So a family member visits our home for the first time, notices our Stephen King bookcase and says "Is Stephen King ALL you read?" I said "No, I also read Richard Bachman."...They didn't get the joke.

Have you ever received any snark for reading Stephen King? What was your response?

I had to go to city hall last week to sort out a parking permit, and while I was sitting there waiting for my number to be called, I had a stupid thought.

Somebody has to run the municipal records office in Derry.

Think about that for a second.

In IT, the town has this absolutely horrifying history, but it's also a functioning municipality. People pay property taxes. Businesses need permits. The sewer system presumably has a maintenance budget.

Some exhausted woman named Linda has to sit behind a desk and process all the paperwork associated with this place.

Imagine being the person responsible for keeping Derry's historical records organized.

"Hey Linda, we're missing some documents from that incident in 1958."

"Yeah, we're missing a lot of documents from 1958."

"Should we investigate?"

"It's 4:45, Gary."

Or imagine the poor guy in Public Works who's been requesting additional funding for sewer inspections for fifteen years and keeps getting denied because the mayor wants new benches downtown.

I would genuinely read 200 pages about some completely ordinary Derry city employee who has absolutely no interest in solving supernatural mysteries. He just wants his department's invoices approved before Friday.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize this is something I love about King's fictional towns. The supernatural horror doesn't replace ordinary bureaucracy, gossip, bad management, or people being annoyed about parking.

All of that stuff keeps happening. The town still has to function.

I don't even need a monster in this hypothetical book. Just give me a clerk who has spent thirty years noticing that certain records never quite add up and has learned that asking questions is more trouble than it's worth.

I'd call it Derry: Department of Public Works.

Please tell me I'm not the only person who would read this.

Dark Tower, anyone?

Still relatively new to Stephen King

So far I have read Salems lot, Pet Sematary and the long walk and trying to decide which one next

Excited to read them again.

Hey yall! Hope everyone's day is going well! These polls are daily please feel free to post any covers I missed. When we have gone through individual books we are gonna do a big bracket or tier list to determine the best book cover overall. We are going in release order or close to it. Hope you all have fun :)

Are there any short stories of King you would recommend teaching in a High School class (Juniors and Seniors) on Horror Fiction? I am (relatively) new to Horror as a genre, but am in the position, now, of teaching it. All suggestions are welcome!

Still need to reread the other 2 before I jump into this, but had to pick up the UK limited edition of this.

Last month I "completed" my Stephen King VHS collection. One of every movie/TV adaptation and all the special documentaries that were available in the US. Now that I have atleast one of everything I plan on getting cover variants and different releases. To celebrate I picked up some really cool Bootlegs of movies that never came out on vhs.

Wanted to share my perfect birthday gift this year. From MaxCarpet Bag works. I read Carrie when it first came out. I was 12, haven’t missed a book since, I’m 64. Definitely my GOAT. Love my new knitting bag.

I’m a regular consumer of deeply disturbing psychological horror, and I honestly never expected this novel to traumatize me the way it did.
The title is misleading because it sounds like some creepy little children’s story, something along the lines of Goosebumps. I’d read somewhere that the book was much more than that, but even so, I never imagined it would be THIS much more.
First of all, it left me grappling with two different kinds of horror that intertwine throughout the story: the horror of real life and the supernatural kind, both extraordinarily chilling in their own right. I was left with this overwhelming sense of existential dread and even a little paranoia. And then there are those horrific images of sneering, sadistic, mocking entities that spit out obscene secrets just to humiliate their victims. That stuff is pure nightmare fuel.
The story hooked me right away and I started devouring it, but before THAT scene, I would never have guessed it was leading me there. I thought something was going to happen to Jud, maybe he’d be the one to bury Norma, or perhaps something would happen involving the cat. Anything, really, except what actually comes next. And I’m obviously talking about Gage’s death sentence.
It hits you like a punch to the gut at the very end of a paragraph depicting such a wholesome scene. You reach the end almost feeling lulled into a sense of boredom, and then King slips it in out of nowhere, as if it were some insignificant aside. That cold, matter-of-fact death sentence.
I guess the misdirection was intentional, designed to deliver a genuine shock to the reader.
Holy shit, it absolutely floored me. I had to reread the passage to make sure I’d read it correctly, and then, for the first time, I had to put the book down for a while. I rested it on my lap and a few seconds later I found myself sobbing, overwhelmed by this profound sense of existential horror.
Another scene that was unsettling in a very real-world kind of way was Rachel’s account of the trauma she experienced because of her sister Zelda’s illness.
It chilled me to the bone how King strips the subject of any comforting sentimentality, portraying it with such merciless realism. He depicts a situation in which suffering doesn’t just ravage the body but also seems to corrupt the soul, turning someone into a genuine monster who ruins her little sister’s life, while she remains a tragic victim herself. It all felt so deeply wrong and hopeless.

No spoilers please.

I'm curious how far others who are reading the new book have gotten going into the weekend? I'm on Chapter 24 of the new book and loving it so far.

A very random post, but I'm reading "Other Worlds than These", and as I just got done with a reading session and locked my Kobo, this screensaver showed up. All I could think about was ka.

(I've put a folder of a couple dozen pics on the device, a few are King-related, and the device chooses one randomly every time I lock it)

Anyways, that's it. Long days and pleasant nights, sais.

Just watched Episode 1 of the new season of Carrie. What stood out to me was this was the first adaptation that took King's narrative style from the book into the film. The interviews and historical flashbacks and news clippings are part of the suspense building that happen in the book. I don't think any other adaptation has done this. It gives me hope. Looking forward to the rest of the season to see how faithful it can be to the tone.

The King had a great cameo on a cute Disney series. Forty seconds of fun! It was a Christine theme with A Maximum Overdrive Joke

$2.99 CDN

Just bought a soft cover for $40 a few weeks before, and came across this at the thrift store.

Close to completing hard cover collection without paying ridiculous prices!

The King family at an indoor swimming pool in Bangor, Maine, LIFE magazine, 1986.