My Respect for Stephen King just went up several notches

On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now … and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel … I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ”

An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.

The difference, O Reporter and Brown Sycophant, is that King is humble about his work, whereas Dan Brown really does go around talking as though is slipshod crap is the work of One of the Great Minds of our Age. His whole schtick consists of telling his ill-educated herd of suckers that he is initiating them into the Inner Mysteries and that through his Flawless Research he is revealing the Hidden History of our Time. He’s a great prideful flim flam man. King knows he writes literary Big Macs. He also knows Brown writes crap. Brown lies and tells us he writes works of genius.

And dumb reporters doubling as ad men instead of journalists write ad copy for this crap and describe him as (cough) “the defining author of our time“.

What, pray, does he define? The death of common sense and moderately healthy literary taste? The guy’s a charlatan in every way.