Webbie wrote on Feb 12th, 2012, 7:27am:monsoonster wrote on Feb 10th, 2012, 10:39pm:Gary A. Markette wrote on Feb 7th, 2012, 3:51am:
I agree with Salem's Lot, and you said a lot about it, but Tommyknockers, the story you didn't like, you didn't really say why. Was it because there was no explanation of why things worked? They just did? I probably liked Tommyknockers for all the reasons you didn't. But i don't want to talk too much and take over the topic, but i have alot to say about this topic; some good, some bad.
The reason I didn't like it was it seemed pointless, wandering and it seemed to lack the three basic thing I have harped on forever about.
1) A beginning.
2) A middle.
And most important of all.
3) An Ending!
A very long movie that left me with the question, "what happened next?" Not in an intriguing way either. I literally though the story would wind up after the next commercial. But it was over.
King puts a lot of words on paper every year. Doesn't make them all good words.
To be sure there are some of his works I do like, just not all of them.
So, genius or hack?
I'm thinking he's like every other writer, a little of both.
Well, not quite what I expected. I guess I was expecting more discussion of the story itself, not signposts of what makes a good story; because this had a beginning, middle, and end. Keep in mind that it has been many years since I read this story:
It begins with an author (King's forever trope) who is having trouble writing (like a large number of his stories) and who has a long "lost" friend who is an alcoholic (another forever trope of King's) who finally comes to her for help, only to discover, after a while, that she has discovered something under the ground in the woods. Something that changes not only her, her dog, and the friend (not directly, because he is an alcoholic), but also the entire town. On one level, it's a haunting of an entire unknown culture; on another level, it is an allegory of what happens when toys of a civilization are left lying around and our civilization picks them up and begins playing with them, but don't know or understand the far-reaching implications of what happens once you turn something on; which is how our civilization is constructed. (In my experience, there are men and women who don't know the basics of how to maintain a car. When younger I worked for a oil change place and this guy once came in wanting a oil change and when I asked him what kind of car he had, he said a white one. And he was totally serious. I asked him again, and he just said the white one, right out there. By the key, I could tell it was a Ford, but that was it. There were fifteen people in the waiting room who heard this exchange and began laughing at him and to lessen the embarrassment, I told him we'd go out and take a look. It was a Ford Taurus) Our civilization is a turn-key, push-button, throw-away culture; I don't know how it works, I just push a button or turn a key and it works. Anyway, back to the novel, things begin happening in the town -- kid plays magic trick, sends a friend to altarius 4 (or something like that), a woman's doll collection comes to life and destroys the town clock (about 200 pages worth) which causes the town to create a projection showing the clock undamaged, the writer creates a typewriter that writes by thought and she creates some kind of earth mover to dig the space ship from the ground, etc -- and the alcoholic, who understands that his thoughts cannot be read and that he cannot be "turned", plans to destroy the thing that is eating up the town like a cancer (another forever trope of King's) and through some daring-do, does just that; because, by his reasoning, if the ship escapes and goes back to wherever and comes back, they could conceivably enslave the planet.
So, for me, there was a beginning, a LONG middle, and an end. I like stories that don't explain every nuance of every little thing in the story, but does offer clues along the way so that I may use my imagination. Some people, for whatever reason, sometimes fixate on what the story is
NOT about and are disappointed when their fascination isn't put to bed properly; which sometimes isn't what the story is about at all. I'll give you two examples below of what I mean:
1. When I first read The Dead Zone, almost 30 years ago (28, if you're keeping count), I was deeply, deeply disappointed. I was like, so that's it? That's what THE DEAD ZONE is? The guy can't remember certain things? See, I was expecting dead things in the story; ghosts or vampires or zombies or ghouls or something, NOT words I can no longer remember or holes where memories once made their home. Where's the dead people, right? Well, I read it again about 6 years ago, was packing books away, and thought, let me give this another try. And I got it. When younger, my imagination had constructed a whole other story than what the actual story was about and I couldn't rectify the gulf between the two. Upon reading it the second time, it was lifted from my "one of King's worst" category.
2 I don't watch TV, but I do watch stuff through Netflix. There was this one, called "The Lost Room", which I thought sounded pretty good. So I watched the first disc and decided to see what the reviews said about the show. I figured the reviews would be saying nothing but good to excellent things about the story. I was wrong. Most didn't like it. Why? Because the reviewers were fixated on what the story wasn't about. It wasn't about two fighting factions, it wasn't about God, it wasn't about getting all the objects of the room or knowing what all the objects of the room were about; it was about a guy (who played Nathan in Six Feet Under) who loses his little girl in a room that doesn't exist and he moves heaven and earth to get her back. That's all the story was about. Simple.
3 And as an added-extra aside, I have yet to read that someone actually knew what "Full Metal Jacket" was about. What it was about is only one sentence long. One sentence and people would understand what the whole movie was about.
Oh. I have Much, much, much more to write about. My worst ( a King book that took me 10 years to read. T-E-N years) and best; and why.
Gary: I bet you're sorry you opened this Pandora's Box now, huh? lol