H.P. Lovecraft

Stephen King recently gave an interview to USA Weekend in which he made some interesting comments about Richard Matheson, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer:

King, whose Stephen King Goes to the Movies collection came out last week, doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains. “People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both 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.“

There’s a lot I’d like to unpack there, but I’m going to leave most of it for the pub’s perceptive patrons.  Just a few notes and questions:

• I find his description of response to Lovecraft interesting.  Is your response to Lovecraft similar to King’s, or different?
  
• Whatever you think of King’s writing (I happen to like it), he’s a guy who’s done a lot of solid thinking … ahem … On Writing. I don’t agree with all of this thoughts on the craft, but on the whole, On Writing is a must-read for aspiring authors.  This, in my mind, lends a bit of credibility to his assessment of Rowling v. Meyer.  Thoughts?
• Read the rest of the article. What do you think of his other thoughts on the non-threatening, “safe” nature of Meyer’s novels?
  

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