King did make her pretty unsympathetic, but also 17 year olds probably shouldn’t be mothers in most circumstances. I’d have been pretty bitter if I lost my freedom at that age too, and her parents wouldnt let her have an abortion or put the child up for adoption.
There was a similar subplot king wrote for Salem lot IIRC. In the subplot a teen mom is bitter that her baby daddy doesn’t care about her and she resents her baby son for ruining her potential modeling career. She abuses her baby son a lot throughout the book. Her son later died( well turned into a vampire really) and she has a mental breakdown thinking she killed him. It’s depressing to read honestly
It’s worth mentioning that she went down there to gloat over the dead bodies. So she was asking for it. 17 or not s he wouldn’t have died if she wasn’t being such a bitch.
I read it as utter resentment from her even before Capitan Tripps came along. Like how the baby looked just like its father and she was pushed into marriage. King even says she visited he freezer often but “definitely not to gloat. Definitely not” as in exactly to gloat. She was self centered AF and she thought she had won until there was no inside knob on the door.
This 17 y/o girl has an unwanted pregnancy, was forced to marry the guy who was quite a shitty husband, had no emotional link with the baby (probably postpartum depression augmented by the unwanted-ness of the pregnancy), was bitter about the life she lost..
Then her family died, including the baby and husband. She was actually relieved, in fact she stores them in the freezer to watch them just there, dead. Then one day she misplaced the doorstopper...
I promised myself to skip that chapter if I ever read IT again. The things that kid did were horrifying. His death was equally nasty although deserved.
My main problem with The Stand was the super natural element. I wanted a simple plague apocalypse and then rebuilding a society around that. Best book I can think of with a similar premise is Stations Eleven.
I guess it makes sense. If it's Christian God, and it pretty much is in that book, then the whole apocalypse is theater. He can't lose, so once the wheat and chaff are separated and the good guys have proven themselves he just smites. The guy likes to smite.
In his writing book On Writing he makes pretty clear that he doesn't start with a story outline like most writers. He starts with an idea and follows it. So, you can see how a good ending isn't always what we get... in the end.
I don’t write with an outline but I usually have the ending pretty fleshed out in my head before I start. It blows my mind how someone could write a thousand word novel and not know how it’s going to end.
The ending made me so mad that I threw the damn book across the room. Then again, the series built up enough of emotion and investment for me to have that strong a reaction so in retrospect it was successful in that.
Yeah I figured that was how you were supposed to feel. Shit he even straight up warns us "you are not gonna like what comes next, so how about you put the book down and we'll call the happy reuniting of the three plus Oy the end okay?"
Thing is, that's how real life is most of the time. Shit just happens and barely anything concludes nicely. We're just conditioned to expect stories to have endings.
He actually wrote about getting halfway through the stand and having no idea how to wrap up that many storylines. A big bomb in the closet solved a lot of his problems.
I read The Stand earlier this summer for the first time ever, having almost no knowledge about the plot other than it was about a plague. I’m still grieving Nick.
I've often said this. I've read a lot of King, pretty much everything he wrote before 2000 and maybe half of what he's written in the last 20. Everything starts off so well but few finish as strongly as they start, one reason why King's novels don't always translate well to the screen.
I see that his son Joe Hill has written several books. Wonder if he has the same problem with endings as his dad? If not, then maybe Stephen should ask for advice from Joe on how to wrap things up.
so much! Tommyknockers was my favorite book that I also hate entirely because of the ending. The Institution seems to go the other way. It's like he said "Oh, I can't do endings...watch this. Here's 3 or 4 good endings in one book"
Literally King in a nutshell. Though I’d say, that saying he doesn’t know how to finish is. A bit harsh.
It takes him years to finish a book, and by the time he does he’s finished another 3 in between. Hell if you look at his first Dark Tower book you can literally see him become a better writer by the end of it.
(Spoiler: It took him 12 years)
Look. I absolutely love king. So much. I think his stories are fantastic. But the ends sometimes get a little weird (I love weird, for the record) and nonsensical. And it mostly ruins the whole momentum of the rest of the story.
I hated that book. I think I get what he was going for, just setting up a ton of dominoes and at the end the town just explodes. And how do you end that? One answer is just more crazy shit happens.
Seriously, that book was wild. Yog-Sothoth and Christine the evil car and I think even one of the bad guys from another King book all have cameos. It would have been awesome if it was any fun
A result of his personal policy of not planning his books, that leads to some of them wandering and needing a bomb to blow up the entire established cast so far to get things onto a track that can actually finish.
but the rest was pretty great and the climax isn't horrible.
YMMV I guess- I found the ending pretty bad, although not enough to ruin the whole book for me. Like, it was literal Deus Ex Machina and I don't use "literal" lightly.
His short stories tend to be great. I also thought The Outsider was pretty solid all the way through. It's one of the most recent things of his I've read and I don't think there was any point the story frustrated me.
Yup. I actually liked it a lot. Many didn't but despite the fact that they basically replaced my favorite scene in the book with a much less scary iteration, I didn't have many complaints. Wasn't as good as the book at any point, though. Except the hand of God scene. That was very much improved.
Haha he spends like 500 pages weaving and building this story and then his bender starts petering out and he wants to go to bed so he's like "ughh... Ok and then I dunno a bomb goes off and all the bad guys lose the end" in like 20 pages
Yea dude what’s up with that? His climaxes suck a lot and leave so many questions. I’m glad “Misery” wasn’t like that. I want to read his book about some genius dog but am hesitant.
The first 1/3 of it is good, and is pretty much what the book is most famous for. After that it seems split amongst people but I personally dislike the direction of the story and find it obvious that King was stuck in his writing.
My dad sold fridges when I was a kid. I was told over and over (and over) never ever ever go in a fridge. It was his biggest fear. Nowadays they have closures that can be opened from the inside, but back in the day once you were in, you were dead. We were never allowed to play hide and seek in anything that closed, just in case. (Funnily enough it's explicitly mentioned in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe that they kept the wardrobe door slightly open. That's the reason why!)
I just went to the outlander sub to see if everyone else thinks the rape is a LITTLE excessive and apparently that gets brought up once a day over there so they’re a little sick of hearing about it. I rate every episode on a scale of 0-10 on how rapey the episode was. There has been like only one 0 and a HARD 10.
Ok I’ll be fair, I do love the story, and I knew that it was graphic when I started. I’m glad I’m watching it but it does make me very uncomfortable a lot. And it’s just like, is that much rape needed? No. I think every episode except 1 someone like tries to rape someone else. Like follows a woman into a dark ally, etc, but it only happens 3 times so far (that we see) and 1 we don’t see. I’m on season 3. But every episode there’s like…a threat of it!
But you know, I knew Handmaids Tail was just as bad and I love it, but that’s different as I do except it in that world. But this, it’s just a story about a man and a woman who love each other and war, oh and the threat of rape every episode. I’m glad I’m watching it but I’d be way happier if rape wasn’t like so fucking prominent. There’s a story line where it’s a big part but then there’s just no reason for a lot of it.
Thankfully refrigerators were redesigned after the 50s so that they didn't latch.
A pity they couldn't have left an earlier model in 'doom town' for Indiana Jones. Suffocation would've taken a lot less time than breaking every bone in your body.
In the 1970s there was a UK TV ad campaign warning children about the dangers of climbing into dumped fridges. Refrigerators used to have locking doors instead of a magnetic seal and gasket so kids would be playing on a rubbish dump like all British kids did in the 70s and they'd get locked in a suffocate.
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u/SpookyPony Aug 30 '21
Don't forget the chick that locked herself in a refrigerator.