this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Years ago I went through a phase of reading his books one after the other. I devoured several of them and had a great time reading. Then I kind of hit a wall with it and haven't read him since. I still like him, and will read more at some point. But I sort of overdosed on it. I needed to branch out, read other writers, and take an extended hiatus from King. But it was fun to binge on it.
I loved the Dark Tower, but it's a slog. And he did one thing in that series that made me roll my eyes. But overall it's a masterpiece. I won't spoil the one dumb thing, but anyone who's read it probably knows what I'm talking about. (I'm not talking about the ending. Some people HATE the ending, but it made sense to me once I thought about it.)
His big hits are all big hits for a reason. Some book snobs look down on him, but if you like fantasy and horror, you can ignore the critics. He writes engaging stories in a well-honed style, not high falutin' literature.
I agree with your points and did the same thing binging on his work a few years back after never having read anything by him before.
I assume the dumb thing you're referring to is
Tap for spoiler
writing himself into the story?Yup!
I reread a lot of books a lot of times, especially ones I actually bought and enjoyed most of the ride. (We're talking ~100-200 new books a year and more that are repeats, mostly audiobook.)
The ending to the dark tower is so bad I'll probably never read it again. It's not the premise. Plenty of books have done that premise perfectly well. It's the most horrendously bad presentation of that premise that I've ever seen.
Steven King endings always feel like he just got bored and wrote whatever awful trash he could think of with no intention whatsoever, and it's even more frustrating because he has interesting ideas and makes them moderately compelling at the start. I'd say it feels like a pretty solid author just handed the last chapter to a random kid to write, but I think the kid would do a better job. He just never has any idea where he's actually going by midway through the book, and doesn't know how to end a book with "spooky" questions still in the air either.