Stephen King had some fire in him when he first started writing. He kept that fire alive for awhile, but when he felt the need to publish 3 novels a year - THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, MISERY and THE EYES OF THE DRAGON all came out in 1987 - his masterworks became scarcer and scarcer. Now he's trying to regain that groove that kept his fans interested prior to his car crash injuries from 15 years ago. None of those aforementioned books are worth reading. FIRESTARTER (1981) is not worth reading. None of them are classics, nor are they "sleepers". They are pulp, submitted to the publisher to make a quick buck and bought by a public who is addicted to the hollow promise of amazement. How can one read that prior years' IT, and find anything worthwhile in THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, much less MISERY, which is basically Stephen King relating his fears that stem from him doing book tours (more "wow, it's like I know the guy! I should write him a letter and invite him over for coffee and show him I'm not like that lady...").
Stephen King has never had any business as a screenwriter. PET SEMATARY wasn't terrible, a story that good and that close to King's heart can't easily be a total trainwreck, but it would have been a MUCH better movie had a professional screenwriter been given the opportunity to adapt it to the screen. Much of the dialogue turned out corny, like the scene when Dale Metcalf's character is telling his wife off about lying to their daughter. The best example of this kind of buttheadedness was when he adapted THE SHINING (1977) into a TV movie in 1996. What the heck was he thinking? First of all, yes, the SFX were finally available to more faithfully adapt the book than Stanley Kubrick did in 1980. Two things of note: they were still very expensive and they were even more expensive to do properly. If you wanted a stupid cartoon for 2 year olds, CGI was still expensive to use. If you wanted dinosaurs realistic enough to terrify a grown man, you're talking the kind of money that Stephen King's fans and "Stephen King movie" fans combined are not numerous enough to make worth spending. Whereas JURASSIC PARK (1993) was a warm-hearted movie, the way Steven Speilberg makes warm hearted movies (even though it was still a horror movie of sorts...), THE SHINING is a deep dark dreary analysis of a family trying to grow closer only to be torn apart for good. And it's wrapped up in the form of a ghastly haunted house movie.
Someone on IMDB put it this way:
"As for Stephen King movie adaptations... sigh... TV is NOT the medium for his work! He is a blood and gore, swear and sex kinda writer, stuff that cant be on TV! It just makes ZERO sense to try and make it work!!!!! It loses so much weight and force when you edit them down for TV... just my opinions...[by TinaJosh, IMDB member since December 2010]
The TV adaptation of IT worked surprisingly well given how deep and dark the book was, not only as a monster story, but also the depictions of sexual abuse, sexual liberation, kids being kids, warts and all, homosexuality, etc. The TV adaptation is very weak compared to the book. It's clearly an adaptation of a story that was written by someone much more "into it" than the people that wrote the teleplay. So, although you're missing the sense of authenticity (the "I was there" of it all; and it did come from King's imagination, which stands to reason he was present at the events as they unfolded...), you still get 75% of the meat from the story. THE STAND was an okay book, not "okay enough" to warrant a six hour TV movie. Especially since the final product looked like a cheesy cheap sci-fi TV show akin to XENA: THE WARRIROR PRINCESS or BABYLON 5. And STORM OF THE CENTURY had no story. And yet it was 6 hours long. How do these things even happen?
If Stephen King makes it back to the publishing world with a truly good book in the vein of 'SALEM'S LOT, PET SEMATARY or IT, it'll be after 30 or 40 books of mediocrity and he will be forever pegged as the man who lost half his brain and continued making money off his name, and in turn ruined it. He's coming ever closer to writing a book that is worth reading. It's been bubbling under the surface. That book named after JFK's assassination date, and FULL DARK NO STARS gave me hope that he'd regained his prowess. DUMA KEY was pretty good, although I've yet to seriously dive into it, since there's so many other authors that I haven't read, including God himself (The Bible), but one thing of note is that he wrote that seemingly basing the opening parts of it on his experiences with re-habilitation/physical therapy, which makes sense, it's good for him to get that off his chest and it's good for readers who may be going through something similar to have that "I know, I know" support, but that alone does not prove he's gotten his groove back. Most of his stories are not re-imaginings of moments in his life, like THE DEAD ZONE, PET SEMATARY and DUMA KEY are. So when I see Stephen King's got a new book out, I don't assume that's what it is. I assume it's some story he wrote in the middle of the night while he couldn't sleep and turned it into his publisher so he could have yet more money. I can't tell you if JUST AFTER SUNSET was on par with NIGHT SHIFT, his first collection of short stories, b/c the first several sentences consisted of goblegook that is intelligible if you know how to read Mainelatin and is extremely off putting to those who understand the value of not trying to re-create English as a written language. If people insist on saying "warsh" when there's no "r" in wash, good for them, keep the traditions of your heritage alive if you insist, but when you write "warsh" instead of "wash", it seems like somebody should have told you to either stay in school or that you don't deserve to be published. I know Stephen King knows how to write. Someone who hasn't read SALEM'S LOT or IT may think Stephen King is trying to be some kind of weird post-modernist. But what do I know? The all heralded William Faulkner made his name golden doing the same thing...
I used to read Stephen King all the time. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDEN was a total waste of time, I didn't finish THE TOMMYKNOCKERS after the first 200 pages showed precious little in way of story progression, and I couldn't help but roll my eyes in annoyance at this one passage I read in BAG OF BONES that just struck me as if a high school kid were trying to be clever...don't remember the exact wording...it was a sentence in the book that was meant to convey that the narrator was receiving fellatio from his wife. Admittedly, I trudged through SKELETON CREW in high school, as many of the stories had nothing to them, even though I praised it at the time, and just kind of "forgot" my opinion of the lesser stories. INSOMNIA is, quite truly, liberal propaganda, a great story yes, but so obviously told from the perspective of someone who does not understand humans unless they are Democrats. DOLORES CLAIBORNE features the title character in the opening pages of the story debating with herself openly amongst police officers weather to start telling the story from the beginning or the end. Seriously? And she "compromises" by starting the story in the middle. Nobody except David Lynch and his disciples tells stories from the end OR the middle! And what kind of 60 year old Maine islander who isn't a pro- writer, or aspiring to be, wants to emulate David Lynch? ROADWORK I tried recently reading for the first time, very tangled up wording, I read he was trying to be "literary" when he wrote that book b/c he often got made fun of by those types, or something along those lines, idk...but if that's true, it shows. The idea of sentences having a meaning and the meaning being part of something bigger seems to escape some of these "esteemed" writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne devoted 1 full page describing a door in the all-heralded THE SCARLET LETTER. Not a "special kind" of door mind you - just a freakin' door! Ian McEwen spent at least one paragraph describing a water fountain (!!!) in one of the pages of ATONEMENT, and while he was describing it, he used very obtuse sentence structure and obscure wording. And the aforementioned William Faulkner writes sentences upon sentences that mean absolutely nothing. His fans relish in this. I don't know everything. I don't claim to know everything. I don't think to myself "I know everything". When something doesn't make sense TO ME, I try to make it make sense. I try to figure out what piece of the puzzle I'm missing. I feel like someone has played a trick on me when I find out there's no puzzle piece missing except that which the author intentionally excluded from his book or maybe just forgot to include[?]. And the parts of these books that isn't meaningless in a lot of cases is a bunch of philosophy and pondering about things that I would either be thinking about anyway, or nitpicking about history and the meaning of some small sub-detail that I don't know anything about in the first place. Usually, I can read the description for a book or documentary, spanning one or two pages, and find enough info to mull over for a couple+ days. These mammoth nonfiction books that talk about these important issues are a slightly less waste of trees. How much does one need to be hit in the head with in order to take an issue seriously? I guess most people don't give a damn unless they spent x amount of time reading about something that forces them to in turn spend x amount of time thinking about that same something, which makes it a little harder (but still entirely possible) to forget about. These non fiction books dealing with real issues are largely pointless. They either offer some nitwits opinion on a matter (i.e.: Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and HOPE: A TRAGEDY), or they document in dull detail a bunch of uneventful events. These "avid readers" and "movie buffs" crack me up. There's only so much time a grown human being can spend watching movies before they end up re-watching the same stuff or end up promoting mediocrity. And there's only so many books that are worth $20++. Oh, well. What would the economy be without over-indulgence? If people cared about their own well being, the food industry would collapse, and Steven Soderbergh would be asking The Salvation Army for food (although he's made a few good movies, none that are mainstream enough to support him financially for every day of his life).
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