With All Due Respect, Fuck You, Stephen King and Your Bullshit Tweet About the AV Club

I like Stephen King. I really, really like Stephen King. I think he’s a great writer in addition to being a staggeringly, almost inconceivably popular  author, possibly the single most commercially successful writer of the past fifty years. 

I don’t just like King as a writer, I like him as a person as well. He seems like a terrific guy, a bona fide mensch who reached the highest pinnacle of fame and power and success yet help onto the common touch. 

I don’t just like King as a writer and a man, I’m supremely grateful for him. For four magical years I had the honor of being a Scribner author, writing modestly selling books for the legendary publisher that has published DeLillo and Fitzgerald and Hemingway but these days makes much of its money from its best-selling author, Stephen King. 

King made so much money for Scribner that they were able to lose money on no-hopers like myself and The Big Rewind and My Year of Flops without going out of business. 

King’s astonishingly successful career as an author helped make my infinitely more modest one possible. Hell, about an hour and a half before I got very angry at Stephen King, to the point of blinding rage, I had just watched, and enjoyed, the pilot episode of Shudder’s Creepshow adaptation, a powerful and emotionally resonant metaphor about the monstrousness of alcoholism adapted from a King short story. 

The problem began, as it often does, when I went onto social media and encountered a tweet from King reading “There may come a day when some story I’m associated with—book, TV show, movie-will get a decent review from AV Club, but I’m not holding my breath.”

This fucking enraged me. 

With all due respect, fuck you, Stephen King. Why, for the love of God, do you care what the AV Club says about your work? Why does it matter to you? Why do you hold onto this grudge? You literally have everything a writer or creative person could ask for: fame, fortune, incredible power and a place in pop culture so vast and important that it is impossible to imagine the last fifty years of American movies, books and TV without you. 

Why is the AV Club’s approval and validation so important to you that you feel the need to take to social media to sourly grouse that you aren’t being treated with appropriate deference by a particular group of modestly compensated strangers?

It feels weird to be defending the A.V Club, a site I have quit twice in protest, the first time because I did not like the editorial direction it was heading, and the second time because it killed My World of Flops but it bears repeating: THE AV CLUB IS NOT AN ALL-POWERFUL MONOLITH EXCLUSIVELY DEVOTED TO ABUSING ITS AWESOME CULTURAL INFLUENCE. It’s a bunch of people in a dying, constantly fluctuating and contracting industry, many with wildly contrasting ideas about the world and how the site should be run, doing the best that they can to survive in a media environment that is brutal to the point of being impossible. 

Pop culture media is hanging on by a thread. Writers are hurting. Editors are hurting. Writers go to work every day knowing that it could be the last not just for them but the institution they write for. 

The AV Club are not bullies unfairly picking on the vulnerable likes of Stephen fucking King and it is insane and insulting for him to pretend that is the case. 

I have been able to leverage 22 years of non-stop, furious labor as a pop culture writer, 18 of which I spent with the A.V Club, into Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place a website that, as of today, has just under 600 patrons and pulls in less than three thousand dollars a month. I support my wife, two children and myself on that money. I do it because it is a labor of love but also because it is the only thing I know how to do.

So when Stephen King throws a pity party for himself over the fact that one pop culture website isn’t nice enough to him it’s not just maddening: it’s fucking insulting. 

You are a seventy-two year old man worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I encourage you to grow the fuck up and stop bitching about the AV Club and how they just won’t cut you a break.

Believe you me, buddy, I have ample reason to complain about the AV Club and I ain’t saying shit. Maybe you could learn from this broke, unemployable Juggalo’s noble, stoic example. 

Unlike Stephen King, I desperately, desperately need money so if you would consider pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace it would be super.