Stephen King

You know, I've never quite understood everyone's fascination and awe over everything that King writes. I've read a few of his books (It, Misery, and Dolores Clairborne) and each one left me with the feeling of "Meh, that was ok, but did it really need to be that long?" I just don't get it, I suppose. While browsing around the internet, trying to keep my mind from exploding while working on the latest manual I'm writing for work, I found this site that sums up all of King's works perfectly:

It was a nice day...........................AND THEN EVIL CAME!

Expanding upon the above site's condensation of all of King's works, I actually think that his books fall into one of two categories. The first is basically what is stated above, something weird or evil happens and people have to deal with it or overcome it. The other category seems to be along the lines of "something mystical happens and we all learn to love life". This can be seen is books such as The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption. Outside of these two categories, however, King hasn't really done anything.

It's because of this inability to deviate from an established formula that I refuse to read any more of his books. Just reading the summaries of many of his other books, you can see how they'd fit into the mold of one of the two categories above. The horror craving populace eat up everything he writes, however. I suppose it's because they know exactly what they're getting when they buy one of his books. It's a safe bet to buy the latest Dark Tower book because you know it'll be exploring "King territory", or in other words generic horror fiction that follows a set writing style, King's writing style. Uggh... like I said, I don't get why he's so highly regarded.