Was waiting for you to bring this up. I actually haven't read the book since I was 15 or so but I remember this being incredibly out of the blue and pointless. Though I guess it might help me with the ladies, if I can convince them it will help me out with my sense of direction I'm not sure but I remember hearing somewhere that his wife actually finishes many of his books for him, so that may be an explanation.

Now you need to watch the movie so you can quote it.

"Hello Georgie, wanna balloon?"

Love that book. I reread it every couple of years. It was my first King book, and still one of my favourites of his.

1)I think the whole Audra/Tom thing was largely a suggestion of how they never really got away from their childhoods, even though they'd forgotten them. Bev, who hadn't thought of her father in years, ends up marrying him; Bill, who had similarly forgotten Bev, ends up marrying her.

Aside from that, Tom gets to be Henry-revisited (much as Henry ends up being Henry-revisited), and Audra gives Bill a purpose as an adult, in the same way that Georgie gave him purpose as a child.

2a) I never found that. Didn't really look for it, but it never jumped out at me.

2b) re: Robert Gray and the Turtle. Unless I misremember, they both are referenced in other books. (Yep; Robert Gray in Dreamcatcher (had to look that one up) and the turtle plays prominently in The Dark Tower.) As to the shapes (spider and turtle), two things come to mind. First, it does say in the book that they weren't actually a spider and a turtle, just that that was the closest analog the minds of the children could come up with. Secondly, I expect that, as with It's other forms, once a shape was chosen in the Losers' minds, it became reality. Sort of like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

2c) I hear ya. Oy...

3) Yeah, it was one of the more 'ended' King books. The man writes a vicious novel, but sh*tty endings for the most part...

I notice in a lot of King's books that the "character building" part of the book is usually 3/4s of it (so for IT like 700 pages) and could definitely be trimmed. That's one reason I liked Koontz better as a kid.

Insomnia is a good book AND a Dark Tower book. Events that occur in Insomnia have a direct influence on some of the later plot developments in the final Dark Tower book so it was double good for me .

Dreamcatcher was ok. It had some of the same interesting "Psychic Landscape" imagery that King has worked with in his other writings. Some of the Derry stuff is interesting if you have read his other books or are looking to trace all of his interconnected story threads across his books. Maybe the book seemed ok because the movie was awful and I saw it before I had read the book. The only good thing in the movie is the awesome, underrated Damian Lewis as Jonesy.

I'm so happy to hear someone else say that they couldn't get into the Dark Tower stuff. I was a big King fan as a teenager/twenty-something, and I still occasionally enjoy reading something by him, but the Dark Tower series simply didn't do it for me. It's not often I concede defeat and put down a book - but I've never made it through a Dark Tower book, ever.

King writes some stories that are wonderful, like The Stand, Dolores Claiborne and The Talisman (co-authored by Peter Straub) - but then there are the weird ones, the ones I can't stick with, like The Tommyknockers and any Dark Tower book. I guess, when an author cranks books out at the rate he does, one can't expect them all to be great!

Tommyknockers was also about aliens, nominally at least. I've read most of King's work, including his short story collections, and enjoyed most of it. Dreamcatcher is a terrible book, though. Dark Tower is an acquired taste, I'd say, although the way he wrote himself in was really well done, imo.

The main problem I have with King is his tendency to write any woman over the age of forty as a sex-obsessed harpy. Everytime I stumble across one of these, I can't help but feel that he got lazy and just reached into his basket of Sterotyped Characters. That, and his love for the Magical Retard - Sheemie from the Dark Tower, Tom from The Stand, John Coffey from The Green Mile, Duddits from Dreamcatcher... Play a different tune, Mr. King.

Well, I'm about 300 pages into DC and it's pretty much on par with everything else of his I've read so far (i.e. "good, not great"). I must admit that the scenes in the cabin with "Rick" and the bathroom have freaked me out more than anything from IT.

He definitely has some stock characters in the casting office. You also know that at some point some white guy is going to start calling someone a "n-----," there's going to be some "bully" (usually, but not always, the racist guy already mentioned), and eventually someone is going to mention their c*ck.

Along with the "magical retard," you forgot the "magical black person." I guess Coffey sort of fits in both... Mother Abigail, of course...

There definitely haven't been too many female characters I can remember... not heroic ones, anyway (although it's not like he doesn't have a large number of asshole male charcters as well) What do you think about Elizabeth from Duma Key? Too minor? Fit under the "magical retard" umbrella? What about the main character's wife from Bag of Bones? Anyway... I suppose you can blame that on King's background and inspirations... the pulps, 50's horror movies... Lovecraft... not a whole lot of positive female characters to be found. I'd always heard his wife was involved in some of his more recent books, so you'd figure that might have softened him up. But at this point in his career, I don't think he's going to change his ways.

I do think he is am amazing writer, when everything aligns. I wish he'd have done a bit more experimenting with different genres over the years, although I guess maybe those other genres just don't interest him enough.

I try not to think of it that way. Honestly, I was annoyed at the tie-in; Insomnia was a good book in it's own right, and I thought the inclusion of any Dark Tower elements cheapened that a little.

more power to you... I thought it was so dry and boring that I couldn't make it through the book (tried to read it twice). I know a lot of that first book was made up of previously published short stories, and maybe they read better that way... I certainly enjoyed the situation where he goes into the town and kicks ass... the other stuff, not so much.

I'm amused to see Morgan Freeman in Shawshank listed on the wiki's entries for magical negros in King novels; in the book, Red was a red-headed Irishman.

To get a glimpse of King in another genre, you might try Blaze. It was written by King as Richard Bachman over 30 years ago and rewritten last year. It's a pretty good read. I think you'll find some similarities with characters to his other works, but it's still pretty good.

Yeah... all of the Bachman books I've read (Running Man, Long Walk) seem to be much more science-fictiony than his usual style. I'm kind of afraid to read RAGE (being a teacher and all), I guess I'll get to THINNER eventually... and I suppose the same can be said with BLAZE.

BTW, I'm 450 pages into DREAMCATCHER and I'm still enjoying it quite a bit. After I finish I'll be very interested to hear why people think it's a "terrible" book... I might actually KNOW by then, I guess... half a book is a lot of space to f*ck something up

Right... I didn't mean they were all SF... just the ones I've personally read.

I really like a lot of the Bachman books. Rage is excellent (in an early-Stephen-King kind of way; his style, and how long ago he wrote it, is very apparent if you know his stuff); I don't think you need to worry about reading it.

I am well aware of Kings "Magical Negro" leanings, but I was just trying to point out the diversity in his characters that I like. He has portrayed plenty of disabled people in a positive light (although I guess Nick Andros qualifies as a "Magical Deaf-Mute" if we get picky). I loved Insomnia because of its retired old codgers as heroes. And I did think it was empowering to see them try and fight a supernatural evil despite their age and infirmity. I guess he hasn't given us a story told from the first-person perspective of a mentally-challenged person, but not everybody can write The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time I guess. His depiction of children and young adults has always been particularly fascinating to read for me. I am just happy to see these types of characters depicted at all I guess. It must come from my youth of reading fantasy and fiction that invariably starred white, male, twenty-something heroes and little else.

Sorry for the de-rail SommerMatt, I'll go away now