News:12 08 2007 King-Search

Für Stephen-King-Fans eine interessante Sache, für Studenten, Professoren und Journalisten ebenso: www.king-search.de bietet (in englischer Sprache) einen Service an, der die von Stephen King veröffentlichten Originalwerke, durchsucht.

Hierbei werden 98 % aller Romane, Novellen, Screenplays und Sachartikel berücksichtigt.

Ein Beispiel:

Stephen King erwähnt Dean Koontz in folgenden Werken:

• 1 x in: The Tommyknockers
• 2 x in: Desperation
• 1 x in: Bag of Bones (unproofed)
• 1 x in: Mauceri - Interview
• 1 x in: 60 Minutes - Interview
• 2 x in: King’s Blurbs
• 1 x in: What Stephen King does for Love
• 1 x in: Horror he wrote
• 2 x in: On Writing

Und hier sind die dazu passenden Zitate:

PASSAGES FOUND IN The Tommyknockers:

Bobbi was up there in Haven, up there right now. He saw her sitting in her rocking chair, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter-top over what boobs she had, which wasn’t much. There was a pair of battered old mocs on her feet and Peter was curled before them, deeply asleep. She had a book but wasn’t reading it. It lay open face-down in her lap (this fragment of vision was so perfect Gardener could even read the book’s title - it was Watchers, by Dean Koontz) while Bobbi looked out the window into the dark, thinking her own thoughts - thoughts which would follow one after the other as sanely and rationally as you could want a train of thought to run. No derailments; no late freights; no head-ons. Bobbi knew how to run a railroad.

PASSAGES FOUND IN Desperation:

“I’ve heard of him,” Cynthia said, “but I never read anything by him. I like Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel, mostly. I just read for pleasure. Nice bike, though. And the guy had great hair. Rock-and-roll hair, you know?”

He snorted. “ ‘Might have saw him.’ Did you learn that reading Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel?”

PASSAGES FOUND IN Bag of Bones (unproofed):

“And there are some surprise additions. Dean Koontz — ”

PASSAGES FOUND IN Mauceri - Interview:

Joseph B. Mauceri: There’s been some distressing news coming out of the publishing industry. Many houses are dropping their mid-list horror lines. If the trend continues, we’ll be left with Peter Straub, Clive Barker, F Paul Wilson, Dean Koontz and yourself. As both a writer and fan of the genre how do you feel about what’s happening, and is there a cure?

PASSAGES FOUND IN King’s Blurbs:

• Phantoms (1983) by Dean Koontz:
• Strangers (1986) by Dean Koontz:

PASSAGES FOUND IN What Stephen King does for Love:

Moby-Dick is a good example of a really bad high-school assignment. I remember my struggle with it in the eleventh grade as one long, low-grade migraine headache. It got so I had to double-clutch my gag reflex every time someone said the word “whale.” Now I find that many high-school English teachers have to double-clutch their own gag reflexes every time they hear my name or Danielle Steel’s or Dean Koontz’s. See what I mean? The bridge is down, and the water between these two land masses seems cold and full of things that bite.

PASSAGES FOUND IN Horror he wrote:

Nor are these necessarily the important people. For most developing readers, there comes a dangerous “dead spot” between the ages of 13 and 17. It’s that time when most young people put down the books of their childhood but before they pick up those of adulthood. As we know, many children never bridge that gap; when they become adults and we go into their homes, we will be apt to find Reader’s Digest, the National Enquirer, Jokes for the John, and not much else. Some children during that passage of years put down Nancy Drew and R.L. Stine in favor of Christie, Dean Koontz and perhaps Stoker. They are the ones who will stock their future homes with the current bestsellers of the moment and continue to provide Danielle Steel’s retirement portfolio with fresh stocks.

PASSAGES FOUND IN On Writing:

John Creasey, a British mystery novelist, wrote five hundred (yes, you read it correctly) novels under ten different names. I’ve written thirty-five or so - some of Trollopian length - and am considered prolific, but I look positively blocked next to Creasey. Several other contemporary novelists (they include Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, Dean Koontz, and Joyce Carol Oates) have written easily as much as I have; some have written a good deal more.

Stylistic imitation is one thing, a perfectly honorable way to get started as a writer (and impossible to avoid, really; some sort of imitation marks each new stage of a writer’s development), but one cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light-years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart. When you see a novel with “In the tradition of (John Grisham/Patricia Corn-well/ Mary Higgins Clark/Dean Koontz)” on the cover, you know you are looking at one of these overcalculated (and likely boring) imitations.

ALL QUOTES (c) BY STEPHEN KING.

Danke an Nicole für die Info