Then you should love him now. Stephen King is the only truly big name writer I've ever known who had an editor removed for not editing his work enough.
You made two mistakes with this post. First, you assumed that I thought that King's work was poorly edited simply because he has a penchant for writing long novels. Worse, you had the temerity to assume that you could tell me that I "should" love a particular author.
Telling me what I "should" do is my wife's privilege, you see.
My beef with King doesn't stem from the length of his works. I prefer his "complete and uncut" edition of
The Stand to the version that was first published. I read long novels by other authors on a regular basis. And I have no business complaining about the length of other writers' work when the first draft of my own WIP weighs in at almost 300,000 words.
The reasons for my suspicion that Stephen King gets away with ignoring his editor(s) has nothing to do with the length of his works. It is my opinion that a competent and tenacious editor would have seen King
insert himself as a character in the last few novels of his Dark Tower sequence and say, "Don't frigging do that!" Likewise, he would have taken one look at
Cell and said that it was weapons-grade craps. If you're going to write a zombie apocalypse, come up with a better origin than a rogue signal from a cell phone.