Stephen King Calls ‘Twilight’ Books ‘Tweenage Porn’
Best-selling horror novelist Stephen King has never been a fan of Stephenie Meyer or her Twilight series, and those who agree with him will he happy to know that his criticisms have only aged like fine wine.
Lamenting the state of horror fiction today, King didn’t pull any punches. He called Twilight“tweenager porn,” and even blasted The Hunger Games as boring and derivative.
He did actually read them, he tells The Guardian. But out of professional interest only. “They’re really not about vampires and werewolves. They’re about how the love of a girl can turn a bad boy good,” he said of the Twilight books.
“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.”
He also talked a bit about another uber-popular novel series, Fifty Shades of Grey.
“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. But a golden age of horror? I wouldn’t say it is. I can’t think of any books right now that would be comparable to The Exorcist.”
So basically, books suck these days.
This isn’t the first time King has criticized Meyer for her writing. In 2009, he discussed Meyer’s inheritance of the young adult novel from J.K. Rowling, saying that 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.”
He continued:
People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, 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.
He added:
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.
Do you think that Twilight is “tweenage porn?”
[Images: WIkimedia Commons]
