Editing The Eyes of the Dragon (section)

==Reception==
''The Eyes of the Dragon'' was warmly received by professional critics. Barbara Tritel of ''[[The New York Times]]'' described ''The Eyes of the Dragon'' as drawing clear influence from European [[fairy tale]]s and wrote that the novel was "more elegant than any other novel Mr. King has written so far."<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/lifetimes/kin-r-dragoneye.html|title= What the Wicked Magician Did|last=Tritel|first=Barbara|work=[[The New York Times]]|location=New York City|date=February 22, 1987|access-date=February 25, 2014}}</ref> Some of King's established fans rejected the novel, considering it a children's book – King originally wrote the novel for his children.{{citation needed|date=March 2025}} Another reason for fan rejection of ''The Eyes of the Dragon'' was the fact that it was epic fantasy, with little to no elements of the horror that typified King's most successful work of this era.<ref name=Beahm1>{{cite book|last=Beahm|first=George|title=The Stephen King Story|year=1992|publisher=[[Andrews McMeel Publishing]]|location=Kansas City, Missouri|isbn=0-8362-8004-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/stephenkingstory00beah_0/page/136 136–137, 242]|edition=2nd|url=https://archive.org/details/stephenkingstory00beah_0/page/136}}</ref> Negative fan reaction to ''The Eyes of the Dragon'' was an inspiration for King's subsequent novel ''[[Misery (novel)|Misery]]''. The protagonist of ''Misery'' was a successful romance novelist who [[Kill off|killed off]] his most popular character to allow himself to write in other styles of fiction, only to be imprisoned by an angry, deranged fan; King saw ''Misery'' as a metaphor for  being chained to writing horror fiction.<ref name=Beahm1 />