Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The number one cause of insomnia? Stephen King (but I love him anyway!)

Somehow I missed the memo that Stephen King’s new book came out yesterday until it was too late to go and get it.
Full Dark, No Stars

I have no idea how this happened, because I’ve gotten every one of his books the day they came out since I was 12.


You might be asking yourself why I’m such a huge Stephen King fan, especially when you take into consideration that I refuse to read anything by many other bestselling authors, like John Grisham or James Patterson.

The answer is simple: Grisham and Patterson are hacks.

Okay, granted, my definition of hacks probably varies from the definition that anyone else would give you, because I also consider Charles Dickens to be a hack. His books were only so long because he got paid by the chapter.  And he needed as much money as he could get.  For booze.  Hack.

All three of those authors are/were hugely successful hacks. But in my book, (no pun intended--but go buy it anyway!) anyone who finds something that sells well, then basically writes the same type of thing for the rest of their careers to keep churning out bestsellers that are fundamentally the same as all their other books is a hack.

Which is also why I refuse to read most chick lit, with the ONLY exceptions occurring when the books have truly original concepts and characters. Because if I read one more book about an early 30-something girl who works for a magazine/newspaper/tv station who gets dumped by her boyfriend/fiancé/husband then goes on a self-discovery kick and eventually finds Mr. Right, who SEEMS to be Mr. Wrong until the last two chapters when we find out that he’s been in love with her all along and they live happily ever after, I’m going to stab someone.

Literally. I will stab someone.

And that brings me back to why I love Stephen King: the stabbings.

I’m kidding. Kind of.  But not about the fact that I will stab someone if I need another chick lit book.  I'm 100 percent serious about that part.

You could argue, however, that Stephen King, like many other writers, sticks to a formula that works. For example, in all of his books, someone or something goes crazy and kills people. But it’s always something super creative and different that goes crazy and kills people. And even though I’ve read all of his books (many of them more than once), Stephen King ALWAYS keeps me guessing (usually incorrectly) about what’s coming next.

Of course, there’s also one major problem with me reading Stephen King books: I have a massively overactive imagination and am completely convinced that once I’ve read something scary in one of his books, it is then lurking in my house waiting to get me.

Statistically, I know this is unlikely. If there IS an evil force in my house, why would it wait until I was suspicious of it to attack me? Wouldn’t it prefer to have the element of surprise? Although, if I were an evil supernatural creature (shut up, no, I’m not!), I’d probably want to wait until someone was afraid of me to attack because the element of fear would be more fun than the element of surprise.

But because I have a ridiculously overactive imagination, it’s not usually the stuff that you’d expect to scare me that scares me the most. For example, I’m not all that scared of ghosts. But every single time I wake up in the middle of the night and have to go to the bathroom, I HAVE to turn on the bathroom light and make sure that the scary dead bathtub lady from The Shining isn’t in there waiting for me. No, not the one from the movie. She didn’t scare me; I found it pretty funny that Jack Nicholson made out with her. But the dead bathtub chick from the BOOK still scares the hell out of me. Because my mind makes her much scarier than any movie ever could.
The Shining
 
The supernatural stuff isn’t his strongest suit though. Don’t get me wrong, he’s REALLY good at that. But deep down, I DO know that most of that stuff can’t be real, so it tends to only scare me late at night, when I’m alone.

Instead, the best part of Stephen King’s writing is his identification of the fear in situations that we can’t control. I know full well that there probably isn’t going to be a giant dome that drops down randomly from the sky one day and cuts Rockville off from the rest of the world like in Under the Dome. But Stephen King creates such a completely believable world in his books that you feel like YOU are in that town with his characters. And it makes you wonder what you would do if you were in the situation that they were in, even though your rational mind KNOWS that is highly unlikely.
Under the Dome: A Novel

 Because what if our cell phones DO start emitting something that destroys rational thought like in Cell. I almost never actually TALK on my phone. I’m going to be one of the people who has to figure out how to save society if that happens. (Well, okay, probably not. The zombie creatures will most likely kill me within the first few minutes of the crisis, so it probably won’t be ME saving the world. But what if by some random chance it is?)
Cell: A Novel

 And in my mind, his scariest books are the ones that have little or no supernatural elements in them. While The Stand DOES have some supernatural parts, the idea that a super virus could kill off most of the world isn’t actually all that far-fetched at all.
The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)

I think his scariest book is Cujo, because every single thing that happens in that book COULD happen. Even today with cell phones, it’s an exceptionally plausible story. Because let’s face it, there are definitely still areas with no reception. Like my parents’ house, which resides in the black hole of all cell service. (Which I immediately realized was a good thing when I read Cell, because in case of a cell-phone based apocalypse, I could hide out there long enough to figure out how to save the world.)
Cujo (Signet)

So I’ll be going to Barnes and Noble after school today to pick up the newest Stephen King book. Which also means I’m going to be tired tomorrow, not from staying up too late reading, but from staying up too late because I’ll be afraid to go to sleep.

But I’m still going to love every minute of it. Bring it on Mr. King. I’m ready.

Although I'm probably going to feel differently once I'm reading it.  Oh well.  To quote the late Warren Zevon, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."  Although if the afterlife is anything like a Stephen King story, I'll actually be roaming the earth and killing people when I'm dead.  But I'm not too worried about that.  I'm more worried about the dead chick in my bathtub, the clown in the sewer, and the Walkin' Dude.

2 comments:

  1. Aaaaaand guess where I'm going on my lunch break? To hand more of my money over to Mr. King? Yup!!

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  2. Lol I'm doing the same thing at 2:10! We'll have to talk about it when we finish :-)

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