Customer Reviews

The Essential Stephen King : A Ranking of the Greatest Novels, Short Stories, Movies, and Other Creations of the World's Most Popular Writer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The problem with the book is that it's utterly uncritical of the entirety of Stephen King's work - it's simply a basic recounting of the novel's plot, followed up with a few bits of trivia and the author's "What I Liked" section.

The problem is that the author of this book likes everything about Stephen King, even when he's talking about King's weaker material. You could write the words "I love Stephen King and everything he's ever done!" on an index card, then post it next to the Amazon search results for Stephen King and you'd have this book in a nutshell.

Plus, he refers to the Gor novels as "wildly popular". Uh, no.

-Darren MacLennan

Spignesi is probably the biggest King fan out there. He knows every book, novella, short story and essay the man has written in and out. There isn't one work he isn't totally familiar with. I actually wonder if he knows more about King's writing than King does himself.

In The Essential Stephen King, Spignesi tries to rank the 101 best things king has ever written. And although every major King work is featured (all of the novels are there, so are the novellas), many of King's best short stories didn't make the cut (where are The Night Flyer and Lawnmower Man?). And I was disappointed when I saw some of my favorite King novels ranked so high up the list (Dolores Claiborne, The Dark Half, Needful Things and Storm Of the Century aren't even near the top 10!). Of course, this is a fan ranking his favourite works. No two fans will think alike.

The reason the book is so powerful is because of the author's writing skills. Spignesi writes with passion and dedication. Every sentence is like a love confession for the King of horror. And I also enjoyed the articles written by King fans/experts at the end of the book. This books makes you want to revisit King's best writings. It's a book every King fan will enjoy and will use time and time again as a reference manual.

Stephen J. Spignesi has been a passionate follower of Stephen King's work for a good number of years. His extraordinary (and expansive) resource - The Stephen King Encyclopedia - placed him at the forefront of King experts. With this new volume, Spignesi examines what he determines to be the prolific author's top 101 works (actually 102 including a special note for a non-fiction eulogy that King wrote following the death of John Lennon, which Spignesi places in "a class of its own"). Although the rankings are primarily Spignesi's opinions and not all of King's wide fan base will necessarily agree with the author's opinions, in the end, Spignesi makes a strong case arguing that King is an essential author of modern American literature who should not be so easily pigeonholed into the "just a horror writer" category, but whose works can (and should) be subjected to the same tedious academic scrutiny that Authors such as Steinbeck and Faulkner have undergone.

Efficiently written with energetic synopses for each of the selections as well as a qualifying explanation as to why the particular work received its ranking, The Essential Stephen King is a wonderful resource for all levels of King Fans to either learn of his exceptional works, or merely revisit them along with Spignesi.

If you took a random Amazon reviewer, collated all their reviews of one author (in this case Stephen King) and asked them to rank the books they reviewed then you'd come up with something like the text book laid out in appearance work, The Essential King. Throw in the fact that Spingesi is as gushing a King fan as a twelve year old girl is of her favourite boyband lead singer and what we've got in this collection are biased positive reviews by someone who thinks everything his idol wrote is a masterpiece, these reviews aren't critical at all. I've read a lot of Stephen King, enjoyed most of it but come on there are some novels and short stories in anthologies that aren't quite up to par including a lot which Spignesi rates highly. I would take in the ranking of an authors work much more critically if done by someone who is prepared to admit their idol has flaws.

Also if you're going to rank his work you've got to at least provide a list of the other stuff that didn't make the list. Spignesi also suffers from the bad reviewer quality of thinking there's nothing wrong about including spoilers in a large number of his reviews which means you may become interested in tracking down a story, well that is until the ending or a major twist is ruined for you. Other than a summary Spignesi provides little reasoning for why each piece of work makes the cut or why he likes the stories with most explanations of this only being one or two sentences. Spignesi's list also contains a lot of rare stuff but often he provides no information which magazines or whatever to locate these for the person who has become interested and wants to track them down.
I picked up this book as I thought it would be an interesting look at King's novels and discuss the major differences in the books from their movie adaptations. There's not much of this here. Flip through it at your local library if trying to put on hold a book and you can't remember what its called but don't waste money on this disaster.

The more I read of this book, the more it seemed like a little mind-trip of self-indulgence for the author. It's very difficult to take this book seriously when observing some of the comments the author makes. For each book he rated there was a section called "What I liked about this book," and more than once his only comment in this section was, "everything." While it's nice to see that he's truely writing about something he enjoys, maybe the author should stick to something more modest, such as a column in the local paper, rather than such an ambitious undertaking as this. While not truely awful, the ambiguous format makes it painful reading.

The idea for this book isn't a bad one: the ranking of the Top 100 of all Stephen King's works. However, in order for such a conceit to mean anything, there has to be some thought, skill, and insight involved on the part of the ranker. Spignesi showcases none of these qualities.

Instead, what you are left with is something that goes no deeper than you might find on any fan-based website. Spignesi's knowledge of King's work is admittedly considerable, but in order for a work of literary criticism -- which this is, no matter how poorly-thought-out and poorly-presented -- to be worth reading, it has to cut a bit deeper than mere knowledge. There has to be insight. Perhaps Spignesi has such insights, but if so, he has no interest in demonstrating it in this book: his typical mode is to simply list what he liked in each work, and usually this consists of saying that he liked the characters, or something similarly facile.

Spignesi himself is a TERRIBLE writer. This book is peppered with poor writing, with the misuse (or nonuse) of commas being especially prevalent. Why should we accept the critical judgment of a writer who himself cannot write?

There is an attempt to make it plain that the idea behind this book is for it to stimulate discussion about King's works. Well, really, the best way to do that is to simply read them for yourself. You don't need a writer who ought to properly be confined to fanzines to tell you what King's best works are. And if you don't need that, then you don't need this book.

Thank God, it was given to me as a gift; no dollars of my own were wasted on this sad excuse for criticism.

Spignesi is a great fan(atic) of King's and his enthusiasm shows in this listing of the top 101 King writings. He includes a wide variety of King's material from across his career. Anyone who is a fan will enjoy remembering the great stories already read and will be inspired to read ones Spignesi mentions that haven't yet been read.

Not all of Spignesi's opinions are correct, of course, but he is well-informed enough to make a strong case for each of his picks.

As another reviewer stated, this work is great for a casual or new fan, wanting to learn more about individual S.K. works and whether he or she might like to read them. For serious fans such as myself, this work is just one glaring error after another, coupled with the lackluster opinions of a self-proclaimed super-fan. In particular, the numerous factual errors that I have found in this book are at the very least distracting, and make me question Spignesi's assessment of S.K.'s writings, especially since he can't seem to keep his literary facts straight! For example, in his entry on "Bag of Bones," Spignesi asserts that Mattie Devore, one of the main characters, is divorced. She is actually widowed, and this facet of this story is important. Another error can be found in Spignesi's entry on "The Dead Zone" (a personal favorite of mine). In this work, Greg Stillson is a third-party candidate for the House of Representatives, not the U.S. presidency! This seemingly minor amount of power initially courted by Stillson is vital to the story. These are just two of many errors, both literary and grammatical, that I found when I read this work. By all means, check it out at the library or borrow it from a friend if you want to know which S.K. book to start with (or just ask an S.K. fan...there are lots of us!).

This book is a great resource. It has a vast amount of information on King's books that you won't find elsewhere in one collection. I found this little gem at a bookstore and spent about a half hour reading through it. I finally broke down and bought it on Amazon and I'm really glad I did.
I'm already a Stephen King fan and have read many of his books. But it was great to read synopsis's on his other works that I havn't gotten to yet. The author made a break-down of each book, gave the character's names, and a movie adaptation of the book if applicable.
If you are already a Stephen King fan, you will no doubt enjoy this book. You can see which books made which spots on his '100 list' and perhaps argue, but I found myself agreeing with the author on most of his choices.
If you arn't a Stephen King fan yet, but are thinking about reading a book of his and are not sure which one to pick first, this is a great choice for you to read, so you get an idea of what your headed for. :)

Stephen King is the best horror writer I know of, and that isnt saying much when you consider how untalented all the competition is. Robert Bloch is the exception. King will never equal Bloch's PSYCHO, and I truly love some of King's books....SALEM'S LOT, CARRIE, CHRISTINE, THE LANGOLIERS, SHANKSHAW REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE. DOLAN'S CADILLAC is a sublime short story.

But King is soooo uneven as a writer; 90% of what he writes is mind numbing, inane chatter with eruptions of genius. King's books are packed with more stuff than Santa's sleigh, and are busier than Katrina looters. The man needs an editor bad! Not sycophants.

This book, THE ESSENTIAL STEPHEN KING, is a sycophant's pilgrimage to Mecca or Lourdes.

Kings best book isnt IT, it's CARRIE.