BOOKS: Let's pick on Stephen King, Part II: The Bloodening

Let's continue picking on Stephen King by ripping on his books! Well, more like 50% praising, 50% ripping on. I am a big fan, after all, or why would I have read all these damn books? I only say the hurtful things I do out of love. And because I like being a jerk.

I'm listing fiction only, and only in book form; I'll list his short story collections, but not his individual stories. Okay, here we go!

My All-Time Favorite

The Stand: This book is 178,000 pages long, and weighs more than the starting offensive line for the Minnesota Vikings. And yet I've read it four times. The original version once, the other times the revised, expanded edition (which is so huge it actually comes with its own forklift). Love this book.

The Dark Tower

Might as well get this out of the way. The Dark Tower series, as a whole, is my second favorite of King's creations. Pretty much everything he's ever written has been tied back into the Dark Tower somehow. So I'll list the whole series here, from most to least favorite.

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard & Glass: The most romantic, and most tragic, of all of King's novels, I think.
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger: "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." I've read the original three or four times, and the revised edition once; I wasn't thrilled with the revision the way I was with The Stand's revision.
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three: The central cast is assembled.
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of The Calla: The return of 'Salem's Lot's Father Callahan! A very slow moving story, but I liked spending the time with these characters.
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands: I'm still disgruntled he left the cliffhanger ending unresolved for six years.
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: I think I need to reread this. I honestly remember almost nothing about it, even though I read it less than a year ago.

...and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower: STILL haven't read it! I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I just don't want it to be over.

The Greats

The Dead Zone: My first King. I was maybe 11 or 12 when I read it, and clearly it broke my mind.
Carrie: A short one, and very different from later works, but it holds up very well.
It: To me, this is the end of his era of greatness. He achieved excellence (outside of The Dark Tower) very rarely after this. Quite possibly this impression is due to how young I was when I read all the books before this; I can see now, for example, that Firestarter and Cujo don't really hold up as well as I once thought they did. But almost all his books up to this one do hold up well.
Pet Sematary: Probably his most chilling ending. It still haunts me.
'Salem's Lot: This was more an exciting adventure (with vampires) than a horror story to me. I've been meaning to reread it, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Dark Tower VII first!
Night Shift: Back when King knew how to write short stories that were short. (Or back when editors had the balls to actually edit him.) He could scare the shit out of you in ten pages. Now, most of his "short" stories take 80 pages to make you go, "Eh."
The Shining: I remember reading most of this in a public library, and being absolutely terrified.
The Talisman: His first with Peter Straub. I don't care for Straub, but I loved this book. Much more a straight-up fantasy than anything King had written before.
The Green Mile: King forced himself to rein in his worst overwriting impulses with this serial novel, and produced his best (non-Tower) work since It.

The Very Good

Skeleton Crew: A few lemons, and King's diarrhea of the keyboard was starting to manifest itself, but mostly very good stories in here.
Black House: The sequel to The Talisman. I might've enjoyed it more if I had reread Talisman immediately beforehand, or if I had ever read Dickens' Bleak House, which apparently was an influence. It tied into The Dark Tower at the end, which put it over the top for me.
Christine: It seems silly to think about it now: an evil car? But man, was it scary. And well-told.
Misery: "I'm your biggest fan!"
Different Seasons: Three great novellas, one lame one.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: Very different for King; it benefited from its relative shortness.
Hearts in Atlantis: Some very good stories, all connected in one way or another, and all tying back once again into The Dark Tower.

The Mediocre

Cujo: The second King book I ever read. I loved how it featured similar settings (Castle Rock!) and characters from The Dead Zone, while very clearly not being a direct sequel. I got a real kick out of the interconnectedness of King's storytelling world. Still do. That said, not a very good book.
Everything's Eventual: About half-and-half, good stories and bad ones.
Cycle of the Werewolf: Illustrated by Berni Wrightson, if I recall correctly. I think I liked the pictures better than the story.
Firestarter: The thing I remember most clearly about the book is that it ends with the main characters going to the most reliable and respected news source around to tell their story: Rolling Stone. Say what? Lame. That ending made the whole book feel like a joke to me. The movie wisely changed the news source to the New York Times.
Needful Things: I don't remember much about this one, except that it was the end of Castle Rock.
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: Mostly a bunch of pointless, toothless, endless "short" stories.
Most of the Bachman books:
Rage
Roadwork
The Running Man
Thinner

The Overrated

Bag of Bones: A lot of people seemed to love this book, and heralded it as King's return to the top of his form. I thought it was boring and predictable.
Insomnia: Another fan favorite that I didn't really get. Thoroughly forgettable.

The Bad

The Eyes of the Dragon: King's attempt at pure fantasy. Even an appearance by The Stand's evil Randall Flagg couldn't make this any less of a failure.
The Long Walk: My least favorite of the early Bachman books.
Desperation: Part one of King's bizarre experiment; released at the same time as The Regulators, the two books shared the same characters, but put them in different situations and gave them different personalities. Didn't work. At all.

The Flat-Out Awful

Tommyknockers: I once thought this would be the worst King book I would ever read. I only wish it had been.
The Dark Half: I didn't care for the book, but I think the horrible movie stained my memories of it even more.
The Regulators: The companion to Desperation, this was by far the worst novel under King's Bachman pseudonym.
Gerald's Game: A chick handcuffed to her bed. That's the whole book. This novel exemplifies King's late career compulsion to turn what might work in short story form into a shamelessly bloated full novel.
Riding the Bullet: Even though this was eventually collected in Everything's Eventual, this originally appeared as King's first e-book, so I'm listing it separately. It was rotten.
The Plant: So was this later story, serialized through King's website. I only read the first few chapters; I got sick of King bitching about how not enough people were choosing to make donations for the privilege of reading it. If it hadn't sucked so much, maybe I would've chipped in. (No, I wouldn't have.)

Haven't Read Yet, and Probably Never Will

Rose Madder: I honestly can't remember a thing about this book. I know it was loosely connected to Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, but I don't think I ever even considered reading it. I wonder why not. Hell, maybe I did read it and forgot about it.
Six Stories: Never even heard of it. Apparently it was a limited edition.

Half-Read and Abandoned

Four Past Midnight: I think I only read the first of the four novellas in this book, and felt no need to go on. Now that I've seen Secret Window, which comes from one of those three unread stories, I kind of want to finish it. But I probably won't.
Dolores Claiborne: I might finish it one day. It dragged a little, but it wasn't bad.
From a Buick 8: This one was bad. It came out right on the heels of Dreamcatcher, and I just decided, I am not going to waste my time on this compulsion to read every word of King's anymore. As the great poet Huey Lewis put it, sometimes bad is bad.

The Worst Thing Ever

Dreamcatcher: If Hitler and Caligula had a baby that fucked your mother and killed your father, this book would still be worse.