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

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction. I blame it on Straub; I think King at least tried to compensate for some of the disparity in their styles. I just finished From a Buick 8 and it's most excellent, and pure King.

[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]

isn't buick 8 just a reheat of christine? (which, for my money, pretty much blew goats). possessed car causes evil, gifs at eleven?

[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. . .

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Very much no. Buick 8 is almost a sci-fi story. The car is not actually a car, but more a gateway to a completely other place masquerading as an almost-car. The entire book but the last two chapters or so is set as a storytelling flashback of a police troop's experiences with this car, from the finding and through much weirdness. It's not so much horror as terror and scifi and just a story of people. It probably shares more commonality of theme with Dreamcatcher or Talisman/Black House than with Christine. Oh, and for the record, Black House does get better, but it takes a while to get there.

[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)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

ahhh. . . sorta like "Driving John Malkovich's Wardrobe." hehehehe.

[felisdemens.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Black House is a seriously weak read, particularly in comparison to the Talisman. The only reason I kept my copy was because of the Dark Tower tie-in. I was disappointed, because I almost always enjoy King, I think Straub is a demi-deity, and I absolutely loved the Talisman.

Don't expect it to improve. The end is just as boring-ass as the beginning. But at least it's consistent...