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[The Mad Engineer]

I unfortunately discovered King's books at a too late age    Some of my most memorable books were the horror stories for adults that I read as a child, scaring me to the point of suffocation under blanket shield (impenetrable!).

When I read IT, I was too old and jaded after an extensive exposure to similar works that I didn't find it as scary as I know it is.  I know that, if I had read it as a child, my parents would have found me dead from lack of air the next morning.

[Vester]

Yeah. What scares me nowadays in King books isn't the monsters, but the themes. The one I like least (or most?) is the theme of forgetting. A lot of his characters Forget things - memory loss in the Kingverse is about as rampant as Whedonian deaths.

[redacted123]

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[Little]

Pet Semetary was great, and The Dark Half was fantastic.

It's kinda sad when you find out what happens to Thad after The Dark Half, though.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

His wife leaves him and he kills himself, right?

[Vester]

Pet Semetary was great, and The Dark Half was fantastic.

It's kinda sad when you find out what happens to Thad after The Dark Half, though.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

His wife leaves him and he kills himself, right?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah. It's in Needful Things (since Alan Pangborn is the main character of that) and Bag of Bones

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[Duke 2.0]

 Huh. Apparently I also read Firestarter. My memory remembers that as a short story though. But I don't remember a random out of place sex scene, so score one for King.

[Lord Dullard]

I've read The Stand, Salem's Lot, and The Talisman, and enjoyed all three. Oddly, I seem to have the opposite problem with Stephen King's novels that most people here do... the first half always seems really freaky to me (such as in The Stand), but once you find out what the 'big bad' behind everything really is, I cease to be scared. I guess for me it's more of a fear of 'terra incognita' than anything - scary things are always scarier when you don't understand them, something that H.P. Lovecraft capitalized on very well.

The Talisman was really enjoyable just for the story, though.

[Zironic]

I've read the Tower-Saga (once in german and then the first two parts in english), which was great, though it hadn't a satisfying ending.
Really liked Insomnia, with its unusual characters and its surreal setting.
Shining wasn't bad as well.

Bought The Stand extended version, but never finished it, because the beginning was so damn boring.
That's generally the problem with most of his books.
In the first half of it nothing of interest happens, then it starts gradually getting exciting.

I think the Stand is possibly his greatest book. The pacing is perfect. It starts off slow and weaves all these  characters into a beautiful story.

[Vester]

That is truth.

Well, the Bachman Books I liked because, well. They're Stephen King not bothering with a complex premise or a mind-wrecking cosmos-spanning plot. They're him writing fueled by pure emotion and cliche and fire, and what comes out is pretty good.

Rage and the Long Walk, for example, are seething masses of passion, and recommended reading for anyone who likes a good yarn.

[Zavior]

First few books of the Dark tower saga were the awesom-o. About the ending..

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Did anyone actually stop in the end, and not read what came after the warning at the very end of the last book? I kind of feel that King always knew how the saga was to be ended, but kind of wanted to spare the readers from it.

[Vester]

I think he's known only since his car accident, actually. Not when he first started out.

I have a copy of the original version of The Gunslinger, and it reads quite differently from the cosmic mythos-type later books.

[deadlycairn]

Having now read The Stand and the Dreamcatcher, I must say I found The Stand to be better. Also, the change of pace between the two really threw me.

I do hate how the Walkin Dude died though. As soon as he started his community, all his badassery just faded away. At least nuclear bombing the place was how he would have wanted to go....

And some of the stuff at the end of Dreamcatcher gave me headaches, as it was sort of implying that THE bad guy, the main evil alien of the entire book, never even existed. I'm still confused.

[Jackrabbit]

I just read The Green Mile. I need more King books, it's starting to infect my miiiiiind.

[piecewise]

I was never a King man, he just strikes me as kinda meh. Not bad but nothing I got terribly interested. I prefer Lovecraft because he's motherfucking Lovecraft. He will rape you and all the while he will stare.


And you will love it, because he is Lovecraft.

[Jackrabbit]

It's funny, because I can't bring myself to finish a Lovecraft novel. I just... don't like it? I'm not sure what my aversion is. I can sure as hell respect what he's brought to horror, because how could you not?

Respect, Lovecraft. Respect.