Interesting premise, but it ends up being mostly just boring. I thought there would be more supernatural action inside the hotel, not just a few. I know he was trying to build an atmosphere where you follow Jack's decline into insanity, which is why the book is slower. Still, there are so many other characters that just weren't used well, one example being Dick himself. Not to mention the contradiction that Jack sees certain things in the hotel, when Dick himself tells Danny that only the Enlightened Ones can see those things. Jack, according to Dick, was not enlightened. To be more precise, he couldn't quite figure out exactly how Jack's psyche works. I haven't finished the book yet, I'm on chapter four. So far, these have been my impressions.
bump
kys.
>>24818839that dog looks pissed off lol
The movie is 100x better. You'd think Stephen King's most popular book wouldnt be such a huge disappointment.
Overrated book. Also weird multi-page digression about Jack, King's self-insert writing a play about a child rapist and how closely he identifies with the character. >>24820724It's telling that, with all of the objectively crap-tier movies that have been made out of how work, the one he's still seething about over 4 decades later is the one regarded as a masterpiece.
>>24818839Does the dog lion hybrid feature in it? The book is boring because it was kings poor attempt at hiding his expression of guilt over what he did to his own family.
>>24820881He seethes about it because The Shining was written as an allegory of his own struggles with Alcoholism, and the Kubrick movie downplays the alcohol angle in favour of Jack just being an unstable nutcase and abusive husband in general and the ghosts just making him worse. Kubrick wasn’t faithful to the source material and King was annoyed at that.He didn’t seethe about De Palma’s Carrie, nor the film adaptation of Misery, and both those films are also quite well regarded.
>>24818839I actually think it's one of his better books. King is a mediocre writer at best and I don't care for him as a person, but when he finds a theme he can work with he does pretty well. He tends to do his best work when he's writing about disintegrating families or writing from the perspective of a child, both of which he does in the Shining. It's basically a story about an alcoholic who wants to succeed on some level and be a good husband and father, but his inner demons keep pulling him down. Not exactly uncharted territory for a novel but King has some personal experience with the subject matter and he handles it well enough.Jack Torrance is basically a mid-to-shit-tier writer who could probably still be successful if he could learn some self-discipline and make himself work. Unfortunately he relies on alcohol as a crutch, and when he drinks he does stupid, self-sabotaging shit. The same behavior is mirrored in his relationship with his family: he loves his wife and kid, but he also has a mean streak that comes out when he's drunk. He's already in a state of advanced decline at the beginning of the novel, and every time he does something self-destructive and stupid it pushes him a little bit deeper into a hole that would already be difficult to climb out of, and he never really had the strength to climb out in the first place. The "ghosts" and whatever in the hotel just latch onto that and pull him deeper and deeper in. He sort-of redeems himself at the end: basically he reaches a point where escape is impossible, sacrificing himself to the hotel so his son can escape is the only good thing he could still plausibly accomplish, and he chooses to do that rather than drag his family down with him. It's a bleak story and Jack isn't an especially likable character, but it's relatable for a certain kind of person and it's a good book for what it is.As a horror story it's passable. It has some creepy moments, but most of the horror aspect just comes from the isolation of the setting. The dead lady in the bathtub scared the shit out of me when I was 13, to the point where I couldn't take a piss at night until I pulled back the shower curtain to make sure nothing was there. Re-reading it as an adult I didn't find it anywhere near as scary, but I still think it has some spooky moments. In any case the hotel ghosts are scarier than self-driving cars or killer cell phones or a lot of the other silly ideas he's come up with over the years.>>24820724>The movie is 100x better.Hard disagree. I like most of Kubrick's movies but his take on The Shining is hands-down the most overrated steaming pile of shit in the history of cinema. Its strengths are literally all aesthetic. Once you take away the cool visuals and Jack Nicholson's acting all you have left is a cornball slasher film about a guy who goes crazy from isolation and murders his family with an axe.
>>24821660The Kubrick movie doesn’t become a slasher flick until the last act though. It’s all extremely slow burn psychological horror up to that point. And the best parts of the movie are that period between them arriving at the motel and the “here’s Johnny” scene anyway.
>>24821656>He didn’t seethe about De Palma’s Carrie, nor the film adaptation of Misery, and both those films are also quite well regarded.Both of those films were good enough to stand on their own and were reasonably faithful to the source material, so there was nothing to seethe about.Conversely, the adaptation of Pet Sematary wasn't faithful to the source material and King didn't seethe about it. The themes about loss and grief are completely ignored, the director just took the basic plot and turned it into a schlocky B-horror film. However, as a schlocky B-horror film it's a lot of fun and there's nothing to complain about, as far as I'm aware King was fine with it. The problem with the Kubrick film is that it's just pretentious, boring dreck. It's a visually stunning film with absolutely no substance to it, and not enough entertainment value to justify the lack of substance.>And the best parts of the movie are that period between them arriving at the motel and the “here’s Johnny” scene anyway.The best parts of the movie are the sets, the camera-on-the-tricycle tricks, the blood in the elevator, and all the other visually interesting scenes that would work better if you threw out the script and recut it as a music video. The movie itself is boring as fuck, I can't imagine anyone wanting to sit through it more than once.
>>24820722>that dog looks pissed off lolCharles Grodin looks pretty glum as well.
>>24821526>Does the dog lion hybrid feature in it?
>>24818839King is a solid writer when he doesn't meander off the path for 50 pages, but he does that a lot. Most of his stuff could be half as long or even shorter. The Shining starts out great but loses me about 2/3 of the way through. King's real strength is his ability to take mundane concepts (author meets biggest fan, devil opens up a store in town, woman accused of a murder she didn't commit forced to recollect about a murder she did) and turn them into compelling stories. That said, I don't understand how anyone could possibly be scared of anything he writes--it's all pretty boring. I think his best work are the real-to-life stuff like Misery or Dolores Claiborne. When he writes about bugs in the mist or an alien-clown it just loses me before it starts. I'm constantly surprised when grown adults say he scares them.
>>24820881>Also weird multi-page digression about Jack, King's self-insert writing a play about a child rapist and how closely he identifies with the characterKing is obviously some kind of pederast if you read his other books. I wish him getting hit by a van taught him anything
>>24821660>King is a mediocre writer at bestNah he's a good writer, pseuds LOVE bashing him for his simplicity while ignoring his mastery of storytelling.
>>24822409His short stories were actually pretty decent
I remember posting on the Stephen king forum in 2008. People were so nice back then.
>>24818839how much did he get from the movie?
>>24822409>I don't understand how anyone could possibly be scared of anything he writesI think the last time anyone was scared by a book was 1860
>>24823060Rose tintedPeople on the internet have always been assholes
>>24821705Those movies also didn't portray King's self-insert as an abusive asshole who resents his family. Movie Jack also doesn't show himself to be a writer so much as a dropout teacher who wants to imagine himself as a writer. Kubrick couldn't have created a better personal insult against King if he tried.
>>24823598There's probably some truth to this, I don't doubt that King also had some personal reasons for disliking the movie. I'm just saying that the objective parts of his gripe with it are valid: the Kubrick movie completely missed the point of the novel, and its not a good enough film on its own to justify the status it has.>>24823020He can be a good writer, I wouldn't go so far as to say that he always is. His problem is that he has no internal filter: he's the kind of writer who will take any idea and run with it no matter how stupid it is, which has resulted in a ton of schlocky novels that don't deserve to be on the same shelf as his good ones. Even his good novels tend to have a lot of extra bloat that could have been cut. He's even released "updated" editions of his classic novels that contain all of the extraneous text his publishers made him cut the first time around.To me he's on about the level of a talented fanfiction writer. He's good when he wants to be and as far as I'm concerned he's earned his success, but he also internalized a lot of bad writing habits early in his career that work against him, and his name is big enough now that he has no incentive to correct any of them. His success, and having a rabid fanbase, has led him to believe that he no longer needs to listen to criticism or improve, he can just keep cranking out words and people will buy them.
>>24818839Stephen King is a fucking terrible prose and dialogue writer. The worthwhile novels in his ever-growing catalogue of airplane drivel are good in spite of his 80s-era after school special dialogue, his descriptions which seem oddly inspired by middle class suburbanite WASP jargon, etc. He is awful and the fact that he is widely reputed as a staple of the horror genre amongst even the snobbiest of snobs is hilarious. I read 100 pages of 'cell' out of morbid curiosity and it felt as though he had consulted terminator judgemenr day's screenplay on the art of dialogue and character building. Garbage
>>24824788Another thing: with the admittedly strong exception of it, all the movie adaptations of his books are superior to their source material, sometimes embarrassingly so.
>>24822552"Some kind of pederast" Bro you are being hilariously charitable considering his creepily feverish descriptions of Beverly's nubile sexual impulses in it, all of which climax with her solemnly volunteering to be tag teamed by her fivebest friends. He also wrote about how she registered one of their cocks as being larger than the rest. I remember it so vividly 12 years later because the fact that it devolved into personal fantasy was laughably apparenr even though I read it at age 14
>>24824803I couldn't even get through the first 100 pages of that crap>IT is whatever your fear is, neato right?ZZZZzzzzzz
>>24824860It felt really engrossing and well-written when I first read it at age 14, but I wouldn't be surprised if he just tricked me into ploughing throw a shit novel like pennywise tempted that boy into a ditch in the novel's intro. Looking back, it really does seem like he used hit 80s movies as an aspirational model for his books; the dialogue, plotting, and characters are unmistakably reminiscent.
I liked the part with the fire hose.
