King takes the axe to ‘tween porn’ writers

Stephen King has blasted best-sellers Twilight, Hunger Games, and Fifty Shades of Grey as his eagerly-awaited follow-up to The Shining hits the shelves.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was dismissed as “tweenager porn” while Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy was panned as derivative.

King — whose latest book, Doctor Sleep, is a sequel to 1977’s The Shining — also laughed off EL James’ work in an interview.

King said he only read the titles out of a professional interest.

“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 [my novel] The Running Man, which is about a game where people are actually killed and people are watching: A satire on reality TV.

“I read Fifty Shades of Grey and felt no urge to go on. They call it mommy porn, but it’s not really mommy porn. It is highly charged, sexually driven fiction for women who are, say, between 18 and 25.”

King was positive towards Harry Potter author JK Rowling, calling her non-Potter debut, The Casual Vacancy, “fabulous”.

“Do you remember Tom Sharpe? It’s a bit like that. And it’s a bit like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s fucking nasty. And I love it,” he said.

“The centre of the book is a dinner party from hell and you say to yourself, ‘These little people in the town of Pagford are a microcosm not just of British society, but Western society as a whole, of a certain class.’ The fact that she set it around this little election that nobody cares about in a shit little town is fabulous. She’s a wonderful storyteller and the writing is better than in any of the Harry Potter books, because it’s sharper.”

King revealed that after 36 years, he decided to pick up the story of Jack’s son Danny Torrance, who survived the surreal events of the original novel, because of intense interest from fans.

“People kept asking me,” said King. “I’d go to autograph sessions and they’d say, ‘Whatever happened to that kid from The Shining?’ And I’ve never been someone who wanted to revisit the past. In particular, I’m really leery about revisiting the scary books, because I feel like a lot of people read those books under the covers with flashlights when they were children themselves — 12, 14 years old.

“You meet people who say, ‘I read that book The Shining, or I read that book Salem’s Lot, and it really scared the hell out of me.’ And I’m thinking to myself, sure, you were easy. You were 14 and away from camp and shaking in your shoes.

“The fear is that people will come back expecting that kind of fear as grown-ups, and that just never happens.

“I was just kind of curious about what would happen to [Danny Torrance], because he was a real child of a dysfunctional family.”

King also revealed he was spurred on by a true story about a cat named Oscar who lived at a hospice and became famous for being the first to “know” when a patient was going to die.

“It always takes two things to get me going,” said King. “It’s like the cat was the transmission and Danny was the motor.”

The New York Times says Doctor Sleep is “scary enough to match the first book, though not better or scarier”. USA Today calls Doctor Sleep a “tour de force about family and redemption starring two of the author’s more memorable protagonists”.