Stephen King

I’ve only read two of his books, neither of them horror. For one, look at my profile. The other is “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”. It has aspects like horror: the main character is lost in the woods of Maine and is followed by something ominous and not human.

I suggest you try The Dead Zone, it rocks. The movie was cool too.

I think King pales in comparison to James Herbert. Read the third novel in his ‘Rats’ trilogy, called ‘Domain’, for real horror. I just think King has gotten progressively worse since his classics, like The Shining. That collaboration he did, ‘Black House’ was it? The most boring book I’ve ever read. I could only stomach the first chapter or two, not because it was gruesome, but because the lack of interest turned my stomach.

So, if you haven’t tried James Herbert already, I’d suggest taking a look. ‘The Dark’ is another of his good ones.

Lunarcry: I don’t think King’s works have gotten worse so much as they have evolved. True, his older works were scarier- I was freaked by Salem’s Lot- but his later works are more HUMAN- they focus more on the people than on the monsters. I dunno if they can truly be called Horror Stories anymore- perhaps Dark Fantasies would be a better term- but they’re still fun to read/watch, in my opinion.

<i>The Wolves of Calla</i>, the fifth Dark Tower book, is now out. My sister bought it, and I get to read it only while she’s at work. How ungrateful! I’m the one who got her hooked on the series…I’ll only have a handful of hours to read it before I head back to my dorm, and as the writing’s likely to be a little more complicated than Harry Potter, I don’t know if I can finish it. I very well might die if I have to put it down for a few weeks right in the middle of a very good part…

I havn’t read any of his book, but I’ve seen a couple movies.

The Stand was good.

Now, The Langoleres (or however you spell it)…THAT freaked the crap out of me. And not so much the creatures themselves as the whole ATMOSPHERE…and I didn’t even see the whole thing.

I still don’t even know HOW I was convinced to watch it…

I need to read The Stand unabridged sometime. I really liked the mini-series (probably my favorite TV mini-series/TV movie! not that that’s saying much).

Now The Langoliers mini-series was stupid. Oh! It sounds like Rice Krispies! Wurrurrurr! The book might be better than its adaptation though. The acting in that was laughingly bad (as opposed to the actual decent acting in The Stand).

Then there’s The Shawshank Redemption. Probably one of my top 10 favorite movies (God bless you TBS!). If it holds to the general rule of books/short stories/novellas/whatever being better than the movie, that has to be incredible piece of writing.

And speaking of TBS, that’s how I’m also acquainted with Maximum Overdrive, yet another King to TV/movie adaptation. It was awful, and I have no desire to read what it was based off of. Although, the Green Goblin 18-wheeler was cool.

And oh yeah, The Green Mile. Yet another great movie, and what it’s based off of is probably much better. I remembered it because one of the actors in The Stand was in The Green Mile.

>The problem with The Stand was I felt it simply went on for about 100 pages too long (in the uncut version, which was over 1000 pages).

The only way in which the Stand the novel was too long was that after Las Vegas is nuked, King devotes a lengthy description of Stu and Tom Cullen’s journey back to Boulder. It’s kind of anticlimactic. Other than that, there are no unnecesary parts of the novel - the characters are all described in great detail.