Recently, Stephen King was quoted as saying about bestselling mormon vampire romance author Stephenie Meyer:

“Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

I thought that was a pretty bold statement from a very famous public figure, and decided to see what else he might have to say.

Most of Mr. King’s books aren’t really my thing (exceptions: Misery, The Shining, The Running Man, Thinner (the gypsy with the rotting nose haunted my dreams when I was about 12), The Stand, Carrie….huh, I like more than I thought), so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really like his writing in his Entertainment Weekly (he does a column called ‘The Pop of King’).

I found it engaging, funny, thought-provoking, decisive and interesting. So it occurs to me that maybe it’s not Stephen King’s writing that leaves me a bit cold, but the genre itself. I love horror movies, but I think perhaps I’ve outgrown horror books.

Anyway, I really loved a lot of what he had to say. Here are some Stephen King quotes I particularly enjoyed.

On bestselling books:
“I believe that 70 percent of the fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists is dreck, and that ”The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, stands as a prime example.”

On movie snacks:
“My candy of choice is Junior Mints. And while I don’t bring bootleg food into the movies, I do bring bootleg toothpicks. Then, as I relax in my seat, I take a toothpick and poke five or six Junior Mints onto it. It ends the dreaded Chocolate Hand, and it’s also kind of fun to eat candy off a stick. I call them Mint-Kebabs.”

On chicklit vs. manfiction:
“Women like stories in which a gal meets a handsome (and possibly dangerous) hunk on a tropic isle; men like to imagine going to war against an army of bad guys with a Beretta, a blowtorch, and a submachine gun (grenades hung on the belt optional).”

On blogs:
“…a place where, as a rule, the self-appointed critics eat their young.”

On why no Harry Potter reviews ever did the books justice:
“In their hurry to churn out column inches, and thus remain members of good standing in the Church of What’s Happening Now, very few of the Potter reviewers have said anything worth remembering. They take a perfunctory wave at things like plot and language, but do little more…and really, how can they? When you have only four days to read a 750-page book, then write an 1,100-word review on it, how much time do you have to really enjoy the book? Rowling set out a sumptuous seven-course meal, carefully prepared, beautifully cooked, and lovingly served out. The kids and adults who fell in love with the series (I among them) savored every mouthful, from the appetizer (Sorcerer’s Stone) to the dessert (the gorgeous epilogue of Deathly Hallows). Most reviewers, on the other hand, bolted everything down, then obligingly puked it back up half-digested on the book pages of their respective newspapers.”

On movies he didn’t care for:
“Hated ”Antwone Fisher”; ditto ”The Life of David Gale.” Don’t tell me the former is better than the latter, and don’t throw a bunch of sentimental tripe at me and call it social commentary. ”Antwone Fisher” is especially annoying in this regard, a $9 Hallmark card that amounts to ”Roses are red, Violets are blue, Life is tough, But you’ll get through.” I knew that already, thanks, now go away.”

On great writers:
“I think Elmore Leonard is the great American writer…but that he was a lot better 10 years ago. I think that if you haven’t read Stewart O’Nan, Peter Robinson (the Alan Banks mysteries), Peter Abrahams, or the early novels of Dennis Lehane, you have some catching up to do.”

On politics (pre-election):
“Barack Obama looks like the grave and intelligent news anchor on a major-market station. John McCain, on the other hand, looks like the slightly dotty commentator who rants about the local sports teams and obscure bond issues on a small-market station.”

On The Road by Cormac McCarthy:
“Simple, stripped to the bare bones, this story of a man’s effort to keep his son alive and to find any place of refuge in the wake of a great disaster is the finest achievement of McCarthy’s career. I thought it was almost the perfect narrative — spare in its beauty and constantly driven forward by its own interior urgency. Impossible to put down, in other words. “

On his wishlist for 2009:
“I wish for a year during which no talented young [people] die before they can realize their full potential. No Heath Ledgers, please; what a sickening shock it was to hear that on the radio. No David Foster Wallaces, either. We need all the bright lights we can get, because the world is too dark already. “

It’s too short, non-descriptive, and a pain in the ass to find using an internet search owing to the fact that you end up getting all sorts of other words mixed in like measURe, pastURe, pleasURe, and URanium.

I would try and give him a break but it’s not even his first offence, what kind of a title is IT. Even when he pushes past that two-letter wall his titles leave something to be desired: Misery, Desperation, and Insomnia also reek of apathy… it’s like he just opened a dictionary at random, and chucked a dart at the page.

However I really shouldn’t complain about King so much, as always things could be worse, here I found a list of the Shortest Book Titles.

Authors using one letter titles:
a, Andy Warhol;
C, Maurice Baring;
C, Anthony Cave Brown;
E, Matt Beaumont ;
G, John Berger;
H, Elizabeth Shepard;
H., Lin Haire-Sargeant;
K, Mary Roberts Rinehart;
K., Ronald Hayman;
M, John Sack;
N, Louis Edwards;
O, Omari Grandberry;
P, Andrew Lewis Conn;
Q, Luther Blissett;
S., John Updike;
V, Thomas Pynchon;
X, Sue Coe;
Y, Brian Vaughn

Can you name a GOOD two-letter book title? Send us a comment if you can.

He says, “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.

“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 it’s 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.”

It seems the French agree with Mr. King, at least in part, offering JK Rowling a place in the French Foreign Leigon

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, a self-described Stephen King fan, has brought Jack Torrance’s book to press. Crediting the work to Torrance, Buehler has self-published a book that also repeats the phrase throughout but employs different formatting on each page, using the words to create various shapes.

I think I’ll go off and bottle my own Red Rum…

Read the article in The Guardian.

Stephen King shares his top 10 picks for 2008 on EW.com. (Note: King does take liberties with choosing only 10 books.)  In descending order his choices include:

10. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

9.  Old Flames by Jack Ketchum

8.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

7.  Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh

6.  Heartsick/Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain

5.  Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

4.  The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

3.  When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

2.  The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III

1.  The novels of Robert Goddard