[Phoenix1010]

I don't have the literary backround to have an informed opinion on this, but I love SK. Yes, great storyteller. I remember while reading Eyes of the Dragon thinking that it was only an ok story, but the storytelling was so great that it made the whole thing better than it should be. And then of course some of his stories are so great that they'd be good even if they weren't executed so well, like those in Different Seasons.

My big knock on him is that he really seems to have trouble with endings. I actually enjoyed Tommyknockers pretty well, but the ending was just fuggin terrible. The Stand is great, but it ends in such ridiculouslness that it almost ruins it for me. I haven't read the Dark Tower series but it seems that it suffers from the same problem. To be fair I can imagine it's hard to write an amazing story and have an equally amazing payoff at the end without screwing something up.

Am I the only one who really liked Desperation? Maybe it was just because I was 12 and it was my first SK book, but I loved it. The beginning to that book is really well done IMO. He sets the stage vividly, and he does a really good job of putting you the reader in a pretty mundane run-in with an authority figure that gradually gets more and more creepy and frightening until it becomes clear that everything's crazy and you should be scared out of your mind. There's also a pretty chilling twist later on that I still remember making me say "oh my god" out loud. Definitely one of my favorites.