Pictures

With this image, I wanted to focus on the barbed wire. I "straightened" the image to straighten the barbed wire and make it the focus of the picture. I then toyed with some of the adjustments such as definition and saturation in order to make it stand out. I also blurred the edges of the photo to draw focus to the center of the picture: the barbed wire.

With this piece, I wanted to make the woman appear very lonely. I did this by changing the bright sky to what essentially appears to be the night sky. I increased definition and lowered the saturation of the image in order to make the woman stand out from the background and also because it gives a nice outline of the bridge's sides that kind of act as a prison of sorts for the woman.

I wanted to make this photograph appear extremely aged, so I used the sepia effect quite a bit. I also saturated the colors a bit to make it appear faded and lowered the highlighting to blur the sun and decreased definition as a whole.

I wanted to make this man appear a bit more larger-than life. I achieved this by cropping out the rest of the white background, increasing the definition of his features, making the photo appear brighter, and using the vignette effect which draws focus to the center of the picture

With this picture, I wanted the focus to be on the man and how powerful he is. To do this, I cropped out the left side of the image and "straightened" the image which put the man in the upper right quadrant of the picture, making him extremely powerful. I also toyed with the tone and temperature of the sky in order to give it a painterly feel to it which suggests a sort of fantastical element to the photo.

I wanted this photo to look a bit aged, but not too much, so I made it black and white. I also wanted more focus on the girl and her face, so I increased definition and contrast in order for her to stand out of the shot more.

I wanted a cute, romantic feel to this picture. To do this, I blurred the edges of the photo and used the vignette effect because it kind of frames the picture in a heart form. I also increased the temperature a bit to warm up the look of the photo and make it nice and comfortable-feeling.

The Gunslinger

The first entry in the Dark Tower series  (what King himself has referred to as his magnum opus), The Gunslinger was written back when King was just a lowly college student and it shows. The story of a man racing across the desert to confront “The Man in Black” and learn the way to the Dark Tower is interesting, but there are several problems with King’s writing that, thankfully, he has improved on over the course of his career. Pacing problems abound in this novel, making a two-hundred page book feel much longer than it should be. King spends long passages describing the unchanging landscape of a desert and little is revealed of the man as the story progresses. The sparse dialogue that is in this story is stilted and unrealistic. These two large problems aside, though, The Gunslinger is a good book. The world-building here sets the stage for the massive universe of Mid-World in which this series takes place. The concept of a story that consists mostly of a man chasing after an unnamed villain is intriguing in itself and as long as you can get past the sophomoric execution, this book leads into a series of novels that are an absolute joy to read and are filled with great characters and set pieces that would put some action movie directors to shame. Stick it out with this book and you will be rewarded with the rest of the series. 

IT

It is widely considered to be one of King’s best works, and for good reason. At over a thousand pages, it’s definitely his most involving story. A simple story about good and evil, It jumps back and forth in time between a group of adults and their children selves as they try to defeat an ancient evil that has been murdering the children of their home town for thousands of years. Considering this book can be used alternatively as a door stop, this story can appear to be a bit of a grind due to its simplicity, but King somehow manages to avoid this problem by dedicating a majority of the pages to character development. These characters are perhaps King’s most believable, human characters. They love, they hate, they struggle through problems we have all had. And this is just the adults; their childhood selves are just as beautifully written and King’s passages on the growing pains of puberty as well as the profound beauty of a child’s look on the world are painfully accurate and poignant. It’s as if King never grew up. We truly care for these characters and King knows this. It also contains the most scares per page in a King book. Some of the scenes between the entity called It (which appears in a variety of grotesque forms including a maniacal clown, an ancient mummy, and a giant spider) and the children will deeply unnerve any veteran of horror literature. It’s clear King is having fun trying to unsettle his readers and he is at the top of his game when he’s having fun. If you have the time this tome requires, I highly suggest starting your King journey with this book. It contains all of the classic aspects of King: small-town life, good vs evil, and well-developed characters. This is classic King at his most mature and most unsettling and the experience is well worth the time requirements.

Dead Zone

My first Stephen King book was Dead Zone, his tale of a man who awakes from a coma to discover he can predict the future. I had picked the book randomly at an airport to pass the time for a delayed flight. I read about half of it during that wait and put it away for some time. Fast-forward about two years and I'm organizing my bookshelf. 

Dead Zone pops out of the pile.

I open it up.

The book is finished by dawn the next day.

It’s tough to describe why I enjoyed the book so much. It wasn’t scary. In fact, I’ve come to discover that most of King’s books aren’t scary in any traditional sense. The plot is pretty adolescent (a guy who can read minds? Come on). Yet, I enjoyed it and for a long time I didn’t know why.

After reading several of King’s books, I now feel like I can answer why I enjoyed Dead Zone.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a good Stephen King book is character development. King is a master at creating real human characters. Even in his weakest book, King still manages to create characters that stick out in a reader’s mind. In fact, this is probably the thing that filmmakers just can’t seem to grasp about his work and that is why his adaptations are either cheesy horror movies (Pet Semetary) with a focus on the macabre action of the plot, or movies that only rudimentarily use his material (The Shining) and instead go in a completely different direction than what the book intended. King’s best books are character-driven stories where the horror they face isn’t necessarily an evil monster, but their own demons and fears.

In Dead Zone’s case, the main character’s “monster” is his own struggle to adapt to a world that has passed him by during his time in a coma. It is his struggle to finally be able to make a difference in the world with his newfound powers. It is his struggle to live a normal life despite becoming an overnight celebrity.

Dead Zone was the perfect book to introduce me to the worlds Stephen King can create. Heartbreaking, unsettling and uplifting all at once, it captures the attributes that make a good Stephen King book in a way that grabs new readers and pushes them forward into the other mysterious worlds of Stephen King.