Stephen King says one of the best-selling book series of all time was so terrible that it made him swear off reading fantasy books, even George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.
King has never shied away from offering a candid opinion, whether that opinion involves fellow authors’ work or even the treacherous world of politics. So sharp is the pang of King’s unfiltered tongue, in fact, that dismissing a great work of art comes almost as easy as breathing for him these days. The best-selling novelist knows exactly what makes a story tick and what doesn’t, and he’s not afraid to let that be known, even if he happens to be talking about one of the most acclaimed books in the epic fantasy community.
King explains he would go on to regret that predisposition towards the genre as a whole, but it seems that picking up Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series really threw him off. This is what he told George R.R. Martin in a shared writers’ panel back in 2016.
“I had not read any of the Game of Thrones books,” he said. “I had kind of a thing, where I said to myself, ‘You know, I probably don’t want to read these things.’ Because I tried to read Robert Jordan, and I couldn’t read any of those books, and so I thought, probably these are just terrible.”
King ultimately decided to give it a try, and it ended up saving his life. Quite literally.
“[Reading Game of Thrones] It just carried me away. What I had not expected, the last thing I had expected from those books, is what page-turners they are. I just got lost. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I read the books, and then when I had to go and record this thing, I had the audio versions, and I’d plug in the CDs in the car. They saved my life man, so thank you.”
What King couldn’t have known is that George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan were actually great friends, and it was partly due to the latter agreeing to write a blurb for A Game of Thrones that Martin’s book achieved some marginal success in those early days.
Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time is a 15-book epic fantasy series taking place in a fictional post-apocalyptic universe. The story is very ambitious, the narrative over-encompassing and extensive, and the cast of characters number in the thousands.
It follows the tale of Rand al’Thor, an unwitting farm boy who gets thrust into the role of chosen one, destined to go mad and both save and destroy the world in his wake. The first book, The Eye of the World, was originally published in 1990, with the last volume, A Memory of Light, co-written by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s untimely passing, bringing the saga to a close in 2013.
The Wheel of Time has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, and a television adaptation by Amazon is currently bringing it to live-action on Prime Video.