A lot can happen in five years. Stephen King is apparently not a fan of either the Twilight or Hunger Games series, and had no problem saying so during a recent interview with the UK’s The Guardian — but just five years ago, the horror genre veteran gave Suzanne Collins’ first Hunger Games book a glowing review.
“I read The Hunger Games and didn’t feel an urge to go on,” he told the paper, adding that the book is a bit of a knock-off of his 1982 novel The Running Man, a fictional sci-fi dystopia in which game show contestants are chased by “Hunters” employed to kill them.
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In a 2008 review of Suzanne Collins’ first book for Entertainment Weekly, however, King confessed that he “couldn’t stop reading” the novel. “Since this is the first novel of a projected trilogy, it seems to me that the essential question is whether or not readers will care enough to stick around and find out what comes next for Katniss,” he wrote at the time. “I know I will.”
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King also slammed Stephenie Meyer‘s hit series Twilight in the Guardian interview, calling it “tweenager porn.” He mused, “They’re really not about vampires and werewolves. They’re about how the love of a girl can turn a bad boy good.”
King, 65, added that he just didn’t enjoy the stories in either series — and the same goes for a certain popular “mommy porn” trilogy.
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“I read Fifty Shades Of Grey and felt no urge to go on,” he said. “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.”
One author that King applauds? J.K. Rowling. According to King, the Harry Potter author’s first post-series novel, The Casual Vacancy, deserves a read.
“Man, this book is like… 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 f–king nasty,” he said. “And I love it.”
