Ob. Lit. Crit.

[digitaldiscipline]

Just started Black House, and my initial reaction (after having just re-read The Gunslinger over the weekend) is that it's wordy as fuck.

perhaps reading a draft of a screenplay for Neuromancer has my literary preferences skewed towards the brisk and austere (feel free to peruse the last half dozen entries here for my own stylistic wibblings), but i want to reach through the cover of the book and whack Straub & King's heads together and shout, "GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT."

meh. . .

Comments

[sabinenotagoth.livejournal.com]

i had trouble getting into it too (and i found some of the literary devices really tedious) but once i got into the story it was pretty good. not as good as the talisman, imo, which i re-read right before tackling it.

i think king's tended toward the verbose in recent years...argh; i can't remember the name of the book i'm thinking of specifically. it had the ghost of a drowned woman in it... :/

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Bag of Bones? (about the writer and his haunted house on the lake)? 530 pages seemed about right.

than again, i like his 600 page stuff, and would gladly read 2,000 pages' worth of "the stand." and IT was good at 900 pages, or whatever - 1077 in the paperback version i have).

but i don't remember the talisman being this dull. . .

[sabinenotagoth.livejournal.com]

Bag of Bones? (about the writer and his haunted house on the lake)?

YES. thank you. for some reason, i felt it really dragged in the middle...it seemed slow and repetitive to me, but that may have been because it was the first horror novel i read after being a long cyberpunk kick, iirc. so the pacing may not have been as slow as i recall.

than again, i like his 600 page stuff, and would gladly read 2,000 pages' worth of "the stand." and IT was good at 900 pages, or whatever - 1077 in the paperback version i have).

i LOVED the stand. and i don't have a problem with length (i waded through all of victor hugo's les miserables once ;) ) - but rather with pacing sometimes.

but i don't remember the talisman being this dull. . .

it wasn't. black house was a much slower read. how far are you into it?

(yay, i got the second book in the dark tower series in the mail today from amazon.com)