I always find myself defending the works of Stephen King. I think he is master at storytelling who creates believable and sympathetic characters and plotlines. Before watching the film I read the The Green Mile which I thought was brilliant that I finished it two sittings and was crying heavily at the end.
Any other underrated or criticized authors need defending?
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Good idea for a thread Kenikki.
J.M.Synge, i feel, has always been heavily criticised and is still underrated.
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I am with you in this Stephen King crusade!! I like his works very much and i think that some of them are already classics in their genre. Maybe his works lack the depth that other books (by other authors) have, but i really enjoy myself while reading them.Originally Posted by kenikki
Reading a lot of posts in the forums i tend to pity Dan Brown also (just a figure of speech, since the guy is a millionaire due to his books). I can't understand what all the fuss is about. I have read the "Davinci code" and "Angels and demons". They were fun, something to read during my hot vacation in Cyprus 2 years ago (meaning hot weather). Something i read and forget about it afterwards. They left no big impression to me, but they were fun, just the thing i needed. Anyway, what i mean is that i have read far worse books than these two.
His prose is nothing to brag about though, and his endings need a thorough edit.
Stephen King is among the greatest storytellers of the modern era.
I very much like King. As a teenager, he was my favorite author. But as I read more of his stuff, I've began to find it very hit and miss. I think he has some modern day classics that, in my opion stack up against the novels of any era (It, The Stand, The Green Mile, etc.). But he also has some stinkers. The Dark Half was one of the worst books I've ever read and I wasn't terribly fond of "The Regulators" either. And while I loved the Dark Tower series, even that had me rolling my eyes very often at some of the lame plot devices he used. But overall, the good far outweighs the bad with King in my eyes.
Definitely. King has written some terrible stinkers - Rose Madder made me check the back-cover for confirmation that it was actually written by King; I couldn't believe my eyes.
But then there is It, Wizard and Glass, Hearts in Atlantis, Four Past Midnight, The Shining, Pet Cemetery, The Long Walk, Needful Things, The Gunslinger....
King's massive readership and automatic shoe-in bestsellers pretty much disqualifies him on both accounts.
How about the writers that help shape the man:
Charles Beaumont
Robert Bloch
Ray Bradbury
John Farris (without The Fury there would be no Firestarter)
William Golding
Shirley Jackson
Fritz Leiber
H.P. Lovecraft
Richard Matheson
John D. MacDonald
Edgar Allan Poe
J. R. R. Tolkien
Thomas Tryon
Stanley G. Weinbaum
Hey! Some of these authors are neither underrated nor highly criticized. At least i think so (for example Lovecraft, Poe, Tolkien, Golding)
Last edited by manolia; 03-27-2007 at 10:51 AM.
Weinbaum is, if anything, overrated - among those who have read him, anyway. Everybody else (with the exception of Tryon, a name I have never heard previously) gets their due.
Yeah, I agree with this completely. The guy is constantly being criticised, and it's like calm down, no one said this stuff is genius or even literature. He hasn't won anything for his books has he? Anyway, everyone knows it's just a bit of fun, page-turning pulp fiction.Reading a lot of posts in the forums i tend to pity Dan Brown also (just a figure of speech, since the guy is a millionaire due to his books). I can't understand what all the fuss is about. I have read the "Davinci code" and "Angels and demons". They were fun, something to read during my hot vacation in Cyprus 2 years ago (meaning hot weather
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I think that's pretty much true, to an extent, of all authors in the modern era. While I still enjoy some modern literature, I don't think there will ever again be another author in the vein of a Hugo, Dickens, Faulkner, etc.; if you know what I mean by that.
I used to read his books too. I liked Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. And, I've read all the 4 books by Dan Brown. They are not great but they are fun, just like those popcorn movies.
Sorry, guys, that was a flippant remark designed to draw out some big (and some lesser known) influences.
Happy someone agrees
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