Thursday, October 25, 2007
Welcome to Stephen King Books!
Stephen King is one of the most prolific and successful horror authors in history. Being an aspiring writer, he's very important to the study of the craft. His prose is rich with thrilling and often funny description, but he always scares. He also has the most vivid characters to help accentuate the settings. Many of his stories are set in Maine, the place where Mr. King was born. Ever since "Carrie" in 1974, he's been an unstoppable presence in the literary world and I hope he'll keep on writing forever.
The Following Reviews are from people who were changed by Stephen King's Writing:
Here are some comments on Stephen King's Writing:
The third part of the book is the official section “On Writing”, although King includes interesting writing anecdotes throughout the book. The value of this section is immense due to King’s extensive and instructive writing examples. He includes further discussion of writing, re-writing, and the symbolism of Carrie and some of his other works, and also some submission and querying examples.
King’s writing advice itself is fairly standard and targeted at beginners, but writers at any level of experience will benefit from the analysis he offers of his work. As a postscript King includes a raw first draft opening passage of The Hotel Story, followed by a hand-revised version and detailed explanation of the revisions. This section alone is worth studying carefully.
It would be perhaps easy to categorize Lisey’s Story as another experiment in magic realism, a genre King has dabbled in before, most notably with Rose Madder. But the truth of the matter is that Lisey�s Story is virtually unclassifiable. The abrupt introduction of the supernatural (as well as the somewhat piecemeal nature) of Rose Madder is absent here; Lisey�s Story allows the otherworldly to creep in slowly, as Lisey remembers more and more about the parts of her marriage she�d wanted to keep hidden. And don�t go thinking that this is a rehash of Bag of Bones either; though both novels deal with love and the past�s dark persistence of will on the present, Lisey�s Story is far darker, with a more overt supernatural threat. (Long-time readers might also detect a certain similarity to the spooky Wendigo scenes in Pet Sematary, and it�s a welcome comparison.) There are also elements of Misery and The Dark Half present (the nature of creativity is very much a theme here, nearly as prevalent as the nature of love), but none of these elements from previous novels take away from the insistent immediacy of Lisey�s Story. It is its own book, and a very good one.
When I was fifteen years old (over a decade ago now, how the world does move on), I received The Gunslinger as a Christmas gift. Fifteen was my King turning point, the year I graduated from fan to fanatic. That Christmas also brought in The Stand and Four Past Midnight � my first two hardcover books � plus Christine, and Danse Macabre in paperback. During that tender age, I was progressing out of the concept that I would only read the King books whose subject matters appealed to me via a quick glance at the blurb on the back. No, I wanted to read everything by King, and right now, please.
So it was with great aplomb and anticipation that I picked up The Gunslinger (after, of course, reading those two hardcovers and tumbling deeper into my King obsession.) I�d been reading King with increasing excitement for three years, and here was yet another world I was going to get lost in, another world I was going to fall in love with.
Warning! Spoilers abound!
The first novel in a proposed series of six or seven, The Gunslinger starts off stark and desperate, immediately thrusting the reader into a world which is quite unrecognizble ... and oddly familiar. It begins with the simple, ominous sentance: "The man in black fled across the desrt, and the gunslinger followed." Who are these two creatures, the dark man and the gunslinger? What is their purpose?
So begins King's longest and most complex tale to date.
It�s been a long wait between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, and the question on most fans� minds is this: has the wait been worth it? The fan reaction to King�s last two efforts (the mediocre Dreamcatcher and the simply terrific From a Buick 8) had been lackluster, and his last jaunt into Dark Tower territory (the King and Straub collaboration Black House) was a difficult � if ultimately rewarding � read for many fans. Readers, both Constant and otherwise, had begun to wonder if King really had the stuff to pull off the final three volumes of his magnum opus. Well? Does he?
Good God, yes.
After a final �Argument� (the word King uses to head the foreword, recapping all that has gone before), King transports us to a small town on the very edge of Mid-World known as Calla Bryn Sturgis. There, we learn the horrible plight of its folken: every twenty-three years or so, harriers known as Wolves ride in from the foreboding land of Thunderclap ... to steal the townsfolk�s children. Not just any children, though. See, for generations untold, the women of the Calla have given birth to twins, far more than to singletons, and it is one of each pair that the Wolves come to collect. Eventually, the children are sent back on a train from Thunderclap ... but they are changed; roont. They return to the Calla as idiot hulks, painful reminders of the bright children they once were.
Carrie introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction Stephen King. The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge remains one of the most barrier-breaking and shocking novels of all time.