Stephen King Bashes Stephenie Meyer (Among Others)

On February 2, 2009, Stephen King had an interview with USA Weekend to promote his new book. Well, what started with an innocent question on what influence he has had on authors such as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer turned into a bash-session of mainstream writers; he was quoted saying, 'I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,' King explains. 'People always say to me, 'Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?' And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, 'This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.' I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. ... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.
"But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. 'He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,' King says. 'Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. 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 didn't realize Mr. King had changed careers from author to literary critic. I personally enjoyed Twilight more than Harry Potter, and Dean Koontz's and James Patterson's books more than wise ol' Mr. Stephen King. I have literally been bored to snores reading a King novel--I stayed up 2 hours more than I intended to finish Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight Saga. It was just a simple question--do you, Stephen King, think you have had any influence over today's authors? No one asked his opinion on these authors, just whether or not he believes he has had any influence.

Is Stephenie Meyer the world's best author? No, but again, I enjoy her books more than his, so she must be doing something he isn't. But Dean Koontz is a genius (I have never read anything better than the Odd Thomas series and I have read ALOT) and James Patterson has won a couple of awards and he is the first author to become a Harvard Business School case study. Harvard is teaching the future of corporate America how to succeed based on Patterson's publishing world successes. Yeah, that's gotta be some real "terrible" writing to be honored by Havard.

Also, back to his criticism of Stephenie Meyer, he has not taken the whole fandom into consideration when he made the comment about the "safe joining of love and sex." It may be true of some of the fans, but there are male fans and fans with children who are than capable of handling sex in a book (you know, since you have to HAVE SEX to have children?). I'm 19 years-old, if Stephenie Meyer had chosen to include the honeymoon scenes in Breaking Dawn, it wouldn't have bothered me one bit. Not everyone who reads Twilight cares about or needs the clear abstinence message. Not every fan is a pre-teen girl, or even a girl at all. Maybe King should do a little research into the nature of a fandom before categorizing its members.

So, if you please, Mr. K., please keep your opinions on other authors to yourself and simply plug your work when you are in an interview.