I started reading "The Dark Tower" series. I'm going for the third book and at the moment it's fine.

Loved The Stand, Insomnia, The Shining (about to start on the sequel), Salem's Lot, From a Buick 8, and I really love his short stories.

Could never get into "It" or "Dreamcatcher". Too many flashbacks and flash forwards and flash sideways. :P

I like reading chronologically, even if the books don't form part of a series. It's still nice to see how the author's style developed, or in case of works that span several decades, the general setting changed. I decided to read all of Agatha Christie's books chronologically 2 years ago, even though I've already read most of her books, some of which several times, and it was very interesting. Especially since if you already know who the murderer is, you can concentrate on style and other nuances that you didn't completely pay attention to during the firs time.

I'm not sure I'm going to read all of King's books though, since horror is not my main genre. But who know, maybe I'll get hooked. I've only meant this to be 2 or 3 books to try something different. I wanted to try The Shining after watching the Friends episode, and since it was third I bought the first 2 too. Ha, won't happen often. I mean I do get affected often by books I read, but not this way. It was like "Oh my God. The poor girl (guy). If only she (he)...I hope she finds peac... what the heck, man. She's not real. She can't rest in peace!"

Anyway, if someone did read the book I'd be happy to talk about a thing or two, but don't want to post any spoilers.

To be honest I never understood the appeal of his work, well at least it produced a few good movies (The Running Man and The Shawshank Redemption).

Rather than Salem's Lot (which honestly lost all tension for me once the identity of the enemy became clear), I'd recommend It. The only major problem with the latter is one highly objectionable, unnecessary, and way too prolonged scene towards the end.

The thing about horror is it's best not approach it with the expectation of being frightened. If you do that, the genre will inevitably fail because most of it isn't SCARY~! Just look at the genre as stories that happen to have certain characteristics such as vulnerable characters being put in jeopardy a lot, darker themes, supernatural occurrences, etc. "Horror" is actually a relatively new term anyway. In the past they were more likely to use terms like Weird Fiction.

(Except for Pet Semetary.)

BTW, the POTUS has blocked Stephen King on Twitter. :P

So, anyone here played Stephen King's F13?

I did it was a Meh game but good Back in the day

what about Goosebumps games they were very Meh even back in the day!

Sorry for the bump but might as well ask here instead of starting a new topic.

I'm generally not keen on reading books out of order, since, if not being outright sequels, they might make references to previous publications which I don't get. But I just picked the Mr. Mercedes triology from my library.

No spoilers please!

Are these ok to read separately, or do they contain any characters from previous novels?

Also, what about the following novels: Cujo, Pet Sematary, It? Are they standalone?

I've read these a long while ago and they are self-contained stories that you can read in any order as they have no narrative dependencies or connection among them or to other King novels.

It's 4.30 a.m. and I just finished Mr. Mercedes...

Wow. Just wow.

It's scary when you're reading a thread and you don't realize it has been bumped until you get to the **BUMP** post! :O

Are gorefest books labelled "horror" an actual thing you have to look out for? I thought that was only in movies. I've never heard of a horror book that gets its horrorness from indepth or vivid descriptions of gore...