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Yup. King in my mind has 3 basic periods of writing.
The early stuff. Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter. All GREAT stories. They still hold up. But the quality of the prose itself was sometimes lacking. He was still learning the craft, and it showed. But fantastic stories nonetheless.
The middle stuff. IT, The Tommyknockers, Christine, Pet Sematary, The Talisman, Thinner. This is the era where Stephen King lost me. I couldn't get into the stories. Just overblown and occasionally even turgid. I later found out this was the point where we was a full-on drunk and addict, and it showed. Then he got cleaned up, and had his brush with death. That seemed to reinvigorate his writing.
I read...tried to read King in his early days. They simply weren't my kind of stories. I was never into horror and while I tried a few of these, I didn't finish one of them.
Being a bookseller for many years cured me of the belief that books I read and loved or hated should be held in the same regard by others. Everybody has different tastes when it comes to literature and fiction.
I think it's just like the food we eat. What one person chows down on is sometimes really disgusting to me and while I might give it a taste, there's no way I can go beyond that one taste sometimes...and this applies to authors. Some of them just leave a bad taste in my mind's eye, and I don't want it there. Books are a very personal taste.
Yup. King in my mind has 3 basic periods of writing.
The early stuff. Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter. All GREAT stories. They still hold up. But the quality of the prose itself was sometimes lacking. He was still learning the craft, and it showed. But fantastic stories nonetheless.
The middle stuff. IT, The Tommyknockers, Christine, Pet Sematary, The Talisman, Thinner. This is the era where Stephen King lost me. I couldn't get into the stories. Just overblown and occasionally even turgid. I later found out this was the point where we was a full-on drunk and addict, and it showed. Then he got cleaned up, and had his brush with death. That seemed to reinvigorate his writing.
The later stuff. Bag of Bones (best ghost story I've ever read), The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Duma Key, Lisey's Story, 11/22/63, Joyland, Doctor Sleep. I LOOOVE his recent stuff. At least most of it (I couldn't get into Revival.) He still manages to be scary, but his prose has finally grown up, and it's obvious he cares more about the main characters than the monsters. And no longer is every book about a writer in Maine that things happen to.
And he really isn't just writing the same stories over and over. He is really stretching himself. 11/22/63 is straight up science fiction, but in the vein of The Twilight Zone rather than Star Trek, and it's a very touching, even sentimental story in a lot of ways. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a great adventure in the vein of Jack London, but with far more psychological depth and horror. Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers read more like Ed McBain than Stephen King. Joyland is almost S.E. Hinton. Bag of Bones is about life, death, and grief, all wrapped in a story about a child custody battle and a decades old curse with a ghost story on top.
I've always considered Pet Sematary a part of his earlier work. It's definitely the best book of his I have read (along with 11/22/63).
My general rule with King is not to read anything he wrote after about 1990. there are a couple of recent exceptions, such as 11/22/63, but I find most of his new stuff to be fairly banal.
I've noticed people who don't like authors like Patterson and King are often the types who love the purple prose naval-gazers, authors who go on and on ad nauseum about the color of the flowers on the tabletop, and leave their characters in perpetual, angsty introspection. They spend all their time thinking up beautiful ways of describing things at the cost of actually having their characters DO something. If I'm looking for weepy poetry, I read a poem.
I've noticed people who don't like authors like Patterson and King are often the types who love the purple prose naval-gazers, authors who go on and on ad nauseum about the color of the flowers on the tabletop, and leave their characters in perpetual, angsty introspection. They spend all their time thinking up beautiful ways of describing things at the cost of actually having their characters DO something. If I'm looking for weepy poetry, I read a poem.
But that's just me.
I don't like the type of writing you just described OR King or Patterson, whoever the heck Patterson is. But that's just me.
I've noticed people who don't like authors like Patterson and King are often the types who love the purple prose naval-gazers, authors who go on and on ad nauseum about the color of the flowers on the tabletop, and leave their characters in perpetual, angsty introspection. They spend all their time thinking up beautiful ways of describing things at the cost of actually having their characters DO something. If I'm looking for weepy poetry, I read a poem.
But that's just me.
No..to be frank, I gave up on Patterson after his 6th or 7th Alex Cross story, when the stories got shorter and shorter, the fonts got bigger, the margins got wider...prices kept getting higher... Not to mention the production lines he has going with co-authors who actually do the writing based on just his outlines.
I prefer Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Robert Crais, Stephen White, Dennis Lehane, Nelson DeMille...all those purple prose authors, you mean?
Or how about sf/fantasy...give George RR Martin or Joe Abercrombie a try, they're real angsty under all that action and violence.
I've always considered Pet Sematary a part of his earlier work. It's definitely the best book of his I have read (along with 11/22/63).
I loved 11/22/63, but I've never been able to finish Pet Sematary. The main characters were so unlikeable. Had the book been about the old man across the road having to put up with his annoying new neighbors, I might have gotten into it.
No..to be frank, I gave up on Patterson after his 6th or 7th Alex Cross story, when the stories got shorter and shorter, the fonts got bigger, the margins got wider...prices kept getting higher... Not to mention the production lines he has going with co-authors who actually do the writing based on just his outlines.
James Patterson is not a writer. James Patterson is a manufacturer of product. He is the literary equivalent of a Swanson TV dinner.
I gave up on James Patterson about five books into the Alex Cross series. He was always getting DC locations so wrong, I finally could only hate-read him.
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