reading tier. But it's consistently entertaining and readable, and he seems like a pretty down to earth guy who knows what he's good at and what he wants to write.

>>6913375
>>6913375
Official list of non-shit King books.

>the Stand
>the Dark Tower books I-III
>His short stories

My opinion of King is that he has the potential to be a genre writer of startling brilliance that is inevitably brought down by his many, many faults.

His books without fail have some core to them that is engaging and enthralling. I'm always excited before I start one and without doubt at least 30-50% of the book will keep me engaged.

But then he always loses it by downright bad editing choices and creative choices that severely date him or have been done to death by him already. I especially hate his tendency for his characters to all be struggling authors from Maine like he was when he was young, all of them suffering from alcoholism and unable to get their big break novel published.

I also hate the baby boomer angst that seeps into his writing, the idea that Led Zeppelin and ACDC are the coolest bands out there and that all the "teeny boppers" nowadays just don't get it. He thinks its still cool and rebellious to like the Stones mostly because he's been so rich and famous for so long that he's lost his vision of the world and how to understand how it has moved on from these old standbys. He lets this into his novels and it dates him severely.

He doesn't know how to end his stories and his writing process of "make no plans just make a scenerio and run with it until you run out of steam" doesn't help at all. He should follow his own adage of "kill your darlings", a wonderful piece of advice for any writer, if only he, or his editor, would have the balls to follow it.

The man has undeniable talent. Just look at the great 30-50% of his novels to see it, or his short stories which are generally pretty great. Even with his faults he is without doubt the best of the big "genre writers" of the era like Dean Koontz or Dan Brown. He blows those no-talent-faggots out of the water.

>>6913394
>know the difference.
The difference is time.

>Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There’s Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t use it. He wants it to burn.

>>6913518
He'll be forgotten or read like Chandler/Hammett as cultural artifacts. Will be no where near Dickens territory

>>6914560

>Dark Tower

Fuck no, this is 100% the kind of baby boomer angst + editing failure you are talking about. Everyone knows the series derails into unbridled insanity and bloat but the problem is, it was already that to begin with. It is just vomitus of one who read Tolkien and watched Leone westerns at an impressionable age and attempted to coopt their mythic and visual languages, respectively, without having more than a surface-level understanding of either. It is indulgent wankfest from beginning to end and not just far longer but literally infinitely longer than it needed to be, it's the type of fleetingly entertaining nonsense that one comes up with after smoking one's third bowl of the night, treated with the solemnity of an E. R. Eddison and the talent of a Piers Anthony.

As you note though, King's real problem is that he writes too much and so is retreading his own footsteps constantly, when not actually walking up his own ass-hole.

>>6913375

>11/22/63

>>6914675
I agree with all that you said. I just don't think it becomes an obvious mess until after the third book. Wizards in glass is when one begins to realize what a sham the Dark Tower is.

>>6914684
I don't understand people who say 11/22/63 is good. Like all King novels it has a really interesting central premise, a gangbusting first 200-300 pages, and it all falls apart by the end. His intricate research is phenomenal and may be worth the investment into reading this 800 page behemoth, but his main character is, once again, a struggling author from Maine. Except this time it's even worse because he's a dumb Mary Sue self-insert who is just boring boring boring.

And then he meets his boring love interest. And then they have their boring love and she has her crazy boring ex. And then they boring dance and all of this melodrama takes up the entire back half of the novel.

But then he manages to even bungle the central idea of the novel. I'd rather he left the changed future unspoken of than showing us what we got; a banal "do not mess with time!" sound of thunder plot-twist that was obvious from miles away.

The idea of "what would happen if Kennedy was still alive" is interesting if he would have put some fucking thought into it. But then it just turns out to be "LOL woah look there's giant radioactive bug and shit and giant earthquakes woah don't mess with the past!"

Then there's the fucking sloppy card hat man metaphor going through the whole thing. Christ I love parts of that book, but as a whole it cannot pass the toll booth of "mediocre".

>>6913375
Stephen King is great at what he does.
He writes entertaining books for people that want to be entertained.
His stories have been turned into some very well-received movies.
He is an objectively successful writer.

However, the same could be said about the achievements of John Green.

That being said, Stephen King still has my respect because he's never claimed to be something he isn't. In his book On Writing, he acknowledges that he's a "good writer" as opposed to a "great writer" (he uses Faulkner as an example, I think).

>>6914605
That incest is even hotter that the friction the character felt without using lube on his mother.

>>6913394
Please explain the difference

>>6913375
I really like his "brief history of time"
its a nice change of pace. All that horror stuff was getting old.
Altough black holes are kinda scary too

>>6913375
The shining is shit, such bad pacing.

>>6913420
This tbh lad.

>>6913487
chuckled

>>6913406
>Gerald's Game, the based answer.

Oooh yes. I never had so much respect for King as I had after reading Jessie's internal dialogues. Say whatever you want, guy occasionally knows some shit about human psychology.

Thanks for reminding me of that, and thanks for your recs. King is really hit or miss, but his hits make for decent reads.

Also Stephen King short stories yes.

>>6914597
The difference is pretensionism.

>>6914675
Makes me want to read those books tbh lad.

>>6915048
No. With enough time, genre fiction becomes literature.

>>6915070
>With enough time hipsters and pseuds pretend to like something.

>>6914638
>Will be no where near Dickens territory
Oh yes he will. The crap the general public will read generations from now will lower the bar that King will be guaranteed a place in the canon.

>>6915070
The reason genre fiction becomes literature with enough time is that it's most vocal critics die off and is supplanted by the next generation who grew up on his junk writing scholarly analyses akin to Spinal Tap's Black Album.

>>6914800
Just because I don't know what it is doesn't mean I'm lying.

>>6913412
Are you fucking kidding? All his female characters are either weird and completely uncooperative with one another, or crazy.

>>6915124
>implying that perfect characters are ever interesting

>>6914704
You sound like an overwhelming bore. Sorry you're you. But if ye can stack yr books the right way and squint yr eyes—

>>6915119
It means yr just yapping and asking for a yiffing.

>>6915124
>female characters are either weird and completely uncooperative with one another, or crazy
>not realistic

>>6915204
>Sexist
Women are notoriously normal, cooperative, and rational. There are mountains of evidence for this—ye can check references in yermamas.ass.com/somanyblisterswtf

did any of you dudes pirate his new audiobook only short story? its like 90 minutes so movie length. i leeched it (only 40 megs) but didnt bother to listen to it, i'd rather listen to a college lecture instead of some stephen king shit. it's called like something fireworks or some shit.

The Jaunt and Survivor Type are the two scariest things he ever wrote. The End of the Whole Mess is a close third. The unabridged version of The Stand is great, too.

>lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers

I like the way he writes:

Most of the nine months I should have spent in the first grade I spent in bed. My problems started with the measles—a perfectly ordinary case—and then got steadily worse. I had
bout after bout of what I mistakenly thought was called “stripe throat”; I lay in bed drinking cold water and imagining my throat in alternating stripes of red and white (this was
probably not so far wrong).

At some point my ears became involved, and one day my mother called a taxi (she did not drive) and took me to a doctor too important to make house calls—an ear specialist. (For some reason I got the idea that this sort of doctor was called an otiologist.) I didn’t care whether he specialized in ears or assholes. I had a fever of a hundred and four degrees,
and each time I swallowed, pain lit up the sides of my face like a jukebox.

The doctor looked in my ears, spending most of his time (I think) on the left one. Then he laid me down on his examining table. “Lift up a minute, Stevie,” his nurse said, and put a
large absorbent cloth—it might have been a diaper—under my head, so that my cheek rested on it when I lay back down. I should have guessed that something was rotten in
Denmark. Who knows, maybe I did.

There was a sharp smell of alcohol. A clank as the ear doctor opened his sterilizer. I saw the needle in his hand—it looked as long as the ruler in my school pencil-box—and tensed. The ear doctor smiled reassuringly and spoke the lie for which doctors should be immediately jailed (time of incarceration to be doubled when the lie is told to a child):
“Relax, Stevie, this won’t hurt.” I believed him.

He slid the needle into my ear and punctured my eardrum with it. The pain was beyond anything I have ever felt since—the only thing close was the first month of recovery
after being struck by a van in the summer of 1999. That pain was longer in duration but not so intense. The puncturing of
my eardrum was pain beyond the world. I screamed. There was a sound inside my head—a loud kissing sound. Hot fluid
ran out of my ear—it was as if I had started to cry out of the wrong hole. God knows I was crying enough out of the right ones by then. I raised my streaming face and looked unbelieving at the ear doctor and the ear doctor’s nurse. Then I looked at the cloth the nurse had spread over the top third of
the exam table. It had a big wet patch on it. There were fine tendrils of yellow pus on it as well.

“There,” the ear doctor said, patting my shoulder. “You were very brave, Stevie, and it’s all over."

>>6915090
the canon isn't created by the public or in line w/ public taste and never will be. Other writers, critics, scholars, publishers.

for the other fellow, if you really think books + time = literature, check out best seller lists from early 20th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_lists_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States

All forgotten.

>>6913393
I concur that the fifth and sixth DT weren't up to par, but i think the last one is good again. Haven0t got around to reading the wind through the keyhole.
I also enjoyed The green mile, Firestarter, The Dead Zone and Desperation
And to a lesser extent, Cell

>>6915243
>look guys he breaks some of the rules we learned in English class!

If you had a million years, you could not write anything half as good as what you pasted.

>>6915274
>All forgotten.
Pop fiction's harshest critics will be forgotten much quicker. Fanboys will grow up to be the next scholars and prop up the crap. King's already on his way unfortunately.

>>6915527
Edmund Wilson is remembered. Unfortunately he's more remembered for poopooing on Kafka, Raymond Chandler, H. P. Lovecraft, and Tolkien.

>>6915204
Sorry but actually being a woman I can say with pretty sure accuracy that the way King portrays and writes his female characters is pretty unrealistic.

>>6913375
He's a sprinter, not a distance runner.

All his stuff starts out explosively strong and then turns to... poor or perfunctory.

But, do any authors consistently finish strong? Maybe all endings are just bad.

Good Stephen King books I have read recently:
11/22/63
The Drawing of the Three

>>6915803
So you agree that all females think the same and that knowing one is the same as knowing them all ? Nice.

>>6915817
I loved 11/22/63. Drawing of the Three was jarring to me because I fell in love with the first book but then the second was so drastically different. Have you read the rest of the DT books? I'm on 6 and I've gone from adoring to ambivalent.

>>6915817
>But, do any authors consistently finish strong? Maybe all endings are just bad.

Kurt Vonnegut

>>6915825
You realize this is a complete paradox as your assumption that King writes female characters accurately could be refuted with the exact same statement.

>>6915840

Who does have an accurate portrayal? What are women really?

I mean there are differences certainly, but these seem mostly cultural. I feel kind of asinine writing female characters, as I know zero women at the moment, but conversely, this could be a benefit. I won't be writing the absurd caricatures that women my age tend to be.

>>6915827
I also enjoyed the Gunslinger, but it seemed hammy, kitschy, and cheaply vague when I read it recently. Also, knowing how poorly the rest of the series delivers on its world-building potential spoils it for me.

Roland being a "fish out of water" in the modern world is a really rich dramatic and comedic device in the Drawing of The Three and I always enjoy reading it for that reason. I think King does reality better than fantasy. Magical realism always works best for him, and it works in the Drawing of the Three.

The Wasteland seems too spare and slipshod, like the Gunslinger, and I think it's where the series runs aground. Fantasy needs strong forethought and structure, and King tries to do it off the cuff, so everything is hazy so he can avoid writing himself into a corner. That's my theory, anyway.

What I've heard about the series past book 4 makes me uninterested in it. The ending seems appropriate, though, so at least he got that right.

>>6915858
I wouldn't mind if King had women the way he writes them, if he didn't do it every single time. That's the part I take issue with.

>>6915840
>as your assumption that King writes female characters accurately

I'm not that other poster. And actually, there's no real paradox, females characters that are not unrealistic and cliche aren't that common in contemporary fiction, it's enough that a female character sounds like a well-fleshed out human being (like the people in see regularly irl) to be a real improvement. So in that sense King can be called a god of female characters, because he's among the extremely rare that doesn't fuck them up horribly.

Or it might just be than King's female characters can be interesting instead of absolutely ininteresting, which is good in itself.

I can't comment on the accuracy part however, merely on the verisimilitude part.

>>6913466
dubs of truth

What does lit think of Pet Sematary?

>>6916709
Scared the living shit outta me. I got to the point where Louis opens up his son's casket and had to put the book down for two weeks.

Can we all agree Nick Andros is the most based King character?

>>6913375

No, The Shining sucks. It's a generic haunted house story.

I don't like his attitude as an author, so I don't read his works on principle. They seem pretty pulpy anyways.

Value is subjective. There is no way to objectively assess or quantify the value in a piece of literature.

The high/low dichotomoy is a falsehood. Critics are nudist emperors.

You'd rather use the media you consume as a means to create an identity for yourself than actually derive enjoyment from it.

Hopefully the kool-aid tastes a little more bitter now

Is dreamcatcher good?

>>6918658
You obviously didn't read it. The Shining is more about addiction and fate than a haunted house.
>>6918756
It's alright, not one of his betters though. Apparently he was wonked out on pain meds when he wrote it.

>>6913375
LOOKS LIKE CHARLES LE V

I love on writing. Great memoir.

>>6918639

Laws, yes.

>>6913375
>>6913393
>>6915286
>>6913420
>>6913423
>>6913581
>>6913950
>>6914560

Yes to all of these.
"It" especially

>>6915124
So just how real women are then?


>>6913518
I agree with this.
I think just his sheer size of work and the fact that they also turned most of his books into TV-movies or movies adds to it as well.


>>6913678
sadly I agree, I read most of his stuff as a teenager and enjoyed it. He got me more interested in reading at a young age which is cool. But, He's not what I would consider a great author now. He has his tropes and he is entertaining and has a few good stories but

biggest disappointments
>Doctor sleep
>The wind threw the keyhole
>the 7th dark tower

>>6914675
lot of really good points

I hate when king tries to be funny. He has to be one of the unfunniest motherfucking writers on the earth...but he just keeps trying.

>>6913393
the stand is awful

>>6918687
>King fan spouts platitudes

more news at 11

>>6913375
so, I ended up fucking one of my neighbors from my apartment building. we didn't really know each other but had been around the building for some years, enough to "know" that we were reputable enough to pay rent and not be rude and disruptive. she was about my age and not what I would call pretty, but alright-looking. she was good at sex, though. the initial hook-up involved both of us already being tipsy and me saying "hi" in the parking lot, her getting very friendly very fast, going to my apartment and getting blown on my couch.

a day or two later, when we were both sober, I was like "I'm not trying to get involved but seems to me we've got all the makings for a good no-strings-attached hook-up situation if you're down." she said yes but it was more-and-more obvious that she needed the person she was fucking to be a boyfriend.

we always went to my apartment, there was always some little push-back to going to her spot even though I was the one with a roommate. but one night he had someone over, so baby, if we're gonna fuck, it's gotta be your place. she hemmed and hawed. she wanted the D but was like "my bedroom is off-limits." Ooow-kayyyyyeeee, so… no?
"Are you alright with the couch"
"Ya."
So we go over. The apartments in our building are fucking small, and her tiny-assed living room is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. "Oh, cool," I'm thinking, so I start trainspotting her books. Hardback editions of every single Stephen King book ever written. For real. Maybe a single shelf of random stuff. Despite being from New Mexico and now we're in the South, she informs me of her goal to move up to Maine or New Hampshire or wherever because the King books are all set up there.

It was our last hook-up.

Who knows what the hell was up with her bedroom.

Some of king's work really sucks, The Stand comes to mind. Some of his stuff is really brilliant though, like It.

Shakespeare wrote over a hundred plays, you've only heard of a dozen of them. Melville wrote a dozen novels, you've only heard of one. Dickens wrote over thirty, you've heard of a handful. Poe wrote hundreds of poems and short stories, you've heard of maybe 10. Why? Because all those other works of theirs sucked.

It's pretty common for great writers to produce shit, and a lot of it. A hundred years from now, I'm sure nobody will even know about King's shittier work and focus on the good ones.

>>6922379
Wtf Shakespeare didn't write 100 plays what u smoking?

>>6922557
what made you think that each of the bard's plays has survived?

>>6922329

I actually thought you were posting a Stephen King excerpt. I was getting ready for a big reveal of something seriously fucked up in her bedroom.

>>6913375
He sells some of his short stories for 1$ so young filmmakers can shoot movies out of them, and that's pretty awesome. They end up almost universally shit, but it's a great idea all the same.

His most underrated works:
The Dead Zone
Eyes of the Dragon

>>6922639
Fucking history you stupid cunt. There are only a handful of his works that are lost, like Love's Labour Won.

>>6922672
>There are only a handful of his works that are lost
source? Does this mrs.History you're dating there teach at a community college?

>>6922379
>>6922639
>>6922688


This thread took a turn for the unexpected

>>6922667
>I was getting ready for a big reveal of something seriously fucked up in her bedroom.

exactly.

had to cut that bitch off.

>>6922379
Stephen King isn't remotely close to Shakespeare. King will be forgotten entirely.

>>6913375
The Shining sucked pretty bad tbh, even as a 16yr old I could see that.

>>6923245
No, he's not close to Shakespeare in terms of skill. I was just making the comparison that a lot of great writers wrote shit too.

King won't be forgotten either, nothing is forgotten anymore.

>>6923484
Especially this thread

King is like the Pink Floyd of the book world. Everybody seems to like him, but i just dont see the appeal. Tried to like him but cant bring myself to finish any of his writings.
Clive Barker is infinitely better.

Saved again

>>6925679
tbh I don't think it's because King is shit, which he definitely is, but more that you're just fucking stupid

>me: so what do you read?
>them: Oh just Stephan King

Every fucking time

>>6914800
he probably meant his works aren't supposed to be rated for their literary merit but instead as some plot based novel read for entertainment.