Meet the Guy Who Fact-Checks Stephen King On Stephen King 121
cartechboy writes "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. The guy has written so many works, and words, that he actually needs a "continuity adviser" to fact check him when he picks old stories up as a new book. Enter Rocky Wood — who is the world-wide leading expert on Stephen King's work. So much so, that King hired Wood (who has authored a 6000+ page encyclopedia on CD-ROM on every single aspect of King's work — including 26,000 different King characters) to fact check himself when he writes."
Off topic, I'm sorry... (Score:3, Informative)
...but this is the first time I've read or heard the term "CD-ROM" this decade. Really? If it was published on CD-ROM, wouldn't it be horribly out of date by now?
Re:The continuity adviser is not doing his job (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure you understand what continuity means.
Re:from the wired article: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The continuity adviser is not doing his job (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Off topic, I'm sorry... (Score:2, Informative)
Well it wouldn't be out of date because the single books would never change so the facts would still be right
Re:Not a "fact check" (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot does not and has never processed unicode.
Yes, this is inexcusable. No, it will probably never change.
Re:The continuity adviser is not doing his job (Score:4, Informative)
The Dark Tower made me weep for him. Really. It's supposed to be his magnum opus and yet it's so flawed.
King has never been that appealing to me because so much of what I have read of his work (which isn't as much as I should have) has been stuff like recycled Lovecraft, recycled Hitchcock, recycled someone else.
But the Dark Tower has some genuinely brilliant concepts in it. Sadly, they glitter like gems in the mud. Some of the most fascinating and fantastic aspects were never really taken to their conclusions, while a lot of the book read like a bunch of unrelated stories bound together with wattle and daub.
Jake's death in volume 1 made me itch. Then Roland just sits on the beach while crustaceans munch his fingers off. Neither he nor the crustaceans were believable at that point.
By the end of the series, it had degenerated into a mish-mash of throwing in chunks of stuff from his other works, then added insult to injury by writing himself into it. That's a trick that only the most capable of writers can pull off, and sadly, he wasn't one of them.
Then, when it all wrapped up, there were loose ends galore, and it turned out to be just a recycled version of The Never-ending Story.
Re:The continuity adviser is not doing his job (Score:4, Informative)
The first book (The Gunslinger) is terrible. By King's own admission, it's essentially an oversized student essay. When it was around a decade ago reprinted, it had some fairly major changes to make it fit better with the rest of the series. But by and large, it's awful.
Things improve markedly with the second book, which has actual... you know... characters and plot. The third and fourth are excellent, the fifth divides opinion but I like it, the sixth a very short and doesn't do much and the seventh is an epic in its own right.
The ending is infamous and many people hate it. Or rather, the second ending is infamous. There is a break point at which he cuts into the narrative and says "you can stop here". If you stop there, you get a perfectly fine open-ish ending. But nobody ever stops there.
Re:The continuity adviser is not doing his job (Score:4, Informative)
I honestly thought wizards and glass , something like that, the 3rd book... was the best one. This one really set the tone for the gunslinger, and took place when he was younger and you basically had knights with guns mixed in with a western, I liked it a lot. The others were kinda sorta ok, page turners and some few good select scenes but felt a bit on the wondering side. Book 3 was the one that really stood out to me.