up for interpretation
To be fair, he was drowning in cocaine when writing that book, so he managed to keep the lid on it to the best of his abilities.
Ah. This is why everyone posting cocaine.
I was trying to figure out how a bunch of tweens stuck in the sewer got a hold of enough cocaine to think an orgy would help their cause.
Yeah, King went through a rough patch that only got worse before it got better.
I will admit I’ve had my suspicions about him for a long time. He’s also written a short story of a child being raped outside a library and in another he went into great descriptive detail about the genitalia of a young girl who is lost in the woods. This is after she drank water from a stream resulting in exposure to Cholera.
I always thought the part with Patrick and the refrigerator was far, far worse than the adolescent sex scene.
Also, Beverly having her period is a pretty big plot point. Not exactly prepubescent. The boys maybe.
Wasn’t IT about the loss of innocence? Also drugs were a factor
“Buy why”
Drugs.
“no it’s about growing up and it’s like the pig thing in Lord of the Flies not my latent (hopefully) pedophilia”
Reading the story, the “gangbang” part wasn’t like a huge orchestrated planned event. The kids were lost in the dark, loosing hope, and knew that IT wanted them to feel down and weak as alone they could be defeated by IT.
In an effort to make them feel close, Beverly took it up her self to make them all Eskimo Brothers. This brought the Losers Club back into solidarity.
I’m a big fan of Stephen Kings work. He’s deserving of respect as a writer and story teller. Your explanation is reasonable and true in the context of the story.
There is just no way to talk about, write about, discuss, etc, stuff like that, without the air in the room not going still as fuck. All of what you say is true, it’s still… off.
And that book was just a bit too long, but again, great book, great writer, questionable AS FUCK portion.
There is just no way to talk about, write about, discuss, etc, stuff like that, without the air in the room not going still as fuck.
I don’t think that’s true at all. I think there are a lot of people out there who could discuss it, but that requires a significant degree of emotional maturity and there are too many people who can’t step back and be open to discussing topics which make them uncomfortable.
Mate, where are you going with this? Aldous Huxely erotic play for children? I think you’re missing the point. It’s not a discussion because the fallacy purported by the writer was to give 12 year olds emotions, desires, and mental processes that they simply have not yet developed. Beverly, the twelve year old girl, wouldn’t think to have sex with her friends to comfort them. Full stop. That’s the writer putting these emotions where they simply wouldn’t exist. And. Creepy.
It’s not maturity. Maturity is knowing that twelve year olds don’t reason that way.
Well, she would, because she’s a child sexual abuse survivor and it’s a hypersexualization thing and a result of how she’s been told things work by the adults taking advantage of her.
Still fucked up to type that out and not have some editor say “Are you doing okay, Stevie?”
And don’t pretend this is only fucked up sexual thing he’s written about children.
i definitely knew about sex by 12
There are plenty of people who are abused at a young age that come to associate sex with giving comfort or thinking its the only way they can help others.
cocaine
That sounds very much like a pedophile fantasy.
That’s like saying that a lot of people get murdered in Stephen King’s stories, so he must have homicidal fantasies.
Horror writers look for ways to shock and shake up their readers, and judging from the comments here, he succeeded.
Yep when your job is to shock, gross out and give people very specifically a moral and ethical panic attack
You tend to do some fucked up stuff.
Jonathan Swift must have really wanted to cannibalize poor children!
I’ll never forget bringing that up in a classroom and realizing adults had no idea it was satire.
… This isn’t satire and King is in the Epstein files.
This isn’t the only pedophile adjacent thing he’s written by the way, not even close.
I assumed that there was a reason that he agrees with trump on not releasing the Epstein files.
No, King does not agree with Trump not releasing the Epstein files.
King doesn’t believe there is a document that clearly lists who is guilty of being a pedophile because that isn’t how long running and successful criminal activity works. They have lists of contacts and hints, which have already been released, but not something so cut and dry as a client list.
Even if there is an explicated log book. It’s likely filled with worthless pseudonyms, chicken scrawl or some other worthless data.
Making it worthless and basically what we already got
but not something so cut and dry as a client list.
Right. I know that. I assumed the ‘list’ people were talking about was able to be made with the actual information. Especially with the financial information on where the money was flowing.
The idea that there was 1 specific list that was found isn’t the idea being pushed when people say ‘Release the Epstein file.’ King said he doesn’t think a definitive list is real, but we sure do have a lot of information that can be used to create a list. That list can lead to questions that might have valid answers. It will also lead to a lot of pedos…so I’m assuming protecting them is the point of Trump’s delay.
King might have his own reason for not wanting a list of people not having to explain their connections with Epstein in the past, but I don’t care. Explain it and then move on, if you are innocent. It just feels King is arguing a red herring (about an actual list) instead of the meat and potatoes of going after pedos. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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…
I can’t agree more. I enjoyed his earliest works some, but he quickly hits his “stride” and falls into his characteristic writing pattern, making every book more or less the same novel with interchangeable variations on the same plot points.
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.
What was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable. There are people that can’t accept that.
In 1986 though? Pretty sure we had our cultural view on child gangbangs locked in by then.
Unfortunately it isn’t even to this day. Just look at who is in the white house.
Most voters who support Trump are in genuine denial that he’s a pedophile. It’s ridiculous, but it doesn’t change the fact that they also hate pedophilia - they’re just being conned into thinking queer people are the pedos (also very likely some of them are pedos/complicit, but I will risk the assumption that that is the minority and the conservatives I’ve met in real life actually aren’t pedophiles).
Also, have the standards of what’s acceptable changed or not? You said they have, then you implied they haven’t. Either way, I highly doubt everyone was just fine with that scene in 1986, especially given it was not recreated in any adaptation.
I’ve been told that cocaine is a helluva drug
If you are writing a horror book, you gotta find a variety of ways to scare people. Sex often triggers a select group of readers.
What icks me out is when they make an evil character LGBTQ or kinky.
I recently heard about how the Hellraiser movies helped represent the kinky community
So many of us loved that film without quite being able to say why.
Misrepresent, you mean? Yeah, the Cenobites are dressed up as kinksters, and that’s done to play upon the ick reaction that the mainstream has towards kink. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about, and it’s probably the reason why their outfits are much less BDSM in the reboot.
Snortin’ Whiskey, Drinkin’ Cocaine.
Well, Coca Cola…
Paedophilia?
there are people being murdered in this story as well, so he must want to murder someone too right?
All characters involved were kids, so not in the context of the story.
It was supposed to be some kind of metaphor for becoming and adult or something. The editor and publisher left it in.
Weird as hell, but not like that.
Cocaine?
Maybe a fleeting dream or memory he had as a teen where he was part of a gangbang?
Really tells us all we need to know about Stephen King.
I read his crap as an older teen, and frankly it sucked.
lol
Stephen King is an objectively good writer, especially when it comes to portraying realistic characters, even if his stories aren’t always great. Just because you don’t enjoy something doesn’t mean that it’s not good.
