I have thought about this for a while. There is an author who wrote dozens of stories featuring celebrities being tortured and snuffed. A lot of his writing was quite imaginative, but the use of celebrity names did make me uneasy, and so did his use of doctored photographs of those same celebrities to illustrate his stories.

Just because a celebrity has a famous name does not give anybody the right to associate it with their personal fantasies in a published story. Of course people have dreams, and dreams will involve celebrities as long as they personify some significant quality such as skill or beauty, in our minds. No celebrity can object to that.

What authors need to do is identify the qualities that they see in the celebrity, and use them in the story, rather than naming the celebrity. By doing this, readers can use their own imagination to conjure up a picture that goes with the story, and different readers may identify it with quite different images.

I regard the use of a specific celebrity name as intrusive - they have families too, don't they! But most of all it is lazy.

By saying, 'They bear a striking resemblance to Nikki Cox', is midnite saying that he is unable to describe Nikki Cox? Actually we don't want a photograph. We don't want Nikki Cox. We want those things that midnite sees in Nikki Cox that are relevant to the story line.