Carrie:
For anyone who was bullied in school this book is disturbing. I just finished reading The Dead Zone and moved on to this one right away. It’s an excellent book, but I told my friend that I want something completely escapist after this! Something that doesn’t hit so close to my own life. No I don’t have any telekinetic powers, but there are people I’d love to see brought to a reasonable justice. So I can empathize with Carrie White’s feelings and how she abuses her powers once she realizes she can. This book is a tragedy. Much like the Dead Zone, it shows how superpowers might corrupt and destroy a person, turning them into a monster.
Salem’s Lot:
This is an excellent updating of the classic vampire legends. No shining in the sunlight or battles between vampires and werewolves. This story is like an hommage to Lugosi and Lee and Schreck. This is the vampire that destroys and currupts, strikes fear at the same time he seduces. This is the spawn of hell that we grew up with as kids in Carmilla and Dracula and the movies. Except this vampire doesn’t just go after a couple of women. He turns and destroys an entire small town. A handful of men and a boy plot to destroy the vampire. This story is done with the usual King mastery of suspense and of interesting character. But King goes further with this to reveal his love of old-time horror and brings in all of the old legends—the birch stakes, the garlic, no reflections, transforming into smoke, etc. This book is a love letter to all the great horror of the past. Yet King makes it fresh and new. Definitely recommended, Top Tale!
The Shining:
A remarkable story and my personal favorite among King’s books so far, though I have a lot more reading to do. I’ve always loved the first movie, but must admit I love Kubrick in general. I wish more moviemakers would have the freedom to pour the art into their craft the way Kubrick did. But the Kubrick movie does not really follow the book that much. The book stands seperate as a great achievement in the horror genre. The writing, the characters, the atmosphere and the imagination all come together to make this incredible. Even more powerful is the fact that for all you read through you are left with questions. There definitely is something larger going on here, but you only get glimpses of it. That may frustrate anybody needed everything to be clearly explained, but the mystery you are left with at the end only makes this story that much more powerful.
-Gregory Kerkman

Salem's Lot: 4/5
As always for Stephen King, the devil is in the details. While it could have been the cut and dry story of the evil that overtakes the town, it's the attention to each citizen that makes you feel attached to the town in the first place. It makes the evil that spreads all the more insidious and heart-wrenching. But undoubtedly still scary, especially of an evil that seems older than you can imagine.

The Shining: 5/5
Wow, the inconic haunted house story. But what really captivates are how the demons in the hotel play on the character's inner demons, blurring who is ghost and who is victim. And slowly the changes happen, watching Jack Torrance go mad. I love the shifting perspectives of the characters and their own instincts and fears. Captivating from start to finish, with some supernatural powers to boot.

Carrie: 3/5:
A short read that reads like an expose' of a supernatural phenomenon, its detachment in the writing style (of newspaper articles, notes from an investigative board, witness testimony) mystifies this unbelievable event. Almost ascends it to urban legend status amongst the locals who tell the story. But it is interspersed with the events as they truly happened, and it makes Carrie a more sympathetic and human character despite how she is viewed in the aftermath.

"You really do feel like you're in the hands of a master storyteller." - Episode 73 - Shining Crew https://thetoreadlistpodcast.libsyn.c...

well, I didn't read Salem's Lot, but you can't find Carrie alone.

The Shining is good, better than Kubrick's film...

Five stars for these early works, not for the proofreader(s) of this edition. ‘answerimg’ (p.383), ‘Edgar Allen [sic] Poe’ (p. 509). The chapter on p. 847 quotes ‘Bad Moon Rising’ in italics, the rest of the page is in italics as well.

"Carrie" was such a thrilling read; I love novels with ambiguous protagonists. Carrie is pinned as this evil girl by all around her, and she truly gets her revenge. As always, I appreciated SK's writing style, finding each page more intriguing than the last. The Prom scene is easily my favorite scene of any book.

Individual Ratings: Carrie ★★★ | 'Salem's Lot ★★★★ | The Shining ★★★★½

I'd be interested to read some of his newer stuff and see how his writing style has changed since the 70s. They were pretty good books, though. Not as scary as I thought. 'Salem's Lot was definitely my favorite.

This book is a great novel for those readers who are sick of the shiny-happy vampires who have taken over, one diamond-studded hottie at a time! (Seriously, in sunlight, Twi-vamps shine like diamonds? C'mmon!) King, way before Twilight, decided to diverge from the gentlemanly count who woos then drinks, to a much fiercer vampire--the kind that rip your throat out, just after they wake you from a deep sleep. Muwuuhahahaha! This is a delicious guilty-pleasure book! (Pun intended.)

The Shining, Carrie, and Salem's Lot - all 3 are wonderful stories by Stephen King.

Read each twice...something I RARELY do.

This omnibus collects Stephen King's first three novels. This time around, I (re)read THE SHINING, one of the greatest haunted-house tales ever written, maybe even better than Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. King was influenced by HILL HOUSE, and it shows in THE SHINING, but what really stands out in this work is its semi-autobiographical nature.

For those unaware, King battled addiction to drugs and alcohol early in his career. In SHINING, Jack Torrance battles alcoholism and loses. One gets the sense while reading the book that Torrance could have been King. Like Ting, Torrance was a struggling English teacher who dreamed big dreams of making it big as a writer. Like King, Torrance had a family to support, and had to take jobs he deemed beneath him to keep them fed and clothed.

The book hinges on Jack's struggling with alcoholism, and with thoughts and impulses that grow darker as the Overlook Hotel's hold on him tightens. Jack blames his wife and son for his situation, and wonders more than once how his life might be different if he didn't have them to think about.

I can't help but wonder if King had similar thoughts during his lean times, when there was writing to be done at the same time there were bills to be paid and mouths to feed. I think it's likely. It's also human, and that humanity, more than the nightmarish images King paints in chapters that explore the haunted rooms and shadowy corners of the Overlook Hotel, is what makes SHINING such a raw and candid read.

I don't think I'm alone in sympathizing with Jack Torrance. He's not a bad guy. He struggles through most of SHINING, and you root for him to stay strong and mourn for his soul when he finally gives in. Readers love to talk about the forays into room 217, and the hotel's grisly history, and the pulse-pounding climax when Jack stalks through the hotel's corridors hunting his family. Those scenes are chilling and haunting, and deserving of the "How about the part when" talk they've generated for decades. But for my money, the book's best scene takes place in a maintenance shed, where Jack quietly scrapes and claws against the hotel, and loses.

My only qualm with SHINING is the characters' tendencies to blame Jack's disease instead of Jack himself for the havoc and horror he wreaks later on. More than once, you'll read "That isn't Jack" or "That's not your father" or "This isn't his fault." I don't want to get into a moral debate on the intricacies of drug addiction. It is a disease, and people in my life have lost loved ones to it.

However, I believe personal responsibility is of paramount importance. Addicts cannot and should not be allowed to blame the damage they cause on their diseases. They must accept their part in the harm they inflict on themselves and on others. As much as I love the Jack Torrance character, as hard as I root for him to persevere every time I read THE SHINING (this marks round three, I believe), I maintain that he is at least partly to blame for his actions, as he must be. The hotel may have conjured alcohol to fuel his demons, but there's a scene where he has a choice: pick up the glass, or go down fighting. Jack picked up the glass.

SHINING is one of King's most well-written books because it doesn't suffer from the bloat that weighs down many of his later works, even the best of the bunch such as THE STAND and IT. Most of the time his prose is elegant and understating, which makes the book's most horrific scenes all the more impactful.

Likewise, King didn't dip his pen in blood to write this story. He became known as the master of the grotesque, and sometimes seems to embrace the label by writing shocking and schlocky descriptions of gore and death. In SHINING, death is omnipresent, but never overwritten. It's beautiful in its way, and stands the test of time.