Julie-Ann
So Stephen King was interviewed by USA Weekend a little earlier this month, and I must say, I think his publicist must have sat him down and had a long hard talk with him after the story went to print. A few choice quotes from the horror king himself…
“Dean Koontz… sometimes he’s just awful.”
“James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very, very successful.”
“Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
On the one hand, you’ve got to appreciate his honesty in expressing his own uncensored opinion for what it is, and on the other hand, you have to laugh at his audacity.
Perhaps he’s just reached an age where he no longer cares whose feathers he ruffles and is willing to give straight talk even on writers like Dean Koontz, a friend and sometimes-co-author of King’s.
It’s generally part of an author’s publicity training to never go too hard on his or her peers, so really, it’s kind of refreshing to see King giving the interviewer a little more than the same old sound bytes about signing tours and “where he gets all his ideas”.
And to be fair, King tends to be just as quick to dole his criticisms out on himself, as well. He recently wrote a top ten list of his favourite movies of 2008 for Entertainment Weekly, prefacing the list with a confession of his own terrible taste in film, and when he published Blaze last year, he opened the book with a warning to the reader that this wasn’t one of his best, and that you may want to read the first chapter in the bookstore before wasting any money on it.
Now, if you really want to hear Stephen King go off on a few bad writers (including himself, at times), his memoirs/how to book On Writing comes highly recommended. If you read enough autobiographies, you get used to reading between the lines and wondering if the author is really being completely honest with the reader. In King’s case, On Writing is as fierce and merciless a portrait as anyone could paint of the man.
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