{"id":57,"date":"2002-02-19T23:10:24","date_gmt":"2002-02-20T04:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/damning_stephen_king"},"modified":"2002-02-19T23:10:24","modified_gmt":"2002-02-20T04:10:24","slug":"damning_stephen_king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/02\/damning_stephen_king.html","title":{"rendered":"Damning Stephen King"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nWell, this is just sad. I’ve been running the Kenneth and Linda Lay
\nEmergency Relief Fund since the month began, and how much have we
\nreceived so far? One dollar. One stinking dollar<\/em>. What’s the matter
\nwith you people? Where’s the compassion? Where’s the love?\n<\/p>\n

\nThere’s a rather
\nstupid article on Stephen King’s retirement<\/a> up at Salon.com. The article isn’t
\nquite<\/em> as bad as the
\n“Lord of the Rings”
\nvs. “Star Wars”<\/a> article that appeared last month, but it’s close.\n<\/p>\n

\nLet’s give the author some credit: he is brave enough to admit that he likes
\nsome<\/em> of Stephen King’s work. True, he establishes right at the beginning
\nStephen King is at best “unpolished”… and he feels he has to sprinkle a little reference to
\nTom Wolfe here and a firsthand account of a New Yorker<\/a>
\nawards ceremony there, just so we know his literary street cred is intact. But
\nat least he lays the groundwork for a real critique — you can’t reduce his article to,
\n“Stephen King sux!” So that’s something, at least.\n<\/p>\n

\nStill, this sort of damning-with-faint-praise really gets under my skin. Why
\nis it each time a “literary” writer refers to a
\nscience fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, or mystery novelist, they have to play
\nfootsies? “When I was a child I just loved<\/em> Writer X — golly, she was
\nsuch rip-roaring fun!” God forbid you should come right out and say, “I like Terry
\nBrooks!” “Orson Scott Card is A-OK!”\n<\/p>\n

\n(For the record: I’ve never been all that fond of Stephen King’s fiction,
\nand Terry Brooks was only rip-roaring fun when I was a child. There, now that
\nmy<\/em> street cred is preserved, let’s move on…)\n<\/p>\n

\nAnyway, the really silly part comes on the second page, where the author tries
\nto portray King as estranged from his fans, hiding behind legal warnings:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nConsider the series of questions and answers his Web site, StephenKing.com, provides
\nfor fans. “Will he read my manuscript?” Nope. “To avoid any litigation problems, he
\nhas been advised by his agents not to look at any manuscript that has not been accepted
\nby a publisher.” Does he accept story ideas? “To avoid any litigation problems, he has
\nbeen advised … ” Can he help find an agent? “There being some legal problems with this … ”
\nYou get the picture. King has built a tall, spiked, wrought-iron fence around himself, and hung a
\n“Beware of (Rabid) Dog” sign on it.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nEh? I’m not aware of any<\/em> published author who reads strangers’ manuscripts,
\naccepts strangers’ story ideas, or helps strangers find an agent. If you know
\nof one, let me know<\/a>, because I sure could use someone to
\nhold my hand while I find an agent…\n<\/p>\n

\nNo, King is absolutely right about the legal problems, but let’s face it:
\nhe’s being polite<\/em> to use that as an excuse. I can’t imagine how many
\nsubmissions he would get from his millions of fans if he offered to read
\nmanuscripts… but I know it would put poor,
\noverworked Tim<\/a> to shame.\n<\/p>\n

\nI dunno. Salon.com must really be in its death-throes, publishing obtuse
\narticles just to provoke a response. After all, these days they’re presenting
\nproduct press
\nreleases as journalism<\/a>. It’s all downhill from here.\n<\/p>\n

\nThat’s about it. Oh, except I bought a copy of Windows 2000 and did a clean install on
\nmy PC. I thought that would solve certain issues once and for all, but it doesn’t
\nseem to have helped a bit. And here I was being good, not buying a cracked version of the OS.
\nI hate, hate, hate, Microsoft. That’s the last cent I pay them, ever.\n<\/p>\n

Edit, April 2003: Hang in there, Evan-from-February-2002. Salvation<\/a> is just around the corner…<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

God forbid you should come right out and say, “I like Terry Brooks!” “Orson Scott Card is A-OK!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}