Official Stephen King Publication Countdown - 2. 'Salem's Lot, 1. The Stand (7 Viewers)

[Zow]

This was a fun thread, @turnjose7 Thanks for doing it.

Poor @timschochet puts in the same effort and doesn't get the same love.

Both of these guys do a great job with their rankings.

I give tim his props in the threads that mean something to me.

As you can probably tell (since I have to have to 2nd-most posts in this thread), I'm a huge King fan. I'd be the same if someone did the "Top Temptations Songs Of All Time".

If unclear, my comment wasn't directed at you even though it was a response to your post. I meant it as more of a general "Tim puts this effort in all the time and still gets **** on quite a bit..." general comment.

 

[Frostillicus]

Great list, great thread, great job. I've read everything he's ever written and I don't have any major quibbles.

 

[Uruk-Hai]

This was a fun thread, @turnjose7 Thanks for doing it.

Poor @timschochet puts in the same effort and doesn't get the same love.

Both of these guys do a great job with their rankings.

I give tim his props in the threads that mean something to me.

As you can probably tell (since I have to have to 2nd-most posts in this thread), I'm a huge King fan. I'd be the same if someone did the "Top Temptations Songs Of All Time".

If unclear, my comment wasn't directed at you even though it was a response to your post. I meant it as more of a general "Tim puts this effort in all the time and still gets **** on quite a bit..." general comment.

I hear you. Some of that is leftover vitriol from a closed sub-forum-that-will-not-be-named and some of that is because tim makes declarations (as opposed to opinions) about art that others don't agree with. Or, it's a combination of both. I like his threads and appreciates the work he puts into them.

I'll hold off on going any deeper into the psychology of a major part of the regular posters here (myself included) so as not to derail things.

 

[Zow]

Great list, great thread, great job. I've read everything he's ever written and I don't have any major quibbles.

I'm super biased to Rage and It, but despite my opinion that they are under ranked the OP did a phenomenal job with this.

 

[Skipdog77]

Great list, great thread, great job. I've read everything he's ever written and I don't have any major quibbles.

I like to think that, while unstated in the book, the Major's last name in The Long Walk is Quibbles.

 

[foxco]

Terrific thread and has made me revisit some of my old faves, especially the short stories. So many hidden gems.

Personal fave: Salems' Lot
Opening line: The Man in Black fled into the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.
Villain: Sir Flagg the Walkin' Dude
Horrifying End: Pet Sematary
Couldn't finish: The Dome
Most enjoyable recent King: The Institute
Thought they might be real when first read as a child: Lobstrosities
Biggest Hero Move: Bill Denbrough leading the losers against Pennywise not once, but twice. (Obviously Roland's middle name is Hero but Bill's just some stuttering dude!)
The "Ick": Frank Dodd and his "slick" raincoat
Best two stories that end with the word "hope": Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Mist.

 

[turnjose7]

This was a fun thread, @turnjose7 Thanks for doing it.

Poor @timschochet puts in the same effort and doesn't get the same love.

Both of these guys do a great job with their rankings.

I really appreciate @timschochet's rankings, even if I often don't agree with them

 

[Brunell4MVP]

2. ‘Salem’s Lot
1975
Novel
Horror
4/5
- Jerusalem’s Lot story

“Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.”

“And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.”


I’ve commented in the Top Books of All Time thread that I think King has some books – like Hearts in Atlantis and Bag of Bones that are brilliantly written and put King on the cusp of being not just a great storyteller, but a truly great writer. While they might not be quite as literary as those, I think it’s the top 2 novels that cement his legacy as an author.

Originally titled Second Coming, ‘Salem’s Lot was renamed to emphasize the fictional small town King created. While Castle Rock and Derry are probably more important to his larger body of work, Jerusalem’s Lot is my favorite of all of King’s fictional towns. The exquisite attention to detail with which he describes the Lot is so good that I have a picture of it in my mind that seems as real as my own neighborhood.

What King did in this novel was take a classic but stale genre and totally reinvented it, making it fresh again. It changed everything.

Oh yeah, it’s also keep-you-awake-at-night scary. I love this book so much. In my opinion it’s the best vampire story ever written.

this is my #1. I don't usually like vampire stuff. kinda fake. But this one is so darn good.

 

[turnjose7]

Just following up on a couple loose ends I said I would address. Like I said, having It just outside the top 5 is certainly not meant to be a slight. I love, love, love the book. There are parts of it that I think are among King's greatest achievements. At that level, it is really just a matter of everything being really good. There are probably days I would flip it with Drawing of the Three, maybe even with Pet Sematary. But as I was making the final decisions, there are two things that kept it just outside the top 5. First, as I have mentioned, I tend to lean more toward the larger scale stories. Not that I don't like the smaller, more personal stories (obviously Pet Sematary is one, and I have others like Shawshank ranked high). The Stand concerns the fate of the the world and the Dark Tower books the entire multiverse. Even 'Salem's Lot, while focused on a smaller footprint, feels like more of an existential threat (until the very end, I was expecting a scene of vampires ravaging Mexico). It feels a little smaller not only because it focuses on a single town, but even within that town the evil comes and goes.

The second reason might be sacrilege to some, but among the pantheon of King antagonists, Pennywise is nowhere near my favorite. Flagg is interesting anc complicated and in the scenes from The Stand in which you see things from his perspective, it is fascinating to see his emotional turmoil. Kurt Barlow takes an icon like Dracula and makes him feel small by being an even more terrifying representation of the same type of character. Annie Wilkes is a great villain. Greg Stillson is a great villain. Rose Hat is a great villain. But the scenes in It that are told from the perspective of Pennywise kind of bore me. He seems like a petulant child with delusions of grandeur who is just jealous that his cosmic turtle brother is the cool one.

The other point I wanted to follow up on was the discussion about King's endings. I agree with @Uruk-Hai that this complaint is overblown and in some ways lazy. A lot of King's books, most I would say, have great endings. I think there are a couple reasons this point gets parroted so often. First, some of his really biggest name books, like The Stand, probably do have some of the weaker endings and people mistakenly take this is being representative of all his work. Second, while it doesn't happen as often as I think some would believe, it is undeniably true that he can from time to time invoke a deus ex machina. Though I definitely think it is lazy to look at that as invariably being a flaw. Obviously it has a negative connotation, but in the right story the deus can make a lot of sense. You could even argue that is true in The Stand.

 

[Uruk-Hai]

Just following up on a couple loose ends I said I would address. Like I said, having It just outside the top 5 is certainly not meant to be a slight. I love, love, love the book. There are parts of it that I think are among King's greatest achievements. At that level, it is really just a matter of everything being really good. There are probably days I would flip it with Drawing of the Three, maybe even with Pet Sematary. But as I was making the final decisions, there are two things that kept it just outside the top 5. First, as I have mentioned, I tend to lean more toward the larger scale stories. Not that I don't like the smaller, more personal stories (obviously Pet Sematary is one, and I have others like Shawshank ranked high). The Stand concerns the fate of the the world and the Dark Tower books the entire multiverse. Even 'Salem's Lot, while focused on a smaller footprint, feels like more of an existential threat (until the very end, I was expecting a scene of vampires ravaging Mexico). It feels a little smaller not only because it focuses on a single town, but even within that town the evil comes and goes.

The second reason might be sacrilege to some, but among the pantheon of King antagonists, Pennywise is nowhere near my favorite. Flagg is interesting anc complicated and in the scenes from The Stand in which you see things from his perspective, it is fascinating to see his emotional turmoil. Kurt Barlow takes an icon like Dracula and makes him feel small by being an even more terrifying representation of the same type of character. Annie Wilkes is a great villain. Greg Stillson is a great villain. Rose Hat is a great villain. But the scenes in It that are told from the perspective of Pennywise kind of bore me. He seems like a petulant child with delusions of grandeur who is just jealous that his cosmic turtle brother is the cool one.

The other point I wanted to follow up on was the discussion about King's endings. I agree with @Uruk-Hai that this complaint is overblown and in some ways lazy. A lot of King's books, most I would say, have great endings. I think there are a couple reasons this point gets parroted so often. First, some of his really biggest name books, like The Stand, probably do have some of the weaker endings and people mistakenly take this is being representative of all his work. Second, while it doesn't happen as often as I think some would believe, it is undeniably true that he can from time to time invoke a deus ex machina. Though I definitely think it is lazy to look at that as invariably being a flaw. Obviously it has a negative connotation, but in the right story the deus can make a lot of sense. You could even argue that is true in The Stand.

I don't think anyone - certainly not me - took having IT at #5 as a slight. I would've had it at #1, but that's my own preference. You made great cases for the stories you had ranked above it.

I agree that Pennywise's internal monologue is tedious (reading the word "dogsbody" 700 times makes me want to stab my eyeballs out with chopsticks). I'll push back a little and say that I think King has it right that most evil people are petulant children having temper tantrums.

The big criticism of the DT's later novels and some of the villians' downfalls is that they didn't go out with a bang. I thought they went out the way they deserved to - pathetically.