The Shawshank Redemption... What a Piece of crap!!!!

[Chaos]

At the risk of getting made fun of, I think King does a great job of character writing.   

Bag of Bones was one of the nicest character driven books I have read.   Maybe that makes me shallow, but I loved that book.

I would never make fun of someone for their opinion. Wait a minute, what the hell am I saying?

Seriously though, for me, Bag of Bones was the absolute steamingest pile of shit I have ever read in my entire life. It is the ONLY book that I have ever stopped reading before I finished it (I think I actually threw it in the trash). And I have read a lot of crap that I still managed to muddle all the way through.

The problem that I have always had with King is his patent disregard for his characters. The true sign of a good writer is someone who is personally invested in their work. When a character dies, it should be painful to the writer. The writer should share in the grief that this causes - otherwise, how can you expect the reader to do the same? King does not care about his characters. He is completely detached from his writing, and that lets him kill his characters very off-handedly. It makes his writing feel cheap and meaningless.

Also, he has a bad habit of writing himself into a corner and then having to make up a bunch of idiotic bullshit to end his story (the green magic stick from Needful Things, the hand of god from The Stand...). Stories that could have otherwise been worthwhile become garbage during the last 30% of the book. The only thing WORSE than leaving the gunslinger series unfinished at the end was in the afterword when he included that horrible excuse for an  "ending" for those people that wanted it, and actively insulted anyone who said it NEEDED the ending.