Somewhat inspired by the scary clown thread and the myriad recent Stephen King threads in Cafe Society, I decided to pick up his book “It”. Well, I just finished it, and now I’m left with a vague feeling of disquiet.
Somehow, a lot of the plot seemed right out of the Lord of the Rings.
[list]
() The villain “It” being an ethereal, non-corporeal entity.
() The
Your list of similarites seems to have been cut off, but it doesn’t matter because my answer would be the same either way:
The plot/details of LotR are so iconic (and were indeed intended to be) that it isn’t strange to see them echoed, sometimes eerily so, in other stories.
This isn’t because the stories are based on LotR or the author is question channelling the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s not even really a coincedence. Great as it is, groundbreaking as it was, LotR was never original even at the time it was first published, it was a story that was designed to be epic and iconic in the way all great myths and legends are epic and iconic. You see its themes echoed elsewhere because those themes are so universal, particularly within the realm of fantasty/horror/science fiction.
Duplicate thread. See complete version here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203389