tulsamal
Member
OK... I guess I'm in the wrong room. I think I have everything King has ever written. Some is great, some is just good, some not so good. Everybody has mentioned The Stand and that is considered to be his master work. Kind of hard to know you hit your peak when you were in your 20's. To know everything else you ever do will be compared to that earlier work. Kind of like Dylan today. I read an interview with Bob where he said his earlier songs were truly inspired and almost magical to him how they just appeared. And that he hasn't had "that feeling" in decades. That the work he produces now is competent but no longer inspired. The magic came, the magic left.
My favorite part of any King story is his characters. No matter what kinds of crazy things happen to them, the people seem like REAL people. He rarely makes that mistake where the reader questions the choices made by a character. Many of his books contain such vivid characters that finishing them is a sad thing, you know that character is out of your life now. You can write novels that are entirely plot driven. While the plot in a King story is often intriguing, the real meat is the characters.
The Stand is great. Firestarter and Christine are very good. He recently published a time travel book that uses the date of JFK's assassination for the title, something like 11/22/63. There are some really good parts to that book but the ultimate ending was very, very disappointing. Kind of like the very end of the Gunfighter series. I consider Hearts in Atlantis to be one of his very best books for his later years. And Rose Madder. Obviously his short story books contain many good stories.
As a person who has read the complete body of work... I'm not sure that's accurate. I know, I know, his works contain vast amounts of "wrong gun information." If you know guns, it's not hard to notice. The first few, I was ready to send him a letter to help him get these things right. But notice how the mistakes usually work. He will arm the character with a Ruger .44 Auto pistol. Gun people start to bang their heads. Or a rifle shooter will use a .349 Magnum rifle to shoot people. After a while, you realize there is a pattern. He finds the real information, picks a real gun or cartridge, and then slightly changes it. To something that doesn't actually exist.
I even saw an interview with him once where he admitted this is what he does. Because he had one sniper story where a real life wacko copied a story and shot some people. So he makes the conscious decision to use "slightly wrong and definitely non-existent" weapons in his stories. He does't want to arm a hero with a Colt 1911 in 38 Super and then find out years later that some nut job took that as the perfect choice for their own deeds. King said he looks up guns in Gun Digest but then changes the information slightly.
I'm not surprised he said some things that we consider anti-gun. He has money, he feels like he has more to lose. And that "regular people" are at least slightly untrustworthy with top line weaponry. Considering the total idiot who ran him down with his rusty old van while King was jogging down the side of the road, it wouldn't surprise me if he thinks a lot less people should own cars as well!
Gregg
My favorite part of any King story is his characters. No matter what kinds of crazy things happen to them, the people seem like REAL people. He rarely makes that mistake where the reader questions the choices made by a character. Many of his books contain such vivid characters that finishing them is a sad thing, you know that character is out of your life now. You can write novels that are entirely plot driven. While the plot in a King story is often intriguing, the real meat is the characters.
The Stand is great. Firestarter and Christine are very good. He recently published a time travel book that uses the date of JFK's assassination for the title, something like 11/22/63. There are some really good parts to that book but the ultimate ending was very, very disappointing. Kind of like the very end of the Gunfighter series. I consider Hearts in Atlantis to be one of his very best books for his later years. And Rose Madder. Obviously his short story books contain many good stories.
I'm not surprised at all that he has a superficial understanding of firearms and the efficacy gun control laws.
As a person who has read the complete body of work... I'm not sure that's accurate. I know, I know, his works contain vast amounts of "wrong gun information." If you know guns, it's not hard to notice. The first few, I was ready to send him a letter to help him get these things right. But notice how the mistakes usually work. He will arm the character with a Ruger .44 Auto pistol. Gun people start to bang their heads. Or a rifle shooter will use a .349 Magnum rifle to shoot people. After a while, you realize there is a pattern. He finds the real information, picks a real gun or cartridge, and then slightly changes it. To something that doesn't actually exist.
I even saw an interview with him once where he admitted this is what he does. Because he had one sniper story where a real life wacko copied a story and shot some people. So he makes the conscious decision to use "slightly wrong and definitely non-existent" weapons in his stories. He does't want to arm a hero with a Colt 1911 in 38 Super and then find out years later that some nut job took that as the perfect choice for their own deeds. King said he looks up guns in Gun Digest but then changes the information slightly.
I'm not surprised he said some things that we consider anti-gun. He has money, he feels like he has more to lose. And that "regular people" are at least slightly untrustworthy with top line weaponry. Considering the total idiot who ran him down with his rusty old van while King was jogging down the side of the road, it wouldn't surprise me if he thinks a lot less people should own cars as well!
Gregg