On pins and needles to see the plaintiff's response. Not that I think it'll make sense--exactly the opposite. Will it be creative writing or obtuse obfuscation? I can't imagine either causing any angst in the defendants' camp.
I suspect the proper alliteration to describe the plaintiff's response will be not "obtuse obfuscation" but "delusional denial" or possibly "batshit bonkers." After looking at his complaints again, I suspect the man is not merely ignorant but
insane.
It's possible -- I suppose -- that sheer ignorance combined with "never reading anything more detailed than the ingredients listing on the back of a cereal box" can lead a sane middle-aged man in AD 2011 to honestly believe "In all the history of the English language, I am the first writer to ever feature a character who asks another character 'What do you think?'" or "Nobody ever thought to write a character with a 'chemical imbalance' until my brilliant trailblazing self came along."
But his legal complaint doesn't merely list tropes and cliches which he thinks are his fresh and original creations; he is seeing similarities where they simply
do not exist. He wrote that a hypnotic state "controlled him like the talons of an eagle wrapped around a harmless garter snake," and thinks that sounds exactly like King's sentence "I was like a bird hypnotized by a snake."
And there's this list of alleged similarities:
"In Keller’s Den, Martin was speeding at 85 miles per hour
In Duma Key, Tom was speeding at 70 miles an hour or more
In Keller’s Den, Martin was driving along highway 13
In Duma Key, Tom was driving along highway 23
In Keller’s Den, Martin swerved to avoid a guard rail
In Duma Key, Tom drove into a retaining wall
In Keller’s Den, Martin found himself in mid-air
In Duma Key, Tom drove into a concrete cliff."
Crashing into a retaining wall, swerving to avoid a guard rail ... one of these things is not like the other, and if you can't see that, you are not merely an idiot but a
lunatic.
If Stephen King wants to be magnanimous, he could have his lawyer tell the idiot's lawyer "We
could counter-sue your client for legal costs, but we'll waive our right to do that if your client submits to psychiatric care and takes whatever medications are necessary to cure the chemical imbalance he so obviously shares with one of his characters."