Stephen King All Over the News (But in a Good Way)

April 10, 2008 at 1:11 pm | In Authors, Books | Leave a Comment
Tags: Joe Hill, Richard Matheson, Stephen King

I’ve seen Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, popping up in a lot of places lately. So here’s a roundup of King news.

According to Techdirt, Stephen King has spoken against the latest attempt to ban violent video games because of their so-called detrimental effect on children. King is very familiar with being banned, and he draws parallels between the evil video games of today and the evil horror comics of his childhood. There is always an evil bugaboo, but that bugaboo is usually a scapegoat for deeper problems that we’d rather ignore. In any case, the only people who should be making decisions about what to keep a child from reading/watching/playing are that child’s parents. So where are the parents?

In a survey on favorite books, The Bible took the number-one spot, of course, but King’s The Stand was number 2 for a lot of respondents. The Stand is probably my favorite King book as well. Other notable favorites were The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye.

Write to Done has a nice article on Stephen King’s greatest lesson for writers: to write fearlessly. This is one of the qualities I admire most about King’s writing, that he has always stretched and challenged himself, and even risked failure in the interest of trying something different. In fact, I criticized King’s latest book because I fear he has stopped writing fearlessly and is now playing it too safe.

Finally, King and his son Joe Hill are collaborating on a novella for a collection honoring horror author Richard Matheson, titled He Is Legend. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve also been enjoying the comic book adaptations of The Dark Tower; the second part of the series, “The Long Road Home,” features new material in the Dark Tower universe (sanctioned by but not written by King).