Everyone’s a critic, or so the saying goes, but one author seems out for blood. Stephen King stepped on teenagers’ toes with some barbed comments about Twilight author Stephenie Meyer in a new interview with USA Weekend. “Both [J.K.] Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people...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.” The Twilight series, he says, attracts a generation of girls by joining love and sex: “It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening.” King weighs in on other novelists, as well: Jodi Picoult is “terrific,” Dean Koontz “can write like hell,” although sometimes is “awful,” and James Patterson is “a terrible writer but he’s very very successful.”
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