King v. Meyer, nerds, hold on to your cloaks of invisibility.
On my trek through the internet to check my email, I always have to go through Yahoo’s home page, and every now and then I find one of their stories interesting (though I will say, they’re completely cursory glances that never give any sort of insight into the story). So today, I came across this article about Stephen King dissing Stephanie Meyer, the author of the hugely popular Twilight series.
The first thing you notice is that King says she “can’t write worth a darn”. Woah there Steve, don’t hold back. Pretty tame trash talk from the king of horror. Of course, that gets to the heart of things doesn’t it? King isn’t really the king anymore is he? From 1974 to 1987 he churned out a bunch of great books, inlcuding Carrie, Misery, Pet Cemetary, Cujo, The Shining, The Dead Zone, and The Stand, but he really hasn’t had a ton of hits since then, aside from maybe The Green Mile. Now, the reality is that he doesn’t have to write hits, he sells books just off the allure of his name, which is great, but he hasn’t written a book that will stick in the collective memory for a while. Heck, you could make the argument that none of his books have been as memorable as the movies they’ve created based on them, but I’m not gonna go that far and disparage the man’s career to that extent.
So is there a little bit of jealousy when King rips Meyer? Face, Twilight is huge; everyone you know is reading those books, trying to catch up on the story in a frenzy not seen since the heyday of Harry Potter. I’ve got to think that’s the biggest part of this: Here’s a guy who’s been a master of his craft and still works very hard at it, putting out a few books a year to this day, and he’s being outsold by this upstart without his history and pedigree. What’s more, people are comparing her to him; that’s gotta make him a little peeved.
Now, this isn’t to say I disagree with Mr. King. I think the books are crap. I do disagree with him about J.K. Rowling; the Harry Potter books were crap too. Whenever I use a “big” word and somebody makes fun of me about it, I ask them if they wanna go read Twilight. They’re trash novels written hastily to make money, they’re the worst kind of escapism, mindless. And the worst part is, the people that read them happily admit it. And they follow up this willful mindlessness with the argument that “Hey, at least people are reading?” Well sure, that’s great, as long as they move on to “real” books. But they don’t, they move on to more mindless schlock. Frankly, this whole “people don’t read anymore” argument is nonsense. We’re all on the internet everyday, we read more in a given day than the majority of people a few centuries ago read their entire life.
But, back to King v. Meyers: He kind of kills his own argument when he says “she’s not very good”, but follows it up with this explanation of how she explores teenage sexuality, “A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.” I’m pretty sure that’s metaphor, and if the woman was smart enough to build an entire book series around this clever utilization of the vampire mythos, then she’s gotta at least be a competent writer.
Again, I’m on the side that says Twilight is junk, but good old Stephen King sounds like a bitter old man on this one.
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