Posted on 07/09/2022 7:19:20 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
The Ministry of Truth pipeline has this type of crap all over social media.
Our populace is hugely divorced from reality.
I found them to be light reading and rather entertaining but not "scary" even though King was billed as a horror writer.
I think "Christine" was the last book I read of his in my youth. I then spent a few decades devouring other books, both fiction and non-fiction.
About 10 years ago I decided to re-read "The Stand" on a whim. The uncut edition. I was immediately struck by the formulaic writing and cringeworthy prose. It was not as satisfying read as it was when I was 17. However I checked out a later work ("Under The Dome") to see if King's writing style had progressed. It hadn't.
I realized then that I had outgrown Stephen King, probably in the same way that many young adults of today eventually outgrow Harry Potter. I won't say he's a bad writer or that he can't weave a decent story but there's so much better out there.
I agree with you on Ken Follett. He is one of the best of the contemporary writers.
Yeah, love Follett and Clancy. Neal Stevenson and Daniel Suarez for scifi. The Reacher books that are actually by Lee Child. I hear the news ones are crap. Michener.
The Dome sucked.
I was horrified that I was reading it. Not sure that counts.
Langoliers had to be his weirdest (at least to someone who hasn’t read many of his stories).
I don’t believe King wrote all those books. Ghost writer.
His books range from pure genius to pure crap, his personal opinions seldom rise above the crap category, but he has done some good things. He probably thinks my opinions are crap too, but that’s America. Or used to be.
King has written of his severe drinking problem at this time, stating that he was drunk while delivering the eulogy at his mother’s funeral.
King’s addictions to alcohol and other drugs were so serious during the 1980s that, as he acknowledged in On Writing in 2000, he can barely remember writing Cujo.
Shortly after the novel’s publication, King’s family and friends staged an intervention, dumping on the rug in front of him evidence of his addictions taken from his office, including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, Robitussin, and mouthwash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King
Dean Koontz!
Stephen King? The over-rated scary book guy? All he seems to do is find a new way to package Hillary Clinton-scale evil into different formats and keep selling to his fans.
Why would this be a problem if true? Liberals demand and require registering to exercise our second amendment rights why not the first amendment?
King is a nut. The title of his next book. Most fitting.
Brain freeze from too much Maine cold air.
Brain dead as a human being.
He is CRA CRA.
“Michener.”
In my opinion, a vastly over-rated writer. His early stuff wasn’t bad (”Bridges at Toko Ri”), but his later stuff was just awful. He fell in love with DETAIL, which is the death knell for a fiction writer. He forgot Fiction 101: SHOW, don’t TELL.
“The Drifters” showed some promise, but never attained it.
Leon Uris was better. So was Herman Wouk. Even Arthur Hailey was a better story teller. Again, in my opinion.
I actually don’t mind a really detailed style. I do like Uris & Wouk, Haley not so much. Neal Stephenson is kind of a maximalist and does a lot of (to me) hilarious hyperbole.
“I actually don’t mind a really detailed style. I do like Uris & Wouk, Haley not so much. Neal Stephenson is kind of a maximalist and does a lot of (to me) hilarious hyperbole.”
Arthur Hailey wrote some good stories: “Airport;” “Hotel;” “Overload;” “Detective;” just to name a few. He’s not what I’d call Top Shelf; but he tells a good story; which, in the final analysis, is what one would want if one is seeking entertainment. His characters are well-developed and believable, unlike many other contemporary writers.
There was another writer I liked, but she died not too long ago: Mo Hayder. Very dark stories; but very well-written.
“I actually don’t mind a really detailed style.”
Oh, I don’t mind detail; but excessive detail is off-putting. That’s my gripe about Michener; he fell in love with detail, as if to say, “Hey! Look at me! Look at all the stuff I know!” He seems not to care that it detracts from a story. That’s one of my pet peeves with “literary” magazines: The focus is all on style, not substance.
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