I used to love Stephen King novels. I remember reading Salem's Lot in high school and jumping when someone came up behind me cause I was so enthralled and wrapped up into the novel. It was genuinely scary!
I remember reading Christine one summer and thinking that it was good but could have been better had King not belabored so many themes. I still liked it, but like many of his books I felt that he had a tendency to get too preachy as if the pacing of the writing didn't match the pace of the story. The Stand, Tommyknockers, Carrie, Cujo, IT, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining, Firestarter, . . . I enjoyed them all.
Then came The Dark Tower, which I gave up on, and The Talisman . . . another that I just couldn't wade through.
With each of his newer works I found myself less inspired to commit. I tried but quite reading Gerald's Game, Bag of Bones and Dolores Clairborne. I finished Needful Things but felt like it had been a waste of time.
I read The Green Mile with skepticism and really only did so due to the marketing of it as a serial. I ended up happy to have read it. Then I tried Hearts in Atlantis and On Writing. Having even wanted to read a book of his since. If anything I've wanted to go back and read some of my old favorites. Wouldn't you love to read The Stand again? I wonder if it's as good the second time? Also, he's incredibly prolific. Take a look at the bibliography . . . extensive doesn't even begin to describe it.
Now King is in the news for his most recent book, Joyland. This article by Jefferey A. Trachtenberg entitled Stephen King Says No to E-book, to Scare Up Business has me just a bit irritated and bemused. I like the fact that King was an author who tried new things in publishing. I may not like is more recent novels, but I liked that he was willing to try new things, even if they were old things. The Green Mile experiment, publising Riding the Bullet as an e-book all the way back in 2000 . . . these all seemed like things that were designed to push the envelope so to speak in the publishing world.
Now this? He has no plans to publish his book as an e-book? Smells of curmudgeondom to me.
Mr. King's latest move to make "Joyland" only available as a physical book is essentially the reverse of what he did in 2000, when he became one of the country's first writers to make a new work available exclusively in a digital format. Then, CBS Corp.'s CBS +3.97% Simon & Schuster publishing arm issued Mr. King's 16,000-word ghost story "Riding the Bullet" as an e-book priced at $2.50.
The tone of the article suggests it's being done to "save" the bookstore. Don't get me wrong, I was a lover of bookstores, but just because I loved em doesn't mean I think we should stop their demise. I love the Pony Express, but I don't think it should be used when there is FedEx and UPS and airlines to transport the mail.
If King is hep to save something and wants to harken back to the good old days, as a lover of his earlier works I would encourage him to go back to the style of writing and the themes that made him so popular in the first place. (Now who sounds like a curmudgeon). Then again, perhaps I should give his newer works another look. It's been a while since I tried reading a King book, I wonder if I'll like the new stuff now that I'm older. I can tell you this though, . . . if I do decide to invest it a Stephen King novel . . . it's going to be an e-book . . . if only to twist the knife a bit.
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