Stephen King’s beef with this Telegraph journalist wins takedown of the week

John Plunkett. Updated September 6th, 2019

Stephen King didn’t take kindly to a Telegraph journalist who said he couldn’t write endings.

Here’s what a chap called Jake Kerridge had to say. Well, a bit of it anyway.

‘Reading a novel by Stephen King sometimes makes me think, oddly enough, of the 1956 Grand National. That was the occasion when the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch was forging ahead with elegance and effortlessness – until on the final straight he mysteriously collapsed.

‘A similar thing happens with King: over the course of hundreds (often many hundreds) of pages he puts in a thoroughbred performance that fully justifies his reputation as the best storyteller alive, only for everything to go to pot in the final chapters.’

King obviously read it – or someone told him about it – and decided to have his say on Twitter. Very effective it was too.

According to Jake Kerridge in THE TELEGRAPH, I can't write a good ending to save my life. If my life was at stake, I probably could. I'd just double space and write, "To his relief, he woke up and discovered it was all a dream." That would probably work.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 5, 2019

The caps make it even better.

Sorry to hear that this “author” thing isn’t working out for you Steve.

You’ll find your calling one of these days.

— Senator Swann Ronson, frmr Ambassador to Zamunda (@strat_nick) September 5, 2019