Stephen King made me crap my pants

Before you make assumptions, I wasn't frightened at all; but this evil heartless bastard still made me shit my pants.

Here's how it happened.

I was messing with the computer when I was suddenly hit with an urgent need to go to the bathroom and drop a duece. So, naturally; I went downstairs to the basement toilet, planning on reading a book which I had left down there earlier. It was one of King's books, a part of the Gunslinger series.

But the book wasn't there. I pinched my cheeks together, holding back the emmenant anal explosion that was begging to be set free. I desperately looked around for the book, but it was nowhere in sight. I had done a little laundry earlier, so I made my way over towards the washing machine in the hopes of finding the book.

And that's when it happened. The ass cannon had fired.

I gave up looking for the book and took care of business, cleaning my underwear and showering afterward. First time I have ever shit my pants. Fucking Stephen King.

And get this, after everything was over; the book appears as if by magic not far from the toilet.

You owe me a new pair of underwear, King.

Why I don't like Stephen King's writing

Things I don’t like about Stephen King’s writing style.

I’ve never been a fan of King, but I hear such great stuff about him from people who seem to otherwise have good taste.

I’ve now read 7 novels* from him, just trying to give him another chance, but I keep getting disappointed. Normally an author gets one chance if they are utterly unreadable, two chances if they aren’t good, three chances if they either show promise or are well praised. King always read like he had promise to me, but not quite anything that really hit me. I read It and Dream Weaver first and didn’t care for either one of them. I wasn’t going to buy another book from him, but my mom gave me a free one “Hearts in Atlantis”.

Hearts in Atlantis is one of the best books I have ever read. Just amazing.

I then read a short story by him in a compilation book called LEGENDS (also where I was introduced to the great George R. R. Martin). The story was about Roland, the gunslinger. He fought off a town of mutant-zombies. So I bought the first full novel he wrote about this Roland character. It was great. The second book was only okay. The third was the same. The fourth... I’m still trying to force myself through it.

Anyway, so I’ve pinpointed what I don’t like about the man’s writing.


-Uses parenthesis as an aside far too often. It’s overdone and starts to annoy me after a while.

-Most of his books have a phrase or three that are repeated constantly throughout. Like the parenthesis, it’s overdone. These are always cool at first, but get really annoying later on. Especially when it relates to the story because it just seems so patronizing.

-His chapter lengths are constantly sporadic. One chapter will be a page and a half, the next will be 20+ pages. While I believe that style is just as important as the story itself, there needs to be some structure, even if it’s a structure unique to the story. Chaos, does not count as a structure.

-He goes into unnecessary detail. Do we really need to read about the time the character had a boner when he was younger? He’s not getting paid by word count, is he? (That’s what ruined Dickens IMO, because Dickens had TALENT, but that’s another thread for another time.)

Anyway, that about sums it up. It's all of those things at once. I can say that Gunslinger and Hearts in Atlantis proved that he has the talent, proved that he could be amazing. He just keeps falling short for me.



*Dream Weaver, It, Gunslinger I-IV, and Hearts in Atlantis