He's not that bad, is he?

>>7668177
at least he's not a women or non-white

>>7668187
>a women

>>7668177

At his best, he's probably one of the best of "pleb lit," however at his worst, yeah he's pretty fucking bad.

>>7668203
>assblasted feminist cuck detected

>>7668187
>>7668203
Or a non-white woman.

>>7668211
If proper grammar make you a feminist I agree with that Nigerian that we should all be feminists.

>>7668218
Lol nice b8.

>>7668177
He's overwhelmingly mediocre. He'll probably be entirely forgotten 20-25 years after his death.

I think we judge him a little too harshly in kind of a "its fun to hate on him way".

I never read him though so I looked up one of his works.

" "May I ask how you've come by this information, sir?"
Hallorann closed his eyes. "What's your name, fellow?"
"Tom Staunton, sir."
"Well, Tom, I know. Now I'll be just as straight with you as I can be. There's
bad trouble up there. Maybe killin bad, do you dig what I'm sayin?"
"Mr. Hall, I really have to know how you — "
"Look," Hallorann had said. "I'm telling you I know. A few years back there
was a fellow up there name of Grady. He killed his wife and his two daughters
and then pulled the string on himself. I'm telling you it's going to happen
again if you guys don't haul your asses out there and stop it!"
"Mr. Hall, you're not calling from Colorado."
"No. But what difference — "
"If you're not in Colorado, you're not in CB range of the Overlook Hotel. If
you're not in CB range you can't possibly have been in contact with the, uh ..."
Faint rattle of papers. "The Torrance family. While I had you on hold I tried
to telephone. It's out, which is nothing unusual. There are still twenty-five
miles of aboveground telephone lines between the hotel and the Sidewinder
switching station. My conclusion is that you must be some sort of crank."
"Oh man, you stupid ..." But his despair was too great to find a noun to go
with the adjective. Suddenly, illumination. "Call them!" he cried"

>>7668260
having now read him I can say that his writing seems pretty bad. It looks like he just wrote whatever was in his head without bothering to change the language or make it sound decent.

He needs to chill the fuck out with those page counts. Like goddamn I love me some genre fiction but I don't need 1600 pages to tell a simple story

>>7668177
do you like him? or do you not like him?

either way, why do you look for validation of your opinions on an imageboard full of teenagers?

>>7668311
I have about a dozen of his books, two of which I took from school and one I got as a gift

>>7668270
>he just wrote whatever was in his head without bothering to change the language or make it sound decent.

If you read On Writing, you'll find out this is pretty much his style of writing. He urges writers to just write whatever comes to your head. And when he goes back to edit, it's mostly just to do stuff like get rid of adverbs and change any instance of the passive voice into the active.

>>7668324
On Writing is just fan-faction of The Elements of Style squished in between an autobiography

>>7668333
>fan-faction

>>7668260
>But his despair was too great to find a noun to go with the adjective.

Why did he write it like this? Why not just "couldn't finish the sentence." Why the stuff about nouns and adjective? I don't remember Halloran being a grammer nerd.

>>7668177
guy's a fucking weirdo. look at him with his sneakers kicked up like that. big time bullshit artist. his work den probably looks more like whitney's crack house or MJ's pedo house full of feces and cocaine based on the quality of his lit

Have you read his cringeworthy writings about gun control?

>>7668354
It's narrated in the third person so that's the narrator describing it that way to you rather than the character thinking it.

It's still an awkward and nerdy way of describing it but it doesn't suggest anything about the character himself.

cute corgi

>>7668260
>>7668270
can someone explain why this is bad?

>>7668996
Its not, it sells by the boat load.

I just find it a bit irksome personally and people on /lit/ seem to agree.

>>7668260
>you're not in CB range you can't possibly have been in contact with the, uh ..."
>Faint rattle of papers. "The Torrance family.

that was bad, it's like he's writing a script not a novel...would have been better with a complete sentence, or just made the unfamiliarity with the name fully clear through the dialogue alone...

>But his despair was too great to find a noun to go with the adjective. Suddenly, illumination. "Call them!" he cried"

but then here he tries to get out of script mode and back to novel by throwing in some grammatical terms and "vocab" words to remind you that you're reading and not watching a movie...

the dialogue wasn't bad, but those two things kind of sucked, prose wise, eye em oh

>>7668177

It's often said of King, and I can confirm it from my reading of him (not extensive, but more than one book), that he sets things up well and writes in a page-turning manner, but he isn't strong with endings. From wat I understand, he generally doesn't know how his stories are going to end until he writes the endings. I actually think this goes hand-in-hand with his success as a horror writer, i.e., that it fits well with the nature of horror and its focus on uncertainty, fear, and so on. I wonder whether other writers of horror can be said to buck that or whether it's a general tendency. (Maybe it often holds with mystery too; I understand for example that Eco didn't know who was guilty in The Name of the Rose until he got to that point in the writing.)

>>7668996
It's not bad, but it's the sort of thing anyone could write. Most things about his writing aren't bad (other than his tendency to go on and on long after he has any idea of what he wants to do with a particular story because he doesn't use outlines and set concrete goals as far as length goes) per-se, just average and underwhelming stylistically and conceptually.

Mediocrity is what sells, and when /lit/ complains about people like him, that's what it's complaining about.

He's pretty shit, but I liked On Writing. I think most people here would agree that he is a pretty cool dude, though.

On Writing is his best book tbhlads

actually the first section of Hearts in Atlantis, were it published as a standalone Novella, could certainly mistaken for passible Lit, there's very little spookiness and it's genuinely moving, eery and to some extent thematically rewarding.

>>7669016
>>7669041
I just want to figure out how to determine quality. I can't really seem to see that yet.

File: oh ffs.gif (2MB, 352x288px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 352x288px

>>7668187

Hes like Woody Allen, everybody knows him, yet nobody knows why

>>7669712

That is such a dumb analogy.

Stop saying things and then posting them.

>>7669030
that's a lot of analysis into something that equates to a finger painting

>>7670356

I recognize that there's plenty of horror and mystery that's not deep or substantial, but there are also titles from among the most respected in literature that can be put in those categories. The Turn of the Screw comes to mind for horror, along with some of Borges, who has some mysteries too. The Brothers Karamazov is (among other things) a mystery.

Hearts In Atlantis is by far my favourite King book.

It's a book of short stories that tie together (and tie together with The Dark Tower), all themed around growing up in America in and around the Vietnam war. It's definitely Kings most thoughtful and heartfelt work, and while it was more than a little trite and cringey at times, overall I think it was great and would highly recommend it.

Think Forrest Gump with more thought and less feeling.

>>7669041

The Stand was not mediocre. It didn't adequately express its themes and schizophrenically changed what it was about every 200 pages or so, but it was definitely not something anyone could have written.

You forget when you're on this board just how good a lot of the stuff we read here is. The stuff that is remembered is so far above most of the crap published that it can't even be compared. The Stand doesn't ascend to that level, but it's certainly impressive when compared to the vast majority of shit published.

tl;dr, sure King looks crap if you only read great classics, but he's head and shoulders above the average published author

I don't read much genre fic but I'd like to engross myself in some fantasy soon, is the dark tower series any good? I really haven't read much fantasy so I'm not aware of the tropes and such

>>7670655

It's good for the first 3 or 4 books, but then gets really shitty after that. You don't have to be too aware of the genre tropes, because it's much more King than fantasy.

>>7670655

It's alright. Not tropey compared to other fantasy, but filled with King tropes.

It falls off hard in the later books though. The 7th and 6th were fucking messes.

>>7668177
The only novel of his I've read is The Stand, which I had a decent enough experience with until the ending, which made me never want to read a book by him again.

That said, he's written some good short stories.

why/how he wrote so much books=?

>>7670724

He just writes a lot, and him being not very meticulous about it, and him repeating himself a lot, allows for him to produce a lot of work at a fast time.

>>7668208
What is his best?

>>7668354

It's a story about a writer. Duh.

>>7668177
His cuckshed looks comfy as fuck