Hail to the King, baby! (blog that other guy)

Meanwhile, in Mandal, Norway

Scene: Overly cluttered living room. Hateful man in front of computer. Cat not caring all over the place.

 

People of interest.

 

Man: Me. Possibly.

Cat: Potatobeak. Probably.

Man: What should we hate today, cat?

Cat: Mice.

Man: Yes?

Cat: And men.

Man: A hate of Mice and men? Really, that again?

Cat: Sorry.

Man: You should be. Go clean everything.

Cat: ....

Man: Did you hear me? Do something useful while I bask in glorious hate.

Cat: You know I have paws, right?

Man: Fair point, you may lick the dishes.

Cat: Also, I can't really talk.

Man: Right. Will this be like the time you wanted me to get Therapy? This is all in my head, sort of thing? Trying to get out of our responsibilities again, are we?

Cat: Why do I even bother.

Man: Why indeed. Today we will really like Stephen King and HATE Dean Koontz. Now, make me dinner.*

Hate

And that is why we really, REALLY like Stephen King and hate Dean Koontz today.

Because I can.

Stephen King is The King of modern literature. Read everything and maybe see some of the movies and series (some of the movies are terrible, but you can't blame The King for that). The end.

Now, Dean Koontz, on the other hand, how can I describe him? As an author I mean, I'm not 100% certain he is a bad person, he may only be slightly blogged up.

Let us call him the poor, uneducated, right-wing, conservative-christian, America-blessing, animal-loving-so-much-that-it-is-creepy man's Stephen King. I don't hate all his books, just most of them, and the author himself. Why have I read them, then? I was mislead, folly of youth, the cat made me do it, pick one.

The point is, the world is not brimming with great horror authors, so I try to check out the ones I come by. Also, I need to kill a lot of time at work, and so listen to a lot of audio-books.**

So as I was making my way through Koontz' catalogue, a disturbing pattern appeared. This part may contain spoilers, but don't worry, you won't read his books after this, anyway Ok, pattern.

Koontz is to horror, what C.S. Lewis is to fantasy.

Talking animals will appear, dogs in particular. Over and over. It's like going to blogging Narnia.

There will be a happy ending 99% of the time. Sort of like Narnia -“yey, Aslan lives!”***

The good guys always think they are damaged somehow, but it turns out they only needed some love and care. Love overcomes E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. -sigh-

If love doesn't overcome evil, then faith will. This may be, because the bad guys tend to be... hmmm... let's see now.... Satan. Or someone or something that thinks it is satan. Evil satanist cultists. Misguided scientists who try to undo the great lord's work with heathen science. Evil muslim terrorists. Evil satanist terrorists. Fallen priests. Russians. Or just plain evil psychos that are thrown in to be evil and have spectacular bad morals/core values. The supernatural and science is equally bad, and gets dealt with as such. Talking dog is happy, good guy finds love and much happiness. Such faith. Wow.

So what is the worst book? Hell, I don't know. The problem is that there is just so many of them, some of them are rubbish, some of them merely bad, and a couple of them are really good. I will not tell which. Either dig your own gold and suffer the rubbish or forgo the gold and the rubbish.

In the book Breathless, he just about says that Darwin was wrong and hooray for creationism. That one is just terrible. The single book that really made me hate the characters and the plot however, is Watchers.

I will now spoil the book. hate

Two creatures are created in a lab. One is a super-intelligent golden retriever. The other is a monkey-lizard-dog-monster. Dog gets lots of love, nice Doggy. Monster gets hate, ugly Monster. He is a monster and supposed to kill things. Monster is quite smart too, and kind of mad he didn't get to be a nice doggy. He got big teeth, a bucket of everything ugly and killer instinct. He hates Dog and mirrors in particular and everything else in general. The one thing they have in common, is their love for Disney cartoons, Mickey Mouse is their guilty pleasure of choice. Of course they both escape the lab. Stuff happens, the plot goes on. The only thing the Monster wants, is to kill that damned pretty Dog, kill people and smash mirrors, and perhaps come to terms with his life and ugliness, such as it is. Quite understandable in my book. Maybe a bit of misguided hate there, Dog did not create him, but hey, I get it. Now, Dog finds Hero-guy. Hero-guy finds pretty Abused-lady. They all move into a nice house and play weird family, blah blah blah. After overcoming impossible odds, Monster tracks down Dog to kill him, it will be his catharsis. Hero-guy shoots Monster over and over. Monster lies sobbing in the rain, dying. He keeps on saying (because Monster has taught himself to speak) “Hurt”, “kill Dog” and “kill me” over and over. In his claws, he clutches the god damn mickey mouse video tape that Family gave Dog for christmas. Monster stole it before he died, so he too could have something nice. WTF ?! I mean, come on! I want to re-write the entire book, have “The Outsider”, as they charmingly name Monster, kill Dog and become the King of Disneyland, where he would live happily ever after with Mickey sans mirrors. Stephen King would too, I'm sure of it.

Recently I noticed that the movie “Odd Thomas” got some attention in Empire. As admiral Akbar once said- It's a trap! I will now spoil this movie without having seen it. Odd Thomas is a series of books by Koontz. It is bad in schneaky way. The main character “Odd Thomas”,**** is the protagonist who will forever be faithful to his dead girlfriend (and thus remain pure), battle just about all of the arch-type villains I mentioned, more or less without weapons (and thus remain pure) and possibly make way for the second coming of christ. I shit you not. I also ruined the movie, you just don't know it yet.

I don't even want to talk about Koontz' Frankenstein books. Just say no, ok?

Now, just go and read all the books of the King instead.

“I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.” - Stephen King

“I love Titanic!” - Dean Koontz******

*This could explain why there is such a mess at my place. Potatobeak doesn't really pull her own weight. We need to have a talk.

**The only audio-book I ever left halfway through is Twilight. Could not do it. It was killing my brain, slowly. Haaaaaaaate

***I say blog Aslan and the stupid boat he came in on.

****I might make some sort of legal complaint. This should clearly be my name.

*****Possibly made up quote.