A couple of months ago I made a post after a friend sent me pictures of multiple typos she was finding while reading Stephen King’s The Stand. As it turns out, there were so many throughout the novel that she sent the book to me and suggested I read it and highlight the typos as I found them. When the book arrived in the mail, I got straight to work. Keep reading, I’ll eventually tell you how many mistakes I found.
I can’t refrain from mentioning the first typo can be found in the PREFACE of the novel. Sad.
I found countless typos scattered throughout the text, like “idca” and “kow,” but I also found a plethora of other errors: missing quotation marks (I can’t tell you how many times I thought a character was still speaking when, in actuality, the narrator had taken over) and other punctuation, improper plural agreement (“two woman,” for instance), and even the misspelling of a celebrity’s name (“Alex Trebeck,” although the Jeopardy host’s name does not have a c in it). What I’m trying to say is, this book is grammatical suicide.
What amazed me more than anything is that the editor didn’t catch that two of the characters’ names were each spelled two different ways at various points in the text. Rita Blakemoor was sometimes Rita Blakemore, and Mother Abagail was sometimes Mother Abigail. Oh, and here’s my proof:
I challenge anyone to find more typos and grammatical mistakes in a published novel than I found in this one (tisk tisk, Signet Publishing). And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to my final error count: 48. Forty-eight mistakes in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax. The part that makes me sick is someone was paid to edit the darn book. I won’t claim to be perfect by saying my count is 100% accurate; but I will claim with absolute certainty that, had I been in charge of editing the novel, I would not have overlooked that insane number of errors.
On the bright side, the story is excellent. I highly recommend it!
Grammaniac 