Prompt: horror piece inspired by The Shining and it has to be red

Carrie being ‘obese’ in the book is being vastly overstated by the general audience; many of whom I would bet haven’t read the book.

She’s not ‘comically fat’ like people would have you believe. However, she is not beautiful, which is my single biggest grievance with the 2013 movie. She’s someone who’s neglected her appearance her whole life, and actually grows into herself a bit during prom.

In Full Metal Jacket from 1986, Private Pyle was considered comically fat, yet today, his body type is very common nation wide and wouldn’t make someone bat an eye. I say this because if novel Carrie was as obese as seemingly everyone is saying now, King (especially early King) would have reminded us every other page.

Obviously this isn’t a big deal, but it’s a massive sentiment being expressed both here and on X, and to me it’s a classic case of people running with misinformation for engagement, virtue signaling, or just to feel like the ‘in crowd’.

I’m 13 and I just finished Salems lot. I finished it with no probs. I didn’t think it was too scary or gory. In fact it was the best book I’ve ever read. I want to know what Stephen king book I should read next. Nothing too gory. Any ideas?

I've spent a few weeks researching what happened directly before and directly after Donald King walked out on the family in 1949. Here's the summation of that archival research, tied together with Thea King's firsthand account.

I picked this up along with a few other King books earlier this week. I have added it to my little collection as he contributed Nona to the book.
How many of you have this one?

Im curious how many liberties the person who adapted it took. We'll see!

I have a Christian ran book store that has Stephen king books from time to time i walked in and was floored to see these beauties all for 50$

Watching the last episode of the Carrie TV series, and noticed when Carrie’s mom is outside seeing the destruction caused by Carrie, the cross-street shown on the street sign is “Calla Bryn St”. Later in the episode, we see a flash of “Hambry” on another street sign. Both of those are locations on Roland’s journey! Very excited to see if this lands long-term!!

Hice la Tortuga como la visualizo al leer la novela. He hecho incluso las galaxias en las uñas.

Something I keep noticing in King is how little it actually takes for a group of basically normal people to decide that one person is now The Problem.
Not because that person caused anything. Sometimes they just said the wrong thing, reacted badly, were already considered weird, or happened to be standing there when everyone got scared enough to need somewhere to put that fear. And once the group settles on someone, every little thing they do suddenly becomes evidence. If they're quiet, they're suspicious. If they defend themselves, they're aggressive. If they panic, well, clearly they have something to hide. The conclusion comes first and everything else gets rearranged around it.
The Mist is probably the clearest version because you can practically watch the social order rot in real time. These are mostly ordinary people who were buying groceries a few hours earlier. Then nobody understands what's happening, panic kicks in, Mrs. Carmody gives that panic a story and a target, and suddenly people who probably would've seemed completely normal yesterday are capable of some seriously fucked up shit.
Carrie is obviously different, but I think the same mechanism is there. Carrie gets assigned the role of "the weird girl" long before the worst things happen, and once everyone agrees that's who she is, cruelty toward her barely needs justification anymore. Under the Dome does this too, just on a much bigger scale. People decide very quickly who's trustworthy, who's dangerous, who's against "us," and after that facts start mattering less than whatever version of that person the group has collectively invented.
What gets under my skin is that King usually doesn't make this a room full of cartoon villains. That's what makes it work. They're scared. They're embarrassed. They're angry. Some are just cowards. Some want to belong to whichever side looks safest. Some probably know deep down that what's happening is wrong, but going against the group would mean becoming the next person everyone looks at.
And honestly, that stuff bothers me more than a lot of his monsters.
A monster can be horrifying because it wants to kill you. A frightened group of ordinary people can be worse because they'll spend ten minutes convincing themselves that hurting you is reasonable first.
The more King I reread, the more I notice versions of this everywhere in his books, sometimes in huge mob scenes and sometimes in tiny conversations where one person suddenly realizes the room has quietly turned against them. Those smaller moments might actually be the nastiest ones

I reread Needful Things recently and the thing that hit me differently this time wasn't Gaunt's merchandise at all.

It's how incredibly well he understands what each person is willing to be embarrassed by.

The objects get everyone through the door, obviously, but the real currency of the book feels like humiliation. People will do things they would normally consider ridiculous, petty or beneath them because Gaunt somehow finds the exact desire strong enough to make them explain the behavior to themselves afterward.

That's the part I find nastier as an adult.

Most people probably wouldn't commit some enormous evil for a magic object. But would they make one anonymous phone call? Move something that belongs to a neighbor? Tell themselves a small lie? Do something mean if they were certain nobody could trace it back to them?

That feels much closer to real life than the supernatural part.

And once Castle Rock starts reacting to all those tiny actions, almost nobody has enough information to understand what's actually happening. Everyone just sees one more piece of evidence that the person they already dislike is even worse than they thought.

It made me wonder whether the store could work without anything supernatural in it at all. Maybe the objects have to be extraordinary for the plot, but Gaunt's actual talent is recognizing the exact combination of want, resentment and plausible deniability that will make somebody cross a line.

On this reread, THAT was the horror for me.

Did Needful Things change for anyone else when you read it older?

I'm rereading The Stand and I'd forgotten how often King just wanders away from the "main" story to introduce some random person, give you their job, their marriage, the stupid thing they do every morning, one embarrassing memory from 1978... and then sometimes kill them almost immediately.

The stretch with people who survive Captain Trips only to die afterward is probably the purest version of it. On paper those characters should just be statistics. Instead he'll spend a page making one of them feel like somebody who had been living an entire life before you opened the book, and suddenly their dumb accidental death lands harder than it has any right to.

Needful Things does the same thing in a different way. Half the fun is that Castle Rock doesn't feel populated by "background characters." Everybody seems to have history with somebody else, an old resentment, a weird habit, a private humiliation, a thing they desperately want. By the time Gaunt starts pushing buttons, you understand why the buttons work.

I think this might actually be one of my favorite things about King and also one of the reasons his giant books rarely feel as long to me as their page counts suggest. The detours are often the point. You aren't just waiting for the plot to continue because the guy who walked into the hardware store two pages ago has somehow become interesting.

And then, of course, sometimes he gives somebody an entire childhood so they can deliver one sentence and never appear again.

What tiny King character or completely unnecessary side-story has stuck in your head way longer than it should have?

Personally, I cried my eyes out over Rich’s death... the last time I cried like that over an adaptation of a King work,before Welcome to Derry, was during The Green Mile, when John Coffey died 😭

Both were so pure and kind, yet the story was so cruel to them.

To the people who have read Stephen King, this would be my first read from stephen king. Any suggestions you would like to provide or things that I need to keep in mind. What were your thoughts after you read this book??