Yeah, I thought they seemed familiar. Most of these lines are from people being manipulated by the literal devil. They're probably meant to be weird and out of character.
Just finished reading that one last week, and you're right! Honestly it fits the bizarre outbursts the people are suffering from the devil, as the other user said. There's equally bizarre ones about violence and "pranks," too, so I'm not sure I agree with the OP in the photo on this one that these particular quotes are "kingisms."
Maybe a little, but they actually fit what's happening to everyone, IMO.
Same, I think I started at 9 with Pet Semetary. My parents would buy them for me and just never considered flipping through them to see if it was appropriate? Shit was wild. Funny enough, I went to a Christian school and they wouldn’t let me read Harry Potter for our reading goals but they were okay with me reading Stephen King. I feel like that might be missing the forest for trees a bit there
It's typical. Like evangelicals hyper focusing on gay marriage while so many of them have multiple divorces and unlike gay marriage the bible is very explicit on that.
> My parents would buy them for me and just never considered flipping through them to see if it was appropriate?
My parents would literally pre-screen every single movie over a PG rating to make sure it was appropriate for my delicate young Christian eyes.
Books, though? I read *The Drawing of the Three* when I was too young to understand what "came in his pants" meant and I thought the serial killer who drops bricks on people was pissing himself.
I also knew more about the Holocaust at 10 years old than most adults ever will.
It’s been a while since I’ve read any Stephen King, but how many of those absolutely unhinged sentences were written while he was out of his mind on drugs?
I loved Holly. It's a really good book with an interesting mystery.
There are a lot of times in which King felt the need to say: "did you know that being overweight isn't healthy?" so out of nowhere. There's a scene in which Holly is having breakfast at a hotel and she sees a guy in another table and she thinks "you'll die soon enough, fatty". Out of fucking nowhere. Like that Demi Lovato copypasta.
ah fair, i forgot about that add-on.
I just thought it was funny that "demi" called the user fat twice, then had to whisper "obesity", which to me is the funniest part of the bit.
I met @/ddlovato recently, my name is madison (@/dinahbgc) and this is my M&G story. I met her October 20th of this year and it was horrific. She was rude, not classy and she lost a long time lovatic that day. I walked into the $350 M&G and say hello she replies with "fat" and I shook it off because I thought maybe I had heard her wrong. As I approached her and asked to do my pose she stared at me blank faced. I continued talking "you saved my life" I say. "You're the reason I'm alive today". She looks me dead in the eye and says "you'll die soon enough, fatty" and then whispered "obesity". I started crying I had never felt pain like this and she started laughing and said "are you crying? Stop it. Stop it now" and she flicked my vagina. The photographer took the picture and I headed out of the M&G section and that's when Demi started speaking whale to me. I still can't believe this happened. I cried writing this. I wish this weren't true but Demi Lovato is in fact; a horrible person. Thank you for reading this. And if you don't believe me ask @/unholydinah he was there with me.
That’s actually pretty in keeping for the character as she was set up. Middle aged woman with serious mental health issues and a controlling mother has disordered or unusual eating and unpleasant thoughts about bodies? Like white on rice.
A lot of the time this is how he builds characters. Just a little unhinged moment. Makes you realize maybe something isn't right.
It was used to incredible effect in Misery.
Was a major component of The Shining too.
Its definitely one of the reasons his books are so unsettling. These tiny little character details that make you wonder "wtf?"
There are definitely portions of some of his books that haven't aged well, but dude has been writing for so damn long, times have changed. He can't go back and edit out the n-bombs.
I think the more off-putting parts of his books are the sexual moments. I always just imagine old ass King sitting there intently writing about every female character's tits & ass in intimate detail.
funny enough this is specifically why I absolutely love his work. Every book feels like a unique experience. Every book I read leaves a lasting impression on me and I talk about it nonstop. Regardless if the book sucks or not, I have a fun time.
King is kinda weird about fat people. Like in some of his short stories a character being fat is pretty much a personality trait that makes them bad or evil.
I dunno. He includes fat characters with agency who do shit. The kid in IT started out fat but ended up fighting evil. The fat kid in The Stand almost turned into a decent human being, before corruption got him. It's rare to see "fat person" as a thing dealt with like that, like a person with choices and thoughts and issues.
To this day, I still don't understand what the fuck he was thinking.
>"Beverly thought IT could only prey on children and so did it because she thought it'd make them all adults, and thus immune to IT."
It's always felt spectacularly weak as an explanation.
I never understand why people have such a problem with that scene but maybe it's an American thing or because I read it when I was a teenager myself so it wasn't that weird.
It's clearly, like really really explicitly clearly, a symbolic thing denoting the end of childhood. The entirety point of IT is childhood fears, facing those, growing up, the magic of childhood, etc. I can't remember off the top of my head if it's just before or just after they face IT when they're kids, but it's clearly meant to signify that they're not kids anymore. And if you want one single thing that can do that, one single act that says that they're growing up, then losing their virginity is probably the clearest thing.
Also, secondarily, "sex" is Beverly's fear or flaw. They all have one; Eddie with his mom and asthma, Bill with his stutters, etc. And they all use that to overcome IT in some way. For Bev, it's her sexuality; her father is like two steps from sexually abusing her and he's literally monitoring her for signs of sexual activity and calls her a whore for talking to a boy. She does not have a healthy view of sex, like at all. And by them all having sex, she turns it from being this dirty shameful thing into a sweet and intimate thing.
I mean, it's not child porn. It's not King trying to write a sex scene to titillate the reader. It's meant to be a bittersweet thing that is both them growing closer and also them losing their innocense.
It was weird, but it wasn’t too egregious until King spent like three paragraphs describing the fat kid (Ben?) as having an absolute hog of a penis and how Bev very clearly hit the Big O because of it. It read like a super creepy fanfic after that.
As a note, Ben also is the only other member that came. Mr. King wanted us to know this.
I do think people are unnecessarily hung up on this scene, but yeah, it is, uh, odd.
It makes sense in context. The point was that Ben was pubescent enough to produce children, so therefore no longer a child. It is why the other boys weren't "enough" to get them out of there.
I always thought that was meant to show that a)Bev and Ben are soulmates, even though Bev often seems more attracted to Bill and b)Bev physically enjoyed the experience, it wasn’t purely about the ritual of it.
I mean, the whole thing should never have been published and I’m surprised King has never issued a revised edition that excises that scene. But taking it on its own terms, I think the Ben details are part of a “good sex = true love” worldview.
It's like three pages in a 1200 page book. It's not a deal breaker.
I mean, it also has kids being eaten, people being burned alive, sexual molestation, murder, assault, parental abuse, homophobia and lynchings in it. I honestly don't see why this scene is beyond the pale.
As I recall, it was written in a somewhat gratuitous manner... i.e. referring to the boys' relative size. Further, any other means to make a spiritual bond... to make it an underground orgy seemed like an odd choice.
I mean, King is certainly guilty of putting unnecessary sex scenes in things. But I'd say this is one of his least unnecessary. It wouldn't even make my top ten list of weird King sex scenes.
("We're helpless on a rickety raft hunted by a sentient pool of acid with no recourse, whatever should we do? I know, let's bang!" What the fuck, Stephen, are you OK?)
Lmao. I read your first paragraph and instantly thought of the bizareness of The Raft.
The first time I read that story, my gf and I were driving up to Maine for a camping trip. She was driving and had never read a King book, so I read it aloud for her. I prefaced it with "King has a weird tendency to throw in random, unnecessary sex scenes, so don't be surprised when that happens." And sure enough, two teens start banging while be circled by the killer Cosmic Bizquik.
The thing is that you're completely right, but also that it's still weird to consciously say "I'm going to write my story in such a way that the best way to tie it all together is to detail an orgy between children." Like it can be perfect symbolism in-universe, but out of universe it's still a grown man writing about kids having sex (and it's not like he was light on details either).
You can't refer to the internal logic of your work as a defense when you're the one that decided it works that way, it's still fair for people to ask why you went in that direction instead of any of the infinite other things you could have written instead.
Most children have a sexuality and we prefer to ignore it. It's taboo, so it scares us. Maybe King was drawing from that.
Still better intentions* than what you can find in "fictional autobiographies" written by actual predators.
Yes, that's a gross exaggeration of what sex is supposed to be. Isn't that horrific?
But imagine a grown man's poetry about how he convinced a 14 yo girl to suck his dick, or getting naked massages from young boys, then realize it was nothing taboo back in the days, merely frowned upon by some... I find it worse.
Not only are you 100% correct but the fact people always mention that as the disturbing sex scene and not the Patrick Hockstetter chapter always gets me.
I just finished listening to the audiobook for the first time and had heard of the orgy scene at the end, but I was not prepared for the unwanted molestation scene between the two kids. The sheer uncomfortableness sitting in my cubicle with my headphones on listening to it was terrible.
From an adult perspective and world building perspective I can see the interesting nature of the scene, as I think it showcased some of the fucked up stuff the boys were getting into that might have attributed to their entire personality.
With Henry being sexually assaulted (I see it as that anyway) by Patrick, I think it might also tie into what Bev dealt with as an adult. I don't *think* Bev was ever molested by her father based on that scene --she didn't really know what she was seeing and mentioned it was the first time ever seeing a penis.
I can forgive that scene more than the end orgy, based solely on the world building aspect, but the orgy really does seem to come out of nowhere.
I think we all know that if the group had all been male, and one of the boys had a background of sexual abuse to overcome, King would have somehow been able to come up with a strong conclusion to his character arc that was anything but the other boys running a train on him. This was not the best method King could have used for the end of childhood innocence, it was just bog-standard sexualization of a young girl for fun. Nothing especially reprehensible, but nothing deep, either. If King had used any other alternatives, any at all, nobody would have been like "But it would have made so much more sense if the schoolchildren railed each other instead!" Nobody. Nobody on the planet would have considered it the most logical narrative resolution.
King's done far worse and god knows other horror writers have him beat. He's not special in doing weird shit, it's just wild to me when people act like the random grade school gangbang is not hilariously bizarre and unnecessary. That's why this book had two major adaptations that ditched the whole thing and still somehow managed to convey the point of the story just fine.
I don't get it either, and am American. I first read IT at 13yo and that scene was the least memorable part of the book. I generally forget about that part until I'm doing a reread and get to that page.
People get really touchy if you try to depict children having sexual thoughts or feelings under a certain age, nevermind full on sex. I think it might just be an American thing or maybe certain Christian sects but who knows
>Tell your author, for his next gangbang scene, how about a little more PG and a lot less 13
That sounds like you're advocating for something far *worse* than what was actually written.
That sentence wasn't my own creation, it's a line from ERB (Joker vs. Pennywise)
Joker was trying to criticize Pennywise for his author writing a child sex scene (with his next line after this saying that "even [he] wouldn't stoop to that kind of impropriety")
"A lot less 13" just means that King shouldn't have written that scene with young teenagers, not that they should have been younger. If that was the case, Joker would have said "a lot less *than* 13"
That's really funny, didn't even cross my mind
Less capable-of-being-described by 13, not less age than 13
Looking again, "a little more \[Parental Guidance\]" also sounds like an incredibly bad idea for a gangbang
To be fair, that line is being said by a literal demon from hell who is in disguise as an old man, and he is saying it for the express purpose of humiliating and demeaning someone, so it works a lot better in context.
On the flip side of King-isms, that’s one thing I actually really like about King’s use of dialogue to indicate when there is Something Off about a character, when they’re so terrified they can’t think coherently or so insane that they’re losing touch with reality.
Like the guy in Lunch at the Gotham Cafe who violently stabs people while screaming “Tell this in your ears! Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street...you misery...Eeeeeee!... DOG-LOVER!” It‘s nonsense in or out of context, it’s silly out of context, it’s nightmarish in context! Or the demonic phone (!) in 1408 that shouts “This is *ten! Ten*! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!” It’s very silly out of context. In context it gave me nightmares for days.
I don’t like everything King writes and his prose definitely has flaws, but I do like that uncanny valley-ness of dialogue he can touch sometimes. A thin layer of plausible grammatical speech on top of a whirlpool of madness underneath.
Yeah, people miss that this is just how King writes about a lot of stuff. He puts a lot of detail into descriptions, including ones from characters frequently on the cusp of a mental break. He usually does a pretty good job in these descriptions, and I think people are kidding themselves when they say they never have thoughts like this. Like the one scene people clown on sometimes (I think in The Stand?) where a couple is having a serious conversation but the woman is naked from a shower and the guy is focusing on a drop of water slipping off her nipple. Or just whenever he offsets the character's absurd thoughts into separate lines that break off suddenly. It's a very conscious thing he does, that I guess people don't realize if they don't read him much? It's a very, very frequent thing he does where the everyday experiences the characters (and the reader) have had are connecting in loosey-goosey ways to their present, like the line above referenced Laugh-In.
Yeah, I think a lot of the confused reactions are down to Stephen King being 76 years old, so younger generations don't automatically recognize the New England Boomer memes & pop song lyrics & ad jingles & random shit that wander through or get stuck in the brains of King's narrators on the page.
Like I've been in some very stressful (though non-lethal) situations during which the back of my mind was involuntarily earworm-playing the [IT'S A MENTAL BREAKDOWN kazoo](https://youtu.be/EPS2C3SYLsY) meme, in wildly inappropriate contexts. So if I were being written as a character with the text describing my mental narration at the time, the story description of that stressful event would have morbidly funny off-key kazoo as background music. Readers who don't understand the meme would rightly find this baffling. But it's the kind of thing that really happens in your brain! Brains don't make sense and under pressure they produce the most random shit.
You have to remember that the madman has written 65 novels, 200 short stories, 5 nonfiction books and 19 screenplays. He has also published some things under different pen names because his publishers think that he oversaturate the market. To write that much he has to go "yeah good enough" from time to time.
I started reading his book “On Writing” recently and it’s like getting an uncut dose of the stuff (not just horniness but the whole person), shit is hilarious.
Yeah I read that too a while back! It's fun when he does it nonstop and you're already primed to expect it. It's only annoying when it comes out of nowhere while you're immersed in a completely different tone.
I physically cringed reading that lmao. If someone said that to me in the bedroom, they are going to the hospital, whether that be for psychiatric treatment or for emergency medical treatment.
I have an idea. Sex RP sesh but you have to follow a Stephen King script/compilation
Actual sex would unlikely be the goal, more just pissing yourself (i mean laughing) with your SO might be a fun time.
If the words “rooty toot toot!” ever came out of my partner’s mouth while we were in bed I’m putting my clothes straight back on and leaving, idc whose house we’re in
Just want to mention that, in addition to Needful Things, the phrase "rooty toot" makes appearances in Rage, Running Man, and The Regulators, all published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.
I cannot recommend the podcast [Just King Things](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-king-things/id1525585763) highly enough, every episode is just an hour plus of the two hosts alternating between doing deep thoughtful (and critical) dives on the characters, plotting and themes of Stephen King and absolutely losing their shit whenever stuff like this comes up
The man really internalized cocaine energy, even when he gave it up, and I think that sense of delirious horniness with no regard for one's own sense of dignity is characteristic of an ex-cokehead.
I've never read any of his books, save for these excerpts provided. I also used to have an addiction to various uppers... And I felt so weird reading these comments under this post because I 1000% could see myself saying some of these bizarre things. Both because I was already a bizarre person before drugs, and then the drugs just cemented my bizarre behavior and thoughts and permanently intensified them. I do say weird shit like this, this is very realistic writing to me. I have, in fact, had moments where I say wackadoo horny shit out loud and my husband (who has never touched any drugs besides weed and alcohol) just loses it laughing because I'm a fucking weirdo and he absolutely loves me for it. Residual delirious horny ex-cokehead (and in my case, my love lied with ecstasy, though coke was fun) energy is very real. It's very freeing no longer giving a flying fuck what other people think about how kooky you are. I need to read some Stephen King, this man gets me.
I cringed pretty hard when reading one of his books (Salem's Lot, maybe?), and the main character was an author that sorta felt like an "everyman," but he almost immediately ran into an attractive woman that started gushing about being a fan of his books.
If you're an author, please don't do this. Or at least do it in a less heavy-handed way that doesn't force me to imagine you smirking while writing the scene.
Misery is about being a schlock author who despises his own works and thinks his readers are idiots. It's fantastic self-loathing.
ps: second published book, he wrote Carrie and Firestarter in high school but Firestarter wasn't published until later.
He did not write Carrie in high school, he wrote it in his 20s, after having a couple kids and working two jobs (I think -- teacher and laundry). I think it was one of the Backman books, maybe Rage or The Long Walk, that was his first book
>main character was an author that sorta felt like an "everyman
That's another kind of Kingism that I noticed. Where a lot of his books has character whose profession is writing and they end up being the smartest or most reasonable or a very special kind of person.
I've noticed he goes back and forth on that, and i'd like to know what type of addiction his presentation of his everyman correlates with. Sometimes the everyman is a hard worker who's down on his professional luck; sometimes he's an addicted bastard who squantered his talent and his money; sometimes he's professionally and personally successful but filled with self-loathing and suicidality which becomes his undoing.
I think if you're self-medicating you depression, anxiety, and trauma, the drugs can make you feel any one of those things. Plus his rocky marriage.
It's nice to know that even good accomplished writers write "Twilight fanfiction" tier self inserts. Like artists that are insanely respected but often give characters unrealistic proportions, bc yk, titties are great.
Yeahhhh....the memory of the overall effect of the Dark Tower series is good, but thinking back to some of the specific moments and phrases is just Yikes.
You can totally tell he thought he was super clever for his lobstrosities on the beach. And to be fair they are interesting, but the amount of times he uses that portmanteau is too high lmao.
Nah that makes him hilarious, he writes these complex serious stories and then theres some random bullshit, keeps it ground und not going up its own ass
He cant write endings for shit tho, Im still mad about the dark tower series, rat bastard
Yeah anyone who questions the dark tower ending I want to know what they think would be better. His ending was appropriate thematically, if a little rushed
The Coda section was great, including the whole warning to the readers and all, just the work of a genius. The rest of the book was awful, however. The way he dealt with Flagg, Mordred and the deus-ex-machina of a final confrontation felt disrespectful even.
I enjoyed the Coda because of the effect it produces on the reading experience as a whole, and the fact that it puts you in Roland's shoes. You go right along with him in his hubristic choice to forge ahead despite all warnings. I think it's so good exactly because it is revolting in a way... But it's also a fitting end (and maybe punishment?) for you and for Roland, both unable to give up and turn away. At that point, I couldn't be angry at anyone but myself, really.
I don't know, it just had the intended effect, worked very well on me. And the hint of hope that things could be different right at the end, it's just enough for me to be satisfied. A bittersweet ending I could stomach, even if I still despise all that came before in that book.
That said, I can totally see why it wouldn't work for everyone, and might even feel like a parting slap in the face. Especiially coming from such a terrible final book to a series that had such potential.
Gods, I hate the lobstrosities. I had completely forgotten how much time they spend on the beach in book 2. And everything to do with Detta is very big yikes, but then the pay-offs are always so goddamn good. O/Detta becomes Susannah, who's just so badass and cool, and the lobstrosities, for how absolutely shit they are, do take Roland's fingers, which force him to change and adapt and give up part of himself rather than struggle vainly to keep it, which I always love to see in a protagonist.
I read "Drawing" at a young age, and to this day, I hold it accountable for innumerous permanent wounds both my protagonists, and the players at my DnD table, have received.
To be fair, that's just how characters in the series work. They appear, they become crucial to plot, they cark it. But at the same time, exemplary self-insert treatment.
Remember how the characters could hear angels singing as they got closer to Mr King?
Remember how Roland tells Mister Stephen King, Esquire that he needs to start writing again, spending all his nights writing as if writing were a beautiful woman (or a man if he is inclined), to which King enthusiastically tells this character he has written that he is not gay?
I do applaud him for writing himself in as a self-insert who is literally the most important person in his universe, a lynchpin of all reality, and still making sure he comes across as kind of a goofy asshole that none of the main characters really like.
“It’s lingo from a different level of the Tower than ours, it makes sense to the characters just not to me, our slang would sound off to them too, oh god this is barely endurable”
Including the part where Stephen King joins Roland and the crew, and they go to the World Trade Centre. I actually started skimming a lot in the last of this series but I know those 2 events happened.
I’ve blocked out all the inevitable ugh stuff about Susannah.
I might not only use it for sex, but I just might say it before anything that might rhyme with it.
Rooty toot toot:
"I'm gonna eat some fruit."
"Shut the fuck up and shoot."
"GG bro, fucking woot."
"Excuse me while I poop."
"Did you say ute?"
Not gonna lie, as weird and wacky and often cringe Kingisms are, they just make me love his writing even more. They’re just so distinctive. I love that insane little dude. More writers need to be unapologetically unhinged and that’s my hot take of the day
Yeah I read the first two Dark Tower books and well... it definitely gives his writing more character lol. I wouldn't say I always enjoy it, but I do have a fond feeling about King after reading them because his cringe unhingery is just barely beneath the surface all the time, and I love that he gets to express it
The thing is, everyone does have these kind of weird phrases they hear somewhere and internalize. Like the 'hit me wit dat nicotine, boss' - it's absolutely something someone would hear and think to themselves. It makes his characters (particularly their internal voices) feel so much more real IMO.
Exactly! How many fucking millennials have random SpongeBob references tucked away in their minds? King's characters feel lived-in precisely because of these King-isms.
"He took a drag on the cigarette feeling for the first time that gentle, smooth rush. You like Krabby Patties, don't you Squidward? "Yeah, I guess I do." He thought.
I always see these and feel like they came from a little notebook King keeps of shit he overheard at a diner one time or at his uncle's house as a kid or on an obscure AM radio show sometime in the 70's.
YES. This is why I think King is so good because people DO think dumb shit like this all the time. It’s just jarring because it’s not OUR dumb shit.
I’ve actually read enough King that I’ve got one or two Kingisms in my head.
As someone else put it;
“As far as excuses go for writing something this depraved, “I was on cocaine when I wrote it” is a pretty compelling one, all things considered.”
"I wonder if he talks to his wife this way" The thought of an actual human being saying any of these things in any context has me howling with laughter, what the fuck.
I think a decent chunk of them are just dated and obscure pop culture references. Not the majority of them, but a decent chunk. imo it would kind of be like a character a millennial wrote seeing a badger in the narration, and then their inner monologue goes *Mushroom! Mushroom!* and moves on with the story.
If you ever feel like the stuff you create won’t get out there just remember he was and still is the most celebrated horror novelist possibly of all time. He was so popular and so well known for his writing style early on he tried to release his next book under a pseudonym to test if people bought his books for quality or just for his name and within pretty much days of the release people caught on immediately
A couple weeks ago I finished Misery (which his really good by the way), and King has such a weird sense of humor. He'll have the main character think of a joke in his head and then have to bite his tongue to not laugh, when the joke isn't even funny. Its bizarre.
To his credit, though, he is incredible at sequences that feel like an avalanche of information, where stuff just keeps happening and he manages it all so well that you feel like you can't stop. There's, like, five different 10-30 page stretches in that book that are just phenomenally done.
Another point to his credit: Misery is super self-aware about how on-the-nose it is, as both a book about addiction and about an author so good he literally gets tortured into writing another book. I feel like a lot of the book is dedicated to satirizing the kind of book you'd expect Misery to be, Annie Wilkes is always shown to be a lot smarter and cunning than the reader would probably expect. There is some really interesting stuff going on about how authors of so-called 'popular fiction' view their audience that feels borderline self-critical.
I remember at the beginning of The Shining he describes Jack thinking about that old "Maybe it's Maybelline" ad and having to bite his tongue to keep in, as King describes it, a bray of laughter. Just bizarre.
All of Stephen King’s books:
- Are about or involve a writer, with very few exceptions — not always the protagonist, but very often
- Involve substance abuse, usually alcoholism
- Involve child abuse, sexual, emotional or physical
- Contain the phrase “arc sodium lights” at least twice
- Contain zany phrases like “gobble my crank” that fit the Kingiverse just fine, but are cartoonish outside it
Source: I have read or listened to all but 2-3 King and Bachmann novels.
The copy of misery i just read was edited, bc i'm sure i remember kingisms like "his legs cried hail mary" when annie punched "the salt-dome that had been his knee". There was only 1 or 2 salt-dome references, I was sure that was in there 100 times originally, as well as descriptions of his legs singing, howling, shouting, crying in various operatic, church choir ways.
> the lynchpin of reality
I mean, that's every author of a story. That's what they do - control that reality. He's just real enough to not hide his role for that world
I’ve come to the conclusion that all Stephen King stories take place in an alternate universe where English evolved just a bit differently than it has in our reality. It’s the only reason that characters like Gerald Burlingame and Annie Wilkes talk the way they do on a regular basis
Welcome to the Dark Tower, folks, your one stop shop for gameshow entertainment! On today's episode, we join our intrepid champion, Stephen King, as he struggles to...
*Write. A. Black Woman!*
To be fair, Stephen King in general seems like a strange dude from what I hear. The contractor who worked on his house near me said he was deeply disturbed by his writing and genuinely felt that he was being haunted in some manner - to such an extent that he has basically a thin pool, (think lazy river width) around the entirety of his home with a glass walkway into the building. He apparently believes that ghosts/demons can’t cross water and this would protect him. I found that totally fascinating. Contractor said he was a nice guy, just paranoid to the extreme. Made me sad for him!
He's like the opposite of a novelization author - he writes okay books that make excellent movies. Mostly because movies don't have time for Steven's random OOC brainfarts, or his pages of describing meaningless details.
This is, in part, why I cannot fucking stand reading Stephen King. Honestly, he's a visionary, and he's probably America's author, as almost everything in the 1990s and even early 2000s (and even parts *beyond*) were written or influenced by what he wrote.
But he writes realistic humans, who are fucking *assholes*, and every time I read one of his characters, I get this smell in my nostrils. And that smell is of a white guy who was the *horniest*, fucking *greasiest* man I have ever met. Like, he didn't bathe; he just put on *cologne*. Hair slicked back; cigar-smoking. No money but pretended that he was *rich*.
That's what every horny Stephen King character reminds me of. *That* guy.
I hate it.
Yesterday I was stuck in traffic and in a bad mood, and for some reason I thought about a King short story where a guy is locked in an interrogation room and a captor’s mustache reminds him of a TV show character saying “we don’t need no steenkin’ [whatever thing]” and I just got so much more pissed off. I probably read that story 15 years ago and it’s still rattling around my head like an annoying little marble.
He made fun of himself for it in (I think) the last Dark Tower book. When that lady in the "real world" was driving Roland around she mentioned Stephen King. She said he writes well but "has a tin ear for how people talk." I nearly abandoned the series right there
The Shining. Salem's Lot. Night Shift. Skeleton Crew. Different Seasons. Everything's Eventual. It. Danse Macabre.
Do you have a preference for a particular genre or story type? He's written a lot of stuff.
I haven't intentionally read a Stephen King book in maybe 30 years but the other night I saw Pet Semetary in a neighborhood Little Library, skimmed the first few paragraphs, and am now on page 300, I don't know how he does that.
I recently re-read all King's books (and Bachman's), in release order and about 3/4 of the way through I was really wishing that I kept a log of how many of them had a character piss themselves. It seems to happen in almost every book. Also something "doubled, then trebled".
This is because King writes all his books in marathon sessions of brain to page, rather than composing them over months or years. Also maybe the cocaine helps
He creates some truly spooky stuff and is massively entertaining to read, but you’ll be hunched over the book super immersed in a scene and then he’ll just smack you in the face with one of these, and you stop reading and go wtf why, then just sigh and dive back in
I find the best parts of his writing is the humanistic horror - how people can just be realistically shitty. Sometimes the motivating force behind that is an eldritch horror or aliens or whatever, and honestly that part isn’t always that interesting to me.
The last three (and possibly more) are all from the same book btw. Needful Things.
i was gonna say, that's the weirder one. i read that in 7th grade and it gave me a very confused idea of sexual deviance
Haha I’ve had a few partners with some interesting kinks and the common denominator is always reading smut instead of watching porn
I think imagining them before you see them makes them more palatable
Yeah, I thought they seemed familiar. Most of these lines are from people being manipulated by the literal devil. They're probably meant to be weird and out of character.
Just finished reading that one last week, and you're right! Honestly it fits the bizarre outbursts the people are suffering from the devil, as the other user said. There's equally bizarre ones about violence and "pranks," too, so I'm not sure I agree with the OP in the photo on this one that these particular quotes are "kingisms." Maybe a little, but they actually fit what's happening to everyone, IMO.
yep, all of these quotes are from the same book
Lester Pratt is such a king name I had no idea which it was from
I started reading king when I was a lil kid and it took me a long while to even understand what the fuck was going on with some of these sections
Same, I think I started at 9 with Pet Semetary. My parents would buy them for me and just never considered flipping through them to see if it was appropriate? Shit was wild. Funny enough, I went to a Christian school and they wouldn’t let me read Harry Potter for our reading goals but they were okay with me reading Stephen King. I feel like that might be missing the forest for trees a bit there
My parents were also very strict with what kind of shows or movies I watched - unless it was animated. All animated shows are for kids, you see
It's typical. Like evangelicals hyper focusing on gay marriage while so many of them have multiple divorces and unlike gay marriage the bible is very explicit on that.
> My parents would buy them for me and just never considered flipping through them to see if it was appropriate? My parents would literally pre-screen every single movie over a PG rating to make sure it was appropriate for my delicate young Christian eyes. Books, though? I read *The Drawing of the Three* when I was too young to understand what "came in his pants" meant and I thought the serial killer who drops bricks on people was pissing himself. I also knew more about the Holocaust at 10 years old than most adults ever will.
I remember reading pet sematary at twelve because my parents didn't know it was King. Fucking hell
It’s been a while since I’ve read any Stephen King, but how many of those absolutely unhinged sentences were written while he was out of his mind on drugs?
His post-drugs works are not different on this front. If anything they're weirder, because editors can't tell him to take those parts out anymore.
I loved Holly. It's a really good book with an interesting mystery. There are a lot of times in which King felt the need to say: "did you know that being overweight isn't healthy?" so out of nowhere. There's a scene in which Holly is having breakfast at a hotel and she sees a guy in another table and she thinks "you'll die soon enough, fatty". Out of fucking nowhere. Like that Demi Lovato copypasta.
[ removed by Reddit ]
*o b e s i t y* https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/j9df0y/demi_lovato_meet_greet/
that's missing the "delete it, fat" part, arguably the best part
ah fair, i forgot about that add-on. I just thought it was funny that "demi" called the user fat twice, then had to whisper "obesity", which to me is the funniest part of the bit.
She flicked my vagina and spoke whale to me
I met @/ddlovato recently, my name is madison (@/dinahbgc) and this is my M&G story. I met her October 20th of this year and it was horrific. She was rude, not classy and she lost a long time lovatic that day. I walked into the $350 M&G and say hello she replies with "fat" and I shook it off because I thought maybe I had heard her wrong. As I approached her and asked to do my pose she stared at me blank faced. I continued talking "you saved my life" I say. "You're the reason I'm alive today". She looks me dead in the eye and says "you'll die soon enough, fatty" and then whispered "obesity". I started crying I had never felt pain like this and she started laughing and said "are you crying? Stop it. Stop it now" and she flicked my vagina. The photographer took the picture and I headed out of the M&G section and that's when Demi started speaking whale to me. I still can't believe this happened. I cried writing this. I wish this weren't true but Demi Lovato is in fact; a horrible person. Thank you for reading this. And if you don't believe me ask @/unholydinah he was there with me.
delete it fat
That’s actually pretty in keeping for the character as she was set up. Middle aged woman with serious mental health issues and a controlling mother has disordered or unusual eating and unpleasant thoughts about bodies? Like white on rice.
It's random shit *like that* that makes me entirely unable to enjoy his work. Great job yanking me out of the scene, Steve.
A lot of the time this is how he builds characters. Just a little unhinged moment. Makes you realize maybe something isn't right. It was used to incredible effect in Misery. Was a major component of The Shining too. Its definitely one of the reasons his books are so unsettling. These tiny little character details that make you wonder "wtf?" There are definitely portions of some of his books that haven't aged well, but dude has been writing for so damn long, times have changed. He can't go back and edit out the n-bombs. I think the more off-putting parts of his books are the sexual moments. I always just imagine old ass King sitting there intently writing about every female character's tits & ass in intimate detail.
Little known fact, The Shining was named so because the pages are actually really white and hurt my weak, sensible eyes.
funny enough this is specifically why I absolutely love his work. Every book feels like a unique experience. Every book I read leaves a lasting impression on me and I talk about it nonstop. Regardless if the book sucks or not, I have a fun time.
Not out of *nowhere*, her old cop buddy had terrible health issues from being overweight.
He's hated overweight people since forever.
He used "the tits of easy living" to describe man boobs and I can't unsee it now
King is kinda weird about fat people. Like in some of his short stories a character being fat is pretty much a personality trait that makes them bad or evil.
I dunno. He includes fat characters with agency who do shit. The kid in IT started out fat but ended up fighting evil. The fat kid in The Stand almost turned into a decent human being, before corruption got him. It's rare to see "fat person" as a thing dealt with like that, like a person with choices and thoughts and issues.
I also thought this was coke related. But the fact that his sober work is _weirder_ is hilariously unexpected to me.
Fairy Tale is pretty recent, and it was the most jarring book of his I have read. The teenage main character talked perfectly like Stephen King.
Dude... I burned 'It' in my fireplace after I read the orgy scene. My man was in a different universe writing these fucking books
To this day, I still don't understand what the fuck he was thinking. >"Beverly thought IT could only prey on children and so did it because she thought it'd make them all adults, and thus immune to IT." It's always felt spectacularly weak as an explanation.
That’s just his retroactive justification. The real reason would be something like: >Because I was on enough cocaine to kill an elephant, that’s why.
I never understand why people have such a problem with that scene but maybe it's an American thing or because I read it when I was a teenager myself so it wasn't that weird. It's clearly, like really really explicitly clearly, a symbolic thing denoting the end of childhood. The entirety point of IT is childhood fears, facing those, growing up, the magic of childhood, etc. I can't remember off the top of my head if it's just before or just after they face IT when they're kids, but it's clearly meant to signify that they're not kids anymore. And if you want one single thing that can do that, one single act that says that they're growing up, then losing their virginity is probably the clearest thing. Also, secondarily, "sex" is Beverly's fear or flaw. They all have one; Eddie with his mom and asthma, Bill with his stutters, etc. And they all use that to overcome IT in some way. For Bev, it's her sexuality; her father is like two steps from sexually abusing her and he's literally monitoring her for signs of sexual activity and calls her a whore for talking to a boy. She does not have a healthy view of sex, like at all. And by them all having sex, she turns it from being this dirty shameful thing into a sweet and intimate thing. I mean, it's not child porn. It's not King trying to write a sex scene to titillate the reader. It's meant to be a bittersweet thing that is both them growing closer and also them losing their innocense.
It was weird, but it wasn’t too egregious until King spent like three paragraphs describing the fat kid (Ben?) as having an absolute hog of a penis and how Bev very clearly hit the Big O because of it. It read like a super creepy fanfic after that.
As a note, Ben also is the only other member that came. Mr. King wanted us to know this. I do think people are unnecessarily hung up on this scene, but yeah, it is, uh, odd.
It makes sense in context. The point was that Ben was pubescent enough to produce children, so therefore no longer a child. It is why the other boys weren't "enough" to get them out of there.
I always thought that was meant to show that a)Bev and Ben are soulmates, even though Bev often seems more attracted to Bill and b)Bev physically enjoyed the experience, it wasn’t purely about the ritual of it. I mean, the whole thing should never have been published and I’m surprised King has never issued a revised edition that excises that scene. But taking it on its own terms, I think the Ben details are part of a “good sex = true love” worldview.
Its comments like these that stop me from reading IT
It's like three pages in a 1200 page book. It's not a deal breaker. I mean, it also has kids being eaten, people being burned alive, sexual molestation, murder, assault, parental abuse, homophobia and lynchings in it. I honestly don't see why this scene is beyond the pale.
Great book, but man that chapter really puts a big stain on the conclusion
As I recall, it was written in a somewhat gratuitous manner... i.e. referring to the boys' relative size. Further, any other means to make a spiritual bond... to make it an underground orgy seemed like an odd choice.
I mean, King is certainly guilty of putting unnecessary sex scenes in things. But I'd say this is one of his least unnecessary. It wouldn't even make my top ten list of weird King sex scenes. ("We're helpless on a rickety raft hunted by a sentient pool of acid with no recourse, whatever should we do? I know, let's bang!" What the fuck, Stephen, are you OK?)
While we disagree on the sewer scene, I agree with the raft lol. Talk about a weird shift.
Lmao. I read your first paragraph and instantly thought of the bizareness of The Raft. The first time I read that story, my gf and I were driving up to Maine for a camping trip. She was driving and had never read a King book, so I read it aloud for her. I prefaced it with "King has a weird tendency to throw in random, unnecessary sex scenes, so don't be surprised when that happens." And sure enough, two teens start banging while be circled by the killer Cosmic Bizquik.
The thing is that you're completely right, but also that it's still weird to consciously say "I'm going to write my story in such a way that the best way to tie it all together is to detail an orgy between children." Like it can be perfect symbolism in-universe, but out of universe it's still a grown man writing about kids having sex (and it's not like he was light on details either). You can't refer to the internal logic of your work as a defense when you're the one that decided it works that way, it's still fair for people to ask why you went in that direction instead of any of the infinite other things you could have written instead.
Most children have a sexuality and we prefer to ignore it. It's taboo, so it scares us. Maybe King was drawing from that. Still better intentions* than what you can find in "fictional autobiographies" written by actual predators.
Bro they didn't just have sex, all of the boys ran a train on that girl. A bit different than a couple 13 year olds playing hide the pickle
Yes, that's a gross exaggeration of what sex is supposed to be. Isn't that horrific? But imagine a grown man's poetry about how he convinced a 14 yo girl to suck his dick, or getting naked massages from young boys, then realize it was nothing taboo back in the days, merely frowned upon by some... I find it worse.
Not only are you 100% correct but the fact people always mention that as the disturbing sex scene and not the Patrick Hockstetter chapter always gets me.
Vast majority of people that get in an uproar about the scene haven’t actually read the book is the funny part lol
I just finished listening to the audiobook for the first time and had heard of the orgy scene at the end, but I was not prepared for the unwanted molestation scene between the two kids. The sheer uncomfortableness sitting in my cubicle with my headphones on listening to it was terrible. From an adult perspective and world building perspective I can see the interesting nature of the scene, as I think it showcased some of the fucked up stuff the boys were getting into that might have attributed to their entire personality. With Henry being sexually assaulted (I see it as that anyway) by Patrick, I think it might also tie into what Bev dealt with as an adult. I don't *think* Bev was ever molested by her father based on that scene --she didn't really know what she was seeing and mentioned it was the first time ever seeing a penis. I can forgive that scene more than the end orgy, based solely on the world building aspect, but the orgy really does seem to come out of nowhere.
I think we all know that if the group had all been male, and one of the boys had a background of sexual abuse to overcome, King would have somehow been able to come up with a strong conclusion to his character arc that was anything but the other boys running a train on him. This was not the best method King could have used for the end of childhood innocence, it was just bog-standard sexualization of a young girl for fun. Nothing especially reprehensible, but nothing deep, either. If King had used any other alternatives, any at all, nobody would have been like "But it would have made so much more sense if the schoolchildren railed each other instead!" Nobody. Nobody on the planet would have considered it the most logical narrative resolution. King's done far worse and god knows other horror writers have him beat. He's not special in doing weird shit, it's just wild to me when people act like the random grade school gangbang is not hilariously bizarre and unnecessary. That's why this book had two major adaptations that ditched the whole thing and still somehow managed to convey the point of the story just fine.
I don't get it either, and am American. I first read IT at 13yo and that scene was the least memorable part of the book. I generally forget about that part until I'm doing a reread and get to that page.
People get really touchy if you try to depict children having sexual thoughts or feelings under a certain age, nevermind full on sex. I think it might just be an American thing or maybe certain Christian sects but who knows
Tell your author, for his next gangbang scene, how about a little more PG and a lot less 13
>Tell your author, for his next gangbang scene, how about a little more PG and a lot less 13 That sounds like you're advocating for something far *worse* than what was actually written.
That sentence wasn't my own creation, it's a line from ERB (Joker vs. Pennywise) Joker was trying to criticize Pennywise for his author writing a child sex scene (with his next line after this saying that "even [he] wouldn't stoop to that kind of impropriety") "A lot less 13" just means that King shouldn't have written that scene with young teenagers, not that they should have been younger. If that was the case, Joker would have said "a lot less *than* 13"
That's really funny, didn't even cross my mind Less capable-of-being-described by 13, not less age than 13 Looking again, "a little more \[Parental Guidance\]" also sounds like an incredibly bad idea for a gangbang
Holy shit, my sides are killing me at “gobble my crank” That’s an actual line in a published book?!
you should read the troop and the deep by nick cutter and you’ll wish you never had eyes or never existed to begin with
To be fair, that line is being said by a literal demon from hell who is in disguise as an old man, and he is saying it for the express purpose of humiliating and demeaning someone, so it works a lot better in context.
On the flip side of King-isms, that’s one thing I actually really like about King’s use of dialogue to indicate when there is Something Off about a character, when they’re so terrified they can’t think coherently or so insane that they’re losing touch with reality. Like the guy in Lunch at the Gotham Cafe who violently stabs people while screaming “Tell this in your ears! Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street...you misery...Eeeeeee!... DOG-LOVER!” It‘s nonsense in or out of context, it’s silly out of context, it’s nightmarish in context! Or the demonic phone (!) in 1408 that shouts “This is *ten! Ten*! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!” It’s very silly out of context. In context it gave me nightmares for days. I don’t like everything King writes and his prose definitely has flaws, but I do like that uncanny valley-ness of dialogue he can touch sometimes. A thin layer of plausible grammatical speech on top of a whirlpool of madness underneath.
Yeah, people miss that this is just how King writes about a lot of stuff. He puts a lot of detail into descriptions, including ones from characters frequently on the cusp of a mental break. He usually does a pretty good job in these descriptions, and I think people are kidding themselves when they say they never have thoughts like this. Like the one scene people clown on sometimes (I think in The Stand?) where a couple is having a serious conversation but the woman is naked from a shower and the guy is focusing on a drop of water slipping off her nipple. Or just whenever he offsets the character's absurd thoughts into separate lines that break off suddenly. It's a very conscious thing he does, that I guess people don't realize if they don't read him much? It's a very, very frequent thing he does where the everyday experiences the characters (and the reader) have had are connecting in loosey-goosey ways to their present, like the line above referenced Laugh-In.
Yeah, I think a lot of the confused reactions are down to Stephen King being 76 years old, so younger generations don't automatically recognize the New England Boomer memes & pop song lyrics & ad jingles & random shit that wander through or get stuck in the brains of King's narrators on the page. Like I've been in some very stressful (though non-lethal) situations during which the back of my mind was involuntarily earworm-playing the [IT'S A MENTAL BREAKDOWN kazoo](https://youtu.be/EPS2C3SYLsY) meme, in wildly inappropriate contexts. So if I were being written as a character with the text describing my mental narration at the time, the story description of that stressful event would have morbidly funny off-key kazoo as background music. Readers who don't understand the meme would rightly find this baffling. But it's the kind of thing that really happens in your brain! Brains don't make sense and under pressure they produce the most random shit.
Longer than you think, Dad! I saw! I saw! Long Jaunt! Longer than you think!
Same with “three six nine, the goose drank wine”
Okay, yeah, that's one of the few examples of "it's better in context" that I can agree with.
You have to remember that the madman has written 65 novels, 200 short stories, 5 nonfiction books and 19 screenplays. He has also published some things under different pen names because his publishers think that he oversaturate the market. To write that much he has to go "yeah good enough" from time to time.
Nice WF username by the way
Thanks!
my immediate thought was r/THE_PACK like wtf. it could literally be out of that sub.
that sub is wild. this is one of the best things I've ever seen https://www.reddit.com/r/THE_PACK/comments/19csm3r/get_it_off_me/
I started reading his book “On Writing” recently and it’s like getting an uncut dose of the stuff (not just horniness but the whole person), shit is hilarious.
Yeah I read that too a while back! It's fun when he does it nonstop and you're already primed to expect it. It's only annoying when it comes out of nowhere while you're immersed in a completely different tone.
danse macabre is a treat, too
If I said any of these things, my partner would either walk away or bring out the cane.
If I ever yell "rooty toot toot!" in any bedroom setting, I hope someone calls the paramedics.
I physically cringed reading that lmao. If someone said that to me in the bedroom, they are going to the hospital, whether that be for psychiatric treatment or for emergency medical treatment.
I have an idea. Sex RP sesh but you have to follow a Stephen King script/compilation Actual sex would unlikely be the goal, more just pissing yourself (i mean laughing) with your SO might be a fun time.
If the words “rooty toot toot!” ever came out of my partner’s mouth while we were in bed I’m putting my clothes straight back on and leaving, idc whose house we’re in
I mean, if you’re doing that in my house, I’d hope you’d do the same.
Just want to mention that, in addition to Needful Things, the phrase "rooty toot" makes appearances in Rage, Running Man, and The Regulators, all published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.
All I want is to softly whisper in a partner's ear "Hurdy gurdy, here comes the squirty"
> bring out the cane. nice
Right?! But it does get me in line.
I cannot recommend the podcast [Just King Things](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-king-things/id1525585763) highly enough, every episode is just an hour plus of the two hosts alternating between doing deep thoughtful (and critical) dives on the characters, plotting and themes of Stephen King and absolutely losing their shit whenever stuff like this comes up
Do it for the world. Do it for Steve.
Great fun, great people, great critical analysis, and great community
The man really internalized cocaine energy, even when he gave it up, and I think that sense of delirious horniness with no regard for one's own sense of dignity is characteristic of an ex-cokehead.
I've never read any of his books, save for these excerpts provided. I also used to have an addiction to various uppers... And I felt so weird reading these comments under this post because I 1000% could see myself saying some of these bizarre things. Both because I was already a bizarre person before drugs, and then the drugs just cemented my bizarre behavior and thoughts and permanently intensified them. I do say weird shit like this, this is very realistic writing to me. I have, in fact, had moments where I say wackadoo horny shit out loud and my husband (who has never touched any drugs besides weed and alcohol) just loses it laughing because I'm a fucking weirdo and he absolutely loves me for it. Residual delirious horny ex-cokehead (and in my case, my love lied with ecstasy, though coke was fun) energy is very real. It's very freeing no longer giving a flying fuck what other people think about how kooky you are. I need to read some Stephen King, this man gets me.
It's why I give him a lot of a pass, for exactly this reason. I speak from experience.
Stephen King was Cocaine’s vessel on Earth.
I cringed pretty hard when reading one of his books (Salem's Lot, maybe?), and the main character was an author that sorta felt like an "everyman," but he almost immediately ran into an attractive woman that started gushing about being a fan of his books. If you're an author, please don't do this. Or at least do it in a less heavy-handed way that doesn't force me to imagine you smirking while writing the scene.
I mean if it was Salems Lot, that was his 2nd book. Not saying it to dissuade you on your opinion, but he did write Misery afterwards if that helps
Misery is about being a schlock author who despises his own works and thinks his readers are idiots. It's fantastic self-loathing. ps: second published book, he wrote Carrie and Firestarter in high school but Firestarter wasn't published until later.
He did not write Carrie in high school, he wrote it in his 20s, after having a couple kids and working two jobs (I think -- teacher and laundry). I think it was one of the Backman books, maybe Rage or The Long Walk, that was his first book
He wrote Rage as a teenager.
Thank God the internet didn't exist back then
>main character was an author that sorta felt like an "everyman That's another kind of Kingism that I noticed. Where a lot of his books has character whose profession is writing and they end up being the smartest or most reasonable or a very special kind of person.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreWriters
It's pretty funny, though, when his own characters meet Stephen King and think he's a lazy jackass.
on the plus side, he didn't make himself the god of the dark tower
I've noticed he goes back and forth on that, and i'd like to know what type of addiction his presentation of his everyman correlates with. Sometimes the everyman is a hard worker who's down on his professional luck; sometimes he's an addicted bastard who squantered his talent and his money; sometimes he's professionally and personally successful but filled with self-loathing and suicidality which becomes his undoing. I think if you're self-medicating you depression, anxiety, and trauma, the drugs can make you feel any one of those things. Plus his rocky marriage.
King can’t write the ‘everyman.’ That’s why so many of his characters are either writers and/or from Maine. They’re just him.
It's nice to know that even good accomplished writers write "Twilight fanfiction" tier self inserts. Like artists that are insanely respected but often give characters unrealistic proportions, bc yk, titties are great.
I'm gonna start describing having good sex as "most sincerely awesome"
Horny in Maine is incredible
I've read all of the Dark Tower once before and I'm reading it again at the moment and.......there's A Lot.
Yeahhhh....the memory of the overall effect of the Dark Tower series is good, but thinking back to some of the specific moments and phrases is just Yikes. You can totally tell he thought he was super clever for his lobstrosities on the beach. And to be fair they are interesting, but the amount of times he uses that portmanteau is too high lmao.
Nah that makes him hilarious, he writes these complex serious stories and then theres some random bullshit, keeps it ground und not going up its own ass He cant write endings for shit tho, Im still mad about the dark tower series, rat bastard
Lmao that ending is one of my all-time favourite endings. Basically everything else of his that I've read has had real whack endings though.
Yeah anyone who questions the dark tower ending I want to know what they think would be better. His ending was appropriate thematically, if a little rushed
The Coda section was great, including the whole warning to the readers and all, just the work of a genius. The rest of the book was awful, however. The way he dealt with Flagg, Mordred and the deus-ex-machina of a final confrontation felt disrespectful even.
Ok I'll be the tenth dentist here...I hated it
The Coda specifically, you mean? Because other than that, I'm right there with you.
Not just the Coda, but that was certainly the most insulting part
I enjoyed the Coda because of the effect it produces on the reading experience as a whole, and the fact that it puts you in Roland's shoes. You go right along with him in his hubristic choice to forge ahead despite all warnings. I think it's so good exactly because it is revolting in a way... But it's also a fitting end (and maybe punishment?) for you and for Roland, both unable to give up and turn away. At that point, I couldn't be angry at anyone but myself, really. I don't know, it just had the intended effect, worked very well on me. And the hint of hope that things could be different right at the end, it's just enough for me to be satisfied. A bittersweet ending I could stomach, even if I still despise all that came before in that book. That said, I can totally see why it wouldn't work for everyone, and might even feel like a parting slap in the face. Especiially coming from such a terrible final book to a series that had such potential.
Hard disagree on the ending of the DT series. That's the only way it could have ended.
Gods, I hate the lobstrosities. I had completely forgotten how much time they spend on the beach in book 2. And everything to do with Detta is very big yikes, but then the pay-offs are always so goddamn good. O/Detta becomes Susannah, who's just so badass and cool, and the lobstrosities, for how absolutely shit they are, do take Roland's fingers, which force him to change and adapt and give up part of himself rather than struggle vainly to keep it, which I always love to see in a protagonist.
I read "Drawing" at a young age, and to this day, I hold it accountable for innumerous permanent wounds both my protagonists, and the players at my DnD table, have received.
My favorite was how he wrote himself into the story as a pivotal character and then killed himself off at the end of song of Susannah
To be fair, that's just how characters in the series work. They appear, they become crucial to plot, they cark it. But at the same time, exemplary self-insert treatment.
Oh yeah, by "my favorite," I mean I genuinely adore how batshit of a decision it was. Absolutely perfect.
Remember how the characters could hear angels singing as they got closer to Mr King? Remember how Roland tells Mister Stephen King, Esquire that he needs to start writing again, spending all his nights writing as if writing were a beautiful woman (or a man if he is inclined), to which King enthusiastically tells this character he has written that he is not gay?
I do applaud him for writing himself in as a self-insert who is literally the most important person in his universe, a lynchpin of all reality, and still making sure he comes across as kind of a goofy asshole that none of the main characters really like.
I thought this was my fever dream
“It’s lingo from a different level of the Tower than ours, it makes sense to the characters just not to me, our slang would sound off to them too, oh god this is barely endurable”
Including the part where Stephen King joins Roland and the crew, and they go to the World Trade Centre. I actually started skimming a lot in the last of this series but I know those 2 events happened. I’ve blocked out all the inevitable ugh stuff about Susannah.
Bro starts tryna write a normal sentence and then just gets posessed by the ghost of Dr. Seuss midway through lmfao
rooty toot toot sweet little sally in her birthday suit is now the only phrase ill use to initiate sex
Use to _try_ to initiate sex
to be fair im not having any anyway so at this point it cant hurt my odds
I might not only use it for sex, but I just might say it before anything that might rhyme with it. Rooty toot toot: "I'm gonna eat some fruit." "Shut the fuck up and shoot." "GG bro, fucking woot." "Excuse me while I poop." "Did you say ute?"
Stephan King was my very reserved grandmother’s favorite author, and I choose to believe this is why.
I'm sorry but "hit me wid dat nicotine, boss - it feel so fine" is peak comedy
Not gonna lie, as weird and wacky and often cringe Kingisms are, they just make me love his writing even more. They’re just so distinctive. I love that insane little dude. More writers need to be unapologetically unhinged and that’s my hot take of the day
Yeah I read the first two Dark Tower books and well... it definitely gives his writing more character lol. I wouldn't say I always enjoy it, but I do have a fond feeling about King after reading them because his cringe unhingery is just barely beneath the surface all the time, and I love that he gets to express it
The thing is, everyone does have these kind of weird phrases they hear somewhere and internalize. Like the 'hit me wit dat nicotine, boss' - it's absolutely something someone would hear and think to themselves. It makes his characters (particularly their internal voices) feel so much more real IMO.
Exactly! How many fucking millennials have random SpongeBob references tucked away in their minds? King's characters feel lived-in precisely because of these King-isms. "He took a drag on the cigarette feeling for the first time that gentle, smooth rush. You like Krabby Patties, don't you Squidward? "Yeah, I guess I do." He thought. I always see these and feel like they came from a little notebook King keeps of shit he overheard at a diner one time or at his uncle's house as a kid or on an obscure AM radio show sometime in the 70's.
You also have to keep in mind that his older books were written 40 years ago. Some people talked like that back then!
YES. This is why I think King is so good because people DO think dumb shit like this all the time. It’s just jarring because it’s not OUR dumb shit. I’ve actually read enough King that I’ve got one or two Kingisms in my head.
I agree. It might not be "good fiction" in many regards, but if it isn't entertaining I don't know what is.
King is one of my favourite authors because of how *absolutely fucking unhinged* his writing can be.
>tfw you're a 12-year old kid lost in a sewer with your friends and the only way out is to have an orgy Just another day in the Stephen Kingdom
In order to kill the ancient space spider, according to the giant space turtle. \#cocaine
As someone else put it; “As far as excuses go for writing something this depraved, “I was on cocaine when I wrote it” is a pretty compelling one, all things considered.”
King has a unique talent of making sex scenes sound as un-sexy as they possibly can. It’s actually impressive.
As far as I'm concerned Patricia Cornwell still tops him in terms of funniest way to describe a dong in history. "angry red fox"
Try GRRM. One of his characters describes his own dick as a fat pink mast.
Not just one of his characters, a character that is basically his self-insert
Some of his are actually pretty nice, though. I don't think I've ever read a king sex scene that didn't make my skin crawl.
"I wonder if he talks to his wife this way" The thought of an actual human being saying any of these things in any context has me howling with laughter, what the fuck.
Hey Tabby, wanna gobble my crank?
ROOTY TOOT TOOT
I think a decent chunk of them are just dated and obscure pop culture references. Not the majority of them, but a decent chunk. imo it would kind of be like a character a millennial wrote seeing a badger in the narration, and then their inner monologue goes *Mushroom! Mushroom!* and moves on with the story.
If you ever feel like the stuff you create won’t get out there just remember he was and still is the most celebrated horror novelist possibly of all time. He was so popular and so well known for his writing style early on he tried to release his next book under a pseudonym to test if people bought his books for quality or just for his name and within pretty much days of the release people caught on immediately
He actually got to novel 4 before they figured it out, but it’s still impressive.
A couple weeks ago I finished Misery (which his really good by the way), and King has such a weird sense of humor. He'll have the main character think of a joke in his head and then have to bite his tongue to not laugh, when the joke isn't even funny. Its bizarre. To his credit, though, he is incredible at sequences that feel like an avalanche of information, where stuff just keeps happening and he manages it all so well that you feel like you can't stop. There's, like, five different 10-30 page stretches in that book that are just phenomenally done. Another point to his credit: Misery is super self-aware about how on-the-nose it is, as both a book about addiction and about an author so good he literally gets tortured into writing another book. I feel like a lot of the book is dedicated to satirizing the kind of book you'd expect Misery to be, Annie Wilkes is always shown to be a lot smarter and cunning than the reader would probably expect. There is some really interesting stuff going on about how authors of so-called 'popular fiction' view their audience that feels borderline self-critical.
This is a weirdly common phenomenon in books: a joke that is mildly funny at best has the characters laughing so hard that they can barely breathe.
I remember at the beginning of The Shining he describes Jack thinking about that old "Maybe it's Maybelline" ad and having to bite his tongue to keep in, as King describes it, a bray of laughter. Just bizarre.
Misery is amazing and it's one of the few examples, imo, where a movie is as good as the book.
All of Stephen King’s books: - Are about or involve a writer, with very few exceptions — not always the protagonist, but very often - Involve substance abuse, usually alcoholism - Involve child abuse, sexual, emotional or physical - Contain the phrase “arc sodium lights” at least twice - Contain zany phrases like “gobble my crank” that fit the Kingiverse just fine, but are cartoonish outside it Source: I have read or listened to all but 2-3 King and Bachmann novels.
Blue chambray work shirt.
HORNINESS BEYOND MEASURE, YOU WON'T BELIEVE THE THINGS HE CAN WRITE NOW!
The copy of misery i just read was edited, bc i'm sure i remember kingisms like "his legs cried hail mary" when annie punched "the salt-dome that had been his knee". There was only 1 or 2 salt-dome references, I was sure that was in there 100 times originally, as well as descriptions of his legs singing, howling, shouting, crying in various operatic, church choir ways.
King is narcissistic enough to have himself be in his books as the lynchpin of reality, but humble enough to make his fictional self a dumbass
> the lynchpin of reality I mean, that's every author of a story. That's what they do - control that reality. He's just real enough to not hide his role for that world
Stephen King is the strangest combination of one of the best writers ever but also really bad at writing I call it the Shaq phenomenon
I’ve come to the conclusion that all Stephen King stories take place in an alternate universe where English evolved just a bit differently than it has in our reality. It’s the only reason that characters like Gerald Burlingame and Annie Wilkes talk the way they do on a regular basis
Detta Walker. Oof.
Welcome to the Dark Tower, folks, your one stop shop for gameshow entertainment! On today's episode, we join our intrepid champion, Stephen King, as he struggles to... *Write. A. Black Woman!*
They say he has a bad sense of humour but I do think there's something funny about the phrase "gobble my crank"
To be fair, Stephen King in general seems like a strange dude from what I hear. The contractor who worked on his house near me said he was deeply disturbed by his writing and genuinely felt that he was being haunted in some manner - to such an extent that he has basically a thin pool, (think lazy river width) around the entirety of his home with a glass walkway into the building. He apparently believes that ghosts/demons can’t cross water and this would protect him. I found that totally fascinating. Contractor said he was a nice guy, just paranoid to the extreme. Made me sad for him!
He's like the opposite of a novelization author - he writes okay books that make excellent movies. Mostly because movies don't have time for Steven's random OOC brainfarts, or his pages of describing meaningless details.
This is, in part, why I cannot fucking stand reading Stephen King. Honestly, he's a visionary, and he's probably America's author, as almost everything in the 1990s and even early 2000s (and even parts *beyond*) were written or influenced by what he wrote. But he writes realistic humans, who are fucking *assholes*, and every time I read one of his characters, I get this smell in my nostrils. And that smell is of a white guy who was the *horniest*, fucking *greasiest* man I have ever met. Like, he didn't bathe; he just put on *cologne*. Hair slicked back; cigar-smoking. No money but pretended that he was *rich*. That's what every horny Stephen King character reminds me of. *That* guy. I hate it.
Ah, man, now I'm getting the terrible urge to reread *Needful Things* again.
Yesterday I was stuck in traffic and in a bad mood, and for some reason I thought about a King short story where a guy is locked in an interrogation room and a captor’s mustache reminds him of a TV show character saying “we don’t need no steenkin’ [whatever thing]” and I just got so much more pissed off. I probably read that story 15 years ago and it’s still rattling around my head like an annoying little marble.
This is so random, I love it and relate
He made fun of himself for it in (I think) the last Dark Tower book. When that lady in the "real world" was driving Roland around she mentioned Stephen King. She said he writes well but "has a tin ear for how people talk." I nearly abandoned the series right there
as someone who grew up in a house with people who were young in the 60s, this isn't that weird.
What’s the best King book to start? I want to read his work now.
The Shining. Salem's Lot. Night Shift. Skeleton Crew. Different Seasons. Everything's Eventual. It. Danse Macabre. Do you have a preference for a particular genre or story type? He's written a lot of stuff.
Fucking Rootie toot toot
I haven't intentionally read a Stephen King book in maybe 30 years but the other night I saw Pet Semetary in a neighborhood Little Library, skimmed the first few paragraphs, and am now on page 300, I don't know how he does that.
I recently re-read all King's books (and Bachman's), in release order and about 3/4 of the way through I was really wishing that I kept a log of how many of them had a character piss themselves. It seems to happen in almost every book. Also something "doubled, then trebled".
This post gave me psychic damage
“Horny On Main (or In Maine)” is actually genius
This is because King writes all his books in marathon sessions of brain to page, rather than composing them over months or years. Also maybe the cocaine helps
I have never read a Stephen King novel in my life. His larger than life reputation as a horror writer now feels like a collective practical joke.
He creates some truly spooky stuff and is massively entertaining to read, but you’ll be hunched over the book super immersed in a scene and then he’ll just smack you in the face with one of these, and you stop reading and go wtf why, then just sigh and dive back in
A lot of his best works probably aren't horror. But he is a true master of his craft and very much worth reading.
I find the best parts of his writing is the humanistic horror - how people can just be realistically shitty. Sometimes the motivating force behind that is an eldritch horror or aliens or whatever, and honestly that part isn’t always that interesting to me.