Like the fact that every book begins with the protaganist being "summoned" to a place to see a "thing" and it takes 100 pages to find out what that "thing" is. It's tedious and sloppy.

Yeah, that sort of thing makes me want to either just give up in disgust, or see if I can skip 20 chapters to get to where something happens. And it really doesn't help that he give enough clues that you can figure out just about everything quite a while before he reveals it. It would be different if anything in there actually surprised me, but thoe only "surprise" that surprised me was the very last thing, and that didn't feel like enough for spending three days getting through the rest of the book.

peole anonymously

OK JohnS, fess up - you're sending the spam with this name on it, aren't you?

Spammers, stop harvesting my genius for your nefarious activity!

Or else.

Thanks for the heads up, Frank.

Reading The DaVinci Code was like reading a crossword puzzle. I only read to find out the answers, not because I cared about the characters. The writing was very skimmable, so it was easy to read it with the goal of finding out "what happened next."

Now that I've seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, I can't even take my opinions on the web seriously.

It's also an argument for anonymity.

What, you don't want the convenience of having belligerent assholes looking to be beat up delivered to your front door?

Y'know how I've been very cynical about Stephen King turning into a hack in his later years, churning out ream after ream of rambling, unscary pages? Well, I have to take some of it back.

I just bought his recent short story collection Everything's Eventual and the story "1408" scared me, to the point that I was jumping at rustling plastic bags in my back seat last night. And after decades of Barker, Lovecraft, and Chambers fandom I am Not Easily Spooked.

I don't know if it's my recent personal connection to the haunted hotel room trope (though mine wasn't scary), the fact that the short story form suits him better, or the possibility that a brush with death and months of misery and pain put him back in touch with what's scary, but King turns in some damn good work in that anthology.

but King turns in some damn good work in that anthology.

Really? I had despaired of him ever writing anything really worthwhile for the genre again.

It was a short story of his that was actually the first King thing I ever read. I remember it vividly, a magazine piece, I think in Esquire, like, 30 years ago. A scifi-horror piece called "I Am The Doorway".

Scared the tar out of me. I kept checking between my fingers for alien eyeballs.

King's short stories are the worst, in the way one likes to pay for.

I'm still freaked out by The Mist, and I last read it 20 years ago.

King's short stories are the worst, in the way one likes to pay for.

"You have been - deleted."

Jeepers. And that one? Had a happy ending.

I'm still freaked out by The Mist, and I last read it 20 years ago.

10 for me, but it was the previous contender for Scariest King Story before I read "1408." The man should have been a contemporary of Lovecraft to join in the formation of the Cthulhu Mythos—he and Ramsey Campbell are the only modern authors I can think of who can do work that's similar in both motif and quality (though until this week I thought King lost the touch long ago).