Terminal acne, IIRC.
The woman I was dating at the time loved Stephen King novels. She was a sweet creature who volunteered at homeless shelters and the like. Commenting on this novel she said," It’s not just the man who gets thinner. There are two other people who get cursed and die, so that’s a good thing."
As King says, sometimes you gotta open that trapdoor to the subconscious and throw them some meat.
BTW – the two other cursed guys isn’t in the Ditko story, so if you’re looking for points of non-resemblance, there’s one. Or two.
FWIW, when I was in a high school writing class I had recieve an A+ on a short story I wrote about a prostitute who was a cyborg and exacts revenge on a homicidal fundamentalist that had planned to kill her as a sacrifice to god. I had borrowed a bit of the premise from a story I had read. (For the life of me I can’t remember who penned the original nor can I recall the title. Anyone remember something similar?) My teacher was well aware that I had done this but it was the fact that I turned it into my own words and added my own flavor that impressed him to the point that he gave me a 115% on the paper.
At any rate, getting back to King. I recall an interview, and I don’t have a cite, (sorry folks, I’m a little off today, no sleep) but he had in so many words admitted to an almost psychotic obsession with the macabre and that the seething evil which lurks in his brain is tempered by funneling it into the characters in his works. He did say something along the lines that if he couldn’t get it out by writing he could very well be a sociopath. Perhaps this is how he truly feels or perhaps it was just a clever marketing ploy. Who knows? But I think any avid King reader can certainly see certain characters that King most likely models after himself. Harold Lauder from The Stand comes readily to mind.
I feel I may have slightly hijacked this thread. I apologize. I’m hitting “submit” nonetheless.
At least somewhat similar: A story called The Moral Virologist from a collection called Pulphouse (sorry, I don’t have it on hand this moment.) It’s a story about a fundamentalist scientist who comes up with some sort of virus that will cause the death of anyone who has homosexual sex or sex with more than one person in his or her lifetime. The scientist goes to prostitutes and asks them to tempt him in order to test his moral strength. The scene I recall is when the scientist decides to explain his virus to a prostitute in order to get her to change her lifestyle, otherwise she will die. Hmmm…maybe not that similar after all, but a darn good story!
Couple of points:
Billy Halleck was a lawyer, and arguably part of the local power structure, but he had nothing to do directly with chasing the gypsies off. In fact, his daughter asks him about why the gypsies are being ousted from the town square, and he rationalizes to his daughter while guiltily thinking of the lies and half-truths he’s telling about the legality of the action. But he, personally, does nothing one way or the other.
He was driving while getting a handjob from his wife, Heidi, when the old woman, Susannah Lempke, shuffled out from between two parked cars and he strikes her. The local police, aware of his prominence, didn’t give him a breathalyzer test at the scene of the accident, and that made it look like a coverup. (The police chief, struck with his own curse, tells Halleck bitterly that he imagines if they had given Halleck a breath test, he would have failed - in other words, the chief was sure Halleck had been drinking, and contrived to keep him safe, not knowing that it would have been perfectly safe to test him for booze). He’s certainly guilty of reckless driving, but even if the police had rigorously investigated, they never would have proved it – and the old woman did jaywalk; there are laws forbidding it for precisely this reason.
Sounds like a darn good story, indeed! But no, that is not the one I “sampled”, if you will.
I have not read many of King’s more current novels with the exception of Bag of Bones and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Are there any examples of “borrowing” in his recent works?
Do you mean like Dreamcatcher, in which he borrowed the complete excremental output of every single bull and cow in the entire world?
The Langoliers was pretty darn similar (read almost the same) as an episode of The New Twilight Zone that I remember from the mid-80s, but i don’t know what the episode was called. In it, a group of people were traveling to places where time hadn’t gotten to yet or had already been, and people were building or taking apart the world.
That was A Matter of Minutes, based on the Theodore Sturgeon story “Yesterday was Monday”
http://tzone.the-croc.com/ntzeplist/minutes.html
I didn’t see or read “The Langoliers”. How similar is it?
Other people seem tyo think there’s a relationship. See here:
http://allentech.net/bookstore/item_B00068NVLQ.html
For the record, Sturgeon’s story appeared in 1941.
In the Langoliers, a plane flies through a ‘rip’ and everyone who wasn’t asleep disappears, except for anything “unnatural” like fillings, false teeth and plastic joints. They land at an airport where the condition is the same. There is a race to get back in the air and back through the rip before giant black “things” with pointy teeth eat up the leftover world and them in it.
Or maybe it was The World According to Garp . Damn stealers everywhere!
Are tales of gypsy curses really so hard to find, especially in horror stories? Offensive, yes, but rare?
How many gypsy curses have you heard/read about where a fat guy gets cursed with catastrophic irreversible weight loss? As soon as I hweard the idea behind the story I immediately had a flashback to that old Marvel comic. I’d bet any money that King had read it.
Well, he’s borrowed from himself many times, making references to previously released stories. Two that come immediately to mind are:
His novels and stories that happen in the Derry area of Maine often refer back and forth to each other.
And The Regulators and Desparados happen in the same universe, but those are more two volumes of the same story.
As The Chao stated above, King has always said (in more than just one interview - it’s a theme he repeats in his non-fiction works describing how he writes) that he has very little conscious control over what his ideas are. He can fix them up once they come out, but he’s not the type of writer who has been able to say “I’m going to write a story about this specific event” and then do it (except in the most general of terms - such as basing a novel on the Roland Childe poem). His standard response to the question “Why do you write about the things you do?” is “What makes you think I have a choice?” Which, if he’s being truthful about the process, implies to me that he has these ideas that churn around in his subconcious, germinated from things he has seen, heard, and read prior in his life. Borrowing is then unavoidable.
In “Garp”, his wife is giving her (high school? college?) student a BJ in the driveway of their house. Garp, after trying to call home from the movie theater, realizes his wife is cheating on him and races home with his two sons in the back seat.
Garp crashes into the car in the driveway, killing one his sons and causing the other one to lose an eye. I think he ends up breaking his jaw. His wife, meanwhile, bit her student’s penis off from the impact.
“Rose Red” is the bastard child of The Haunting of Hill House (fictional) and the story of the Winchester mansion (true)
One of the things you’ll hear authors say quite often is that ideas are close to worthless. What really matters is: can you make it interesting to read? I’m sure you’ve read some books that have interesting premises but turn to utter crap in the hands of the writer, while another author would have no problem turning the same idea into something wonderful. Most of the time, even significant borrowing is legal as long as the author acknowledges the source material and the story is not simply a copy of the original with some changed words.
I also have borrowed for my writing. It was actually a requirement for an assignment once. We had to re-tell a story from the those we’d read that semester and set it in a time and location that was familiar to us. I chose a story that was told in three parts, expanded the part I thought was most interesting, gave some more depth to the characters, and changed the story line slightly. When I was done, you could tell what my source material had been, but the story was substantially different from the original. Had the story still been in copyright instead of in the public domain, I probably would still have been able to publish it with no problem.
Except is was written by Ridley Pearson…
I have heard this often enough, and seen enough examples of stories written by different authors based on the same idea to agree. Read Arthur C. Clarke’s introduction to Stanley Schmidt’s The Web Between the Worlds. They asked Clarke to do it because he had just published The Fountains of Paradise, which is eerily similar. Clarke even points this out – both books are about the building of a “space elevator” made of especially strong single crystalline materials. The architect is the builder of the l;ongest suspension bridge in the world. The Car that carries people up and down on the cable is called “The Spider”, and so on…
In this case, it’s not hard to see convergent evolution at work – technology and the way it works practically forces a good hard-core Sf writer into writing the above scenario, so it’s not all that surprising that Clarke and Schmidt wrote very similar things at the same time…
What’s different about Stephen King is that he wasn’t being forced by tecvhnical circumstances to do this – he’s a fantasy horror author. What’s more, he didn’t come up with it at the same time. the examples of stories that seem so similar precede his, often by decades.
The whole point of my OP is that he seems, consciously or unconsciously, to have lifted the often very bizarre setups from other works. They’re so specific that I find it very hasrd to credit that it’s purely chance, or that this is just the kind of thing any horror author would come up with , given time. ASnd he’s done it repeatedly.
Looking up some of these things on the Internet, I found what purports to be a copy of Ray Nelson’s “Eight O’Clock in the Morning”. It’s a textbook case of how authors do different things with the same idea. In no way can King’s story be thought of as plagiasrizing. The Nelson story is incredibly short and lacking in detail. On the other hand, the similarity of events and especially of the title makes it impossible for me to think that this is even an unconscious borrowing. I just think that King was doing an homage and letting us knmow with that too-obvious title similarity.
**The Roots of Stephen King **
Stephen King has more than one root? :eek:
Damn. Now I know why he’s so wierd…