The man who gave us ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘The Shining’, ‘Misery’ and ‘Carrie’ – horror writer, all around long-time story maestro and Hollywood hero Stephen King has been accused of *gasp* plagiarism. Ron Marquardt‘s lawsuit against King and against King’s publisher Simon & Schuster says that the author copied from Marquardt’s 2002 Keller’s Den to create his 2008 novel – and New York Times number 1 bestseller Duma Key.

What can we say but SURELY SOME MISTAKE? Why would the King of Stories have to COPY from another book? Could it be that Stephen King’s run out of gas?

What has Marquardt’s book got that King’s has? For instance, “In Keller’s Den, the hypnotic state “controlled him like the talons of an eagle wrapped around a harmless garter snake (page 21).” In Duma Key, “I was like a bird hypnotized by a snake (page 447).”

Now, in and of itself, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But the simliarities carry on, not all of them convincing:

“Both main characters look at a blank canvas, waiting for the impulse, or the calling to determine what they will paint (Keller’s Den, page 212 – Duma Key, page 438).”

In fact, there are about 17 pages of similarities: there’s telepathy and bathtub drowing, and all sorts of good things that seem to be taken from the lesser, earlier novel.

The complaint, filed on 3 December, will await consideration from Simon & Schuster and King himself.