>>24111236
Stephen King is a horrific author. I got twenty pages into the shining and threw it across the room. Gormless trash

>>24111236
No. King himself says his work is the fast food of the book store. "Simple fare for simple folk," "a big mac and fries." It's all garbage, most popular works are too, as is all genre fiction. The positive thing is you've developed a literary taste and can filter them out within a few pages now. Don't waste your time on them.

>>24111268
>>24111241

Thanks for your opinions. But christ, I hate getting a few chapters into anything and giving up. But it helps to know that I'm not going to be missing out on anything.

>>24111236
I remember greatly enjoying the Dark Tower as a teen, more than any other King book.
You can't treat Melville and Stephen King the same way. Melville is like watching a Bergman or a Tarkovsky film, Stephen King is like watching an action flick with the bros. Both have their place and you shouldn't compare them directly. The Raid is one of my all-time favourite films btw.

>>24111268
Full King quote is
>Most of them are plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.
Apparently from 'Different Seasons'
Hodder, London (1982) p676.

>>24111304
This is inaccurate because McDonalds is enjoyable. King is like eating out of a skip

>>24111236
>Is The Stand and some of Stephen King's other "well received" works WORTH reading, in your opinion?
A lot of people struggle with The Stand. I'd recommend The Shining to see if you really have a problem with his writing or not. That and his short stories. Many people feel those are his best writing full stop.

>>24111236
King is a spectacular storyteller, not a writer. His character development is pretty tight, but damned if he doesn't fuck up every single timeline and detail, by treating them as inconsequential impediments to the story. It always did drive me crazy.

His short stories are pretty good allegedly

It's been probably 15 years since I read it but I remember absolutely loving the first half of The Stand.

salems lot is crazy good

people smelling their own farts: the thread

>>24111236
Read Clive Barker if you want to read some well written horror slop

>>24111236
>Moby Dick (which was fantastic and thoroughly enjoyable and beautiful and thought provoking, etc.)
You just made this thread to suck your own dick, Moby Dick is dogshit barely better than King and sometimes even worse.
>but you dont get it the 20 pages of made up bullshit written like a wikipedia page was absolutely necessary
Melville is a mediocre author and Moby Dick isn't even his best work.

>>24112240
Holy pleb

>>24112244
I read 10x more than you and I know 100x more than you about Melville. You're reading slop but you're too much of a midwit to realize it.

>>24112248
You're defending Stephen King. What more needs to be said. There's nothing of value you can offer the board.

>>24111236
If you like Hollywood slop and soap operas, King's work is worth reading.
I recently re-read some Stephen King's books, and it hit me just how much they're influenced not by books, but by television: from the heroes to the romance to the progression of a plot. They're like a slop movie in book form.
If you're coming from TV influenced fiction slop, classical literature and literary fiction would seem like a slog because the rules are different: an accent on language, prose; on complex characters; on conveying complex ideas. And the same is true of the reverse process. After literary fiction King seems very bland, character and prose wise, and the books feel like an assortment of gory or pornographic scenes strung together to keep your attention till the end.
That said, King's writing, purely from a technical angle, is actually better than that of his colleagues. If you think King is bad, try Koontz, Dan Brown, Hoover, J.Maas, Branderson, Rowling, Vandermeer. Compared to his competition, King can actually write.

>>24111236
>>24111268
This Anon has it right, King isn't trying to write like Melville, Pynchon, Joyce, etc he's writing for a huge market of common people.
Are his books worth reading? I think so but you have to accept what they are. You're not going to read too many lines that stick with you for being beautifully written, most of the characters are going to be pretty predictable, and he uses a lot of the same tricks over and over.
My favorite is Salem's Lot, it's one of very few books I have found to be scary at all. If you can't finish that or Pet Semetary I doubt you will like anything else King has written.

>>24112286
>ESL retard has no reading comprehension

>>24111236
its the television of books

>>24112353

Yeah, I guess you’re right. Ironically, the only king books I’ve ever actually read are Salem’s Lot and Pet Semetary, and enjoyed them both (unironically). Although both were in my early days of reading

I posted this thread mainly because I wanted some objective opinion on King and also basically to gather some input about whether not I’d just be wasting my own time reading The Stand.

In the interest of closure of this thread, I did put it down like 50 pages in and picked up All The Pretty Horses. Which is beautiful already and I’m glad I switched. However having read all of the comments I might go back to The Stand because I want to enjoy easy reading sometimes if only for the story and I don’t want to end up like a complete autistic who can’t enjoy reading anything except 18th century untranslated Russian parlance.

Thanks all

What is his scariest book? Salem's Lot really disappointed me