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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3398 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026

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I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.

Do you consider IT his magnum opus? In On Writing, he bemoaned the fact that The Stand is widely considered his best work i.e. he did his best writing 22 years earlier.

I'm starting The Stand next (I watched the old miniseries in pieces a dozen times on SciFi cable growing up), and my exposure to King's writing is limited to IT, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and some short stories. So I might change my mind on that front, and I'm open to being convinced otherwise on any count.

But IT is probably his most iconic work, which is most emblematic of his overall output, and his contribution to culture more broadly. Pennywise was well known to me even before reading the book or seeing the films, where I don't feel like I could reference Trashcan Man or Randall Flagg or Mother Abigail in a conversation. I could definitely expect everyone to get a joke about the sewer clown, even if they haven't actually consumed IT. If you ask a room full of people about IT they'll tell you it's that clown in the sewers that eats children, if you ask about The Stand you'll get less.

Stephen King is mostly famous as a horror writer, though he pumps out a lot of other material as well, and IT is a monster book. Where The Stand might not even be top-5 in apocalypse books off the top of my head, IT is near the top of monster books and influenced every monster that came after. IT is closer thematically to Carrie and The Shining than The Stand is, in my mind.

Also I just looked it up, just by book sales, IT is King's best selling novel, with twice as many copies as The Stand. I've seen copies of IT being read by people in real life, but never copies of The Stand.

So yeah, the clown stands alone, IT is it, the magnum opus.

If you pretend that the last four books didn't happen, I'd say that the dark tower is a pretty strong contender. The drawing of the three and the wasteland blew my teenage mind.

That isn't exceptional. For example, Asimov was an extremely prolific writer - probably the most prolific out of well-known ones, and wrote for over 40 years - and yet the stuff he's most remembered for now are the things he wrote in the 1950s - robots, Foundation, etc. It's not to say the rest of his writings were bad or completely ignored - they enjoyed their success, but they weren't the best.

Indeed. Einstein never wrote anything as good as his annus mirabilis papers. Orson Scott Card never won both the Hugo and the Nebula award again in the same year after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Scott Alexander never regained his magic after he moved to Substack.

From "On Things that are Awesome" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

(2) I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious). In fact, when my brain says “Greg Egan” it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book. And when my brain says “Hofstadter” it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas. For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).

(3) Once you realize that you’re only admiring someone’s peak work, you also realize that the work is not the person: I don’t actually know Hofstadter, or Greg Egan, or E. T. Jaynes. I have no idea what they are (were) like in their personal lives, or whether their daily deeds had any trace of the awesome that is in their books. If you start thinking that a person is supposed to be as universally and consistently awesome as their best work, so that every word from their lips is supposed to be as good as the best book they ever wrote, that’s probably some kind of failure mode. This is not to try to moderate or diminish the awesomeness: for their best work is that awesome, and so there must have been a moment of their life, a time-slice out of their worldline, which was also that awesome. But what the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” stands for, in my mind, is not all his works, or all his life.

Oh I'm aware. I was just under the impression that The Stand was widely considered King's masterpiece, as opposed to IT.

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