Authors most in need of editing or abridgement

[rwsmith]

Most 'manufactured' horror......

Having to read An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, for a Jr. High English, class was pure torture. The prose is so dry and boring that the book should be illegal. "Classic", my Granny's old fiddle!

I tried reading Stephen King... once! I forget which book, but it was way too sophomoric for my tastes.

Most manufactured horror is sophomoric because you are trying to convince and hold an adult to be afraid of something created by a guy behind a typewriter.

I'd cite one of King's novels as different and a good analysis of what goes on in people's minds.

It's not rampaging cars or dogs, or girls that can think and set things on fire. It's Pet Sematary because I find the non-supernatural and truthful horror of losing a child in a highway accident to be terrifying. The book goes into ghosts and goblins, but it's not nearly as scary as what can and does really happen to people.

His short story 'The Reach' also impressed me.

I have to admit that the 'Salem's Lot' movie scared the beejeezes out of me. I had come in, my wife was in bed and I was in the living room standing in front of the TV playing channel roulette. One station had some kind of movie on. Two guys are next to a covered slab. One of them tapes tongue depressors into a cross and begins to recite liturgy. Hmm, must be a horror movie I thought. Then the sheet on the slab twitched. Might be pretty good, I thought, somethings coming back to life. The the thing on the slab jumped up and and hissed through it's fangs and glared with red eyes and said, "whoewhoewhoewhoe" and backpedaled away from the TV. It really caught me by surprise. it's fun being 'scared' when it's not real.

Nothing like a good mystery. That's something my wife and I usually read to each other. Maigret was a favorite.

 

[Absalom]

I just don't like horror stories any more, although there was a time quite some years ago when I was entertained by Stephen King's books of that type and read the really long ones, "The Stand", "It", "Tommyknockers" and a few others before tiring of them.

I do enjoy his writings outside the horror niche. I've read "11/22/63" a few times; even though it deals with time travel, it's not really science fiction, but focusses on the story and history. It's long, but I'm always sorry when it's done.

He also wrote some great short stories. "Dolan's Cadillac" is probably my favorite short story, even though it's somewhat longish. And then there is "Suffer the little Children". When I was still teaching I used to e-mail this to colleagues on Halloween. They thought me just slightly weird.

It's a quick read, the opposite of the too-long books that are the topic of this thread:

http://www.bestlibrary.org/files/suffer-the-little-children.pdf

 

[Wise_A]

Which version of the Stand - the original or the 'enhanced' version? The Stand was, by far, my favorite King novel, even with the glaring error of Harold using a Colt Woodsman in .38 caliber.

I have found errors in many of King's books. There are only two possible explanations, either he doesn't take time to research things or he makes them intentionally to see what reactions they create. I wouldn't rule out either explanation, or even a combination of the two.

Either, although I understand the enhanced isn't as well-loved. I only read the latter.

King is...well, he's not on our side. He penned a 25-page essay trashing guns and calling for a ban on semiautomatics after Sandy Hook--of course, using the defense that he, himself, is a gun owner:

"No one wants to take away your hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can't kill a home invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range."

"How paranoid do you want to be? How many guns does it take to make you feel safe? And how do you simultaneously keep them loaded and close at hand, but still out of reach of your inquisitive children or grandchildren? Are you sure you wouldn't do better with a really good burglar alarm? It's true you have to remember to set the darn thing before you go to bed, but think of this — if you happened to mistake your wife or live-in partner for a crazed drug addict, you couldn't shoot her with a burglar alarm."

And the last 75 pages of Sleeping Beauties was gag-worthy. Apparently, you can buy rocket launchers at "folding table gun shows" in Appalachia.

What I find absolutely, perfectly, deliciously absurd is the fact that a great many of his books could have been considerably shortened...had just one gun found its way into the right hands.

Cujo
The Shining
Desperation
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (she just needed a .44 for bear defense)
Duma Key
Under the Dome (all of his small-town societal collapse books are superb arguments for more guns)
Finders Keepers (literally could have been ended on Page One)

 

[Jeff423]

Verbosity can be a plague in a journalist or a lawyer, but I would be slow to criticize it in a novelist. Cormac McCarthy, for example, has been accused of overwriting, but consider this:


"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

What would you cut?

I think this is an example of The Exception That Proves the Rule.