[Books] FUCK STEPHEN KING!

[Despanan]

Yeah so, I always sorta held this view that King was a hack. I never really had anything to go on it besides how horrible the movies based on his books were (except for the Kubric "Shining" and King hated that one so much he made a second, far crappier, "Shining" starring the guy from Wings).

Still, there were alot of people at my old job who loved his work. Anyway, I'm hoping to some time in the future write a novel about Zombies, and since I don't regularly read or write horror, I sorta thought I'd look for a novel about zombies (I'd already read World War Z and loved it) from the "Master of Horror". A friend of mine gave me a copy of a SK Zombie book he particularly liked called "Cell".

It's bad. It's BAD. IT'S BAD. It's Bad!
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OHMYGODit'ssooooooooooooooooooooooooooFuckingBAD!

For those of you who don't know, the zombie virus thingy is spread BY CELL PHONES (and it's called CELL! oh How Wonderfully magnificent! A Play on WORDS! *Chortle!* Good chap!) The basic plot revolves around Cell Phones which turn people into jabbering maniacs, They aren't zombies in the traditional sense, but more like 28 days later "rage" zombies, which is cool, I can deal with that. So one minute the main character is in the park enjoying an ice-cream cone (how cliche'd can you get?) the next minute the people talking on their cell phones start eating their dogs and attacking the innocent vendors and such. So I'm all hyped because here comes the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE from the "Master of Horror". The Business suit clich'e reaches out to eat the Ice cream clich'e who is saved by...The little girl Zombie Clich'e attacking the Buisiness suit...

WHAT THE FUCK?!

Look, there is no way to have a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE if the zombies attack each other! You cannot have hoards of the walking dead, slowly and methodically descending upon you to eventually tear your larnyx out if that horde is spending all it's time wiping itself out! The whole POINT of Zombies being scary, is that they embody our fear of the collective! Zombies are the personification of two things: Our own impending demise, and society turned against us. Walking corpses are scary for obvious reasons and Movies like 28 days later are horrifying because they take all the things that have kept humans alive for so long (Compassion, Family, Society etc.) and turn them into deadly mistakes.

(I'm particularly reminded of a moment I spent watching 28 weeks later. One zombie had gotten into a room filled with refugees and was slowly spreading the virus among them, the refugees were running for their lives but were inevitably going to be killed and turned into more zombies. There were soldiers on the rooftops who were given the order to fire on the innocent, fleeing, refugees, and all I could think of was: "YES. Yes! Kill them. Kill them all! because if you don't everyone is going to die!" The realization, that in this context, I supported soldiers gunning down innocent civillians...that my friends, is horror.)

Then the whole scene is followed up by zombies wielding cleavers, zombies driving busses, etc. You get the idea, Pandemonium ensues. Except, the zombies aren't really zombies, they're just crazy people doing crazy things. It's as if I turned on the TV to watch SNL and instead of an actual comedy sketch they gave me a bunch of actor running around the screen going: 'I'm crazy! I'm CRAZY! Aren't I so fucking WHIMSICAL! This is funny right?" It's not funny, and similarly Cell isn't scary.

The dialogue is laughably bad. And when I say bad, I mean BAD. As in:

"Hey Buddy, How ya doin?" he murmered "I mean, What's the haps?"

or

"it's like the fucking night of the living dead, except these people aren't dead. Unless we help them that is."

or

"Joxer the pirate stands at your service my pretty one."

WHO THE FUCK TALKS LIKE THAT?

The character's names are fucking laughable too: Clayton Riddell? Tomas McCourt? Officer Ulrich Ashland??? It sounds like they were made up by Strongbad for fuck's sake!

What also pisses me off is the utter lack of depth in our main character "Clayton Riddell". For example He's supposed to be a graphic novel writer/artist who just got a break despite his troubled marriage. The problem is, when he goes to the comic shop he buys his son ONE copy of Spider-man. Not the Spectacular Spider-man, or the Amazing Spider-man, or the Ultimate Spider-man, or HOLY SHIT! it's Spider-man!, nope just Spider-man and nothing for himself. This is just lazy as hell. Can you sincerely tell me that someone who spends his life making comics, is not a fan of comics? It's obvious that the writer just went...okay, lets give him a job...how about Comics? yeah comics sounds good. And left it at that, It's cheap, and lazy and one-dimensional, just like the rest of this book.

Now I haven't finished this book. In fact I've barely started it and already I want to bludgeon that two-bit hack to death with the corner. Now there's bad, campy, zombie stuff out there In fact the market is saturated with it. Pretty much the only good Zombie Franchizes are like, Half-of Romero's work, the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days later, World War Z, and Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead". The rest is garbadge, but you would've at least expected something passable from "The Master of Horror: STEPHEN KING!" So in conclusion, fuck Stephen King for putting his name to this huge pile of fecal matter and calling it a book, and fuck him for tricking me into reading it.

BLLLLAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGG!

[Slap Your Love]

I love Stephen King but The Cell did suck. I agree.

[TheSomnambulist]

King isn't really a man of depth and subtlety, but he has spun out quite a few decent, if not captivating, tales. These days he writes complete shit, however.

[Slap Your Love]

King uses small town settings and I live in a small town so I relate to most things he writes which adds to the experience of the story for me. That's why I like him.

[Despanan]

Cell is set in Boston...


FUCK!

[Saya]

Hahahahha ^_^ King is a hit or miss. I didn't like his book Thinner or The Gunslinger, but I did like Dolores Claiborne, The Shining, Everything's Eventual (its a book of some short stories he did) and Salem's Lot. I was reading IT but I watched the movie when I was about half way through, and from then I was just picturing the movie in my head, so it wasn't scary anymore :/ I thought the movie for Night Flyer was absolutely hilarious. I think he's far better with short stories than novels, actually. I also hate how most of his main characters are writers, its getting too predictable now.

Anyway, I'm betting the idea for Cell went something along the lines of "I wanna put a new twist on the zombie story. Radiation from Venus? Was already done. Hell was too full? Was already done. Virus? Done to death....Lamps? No no, Family Guy already made fun of me with lamps......Hey! Cell phones! I can incite fear into an ordinary device that everyone has! People might think I'm trying to say something that way!"

[a morbid curiosity]

I never bothered reading anything by Stephen King. And I probably never will.

[tekajo]

It had been awhile since i bought a SK novel so when i saw Cell at a store i had to have it. Not even bothering reading a synopsis about the book. Even shelled out a little extra for the hard cover. i was like "Steven Fucking King \m/!!!".

Read the book in a couple of days and in the end i was speechless for several minutes. i put the book aside in disgust. That fucking sucked.

i thought Cell maybe was an isolated event until i got my hands on the final books in the Dark Tower series. Yep, still disappointed.

[Underwater Ophelia]

Yeah, King has pretty much lost his way.

[Apathy's_Child]

I have to admit, I liked the message of Misery, if not the prose itself.

Writer churns out shitty pulp romance. Idiot who adores such drivel kidnaps him and holds him hostage, threatening death if he doesn't write more. Maybe I'm giving King too much credit, but I read it as a smart little metaphor for what happens when the artist just gives the people what they want and churning out gobshite - he is literally held hostage by his audience. In trying not to die both the metaphorical (and in this case, real) death of the artist who sells out - she has told him she'll kill them both when he finishes the story - he writes something good and saves his life. By slaying the demon, the audience who tried to make him write gushy drivel he keeps the artist within alive (he doesn't die). He's an avatar of Sheherazade, telling stories to stay alive.

That fucking RULES. If a shit-hot writer had written that plot as a short story the pages of my copy would be eternally stuck together.

[JCC]

I partially enjoyed The Green Mile, I guess, but it wasn't amazing.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Never read him. I'm still curious about all his Dark Tower series.
But in any case, for horror fiction of the type of Stephen King, I recommend Dan Simmons better. He's good friends with King, but his works have more literary depth.

[Apathy's_Child]

I don't really like horror fiction. I went through a Richard Laymon phase when I was around eleven and I've barely read any since.

[Man In Room 5]

I'm going to guess that the inception of Cell went something like this. Stephen King was sitting in some busy posh restaurant with his fast talking agent and he was about to tell him that he was thinking of retiring (again) because he's run out of good ideas and overexploited all the bad ones already. Then there was a conversation that went something like this.

Agent, "Well Steve, what's your next book about? You know you're hot. Put your name on anything and it'll make a gobzillion megabucks. Simon & Schuster would publish your toilet paper if you'd wipe your ass with 8 1/2 by 11 paper and submit it double spaced."

Stephen King is only half listening as he looks out over all the seedy, greasy businessmen drinking themselves into a stupor while making multi million dollar deals on their cellphones. They're ignoring everyone around them, screaming vulgarities into their phones, and using rude gestures to communicate when they want their martinis refilled. King looks around the restaurant for ideas and slowly says, "Ummm, I was thinking....my next book is gonna be about...umm...people turned into zombies by cellphones. Umm, yeah....people addicted to cellphones become stupid, violent, inarticulate assholes and society falls apart so that only a handful of intelligent people are left fighting for survival against the brainless masses."

The agent smacks his forehead and says, "Whoa! I knew you still had the old horror touch Steveo. I smell a made for TV mini-series in this one. Jesus, where do you get your ideas? You're a fuckin' literary genius Steveo. We call you King for a reason. I'm gonna call Simon & Schuster right now."

King just shakes his head and thinks anyone can be a literary genius when you're surrounded by inarticulate zombies.

[Underwater Ophelia]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Never read him. I'm still curious about all his Dark Tower series.
But in any case, for horror fiction of the type of Stephen King, I recommend Dan Simmons better. He's good friends with King, but his works have more literary depth.

I don't know about the whole thing, but The Gunslinger is really good.

[Despanan]

From what I understand Stephen King uses ghost writers allot these days, ie: someone else who no one cares about writes a horror novel and signs the rights over to the publisher, the publisher gives it over to King, King changes a few things and slaps his name on it, and instant cash-cow since people will buy anything that says Stephen King on it. Which might explain the fact that some of his fans tell me his books are really inconsistently hit or miss.

So maybe he didn't write most of this. Not that it would make it any better, but, you know.

[xParadigmx]

I have a hard time reading his books. Some of them, like 'Neeful Things' flew by for me, which is about usual. I read a book a day, most days. But King, well, I have to put it down and come back to it when I am in a better mood. His stories are... all right, for something to kill the time. I really likes 'The Stand' though, and I saw a comic book preview for it pretty recently. It looked like it might not be half-bad.

[gothicusmaximus]

Speaking of shitty writers, Michael Crichton is dead.

[TheSomnambulist]

The Dark Tower is a mixed bag. It is intensely imaginitive but flawed. His writing is at his absolute worst in the second half of the series, but he has quite a handle on character development throughout. My feeling is that people continue reading the books to the end because they cannot help but take an interest in those he's writing about, and the "wheres" and "whens" they are inhabiting.

The series starts off as really enthralling, but starts to go downhill after the third book. I am trying to painstakingly get through the seventh, which exudes his narcissism to such an extremity (in more ways than just his writing, but I won't reveal it lest you're considering reading it). However, I've decided that I have made it this far, so I'm determined to find out how this series ends.

I'd say that if you were to start reading them, keep in mind that his blatantly horrible writing techniques will creep under your skin and ruin your enthusiasm a lot of the time.

[Saya]

Originally Posted by gothicusmaximus

Speaking of shitty writers, Michael Crichton is dead.

I thought Jurassic Park was very good, only book by him I bothered to read though.

[Joker_in_the_Pack]

Dean Koontz > Stephen King.

[Beneath the Shadows]

Lamp monster. That's all I have to say.

[Slap Your Love]

Originally Posted by JCC

I partially enjoyed The Green Mile, I guess, but it wasn't amazing.

I forgot about The Green Mile. I loved the book and the movie.
When john says this line: "He killed them with their love. With their love for each other. That's how it is, every day, all over the world." during the movie it makes me cry everytime. Heh..

[Steppenwolf]

No , Cell wasnt really bad ... only the worst thing he ever wrote in his life , the worst crap ever , and not even good written . He used to have a smooth style , easy to read , and this has been replaced by some kind of cheap machinery that doesnt work and makes you left the book unfinished and forever lost by page 99 .
But perhaps this is only because we are trying to believe he is still the same Stephen King who wrote Misery . Obviously he is not anymore and never will be unless he locks himself for ten years somewhere with no phone , family or friends around ... which I doubt he'll be able to ...
There you got the real writer and the ... people who writes ...
Its a pity , sure , because he belonged to the people who writes , enjoys it and gives you a piece of this joy through the book .
But not a writer ... A writer would be ashamed of publishing Cell under his name
@Man in room 5
True , true ... I can almost see this scene .

[Saya]

Originally Posted by Joker_in_the_Pack

Dean Koontz > Stephen King.

Koontz has his screw ups. Ever read The Bad Place?