I think Lovecraft’s best stuff is his straight horror stories. In the Vault. The Outsider. With the Pharoahs. (Not sure if that’s the right title, but it’s close.) The Diary of Alonzo Typer. (This last a rewrite of someone else’s story.) A few others.
For the most part, these stayed out of, or stayed on the fringe of, the Cthulu Mythos. (As fine a concept as this might be, it saddled Lovecraft’s writing with an awful lot of ornate verbiage and the reader with additional burdens.) The horror pieces were subtler, slyer, less heavy with language.
You forgot “The Rats in the Walls” Peter, that one is just brilliant. I see your point even though I strongly disagree with you. But I see your point. That sentiment is exactly what I meant when I recommended Mark start with his “more accessible” stories. They’re good, but it’s the Cthulhu stuff that will keep Lovecraft a (pardon the pun) cult figure for a long time to come.
I really liked the characters and story lines in Needful Things.
And William I agree. I did not know how bad King was until I read it here. [size=2](One of)[/size] My problemsize=2[/size] is I went for several years without reading much else while catching up on his older stories so I had nothing to compare him to. Now that I have some perspective I can finally say…
Dreamcatcher was really good and I will be buying his next book as soon as it hits the shelves. So there.
I don’t think the “heavily edited” comment is true at all. Based on an interview with King from a few years back, the only major edit made to 'Salem’s Lot was the stair scene–originally rats scurried out and did the killing and King’s editor (Bill Thompson, I believe) requested it be changed to a board with knives.
As near as I can tell, most of the changes made to King’s work have been in regards to scenes of violence, not the actual language he used or his style. And even some of his more recent work, such as Misery (which is a great read) is tight and to the point. Even the Bachman books, which were written before he was ever published (except for Thinner) are fantastic reads–the prose is tight and the pace is brisk.
The other reason that argument doesn’t hold up for me is because of his short stories. He’s published a lot of them and for the most part they’ve all been flat-out brilliant, especially the ones in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. Those stories were published in a variety of publications; I seriously doubt that the fiction editor working at Cavalier was as good as the fiction editor working at Playboy. If it all hinged on the editor, there would be wild swings in the quality and that simply isn’t the case.
Like I said, it’s popular to kick him around now and I think some of that is warranted: Dreamcatcher’s ending was predictible, Bag of Bones was a snore-fest, and Rose Red was damn near an affront to humanity. But just because he’s wordy and loosey-goosy with his use of language now doesn’t invalidate his entire library of work.
In some ways, Lovecraft’s non-Mythos work is stronger because it latches on to a more familiar form of horror story. Particularly the suspenseful Poe-esque tale. But, for mine and anyone’s money, that’s what Poe is for. Lovecraft can’t compare.
Lovecraft’s mythos work is less about suspense and the ending that catches you like a noose with a twist or shock, and more about atmosphere – built and sustained until it is often left, fairly unresolved, to slowly dissipate around you as the story ends. Mountains of Madness is a classic example of this.
I dunno about “brilliant,” but those collections do feature some really good stories (…and also some crap like The Mangler and Children of the Corn). But they’re awfully old, now. King’s short stories and novellas after that universally blow. Try reading Everything’s Eventual sometime, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic. If I didn’t know that King went to bed every night on a bed padded with gazillion dollar bills, I’d have felt embarrassed for him, peddling that schlock. But what’s even more astounding is that King is getting the best reviews of his career for this garbage, in complete contrast to his earlier, better work, which was critically savaged.
Like most horror writers, Campbell often can’t sustain what he’s doing for the length of a novel. So he’s better appreciated in short story form. His novels are spotty at best, particularly the early ones. I couldn’t finish The Doll Who Ate His Mother, either, and had a tough time with Parasite and Incarnate as well. I liked some of the later books, like Ancient Images and Count of Eleven. But, again, Campbell’s short story collections show him at his best. Cold Print is a great anthology of Cthulhu tales. Anyone who likes Lovecraft should hunt down a copy of it. I also really liked Scared Stiff, a collection of sexual horror stories that features some really disturbing artwork by JK Potter, who used to do illustrations for Night Cry magazine (horror digest anthology, sister mag to Twilight Zone) back in the 80s. And Demons by Daylight rounds up some of Campbell’s older stories.
And Lovecraft did? Every second story was jammed with “incredible, mind-blasting horrors that I cannot describe,” described in detail on page after page. What worked best were the sparser pieces, like “The Rats in the Walls.” Parts of that story still stay with me, like the noise of the “rats” and descriptions of the old Roman temples beneath the castle. That is one incredibly creepy story.
Overall, though, I’ve never bought into Lovecraft’s “worldview.” The insanity stuff seemed too stylized to me, even back in grade and high school when I was first reading the Cthulhu mythos stories. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief when there is little evidence of real life, too. When the characters are all grotesque stereotypes–every story has a protagonist who delves into things man was not meant to know, and gets his synapses kicked around because of it–and they rarely speak with one another, how can you be afraid? It’s so far removed from actual living human beings that you can’t help but see the stories as fiction. You can never lose sight of Lovecraft himself pulling the strings. Most of all, I can’t get past the absence of dialogue. Lovecraft’s ideas were often brilliant, but he wasn’t a very good story-teller.
Stephen King’s problem (re: later works) is not so much that he isn’t being editted anymore. In my opinion, it seems pretty clear he isn’t writing with an outline. The books are tedious, meandering and tangential. He can go hundreds of pages in his later works without making a single point and entire chapters without illustrating a character better than he did in his introductory paragraph.
Even his earlier works suffer from this. I’d say the only really great (not literary great, just fun great) books he’s written have been The Shining, Pet Semetary and The Gunslinger (first book only), and they are all pretty well-plotted and effectively terse, but look at slop like “The Stand”, which was 800 pages too long when he released it the first time in 1978, then added 600 pages more in 1990.
King has gone on record saying he just sits down every day and for 8 hours hammers out fiction. This is a BAD way to write, especially for someone as verbose and seemingly clueless to the advantages of tense, sinewy pacing in a horror story as King is. When I write like this, I tend to get caught up in my own cleverness and go flailing about, writing some (independently) great stuff that I end up having to profusely cut out with a sigh when it is time to revise, because it doesn’t fit. King is like this (and so are other really mediocre popular writers like Tom Clancy, every fantasy author under the sun who can’t tell their retarded Conan rip-off stories in under twelve, one-thousand-page tomes, etc.) - I haven’t read a single one of his books that couldn’t have been cut down to less than three hundred pages. He ought to be writing with a strict outline to keep him on track.
If you need twelve hundred pages and an epic scope of forty years to tell the story of a spooky clown and his age old battle with a giant turtle, you’re a pretty incompetent writer.
Sometimes reading existential lit stuff makes me feel insane or mad depressed!, but it isnt scary. Reading something grotesque like Amercan Psycho or Blood Meridian is creepy but not scary. I dont know if I can be scared in a book anymore. I definitely get more scares (more like a feeling of being scared/watched) in some pc games than in books!
I think the ‘scary’ books of today are the serial killer vs cop books ala Red Dragon or Hannibal since they are closer to home I guess.
Plus I think Stephen King should stop writing and just take a break. Hes already damn rich! I stopped reading him after Misery (my fave King book). And Carrie and Christine were awesome!
William, King’s short stories work best because of the limitations of the form. Since most of King’s foibles, I’d argue are overindulgence (and a mistaken belief that anything he writes is printable), of course he’s going to be more effective with a lower word count and limitations. I think you’re wrong about the editing. Give me any King book, even early work like The Shining and Salem’s Lot and I’ll find you pages that could be cut out. (Show me something recent and I’ll remove entire chapters.) As King has grown more powerful, his page count has risen and he’s lost editors with the courage to suggest changes to sentences. Dr. Crypt nailed it with his The Stand example. Some editor removed 600 pages (600 pages!) from that book. King added them back in in 1990… and I think they were better left out. Right now it looks like King’s editor is about as effective an advisor to him as McCallum is as George Lucas’ Star Wars producer. Someone who says “yes” instead of saying: “Um, that isn’t working boss.”
As for Brett and Lovecraft. I think the lack of dialogue and his removing it from a context I can relate to is why it works. Put it into a context I can relate to and it becomes a little silly. “Uh-oh, the island was just a sleeping giant octopus guy!” What proves this is when you see better writers try and imitate him, it falls flat because they can’t get the obscure/bizarre cadence right, most notably with Michael Chabon’s story at the end of “Werewolves in their Youth” (a decent short story collection overall - he writes as that fictional horror writer from Wonder Boys, I think this story was in the New Yorker too.)
And you missed my asterix edit. Lovecraft was poor in describing things in concrete terms. That works. He admittedly totally overdid it with the “cyclopean vistas of terrifying reality” passages.
mtkafka is right that King absolutely needs to take a long break. The Green Mile was great (again, I’d argue because he had to limit himself to bite sized peices and he had to plan the book out)… and whomever mentioned Needful Things… I love that book too. More for the concept than the execution though.
In regards to The Stand, 400 pages were cut from the original version because of how the additional pages would’ve affected the book’s price point–his publisher thought the increase in price (because of the increase in pages) would result in lower sales. As for the cuts themselves, he made them, not his editor.
Also, just because you can find examples of sections that should be cut doesn’t mean anything; I can pick up any book and find passages and/or pages that I find dull or boring. That doesn’t mean the author or the author’s editor agrees that those sections should be cut or that they are ineffective.
When I get to that first semi-colon, I mentally append an aposiopesis, then “cunt!”, then <BITCH SLAP> to the end. But not to interrupt you in getting your panties in a bunch…
And just because an author feels that those sections should remain, it doesn’t mean that they SHOULDN’T actually be razed out of the manuscript immediately. This entire new-fangled idea that “writers know best about their art” is complete nonsense most of the time. Look at Max Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, or Max Perkins and Ernest Hemingway, or Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald… Max Perkins made these guys by editting their clunky books into masterpieces.
Good writing is knowing when to cut. That’s why artistic-minded editors are necessary: they have none of the paternal-love for the prose in front of them that misty-eyed writers do, and have no problems with hacking it apart with a razor and burning the viscera in their waste-paper basket as an offering to Art.
Not that a good editor would make King a literary genius, just saying…
Hey! How are we supposed to have a argument like this based on something other than gut feeling and personal opinion William? I thought this whole thread was based on personal opinion! Go back and mentally add the IMOs to my post if that makes you feel better about what I wrote there. I suppose I could reference links to all kinds of anti-King columns and reviews… But hey man, If you disagree with me, that’s fine too.
Seriously though, no offense intended with the above. I just think, even in his earlier better work, King goes to 11 just because he can. He’s scarier at 10. And I’ve seriously read everything he’s written.
Oh and William … that anthology “Weird Trails”, the collection of Western horror stories from Triad I told you about, is hide your eyes and protect your children from the sight of the cover, unremittingly awful. Maybe the worst writing, in so many different ways, I’ve ever seen in print form. The Western Horror Story is still a genre for you to dominate and I’m tempted to ask you to send me a draft of yours … just to wash this taste from my brain.
That’s too bad–the western and the horror story were made for each other, in my opinion. As for my little tome, it’ll be released next year (assuming the artist finishes on time) in graphic novel form by AiT/PlanetLar, the same folks who are publishing the reissue of Abel. I am bound and determined to become the Harry Turtledove of western horror fiction! :-)
I didn’t say anything that disagrees with your statement…I said that just because Bub feels a certain passage should be cut or rewritten doesn’t mean that the author and the author’s editor would agree with that opinion.
As for Max Perkins, the days of seeing someone of his genius wandering the halls of a major publishing house are over. It’s a sad situation when the marketing department has the final say in what does and doesn’t get published.
Indeed. Congratulations on your next graphic novel William. That’s great news! Man, you sure have rebounded since the last time we talked about that. Things were bleak then. (Any editor that comes to me for “work-finding” tips is in a bleak situation.) But you’re back at PCGamer and publishing a new graphic novel. Kudos!
When I get to that first semi-colon, I mentally append an aposiopesis, then “cunt!”, then <BITCH SLAP> to the end. But not to interrupt you in getting your panties in a bunch…
And just because an author feels that those sections should remain, it doesn’t mean that they SHOULDN’T actually be razed out of the manuscript immediately. This entire new-fangled idea that “writers know best about their art” is complete nonsense most of the time. Look at Max Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, or Max Perkins and Ernest Hemingway, or Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald… Max Perkins made these guys by editting their clunky books into masterpieces.
Good writing is knowing when to cut. That’s why artistic-minded editors are necessary: they have none of the paternal-love for the prose in front of them that misty-eyed writers do, and have no problems with hacking it apart with a razor and burning the viscera in their waste-paper basket as an offering to Art.
Not that a good editor would make King a literary genius, just saying…[/quote]
Such unreconstructed, old-school literary snobbishness is an absolute delight. This is like listening to a high school English teacher, circa 1958 or so.
I hardly know what to praise first. The slams at genre fiction, bolstered by sentences taken out of context; the assertion that King ought to write to an outline, which is the noted technique of the hacks you deplore; the notion that Max Perkins “made” Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Wolfe (well, maybe Wolfe); the backhanded compliment of King as a “fun” (ie, not important) writer (one can almost hear the harumph, there).
I think my favorite moment, though, occured earlier in thread, when DC praised, of all things, the first Gunslinger book, as unrepentant a book of juvenalia as I’ve ever seen, as being “good King”.
1958 being the date when my fellow high school English teachers were routed and delivered from the shackles of their pince-nez literary snobbishness by Tom Clancy and his Charging Light Brigade, riding ivory steeds a thousand pages high, right? I alone remain, the last bastion of defense, to fight the good fight. Pip pip!
I think my favorite moment, though, occured earlier in thread, when DC praised, of all things, the first Gunslinger book, as unrepentant a book of juvenalia as I’ve ever seen, as being “good King”.
Jesus, what have we got here, a Stephen King snob? Oh, sorry, gourmet? I might not have the well developed palate necessary to detect the proper delicacies and degrees of fineness in the bouquet of whatever King’s latest dysenteric literary expulsion is - but then again, I never wanted to start profusely guzzling from the septic tank. Anyway, I liked The Gunslinger, but if you Stephen-King-gourmet fancy-pants want to rank Rose Madder or the Stand higher on a Stepen-King-centric scale of excellence, be my guest.
On my part, I don’t see what your temper tantrum here is about, since I always thought the point of novels was entertainment, not what some stranger on the Internet thinks. Yeah, you’re right, though - I don’t think Stephen King is an “important writer”. I could sort of argue my point more, but I’m pretty secure in my opinion that the majority of King is absolute garbage that only an idiot would possibly find more “literary” than penny-dreadful slop. And anyway, your shrill, hysterical response is the token one I get anytime someone gets huffy that I don’t take the dog-eared paperback saturated in urine splashes and sitting by their toilet to be “serious literature”. Then again, the fact that you’re getting upset shows you put more importance on something being “serious literature” than I do. So I’ll let you get back to furiously underlining passages and scribbling notes in the margins of “Buick 8” or whatever King’s latest is.
PS: I’m kind of assuming you were being sarcastic or ironic or whatever is being passed off for a witty retort these days in all of your praises, but if you were being dead serious and emphatically agreeing that everything I’ve said is dead on: obviously, I agree, and in closing, I rule!!!
[size=2](One of)[/size] My problem