Stephen King slams Twilight franchise as 'tweenage porn'

[steve2470]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/21/stephen-king-twilight-tweenage-porn

Stephen King, the prolific and best-selling patriarch of the horror novel, has used a rare interview to express disdain for modern pretenders to his title, dismissing the Twilight franchise as "tweenager porn" and calling The Hunger Games dull and derivative.

More predictably, King, who is about to release his 56th novel, is less than impressed by Fifty Shades of Grey, although he does have praise for JK Rowling's "fabulous" non-Harry Potter debut, The Casual Vacancy and compared her style to that of the late Tom Sharpe.

In an interview in the Guardian's Weekend magazine, the 65-year-old author said he had read Twilight, among other modern titles, out of professional interest, and had been underwhelmed. "They're really not about vampires and werewolves. They're about how the love of a girl can turn a bad boy good."

"I read Twilight and didn't feel any urge to go on with her. I read The Hunger Games and didn't feel an urge to go on. It's not unlike The Running Man, which is about a game where people are actually killed and people are watching: a satire on reality TV.

[liberal_at_heart]

1. I love Stephen King but really don't care what he thinks about Twilight or Hunger Games or any other

series for that matter.

[tkmorris]

7. I'm guessing you like one of those he criticized

That's cool. He would think that's cool too actually. He just thinks they aren't particularly innovative. They are formulaic and their plot ideas are rather old hat. If you like them nonetheless, That's fine.

Myself, I'm a sucker for time travel novels. I haven't seen anything NEW in that genre for years but I still like reading them and that's OK.

[liberal_at_heart]

8. Stephen King himself often recycles his own plots. A group of people are cut off

from society. Panic and mob mentality ensue and usually some supernatural event causes things to come to a conclusion. Not that I don't like them. I love his stories. He is wonderful at character development. His characters are complex and usually deeply flawed. You come to care about them and then bam he kills one of them off. I love, love, love the Dark Tower series.

[exboyfil]

30. Under the Dome (both book and series)

is a rip off of Gone (I know King says he started Dome in the 1970s). Gone is a science fiction series for teenagers.

Under the Dome was one of King's less inspired works. The television series leaves much to be desired. Finally you have CBS changing it from a 'mini"/limited series to a 2nd season which really upset my daughters (they were only hanging on to watching knowing that it will conclude at the season end). Good luck getting any viewers next year.

That being said. His opinions on Twilight and to a lesser extent Hunger Games (which is another rip off of a series and whose second and especially third book are near Twilight level bad) are on the mark.

Didn't you find the end of The Dark Tower series almost masturabatory?

[dionysus]

41. Tower is the best series ever but yeah.. the very end.. well....

an eraser? really?

[frylock]

14. The Anubis Gate is the greatest time travel novel ever imho

[bravenak]

37. Replay.

By Ken Grimwood. Best time travel book ever.

[haele]

40. Seconded.

Pretty much makes a complete historical circle, which might potentially be the only way that time travel could "work" without making a total hash of reality.

Haele

[quinnox]

2. Well, he did more than I would, in actually reading those books

I can't believe anyone over 20 years old or not a teenage girl would read the twilight books, based on what I have seen from clips from the movies. Really teeny-bopper girl stuff. On the other hand, The Hunger Games, well, I agree with him that it was rehashed stuff, but I thought the movie was actually pretty decent. I would consider reading that book, just to see if it was any good.

And I want to make clear I am not some huge fan boy of King. I read maybe two of his books, in total. One book I thought really sucked (Cell) One book was pretty scary (Pet Sematary) and one part of a book was terrifying (Cujo) {I happened to pick it up one day and read the middle part that was the scene with the dog outside a car with a woman trapped inside, it was really scary, but I never read the whole book}

And some short stories too, which he seems to be at his best doing.

[liberal_at_heart]

3. I'm a visual person so I watch more movies than read books. I watched Twilight and Hunger Games.

True, they're not Oscar material but I enjoyed them. I watched Twilight at a time when my husband and I were kind of busy and not spending much time together and the movie made me think back to when we fell in love. And I love the social commentary of the Hunger Games.

[quinnox]

9. We all have different tastes

I can see how a woman can find the Twilight stuff interesting, but it just isn't for me.

[frylock]

15. Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale

[liberal_at_heart]

16. okay. Doesn't bother me. I still enjoyed it. Maybe people who like the Hunger Games will go read

Battle Royale. My daughter read the whole series of Hunger Games. If she knew they were similar she might just go and read Battle Royale.

[frylock]

18. battle royale comes in novel, film, or manga..

published in 1999. It rocks.

[X_Digger]

4. Twilight doesn't even deserve to be called 'pretender'.

I read three of the books when they came out, and by the end of the last one, I was rooting for the villains.

[liberal_at_heart]

6. sometimes the villains are more interesting because they are more complex.

[X_Digger]

10. Well, no, they were as one-dimensional as the heroes..

.. but the bad writing + author-as-main-character-stand-in-wish-fulfillment made me despise the main characters even more.

If I weren't so OCD / optimistic about quality ("surely it'll get better in the next chapter / book&quot I would have chucked the first one in the trash about 50 pages in.

[liberal_at_heart]

13. yeah character development was definitely lacking.

[JI7]

5. the hunger games was pretty good but the last book kind of dragged

it seemed like the author had run out of ideas and got too repetitive.

haven't watched the movie .

don't intend to read or watch twilight.

[Agnosticsherbet]

11. I like King detest Twilight, but in "It" a ten year old girl

has sex with the other six boys in the Loser's Club and that act is magic that binds them together after they stop It the first time.

Granted, I thought that it made sense in the story, but calling Twilight Tweenage Porn, though accurate, is a bit of the Pot calling the Kettle Black. (Though It was very much written for an adult audience while Twilight is written for the Tween and Teen market.)

I read the first of the Twilight Books and found it demeaning to women and boring. (Saw the movie with my wife, on Television, and didn't care for it.) I thought the movie was worse. Haven't tried "the Hunger Games" because the first chapter didn't grab me when I read it in the book store. I didn't bother to see the movie.

[Aristus]

48. I agree with that.

The whole idea of Bev having sex with the other kids in the group in order to keep them bound together was repellent in the extreme.

And I was very disappointed in the ending, where they all start to forget one another as if the whole thing had never happened. That was a rip-off, and very unfair to the reader who had invested so much emotion into the characters by that point.

[longship]

12. I have a guilty pleasure for "The Stand"

But my fave King is "The Shining".

But I haven't read that many of his novels. So take this with a grain of salt.

[frylock]

17. i think that "Christine" was my fav..

check out 'The Bachman Books' if you get a chance. Includes 'Stand By Me' and 'Shawshank Redemption.'

[exboyfil]

43. Bachman books

are Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, and Blaze. The first four were published without revealing the author's real identity and are collected in The Bachman Books. Good luck finding a copy of Rage which is about a teenager with a gun taking over a school. They are pretty good books (much better than Twilight and the last two Hunger Games books). Stand by Me and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" are from Different Seasons (which is a fine collection of novellas).

[NuclearDem]

46. The Stand is probably my favorite post-apocalyptic works of all time

The miniseries as well.

[X_Digger]

49. I re-read the stand about once a year.

And I can't hear 'Don't Fear the Reaper' without seeing the opening scene of the miniseries.

[MuseRider]

51. I don't read it that often

but I bet I have read it at least 3 times, maybe 4. I too love that book.

Miniseries was not bad but the book, oh so much better.

Glad to know there are others who read it more than once, it is a long slog but a good one.

[RebelOne]

59. I think "The Stand" was one of his best novels.

I have read both versions.

[A Little Weird]

19. I'm happy to see kids reading

Even if it's not the greatest work of literature. Many kids I know do not read for pleasure at all which I think is sad.

I read the Twilight series and didn't think it was very good. But I saw the first movie with my cousin's daughter and that made the book seem much better by comparison. I actually felt embarrassed for the actors.

I only read the first book of the Hunger Games series. I thought it was pretty good, but it was really depressing. Too much other sad stuff going on at that time for me to want to read a sad book so I didn't continue. But for the most part I liked the main character. There are too few books where the girl is the hero and not just some prop to be rescued by the boy.

[liberal_at_heart]

20. I wasn't sure if my autistic son would ever become a reader. He would only read

books that would be classified as elementary school reading. But now he's reading James Patterson kid books and Rick Riordan books. He also loves funny comics like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbs and he likes fact books like Ripley's Believe It or Not and Guinness Book of World Records. I too am happy to see kids reading. I think Harry Potter really helped get kids interested again.

[A Little Weird]

21. That's great!

I agree that Harry Potter got a lot of kids reading. I kind of wish they hadn't made the movies.

Rick Riordan is the one who writes the Percy Jackson books right? I haven't read those but I was thinking of getting one for my young cousin to try and spark an interest.

[liberal_at_heart]

22. Yes, he did write the Percy Jackson series.

Another series my son liked was Animorphs by Katherine Applegate. That is a big series. It was the first series my son read. I was both shocked and very pleased that he would read that many books.

[ladyVet]

23. I went and read the whole article.

King hardly "slams" those books, but rather offers reasoned, logical explanations about why those two series a) aren't horror, and b) why he didn't like them. Nothing wrong with that at all.

On a side note, another story there (they must have done an extensive interview, which they cut into separate articles) says that King "damns" Shelley Duvall's character in the movie The Shining, but the actual quote is from someone else, per the last sentence (in which the remake was discussed):

Writing in the book Hollywood's Stephen King, Tony Magistrale praises the reinvention, damning Duvall's take as "Olive Oyl revisited".

Let's not put words in someone's mouth, or attribute actions to them that aren't factual. Our mainstream media does enough of that.

I will divulge that I am a huge Stephen King fan, have been since I read Carrie back around 1979. He's a good person, and a good liberal.

[Union Scribe]

24. +1 to all you said.

I'm a King fan too, and even more than his fiction I love when he writes about writing or about creativity and that process. He rocks all around.

[LuvNewcastle]

25. King's written plenty of garbage, too.

Once you've read a few of his books, you've read them all because he recycles the same characters with similar plots over and over. Maybe if he wasn't so interested in churning out a new book every month, he might take a bit more care with his work and be more creative. He's got some talent, but I think much of it is untapped. I don't know if it's laziness or what that keeps him from coming up with something new.

[HappyMe]

26. Twilight and Hunger Games are schlocky.

I hoped that Anne Rice's vampires would show up and put an end to their whiney asses.

[LuvNewcastle]

27. Lestat alone would eat all the Twilight vampires for breakfast.

Someone needs to write a book about it. I think it could be hilarious.

[HappyMe]

28. Hell yeah, it would be hilarious.

Lestat would make short work of them.

[Squinch]

39. But Anne Rice's later work is very Twilight-ey. Loved LeStat and the rest, but the recent

books didn't do anything for me.

[HappyMe]

50. I haven't read any of her more recent books.

[X_Digger]

53. I think Blackwood Farm was the last one I read.

Just got too jesus-y and silly.

And this is coming from the guy who ran the #annerice channel on IRC for years, did the live cast for the annual ball from Nola, and ran the website for the ARVLFC.

[Squinch]

57. She dropped the jesus-y stuff, and then tried to go back to

horror, but it was more like her old erotica books but without the sense of humor. The new stuff is pretty dull.

[X_Digger]

58. Shame, really.

She was doing "urban fantasy" (ish) before it was cool.

What I wouldn't give for another book of the caliber of The Witching Hour.

[Android3.14]

29. Neither Library of Congress nor Amazon class "Twilight" as horror

According to my reference librarian spouse.

[LuvNewcastle]

31. It shouldn't be. It's a Romance.

I think my local library has that stuff in the Young Adult section.

[Recursion]

44. The last B&N I went to had a shelf marked "supernatural teen romance"

And another one marked "new supernatural teen romance".



Kids today are certainly reading (and writing!) more than my generation did. That can't be a bad thing per se.

[pipi_k]

32. Different tastes and all...

I'm not really interested at all in vampires and zombies and any of that supernatural stuff, but...

I do love to read, and I love to see other people read.

So whatever gets people to read...well...it's all good, IMO.

[Zorra]

33. Children should definitely not be encouraged to admire, or kiss, either vampires or republicans.

It sends the wrong message.

[Brickbat]

34. Says the author who wrote an extended scene of a bunch of 12-year-olds having sex.

[LuvNewcastle]

36. Great point. I guess that was porn for pedophiles.

Not his finest moment.

[exboyfil]

42. If he could go back in time and excise that

that portion of It, I think he would. That scene was utterly disgusting ad ruined a pretty good book. He revisited two of the characters in a later book, but I could not get that scene out of my head.

[Brickbat]

45. I totally agree. It makes such little sense.

"Everybody, quit freaking out! We don't know where we are or how to get out, but just chill!"

"How can we possibly settle down when we're lost in the sewers?"

"Hmm. I know! Let's all have sex with me!"

[bravenak]

35. I read all of the books he spoke of.

His under the dome books I read were not all that. I'd rate it under twilight and the hunger games.
The book The Host by the Twilight author was bang up to the mark. Most plots are recycled these days, he should know, since he does it too.

[closeupready]

38. Stephen King's books are popular, but as a critic, he sucks.

I recall reading Danse Macabre years ago - he explains writing, the horror genre of fiction, his theories about culture, etc. None of that is so bad, but at the end of the book, he lists what he felt were the best works of writing and film in horror, and while some of them are spot on, many others (probably most) were just really either mediocre or even boring.

And then of course, publishers put his positive critiques on paperback covers as an aid to sales. Like an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection, those books are to be avoided as a rule of thumb.

[NuclearDem]

47. I didn't really care for Twilight.

Hunger Games was actually pretty fun, even just as Battle Royale for millennials.

[PeteSelman]

52. King knows his shit.

Twilight is absolute garbage and fifty shades of grey was created out of twilight fan fiction so that says all you need to know about that.

Now, not everything King has written was a home run but he has had enough brilliantly written work that he can claim the authority to trash anyone he wants. The only real problem I have is that he's punching down here, way down. This is beneath him really.

[joeybee12]

54. I don't know much about porn...the only gay porn movie I ever saw...

was "Twilight: First Moon."

[DonCoquixote]

55. somthing that i am surpised gets under the radar

SPOILER ALERT if you have not read the books, seen the movie, etc.










OK, Bella gets impregnated with a baby that will kill her. The baby will also cause a LOT of family strife, even to the point where innocent people will get killed. What does she do, she has the kid, and is joyous, even as the spawn rips her to pieces..

Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon...am i the only one who saw a nasty bit of anti-abortion propaganda here? Add to it that bella spends the book being beaten and treated like crap by her boyfriends, sounds like a woman Mitt Romney could love.