I'm staying at my parents' and I found a book of Steven King short stories, no-one would admit to owning it until eventually my brother said he'd borrowed if off a friend twenty years ago and thought he'd given it back to him. Anyway I started reading it and... I wish it was better than it was, I like the idea of Steven King, I like him on twitter, I (quite) like the films based on his books. I guess he's a victim of his own success in that he pretty much defined what horror was or became for the last thirty years, but the result of that is that the stories all seem so tired and predictable. The first one in the book is The Mist and it stretches the definition of a short story to the limit, it's really loooong and really boring despite a really good start - the bit before the "horror". I've seen, I think, two films based on that short story and to my surprise the more recent one was very very faithful to the book, the reason the film was rubbish was simply cos it was based on something rubbish.
The other day we saw the second part of It - the re-make I'm talking about - and to me there is something so frustrating about the way those films waste such a good idea. There's a killer clown that lives in the drain and the first time you see him it bites off Georgie's arm and it's brilliant and terrifying and ace all at once... and then by the end the last fucking hour is them battling with the spider thing and it goes on and on and on it's so fucking boring, and I thought that was a problem in the film but maybe it's also in the book.
And another thing... It is horrible in the bits when they're not fighting Pennywise the Dancing Clown; the girl getting fucked by her dad, the kid with the evil mum destroying his confidence, the whole thing with the bully Bowers who is carving his name in their flesh and stuff... what's he getting at? Life is horrible but you can get a bit of light relief by defeating an eternal child-eating entity that tends to manifest as a clown? I don't think so cos it's obvious that in his mind Pennywise is the ultimate evil and supposed to be worse than (ok and I guess perhaps the ultimate cause of) the everyday horrors but it fails in that way and the film ends up being somewhere between two stools. But it's so frustrating the tantalising bits when it's good... despite being - on the whole - terrible, Pennywise is still one of the most famous figures in horror. Imagine if the rest of it was good is what I'm saying?
Has anyone read King properly? His whole mythology about the dead lights and floating and shit? Is it good, is he good, does he ever deliver on the promise that's there?
