People often ask me my favorite author...which is an impossible question ..but I get the intent..so my answer is always "Stephen King …and Thomas Hardy"...
𝔰𝔦𝔩𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢
but I do wonder, is there a connection between these two wordsmiths?
Other than my questionably low brow and Gothic tastes?
Surely! and yes!...King loves to read and loves to talk, and so we have this random gem I found on the internet..
"Thomas Hardy...the only book of his I read (Jude) was so sad I not only never went back to it, but quit reading entirely for a while - but then I was 17"
Well, I shall take that as a compliment to my dear Mr. Hardy.
I feel a little less sure that Hardy would have been much effected by Stephen King's writing should it have suddenly appeared on his desk at Max Gate (via the time machine, of course) ..but still, to my mind they are complementary additions to the well rounded book shelf...
This correspondence between RL Stevenson and Henry James is amusing ..James isn't wrong, but misses the point of reading a Hardy. As an aside, I wonder how James would feel about the Netflix take on his "The Turn of the Screw"?...anyway, I suspect modern literary critics are missing the joy of reading King for pretty much the same reasons...
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1330&context=cq
Just to wrap up this odd flow of conciousnes....to all the customers who have left this shop with an unexpected Stephen King recommendation from yours truly...my apologies ..but trust me he's a great writer, in a much maligned genre, one which both Hardy and James would probably find themselves dabbling in were they born in this somewhat flawed, but nonetheless exciting modern age.
