Apparently this year marks 50 years since the publication of Carrie kickstarted Mr K’s career. Not bad for a book that, like several of Richard Thompson’s finest songs – his wife dug out of the waste paper bin. Not bad for a writer who once self-effacingly referred to his ouevre as being the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries”.
While it’s true that I’ve ever re-read one of his books, it’s equally true that I’ve never struggled to finish one either.
Given the vast number of best sellers he’s written, it’s almost impossible to pick out a favorite. From his early years, I’d probably go for the expanded version of The Stand while from his more recent work, it would probably be Billy Summers
The elephant* in the room is, of course, a well-known AWer – no name, no pack drill – who regularly’ carps that SK has plagiarized at least one of his own books.
While a cursory glimpse at both writers work will show certain commonalities (the shared use of words like ‘are’, ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘and’ and ‘but’), this is one literary spat I think it best for us to steer well clear of
* Spot the subtle Thai reference
At the end of the new not-as-good-as-the-film Ripley series, Tom Ripley changes his name to “Timothy Fanshaw.” Coincidence?
This response is ironic.
I’ve just got out of bed, in a panic sweat that I may well have misread Jaygee’s comment entirely. I’ve missed the edit window, so – you have the benefit of doubt and my apologies, Jaygee. I’ve asked the mods to delete my comment.
It takes a big man to say sorry. It takes an even bigger man to give a giraffe a haircut.
(plagiarised joke)
Anyone who fancies doing a spot of writing, his Danse Macabre is as good a primer as exists.
If you want an actual writing primer, try his On Writing, which I published in the UK, somewhat to my surprise. His regular publishers didn’t want it. The tone is pretty robust.
“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.”
It’s also a memoir of his early years and early writing years:
“In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.”
On Writing is what I recommend to every person who says “I think I have a novel in me”
When I meet such people, I always remember the famous Private Eye cartoon and say “neither do I”
True although these days self-publishing has changed the game. I have a friend who has written 3 thrillers with total sales of over a thousand. They are absolutely terrible, awful beyond belief but he’s convinced his trilogy will soon be picked up by TV and then onto Hollywood. He’s already written the screenplay for the first movie – who knows, he’s quite possibly right?
Agree re the self-publishing, although 1,000 sales is a heck of a lot more than I managed with my own effort a few years back.
Friend is very good at promoting via the internet – not quite sure how he does that but 1000 is 994 more than I ever managed
The Blair Witch Project was successfully promoted and marketed on the Internet, alas the film didn’t live up to the hype.
Sometimes, success is down to dumb luck – Bouquet of Barbed Wire sank without trace when it came out.
Then, a couple of years later, a TV producer picked up a copy in a second- hand bookshop and it became a TV series and best-seller in quick succession
Big fan. ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand and Pet Sematary from his Imperial phase, along with the Different Seasons collection. Perhaps Gerald’s Game too. More recently The Institute zips along nicely.
He’s done some belting shorter works too: Gingerbread Girl and most of the Full Dark, No Stars collection.
Basically when he keeps to human evil rather than ghosties or aliens he is far more effective.
Are you sure his wife didn’t dig it out of a bookshop? Seems to be where he gets his “ideas”.
Any examples?
We’re discussing Stephen King, not Bob Dylan.
I’m a big fan. I get frustrated when people just refer to him as a horror writer. Yes of course that’s how it started but he has evolved to be simply one of the finest authors around. His depiction of small town America and the flawed characters that live there is superb. Maybe the standard has slipped of late but as @jaygee mentioned they are never less than readable.
Off the top of my head favourites would be The Stand (of course), It, 11.22.63 and The Green Mile. More obscure ones that have stuck with me are From A Buick 8 and Hearts in Atlantis.
Another vote for The Stand and Billy Summers. Also The Tommyknockers is one I always liked, and the Dark Tower series, although at times it got a bit too convoluted. Of the short story collections I have a soft spot for the relatively early Skeleton Crew.
I used to, 30 years ag, hoover up everything he wrote, including his non-fiction musings, concurring with @mikethep around On Writing. But, say around 1994, I realised he seemed to write almost on automatic pilot, if without satnav, hence the interminable length of his books, trying to wriggle his way to an ending. When he learnt better, his short books were even worse, as they recycled the woes of the blocked writer.. Never picked one up since the turn of the century.
I read a few of his books, some years back, and came to the conclusion that he wasn’t bothered about endings or explanations. They rattled along like soap operas u til he got bored and then whatever the Big Bad is just stops. The End.
Not quite sure of the dates (turn of the century till around five years ago?) but definitely a period where he was coasting, churning them out. Since then, a real return to form.
Agree endings were never his strong point but mostly they suffice.
I think there was a definite downturn around the time of Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder. Pretty sure that was around the time his drinking had spiralled out of control
@jayjee: didn’t know that, but it coincides with when I got off the King bus. I have an interest in addictions and recovery. Has King ever referenced that in any of his writing? I would like to read that.
Lots of refs to AA and “meetings within meetings” in books around that time, IIRC. Always very upfront about it
Yes he’s very frank about the downward spiral in “On Writing”. Sounds grim.
I’m a huge fan of his short story collections, especially Night Shift and Skeleton Crew
Ah! So maybe On Writing isn’t the book he wrote about writing that I read. I’ll do a wiki and get back.
I’m back, it was Danse Macabre. I shall now search out On Writing and read it.
Do so! It’s an excellent blend of memoir and no-bullshit writing manual. I still enjoy dipping into it every now and again. The monster metaphors for his addiction, become clear. It’s interesting to see he was so fucked he had no memory of writing Cujo, for example.
Which is wild, because it’s a great novel and you can’t tell while reading it that he was f-ed up!
New collection of short stories – You Want it Darker – coming out in a couple of weeks
Some of my favourite King novels are:
The Dead Zone
The Shining
Duma Key
Revival
The Outsider
I also have a soft spot for The Tommyknockers, which many say is one of his worst, for some reason that I don’t quite understand. I think it’s – apart from being very entertaining – one of the best novels about addiction that I’ve ever read. No wonder King had an intervention soon after…
I’ve always thought of Greg Stillson in TDZ as being a sort of proto-Donald Trump.
Interesting that Martin Sheen who played him so convincingly in the movie later went on to play arguably the most decent and morally right-on President in TV or cinema history -0 Jed Bartlett in The West Wing
Huge fan here – he is by far my favourite author, and I don’t think he’s written a *really* bad book (although Dolores Claiborne was a bit meh, and I wouldn’t rush to read Carrie again).
I prefer his longer stuff where he really gets his teeth into small-town America and the characters have plenty of room to bounce off each other as things get progressively darker/stranger: The Stand (especially the uncut version), Needful Things, Insomnia, Desperation, etc.
Whatever the X factor is when it comes to writing, for me he has it in spades. For example, within a page of starting Doctor Sleep (his sequel to The Shining, and one of several books where his boozy past comes out), I was hooked and had to know what happened next. Whether it’s his use of language or his ability to create characters who appear quite normal but (we gradually discover) are quite mad underneath, I’ve never found another writer who can take me on such an interesting journey.
Are all his endings great? No (see Under the Dome for one of the best examples of me thinking “What?! Is that it?”). But there’s always enough there to keep me reading – UtD also contains one of his best scenes, featuring a character stuck in a house with a corpse. Chilling stuff.
He might not win a Booker Prize or be considered great literature – and he has written eloquently on both topics – but for me he is the, erm, king.
When at school/uni I read most of his 70s and 80s output before I reached the conclusion (true to most novels I’ve read from the past 40 years) that they would make far better short stories. Then I read his short story collections and realised that I just didn’t like his writing style. Why struggle writing a succinct and lean 20 page short story when you can vomit out 700 pages of over-descriptive prose? He also has that other problem shared by modern horror writers of interminable set-ups without the requisite pay-off at the end.
On the other hand, his novels can make OK films, as they are effectively trimmed into short stories and shorn of the verbal baggage.
For me, the set-ups are the pay-offs. Which is why I don’t mind if an ending now and then isn’t the greatest.
I can tolerate that to some extent. Lovecraft is the best example of this: he creates a genuinely creepy build-up and then blows it with some ludicrous attempt to describe the indescribable (I’m always reminded of Father Dougal’s description of the Beast of Craggy Island: “It has claws as big as cups and four ears, two for listening and two as sort of back-up ears, and it has a retractable leg and instead of a mouth it has four arses!”.)
M.R. James remains the master of restraint when it comes to this stuff, and his least-successful stories are the ones where he ventures too far into explanation.
For me, Algernon Blackwood is the master of the suggested horror. He very cleverly lets the reader fill in the blanks.
@Podicle
Best of the SK film adapts just has to be another SK’s take on The Shining.
What makes it such a captivating film is that rather than relying solely on the visceral shocks of King’s book, Kubrick ups the inner torments that lead to Jack Torrence’s inevitable mental and marital breakdowns. At the start of the book, JT was like King himself around that time, a heavy boozer/recovering alcoholic.
Ironically, given its status as one of the best horror movies of all time, King hated Kubrick’s adaptation. So much so that in the late 1990s he wrote and directed a version that he felt was truer to the spirit of his book. Needless to say it sank without trace.
He didn’t go into recovery until the mid-Eighties, so when he wrote The Shining he was right in the downward trajectory part of addiction.
I’m going to throw in The Body, an excellent novella that became the even better Rob Reiner movie Stand by Me.
It’s not horror, except the banality of evil in the book makes it one.
Yes, it’s one of the three classic novellas in Different Seasons, along with Apt Pupil and Shawshank.
The comments around SK film adaptations make me wince a little, as, apart from a small percentage, they have tended towards the schlockier end of interpreting to the letter. It is only when liberties are taken that they rise above gorebuster, which, unironically, is when King has no part in the screenplay. The Shining is, clearly the exemplar, to which I would add Stand By Me, as commented, and Carrie. And that’s probably it, altho I have a soft spot for the David Soul TVM of Salem’s Lot. My inclusion of Carrie, I guess, relies possibly in part the opening locker room sequence, being then of a formative age. Anyone commend any others?
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen it but Apt Pupil wasn’t bad
Adapts of SK books seem to fare a bit better as long-form TV rather than standalone movies – The recent 22/11/63 and Mr Mercedes were both reasonably enjoyable
I enjoyed The Outsider from a few years ago. I think it was HBO
I rather enjoyed Misery, although it was {checks Wikipedia} nearly 35 years ago.
I haven’t ready any of his books but I’ll tell you this. The scene in the TV movie of Salems Lot where Mr Barlow visits the bloke in jail scared the hell out of me. Must have been early teens when I saw it.
That would have explained Bill Roache’s lengthy mid-70s sabbatical from Corrie
The scene in Carrie at the grave is one of the great surprises in Horror movies. Another example is the scene with John Hurt in Alien. But that one is too famous now. The Carrie scene is still surely making people jump out of their seats today.
Arguably Brian De Palma’s finest moment.
What? Surely after the masterpiece that is Sean Connery’s Oscar winning performance in The Untouchables.
“He pullsh a knife” etc etc
That’s not even Sean Connery’s finesht moment. That particular honor would go to his unforgettable Russian submarine captain in Hunt for Red October, tuhvarisssssh
In the late 90s I was in a train in Spain (probably on the plain) and they were playing Dragonheart. (They used to play films on the trains in Spain, it was very civilised). What I remember was the actor who was dubbing Sean Connery into Spanish was doing an impersonation down to the pronunciation of the letter s: “Shi! Tienesh que matarme!!”
Similarly, I saw the French dub of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.
Even before his face appeared on screen, I w2as confident that it was going to be Shir Sean.
Aside from the “gob-smacking” number of books he writes (and indeed sells), the other “remarkable” thing about SK is the number of other authors’ books whose covers are graced by blurbs bearing his name.
Despite being semi-retired, everyday hassles mean I struggle to read one a week these days and haven’t found time to write a word of my new magnum opus for more than a month
I kept thinking he must be getting paid for all these cover recommendations he does then “He’s worth roughly 98 million squillion dollars”.
I write, mainly for my own pleasure, but one rule I have is that if I’m really deep into a plot I don’t read anything else because however hard I try, similar plotlines etc creep in.
Hold on, hold on – is that what happened with HP????
Oh and BTW his latest, Holly, is a belter.
The only King book I’ve read is Elevation, and I’m not likely to read another. He has a yooooge following, says the right things on social media (anti-Trumper), and seems well-liked as well as admired for his writing skills. He’s basically a corporation. You can’t get more successful than he is at writing books, and he’s obviously damn good at it – not a hack success like Dan Brown, but a real writer. This corporate profile does not fit with plagiarism. He can clearly come up with his own ideas, but in this instance he came up with mine. Apparently there have been other accusations of plagiarism from other invisibly small and forgotten writers. I get it – ideas and how they’re presented (in terms of narrative) are not anybody’s property – legally speaking – and pursuing copyright infringement through the courts is both expensive and ultimately futile; how can damages, if any, be assessed? I haven’t suffered any material harm from his lifting my book. But it did give me a bitter ache for a while. The feeling of coming home to find the house burgled, sorta kinda. But I was lucky to get published at all. Lucky to get a movie deal even if it went nowhere (the destination of most movie deals). That little book materially changed my life, for the better.
But back to Stephen King; I see a different person to the millions who admire him. But I don’t think he can be any happier than I am.
Well said Sir. I feel a slight twinge of guilt for bringing it to your attention, sorry about that.
Nooooo! Thank you very much. Somebody would have told me sooner or later.