For reasons of verification, this sort of request is best made through the Goodreads Librarians Group here.

Not all addictions are equal, or even comparable.

Both, at the time, excellent and interesting authors of the genre, King's easy-going populism and Straub's literary mastery. Unfortunately, The Talisman exhibits neither of these qualities, remaining resolutely humdrum and bloated, and wholly unremarkable. Black House is, if anything, even worse.

King doesn't remember writing the book these days (that may be his age as much as anything), but he recalled it well enough in interviews at the time, just after Cujo was published. Regarding that scene specifically, he relates writing it and shocking himself (King, as you may know, doesn't write detailed outlines for he books, just writes it as he goes) and just sitting there, thinking it over. Eventually, he decided to carry on and see where that plot point took him.

I think it makes the book—the entire thing seems to be a critique of the destruction of the nuclear family and a treatise on karma.

I thoroughly enjoyed 11/22/63 (more for the unexpected love story than anything else), and thought Finders Keepers was by some margin the best of the Hodges books, and the last truly decent book he published—but I consider them outliers in his recent work.

>My first was the shining, which i would rate a 8/10. So maybe, King is just not my style and i was lucky with the shining.

I think you could pick any of King's first half-dozen or so books (and all of the initial Richard Bachman novels) and have a pretty good time, rewarding your time and interest. After that, maybe another half-dozen equally strong reads, as long as you avoided the novels veering into fantasy (and I would include the Dark Tower series in this).

Fairy Tale comes in the twilight of a very long career, when most folk would just retire. King can't not write, so he'll continue to be published, but he's written very little of real worth—certainly compared to his heyday—for almost two decades now.

SF is the literature of ideas, which may be the issue you have with Foundation.

Case in point...

Curious how it is that almost every downvoted comment here also contains criticism of—or indifference to—McCarthy's book. Astounding how our supposed literati of intellectual giants seem utterly incapable of engaging in good faith debate or unwilling to defend a criticised work in favour of hit-and-run cowardice.

You sound triggered.

Other than his New England background, Lovecraft was probably most influenced to this end by the supernatural novels and stories of William Hope Hodgson, many of them maritime in theme and setting.

The Road is quite beautifully written, and about as bleak as you could imagine, but like most 'literary' works dipping their toes into genre, it's a tired and unambitious retread of far lesser known, generally lesser-regarded, but ultimately more satisfying and original works: you could look to Earth Abides, by George R Stewart; A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M Miller Jr; I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson; The Postman, by David Brin; or much of Ballard's early work—The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World.

If you do fancy reading outside of the genre specific, and into literary writers making a better fist of venturing into the post-apocalyptic, you could do worse than Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven, PD James' The Children of Men, or Nevil Shute's On The Beach.

I don't know, but I wonder if reading the linked article would answer your questions?

No, he didn't write that. He wanted to be known for his writing, not his name, but he never denigrated the works he published under the Bachman name.

Downvoting doesn't make you any less wrong.

All of the original four Bachman books were written before King was even published, much less got into coke.

I think many things Harlan Ellison did in his lifetime made Harlan Ellison's life harder, so why should this be any different?

The last I heard, JM (Babylon 5) Straczynski, the executor of Ellison's estate, had pledged to preserve Ellison's house and make all of his work available in new editions. Clearly it's taking some time, and existing contracts and licenses may have lapsed.

Again, it's a scale for maximising profit. As mentioned elsewhere, all of these formats cost relatively the same amount to print and bind, so the earlier, more expensive formats make more money for the publisher, and offer the consumer a choice, both in format and early access.

Usually, the hardback and the larger paperback are released together, the paperback being slightly cheaper. Then the B-format paperback comes some time after that. There used to be an A-format, or 'mass market' paperback that was the cheapest of all, but those have fallen out of fashion.

In the grand scheme of things, IT is one of King's earlier works.

> If anything it just reduces potential profit on release for the new books.

Literally the opposite—publishers make more money off the readers who will pay more to have a book straight away, or prefer the quality of a hardback. It divides the audience for a book into tiered payments, and makes more money off those happy to pay more.

I ignore the preface, foreword, or introduction these days, saving it until I've read the book, and treating it as an afterword—which, it seems to me, most are intended as by the author, given how spoilery they can be, and it's the publisher who messes up by publishing them at the front of the book.

It's not supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be ironic and satirical.

King didn't use cocaine until the writing of The Stand, and had been writing short fiction for fourteen years by the time Carrie was published, seven or eight of them professionally published.

I've not seen The Running Man getting worse reviews than any other of the Bachman books, or King's books in general. 3.89 on Goodreads, 4.5/5 on Amazon—where are seeing poor reviews?