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HugoNebula t1_ja7nfuy wrote

>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.

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loneacer t1_ja7otty wrote

I think some of his best work has been in the last decade. For me, his low point was the 90s and early 2000s. The Mr Mercedes / Bill Hodges Trilogy and 11/22/63 were fantastic.

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HugoNebula t1_ja7phvk wrote

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.

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