
So I finally finished reading Stephen King's It.
This book is huge, and the real
plot maybe takes up the last 300-400 pages.
It is full of characters who aren't really important, but whose life story we get.
Yes, the reader is taken into the head of almost every single character involved, and we get the whole story of their life. That's quite a lot of POVs there.
One of the main characters is a stutterer.
The Evil is not a very original one.
The Love is a little cheesy.
There are eleven-year-olds having sex.
And I still want to worship the ground Stephen King walks on.
I don't know how he does it, but what he does, he does pretty damn well. He just gets away with everything. All of the stuff mentioned above; all the clichés; them damn brackets interrupting already incoherent thoughts with other brainfarts of the character, as if my own mind wasn't confusing enough already; the fact that almost every one of his books has a writer or illustrator in it; ...
I'm amazed almost every single time I finish one of his books.
Of course they're not all amazing.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, for example. Rather forced.
Bag of Bones, which I never finished because it was boring as hell.
But then there are
The Green Mile,
Shining,
Misery,
Cell,
Blaze,
It,
Cujo, hell, even
Dreamcatcher was incredible (and I so despise the Alien motive).
And then, the movies? I really like horror movies and thrillers, but I've seen nothing but complete and utter shit for five years (I count the original SAW movie as a really good one),
except The Mist and
1408. (Oh, and
Desperation was just funny, although a little disturbing.)
And the other movies, too.
The Green Mile,
Misery,
Pet Sematary,
Apt Pupil,
Dreamcatcher,
Dolores,
It,
Carrie,
Thinner and, my personal favourite,
Rose Red... either his stories translate really well into films, or he writes awesome scripts.
I haven't seen it all, I haven't read it all, but what I've seen and read so far makes Stephen King my favourite author of all times. I know I love Wilde and Wodehouse and Tolkien and the occasional Shakespeare adaptation (*cough*), and I will happily read Schiller and Brecht and Dürrenmatt and appreciate their work as much as I can, but I will always go back to the man who apparently calls himself the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
It's a little weird how there is still this old argument in my head that makes me feel like I, a student of Literature, should go for the more highbrow stuff instead of simple pop literature. Which is stupid; I'm still slowly and painfully making my way through
Bleak House and the book being written by Charles Dickens doesn't make up for the fact that it bores me to no end.
Speaking of Bleak House, I haven't yet read my daily two chapters.
I already miss Pennywise and the Losers :(