Stephenie Meyer: More pale than the vampire on the cover of her book.

Stephen King recently told an interviewer how much he thinks Twilight author Stephenie Meyer sucks, and unlike me, he sounds like he’s actually read her books.

What started with an innocent question on the recent juggernaut success of fellow mainstream writers Meyer and [Harry Potter author] J.K. Rowling quickly devolved into a full-scale denouncement of the former’s skills.

“The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn,” he said. “She’s not very good.”

Possibly sensing the worldwide fallout, King went on to say that while Meyer’s writing may bite the big one, her storytelling is compelling…at least to a certain, less experienced segment of the population.

“People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s very exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual.

“A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

While King seemed to reserve his choicest words for Meyer, she wasn’t the only best-selling author eviscerated by him. On the contrary, King declared Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner “terrible,” Dean Koontz “sometimes…just awful,” and James Patterson “a terrible writer” who is nonetheless “very very successful.” [Yahoo]

Janitors at the convention center later discovered grafitti on the bathroom wall reading “JOHN GRISHAM SQUATS TO PISS”, but it was unclear whether King had been the author.