I caught that you were specifically talking about Stephen King. I think Jordan is really guilty of it as well.
I'll try to avoid spoilers. But in one particular book, the good guys stand around and recap for the first 150-200 pages. No joke. They know right from the beginning that two people are kidnapped. The villian says, "meet me here, and we'll resolve things". For the next 600 pages, they do random things and avoid that location for no particular reason.
Then for no particular reason, they finally go to said location, hero releases generic balefire and passes out. Good triumphs while the conflict isn't written (the hero keeps passing out) and we move on to the next book.