authors

Stephen King

• Oct 19, 2023 The Gunslinger By Stephen King Stephen King's voice is smooth, straightforward, easily digested. Technically, aesthetically, he is quite good at that voice - but I don't think when it comes down to it, that I care very much for it. It is maybe without flaws, but that makes it without character? Or perhaps it is simply unambitious to the point that it becomes uninteresting. The plot of The Gunslinger, on the other hand, is quite ambitious, aiming for the unusual, unpredictable, and potentially offputting. Snippets of Lore are dropped here and there, slowly filling in the backdrop of the strange Arthurian-Western post-apocalyptic dystopia. I think at periods in my life I would be enraptured by that, but at the moment I feel like it is little more than a random collage, a patchwork of tropes and times thrown together based on authorial whim - surely a story, a cohesive world can be woven of a random collage, but again, it becomes a bit uninteresting.
• Oct 21, 2023 The Drawing Of The Three By Stephen King The second book in The Gunslinger series is less engaging. It is more ambitious than the previous, with King filling out his patchwork universe with connections to times, places and trends from Our World, that are ultimately not particularly poorly handled - but I don't find King to be the best writer for wading into issues of addiction, racism, criminal psychology. He can write a good cereal-box thriller, and the characters are somewhat fun, but it mostly just feels overstretched.