I've never read a Stephen King book... which do you recommend?

[HumblePie]

What you refer to as the Dark Tower is actually "The Gunslinger" - book 1 of the Dark Tower.

Yah, it's been so long since I read it. Barely remember it. I just remember liking it a whole lot when I first read it like 20 years ago. I also remember the second one being ho-hum and so different from the first I couldn't get into it. It was also a good 7 year span or so before I tried reading the second one after the first. I did read a few other SK books, but they were just decent and nothing great to me. Then again I don't really get into the horror books because they just don't scare me. Once you've taken the fright factor out of the equation due to silly paranormal crap and characters that I usually don't care if they live or die then the story becomes bleh at best.

The stand I liked because it was a bunch of character development. Almost a little to much, but still most of the character felt fleshed out well. Which is why people find it slow because there is so much fleshing out on so many characters.





Funny thing this thread came up just now. Rich friend of the family was out at his vacation home in Vegas. He described a story where he ran into Steven King at one of the grocery stores there. He said it was funny because some people managed to recognize him. Not many, but some. He said that this old lady came up to him, when a few people like him were around asking him questions, and said, "You that guy that writes all those scary books?"

"Yes, Maam"

"Well I hate all that stinking shit. It all hokey and nothing like what any real author would write. You know what a good book by a good author is?

"Uhh...."

"Shawshank Redemption that's what. Now there's a real good story by a real good author unlike you phoney."




The guy telling me this story said SK had this incredulous look on his face as this old lady hrumphed at him and walked off. Whether this story as it was told me was true or not I have no idea. I'm just repeating a story I was told by someone I know isn't prone to make them up as a retired AF general.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Yah, it's been so long since I read it. Barely remember it. I just remember liking it a whole lot when I first read it like 20 years ago. I also remember the second one being ho-hum and so different from the first I couldn't get into it. It was also a good 7 year span or so before I tried reading the second one after the first. I did read a few other SK books, but they were just decent and nothing great to me. Then again I don't really get into the horror books because they just don't scare me. Once you've taken the fright factor out of the equation due to silly paranormal crap and characters that I usually don't care if they live or die then the story becomes bleh at best.

I don't think I've ever read them for a "fright" factor. I love horror movies as well but not because they scare me.

 

[Markbnj]

I still think "Salem's Lot" is the scariest book he ever wrote.

 

[akenbennu]

Pet Semetary and Salem's Lot would be good to start with (fairly quick reads) and fit his usual horror genre. Long Walk/Shawshank are both very good. The Dark Tower series isn't his usual fare, but he ties a lot of his other books into it. (I enjoyed the series, but if you stop after Wizard and Glass, you'll probbaly be much more satisfied.)

 

[destrekor]

Yah, it's been so long since I read it. Barely remember it. I just remember liking it a whole lot when I first read it like 20 years ago. I also remember the second one being ho-hum and so different from the first I couldn't get into it. It was also a good 7 year span or so before I tried reading the second one after the first.

The first book was truly a wholly different experience from the other books in the series, because it was more of an attempt to truly start an epic with the classical epic "style"... and many considered it the driest and slowest of the DT series.

I personally enjoyed it, but I did like the other novels better... but I also only read the revised/expanded version of The Gunslinger, AFTER the entire original series was already completed - this was only about a year or so ago, and I flew through the series in a few months (shitty ass job, but in the winter I can read a lot ).
The second book really got the series [proper] rolling, and serves as an expanded "character introduction." The rest of the series then rolls on from there, and whether the later novels are enjoyable to you is really all about what you are looking for from King and the story itself.

I enjoyed each and every book, but I do agree, reading up through Book 4 is really a must simply because Wizard and Glass is such a fantastic novel. It's Dark Tower, but it's a story within a story, making it sort of a prequel as it gives you a lot of terrific story that occurs before The Gunslinger.

It appears the upcoming Dark Tower novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, appears to sort of follow a similar approach as Wizard and Glass - it will have a little bit about the "current" story, as it's set, I think, between books 4 and 5... but it will have the majority, I imagine, dedicated to Roland telling a story about his youth (much like Wizard and Glass)... but I think it takes it one step further, because the story Roland tells will also be about another story. From what I've read about the plot of the novel, it seems it'll be the ka-tet listening to Roland tell a story about a time he ended up telling a story. :biggrin:
I'll read it for sure, and I'm hoping the prequel moments are somewhere approaching Wizard and Glass's quality.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

I believe the first short story I read was 'The Crate' in some collection of horror stories (Great American Horror Writers or some forgettable title like that, was a very long time ago). It got me interested.

'Four Past Midnight' turned me into a fan. Of the four novellas, 'The Langoliers' has apparently been produced as a crummy TV mini-series and I think it's some of his best work (not to mention worthy of a cinematic adaptation) - like a really good episode of The X-Files or The Twilight Zone maybe. 'Secret Garden, Secret Window' is also from the same collection and you may have seen the movie adaptation featuring Johnny Depp.

The Gunslinger is also very good but I would recommend a short story first. Carrie is also a very, very interesting and easy read.

 

[pcgeek11]

The Stand.

 

[thedarkwolf]

I like Koontz as well. Midnight, Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place. The problem is the more of his works you read the more you realize they are all almost the same story.

Yeah. A guy with problems meets a chick with problems and together they have a bigger problem and if at all possible include a dog with above average intelligence. He is the AC/DC of writers.

Might as well throw Robert McCammon into the mix as well. His older horror books are up there with King and Koontz. Swan Song, The Wolf's Hour, Mine, Boy's Life, and Stinger are all great books.

As for King I'd go for The Long Walk. Out of all the books of his I've read that one has stuck with me the most.

 

[chusteczka]

Pet Cemetery freaked me out as a teenager.

The Long Walk still reverberates within me now, 20 years after having read it. The desperation is developed so well that I can still feel it today.

 

[Arkaign]

Yeah. A guy with problems meets a chick with problems and together they have a bigger problem and if at all possible include a dog with above average intelligence. He is the AC/DC of writers.

Might as well throw Robert McCammon into the mix as well. His older horror books are up there with King and Koontz. Swan Song, The Wolf's Hour, Mine, Boy's Life, and Stinger are all great books.

As for King I'd go for The Long Walk. Out of all the books of his I've read that one has stuck with me the most.

I recently saw a trailer for 'The Hunger Games', which looks like it cribbed some ideas from The Long Walk as far as I could tell. I've only read the Long Walk though, so I don't know how deep the connection really lies.

Agreed on Koontz. He can tell a fun, fast-paced story, but he really does recycle ad infinitum.

 

[edro]

The Twilight Series

 

[Gooberlx2]

Carrie. It's not long, I like the story, and introduces you to King's horror style. The Shining is another decent one. The Stand is way too long for a first King novel, imo. It's a great story, but his foreward in the "unabridged" edition, or whatever it was called, about having "diarrhea of the typewriter" is fairly accurate.

 

[HumblePie]

I just read The hunger Games. It's just so-so at best. Not horrible, but definitely not my favorite book. But I can see where you might see the connection.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Insomnia would be a great intro.

I love the Dark Tower series (obviously,) but you'd need to read the first 4.

 

[zinfamous]

That movie sucked compared to the book(don't they all?). It was the most cursory glossing over you could do, and still keep the name. King goes into a lot of detail and subtleties which get lost in film, and they make the difference.

which is why the film was so good!

 

[Stifko]

I still think "Salem's Lot" is the scariest book he ever wrote.

I was going to suggest "Salem's Lot." I could not put that book down when I first read it.

 

[DominionSeraph]

As a PSA to everyone, stay away from Under the Dome. The whole book is pointless intrigue completely unrelated to the problem at hand. You know it's pointless when it's happening. The people engaged in it should all know it's pointless. Yet King makes you wade through 1000 pages of it before he finally gets around to wiping everything clean. And then he ends with a total deus ex machina.
His editor should be shot.

 

[cKGunslinger]

As a PSA to everyone, stay away from Under the Dome. The whole book is pointless intrigue completely unrelated to the problem at hand. You know it's pointless when it's happening. The people engaged in it should all know it's pointless. Yet King makes you wade through 1000 pages of it before he finally gets around to wiping everything clean. And then he ends with a total deus ex machina.
His editor should be shot.

Truth

 

[surfsatwerk]

As a PSA to everyone, stay away from Under the Dome. The whole book is pointless intrigue completely unrelated to the problem at hand. You know it's pointless when it's happening. The people engaged in it should all know it's pointless. Yet King makes you wade through 1000 pages of it before he finally gets around to wiping everything clean. And then he ends with a total deus ex machina.
His editor should be shot.

I liked it.

 

[Via]

I think Pet Semetary is really well done. I got pretty involved in that book when I was younger.

Misery is good. As mentioned before - The Long Walk is a fricking trip.

I tried to start The Stand a few times, but it wouldn't take.

 

[walrus]

The Shining

 

[Arcadio]

Interesting suggestions. I'm very patient when it comes to reading, so I don't mind reading a very long book or series in order to get introduced to a writer's body of work. I'll probably start with some of the short stories or books mentioned, though. "The Stand" seems to be the must-read book of the thread, so I don't think I want to read it first and (probably) be disappointed by the rest of the books if I decide to read them later.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I liked it.

It was unrealistic in that nobody went into orderly survivalist mode and started to lay out some organization. King just left them all in a hazy, civilian, "don't look too closely into what's going on" mode so he could set things up to blindside them. He didn't spend the effort to actually hide and perfect any of the machinations or really set up the disasters, he just made everyone around them incompetent. It was lazy and an insult to the reader's intelligence.

And you couldn't tell from early on that everything going on internally was pointless?
His descriptions of the goings-on were wordy. They would've been wordy even if they wove together into a meaningful pattern, which they didn't. You could tell that nothing meaningful was going to come out of any of them. You could tell that a calamity was coming that was going to overwrite it all and render it moot. So you could tell that it was all pointless filler. Wordy, unending filler.
It was agonizing.

The only things of any meaning in the entire book were the setup, the military efforts, the page or two they gave to the artifact, and then the very ending. Everything else was wiped clean by circumstance.

 

[ReggieDunlap]

The first Stephen King book I read was "The Dead Zone". I'm surprised no one mentioned it in here. I think it's a great choice as a starter. Misery as well, mainly because they're people/character driven books. While the Dead Zone has an ESP type of vibe to it, it is still a story about people and their motivations more than anything. Salem's Lot is the perfect primer for King's horror oriented books.

 

[destrekor]

As a PSA to everyone, stay away from Under the Dome. The whole book is pointless intrigue completely unrelated to the problem at hand. You know it's pointless when it's happening. The people engaged in it should all know it's pointless. Yet King makes you wade through 1000 pages of it before he finally gets around to wiping everything clean. And then he ends with a total deus ex machina.
His editor should be shot.

... It was about a town, one that already had a lot of small-town secrets and some retarded people make retarded decisions, that happened to, well, get stuck under a dome that apparently no human inside or outside could do anything against. So, the town continued doing their normal stuff, now with an edge.

To me, it felt fairly intuitive. But I guess I could see how it annoyed people, expecting the dome to take up everyone's focus.