Posts Tagged ‘xkcd’

I’ll be honest: I’m a wuss. Really. As I tell most of my friends and people who have just met me, I tend to have a fairly solid memory and after watching a particularly horrific show or movie, I end up re-creating the scene in gruesome detail in my own room. In short, I end up scaring myself all over again even after said program.

The Ring? Yeah, couldn’t stand being near a TV, especially a TV in my ROOM for the longest time. Could hardly stomach The Blair Witch Project (not just because of the crazy camerawork) and yes, when I read ghost stories sometimes my overactive imagination gets pumped on fictional steroids and then I can’t sleep.

The point of my rambling? I avoided Stephen King like plague for the longest time. After all, given my penchant for scaring the bejesus out of myself, it only makes sense that I would stay away from a guy who has carved a hefty niche in the horror fiction world.

Of course, despite my own misgivings, I do have to say that my curiosity bested my own sense of self-preservation (at least when it comes to sleep). I figured I’d give his fantasy series a try. So I went to the library and picked up The Gunslinger.

Now, I think Stephen King is a great writer. A prolific author, and a pretty masterful storyteller…my first book by him was actually ABOUT writing and I greatly enjoyed it. But with The Gunslinger? Mmmm…not so much. I had a brief chat with a colleague of mine about this, actually - it’s not that his work is too densely populated with obscure vocabulary words. It’s not even that he writes in a boring, pedantic way (quite the opposite). But for some reason, I really just didn’t like the first book in his dark tower series.

I thought it would have promise. After all, in his foreward he mentioned how he was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate world of Middle Earth. I like Lord of the Rings. Heck, I read all of them and thought they were, you know, nifty. And I’m pretty cool with cowboys too, not just because I’m from Texas. I enjoy the mashup genres like Firefly, with a little bit of sci-fi and a little bit of good ‘ol fashioned Western flair.

With The Gunslinger…it felt like there were too many things unexplained and things that were meant to be symbolic…but just ended up boring me. There was talk about KA, and katet, and High Speech and … I don’t even know. It reminded me of this chart from xkcd:

There were brutal, violent scenes and background that just didn’t connect for me. In fact, while I was reading this book I started to drift off quite a few times and ended up skimming most of it. Would I recommend this book? Erm, no. I really wouldn’t. In fact, it almost dissuades me from reading another Stephen King book…almost. We’ll see how the next one goes.

The current book I’m working on now has taken on a completely different direction than any of the other books I’ve read. It’s even (dare I say it?) NONFICTION. Dun dun DUN….

Sadly, the third frame really hit home for me.