Stephen King is not a good writer. He has great story ideas; but, his actual writing is poor and he does weird things that are unsupported by the narrative - like writing sewer gangbang scenes with children so that they can defeat the bad guy with the power of underage eskimo brotherhood.
You can explain that in a less derisive way that sounds a bit more reasonable, but it doesn’t make it a good narrative choice.
Another example is 11/22/63. People on reddit cream their pants over the book, but it’s literally just King self-inserting as the main character so he can (totally uncritically) reminisce over how great small town America was in the 50s/60s and have a fantasy relationship with this incredibly weak/badly-written female character and repeatedly “make poundcake” with her and drink rootbeer floats in diners or whatever. It’s an 800+ page book (paperback is 1049 pages) supposedly about time traveling to stop the Kennedy assassination (which is a cool story idea), but like 700+ pages are filled with asinine garbage and the actual plot is thin and pretty bad.
I read so many of his book thinking “at some point I’ll land on one that’ll make me understand what all the fuss is about”. Never happened. As you said, the guy has great concept ideas, but he doesn’t know how to build on them. So many endings are so stupid and far fetched it would be comical if it were a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episode…
King isn’t a “writer” as much as he’s “some rando that took up horror lit as a paid hobby in college in order to fund the completion of his ‘opus’ The Dark Tower series …some numerous decades later” 🤢 Prolific =/= professional, etc.
This is pretty much my experience with King. I highly appreciate his ability to consistently create great story ideas, but his actual writing is just kind of bad. Since he has so many books, there might be some good ones in there, but from what I’ve read I’m not impressed. Not that he needs to impress me, he’s done fine for himself.
Stephen King is not a good writer. He has great story ideas; but, his actual writing is poor and he does weird things that are unsupported by the narrative - like writing sewer gangbang scenes with children so that they can defeat the bad guy with the power of underage eskimo brotherhood.
You can explain that in a less derisive way that sounds a bit more reasonable, but it doesn’t make it a good narrative choice.
Another example is 11/22/63. People on reddit cream their pants over the book, but it’s literally just King self-inserting as the main character so he can (totally uncritically) reminisce over how great small town America was in the 50s/60s and have a fantasy relationship with this incredibly weak/badly-written female character and repeatedly “make poundcake” with her and drink rootbeer floats in diners or whatever. It’s an 800+ page book (paperback is 1049 pages) supposedly about time traveling to stop the Kennedy assassination (which is a cool story idea), but like 700+ pages are filled with asinine garbage and the actual plot is thin and pretty bad.
I read so many of his book thinking “at some point I’ll land on one that’ll make me understand what all the fuss is about”. Never happened. As you said, the guy has great concept ideas, but he doesn’t know how to build on them. So many endings are so stupid and far fetched it would be comical if it were a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episode…
King isn’t a “writer” as much as he’s “some rando that took up horror lit as a paid hobby in college in order to fund the completion of his ‘opus’ The Dark Tower series …some numerous decades later” 🤢 Prolific =/= professional, etc.
This is pretty much my experience with King. I highly appreciate his ability to consistently create great story ideas, but his actual writing is just kind of bad. Since he has so many books, there might be some good ones in there, but from what I’ve read I’m not impressed. Not that he needs to impress me, he’s done fine for himself.