/lit/ - Literature

I find it fascinating that he writes really long books with really long paragraphs and yet his core fanbase is YA plebs who would find Forgotten Realms books too difficult.

>>11468039

>What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

>>11468069
>let [the author] go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

lol this can't be real

>>11468176
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-stephen-king-problem-a-snobs-notes/#!
exercise some critical thinking

>>11468205
Only an American could write this.

>>11468205

>>11468747
Mad? I'm an Australian. *infects you with lice* Americans will always be the object of penetrating, unrelenting investigation, examination, mockery. We will observe your naked continent and take mental possession of the body of every little Yankee harlot forever.

>>11468752
I think soon you'll be so busy with learning Xi Jinping thought you won't have the time.

>>11468752
Australians are just defective britbongs living on an island of misfit toys

>>11468039
It's highly effective at evoking mental imagery, for some reason that a brainlet like me can't properly explain. It lets him make even mediocre ideas connect with people's imaginations on a pretty vivid and primitive level.
Maybe after a point people started reading because of branding, but you gotta remember he wasn't born with his audience. He built it up like everyone else, hack or not.

>>11468784
He built it up by pumping out a few dozen novels in a years-long heroine bender

Is it true that the Stand is at least decent?

We had his book On Writing assigned in high school, which was such a poorly written appeal to mediocrity it completely purged in me any inclination to read his fiction works. If you consider yourself a fan of prose, or even more so a writer yourself, then I hope you do not submit yourself to such mental castration.

>>11468205
But I did exercise my critical thinking skills by doubting the claim.

>>11468821
No. The Stand is just people wandering around for approximately 2.8 million years and then the Trashcan Man blows up Las Vegas with a nuke.

The best King is IT. IT isn't great but it is the apex of King's abilities.

Writing for plebs is about buildup of tension. R L stine ends every chapter on a cliffhanger, Dan Brown writes extended chase scenes, and George R R Martin kills off a vital character evey other page. The difference between them and Stephen King is he's a master of horror, the way he places you squarely in the center of his stories and surrounds you with dread is an art in and of itself. Have you ever read IT? Some spooky shit if I'm telling you the God's honest truth. It's like being dead center of the ocean 40 miles under where it's a pitch black in every direction and hearing something make sound that shakes the water around you every bone in your body. It's the kind of shit you remember before you close your eyes to sleep at night and everything around you is as dark as you'd imagined that water would be.

Writing for plebs is about buildup of tension. R L stine ends every chapter on a cliffhanger, Dan Brown writes extended chase scenes, and George R R Martin kills off a vital character evey other page. The difference between them and Stephen King is he's a master of horror, the way he places you squarely in the center of his stories and surrounds you with dread is an art in and of itself. Have you ever read IT? Some spooky shit if I'm telling you the God's honest truth. It's like being dead center of the ocean 40 miles under where it's a pitch black in every direction and hearing something make sound that shakes the water around you and every bone in your body. It's the kind of shit you remember before you close your eyes to sleep at night and everything around you is as dark as you'd imagined that water would be.

Writing for plebs is about buildup of tension. R L stine ends every chapter on a cliffhanger, Dan Brown writes extended chase scenes, and George R R Martin kills off a vital character evey other page. The difference between them and Stephen King is he's a master of horror, the way he places you squarely in the center of his stories and surrounds you with dread is an art in and of itself. Have you ever read IT? Some spooky shit if I'm telling you the God's honest truth. It's like being dead center of the ocean 40 miles under where it's a pitch black in every direction and hearing something make sound that shakes the water around you and every bone in your body. It's the kind of shit you remember before you close your eyes to sleep at night and everything around you is as dark as you'd imagined that water would be.

>>11468908
>>11468900
>>11468892
based redditor

>>11468913
I swear I only posted it twice. I think someone literally just copied and pasted my post and reposted it.

From talking to a woman who's a fan of Stephen King and also "reads a lot" (I mean she has but it's all pretty basic 'woman who reads a lot' stuff, Harry Potter, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, etc), the chief distinction between fans of King and non-fans of King appears to be the reader's subjective disposition towards actively being frightened by the work. King fans are people who are naturally empathic (or who project their emotions) to the point that even incredibly superfluous or outright weak narrative structures can elicit palpable fear in them, and since King writes about a lot of fairly generically scary sense with some moderately engaging language he's emerged as the gold standard for whitebread "ohmigosh so scary" lit.

>>11468908
For the love of god please tell me this is pasta and that there isn't actually someone outside of reddit who believes this

>>11468908
*upvotes*

>>11468908

>>11468908
*downvotes*
King is a hack, the true master of horror is P.T. Evans

>>11468908
>RL Stine
>pleb
Kys

>>11468069
"King is Cervantes compared to David Foster Wallace."

>>11468925
You sir, are an idiot.

>>11468908

>>11468039
you sound like you have around 110 iq, op.

>>11470236
Bloom fucking sucks

>>11468821
No. His only good book is the long walk.

>>11470404
I enjoyed 11.22.63

>>11468039
being able to connect with armies of plebs on a visceral level is not an undesirable quality - if i could do it, i'd have cashed in by now.

even if he were capable of writing "better" prose, why would he? if the hustle works, don't fuck it up

>>11468039
>What is his sheer ability to connect to low IQ members of society.
I always thought McCarthy shared that ability

>>11470412
Twas a great book

>>11468043
I find franchise fiction too difficult.

I noticed that shitter sites like twitter and metafilter are full of filler and affect, as opposed to structure and reason, much like King's books. Incidentally, I've listened to a "podcast" where a few fans talk about why they like him. One of them unironically said she found his description of a basement scary because she is scared of basements in real life.

>>11470412
#metoo

>>11470344
Nice counterpoint

>>11468888

>then the Trashcan Man blows up Las Vegas with a nuke

so you didn't read it then

His "heroin era" books are really good though, but you had to be there. He was revolutionary at the time, people never experienced something like this.

Accessibility and marketing just like everything that is popular in every medium.

>>11470404
Supporting this. Long walk was great. I actually read it while I was in jail over the weekend for a DUI and it fit the atmosphere perfectly

OK I have loved many Stephen King books and unironically think he is a great writer. Let me try and explain why I enjoy (or enjoyed, should I say - it's been years since I read one) his classic novels and other stories, such as The Shining, Salem's Lot, IT, The Stand, Tommyknockers, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Different Seasons, Christine, The Dead Zone, Pet Semetary, Misery, and the Bachman Books.

First of all - look the fuck at that string of HITS. If he was a musician he would be dectuple platignum, he would be the God Emperor of Rock and Roll. That is a truly astonishing track record of popular literature. You may not like what he does, but DAMN he was on fire through the seventies and eighties.

I don't (didn't) enjoy his books because they were "scary". As a child, thinking about some of the worst scenarios from his books was occasionally chilling, late at night, possibly when walking home in the dark. But "scary" wasn't the reason I read them, it was

a) the superb characterisation, incidental detail and slow build-up that hooked you in and made you want to keep turning pages to "find out what happened"

b) The horrified fascination at the appalling shit the well-developed characters are then put through

>>11471618
continued

I don't really understand people's basis for calling his books the "mac and fries" of literature. I'd sooner call them, perhaps, the Twin Peaks-eqdue coffee and cherry pie of literature. Honest, unpretentious, utterly satisfying and utterly American fare.

Are people saying the subject matter of his books is trivial, stupid, unworthy? Christine, for example, is astonishingly thematically rich. It's about at least a dozen things - the baby boom, oil crisis, coming of age, the dark side of US small town existence, manhood, machine fetishisation, consumer culture, male role models, the education system... and a haunted car, the perfect VEHICLE for a parable about teenage rebellion gone wrong and how poison can be passed down from generation to generation.

Are people complaining about King's prose? You can cherry pick terrible writing from any author's work. But I challenge anyone to read the section of the extended version of The Stand, for example, where The Trashcan Man sets fire to a giant oil storage silo, and not be drawn in by the incredibly powerful evocation of a deserted, echoing America shimmering under the summer sun, the mounting tension and excitement of the protagonist, the way he tries to flee the expanding wall of flame... it's just fantastic descriptive writing, not an exercise in bad poetry or thesaurus-delving, but just straightforward COOL SHIT that brings a cinema to life in the reader's head.

I think a huge part of why he is so popular with the masses now is the amount of movies that are based on his work. Has anyone done an analysis of his success along side his film releases?

In b4 you need a large following to have your book adapted into a movie.

>>11471618
>>11471660
Good posts

>>11471618
>using the term God Emperor to describe anyone else than the true God Emperor
kys

airplanes and book to tape. america is large and with a lot of americans travelling for work there is a lot of down time crossing the coasts. to deal with the boredom long but easy to read books became very popular junk food in airports and car rental places.


stephen king is a you had to be there thing. you have to imagine yourself in the 80s and 90s flying for 10 hours or driving two days across the country or stuck in a bus for 14 hours. there is not much to do.

>>11474028
Have figured me out yet anon?

>>11471618
>the superb characterisation

>>11468747
heh heh heh u mad America just cus you literally do ANYTHING like vote for a fat orange lord to rule your kingdom haha absolute madmen cya later babes haha keep your tariffs we'll take our trade deals elsewhere lmaoi hear newfoundland does a good deal on rocks

>>11468039
What is wrong about his facial bone structure? It just looks a bit off but I can't quite put my finger on why. Is it the long philtrum maybe?

All the cool people online say King is for plebs. I'm not a pleb! I hate King! T. Average lit snowflake.

>>11474390
Example of some amazing King characters:

Harold Lauder (The Stand)
Patrick Hocksetter (IT)
James "Gard" Gardener (Tommyknockers)

All astonishingly well realised depictions of human beings, who you feel you know exceptionally well yet who are still capable of surprising you. I think there are quite a few Harold Lauders browsing this board right now...