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.
[ul]
[li] The villain “It” being an ethereal, non-corporeal entity.[/li][li] The whole she-spider thing.[/li][li] The “band of kids” going on a quest with the fallible one (Stan) dying. [/li][li] The villain-on-the-side: Henry Bowers vs. Gollum.[/li][/ul]
And that’s just off the top of my head.
Was Stephen King “inspired”, IYHO?
Apologies for the the other thread. Hit Post Reply by mistake.
Anyway, to add on, there were also…
[ul]
[li] The two women for the hero, and[/li][li] One of the hero’s women eventually going off with another character (Eowyn-Faramir, Beverly-Ben)[/li][/ul]
Or am I reading too much into nothing?
(The “nothing” was not meant as a putdown for It…the book’s a decently told story.)
Well, yeah, ProjectOmega, it’s just that I found too many of them coming together in too similar a manner.
Like I said, I may be off-base. But I was curious if anyone else felt the same way. By the way, if you think about it, could you come up with any more similarities?
Those are all pretty superficial similarities (if you can even call them that) in two very dissimilar stories. I really don’t see what you’re getting at.
There are a lot of continuity errors in It, but I got no feeling of plagarism, if that’s what you’re getting at. In It, only a town is threatened, and the townspeople seem oblivious to it. In LOTR, the whole world is in danger.
Well, there’s the whole setting of a fictional town (Derry/The Shire) which very closely resembles a place in the real world (Bangor/Wales.)
Silver the bike = Shadowfax the horse? Maybe…
And that whole pointless kiddy porn scene in the sewers where Becky rides a train with all six boys, which closely resembles the love scene just before Sam & Frodo enter Mt. Doom…oh wait, that was from a slash fiction story I read. Never mind.
For the second one, you must be thinking of the movie. In Tolkien’s three books, which King may have been influenced by, there was no passion between Aragorn and Eowyn. A lot of fans of the books were outraged by that addition to the story for last year’s movie.
