Stephen King is not a good writer. He has great story ideas; but, his actual writing is poor and he does weird things that are unsupported by the narrative - like writing sewer gangbang scenes with children so that they can defeat the bad guy with the power of underage eskimo brotherhood.
You can explain that in a less derisive way that sounds a bit more reasonable, but it doesn’t make it a good narrative choice.
Another example is 11/22/63. People on reddit cream their pants over the book, but it’s literally just King self-inserting as the main character so he can (totally uncritically) reminisce over how great small town America was in the 50s/60s and have a fantasy relationship with this incredibly weak/badly-written female character and repeatedly “make poundcake” with her and drink rootbeer floats in diners or whatever. It’s an 800+ page book (paperback is 1049 pages) supposedly about time traveling to stop the Kennedy assassination (which is a cool story idea), but like 700+ pages are filled with asinine garbage and the actual plot is thin and pretty bad.
People always praise his characters, but they always come across as flat caricatures to me. And he seems to have maybe 10 of them that he just repeats over and over again.
I completely agree. A couple of his books are okay, but most are long-winded, self-indulgent tosh that would have been far better if written by practically anyone else. Half the time, you can skip entire chapters and miss nothing, because he seems to think describing every minute aspect of every minor character’s life equals character development. Five pages cataloguing all the canned goods in Jimmy’s grandmother’s pantry, all the steps of her apple pie recipe, where she learnt it, how she decides which milk to buy, why the grocer moved the milk from aisle 5 to aisle 2, etc, etc, etc – none of it matters and it’s a slog to read.
It’s like he thinks more words equals a better novel. He is a better writer than a director, though.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed the Tower books and many of his other books.
Often his man characters are reparative, always writers. I had many hits with him but also misses. Like maybe because I was too young and have no children of my own I found Pet sematary not very good.
But what he does he gets me into a flow of reading. He makes it easy for me to enjoy the book no matter how thin the plot is.
But there a couple of plot points I admit I find now weird and not well played out. Like in The Stand why is everybody understanding English? There is no real communication barrier apart from not being able to talk at all. So I miss language barriers.
So his books have a place in my heart but I also grew up with Goosebumps so it was a natural progression to King.
I read so many of his book thinking “at some point I’ll land on one that’ll make me understand what all the fuss is about”. Never happened. As you said, the guy has great concept ideas, but he doesn’t know how to build on them. So many endings are so stupid and far fetched it would be comical if it were a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episode…
At least people will admit that the horror books often are terrible. The dark tower books suffer from so much of the same, but are lauded and people will flip out if you say they’re not good. The entire first book was like reading a history timeline rather than a story, and was boring history to boot. The second book was better, but still just felt like a really dull friend relaying a story.
I can’t agree more. I enjoyed his earliest works some, but he quickly hits his “stride” and falls into his characteristic writing pattern, making every book more or less the same novel with interchangeable variations on the same plot points.
This is pretty much my experience with King. I highly appreciate his ability to consistently create great story ideas, but his actual writing is just kind of bad. Since he has so many books, there might be some good ones in there, but from what I’ve read I’m not impressed. Not that he needs to impress me, he’s done fine for himself.
King isn’t a “writer” as much as he’s “some rando that took up horror lit as a paid hobby in college in order to fund the completion of his ‘opus’ The Dark Tower series …some numerous decades later” 🤢 Prolific =/= professional, etc.
Stephen King is not a good writer. He has great story ideas; but, his actual writing is poor and he does weird things that are unsupported by the narrative - like writing sewer gangbang scenes with children so that they can defeat the bad guy with the power of underage eskimo brotherhood.
You can explain that in a less derisive way that sounds a bit more reasonable, but it doesn’t make it a good narrative choice.
Another example is 11/22/63. People on reddit cream their pants over the book, but it’s literally just King self-inserting as the main character so he can (totally uncritically) reminisce over how great small town America was in the 50s/60s and have a fantasy relationship with this incredibly weak/badly-written female character and repeatedly “make poundcake” with her and drink rootbeer floats in diners or whatever. It’s an 800+ page book (paperback is 1049 pages) supposedly about time traveling to stop the Kennedy assassination (which is a cool story idea), but like 700+ pages are filled with asinine garbage and the actual plot is thin and pretty bad.
People always praise his characters, but they always come across as flat caricatures to me. And he seems to have maybe 10 of them that he just repeats over and over again.
I completely agree. A couple of his books are okay, but most are long-winded, self-indulgent tosh that would have been far better if written by practically anyone else. Half the time, you can skip entire chapters and miss nothing, because he seems to think describing every minute aspect of every minor character’s life equals character development. Five pages cataloguing all the canned goods in Jimmy’s grandmother’s pantry, all the steps of her apple pie recipe, where she learnt it, how she decides which milk to buy, why the grocer moved the milk from aisle 5 to aisle 2, etc, etc, etc – none of it matters and it’s a slog to read.
It’s like he thinks more words equals a better novel. He is a better writer than a director, though.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed the Tower books and many of his other books.
Often his man characters are reparative, always writers. I had many hits with him but also misses. Like maybe because I was too young and have no children of my own I found Pet sematary not very good. But what he does he gets me into a flow of reading. He makes it easy for me to enjoy the book no matter how thin the plot is.
But there a couple of plot points I admit I find now weird and not well played out. Like in The Stand why is everybody understanding English? There is no real communication barrier apart from not being able to talk at all. So I miss language barriers. So his books have a place in my heart but I also grew up with Goosebumps so it was a natural progression to King.
I read so many of his book thinking “at some point I’ll land on one that’ll make me understand what all the fuss is about”. Never happened. As you said, the guy has great concept ideas, but he doesn’t know how to build on them. So many endings are so stupid and far fetched it would be comical if it were a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episode…
At least people will admit that the horror books often are terrible. The dark tower books suffer from so much of the same, but are lauded and people will flip out if you say they’re not good. The entire first book was like reading a history timeline rather than a story, and was boring history to boot. The second book was better, but still just felt like a really dull friend relaying a story.
I can’t agree more. I enjoyed his earliest works some, but he quickly hits his “stride” and falls into his characteristic writing pattern, making every book more or less the same novel with interchangeable variations on the same plot points.
This is pretty much my experience with King. I highly appreciate his ability to consistently create great story ideas, but his actual writing is just kind of bad. Since he has so many books, there might be some good ones in there, but from what I’ve read I’m not impressed. Not that he needs to impress me, he’s done fine for himself.
King isn’t a “writer” as much as he’s “some rando that took up horror lit as a paid hobby in college in order to fund the completion of his ‘opus’ The Dark Tower series …some numerous decades later” 🤢 Prolific =/= professional, etc.