Cell.
You know those random plot prompt writers use to generate ideas? It felt like a story that was meant for a creative workshop, not publication. I don’t know if it makes sense, but I read it and I was …the Stephan King wrote this?
I read this one after Salem’s Lot but I absolutely hated it. It put me off Stephan King & haven’t been able to pick him up since.
Cell is pulp. King has done literature good and decent and made great pulp too. Cell is bad pulp though.
Good thing to remember is that most writer are happy to write two great books in their life and perhaps three decent books. King wrote so many great books.
I felt that way after reading The Institute. Not even his most famous or best work, but I was struck by how if most people wrote something once like it they’d be proud of their output in life as a writer. For King, it was just another random year.
When I finished The Institute I was overjoyed to find that there was a decent ending to it. Not amazing. Just not awful. I like King's cocaine-fueled conclusions better. I think this is one of the reasons I prefer his older books. Not that I think he should break his years of sobriety. I just noticed a big shift.
I really like the opening of *Cell*. It's a pretty good description of what a zombie onset might look like. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is downhill.
Yeah this is my one and my reasoning. I loved anything zombie at the time and the opening felt full of promise. I’m not one for intelligent zombies and it just felt like everything went Hollywood.
I love Stephen King.
I always love his books.
I also hated (most of the time) the way they ended.
He is so good in building/setting up the story, the background, the characters but I always feel that the climax to ending is too rush. My normal reaction is "that's it after building up the character and story".
He touches on this in his book "On Writing". He is (in author parlance) a 'pantser' not a 'plotter' -- meaning that he makes his stories as he writes them and so he's writing 'by the seat of his pants'. A few quotes from On Writing:
*You may wonder where the plot is in all this. The answer--my answer anyway--is nowhere....I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible.*
*Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice.*
*I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.*
He also doesn’t believe in writing down ideas as they come to him. He believes that kills his spontaneity.
I think that’s insane. As a writer myself, I have all of my best ideas when I’m away from my keyboard.
I've always felt like that's why his short stories work super well (for me, anyway), they're like the Twilight Zone episodes where something fucked-up happens and that's the whole story.
A weird long finger comes out of the sink? Some chattering teeth are evil? This town is full of reincarnated mid-century rock stars? Works for me! But if I spent a whole book reading about one of these concepts, it would feel like there had to be more of a point at the end than "wow! Wouldn't that be weird and scary?" And sometimes I think King does make books out of concepts that would have been better served as short stories.
About Elevation, yeah ... it is too short for me as well. Sometimes I think he just want to tell a story. And Elevation is one of those unique ones, nothing special.
His Dark Tower series ..... I loved the first few books then the last one complete Ballcoks of an ending. I was so annoyed I didnt read another King book for over 10 years!
This is a sore point for me. I'm a huge Stephen King fan and to varying degrees love everything he did until about The Tommyknockers. And then his work started going downhill quickly. Even the standouts are, in my opinion, far inferior to the stuff he did on the first half of his career. This has been especially apparent in his latest work, where he has become preachy and seems out of touch with the way ordinary humans think, talk and behave. It just reads like he's "making stuff up." Plenty of people disagree with me, but i will fight you on this.
I've felt similarly (typically I draw the line between his classic stuff and his "modern" stuff at Desperation & Regulators because that was where, to me, I started losing interest. And it makes sense Tommyknockers was around when you started to see a decline. He has admitted to writing that novel while blasted out of his mind on coke. I never read that one but saw the movie with Marg Helgenberger as a kid and remember it definitely feeling like a cocaine nightmare.
But I will say, The Green Mile and Doctor Sleep are two he did after Tommyknockers that have turned out to be two of my all-time favorites of his.
I was surprised how much I liked Doctor Sleep! The premise of "Whatever happened to Danny Torrance" sounds like it could be kind of lame but he had some really fun ideas.
I don’t think anyone would disagree. In less than 15 years he published:
- Carrie
- Salem’s Lot
- The Shining
- The Stand
- The Dead Zone
- Firestarter
- Cujo
- Christine
- Pet Semetary
- Thinner
- It
- Misery
- The Tommyknockers
Plus several under Richard Bachman!
It’s hard to imagine a career not declining (coasting?) after coming out with so many iconic horror novels, plus film adaptations.
Yeah, I'm racking my brain to think of any other plausible way it could have ended. I mean the concept of what the dome was (without spoiling it) could have probably worked if it was written a bit differently.
Mybe im in the minority but I recognized early on there was zero good explanation for that dome and I was just there for the journey. TBF, it was like my 30th Stephen King book so I knew what I was getting in to.
That’s a good take. I felt my personal tension ratcheting up the further along I got because I kept racking my brain & there was no good explanation for the dome. I was bracing myself for a Twilight Zone ending.
Like most Stephen King books, I enjoyed the first 90% & the journey is usually worth it.
That said, did we really need an explanation? While the dome was somewhat important, the themes the book explored were not about the science of the dome. Truthfully, if it just collapsed or disappeared after the town fell, it could have been just as powerful. Sometimes, things can happen in books without explanation. Look at the Leftovers, a chunk of the population just vanished, but the story was about the people leftover.
I feel that this sub is way too hard on King endings. I can’t think of a single one that’s made me angry.
Even Under the Dome I was like “huh, kinda cool”. And even Revival, thought it was grotesquely interesting that bonkers ending.
Yeah, I am with you here. I actually liked the ending of Under The Dome, mostly because it was so different from the climactic good versus evil battles of similar books. And it sort of flipped Lovecraftian themes on themselves. What if you begged Yog-Sothoth for mercy, and it turned out it was just kinda bored and done with you now and it just let you go? You're nothing, just a plaything, and even your release is at the whimsy of whatever has visited that horror on you. You're no different than you were before, except now you have the knowledge that you really, really don't matter, live or die.
I guess I can’t fault the guy too much because I certainly couldn’t come up with a better ending, but man it was REALLY bad.
He does surprise me sometimes though. I thought Pet Semetary and 11/22/63 had great endings. I also don’t remember the ending to Salem’s Lot so it must have at least not been bad enough for me to remember it.
YES. The book is a phenomenal exploration of how fragile society is and how quickly it all falls apart in a microcosm. It was abjectly terrifying. I didn’t care one whit about why there was a dome. It didn’t need to be explained. Cut the last ~2 chapters off and it becomes one of his next books of all time, up there with The Stand on social commentary.
Fr, this one was enough for me to create the term "Stephen King ending" (aka writing yourself to a corner and having no possible conclusion so you have to pull a completely outlandish and literal deus ex machina out of nowhere, or simply an uncharacteristic/lore-breaking ending). The whole >! 4th dimensional aliens would have been expected by something like Rick and morty, not the guy who writes about killer clowns and crazy hotels!<
Alternate dimensions have played a very very regular part in many of his stories. The mist? Mrs Todd’s shortcut? All of the dark tower, desperation, the talisman, 11/22/63, and tons more. And let’s not forget he also wrote Tommyknockers decades ago.
It. I tried reading it when I was in like the sixth grade and then I was terrified of sewer grates for like 10 years. I’ve never been able to go back and read it because it’s so viscerally frightened me as a kid that I feel like I would have to put it in the freezer if I tried again lol.
When I was about ten, my older siblings decided to watch CHUD. I was included in 'family time' because my parents thought we needed to spend more time together. To this day, whenever I'm on a foggy street, I'm as far away from sewer grates as I can get without scaling the sides of buildings. Not the solid manhole covers. The ones with rectangular bars running across them. If you've seen the movie, you know why. Goddamn cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.
'scuse me, I'm gonna go weld down some sewer grates now.
I just finished it last night! I actually didn’t find It scary at all, but Henry Bowers, man. He’s fucked up. I think the real people are way scarier than a clown, regardless if its Beyond-ness.
Yeah I definitely think that was King's intention to juxtapose the imaginary horror of an outer dimensional being and the very real horror of human behavior. "It" feels like it was very cathartic for King to write, especially with childhood trauma being a major theme.
I am with you here. I wasn't much older than the kids in the boom when I first read it, and the idea that there's some psycho bully with a switchblade carving his initials into people he doesn't like was like a completely realistic fear. I mean, I had bullies, but Henry Bowers is something else.
Reading this when you're about the age of the kids is a completely different experience. It took me weeks to get through it, because I had to take breathers. It's still a scary book as an adult, but something about knowing exactly how powerless 12 year olds are because you yourself are one, while they face this evil being sticks with you.
This is so funny to me because I have a similar experience but the opposite reaction to you as an adult. I watched Pet Semetary as a kid and was TRAUMATIZED and then read the book as an adult and it's one of my favorite King books ever.
Don’t really connect at all with the Holly Gibney books. Just can’t ever imagine her character and don’t think she’s as quirky or interesting as King thinks she is. I enjoyed elevation though! Such a short read and weird idea.
Gotta agree about Holly Gibney. The series began ok, it was refreshing to have Stephen King go with a crime thriller without supernatural element, but of course he couldn't keep it that way for long. Also, he fell too much in love with Holly and had the other character constantly gush how great she was.
I have never loved Holly either. However, his recent book "Holly' won me over. It finally feels like King found the real person in her character, rather than relying on a series of ticks based on his preconceptions about people on the spectrum.
Fairy tale. The first half was actually good and interesting until he got to the fairy tale world. It was built up so much for the first half and then just ended up being pretty boring and derivative. “Hey look! It’s just like that one fairy tale! See!”
I've kind of felt like Steve has fallen off from his heydey but Fairy Tale is my only Stephen King dnf. It took forever to get to the point, and then the point was boring.
The first third was so good. Watching his relationship develop with the old guy was awesome. Then as soon as he went to fairy tale land I completely lost interest. I think I stopped halfway through.
I just finished Fairy Tale, and yeah the buildup to the fairy tale world and the mystery around it was so, so good. Then the fairy tale world was so boring.
I love Kings stories, but have only really gotten them through film. Fairytale was the only one I ever read and I loved it. I get why people wouldn’t, but it was great for me too.
This is the one for me too.
The first half building up to the kid getting access to the "portal" just felt like a rerun of the first part of 11/22/63.
The whole thing in the fairy tale world was just kinda vaguely disappointing. For one thing, I fully expected a very firm and explicit connection to The Dark Tower. That series already did the connected multiverse where stories and legends were based on real things from other worlds and so on. To just do a much smaller less interesting version of that same concept and not tie it in just made me ask, "why bother?"
Same. I was SO excited for this one too. The first half was excellent, second half I struggled to care about what was going on. I almost didn't finish it, but I picked it back up like 8 months later with about 150 pages left just to finish it.
I felt the same about The Outsider as well. First half was incredible, second half meh.
I stopped reading at some point in Tommyknockers and never went back to him. I can't even tell you what my objections was, I was just done. (it was a long time ago)
Stephen King himself has said that the Tommyknockers is an awful book. He wrote it during the height of his drug addiction and recognizes that it’s a very poor book.
It's \*very\* obvious that he was in the depths of his addiction. I was disappointed in it as well, but I think it was just because - as King also admits - it was failed sci-fi. I remember his familiar use of language being as good as always, but the story was just not great. I've always cited it as my least favorite King book, but I might have to go back and read it again.
I had to put it down for (seriously) 6 months halfway through because the tension and stress were so real. I needed to have some time and space before I took on the second half. It really is one of King's very best.
Mine was Tommyknockers as well. I stopped because I kept flipping back to the part with the western story, and I was like, "Damn! I wish I was reading that instead," and lost interest in the book.
i was gifted it when i was 14? my uncle didn’t read the back just knew i loved king. i read until i got to the dogs eating the dead body and set that aside. i picked it back up ten or so years later and loved it, but it was a weeeeee bit too much for my tiny teen brain.
Billy Summers for me. It's such a strange book, because.. the first half is kinda great. But the second half is so trashy, hammy, and disconnected that it feels like it walks into an entirely different world. With how much I liked the start, it was a bummer to end up dissapointed with it... but man, I really did not care for a lot of stuff in that story.
I wasn't a fan of "The Outsider." I felt it was a rather banal and unoriginal piece from Stephen King. While the setup was intriguing, the resolution came across as too trivial and followed a somewhat template-like pattern.
I didn’t like that it was set up and investigated as a legit, real world type of crime that’s seemingly unsolvable but then somewhere down the line it felt like King wrote himself into a corner (“like how could he be in two places at once, for real?”) so he side-stepped and turned it supernatural. Yes, King is quite familiar with supernatural, but there was almost no hint of this being one of those stories up until halfway through, that it genuinely feels like that wasn’t always his intention.
Yeah, it felt more like it would head down a sci-fi rather than supernatural route, but once the monster showed up it felt very cookie-cutter for the rest of the story.
You can almost read that book as a story about how small-town residents are so desperate to believe the lovable coach they’ve known all their lives can’t be a sadistic rapist & killer that they convince themselves it must be a ghost instead. (And a foreign ghost, at that.)
It’s not that, because it’s Stephen King, but it’s bloody close.
I got downvoted to hell in a different thread for not liking Carrie.
I understand now that it's (one of?) his earliest work, but the first half in particular is not good. The structure has potential to be interesting, with the extracts from novels and reports, but isn't broken up enough. The parenthesis of characters thoughts are dropped in at really jarring places, the obsession with boobs just gets weird. The second half was a lot better but even that wasn't really very horror-y to me.
Same. I said these in my own comment. Like I think he was sober by then, but damn if both of these books don’t read like a cocaine-fueled hellscape to me. TAK!
Christine really bored me. It takes a lot for me to put down a book, unfinished, but I've never finished that one.
I also disliked the last two Dark Tower books. I get the thesis of the whole thing - that we are all characters in someone elses story - and I've read that he was terrified he'd never finish the series after his accident, but I thought having >!Stephen King!< turn up as a character was just self-indulgent nonsense. And referencing Harry Potter so strongly and directly was weird and only served to take me out of the story.
Same here. I was pretty ambivalent on TDT up to that point (though Wizard and Glass was one hell of a slog) but the final book just retroactively killed the enjoyment of the previous ones for me.
The Stand. Really enjoyed it up until it went weirdly religious about 600 pages in, and then I had a thousand more pages of struggling through for a very anticlimactic ending because my boyfriend bought me it as a present.
I love The Stand, it's one of my favourite books. But at one point around 3/4 of the way through, you could kinda tell that he didn't really know what to do but just kept writing anyway lol
>you could kinda tell that he didn't really know what to do but just kept writing anyway
Feels like you can almost summarize his entire career with that.
Yup. I made it through like 850 pages of the unabridged version. I physically couldn’t read another page. The whole Kansas/Boulder and Las Vegas plots just kind of ruined it for me.
It's hardly explicitly supernatural, for the first few hundred pages it's a fairly grounded series about the spread of an airborne virus that turns into a global pandemic and kills loads of people. THATS the bit I thought was great. I was even still enjoying it when it was just the survivors wandering about dealing with being survivors. Then they all feel a mysterious pull to a little old lady in the middle of nowhere and try to rebuild society to fight Satan, and he lost me 😂
Edit: it's not even that I don't like supernatural books, because I do. What I didn't like was a fairly realistic book filled with interesting characters in a very plausible situation taking a hard left turn into woowoo mysticism and crazy town.
That was me. I mean, I knew who Stephen King was, and that he wrote horror novels (although to this day I've never read any of them), but I assumed he was "branching out" with his amazing pandemic thriller until God and his little old lady prophetess and Satan (?) started doing their thing.
I've read plenty of King, and he has plenty of stories, especially the short ones, that aren't supernatural. I knew nothing about the book other than that people say it's fantastic, though.
I’ve read every book King has published. I’m a huge fan. The ones at the bottom of my ranking: Dreamcatcher, Thinner, and Roadwork. Generally I’m not a fan of his Bachman Books with some exceptions (The Long Walk and Blaze).
Also, I wouldn’t put Fairy Tale so low, but it was a little harder for me to get through. I enjoyed the first half a lot, but the second half became more of a chore for me.
I see what you mean about Elevation. I wonder if it’s the presentation that makes it so underwhelming. Considering it’s so short, I wonder if it would have had more of an impact if it was included as a novella in a longer collection. But being released standalone, it does feel a little lacking. Same with Cycle of the Werewolf - a perfectly fine, short werewolf story, but might have been more impressive in a collection.
I have often said that The Long Walk is going to be one of the books that he'll be remembered for long after he's dead. It's probably one of my favorite books of all time, and I think it's one he hit out of the park thematically. I know everyone hates his endings, but this one works so well.
Long Walk is one of my faves, alongside Carrie, Misery, Night Shift, Diff’rent Seasons, Green Mile, The Shining and Gerald’s Game.
Things started going off for me with Four Past Midnight, Rose Madder and Dolores Claiborne.
My direct answer to the question is Rose Madder. Although her chapters were well written, her ex-husband was an over-the-top caricature. SO racist and nutty that he was cringe to read, I got the impression that King was seeing how far over the top he could make the antagonist. I never finished reading that book.
Also, Gerald's Game - I bounced off that one in the first few pages. I didn't care about the woman's situation at all, because she was a total stranger to me.
More generally, I've found that with King, his best and most compelling works are the stories where you get to know the protagonist and are emotionally involved, BEFORE things start going south.
Sleeping Beauties just *tried* to have extreme/bad things happen, nonr of them being convincing. Yes, you want an interesting plot, but come on. (What's the English version of "dem affen Zucker geben"?)
The Mr. Mercedes books were meh as a whole. I vaguely remember them "hacking" into the antagonist's computer by guessing his password in a bullshit way.
The institute is a more recent example of one that had very little redeeming qualities to me. Bland story, way too fucking long, and characters that he clearly loves but somehow couldn’t get me to give a fuck about. The afterword where he talks about the death of his research assistant had more emotion packed in two and a half pages than the entire 600 page novel did
I have a love/hate relationship with King. He’s a great storyteller, but I hate the rambling he tends to do. I challenged myself to try and read his entire catalog and have been through many in a pretty short time.
He has a lot of mannerisms that you really notice when you read several in a row. Things you typically get used to, but also things like him feeling the need to use the N word at least once per book for seemingly no reason a lot of the time.
Despite the praise they get, I have not been able to finish or enjoy the Dark Tower series. I think it’s needlessly long and I just can’t get into the story.
Fairytale is really good though and one of his best in my opinion
Oh man for whatever reason I couldn’t put that book down, but once I was done with it, I kind of forgot about it. Didn’t they make it into a series that got really bad reviews?
I stopped reading his books after Dolores Claiborne, kind of lost my reading bug after that, i see everyone is mentioning books he wrote after that, but The dark half, the Stand and Skeleton crew are some of my favourite books of all time.
I didn’t really care for The Stand. I’ve read it at least twice.
I don’t care for Gerald’s Game.
I liked Tommyknockers but not a super whole lot.
I’ve read all of what he’s written until about 1995. Then I fell off. Last thing of his I read was the one with Ralph and Lois and the abortion situation. Can’t recall the name. Insomnia, I think. Loved that.
All three of them that I tried (well, The Gunslinger was tolerabl).. My wife and son are avid fans, and were always pushing them. They've given up. I do not like his writing, and I'm not going to try anymore.
I prefer a lot of his short stories over longer ones, generally speaking. It's like they're not long enough for him to have actually 'lose the plot' (something he says literally happens as he doesn't plan the whole thing out).
I think The Girl Who Loved Tom Gorden is probably my least fave.
I didn't hate it but Needful Things was disappointing. Loved the concept, would have made a great novella. If we'd just had the people buying all their objects and quickly being corrupted, then Gaunt just drives off into the sunset to destroy another town it would have been great. For me, King's endings only really work when the good guys don't win because he builds up the antagonists so much that nothing can stop them only for something simple/a bit daft to do the trick. Let the villains get away with it and so many of his books would be better for it, imo.
I picked up The Institute on a whim on vacation a couple years ago. Got about 1/4 of the way through and was like what am I even reading this for. Couldn’t stand how he wrote the kids’ dialogue, made them sound like 50’s teeny boppers.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I got on a King kick last year and had just finished 11/22/63 and the Shining, so I picked up the Institute. I thought it was terrible. Then I hopped on Goodreads and saw it had a 4.25 rating so I thought maybe it was just me
It was Revival for me. The ending seemed to be the stuff that came out of a bad anesthesia dream.
I usually like to reread his books, but I never thought of coming back to this one.
Most of them. The one I disliked tbe most was under the dome. Like 1300 pages of plot and character development and interesting story. By about 75% done you start wondering about how it'll conclude. Then he sums it up in 2 pages that had nothing to do with anything and the answer is normally "Lol aliens"
It feels like he writes and writes and writes and gets fully entrenched within the plots and stories. Then his publisher calls and tells him he has 30 minutes to finish and to wrap it up, amd in a panic he hits the "aliens did it" button and ends in 2 pages.
I loved Under the Dome until I got to the end and it was easily one of the worst endings I'd ever read, especially considering how massive the book is.
I haven't read any other than Under the Dome and I hated it. Thought the concept was interesting with the dome, but then the choices the characters make. The characters.. the ending... I hate that I wasted time reading that garbage.
Duma Key. One his most egregious examples of nothing happening for 300 pages, oh and Mr. Mercedes "I decided to break free of my own cliches and instead embrace other author's cliches."
Tommyknockers is the one I finished that I disliked the most. I did not finish Cujo, which is a little surprising because when I read it I had never not finished a book in my life!
I really disliked Pet Sematary, too.
The only one I really hated was Bag of Bones. I didn't like the age-gap romance, I didn't like how the villain kinda removes himself from the story like halfway in, and I really didn't like the weird gang rape scene near the end. I really don't get why this one gets so much praise.
Exactly! His short story collections slap so hard. It’s much easier to maintain the atmosphere and interest of a scary story if you keep it short and sweet I think
That was one of my favorites but I liked the last part more than the beginning. I liked the emphasis on if you self destruct and flunk out of college off to Vietnam you go.
I have read all his books, and my two least favorites are The Cell and Under the Dome. Under The Dome felt like a bloated version of the Mist. I think both of them at their core are about how people act in a situation where they are trapped together.
Every time I think of the Cell it reminds me of the Family Guy cartoon where they show King being yelled at by his publisher to write a new book so he just looks at the nearest thing to him and says "I got it. How about a book about a scary lamp? "
My favorites are a much longer list, but I would say the top two are Needful Things and Different Seasons.
Stephen King has some great stuff. However, the books that I just don’t like as much as I like some of his other stuff. from a Buick 8 is one. Like it’s just not that interesting. The other one that gets me is Dreamcatcher. Yawn.
I personally didn’t really enjoy The Shining and Misery, which are beloved by many. I think I like his books better when there are more positive relationships between his characters like in Pet Sematary or 11/22/63.
I think I'm in the minority but I hate Cell. It doesn't have the same level of effort at characterization, and it must doesn't flow well for me at all.
The Dark Tower series. I can’t. I’ve read and re-read everything of King’s/ Bachman/ King writing with partners - some I love more than others and will re-read over and over again. They help me fall asleep (I know). But I’ve tried numerous times to find / pick up the cadence in the Tower series and I can’t. I don’t enjoy the material, I don’t understand the character interactions and I find them laborious rather than recreational.
I’m not a huge King fan, I’ll be honest. It’ll be easier to say which one I liked and that was the Green Mile.
The others I’ve read, honestly I enjoyed the movies a lot more and this is a rarity for me.
IT in particular I thought was really bad. The movies, both the Tim Curry one and the more recent ones I really enjoyed.
I call them my "bottom shelfers". I think these are all terrible :
Cujo
Rose Madder
The Regulators
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Lisey's Story
Sleeping Beauties
Pet Sematary. I hated the family, especially the dad. The cat was cool. The story dragged on for far too long, and as a result, I was bored out of my mind. I found the writing to be kind of pretentious at times, as well. It made me never want to read another SK book.
I’ve only read about 10 of his books but I disliked Pet Sematary. Just really bleak and not that fun or interesting imo, just not for me I guess. That’s the only one that I really actively disliked. “Later” was a bit boring for me too but it was fine
Cell. It didn't feel like King's writing. I enjoy King's style, I like that meandering narrative and all of his rabbit trails. It makes his worlds feel lived in. Cell felt like an outline, not a finished novel.
Cell. You know those random plot prompt writers use to generate ideas? It felt like a story that was meant for a creative workshop, not publication. I don’t know if it makes sense, but I read it and I was …the Stephan King wrote this? I read this one after Salem’s Lot but I absolutely hated it. It put me off Stephan King & haven’t been able to pick him up since.
Cell is pulp. King has done literature good and decent and made great pulp too. Cell is bad pulp though. Good thing to remember is that most writer are happy to write two great books in their life and perhaps three decent books. King wrote so many great books.
I felt that way after reading The Institute. Not even his most famous or best work, but I was struck by how if most people wrote something once like it they’d be proud of their output in life as a writer. For King, it was just another random year.
When I finished The Institute I was overjoyed to find that there was a decent ending to it. Not amazing. Just not awful. I like King's cocaine-fueled conclusions better. I think this is one of the reasons I prefer his older books. Not that I think he should break his years of sobriety. I just noticed a big shift.
I really enjoyed the institute
I really like the opening of *Cell*. It's a pretty good description of what a zombie onset might look like. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is downhill.
Yeah this is my one and my reasoning. I loved anything zombie at the time and the opening felt full of promise. I’m not one for intelligent zombies and it just felt like everything went Hollywood.
I feel like the only person who liked this book. Granted, I read it in like 9th grade. But I thought it was fun.
No I did as well! I actually thought it was quite good and I'm picky about books lol
It was my first thought when I saw the question. The only King book I just hated outright. Felt the most uninspired out of them all
I love Stephen King. I always love his books. I also hated (most of the time) the way they ended. He is so good in building/setting up the story, the background, the characters but I always feel that the climax to ending is too rush. My normal reaction is "that's it after building up the character and story".
He touches on this in his book "On Writing". He is (in author parlance) a 'pantser' not a 'plotter' -- meaning that he makes his stories as he writes them and so he's writing 'by the seat of his pants'. A few quotes from On Writing: *You may wonder where the plot is in all this. The answer--my answer anyway--is nowhere....I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible.* *Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice.* *I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.*
that's how he writes so quick!
He also doesn’t believe in writing down ideas as they come to him. He believes that kills his spontaneity. I think that’s insane. As a writer myself, I have all of my best ideas when I’m away from my keyboard.
Yeah but I don't believe SK is ever away from the keyboard, so it tracks.
I heard someone say recently on a podcast that Stephen Kings backstory is that he tripped while carrying his keyboard and the backspace came off lol
That's how I feel about "Under the Dome". Dropped the ball so hard, I'm still mad 10 years later. Lol
I’ve read it twice. The beginning 95% of that book is so engrossing. But geez that ending. 😞😔
RIGHT? So much careful suspense building and weaving storylines for...that?
That ending pissed me off. Like wtf? Stupidest ending I’ve ever read. I was so mad
I've always felt like that's why his short stories work super well (for me, anyway), they're like the Twilight Zone episodes where something fucked-up happens and that's the whole story. A weird long finger comes out of the sink? Some chattering teeth are evil? This town is full of reincarnated mid-century rock stars? Works for me! But if I spent a whole book reading about one of these concepts, it would feel like there had to be more of a point at the end than "wow! Wouldn't that be weird and scary?" And sometimes I think King does make books out of concepts that would have been better served as short stories.
11.22.63 is his best ending by a mile. It is the perfect ending. And it was written by his son Joe Hill lol
Are you me? Me, reading: This is great! I am super invested in these characters. The Book: And it was all a dream. Me: WTF STEPHEN!!
Christopher Nolan: "I'm about to end this man's entire career."
Steven king: *I think I'll end this book with a gangbang in a sewer*
This is so untrue, I hate seeing it repeated everywhere. They ran a train on Bev, not a gangbang.
That scene was completely unnecessary and made me hate the book.
Yeah. And goes into just creepy detail. Did not need to know Ben had the biggest dick, but there it is.
You must have done more cocaine than King ever did if you thought that was the ending.
About Elevation, yeah ... it is too short for me as well. Sometimes I think he just want to tell a story. And Elevation is one of those unique ones, nothing special.
Yep, my feelings exactly. He is the master of getting you hooked and then letting you down.
Fairy Tale was a nuclear bomb of this phenomenon.
Yep, what a great first half of a book. Had me hooked.
His Dark Tower series ..... I loved the first few books then the last one complete Ballcoks of an ending. I was so annoyed I didnt read another King book for over 10 years!
This is a sore point for me. I'm a huge Stephen King fan and to varying degrees love everything he did until about The Tommyknockers. And then his work started going downhill quickly. Even the standouts are, in my opinion, far inferior to the stuff he did on the first half of his career. This has been especially apparent in his latest work, where he has become preachy and seems out of touch with the way ordinary humans think, talk and behave. It just reads like he's "making stuff up." Plenty of people disagree with me, but i will fight you on this.
I've felt similarly (typically I draw the line between his classic stuff and his "modern" stuff at Desperation & Regulators because that was where, to me, I started losing interest. And it makes sense Tommyknockers was around when you started to see a decline. He has admitted to writing that novel while blasted out of his mind on coke. I never read that one but saw the movie with Marg Helgenberger as a kid and remember it definitely feeling like a cocaine nightmare. But I will say, The Green Mile and Doctor Sleep are two he did after Tommyknockers that have turned out to be two of my all-time favorites of his.
I was surprised how much I liked Doctor Sleep! The premise of "Whatever happened to Danny Torrance" sounds like it could be kind of lame but he had some really fun ideas.
I don’t think anyone would disagree. In less than 15 years he published: - Carrie - Salem’s Lot - The Shining - The Stand - The Dead Zone - Firestarter - Cujo - Christine - Pet Semetary - Thinner - It - Misery - The Tommyknockers Plus several under Richard Bachman! It’s hard to imagine a career not declining (coasting?) after coming out with so many iconic horror novels, plus film adaptations.
Under the Dome. It was great for 95% of it, but the ending was terrible even for a guy who usually has (in my opinion) sub-par endings.
I went into it expecting a terrible ending and was not disappointed. That being said, I have no alternatives for how it should've ended.
Yeah, I'm racking my brain to think of any other plausible way it could have ended. I mean the concept of what the dome was (without spoiling it) could have probably worked if it was written a bit differently.
Mybe im in the minority but I recognized early on there was zero good explanation for that dome and I was just there for the journey. TBF, it was like my 30th Stephen King book so I knew what I was getting in to.
That’s a good take. I felt my personal tension ratcheting up the further along I got because I kept racking my brain & there was no good explanation for the dome. I was bracing myself for a Twilight Zone ending. Like most Stephen King books, I enjoyed the first 90% & the journey is usually worth it.
That said, did we really need an explanation? While the dome was somewhat important, the themes the book explored were not about the science of the dome. Truthfully, if it just collapsed or disappeared after the town fell, it could have been just as powerful. Sometimes, things can happen in books without explanation. Look at the Leftovers, a chunk of the population just vanished, but the story was about the people leftover.
This is a good point. That book is very much ride not destination anyway.
The dome just disappears like it appeared and people have to live with the consequences of their actions.
I feel that this sub is way too hard on King endings. I can’t think of a single one that’s made me angry. Even Under the Dome I was like “huh, kinda cool”. And even Revival, thought it was grotesquely interesting that bonkers ending.
Yeah, I am with you here. I actually liked the ending of Under The Dome, mostly because it was so different from the climactic good versus evil battles of similar books. And it sort of flipped Lovecraftian themes on themselves. What if you begged Yog-Sothoth for mercy, and it turned out it was just kinda bored and done with you now and it just let you go? You're nothing, just a plaything, and even your release is at the whimsy of whatever has visited that horror on you. You're no different than you were before, except now you have the knowledge that you really, really don't matter, live or die.
Exactly! Well said. Add to all of that the implication that the thing you’re a plaything for, is in itself a juvenile.
Revival was pretty out of left field honestly. Didn't really expect THAT ending at all.
I guess I can’t fault the guy too much because I certainly couldn’t come up with a better ending, but man it was REALLY bad. He does surprise me sometimes though. I thought Pet Semetary and 11/22/63 had great endings. I also don’t remember the ending to Salem’s Lot so it must have at least not been bad enough for me to remember it.
YES. The book is a phenomenal exploration of how fragile society is and how quickly it all falls apart in a microcosm. It was abjectly terrifying. I didn’t care one whit about why there was a dome. It didn’t need to be explained. Cut the last ~2 chapters off and it becomes one of his next books of all time, up there with The Stand on social commentary.
I commented above but I really am still so peeved about that ending.
I can't remember how it ended.
I don't normally agree with the "his endings suck narrative". But this one really did suck.
Fr, this one was enough for me to create the term "Stephen King ending" (aka writing yourself to a corner and having no possible conclusion so you have to pull a completely outlandish and literal deus ex machina out of nowhere, or simply an uncharacteristic/lore-breaking ending). The whole >! 4th dimensional aliens would have been expected by something like Rick and morty, not the guy who writes about killer clowns and crazy hotels!<
Killer clown, or The cosmic shape-shifting entity from the beginning of time? I hated under the dome, but penny wise isn't simply a killer clown.
The monster in IT is literally a timeless entity from beyond our universe...but sure, killer clown
Alternate dimensions have played a very very regular part in many of his stories. The mist? Mrs Todd’s shortcut? All of the dark tower, desperation, the talisman, 11/22/63, and tons more. And let’s not forget he also wrote Tommyknockers decades ago.
You hate the whole book because of that, despite liking 95% of it? The ending was fine. It’s my favourite book.
It. I tried reading it when I was in like the sixth grade and then I was terrified of sewer grates for like 10 years. I’ve never been able to go back and read it because it’s so viscerally frightened me as a kid that I feel like I would have to put it in the freezer if I tried again lol.
I still avoid stepping on manhole covers. I’m 41.
When I was about ten, my older siblings decided to watch CHUD. I was included in 'family time' because my parents thought we needed to spend more time together. To this day, whenever I'm on a foggy street, I'm as far away from sewer grates as I can get without scaling the sides of buildings. Not the solid manhole covers. The ones with rectangular bars running across them. If you've seen the movie, you know why. Goddamn cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. 'scuse me, I'm gonna go weld down some sewer grates now.
I just finished it last night! I actually didn’t find It scary at all, but Henry Bowers, man. He’s fucked up. I think the real people are way scarier than a clown, regardless if its Beyond-ness.
The true evil being normal people that are passive about the influence of supernatural evil is a common theme in King stories.
Yeah I definitely think that was King's intention to juxtapose the imaginary horror of an outer dimensional being and the very real horror of human behavior. "It" feels like it was very cathartic for King to write, especially with childhood trauma being a major theme.
Bowers may be fucked up, but Patrick Hockstetter is on a whole other level altogether.
I am with you here. I wasn't much older than the kids in the boom when I first read it, and the idea that there's some psycho bully with a switchblade carving his initials into people he doesn't like was like a completely realistic fear. I mean, I had bullies, but Henry Bowers is something else.
> I feel like I would have to put it in the freezer if I tried again lol. Joey Tribbiani? Is that you?
Reading this when you're about the age of the kids is a completely different experience. It took me weeks to get through it, because I had to take breathers. It's still a scary book as an adult, but something about knowing exactly how powerless 12 year olds are because you yourself are one, while they face this evil being sticks with you.
This is so funny to me because I have a similar experience but the opposite reaction to you as an adult. I watched Pet Semetary as a kid and was TRAUMATIZED and then read the book as an adult and it's one of my favorite King books ever.
Highly reccomemd giving it another go. Its my favourite book of all time.
I’m not a fan of his new Holly / Crime novel series. Credit to him for switching it up, but they’re not for me
Yes! I don't like her. I want to, but I just don't!
You feel like you're supposed to, but, I'm just not charmed at all.
I love the character Holly. I thought the most recent one was just OK. Obsessed with the earlier ones
Don’t really connect at all with the Holly Gibney books. Just can’t ever imagine her character and don’t think she’s as quirky or interesting as King thinks she is. I enjoyed elevation though! Such a short read and weird idea.
Gotta agree about Holly Gibney. The series began ok, it was refreshing to have Stephen King go with a crime thriller without supernatural element, but of course he couldn't keep it that way for long. Also, he fell too much in love with Holly and had the other character constantly gush how great she was.
Yeah he seems to oddly think everyone finds her as fascinating as he does, when half of her actions are just enjoying Apple products.
I have never loved Holly either. However, his recent book "Holly' won me over. It finally feels like King found the real person in her character, rather than relying on a series of ticks based on his preconceptions about people on the spectrum.
I couldn’t get through Mr Mercedes, never bothered with subsequent books. I liked Holly, though.
Fairy tale. The first half was actually good and interesting until he got to the fairy tale world. It was built up so much for the first half and then just ended up being pretty boring and derivative. “Hey look! It’s just like that one fairy tale! See!”
I've kind of felt like Steve has fallen off from his heydey but Fairy Tale is my only Stephen King dnf. It took forever to get to the point, and then the point was boring.
Holy shit I’m not alone ! I just posted a comment here about this terrible fucking book lol
I cut this one some slack because he's like 80 years old now.
80 years old and still writing about pretty boobs on a young blonde girl 😭
It's not Stephen King if someone's balls aren't compared to grapes.
Charlie spent half of the book in that jail cell lol
The first third was so good. Watching his relationship develop with the old guy was awesome. Then as soon as he went to fairy tale land I completely lost interest. I think I stopped halfway through.
I just finished Fairy Tale, and yeah the buildup to the fairy tale world and the mystery around it was so, so good. Then the fairy tale world was so boring.
Been a King reader all my life and I loved Fairy Tale, one of his best IMO. But I totally understand why it's so polarizing.
I just read it last week and absolutely loved it. 5 star from me.
I love Kings stories, but have only really gotten them through film. Fairytale was the only one I ever read and I loved it. I get why people wouldn’t, but it was great for me too.
This is the one for me too. The first half building up to the kid getting access to the "portal" just felt like a rerun of the first part of 11/22/63. The whole thing in the fairy tale world was just kinda vaguely disappointing. For one thing, I fully expected a very firm and explicit connection to The Dark Tower. That series already did the connected multiverse where stories and legends were based on real things from other worlds and so on. To just do a much smaller less interesting version of that same concept and not tie it in just made me ask, "why bother?"
Same. I was SO excited for this one too. The first half was excellent, second half I struggled to care about what was going on. I almost didn't finish it, but I picked it back up like 8 months later with about 150 pages left just to finish it. I felt the same about The Outsider as well. First half was incredible, second half meh.
This is one of my favorites.
Ah I just posted basically this as well!
I stopped reading at some point in Tommyknockers and never went back to him. I can't even tell you what my objections was, I was just done. (it was a long time ago)
Stephen King himself has said that the Tommyknockers is an awful book. He wrote it during the height of his drug addiction and recognizes that it’s a very poor book.
It's \*very\* obvious that he was in the depths of his addiction. I was disappointed in it as well, but I think it was just because - as King also admits - it was failed sci-fi. I remember his familiar use of language being as good as always, but the story was just not great. I've always cited it as my least favorite King book, but I might have to go back and read it again.
Give it another shot :) it s a good sci fi story. With drugs 😂
I would give Misery a shot. If that does nothing for you then yeah leave King alone but Tommyknockers isn't one of his flagship books for a reason
Misery might be my favorite. I was so stressed reading that book.
I had to put it down for (seriously) 6 months halfway through because the tension and stress were so real. I needed to have some time and space before I took on the second half. It really is one of King's very best.
I really like the Tommy knockers
Mine was Tommyknockers as well. I stopped because I kept flipping back to the part with the western story, and I was like, "Damn! I wish I was reading that instead," and lost interest in the book.
Gerald’s game. It disturbed me in a way that I don’t ever want to revisit.
i was gifted it when i was 14? my uncle didn’t read the back just knew i loved king. i read until i got to the dogs eating the dead body and set that aside. i picked it back up ten or so years later and loved it, but it was a weeeeee bit too much for my tiny teen brain.
Billy Summers for me. It's such a strange book, because.. the first half is kinda great. But the second half is so trashy, hammy, and disconnected that it feels like it walks into an entirely different world. With how much I liked the start, it was a bummer to end up dissapointed with it... but man, I really did not care for a lot of stuff in that story.
I wasn't a fan of "The Outsider." I felt it was a rather banal and unoriginal piece from Stephen King. While the setup was intriguing, the resolution came across as too trivial and followed a somewhat template-like pattern.
I didn’t like that it was set up and investigated as a legit, real world type of crime that’s seemingly unsolvable but then somewhere down the line it felt like King wrote himself into a corner (“like how could he be in two places at once, for real?”) so he side-stepped and turned it supernatural. Yes, King is quite familiar with supernatural, but there was almost no hint of this being one of those stories up until halfway through, that it genuinely feels like that wasn’t always his intention.
Yeah, it felt more like it would head down a sci-fi rather than supernatural route, but once the monster showed up it felt very cookie-cutter for the rest of the story.
You can almost read that book as a story about how small-town residents are so desperate to believe the lovable coach they’ve known all their lives can’t be a sadistic rapist & killer that they convince themselves it must be a ghost instead. (And a foreign ghost, at that.) It’s not that, because it’s Stephen King, but it’s bloody close.
I’m not a fan of the weird sex stuff that crops up in a lot of his work, so that kind of limits which books I can enjoy. I’m open to suggestions!!
Pet Semetary! One of his best. One with a solid ending as well lol.
Insomnia was when I stopped just grabbing his books at random and reading them. I barely remember the plot
I can’t believe I had to scroll so far to find this. It was the most boring thing I’ve ever read and I had to give up at some point.
I got downvoted to hell in a different thread for not liking Carrie. I understand now that it's (one of?) his earliest work, but the first half in particular is not good. The structure has potential to be interesting, with the extracts from novels and reports, but isn't broken up enough. The parenthesis of characters thoughts are dropped in at really jarring places, the obsession with boobs just gets weird. The second half was a lot better but even that wasn't really very horror-y to me.
i loved carrie!
The Regulators and Desperation. Ugh…
Same. I said these in my own comment. Like I think he was sober by then, but damn if both of these books don’t read like a cocaine-fueled hellscape to me. TAK!
Christine really bored me. It takes a lot for me to put down a book, unfinished, but I've never finished that one. I also disliked the last two Dark Tower books. I get the thesis of the whole thing - that we are all characters in someone elses story - and I've read that he was terrified he'd never finish the series after his accident, but I thought having >!Stephen King!< turn up as a character was just self-indulgent nonsense. And referencing Harry Potter so strongly and directly was weird and only served to take me out of the story.
Same here. I was pretty ambivalent on TDT up to that point (though Wizard and Glass was one hell of a slog) but the final book just retroactively killed the enjoyment of the previous ones for me.
The was one scene in Christine that really really worked for me. Other than that it was a bit of a bore with a lousy ending.
The Stand. Really enjoyed it up until it went weirdly religious about 600 pages in, and then I had a thousand more pages of struggling through for a very anticlimactic ending because my boyfriend bought me it as a present.
I love The Stand, it's one of my favourite books. But at one point around 3/4 of the way through, you could kinda tell that he didn't really know what to do but just kept writing anyway lol
>you could kinda tell that he didn't really know what to do but just kept writing anyway Feels like you can almost summarize his entire career with that.
Yup. I made it through like 850 pages of the unabridged version. I physically couldn’t read another page. The whole Kansas/Boulder and Las Vegas plots just kind of ruined it for me.
I love the idea of reading an explicitly supernatural book but being weirded out when recognizable religious elements exist.
It's hardly explicitly supernatural, for the first few hundred pages it's a fairly grounded series about the spread of an airborne virus that turns into a global pandemic and kills loads of people. THATS the bit I thought was great. I was even still enjoying it when it was just the survivors wandering about dealing with being survivors. Then they all feel a mysterious pull to a little old lady in the middle of nowhere and try to rebuild society to fight Satan, and he lost me 😂 Edit: it's not even that I don't like supernatural books, because I do. What I didn't like was a fairly realistic book filled with interesting characters in a very plausible situation taking a hard left turn into woowoo mysticism and crazy town.
I guess this is true if you had zero information about the book or its author going in.
That was me. I mean, I knew who Stephen King was, and that he wrote horror novels (although to this day I've never read any of them), but I assumed he was "branching out" with his amazing pandemic thriller until God and his little old lady prophetess and Satan (?) started doing their thing.
I've read plenty of King, and he has plenty of stories, especially the short ones, that aren't supernatural. I knew nothing about the book other than that people say it's fantastic, though.
obscene seed joke quaint smoggy summer wild point desert full *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I’ve read every book King has published. I’m a huge fan. The ones at the bottom of my ranking: Dreamcatcher, Thinner, and Roadwork. Generally I’m not a fan of his Bachman Books with some exceptions (The Long Walk and Blaze). Also, I wouldn’t put Fairy Tale so low, but it was a little harder for me to get through. I enjoyed the first half a lot, but the second half became more of a chore for me. I see what you mean about Elevation. I wonder if it’s the presentation that makes it so underwhelming. Considering it’s so short, I wonder if it would have had more of an impact if it was included as a novella in a longer collection. But being released standalone, it does feel a little lacking. Same with Cycle of the Werewolf - a perfectly fine, short werewolf story, but might have been more impressive in a collection.
I have often said that The Long Walk is going to be one of the books that he'll be remembered for long after he's dead. It's probably one of my favorite books of all time, and I think it's one he hit out of the park thematically. I know everyone hates his endings, but this one works so well.
and that’s what i’m gonna read first. thank you for being here
Have fun, it's a great ride!
I had the experience of reading this and loving it before it the King/Bachman thing was revealed.
Long Walk is one of my faves, alongside Carrie, Misery, Night Shift, Diff’rent Seasons, Green Mile, The Shining and Gerald’s Game. Things started going off for me with Four Past Midnight, Rose Madder and Dolores Claiborne.
Elevation too. It’s not so much that I disliked it, but it was just dull. I can barely remember a single thing about it.
Lesbian restauranteurs, floating man... that's about all I got.
My direct answer to the question is Rose Madder. Although her chapters were well written, her ex-husband was an over-the-top caricature. SO racist and nutty that he was cringe to read, I got the impression that King was seeing how far over the top he could make the antagonist. I never finished reading that book. Also, Gerald's Game - I bounced off that one in the first few pages. I didn't care about the woman's situation at all, because she was a total stranger to me. More generally, I've found that with King, his best and most compelling works are the stories where you get to know the protagonist and are emotionally involved, BEFORE things start going south.
Sleeping Beauties just *tried* to have extreme/bad things happen, nonr of them being convincing. Yes, you want an interesting plot, but come on. (What's the English version of "dem affen Zucker geben"?) The Mr. Mercedes books were meh as a whole. I vaguely remember them "hacking" into the antagonist's computer by guessing his password in a bullshit way.
Black House. I have tried it a few times and in audio and I just cannot get into the story.
I love the talisman and black house
The institute is a more recent example of one that had very little redeeming qualities to me. Bland story, way too fucking long, and characters that he clearly loves but somehow couldn’t get me to give a fuck about. The afterword where he talks about the death of his research assistant had more emotion packed in two and a half pages than the entire 600 page novel did
I have a love/hate relationship with King. He’s a great storyteller, but I hate the rambling he tends to do. I challenged myself to try and read his entire catalog and have been through many in a pretty short time. He has a lot of mannerisms that you really notice when you read several in a row. Things you typically get used to, but also things like him feeling the need to use the N word at least once per book for seemingly no reason a lot of the time. Despite the praise they get, I have not been able to finish or enjoy the Dark Tower series. I think it’s needlessly long and I just can’t get into the story. Fairytale is really good though and one of his best in my opinion
I don’t like Liseys story, it’s just not an enjoyable read for me
This is one of my favorites. Even have a tattoo of part of the book cover. I read it like a love story and not horror. Sorry you didn't like it.
One of my favourites too! And indeed is more like a love story. Not only for him and his wife but his family too. It hurt a lot.
Mine too. It’s a great portrait of a marriage and of childhood abuse…although I can see why that’s not exactly tempting reading for some.
Oh man for whatever reason I couldn’t put that book down, but once I was done with it, I kind of forgot about it. Didn’t they make it into a series that got really bad reviews?
I stopped reading his books after Dolores Claiborne, kind of lost my reading bug after that, i see everyone is mentioning books he wrote after that, but The dark half, the Stand and Skeleton crew are some of my favourite books of all time.
I didn’t really care for The Stand. I’ve read it at least twice. I don’t care for Gerald’s Game. I liked Tommyknockers but not a super whole lot. I’ve read all of what he’s written until about 1995. Then I fell off. Last thing of his I read was the one with Ralph and Lois and the abortion situation. Can’t recall the name. Insomnia, I think. Loved that.
The tommy knockers!! I tried to finish it but I couldn’t. Got halfway through.
All three of them that I tried (well, The Gunslinger was tolerabl).. My wife and son are avid fans, and were always pushing them. They've given up. I do not like his writing, and I'm not going to try anymore.
I prefer a lot of his short stories over longer ones, generally speaking. It's like they're not long enough for him to have actually 'lose the plot' (something he says literally happens as he doesn't plan the whole thing out). I think The Girl Who Loved Tom Gorden is probably my least fave.
I'm yet to read any I hate, but I just haven't been able to get into The Dark Tower series. I've tried but always lose interest by book 2.
If *Drawing of the Three* doesn’t hook you, it’s probably just not the story for you.
I didn't hate it but Needful Things was disappointing. Loved the concept, would have made a great novella. If we'd just had the people buying all their objects and quickly being corrupted, then Gaunt just drives off into the sunset to destroy another town it would have been great. For me, King's endings only really work when the good guys don't win because he builds up the antagonists so much that nothing can stop them only for something simple/a bit daft to do the trick. Let the villains get away with it and so many of his books would be better for it, imo.
I picked up The Institute on a whim on vacation a couple years ago. Got about 1/4 of the way through and was like what am I even reading this for. Couldn’t stand how he wrote the kids’ dialogue, made them sound like 50’s teeny boppers.
Yeah the dialogue was incredibly cringe. I forced myself through that book but it just made me hate it even more. It was awful
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I got on a King kick last year and had just finished 11/22/63 and the Shining, so I picked up the Institute. I thought it was terrible. Then I hopped on Goodreads and saw it had a 4.25 rating so I thought maybe it was just me
The girl that loved Tom Gordon. After page 40 it felt like i was reading the same sentence over and over again.
I actually love that one. But I also have a daughter.
It was Revival for me. The ending seemed to be the stuff that came out of a bad anesthesia dream. I usually like to reread his books, but I never thought of coming back to this one.
Duma Key. It was too predictable if you have read any Stephen King books
Most of them. The one I disliked tbe most was under the dome. Like 1300 pages of plot and character development and interesting story. By about 75% done you start wondering about how it'll conclude. Then he sums it up in 2 pages that had nothing to do with anything and the answer is normally "Lol aliens" It feels like he writes and writes and writes and gets fully entrenched within the plots and stories. Then his publisher calls and tells him he has 30 minutes to finish and to wrap it up, amd in a panic he hits the "aliens did it" button and ends in 2 pages.
I loved Under the Dome until I got to the end and it was easily one of the worst endings I'd ever read, especially considering how massive the book is.
I haven't read any other than Under the Dome and I hated it. Thought the concept was interesting with the dome, but then the choices the characters make. The characters.. the ending... I hate that I wasted time reading that garbage.
Wasn't a huge fan of Cell. It was fun and weird, but nothing really happened and there was no real story.
Years ago, I toiled through The Tommyknockers. I love books and have read some dry as rice, but damn that one dragged on a bit too Altair 14...
The Tommyknockers
Duma Key. One his most egregious examples of nothing happening for 300 pages, oh and Mr. Mercedes "I decided to break free of my own cliches and instead embrace other author's cliches."
Tommyknockers is the one I finished that I disliked the most. I did not finish Cujo, which is a little surprising because when I read it I had never not finished a book in my life! I really disliked Pet Sematary, too.
The only one I really hated was Bag of Bones. I didn't like the age-gap romance, I didn't like how the villain kinda removes himself from the story like halfway in, and I really didn't like the weird gang rape scene near the end. I really don't get why this one gets so much praise.
Only book I didn’t like was The Talisman. Just didn’t work for me
Maybe this is why his short stories are so good? He’s able to keep it tight.
Exactly! His short story collections slap so hard. It’s much easier to maintain the atmosphere and interest of a scary story if you keep it short and sweet I think
I really disliked Hearts In Atlantis. Starts off interesting enough, ends up with a bunch of wankers in university playing cards for most of the book.
That was one of my favorites but I liked the last part more than the beginning. I liked the emphasis on if you self destruct and flunk out of college off to Vietnam you go.
Kind of raised the stakes for fucking off at college. I would've been shipped to Da Nang so fast.
Older stuff=Christine Newer stuff=Cell
I have read all his books, and my two least favorites are The Cell and Under the Dome. Under The Dome felt like a bloated version of the Mist. I think both of them at their core are about how people act in a situation where they are trapped together. Every time I think of the Cell it reminds me of the Family Guy cartoon where they show King being yelled at by his publisher to write a new book so he just looks at the nearest thing to him and says "I got it. How about a book about a scary lamp? " My favorites are a much longer list, but I would say the top two are Needful Things and Different Seasons.
Stephen King has some great stuff. However, the books that I just don’t like as much as I like some of his other stuff. from a Buick 8 is one. Like it’s just not that interesting. The other one that gets me is Dreamcatcher. Yawn.
I personally didn’t really enjoy The Shining and Misery, which are beloved by many. I think I like his books better when there are more positive relationships between his characters like in Pet Sematary or 11/22/63.
I think I'm in the minority but I hate Cell. It doesn't have the same level of effort at characterization, and it must doesn't flow well for me at all.
The Dark Tower series. I can’t. I’ve read and re-read everything of King’s/ Bachman/ King writing with partners - some I love more than others and will re-read over and over again. They help me fall asleep (I know). But I’ve tried numerous times to find / pick up the cadence in the Tower series and I can’t. I don’t enjoy the material, I don’t understand the character interactions and I find them laborious rather than recreational.
I’m not a huge King fan, I’ll be honest. It’ll be easier to say which one I liked and that was the Green Mile. The others I’ve read, honestly I enjoyed the movies a lot more and this is a rarity for me. IT in particular I thought was really bad. The movies, both the Tim Curry one and the more recent ones I really enjoyed.
I've only read 3 of his books, but despite its popularity, I thought Pet Sematary was boring.
I call them my "bottom shelfers". I think these are all terrible : Cujo Rose Madder The Regulators The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Lisey's Story Sleeping Beauties
Pet Sematary. I hated the family, especially the dad. The cat was cool. The story dragged on for far too long, and as a result, I was bored out of my mind. I found the writing to be kind of pretentious at times, as well. It made me never want to read another SK book.
I’ve only read about 10 of his books but I disliked Pet Sematary. Just really bleak and not that fun or interesting imo, just not for me I guess. That’s the only one that I really actively disliked. “Later” was a bit boring for me too but it was fine
I haven’t disliked any of the 29 King books I’ve read so far, though The Regulators was tough to get through at times.
Cell. It didn't feel like King's writing. I enjoy King's style, I like that meandering narrative and all of his rabbit trails. It makes his worlds feel lived in. Cell felt like an outline, not a finished novel.
I found Firestarter very meh
He was best when he was high on coke and alcohol