High Lord Tolkien wrote:
The Stand was the best example of that for me.
The Stand is the only SK book I've ever read. Unfortunately, all I could find was the newer
author's cut version, which was about 500 pages too long (dude, that's why you pay editors to edit your manuscripts!). I totally agree that the ending was silly. I loved the beginning, and the middle, but some of his characters are just so lame. Right now, I'm watching the miniseries (it was on sci-fi sunday, and I tivo'd it), and it's bringing back a lot of memories of that book (I read it ~5 years ago), most of them bad. Mainly, most of the characters are horribly one-dimensional. In this story, at least, all of the characters fit into some sort of simplistic archetype: I'm a simpleton! I'm a bad dude! I'm a daddy's girl! I'm a dork who couldn't get laid at the Mustang Ranch with a fistful of benjamins! I'm a vain, 10 cent flash-in-the-pan pop star! Seriously, the characterizations were just bad in that book, and it makes me not want to read any more King ever again, even though everyone says that
The Dark Tower series is excellent. I really found The Walkin' Dude to be an embarrasing bad guy, and Trashcan Man was just plain stupid. I guess I'm not into supernatural stories, and that's largely what ruined the book for me. I thought that all of the dreams of Mama Abby were ridiculous, and the simplistic good v. evil storyline was just kind of childish. Again, I loved the beginning of the book; it's a classic disaster story along the lines of
Footfall or
Lucifer's Hammer. And like most disaster stories, everything in the aftermath of the disaster is a bit of a let-down. But I found the last half of
The Stand to be a massive let-down, and I really felt that the characterizations were flat-out horrible.
I guess I'll read the DT series at some point, but I really hope that the characters in those books are more than cartoons.