Theorizing Stephen King 9048559618, 9789048559619

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction: Stephen King and His Critics
I Why Theorize?
1. Reading Stephen King through the Years: Theoretical Permutations
2. “Can’t someone else do it?”: An (Attempted) A-theoretical Reading of Needful Things
3. Stephen King and the Trouble with Poststructuralism
II Making Meaning
4. Reading Stephen King Religiously: Scary Stories and the Teaching of Religion
5. Stephen King’s and Peter Staub’s Mythmaking : Jack Sawyer as an American Hero
6. The Gospel (Paraphrase): King and Christian Epigraphs
7. Excursus on Suffering, Meaning, and Metaphysics in Stephen King’s Revival
III Adapting Stephen King
8. Cinematic Skeleton Crew: Adapting Stephen King in the Mid-1980s
9. Towards Infection: Viral Adaptations of King
IV New Critical Interventions
10. “Is Zelda dead yet?”: Disability, Mortality, and Narratives of Appropriation in Pet Sematary
11. “For you the sun never came back out”: Theorizing Trauma in IT and Gerald’s Game
12. Choosing to See: Gardening IT within The Upside Down without a Cord
13. “the tongueless voice of the temple whispered”1: Delirious Voices in Rose Madder
14. A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King
15. “A certain rough justice”: Stephen King, Digital Activism, and Donald Trump
16. Dead Is Better: Pet Sematary and Animal Studies
17. Author Functions: Stephen King’s Writers
Index

Citation preview

Theorizing Stephen King

Horror and Gothic Media Cultures The  Horror and Gothic Media Cultures  series focuses on the influence of technological, industrial, and socio-historical contexts on the style, form, and aesthetics of horror and Gothic genres across different modalities and media. Interested in visual, sonic, and other sensory dimensions, the series publishes theoretically engaged, transhistorical, and transcultural analyses of the shifting terrain of horror and the Gothic across media including, but not limited to, films, television, videogames, music, photography, virtual and augmented reality, and online storytelling. To foster this focus, the series aims to publish monographs and edited collections that feature deep considerations of horror and the Gothic from the perspectives of audio/visual cultures and art and media history, as well as screen and cultural studies. In addition, the series encourages approaches that consider the intersections between the Gothic and horror, rather than separating these two closely intertwined generic modes. Series editors Jessica Balanzategui, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University London, United Kingdom

Theorizing Stephen King

Edited by Michael J. Blouin

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Sydney Reeder-Wood Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 4855 961 9 e-isbn 978 90 4855 962 6 doi 10.5117/9789048559619 nur 674 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2025 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Dedicated to Tony Magistrale Mentor, Collaborator, Friend



Table of Contents

Introduction: Stephen King and His Critics Michael J. Blouin

9

I  Why Theorize? 1. Reading Stephen King through the Years: Theoretical Permutations

21

2. “Can’t someone else do it?”: An (Attempted) A-theoretical Reading of Needful Things

41

3. Stephen King and the Trouble with Poststructuralism

59

Tony Magistrale

Patrick McAleer

Michael J. Blouin

II  Making Meaning 4. Reading Stephen King Religiously: Scary Stories and the Teaching of Religion Douglas E. Cowan

83

5. Stephen King’s and Peter Staub’s Mythmaking: Jack Sawyer as an American Hero

103

6. The Gospel (Paraphrase): King and Christian Epigraphs

121

7. Excursus on Suffering, Meaning, and Metaphysics in Stephen King’s Revival

139

Daniel Compora

Rebecca Frost

Jacob M. Held

III  Adapting Stephen King 8. Cinematic Skeleton Crew: Adapting Stephen King in the Mid-1980s 159 Joseph Maddrey and Carl H. Sederholm

9. Towards Infection: Viral Adaptations of King Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels

181

IV  New Critical Interventions 10. “Is Zelda dead yet?”: Disability, Mortality, and Narratives of Appropriation in Pet Sematary

199

11. “For you the sun never came back out”: Theorizing Traumain IT and Gerald’s Game

219

12. Choosing to See: Gardening IT within The Upside Down without a Cord

237

13. “the tongueless voice of the temple whispered”: Delirious Voices in Rose Madder

251

14. A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King

267

15. “A certain rough justice”: Stephen King, Digital Activism, and Donald Trump

285

16. Dead Is Better: Pet Sematary and Animal Studies

305

17. Author Functions: Stephen King’s Writers

323

Index

341

Melissa Raines

Laura Mulcahy

Michael Perry

Theresa Mae Thompson

Greg Littmann

Philip Simpson

Sarah D. Nilsen

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock



Introduction: Stephen King and His Critics Michael J. Blouin

Abstract: The introduction establishes the purpose of the collection, highlights its thematic contours, and sets up the essays to come. Keywords: Harold Bloom, methodology, critical theory, literary criticism

Stephen King does not much care for English professors. Examples of his distaste abound. In his treatise On Writing, King bluntly states: “A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person” (143). He proceeds to dismiss the literary critics that dare critique his “symbolic simplicity” by posing the question, “What is this, rocket science?” (197). He repeatedly denounces these scholars as “little elites,” “avatars of high culture,” and “the ‘enlightened’ cognoscenti” (Playboy Interview 52–53). Throughout his storied career, King has insisted that most critics commit egregious errors in attempting to unpack the deeper meaning of his narratives. King also makes clear his distaste for academic interpreters throughout his fiction. The Tommyknockers depicts a horrific faculty gathering of pompous profs, each of whom behaves like a gluttonous animal. Lisey’s Story demonizes not one but two English professors: Professor Woodbody, with his wooden, self-important posture and a life wasted on “footnoted fool’s gold” (536), and Professor Dashmiel, a petty coward with an “I’m-an-assistantprofessor-on-my-way-up-and-don’t-you-forget-it” attitude—both of whom cause real harm for the titular protagonist (51). Under the Dome features the grating Thurgood Marshall, an adulterous, drug-addicted academic with a “fishbelly” and an “intelligence-to-exercise ratio [that is] out of whack” (366); by the end of the text, Marshall learns that emptying bedpans matters more than tenure or his insignificant contributions to obscure academic

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journals. More recently, Fairy Tale goes out of its way to lambast “‘hoity-toity’ academic writing, full of five-dollar words and tortured syntax” (183), while Holly foregrounds a cannibalistic scholar named Emily Harris, a serial killer who both figuratively and literally dissects her chosen targets. In these moments, and a host of others, King appears to be defensively striking back to discredit critics that dare to dissect his prose. One could perhaps attribute this antagonistic approach to King’s antipathy to institutional logic of all sorts, cultivated during his time as a college student in Maine during the 1960s; or one could perhaps attribute it to King’s strong sense of individualism as well as his tacit endorsement of certain neoliberal patterns of behavior that developed parallel to his successful career as a writer from the late 1970s to the present.1 Regardless of the specific cause, it is safe to assert that Stephen King routinely undercuts academics as the assumed gatekeepers of important cultural work. King’s most visible clash with a real-world English professor occurred when the infamously priggish custodian of the western canon, Harold Bloom, wrote a short, acerbic, and derisive introduction to a collection of critical essays on King’s corpus. Bloom’s hit piece posits that King’s success is proof positive that American culture is forsaken: “I cannot locate any aesthetic dignity in King’s writing” (3). Bloom derided King’s “earnestness” as un-artistic, and added, with a hyperbolic flourish, that King’s coronation marked “the death of the Literate Reader” (3). Considering the outright hostility that his popularity has generated in the halls of the proverbial ivory tower, it is no small wonder that King continues to express ill-will toward literature professors. But it should be noted that, even as he laments his second-class status in the eyes of the academy, King periodically wrings his hands at the situation: “I don’t think I ever will be taken seriously” (High Times Interview 205). The stand-off between King and some of his critics shows no sign of easing. The collection that follows brings together the leading scholars in the field of King studies in the name of reconsidering this relationship. As interest continues to grow in the study of King’s work, the time has come to reflect upon what has already been done (methods for reading King’s f iction) and what might come next—that is, the future for rigorous analysis of the author’s output. Accordingly, the collection is broken into four distinct sections: the first section contemplates the promise and peril of various methodological approaches to King’s corpus; the second section considers how King has helped American audiences to make meaning out of their 1

For a discussion of King’s relationship to neoliberalism, see Blouin (2021).

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cultural experiences for half a century; the third section delves into the countless adaptations of King’s texts and asks what adaptation studies contributes to this line of inquiry; the fourth and final section opens up exciting new ways to interpret King, from trauma studies to animal studies (and beyond). In sum, Theorizing Stephen King seeks to define the evolving field of King studies, to discuss the methodological challenges that confront his critics, and to (re)articulate the stakes of this ever-pressing question: “With fifty years of incredibly influential material by the author now in circulation, how am I to read Stephen King?”

How to Read Stephen King Critics might wonder how they ought to engage with King’s corpus. Does King taunt academia to shield his fiction from the prying eyes of the selfproclaimed literati? Is King’s caricature of the supercilious professor a fair one, or is it only further evidence of what Richard Hofstadter has described as the anti-intellectual streak in the United States? It remains difficult to know which one to mistrust more: Bloom’s Literate Reader, defined as Literate with a capital L and representative of the college-educated crowd, with its assumed disdain for popular culture, or King’s Constant Reader, defined as Constant with a capital C and representative of the so-called mindless masses. One can almost hear the gruff voice of the proverbial highwayman: which will it be—Literacy or Constancy? Increasingly relevant in the early decades of the twenty-first century, given a growing chasm between supporters of Donald Trump (a group that adopted the moniker Make American Great Again, or MAGA) and the “woke” crowd, a bloc that sometimes has little patience for what it dismisses as working-class backwardness, the antipathy on display in the feud between King and Bloom foreshadows the thrusts and parries exchanged in polemics penned by “coastal elites” as well as the aggrieved commoners imagined to occupy “fly-over country.” In his chapter for this volume, Philip Simpson ruminates upon King’s complicated relationship to MAGA via the author’s robust presence on social media. An enduring divide exists between King’s scholarly critics, on one side, and many of his most devoted readers, who stand apart from the relatively insular world of academia. Not without justification, the typical Constant Reader could choose to resist overly technical jargon and view the Bloomian crowd as shackled by institutional demands that lack “real-world” corollaries (tenure/promotion, department politics, and so forth). At the same time, and

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likewise not without justification, the typical Literate Reader could resist overly generalized readings of American culture by dismissing the Constant Reader’s analysis of King’s books as amateurish—the unsophisticated fluff of pure fandom; the Literate Reader theorizes Stephen King at risk of being labelled by her peers as a sell-out or relegated to the dustbin of disciplinary irrelevance. Although these two groups read King for different reasons, the faults that they find in one another tend to be based upon an assumption that there is only one reason that anyone should read in the first place: namely, to maintain the interpretive priorities of the group in question. Each group retreats into its own silo as the imaginative landscape flattens. Indeed, this simmering animosity speaks volumes to the troubled state of cultural criticism. A persistent Balkanization of cultural critique has been unproductive at best. Fortunately, I believe that King’s critics can do better. This collection of essays by King readers of every stripe cuts through the clamor in hopes of glimpsing higher ground: a richer world in which the art of reading can be magical and critical, Constant and Literate. Of course, it remains impossible for readers to analyze a piece of fiction without some kind of methodology, however haphazard or inconsistent that methodology may be. In the opening chapter for this book, Tony Magistrale, one of the longest-standing academic analysts of King’s fiction, surveys the dominant methodological approaches that have been employed by King’s Literate Readers. A good number of King’s critics over the years have applied an approach called myth-and-symbol, in which the scholar hunts down cultural symbols to decipher King’s contributions to an ongoing national mythos (an approach that remains “sociological” in the broadest possible sense). Other critics apply a model known as reader-response theory, first heralded by Stanley Fish, in which they paint a portrait of an intended audience and then view King to be catering to a specific set of concerns among his fan base. Still other critics of the author draw from a loosely defined psychoanalytical methodology by claiming to access the unconscious of King, or his reader(s), or both at once. And certain interpreters hold true to what has been described, unflatteringly, as the “intentional fallacy” by making extensive use of King’s countless interviews as well as commentaries upon his own work (as the reader of this introduction will likely notice, I have already committed such a “sin” in the preceding paragraphs). This type of reader holds f irm to the idea that, no matter what critics say, King’s intentions really do matter. Still, the fact that the intentional fallacy persists as a lodestar for so much of King studies warrants greater scrutiny, if for no other reason than that countless postwar literary scholars have labored tirelessly to debunk it. Knowingly or not, King’s readers

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tend to drift in and out of these diverse theoretical encampments, and so the widespread resistance to theory among King and his interpreters must be defined in concrete terms. When King and a cohort of his critics vocally resist theorizing, what precisely do they resist? And why? To be transparent, I have my own allegiances. My previous analyses of King’s works rely quite a bit upon critical theory. With that proclivity in mind, I would seize this opportunity to reference Michel Foucault’s influential lecture “What is an Author?” (1969) to complicate relatively facile deployments of the King name. Just how much does the critic owe to the flesh-and-blood man signified by the name Stephen King, a person with his own personality, history, and ever-evolving relationships to his environment? Jeffrey Weinstock’s closing chapter poses a related question as it delves into how King’s corpus engages in an ongoing commentary upon the role of writers. Does the name Stephen King signify anything more, or less, than a brand: a constellation of marketable tropes tied irrevocably to the demands of the literary marketplace as well as the profit margins of a Hollywood machine that relentlessly extracts profit from the moniker? The name signifies complex discursive constraints with which even King himself, in his more meta-moments, must do battle. He once noted, “Being a brand name is all right. Trying to be a writer, trying to fill the blank sheet in an honorable and truthful way, is better” (“On Becoming” 42). By bringing up Foucault’s concept of the author function, I want to insist that every assumption a critic can make about King as well as his work begins with assumptions about what the author’s appellation—his brand—actually means. Every analysis of King’s works should take as its foundation a thoughtful response to the King brand as a cultural phenomenon. After all, King remains one of the most frequently adapted authors in history. In their chapter for this volume, Joseph Maddrey and Carl Sederholm dissect the difficulty auteurs have had in transposing King from page to screen. The signifier Stephen King should be investigated with greater sophistication because, even though King does not always have a direct hand in adapting his own fiction, critics cannot isolate the literary brand “Stephen King” from its respective cinematic, televised, and streaming variants. Increasingly, King’s adaptations influence the author’s literary output, and so, as Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels demonstrate in their contribution to this book, the endless adaptation of King’s work can be compared to a sort of self-replicating virus. To theorize Stephen King is to move fluidly back and forth between mediums—from paperback to projector to streaming platforms (and back again).

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For example, Doctor Sleep, a 2019 adaptation directed by Mike Flanagan, must reckon with multiple sources, including the two novels penned by King, Stanley Kubrick’s canonical adaptation, and a 1997 television miniseries based upon a teleplay by King. It is worth noting here that King’s manifesto on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, spends more time discussing films than literary texts. King’s adaptations have become so ubiquitous, his reservoir of filmic references so deep, that he has spawned what I would describe as a style in its own right: the King-esque. Simply put, because it has become extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate the author’s legacy from the ever-growing tome of adapted versions of his work, spanning a wide array of mediums, one cannot adequately theorize Stephen King without the aid of adaptation studies.2 And if the Constant Reader never ventures into these admittedly murky waters, her interpretations of King’s works may prove to be little more than sycophantic devotionals. To modify very slightly the rally cry of the late Fredric Jameson, “Always theorize!” However, in their rush to “always theorize,” it can be argued that some Literate Readers have too quickly dismissed the staunch resistance to critical theory by King as well as his staunchest defenders. Scholars who look down their noses at an under-theorized field of inquiry like “King studies”—and, one must ask, has such a field truly defined its boundaries yet, beyond the hallways of a handful of academic conferences?— maintain that King is always-already unworthy of being theorized. From their vantage point, critical theory is best reserved for works of “high culture.” King’s suspicion that most academics are soporific elitists is re-enforced the moment that the Literate Reader follows Bloom’s lead and pooh-poohs King as only so much derivative dreck. In the spirit of open intellectual inquiry, King’s readers from all walks of life ought to entertain, in good faith, the following hypothetical: what if King’s antagonism of the literati is more than just sour grapes? In developing a theoretical grammar that alienates even readers who are making a good faith effort to find meaning in the books that they read, it can be argued that a number of Literate Readers, although surely not all, busily pave their own path to irrelevance and leave thoughtful Constant Readers with few places to turn but the arms of mass-market authors (figures commonly recognized due to their lack of subtlety, their appeals to intuitive trust between reader and writer, as well as their privileging of gut feelings over intellectual engagement). As theorists heap scorn upon popular culture as little more than escapist drivel, and paint its consumers as hapless dupes, 2

For a seminal discussion of King’s relationship to adaptation studies, see Brown (2018).

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King’s case against over-theorizing his work grows ever stronger. Unlike the stodgy literature professors of lore, King grants his readers permission to have a little fun, let loose, and enjoy what can be an otherwise insufferable human condition; this sentiment is conveyed nowhere more cogently than King’s Joyland, a book about the need to relax and be amused by the author’s carnivalesque output. Through King’s identification with subjects roaming outside of the ivory tower, he consoles his audience in a pastoral sense, marking them with an affectionate nickname (his Constant Reader) and then leading them into a mode of reading stripped of pretense. In sum, King artfully manages the ways that his works are meant to be interpreted. In their chapters for this collection, Rebecca Frost reveals how King uses Christian epigraphs to encourage a certain heuristic, while Greg Littmann unpacks how King appropriates as well as deviates from the aesthetics of fellow horror writer H. P. Lovecraft to orient readers within his cosmos. In a variety of ways, King strives to maintain control over how his texts are read.

King’s Trap Stephen King routinely lays a trap for over-zealous critics. To theorize King’s works is to mirror his unworthy English professors—yet to refuse to theorize King’s work is to act like the snobbish Bloom. To avoid this trap, readers in pursuit of greater meaning must trust King, which is to say, they must take him at his word, without sustained reflection, and obediently follow his lead by encountering his texts intuitively, as if his works are in fact “portable magic” (to borrow King’s well-worn phrase) and not works of literature to be rigorously critiqued. Loyal readers of King’s fiction are meant to be nothing if not Constant, poised and ready for the next offering. I offer as a representative example King’s novel Dolores Claiborne, in which a woman named Dolores, who has been accused of murder (twice), tells her own side of the events. In part due to its status as a confession, the book demands to be analyzed, in multiple senses of the term. Near the close of the text, a would-be analyst arrives on the scene named John McAuliffe, a county examiner that bears an uncanny resemblance to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. McAuliffe figuratively devours Dolores and plumbs her depths to tease to the surface the deeper meaning that he believes must be lurking within her account. Dolores vents, “That smart little Scots doctor … mad as hell at the idea of being beaten by an ignorant island woman” (310). This probing fellow reads a lot of mystery stories and fancies himself an “amateur detective” (303). The arrival of the cocky McAuliffe

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underscores King’s adversarial relationship with the literary scholar; like Dolores, King humiliates McAuliffe as well as any theorist who dares to try and “beat the house.” When King includes an array of appendices to prove that Dolores was not being deceptive, and that her account was the “authentic” version of things, he seems to laugh at any Literate Reader who has modeled their behavior on the behavior of McAuliffe by trying to uncover his book’s innermost secrets. These Literate Readers have been engaged in a pitiful act of misreading. Better to sit back and consume the story with a devoted heart, to marvel at its portable magic, than to behave like the penetrative McAuliffe. Dolores Claiborne maintains that critics violate the sanctity of King’s work, which remains—in fascinating, if problematic, ways—coded as “feminine.” In this way, King presents the English professor as both hyper-masculine and thoroughly emasculated, power-hungry and powerless before an all-powerful author (King himself). Once the trap has been sprung, Dolores Claiborne leaves the imagined literati with few opportunities for a breakout. For academics—or individuals that choose to read like them—King’s trap may be unavoidable. If the Bloomian critic takes King’s word for it, and treats King’s output as so many empty calories, as pleasurable stories without an intellectual agenda, she unwittingly assumes the posture of the corps d’elite and thus confirms King’s caricature of the egoistic scholar. But if the critic rebuffs King and treats his output as deserving of an interpretive goring, the critic invariably “over-reads” and comes across as being too clever by half. Either way, King saves the last laugh for himself because the overzealous critic is left with no way to engage with King’s corpus short of unwavering admiration. To imagine a way out of this trap—or, to understand this trap better—is the impetus of what follows.

King Studies and a Big Tent Mentality The mode of reading curated by King and his publishing team warrants neither automatic derision nor a slew of invectives. It can be argued that King treats his reader with something that a particular type of professor does not: respect. He also supplies his Constant Reader with a healthy dose of literate prose that references authors as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, William Butler Yeats, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, and many others. Moreover, King provides the pleasant illusion of rubbing elbows with his Constant Reader. When he occasionally attempts to be clever or “meta,” he quickly reassures his Constant Readers that they are not the target of his trickery; he saves

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his most acerbic jokes for his adversarial critics. In Theorizing Stephen King, analysts of King’s work that remain wary of critical theory have been invited to the table, and I maintain that it is worth hearing what they have to say. For example, the chapter by Patrick McAleer argues that theorists can become inflexible and dogmatic and as a result overlook King’s profound points. Likewise, the chapter by Michael Perry argues that academic writing, with its stiff trappings and conventions, may be a less compelling answer to the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence than King’s fantastical fiction. At the very least, a quorum of King’s diverse readers is overdue. The stakes of such a quorum are higher than they might appear upon first blush because when one considers King’s enormous appeal, as well as his tendency to inject a significant amount of literariness into his bestsellers, the inchoate field of King studies could prove to be atypical in its capacity to generate a Big Tent mentality among cultural critics of various stripes. King’s fiction probes into the existential questions that preoccupy human beings in every walk of life. Several chapters in this book identify these preoccupations. Daniel Compora, for instance, charts the archetypical patterns in texts like The Talisman, Jacob Held explores how King encourages his readers to find deeper meaning in their live, and Douglas Cowan reveals the complex relationship between King and America’s religious imaginations, especially when it comes to monumental questions about fear and hope. To theorize Stephen King is to reframe the difficult questions that most of us ask ourselves daily, regardless of our perceived Literacy or Constancy. King compels his audience to linger with core questions about what it means to be human. This volume provides King’s readers, new and old alike, Literate as well as Constant, with a set of tools meant to empower them to engage with his voluminous corpus and make ever greater meaning for themselves. In turn, King’s readers as well as his critics might cultivate more generous, gracious, and inclusive interpretive communities. Everyone will find something useful in the essays that follow. For firsttime readers of King, this book offers an array of novel critical frameworks with which to make sense of King’s f ictional universe: Laura Mulcahy interrogates the assumed unrepresentability of trauma in King’s works, for example, while Melissa Raines and Sarah Nilsen both return to King’s Pet Sematary, through the lenses of disability studies and animal studies. Meanwhile, Theresa Mae Thompson, who has written seminal essays on the subject of King and gender studies, returns to King to contemplate how the author at times tarries with what she calls “tongueless voices” that elude the patriarchy. For professional scholars with or without an affinity for critical theory, this volume affirms that King’s oeuvre remains a site for robust

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intellectual inquiry. For vested members of King studies, the conversation in the pages to follow provides an occasion to rethink King’s relationship to the academy as well as his legacy as a preeminent American writer. By theorizing more diligently their relationship to the author, King’s assorted readers facilitate a deeper understanding—of the author’s enormous body of work and, even more crucially, of the shared projects that bind them together.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Stephen King: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1998, pp. 1—5. Blouin, Michael. Stephen King and American Politics. U of Wales P, 2021. Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television, U of Texas P, 2018. “High Times Interview: Stephen King.” Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Grand Central Publishing, 1989, pp. 198—210. King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. Signet, 1993. King, Stephen. Fairy Tale. Scribner, 2022. King, Stephen. Lisey’s Story. Pocket Books, 2007. King, Stephen. “On Becoming a Brand Name.” Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Underwood Books, 1982, pp. 15—42. King, Stephen. Under the Dome. Scribner, 2009. “Playboy Interview: Stephen King.” Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Grand Central Publishing, 1989, pp. 24—56.

About the Author Michael J. Blouin, PhD is a professor of English and Humanities at Milligan University. His recent publications include Democracy and the American Gothic (2024), Stephen King and American Politics (2021) and Stephen King and American History (2020). He currently serves as the editor for the Popular Cultures Studies Journal. Blouin’s primary research interests are horror, popular culture, and critical theory.

I Why Theorize?

1.

Reading Stephen King through the Years: Theoretical Permutations Tony Magistrale

Abstract: A detailed overview of the relationship between critical theories and their influence on major work by Stephen King over the past fifty years. The theories that are applied to King in this essay include: Marxist, psychoanalytic, mythic—particularly Jung and Campbell—archetypes, feminism, critical race and ethnicity, ecocriticism. While not privileging the importance of a single theoretical orientation over any other, this brief survey argues that certain literary theories are more productively aligned with King’s fiction at specific points during his career than at others. Keywords: theory, uncanny, mythic journeys, feminism, race, ethnicity

Reading Stephen King through the shifting prism of literary theory is fraught with complications and qualifications, even as particular theories open the potential of enriching our comprehension of his work. King himself has often chafed against criticism delivered by English teachers who (at least in his mind) tend to overanalyze fiction, most notably his own: “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear” (“Why Hollywood”). Despite similar admonitions posted throughout his long career, the author has also been receptive to certain theory-based arguments—such as those available in popular feminism or mythic archetypes, which, in turn, have influenced the composition of several of his novels. But what about other, less obvious critical positions? What new insights do we gain when his fiction is scrutinized in the context of, say, psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, racial studies, and other theoretical orientations? Is King’s relentless critique of American military-industrial capitalism, for example, enhanced by a knowledge and application of Marxist principles?

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King and Politics King’s books are full of political and social commentary, yet there is little direct evidence in his fiction of the kind of political activism that has played such a large part in the writer’s personal life.1 On the one hand, he has provided his enormous readership with portraits of dangerous autocrats and the consequences of their commitment to rigid conformity. In fact, speaking generally, every monster in the King universe—human and supernatural—embodies anti-democratic, proto-fascist values. On the other hand, we would be hard-pressed to f ind an example of a hero or heroine in possession of a leftist or even an overtly progressive ideology to which that character remains determinedly committed. In his prescient review of King’s initial work, Robin Wood recognized as early as 1979 that while “the horrors of the King world are the horrors of our culture writ large, made visible and inescapable,” his “critique of Reaganite America (is) plainly reactionary” (271—72). King’s protagonists are typically apolitical, leaning liberal rather than conservative, especially considering the current American ideological spectrum, but they are essentially uninvolved and uninterested in political movements or theory. In The Stand, arguably King’s most overtly political book, Glen Bateman, the associate professor of sociology bearing an incongruous MFA degree, comes closest to revealing King’s own sociological orientation; Bateman’s pessimistic views on human beings living in harmony with one another point the way to a traditional Yankee autonomy that warns against the dangers inherent in societal compliance. Bateman’s perspective, supported by the novel’s two new societies in Las Vegas as well as Boulder, suggests that as any society grows larger, the positives diminish, and the negatives accrue: “Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? … Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get 1 This is a convoluted topic worthy of its own essay, as the Stephen King who entered the University of Maine was not the same political being who graduated. Radicalized by his association with the leftist group SDS as an undergraduate, King “decided the war in Nam was your basic death machine run by politicians who could probably no longer get a hard-on” (Hearts in Suspension 30). What King learned in college has fed his commitment to grass-roots progressive politics throughout his adult life. The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, established in 1986, for example, awards grants in support of projects “that address the underlying causes of social and environmental problems, as well as those that address the consequences.” For a broader analysis of King’s politics, consult Blouin’s Stephen King and American Politics and Magistrale and Blouin’s Stephen King and American History, chapter 5, “The Vietnamization of Stephen King,” in particular.

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back home” (387, author’s emphasis). Bateman’s position is the prototype for understanding King’s political theorizing, ultimately highlighting the sanctimonious value of American individualism to which King’s most important protagonists adhere. In texts such as ’Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, Desperation, Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, Doctor Sleep, and The Tommyknockers, for example, the zombie-vampire becomes a symbol of the loss of individuality and conformance to an intruding, alien consciousness; the progressive degradation of individuals into a spiritless mass of hungry undead completes the moral disintegration of the community. In Storm of the Century, Bateman’s worry over the capacity for societal corruption is illustrated in a utilitarian course of action that saves Little Tall Island at the expense of a single child and his family. The island’s communal decision to doom this child instead of taking the more difficult—and potentially lethal—ethical stand against Andre Linoge’s evil manipulation is an indication both of its inability to rise above what Jacob Held has described as “the ego grabbing hold, overpowering, and driving one to do the unthinkable” (282), ultimately freeing the island from the obligation to undertake difficult moral choices. The greatest legacy that the 1960s counterculture left with King as a post-Vietnam novelist may be the reaff irmation of a Yankee faith in the vitality of the individual, the ability to maintain a moral center at variance with small-town/group conformity and especially those interloping authoritarian f igures found at large roaming his landscapes. As government reveals itself to be a less dependable source of trust and stability, and the microcosm of his towns in Maine prove suspectable to destructive secrets and a stupefying groupthink, King’s characters f ind themselves left on their own, thus internalizing an individualist rather than collectivist view of citizen and society. Postmodern America reveals its corruption in the many debased institutions King holds up to scorn throughout his canon, most egregiously in the government’s duplicitous military actions to undermine the welfare of its citizens in The Shop (Firestarter), the Arrowhead Project (The Mist), the Vietnam War (Hearts in Atlantis) and the scientific agency responsible for creating and unleashing the superflu (The Stand). Yet, King’s typical heroes and heroines—Stu Redman, Mike Andersen, Bill Hodges, Johnny Smith, Dick Hallorann, Dolores Claiborne, Carol Gerber—while all members of the working class, share no awareness of a common class consciousness and f ind no solidarity with their fellow proletariats. King’s own personal neoliberalism and his acute criticism of military-industrial capitalism notwithstanding, Marxist theory holds no more sway over his heroes

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and heroines than does the far-right orientation of Randall Flagg in The Stand or Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone.2

Psychoanalysis and The Uncanny At the midpoint of his career in 1992, I shared an interview with King where I asked him about various mythic and psychoanalytical theories—how much was he influenced by them, and which theoreticians in particular? He cited immediately the importance of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces as “a wonderful book that definitely had some effect on me” (Magistrale, King: Second Decade 3). When I pressed him further, he also acknowledged, “A writer would have to come in very late on the movie of the twentieth century and not have his work influenced in some way by Freud … You can use his theories to advance the importance of dreams. You can use them to advance the plot. As a Freudian, I’m a real opportunist. I’m more apt to use the theories to advance my ideas rather than to use my ideas to explore further the theories” (4). Evidence of Freud’s impact on King is readily available throughout the latter’s canon. In a novel such as Gerald’s Game, for example, the main character, Jessie Burlingame, finds herself handcuffed to a bed, the result of a sexual encounter with her husband that goes horribly awry. Most of the book is a psychoanalytic retreat into her repressed memory of a past molestation event involving her father. The novel employs the metaphor of sexualized bondage as a means for connecting that single, quasi-incestual moment she has repressed to her current relationship with her husband, and men in general. After Gerald’s untimely exit in the first chapter, the plot moves inside Jessie’s head. And because of her current physical situation, Jessie is essentially tied to examining her misogynistic past. As she processes a way out of her bondage, real and metaphorical, she incorporates all the tools typically available to a psychotherapist who would seek to help her to recognize and overcome what she has spent her adult life suppressing: 2 One way of contextualizing King’s f ierce commitment to individualism is perhaps best described in Hari Kunzru’s discussion of the movement away from class-struggle organization of the 1960s and toward the philosophical promotion of personal individualism so characteristic of the 1980s. American group solidarity so necessary to Marxist/socialist politics was challenged by the emergence of a “culture of personal growth, [where] political identity became just one among many other forms of self-expression, a turn to lifestyles that led [Americans] out of the left altogether, toward neoliberalism and the logic of enterprise and competition” (Kunzru 48). This national shift occurred coincidentally at the very moment King began publishing his major fiction in the mid-to-late 1970s.

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dream analysis, a deep-seated father complex, sexist objectification, body image ambivalence, reconciling her career abandonment with the failure to become a mother, and a reconnection with lost female friends—including a younger version of herself (“Punkin”)—who help put her in a position to reinterpret events long denied and left unactualized. The consequence of her prolonged self-analysis is a recognition that she has spent her life betraying and ignoring “feminine truths” in herself and from her girlfriends, while conforming to pornographic images constructed to attract and arouse men—the “too small and too tight” sundress her father prefers the day of the eclipse (138) and the collusion between the bound “damsel in distress” and Gerald’s sexual arousal (6)—all of which result in Jessie’s choice at the end of the book “never to go to bed with another man” (298). Maladjusted sexualities surface repeatedly throughout King’s canon, a veritable Freudian stew of childhood and spousal dysfunction that frequently involves incest and sexual abuse. One of the things Freud has taught us is how difficult it is truly to know oneself. The multiple ways in which shame and projection undermine our most intimate relationships and personal identities cannot be told too many times. King has been producing portraits of the dynamic that has lately been termed “toxic masculinity” for decades; they appear in his various characterizations of fathers and husbands who are seldom capable of recognizing, much less ameliorating, their toxicity. David Skal opines that “pervasive fantasies of intergenerational abuse have more to do with the baby boomers’ shifted resentment of their own children—not to mention their own parents” (362). Violence against women, other men, and themselves has a kind of frantic energy that speaks to a deep-seated sense of masculine disappointment and exasperation, a gendered trap where boys and men are taught historical definitions of masculinity that center on omnipotence, denial, and control. Through these fictional portraits the sensitive reader is encouraged to ask: what exactly is being passed down from one generation to another? Little wonder that so many of King’s males are not only frustrated failures—how could they not fail given these core principles?—but are also left to confront alcoholism, drug addiction, dysfunctional families, and degrees of mental illness. Freud’s use of the uncanny presents us with the most specific and most prolific psychoanalytic association evinced in King’s canon. Even if this novelist was not consciously influenced by Freud’s essay “On the Uncanny,” his reliance on multiple Gothic constructions of the haunted house (das Unheimlich), ghosts, doubles, omnipresent sentient inanimate objects, and disturbed psyches suggests immediate correspondences. In The Shining alone, the proliferation of doppelgänger (e.g., Jack’s identity mirrored in the histories

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of his father and Delbert Grady, as well as the cross-connections between Jack Torrance and Stephen King), various manifestations of id eruptions (e.g., the hotel as an extension of Jack’s repressed unconscious), and a cross-generational history of involuntary repetitions of alcoholic and violent behavior underscore King’s fascination with characters wrestling with disruptive pathologies. Jack’s selfhood is certainly placed in crisis though his identification with the history of patriarchal abuse at the Overlook, but it is likewise clear that such behavior originated in Jack’s childhood and, as for Jessie Burlingame and so many other King characters, his past continues to haunt his present. The novel tracks Jack’s unresolved Oedipal crises as the son steadily transforms into his father. As Jeff Ambrose points out, the act of remembering trauma in King’s fiction becomes trauma: memory becomes a monster (139). Freud’s fundamental association of the uncanny with an abrupt awareness of childhood fears—“that class of the terrifying that leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud 1–2)—contributes to define Jack Torrance’s psychic deterioration in The Shining. Chapter 23, “In the Playground,” illustrates the uncanny nexus that the hotel encourages between Jack as an adult who seeks control via reason over the disturbing events his mind exaggerates at the edge of the playground, and the neurotic child terrified of nursery fables and fairy tales brought to ominous life. While Jack begins his exploration of the hotel’s playground surrounded by identifiable childhood toys—a slide, swing set, cement rings, a playhouse scale model of the hotel itself, a topiary made to resemble various animals—his initial fascination transitions into terror as his adult mind is overwhelmed by the familiar turning suddenly unfamiliar. All these objects rekindle in Jack a memory of when “his old man took him to a park in Berlin when he had been Danny’s age” (207), but on this occasion they fill the adult with awkward dread because they are imbued with a sinister aura. The hotel thus draws Torrance back into his past, and when he attempts to go down the playground slide he discovers the harrowing nexus between adult and child: “He pushed off with his hands and went to the bottom, but the trip was unsatisfying … His ass was just too big. His adult feet thumped into the slight dip where thousands of children’s feet had landed before him” (208). Angst, according to Dylan Trigg’s interpretation of Freud’s “Uncanny,” is the primary sensation produced by evidence of the uncanny; it is tied to a disruption in time’s sequencing, an inner repetition-compulsion, and an interruption of the current moment by an intrusion from the past (Trigg 319). Moreover, Jack’s own dreamy “unsatisfying trip” back to adolescence contains a farcical edge, an unanticipated grim humor—Freud describes the uncanny as “irresistibly comic”—at the same time as it unnerves Torrance

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with its “daemonic character, very clearly expressed in the tendencies of small children” (Freud 11). Trapped between these two states of development, one conscious and rational and the other unconscious and therefore repressed, and further aided in his delusions by the active supernatural agency of the hotel itself, the innocuous topiary he set out to trim transforms into something aggressively animate: “Part of his mind tugged fretfully at him, tried to make him detour around the hedge animals” (212). The chapter signals Jack’s vulnerable descent back to his own traumatic childhood—a theme central to the remainder of the novel’s psychology, as memories of his father begin to emerge for the first time in this chapter summoned by the hotel’s uncanny power to tap into Jack’s repressed and unfulfilled adolescent neuroses. Avril Horner characterizes the uncanny as “the fear which derives from the helplessness experienced by one who continually finds himself confronting that which he desires escape” (250), which is an insightful way of reading Jack Torrance. Examples of the uncanny exist to suggest the hotel’s growing influence over Jack as it pursues his psychic fragmentation. His actions in the playground contribute to a cyclic pattern connecting him back to the terrifying masculinity of his own father (who is elsewhere in the story linked to the fairy tale “Bluebeard”) while also preparing him to recognize and identify with the mythic archetype of the “Bad Father” as a reference point for his own parenting. Since Freud and Jung were both so impressed with the importance of fairy tales, it is relevant to point out how often King adapts specific fairy stories for use, especially in The Shining and throughout his fiction.3 As King notes in Danse Macabre, “The mythic, ‘fairy-tale’ horror film … urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites” (184–85).

Mythic Archetypes The impact of mythic theorists—specifically, Campbell, Frazier, Jung—represent the most incisive theoretical paradigms for interpreting King’s work, particularly those books published with Doubleday during the first half of his career. The Stand, Firestarter, The Talisman, The Body, IT, especially the seminal The Dark Tower, and more recently Fairy Tale share common ground 3 See Ronald T. Curran’s excellent intertextual analysis of King and Jung, “Complex, Archetype, and Primal Fear: King’s Use of Fairy Tales in The Shining.”

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insofar as they weave a vast historical, mythological, and social matrix into epic quests. While these fictions present a macrocosmic view of postmodern America, providing journeys to the center of a post-Watergate/Vietnam heart of darkness, the adventures in which the main protagonists of these books engage follow patterns that conform closely to the nuclear monomyth defined in the theories of Jung and Campbell—specifically, as my interview with King reveals, to Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Typically, a young male departs his place of origins, embarks on a long and dangerous road quest, encounters magical realms and dark challenges that he survives only at the expense of his innocence and in the sharpening of his wits, and ultimately returns to his community a changed person: separation—initiation—return. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell 23). The Body is just one of several King narratives that conforms to this mythic paradigm, but it is probably the best example. While Teddy and Vern take away little from their confrontation with Ace and the dead child Ray Brower, Gordie and Chris deepen their values of loyalty and bravery in the face of both danger and death. (Events that involve water, or the crossing of water appear frequently as milestones associated with confronting death, e.g., the train suspension bridge, the leech pond, the Royal River, and the final confrontation over Brower’s body.) Out in the wilderness, the two boys transcend the limitations of adolescence through their confrontation with adversity together, coming to a more mature appreciation of death and grieving, and consequently emerge more ready to enter into adulthood and realize the dream of social mobility. However, it should be noted that Campbell’s conclusion regarding the hero returning to his community to “bestow boons on his fellow man” is antithetical to the strong anti-societal individualism earlier noted throughout King’s work; at the end of The Body, Chris is murdered when he attempts to intervene in a dispute between two strangers in a fast-food restaurant while the adult versions of Vern and Teddy end up trapped in the cruel banality of Castle Rock. Whatever “boons” are left to bestow fall to Gordie exclusively in his transformation into a father and writer. It is virtually impossible to read many of King novels without an appreciation of Campbell’s mythic structures. (King even references Campbell’s construction of the “Hero” directly in his 2021 book Billy Summers [17], evidence of just how long and deeply King has drunk from the Campbell myth pool.) The individual quests may vary from reclaiming a mother’s

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life (The Talisman) to restoring worldly balance by sustaining the Beams that hold it together (Dark Tower) to the more recent wormholes that provide King protagonists portals to access the historical past and other realms in 11/22/63 and Fairy Tale. In each case, the young hero undergoes a similar process leading to something resembling what Jung labelled “maturation.” King’s fictions, most notably his earliest work, rely heavily on Jungian archetypes. 4 According to Jung, archetypes emerge as components of the collective unconscious and serve to shape meaning by virtue of recurring images and recognizable character types. In King’s hands, the horror novel offers a means for revealing archetypes of the id as well as the collective unconscious. Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower, a prime example, embodies multiple features the psychoanalyst associated with the “Hero” role, at the same time as he is also representative of the “Outsider” insofar as he engages in a journey quest loved by no one and with no one for him to love. Jung’s formulation of the “Shadow” persists in Roland’s own dark side, those repressed aspects of himself which he does not acknowledge nor confront directly, as well as in the villainous man in black who is likewise conceived as a “Shapeshifter” and linked in these volumes to Randall Flagg and the Crimson King. It is certainly possible to appreciate The Dark Tower without applications of such archetype-based parallels, but since King himself so clearly relied on them in the plot’s larger composition, recognizing their shifting presence throughout the epic only enriches the reading experience. Any theoretical discussion of The Dark Tower provides an opportunity for linking King to the tenets of ecocriticism, as many of his novels, especially those with epic tendencies, tend to explore the ravages of a polluted America exacerbated by the co-existence of fantasy projection-parallel universes that bear the various names of Territories (Talisman), Mid-World (Dark Tower), even 1963 (11/23/63). These imagined places feature environments lush with sparkling waters, food with deeper flavors, air that smells like 4 Geoffrey Cocks informs us that in addition to Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson both read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales prior to co-writing the screenplay for their film version of The Shining (32). Bettelheim employs Freudian and Jungian analyses of various fairy tales and myths that Kubrick and Johnson recognized as omnipresent in King’s novel and worthy of further exploration in The Shining’s screenplay. “Only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence … myths and fairy tales give symbolic expression to initiation rites or other rites de passage—such as a metaphoric death of an old, inadequate self in order to be reborn on a higher plane of existence” (Bettelheim 8, 35).

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watermelon—reminders of a premodern past before the assault of pesticides, pollutants, radiation, and the influx of too many machines and people transformed America into a deforested wasteland. King is seldom recognized as an environmentalist, and I know of no attempt to examine his fiction through an ecocritical lens, but novels such as The Talisman, Black House, Roadwork (Bachman), and multiple volumes of The Dark Tower set up deliberate contrasts between mythological worlds and real-world environments that have undergone such deterioration that cancer is confronted as both a serious epidemic as well as a cultural metaphor. King’s early writing in the Bachman novels is riddled with characters suffering from various stages of cancer and cancer-haunted subplots (the novel Dreamcatcher was initially titled Cancer). The pristine beauty of the Territories in The Talisman, for example, is meant to contrast with what modern technology has created in degrading the contemporary American landscape. It is significant that the protagonist Jack Sawyer’s closest friend in his journey westward is a werewolf—half man, half beast—implying that Jack’s sensibilities have enlarged beyond the human sphere to the point where he has come to respect all living beings. Before he can restore the wasteland, King implies, Jack must learn to appreciate what has been sacrificed in its place. Thus, many of King’s epic adventures are also fierce ecological statements dealing with the “re-enchantment” of a world relentlessly dis-enchanted by capitalist exploitation; if the wasteland is to be renewed, it will require the worldview of a child, a poet, or a fantasist to do so. As we witness the devastation rendered by climate crisis occurring across the globe, the rational voice of eighteenth-century man, refined and bolstered by the technologies of our own time, have proven inadequate to the earth’s preservation, and must be counterbalanced by the medieval magic of a pre-modern world.

The Feminist King From the start, feminist scholars have observed that the roles King has traditionally allotted women in his fiction, and specifically female sexuality itself, are patronizingly restrictive and frequently negative. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was the first to lament that “it is disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength of vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty” (65). In a seminal essay evaluating King’s women characters, Mary Pharr opined that “King’s women are reflective of American stereotypes … his most convincing female characters are precisely those who are least threatening to men … and

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those who refuse either their social role as wife or their biological right to be a mother are always destructive in the end and always isolated from humanity by that destruction” (23). In his earliest novels, King’s males dominate the gender spectrum: ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, Christine, The Body, the initial volumes of The Dark Tower, even The Stand relate the narrative from a masculinist point of view. The women in these books are limited because they are seen through the central male protagonist’s subjective, socially constructed perspective. The protagonist-heroes in King’s fictional microcosm reflect the prejudices of the 1950s era that King grew up in—and thus feature young, white, male, middle-class American Everymen. Texts such as The Shining and Pet Sematary in particular reveal a repeated pattern of husband-fathers harboring desperate urges to flee the restrictions of domestication and marriage, a masculine desire to escape wives as suffocating mothers that often expands into a revulsion of the feminine—and to avoid it by indulging the forbidden lures of male bonding secrets, including alcohol, violence, and unholy revivifications. Ironically, as these King males stray ever further from the stabilizing world of women and children, they confront an isolating supernatural surrealism and pay a severe price in the destruction of their personalities and mental health. In books published since Misery (1987), and especially in a collection of female-centered narratives throughout the 1990s—e.g., Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder, Bag of Bones, and Hearts in Atlantis—King has labored to create more complex and less predictable female characters. Until the 1990s, King’s landscape was populated almost exclusively with heroes rather than heroines. By contrast, the women in his “feminist” fiction differ markedly from female characters who appear in King’s earlier canon. These later wives and mothers are situated at crisis points in their lives where they must either rise above their oppression or capitulate to it entirely.5 In narratives from the 1990s, the various supernatural monsters that proliferate 5 Although Carol Gerber is neither a wife nor a mother, her role in Hearts in Atlantis continues to intrigue as a result of her response to masculine violence—first as a child victim of bullying and, later, as a protester against the Vietnam War—conducting her life from the position that “there’s a price to pay for hurting people, especially people who are smaller than you and don’t mean you any harm” (418). Carol is the nucleus of this novel: “Carol was the one who didn’t sell out” (523); she forces all the men in it to confront their consciences over Vietnam. One of the most nuanced female characters in King’s canon, Carol’s response to the war begins as a vigorous protest in opposition to its insanity and concludes in the loss of her own sanity. Gerber’s storyline epitomizes the larger forfeiture of Atlantis, embodying the scarred memory (literally marked on her face) of those whom this nation sent to fight and die, but also the aggrieved collective psyche of the generation at home that experienced Vietnam’s horror vicariously.

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throughout the King multiverse coalesce into monstrously human fathers and husbands who haunt the landscape of domestic tragedies. Moreover, these “New Women” usurp the narrative point of view that formerly belonged exclusively to King’s male protagonists. Dolores Claiborne, for example, completely eschews King’s traditional third-person narratology to provide Dolores with an autobiographical voice and consciousness. This departure from the writer’s typical omniscient point of view to a first-person monologue marks the importance King is willing to invest in legitimizing Dolores’s perspective and the domestic issues her narrative explores. Dolores’s distinctive voice appears, then, as a direct rebuttal to Karen Hohne’s early lament that King’s women “are never allowed to speak themselves, to make themselves with words. They get little dialogue; their speech is generally flat and undistinguished or stereotyped” (330). Feminist analysis has abundant material to address in Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder, Bag of Bones, and Hearts in Atlantis. In some capacity, these books not only speak to King’s effort at redressing the limitations of women characters elsewhere in his canon; they also speak to a relentless misogyny within the American family that reduces girls and women to sexualized objects. The appearance of father-daughter incest in several of these plotlines is both a nod to Gothic’s three-hundred-year obsession with the subject at the same time as it reveals the secret sin of contemporary fathers and husbands. While King is seldom included, if ever, on the syllabi of Women Studies courses,6 in mid-career he produced a series of strong women characters who effectively counter the erroneous conclusion issued in 1998 by Lant and Thompson that his female characters “have really not come a long way from the politically and discursively powerless times of their disenfranchised mothers and grandmothers” (6). The women in 6 This underscores a prejudice deserving of commentary. I think that too often King is viewed superficially as just another male horror writer who has nothing to contribute to the curricula of Women’s Studies courses, an oversight worth pointing out especially considering the novels that emerged during the apex of his “feminist” period. To my knowledge, a Stephen King novel has yet to find its way onto the syllabus of any class specializing in women or gender studies, probably because these courses tend to prioritize women’s voices that have been historically marginalized. Whether this is reflective of the ironically conservative nature of political correctness guiding most Gender Studies curricula or just a stubborn refusal to view King as a writer capable of addressing issues relevant to such programs, his exclusion is an unaddressed legitimate concern. The earliest novels of King, because they are so representative of a prefeminist, 1950s-era dominant male consciousness, might someday find a home in Masculine Studies; Jack Torrance and Louis Creed are variations, after all, on the theme of masculinity in crisis, “horrifying revelations of what being a heterosexual male within patriarchal culture entails” (Wood 267).

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these books do not remain mere victims of the patriarchy; they also find a way to self-rescue through the bonds they create with other strong females.

Ethnic and Racial Bungling There is plenty of evidence in support of King’s efforts to create more multidimensional women protagonists as his career progressed. Perhaps the truism that middle-aged males begin to explore their “feminine side,” especially after multiple years of raising daughters and being married to a woman, are additional explanations for the novelist’s confidence in developing more engaging female characters. However, this degree of evolution makes King’s protracted failure to produce more nuanced and complex ethnic characters even more egregious. There exist serious holes in King’s racial and cultural portraits. For starters, every time an Italian American male (there are no women) appears in one of his novels, King links him to some level of stereotypical involvement with either a pizza shop, eating pasta, or with the Mafia. From Sal Magliore, the name of the gangster who supplies Barton Dawes with illegal explosives in Roadwork, to Vito “the Chopper” Gienelli and Charles “Baby Charlie” Battaglia in The Shining, to Georgio “Georgie Pigs” Piglielli in Billy Summers (note this writer’s compulsion to belittle further these Tipi duri with quaint Mafioso sobriquets), there is not a single Italian American in the King canon that manages to break free from American popular culture’s criminal and pejorative stereotypes. “Gypsies” fare no better in the novel Thinner, succumbing to prejudices that link them to toxic curses and relentless punishment. The legacy of Native Americans in Pet Sematary, The Shining, and Firestarter is pressed into plot relevancy because of its cultural exoticism and present-day trespassing violations orchestrated by white, male Americans, while Hispanics and Jews (except for Stan Uris in IT, whose fear is so abject that he commits suicide rather than risk a return to Derry) are largely unrepresented in his fictional microcosm. King suffers from myopic impairment towards all these ethnic groups, some of the last remaining “acceptable” American stereotypes, that disturbingly resembles his predisposition against homosexuality.7 All of 7 See Magistrale and Blouin in Stephen King and American History: “There exist no gay male or lesbian relationships that are portrayed as mature, morally responsible, or loving. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of this novelist employing homosexuality as a metaphor for oppression and otherness, a point acutely apparent in King’s treatment of male homoeroticism that crosses into the worst stereotypes of homosexuality: predatory pedophilia” (111). For an

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these limitations serve to illuminate the writer’s working-class origins and Maine’s own postindustrial psychic landscape as the whitest state in America insulated from the large-scale impact of ethnic diversity other states have experienced. The white supremacist Tucker Carlson, for instance, has elected to live in a compound in Bryant Pond, Maine, and once broadcast his Fox News program from there. Many Mainers tend to be very insular and wary of outsiders; politically, the state is broadly conservative, so its racial and ethnic issues are deep-rooted, and the dispossessed tend to be the LGBTQ community, ethnic minorities, and those outside its (Irish-Anglo-Saxon) middle-class and blue-collar white population, the demographic aligned with King’s own background and most of his fictional heroes and heroines. Over the years, King has expressed his dissatisfaction with the “superblack” capacities he tends to invest in his African American depictions, even as Black characters certainly occupy more important roles than those assigned to Italian American males. (Indeed, this essay is, to my knowledge, the first time King’s Italian American stereotyping has ever been held up to scrutiny, which further underscores its superficial place in his oeuvre.) The centrality of African American characters throughout his canon, ironically, contributes to the problem as their individuality and agency are sacrificed in service to narrative designs; just as his treatment of Native Americans focuses on white appropriations of their ancient burial grounds and little else relevant to their culture, Black characters remain essential plot devices, subservient to King’s larger thematic purposes. In his 1983 interview with Playboy magazine, King acknowledged that Hallorann, the cook in The Shining, and Mother Abagail in The Stand “are cardboard caricatures of superblack heroes, viewed through rose-tinted glasses of white-liberal guilt” (Playboy Interview 47). Unpacking this comment reveals that in his self-critique, despite his best intentions, King has created “caricatures”— sainted Black characters devoid of real identity or independence. Mike Hanlon’s position in IT is reduced to that of a sentinel: while his white friends are permitted to abandon Derry, repress their adolescent trauma of the place, and further insulate themselves by becoming rich and famous adults, Mike’s self-imposed exile requires him to remain behind in dismal Derry monitoring levels of violence in the city and summoning the others when Pennywise reemerges. He is the only member of the Losers who remains fully cognizant of the club’s collective pledge to continue their fight against Pennywise, but unlike his white friends, this comes at the expense alternative attempt to view King and homosexuality in some of his lesser-known work, see Kennedy (2015) and Yankovich (2022).

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of Hanlon’s choice to marry or to experience a full adulthood. Following the example of a young Dick Hallorann, Trev Dawson, and his own father, who rescued several of the of Black burn victims at The Black Spot in the 1930s, Mike Hanlon emerges as a paragon of bravery and self-sacrifice. His commitment, however, ultimately proves to be less about saving the few Black citizens of Derry than to salvaging the town’s future generation of white children. The role of Black characters when they appear in each respective novel thus conforms to a similar pattern: never central protagonists, these characters serve as secondary sidekicks who aid and often rescue the embattled white protagonist(s). As Spike Lee pointed out years ago, King’s Black characters are invested with great powers to cure disease and impart wisdom, but “they use these powers [solely] for the benefit of white people” (Lee). This is true when discussing Hallorann, Hanlon, and Mother Abagail as well as similar depictions in John Coffey (Green Mile), Speedy Parker (Talisman) and Jerome Robinson (Mr. Mercedes).8 King thus relies insistently on the figure of the “superblack” or “Magical Negro” in his novels to reassure white masculinity while also assuaging his own white-liberal guilt. In fact, the entry for the term “Magical Negro” in Wikipedia begins with a reference to King’s Green Mile. Like the many critics that have recognized John Coffey’s stereotyped role in this book and film,9 Linda Williams reaches an unsentimental conclusion: “What is striking is the remarkable extent to which the establishment of white virtue rests upon the paradoxical administration of pain and death to the Black body so that white people may weep” (20). King’s consciousness of the “Magical Negro” as a trope present throughout American literature—from Stowe’s Uncle Tom to Twain’s Jim—does 8 A notable exception to the “Magical Negro” trope appears in one of the more vital female characters to emerge from King’s canon, Susannah Dean in The Dark Tower. Susannah holds her own linguistically and militarily as the sole female member of Roland’s ka-tet, and she chastises anyone who disrespects her as Black, disabled, or a woman. It is important to note, however, that although she is clearly associated with being female—especially in the climactic “plate” battle that ends Volume V: The Wolves of Calla—her racial identity is less easily deciphered. The fact that she is Black is complicated by her split personality when she makes her appearance as Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker in Volume II: The Drawing of the Three, and ultimately her Blackness throughout the epic is revealed as far less germane than her presence as a skilled warrior. 9 See Brian Kent’s “Christian Martyr or Grateful Slave? The Magical Negro as Uncle Tom in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile,” Sarah Nilsen’s “White Soul: The Magical Negro in the Films of Stephen King,” Tania Modleski’s “In Hollywood, Racist Stereotypes Can Still Earn Oscar Nominations,” and Heather Hicks’s “Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film.” Although these essays speak to the film adaptation of The Green Mile, their arguments are nevertheless relevant to King’s source work.

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not excuse his perpetuation of it; it may, however, explain the reason he began relying on the construction in the first place. In her essay “Reading King Darkly: Issues of Race in Stephen King’s Novels,” Samantha Figliola posits that King has remained highly cognizant of Leslie Fiedler’s famous racialized insight in Love and Death in the American Novel and has sutured it into his own fiction, “returning to the romantic pairing of white youths with ‘savage’ mentors again and again, drawn to its ideological possibilities … As surrogate parents King’s Black characters educate their ‘children’ to seek alternatives to the many evil institutions that surround them” (147). This comment brings us full circle back to the brand of political liberalism that is most evident in his f iction: Black characters are always benign and noble, and their true purpose is to teach naïve white protagonists (as well as King’s readership) about the horrors of war, environmental degradation, white hypocrisy, recurrent patterns of historical violence, and racism. Scott Woods argues these good intentions (in King’s mind) “allow him to wade into discussions largely shielded by a privilege even most White people will never experience, while at the same time absolving himself of any [racial] wrongdoing because he thinks he’s at least ahead of the political curve.”

Conclusion Specific literary theories are more productively aligned with King’s fiction at specific points during his career than at others. Mythic, political, and psychoanalytic approaches prove especially valuable when applied to the first two decades of his writing—the best of the Doubleday and Viking narratives penned from a young, hungry artist seeking urgently his place in the world. There is a sense of foreboding and imminent danger in the early King novels. The Stand, The Shining, Pet Sematary, and IT are examples of what King can do when he pushes his writing to the limit, conjuring “the poetry of fear.” In the following decade of the 1990s, feminist principles inspired King’s work and provided his Constant Readers with narrative contexts for understanding it. These theoretical paradigms became less essential once The Dark Tower was finished. I do not mean to imply that King’s publications in the new millennium stop being relevant, but by the time The Dark Tower reached completion in 2012, the writer had produced what will be his most important and lasting contributions to American fiction.

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Works Cited Ambrose, Jeff. “Memory as Monster: Remembering and Forgetting in Stephen King’s IT,” Encountering Pennywise, edited by Whitney S. May, Mississippi UP, 2022, pp. 135–48. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Vintage, 2010. Blouin, Michael J. Stephen King and American Politics. U of Wales P, 2021. Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008. Cocks, Geoffrey. “Stanley Kubrick’s Magic Mountain: Fiction as History in The Shining,” Central European History, 2022, pp. 1–23. Curran, Ronald T. “Complex, Archetype, and Primal Fear: King’s Use of Fairy Tales in The Shining.” The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 33–46. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Stein and Day, 1975. Figliola, Samantha. “Reading King Darkly: Issues of Race in Stephen King’s Novels.” Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic, edited by Elisabeth Anne Leonard. Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 143–58. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. Held, Jacob M. “From Desperation to Haven: Horror, Compassion and Arthur Schopenhauer.” Stephen King and Philosophy, edited by Jacob M. Held, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, pp. 277–97. Hicks, Heather J. “Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film.” Camera Obscura, vol. 18, 2003, pp. 27–55. Hohne, Karen A. “In Words Not Their Own: Dangerous Women in Stephen King.” Misogyny in Literature, edited by Katherine Anne Ackley, Garland, 1992, pp. 327–45. Horner, Avril. “Unheimlich (The Uncanny).” The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. 2nd ed., New York UP, 2009, pp. 250–51. Kennedy, Lois. “As Gay as Old Dad’s Hatband: The Five Kinds of Gay and Bisexual Characters in Stephen King’s Writings.” Horror Novel Reviews, 16 Dec. 2015, https://horrornovelreviews.com/2015/12/16/as-gay-as-old-dads-hatband-the5-kinds-of-gay-and-bisexual-characters-in-stephen-kings-writings/. Kent, Brian. “Christian Martyr or Grateful Slave? The Magical Negro as Uncle Tom in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile.” The Films of Stephen King from “Carrie” to “The Mist,” edited by Tony Magistrale, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 117–30. King, Stephen. Bag of Bones. Scribner, 1998. King, Stephen. Billy Summers. Scribner, 2021. King, Stephen. The Body. Different Seasons. Viking, 1982. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Gallery Books, 2010. King, Stephen. The Dark Half. Viking, 1989.

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King, Stephen. The Dark Tower. Eight volumes by various publishers, 1982–2012. King, Stephen. Desperation. Viking, 1996. King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. Viking, 1993. King, Stephen. 11/22/63. Scribner, 2011. King, Stephen. Firestarter. Viking, 1980. King, Stephen. Gerald’s Game. Viking, 1992. King, Stephen. The Green Mile. Signet, 1996. King, Stephen. Hearts in Atlantis. Scribner, 1999. King, Stephen. Hearts in Suspension. U of Maine P, 2016. King, Stephen. IT. Viking, 1994. King, Stephen. Misery. Viking, 1987. King, Stephen. “The Mist.” Skeleton Crew. Viking, 1985. King, Stephen. Mr. Mercedes. Scribner, 2014. King, Stephen. Needful Things. Viking, 1991. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Doubleday, 1983. King, Stephen. [Richard Bachman, pseud.]. Roadwork. New American Library, 1981. King, Stephen. Rose Madder. Viking, 1995. King, Stephen. ’Salem’s Lot. Doubleday, 1975. King, Stephen. The Shining. Doubleday, 1977. King, Stephen. The Stand. Doubleday, 1990. King, Stephen and Peter Straub. The Talisman. Viking, 1987. King, Stephen. “Why Hollywood Can’t Do Horror.” Entertainment Weekly, 7 July 2008, https://ew.com/article/2008/07/07/stephen-king-why-hollywood-cant-do-horror/. Kunzru, Hari. “Socialists on the Knife-Edge.” New York Review of Books, vol. 69, 18 Aug. 2022, pp. 46–49. Lant, Kathleen Margaret, and Theresa Thompson. “Introduction.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Lant and Theresa Thompson, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 3–8. Lee, Spike. “Director Spike Lee Slams Black Stereotypes in Today’s Films.” Yale Bulletin & Calendar, 2 Mar. 2001, http://archives.news.yale.edu/v29.n21/story3.html. Magistrale, Tony, and Michael J. Blouin. Stephen King and American History. Routledge, 2021. Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade: “Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half.” Twayne, 1992. Modleski, Tania. “In Hollywood, Racist Stereotypes Can Still Earn Oscar Nominations.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 Mar. 2000, https://www.chronicle.com/ article/a-flawed-film-critique/. Nilsen, Sarah. “White Soul: The Magical Negro in the Films of Stephen King.” The Films of Stephen King From “Carrie” to “The Mist,” edited by Tony Magistrale, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 131—42.

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Pharr, Mary. “Partners in the Danse: Women in Stephen King’s Fiction.” The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 19–32. “Playboy Interview: Stephen King.” Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, McGraw-Hill, 1988, pp. 24–56. The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson. Warner Brothers, 1980. Skal, David. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Plexus, 1993. Stephen King’s Storm of the Century. Dir. Craig R. Baxley. Teleplay by Stephen King. ABC-TV, 1999. Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Ohio UP, 2012. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama in Black and White: Uncle Tom and The Green Mile.” Film Quarterly, vol. 55, 2001, pp. 14–21. Wood, Robin. On the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Wayne State UP, 2018. Woods, Scott. “Stephen King Needs More Black Friends.” Level.Medium.com, 15 Jan. 2020, https://level.medium.com/stephen-king-needs​-more​- black​ -friends-5547f245d424. Yankovich, Margaret. “‘A Sudden Upheaval of Beauty or Terror’: Body Horror and Abjection in Stephen King’s IT,” Encountering Pennywise, edited by Whitney S. May, Mississippi UP, 2022, pp. 63–78. Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. “Cinderella’s Revenge—Twists on Fairy Tales and Mythic Themes in the Work of Stephen King.” Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, New American Library, 1982, pp. 45–56.

About the Author Over the past three decades, Tony Magistrale’s twenty-six books and many articles have covered a broad area of interests. The majority of his books have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. He is frequently cited in scholarly books dealing with the interdisciplinary aspects of American horror art.

2.

“Can’t someone else do it?”: An (Attempted) A-theoretical Readingof Needful Things Patrick McAleer

Abstract: This essay allows alternative readings (and even alternative theories—game theory, theories of collecting and collections, theories of manufactured markets) to take the spotlight from, say, Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) as it attempts to open up King’s texts and remove them from typical methods of theorizing. There is much more to King’s novel Needful Things than a monster’s masterful manipulation of a small town through a bastardized, yet still effective, “free market” (“caveat emptor!”). Keeping Marxism and economic considerations on the sidelines can help the Constant Reader better understand the people, and not just the machinations, of the text. Keywords: blame, greed, accountability, delusion, manipulation

As Stephen King has arrived at the fiftieth anniversary of the start of his career that came with the publication of his first novel Carrie, his Constant Readers, academics among them, often look at his immense body of work with a sense of awe. Among other things, there is general fandemonium alongside nostalgia as King’s presence in the minds and homes of the American populace takes readers from Watergate to the post-Covid American social-scape wherein King continues to frighten and entertain through his writings (including pithy musings posted to his Twitter/X account). The academic audience, in particular, continues to look at King and his works with eyes towards not just lending credence and credibility to the insights and intellect that form each text, but also towards finding new and illuminating pathways into the fiction so as to facilitate discussions that assist with meaningful interpretations. To that end, Needful Things is, by

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch02

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and large, a “forgotten” King text, in the same way that Roadwork tends to be forgotten as one of the Bachman Books or Elevation remains a relative footnote in King’s otherwise illustrious career. It should go without saying, however, that in this realm of the under-appreciated, there remains much to be said and unearthed within King’s canon, and Needful Things is as good a place as any to (re)discover King’s brand of horror, humor, and incisiveness. Written after King began recovery from his various addictions and within the shadow of a decade of opulence as well as change, Needful Things screams simplicity, as it is a book that criticizes capitalism and the “greed is good” mantra that permeated the Reagan years, even though some critics argue that the fact “that one of the most prolific and successful writers of our times explicitly experiments with the socio-economic and moral Zeitgeist of a highly peculiar decade of recent United States history is not in itself sufficient reason for sociologists and economists to devote attention to Needful Things” (Akdere, Cedrini, and Dagnes). In some respects, the economic backdrop of the text is both obvious and even, arguably, basic, particularly in an academic light, as the text seems to be all but pre-determined to be read through a Marxist lens. But there are certainly limits to consider regarding theoretical approaches to this story as readers, theorists, and academics would do well to avoid automatically defaulting to a reading of a text that on the surface seems all too easily classified and, then, all too easily understood as a bloated story plainly focused on criticisms of excess and consumption. To that end, what if Marxist theory is largely relegated to the sidelines in the case of reading and revisiting the “last” Castle Rock story? What occurs when concerns with capitalism and economics are set aside in favor of a less dogmatic, or even an (attempted) a-theoretical, approach? The result of such an endeavor is one that finds a readerly gaze cast less and less towards what King “really means” or has embedded in the text via overly-clever and serious theory-based mechanisms. This chapter considers pathways of reading that embrace alternative yet fruitful observations regarding the human condition: a condition based upon mental inertia and moral laziness that is as general as it is enlightening.

Shifting Approaches With my theoretical skepticism on the table, consider King’s own “theories” on the craft of writing, starting with his opinion that “symbolism doesn’t have to be difficult and relentlessly brainy” (On Writing 198). Assuredly, adding arbitrary or excessive layers of “meaning” into a work of fiction does

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not necessarily make the text more enjoyable or automatically intelligent. King further says about symbolism, as a rough comparison to the utilization of literary theory, that “Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity” (On Writing 200). One way to consider these words is to focus on the notion that symbolism is not necessarily utilized to enhance, or, rather, to inflate a given text and elevate it into realms of the heady or overly conceptual. Clearly there is a sort of “simplicity” which King champions, and if it is fairly safe to say that King has not devoted a significant amount of his writing and writing career researching in-depth layers and levels associated with particular symbols, colors, themes, associations, etc., then, conversely, it becomes safe to presume that King’s writing is not necessarily intended to be grounded in any particular theoretical school. Sure, King understands the basics of semiotics (“the word is only a representation of the meaning,” for example [On Writing 118]), but readers do not necessarily need an eight-lane superhighway of theoretical transport to find full and meaningful insights into his work. A two-lane dirt road, much like those which populate King’s home state of Maine, will suffice, as opposed to a theoretical playground of esoteric erudition generally inaccessible to the Constant Reader. Indeed, “theorizing” Stephen King is a task that may yield numerous pathways of literary analysis and criticism as schools of theory remain as wide and varied as the works that King has penned throughout his career. Although the “Master of Horror” is often cornered into genre studies, for example, because of the purported presence of “pure” horror and/or the Gothic in everything he writes, King also cannot necessarily escape the wide scope of theory and its applications to his writing, whether in terms of genre or even the typical schools of thought (Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc.); however, resistance to certain theoretical lenses is perhaps noteworthy and may even elucidate King’s creations. With respect to Needful Things, a rather common approach to reading and understanding this novel comes from, as previously noted, a Marxist perspective: the economic conditions and exchanges between Leland Gaunt and the willing customers found in Castle Rock reeks of what King himself dubbed an attempt to “satirize Reaganomics.” Specifically, King says, “I thought that I’d written a satire of Reaganomics in America in the eighties. You know, people will buy anything and sell anything, even their souls. I always saw Leland Gaunt, the shop owner who buys souls, as the archetypal Ronald Reagan: charismatic, a little bit elderly, selling nothing but junk but it looks bright and shiny” (qtd. in Lehmann-Haupt and Rich 89). Such a sentiment invites the reader to focus on what is clearly foregrounded throughout the text—images of

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blind greed and the devastation of unchecked desire though economic vehicles, or “a vivid illustration of the perilous tensions between ideals of self-realization (via market logics and consumption) and social relationships that a consumer society is bound to engender” (Akdere, Cedrini, and Dagnes). James Anderson furthers this particular thought, “In the time when [Needful Things] was written, King saw Reaganomics as a symptom of a defective society where people cared only about their own wants and needs and not about the greater good” (135). Needful Things undoubtedly carries a taut tension with acute criticisms of 1980s (over)indulgence, just as the purchases of Gaunt’s wares through monetary exchanges (and valued favors with an ambiguous worth that are nonetheless agreed upon and “produced” without wholly knowing what such favors entail) easily propel the reader towards a theoretical and critical examination of need and greed as well as the power structures that create and take advantage of human desire. However, theory, just like generic labeling, often relies upon clearly demarcated categories to furnish a semblance of structure and, at times, an illusion of order and understanding. This is not to say, though, that theory or genre studies are wholly negligible; rather, this is merely a reminder that one way of reading a text is not necessarily more important or valid than another. Raymond Williams broadly def ines theory as “the discovery of a method, perhaps even a methodology, through which particular works of art can be understood and described,” but he further notes “I would not myself agree that this is the central use of cultural theory” (1348). Sometimes a devotion to theory creates blindness instead of illumination, and on one hand, while theory or even a critical reading of a text has its place as a tool, a means of considering possibilities that may not have been otherwise exposed or considered, on the other hand one would do well to consider that a dogmatic attachment to theory or a singular method of reading a text poses a problem. Assuredly, as critics have cleared the way for the most reasonable, or obvious, method of examining Needful Things—“Since Needful Things contains an obvious subtext of consumerism, possessions, and money, examining this novel through the perspective of the Marxist critics proves to be a productive strategy”—it is arguably just as reasonable to avoid deferring to a singular means of examining this, or any, text (Anderson 128). For Needful Things, there is much more to consider than a monster’s masterful manipulation of a small town through a bastardized, yet still effective, “free market” (“caveat emptor!”). Of course, in looking at the end of Needful Things when the town lays smoldering in ruins and numerous lives have been lost, one could easily invoke Marx and Engels, who say “The worker becomes all the

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poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (657). In other words, a consideration of how the worker/citizen facilitates his or her own demise and devaluation by participating in Gaunt’s twisted schemes aligns with this theoretical sentiment: as the citizens of Castle Rock willingly acquire goods from Gaunt, placing high value on these cheap trinkets, the increasing value with which the useless artifacts are imbued corresponds with a lessened value placed on the life of the human who possesses and protects these goods. Clearly, it is a fair Marxist sketch of Needful Things to claim that “the greater the product, the less is he [the worker] himself” as most citizens in Castle Rock are disposed as meaningless pawns in a devilish game that Leland Gaunt orchestrates (Marx and Engels 657). But the overarching purpose of Gaunt’s game is not one of economic gain, or even a means of acquiring wealth and abusing power; Gaunt sees Castle Rock as a gameboard, with the souls of the townsfolk as prizes, and he even smiles once he knows Brian Rusk has committed suicide (“We’re having fun now,” Gaunt even says upon Brian’s death [Needful Things 554]). While such callousness may be aligned with Marxist criticism pointed towards the superstructure that depends upon tractable and disposable labor, a strict adherence to this school of theory may take one away from looking at the individuals within these mechanisms, or, rather, individuals within King’s story that are not necessarily faultless puppets when it comes to how they are viewed, treated, and discarded by Gaunt.

Shifting Responsibility With a specific focus on the characters of Needful Things and the larger issue of, specifically, personal responsibility—the responsibility for the well-being of the town, the responsibility to own up to misdeeds and wrongdoings, the responsibility of correcting the events that break the community down—and how almost every single character has at least one finger pointing towards someone else in one way or another, the emerging argument, then, is one that posits the core issue, or horror, of Needful Things as follows: there is constant blame and deflection to be found within almost every flawed character that populates the pages despite the overarching inability of each character to recognize such a critical (and personal) shortcoming. The inability to account for personal responsibility, which is certainly indicative of a dysfunctional human social-scape—of which literary theorists certainly

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have something to say through one means or another—actually seems to channel the buffoonish yet sage wisdom of the television character Homer Simpson. To illustrate, in an episode of The Simpsons titled “Trash of the Titans,” Homer decides to run for public office, more specifically, the post of Sanitation Commissioner of Springfield. His decision stems from a fight with the local garbage collectors that ends up with Homer seeking office and running a campaign with an inane mantra: “Can’t someone else do it?” Homer’s promise to the voters of Springfield is that, under his watch and guidance, the garbage collectors will essentially be on the clock 24/7 and at the ready, for example, to take away soiled diapers the moment a baby has been changed so the citizens do not have to perform such dirty work themselves. (Undoubtedly, quite an appealing platform.) While this brief look at an obscure reference to a popular television show and character may seem random, consider that the campaign slogan actually propelled Homer to victory. Moreover, this silly fictional scene is chillingly reflected in the thoughts and deeds of most of the characters in Needful Things. The inability to engage in introspective analysis alongside the drive to point the finger elsewhere, while giving the subject a free-pass to behave poorly (even if such an individual would dare consider their behavior to be “poor” in the first place) smacks of selfishness as well as myopia. When it comes to critical thinking, or even criticism of the self, the townsfolk mostly seem to be under the spell of Homer Simpson—they want someone else to do “it,” and in this case, “it” is careful analysis. They want someone else to do their thinking for them … which is mirrored throughout much of Castle Rock, and definitely to Gaunt’s delight. In looking towards the mental failings within Needful Things, an admittedly minor character—Dr. Everett Frankel—helps the Constant Reader to see that the ultimate demise of Castle Rock can be largely attributed to selfish acts of passing blame and responsibility to someone else, especially the responsibility to exercise a rational mind. Dr. Frankel is just one more customer who owes Gaunt a favor/prank, and even as he has some wherewithal to think about the potentially devastating causal relationships that could branch out from his act of repayment, such reasoning is quickly flushed away: “He had been a little worried about the ‘prank’ Mr. Gaunt wanted him to play. Now he saw that his worry had been foolish. It wasn’t as if Mr. Gaunt wanted him to stick a firecracker in the lady’s shoe or put Ex-Lax in her chocolate milk or anything like that. What harm could an envelope do?” (King, Needful Things 353). Dr. Frankel’s rationalized examination of the allegedly innocuous nature of the prank he has been assigned (leaving an envelope for Sally Ratcliffe to discover, complete with pictures of her beau

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Lester Pratt engaged in infidelity) is a key example of “passing the buck” (no economical pun intended): Dr. Frankel reasons that the simple action of placing an envelope with unknown contents in a specific location at a specific time is not a cruel deed in and of itself. In this particular case, he is generally right as there is no physical harm in the “favor” in and of itself. But this is as far as Dr. Frankel’s thinking goes. For him, he cannot, or, rather, will not even entertain the critical thinking required to consider the numerous possibilities that might play out because of his small “prank,” or “errand” (to use one of Gaunt’s preferred euphemisms). Dr. Frankel leaves the thinking, and thoughts of repercussions, to Gaunt, and this deferral is not just mildly convenient, but also indicative of the mental limitations that the townsfolk as a whole have largely placed upon themselves and accepted with little resistance. More to the point, from an arguably concrete application of theory, one might conclude that this unquestioning relationship between Frankel and Gaunt is merely a natural outcome of their power dynamics, that Frankel owes Gaunt a favor, and, thus, the relationship is as simple as a “have” ruling over a “have-not.” To dismiss the theoretical leaning here is problematic because “if we fail to see a superstructural element we fail to recognize reality at all” (Williams 1341). But Gaunt is not a black/white character, a simple devil-figure in a position of power with unquestioning minions who are legally or honor-bound to do his bidding, which echoes Antonio Gramsci who notes that “when studying a structure one must distinguish the permanent from the occasional” (38). Indeed, Gaunt is a temporary presence in Castle Rock, and without much of a foundation within in the town or among its people, or its (super)structures, the merits of his “authority” are certainly open for scrutiny. As such, to consider Gaunt as a man with a plan destined to succeed because of the position he eventually holds over his customers as one who can supply them with anything is to fail to consider that there is much more nuance involved. One key consequence that comes from this initial look into the uncritical mind of Gaunt’s customers is that Gaunt has more than just objects, or commodities, to exchange and use for extended payment plans that include devious favors; Gaunt’s particular skill is that he is able to anticipate how his devious plans can take shape and take root, and by anticipating specific movements by understanding different relationships among the citizens of Castle Rock, he can then initiate (but not necessarily ensure) key maneuvers that he has every reason to believe will end with a conclusion that he desires. But how does this all come together for Gaunt? It is certainly not just because he has simply created debts to be paid; these debts, though, combined with the observable tractability of a community based upon lazy thinking in lieu

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careful analysis or ethical considerations result in disaster (or success, in Gaunt’s mind) primarily because careful analysis has been all but cast aside or “outsourced” to “somebody else.” Harem Qader comments on these dulled senses of Gaunt’s customers in that “what is most striking in this novel is that not one of the characters has seriously considered the exact meaning of the sign of Gaunt’s shop [CAVEAT EMPTOR]. It can be argued that Gaunt ensured a fair amount of warning but no one took it seriously” (17). Perhaps the easiest explanation is the most effective, and in this case, the lack of critical thought and suspicion is cast aside for the promise of fulfilled desire, particularly as the objects of desire found within the Needful Things shop have become artifacts that have been linked to small but powerful emotions for the citizens of Castle Rock, often functioning as stand-ins for larger wholes, like lost childhood in the case of Norris Ridgewick and his Bazun fishing rod: “He had loved the Bazun for two reasons: what it was and what it stood for. What was it? Just the best damned lake-and-stream fishing rod in the world, that was all. What had it stood for? Good times. As simple as that” (149). These “good times” are those that Norris has spent with his now-deceased father; his recollections of his youth alongside his father are heartwarming and relatable, much in the same way a particular smell in a restaurant might remind one of family meals, or the lyrics of a song one hears on the radio might invoke feelings of positivity if, say, such a song has been anchored to a specific and pleasurable memory (a picnic, a sporting event, a road trip, a first kiss, etc.).

Shifting Value(s) To be sure, the way that Norris is enamored with his Bazun rod—similar to Hugh Priest’s protection of his fox tail or Nettie Cobb’s extreme anxiety regarding her carnival glass—suggests that he has gone down a path that becomes less and less innocuous as the personal value of the acquisitions increases. The value here is not necessarily a monetary one, which can, of course, cause many of the same irrational and violent impulses that are triggered within Needful Things, but “many of Gaunt’s ‘things’ rely on nostalgic recollection and childhood desire for their effects that they also become vehicles for the relentless, cynical game of the commodification of desire as nostalgia” (Sears 220). Regardless of the value/commodification of each item, beyond mere consumption there is “appreciation and interpretation,” or an appreciation through selective interpretation—like Polly’s interpretation of her azka as a godsent cure for her arthritis when a cure, by definition,

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is something that is not needed in perpetuity—is hardly earth-shattering, but what is even more interesting is that monetary appreciation is largely missing throughout Needful Things (Melchionne 149). Although, for another example, Buster Keaton’s appreciation for a potential pathway towards reconciling the town’s diminished coffers is found within his “Winning Ticket” game, there are plenty of other examples/items/relationships that maneuver around typical economic concerns. To wit, the way Norris looks at his fishing rod as a connection to a nostalgic past wherein he shared an activity of bonding—fishing—with his father, or how Sally Radcliffe looks towards the purported splinter of Noah’s Ark not as a valuable historical artifact but, instead, as a true and genuine connection to the divine that can deepen her faith (instead of her pockets), these examples take the reader past most fleeting thoughts given to the items purchased in Gaunt’s shop as those that require protection because of their financial prospects; instead, protecting the acquisition for the sake of protecting the self, or the self that has been enhanced or even (re)created through these objects, is the result. In other words, from Norris Ridgewick to Brian Rusk, monetary concerns are not at the forefront of the desires that are fulfilled by purchasing Gaunt’s wares. Again, no one item purchased from Gaunt’s shop is even considered as a traditional investment in and of itself (although Ace Merrill believes that his Lost and Buried Treasures of New England book will lead him to his grandfather’s reported wealth as Ace saw nothing upon Reginald Merrill’s death). However, the absence of financial value does not deter either Gaunt or his customers from completing their transactions, fulfilling their bargains, or agreeing willingly to whatever transactional terms initiated each purchase. Just as Gaunt remarks that “I don’t much care for smart people,” one could consider this declaration as a plain and rather unsubtle commentary on the foolishness of his customers who purchase items that are revealed to be worthless in every sense of the word (169). For a customer to obtain something that has no value and that cannot be traded or exchanged for money, goods, or deeds seems to be easily classified as a frivolous, mindless, and idiotic purchase, which is the exact kind of purchase King correspondingly critiques. But the folly on display is not necessarily limited to fools and their money parting ways; instead, the narrow-minded thinking, if thinking is indeed present in any way, shape, or form, is largely limited and obscured by participation in a game (as opposed to a normal transaction) that the players do not necessarily know they are playing. To clarify, as “bargaining is a sequential game in which the actions selected by the parties determine the outcome,” this point may sound quite direct and simple, but the presumption that there are fixed limits and a particular awareness

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regarding a reportedly guided, if not linear, path of determined actions gives too much credence to the problematic aspects of a different type of theory—game theory—that has thorny connections to Needful Things if/ when used in isolation or as a fixed, settled means of interpretation (Wilson 42). Undoubtedly, no customer of Gaunt’s understands the entirety of the rules placed before them: they may understand that there are two prices for their purchases, but they fail to understand of how the second price (a “prank”) constitutes the beginning of a dangerous chain of events.

Shifting Expectations In speaking of “rules,” or the rules of the game that Gaunt initiates, theories of games and gaming may suggest a certain clarity on the surface, but neither Leland Gaunt nor the Constant Reader can depend upon the predictability facilitated by game theory. In the words of former World Series of Poker champion Doyle Brunson, “I prefer using judgment on individual games rather than hard rules” (30). As Brunson further advocates for deviation from firm rules and predictable play when he says “your first instinct is the right one,” it is imperative to note that moves and turns within many games, and larger theories of “proper” gaming (i.e. the right move in a chess game at any given juncture), are not necessarily supposed to be a matter of instinct (37, author’s emphasis). Such prospects may appear to be troublesome for Gaunt, but he is hauntingly accurate (and foreboding) with his assertion “logic often has little to do with the way people behave” (King, Needful Things 373). Further, as John C. Harsanyi states, “Limitations of human rationality do not generally prevent rational-behavior theories from yielding reasonably good approximate predictions,” Gaunt seems to encourage the opposite of limiting variables and outlandish behaviors, or moves, and even with this move away from firm theoretical foundations, abandoning any sort of guidance or insight that these theories may provide as a supplement to fuller understanding is its own kind of limited cogitation (17). Still, while a game theorist might be bothered by, or even horrified at the prospect of limited logic, and, therefore, limited foresight regarding the outcomes of a particular game, Gaunt knows, and indirectly lectures the reader on it, that this sort of chaos is fortuitously beneficial to his schemes, typical rules be damned. Although variables concerning human actions and reactions promise to be exceptionally frustrating to one who is attempting to exert and maintain control over an entire town, Gaunt has nonetheless focused on the only constant worthwhile to his plans: humans are easily led when

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critical thinking is absent. And when the townsfolk become blinded to key realities around them by foregoing critical thought, they find themselves walking a largely pre-determined track. There may be some unanticipated movements that Gaunt must look out for, but the ace up his sleeve is that his customers have clearly embraced the notion that deep analysis is best reserved for someone else. But what facilitates this restricted analysis, and this to Gaunt’s fortuitous benefit? Within Castle Rock, the well-acquainted setting of The Dead Zone, Cujo, and The Dark Half, the familiarity and simplicity of this small town as small town reveals much as it relates to Gaunt’s dependence upon a lack of critical thought, or even an outright abandonment of various tools (like theory and theorizing) that may be available to its citizens. As Rebecca Frost claims, “Gaunt is only able to wreak such havoc because of relationships already present when he enters the town. ‘He may have an unfair advantage because of his supernatural powers,’ but Gaunt still needs to use the everyday citizens of the town in order to make his plan work” (95). To clarify, the small town is ostensibly the perfect setting for such a scene to play out—there are allegiances, there are arguments and feuds both old and new, almost everyone knows one another, and there is a strange, illusory “harmony” holding the town together; but, more importantly for Gaunt, there are size limits for the town that create critical boundaries within the image of a close-knit community. The isolation of Castle Rock from the rest of the state of Maine helps Gaunt to at least somewhat limit variance in the form of outside influences and sharp eyes that might upset his designs. Moreover, even internal “surveillance” has its limits: “Not all things which happen in a small town are known to the residents, no matter how sharp their ears are or how energetically their tongues wag” (King, Needful Things 186). With the understanding that the purported cohesion of a small town is more illusion than reality, Gaunt is able to navigate one of the common minefields of keeping a secret, or, obscuring his secret designs for the town: lines of communication. Although Gaunt cannot necessarily guarantee no one will upset his plans by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person, he does adeptly predispose his customers towards isolation by facilitating their own need for secrecy and independence. In other words, “Ensconced in the objects, the collector [or purchaser] finds security at the cost of having lost all sense of the present, or of other people” (Melchionne 150). And as Castle Rock is comprised of “Americans who secretly value comfort more than ethics, who cannot communicate with their neighbors, and who descend into violence as the most obvious solution to any conflict,” Gaunt understands and facilitates this comfort—the desire to focus on the

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self and only the self—which is almost strong enough in and of itself to propel the bulk of his plan (Pharr 172). By focusing on comfort, nostalgia, and the self, individuals become less willing to interact with the rest of the world, much less a neighbor, friend, or even a sibling, and this fact strengthens Gaunt’s designs. Therefore, the inward focus of the self that Gaunt has facilitated through trifling commerce creates an easy pathway towards uncritical thinking as the customers “believe what they find and don’t actually talk to the other person involved” (Russell 115). Interacting with someone, anyone, in more than a cursory manner poses threat to the objects that have been purchased; it also appears to pose a threat to each individual who enters Gaunt’s store. The result is more distance between each member of the town as suspicion and blame become the new(er) paranoid norms of the townsfolk. As Sharon Russell argues, “We quickly believe the worst of each other and act rather than talk,” and while simply talking to another person, strange or familiar, appears to be a simple and near-effortless action, the overarching silence that permeates King’s small-town screams of extreme levels of inertia (122). Such inertia is hardly surprising as reaction, rather than action, becomes the language of the land, like when Lenore Potter accuses Stephanie Bonsaint of destroying her garden: “‘I didn’t need to see her! She’s the only one who hates me enough to do something like that’” (454, author’s emphasis). Such scenes reflect a problematic application of Occam’s Razor—defaulting to the easiest, or most convenient explanation (or enabling confirmation bias)—that Gaunt certainly theorizes as a highly likely outcome of his schemes. As such, King’s Castle Rock has been transformed into a domino set with at least two distinct possible outcomes, the most likely of which is destruction and devastation because of the continued compartmentalization of the town that Gaunt has choreographed.

Shifting Blame Yet, for the outcome antithetical to Gaunt’s plotting, all Castle Rock needs is just one person to speak, communicate, and/or act instead of reacting by, say, seeking revenge for a perceived slight, particularly one based upon hearsay. Additionally, there would need to be critical self-reflection and brutal honesty among the characters in order for a more positive outcome, but, for example, “since neither Brian or Norris can admit what they have done in exchange for their bargains […] the baseball card and the fishing rod [then] isolate them from human relations” (Strengell 222). Furthermore, such

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an isolated status, or state of mind, is prevalent (if not already deeply-rooted) within the town selectman Danforth “Buster” Keaton, whose recurring mantra regarding any and all perceived woes is that of a single word— “them”—through which his anxiety and fear grows so much that Buster becomes a rather formidable ally for Gaunt. Similarly, Ace looks at Alan and the entire town of Castle Rock as outside forces (also “them”) that constantly work against him, those who never quit and who will do anything they can to make sure that Ace has no opportunity to thrive (even as a drug dealer, or, in Ace’s mind, “entrepreneur”). Of course, neither Buster nor Ace display any semblance of self-reliance or the desire to forge their own (honest) paths of success by themselves or through their own physical exertion or mental ingenuity. Each character, tabbed as antagonists aligned against the town, is nonetheless linked to their neighbors because the same fingers that Buster and Ace point towards “them” are the same fingers that prompt the simple, singular thinking that is exhibited in the minds and actions of fellow community members like Wilma Jerzyck, who displays eerily similar thinking because she never once considers that anyone other than Nettie Cobb could be responsible for her muddy sheets or broken windows. Wilma never stops to consider if or how her actions may have precipitated or contributed to the entire scene that then unfolds and ends with her (and Nettie’s) deaths. Assuredly, it is quite difficult for King’s characters, or even the real-life humans who read about these individuals, to consider their responsibility when a feeling of victimization is just plain easier. And the Constant Reader certainly sees this victim role become embraced, if not celebrated and cherished, throughout each page of Needful Things. Such a mentality may be simple and short-sighted, but it is nonetheless a satisfying cognitive state when it is perceived that the rest of the world (or even just the rest of a small town) is in the wrong. But, as King has said elsewhere, “Fault always lies in the same place […]: with him weak enough to lay blame” (King, Drawing 170, author’s emphasis). Admittedly, there would be little horror present, and little to propel the plot of Needful Things, if intelligence or even attunement to one’s emotional states were so easy. When Brian Rusk, just before he commits suicide, tells his brother Sean to stay away from Gaunt and his store—“Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man”—he is doing more than fulfilling one final task as the older brother in half-heartedly trying to protect his younger sibling (King, Needful Things 553). Although Brian is not wholly wrong in his depiction of Gaunt as a poison, toxic man, Brian is engaging in the blame-game that has emerged as a lynchpin of Needful Things: Brian may have had a few moments of remorse

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and self-inflicted shame for his role in lighting the powder keg of events within the novel, but his final words take all responsibility for the emerging and ensuing chaos and place it squarely upon Gaunt, more or less suggesting that it is Gaunt’s invisible yet very-present hand that forcibly directs the shotgun into Brian’s mouth. Polly Chalmers, too, succumbs to the ease of thinking that comes with placing blame elsewhere: when she questions the prank she is pulling on Ace Merrill, Polly hears Gaunt in her head, “It’s only a harmless little joke. And if something serious were to come of it—it won’t, of course, but just supposing, for the sake of argument, that it did—whose fault would that be?” (558, author’s emphasis). In response, Polly answers the ghostly version of Gaunt by declaring Alan would be to blame for any overarching problems that came about from her actions and interactions with Gaunt—simple as that. Scapegoat found, scapegoat sacrificed. To say the least, both blame and thinking have been passed along to someone else within each character noted thus far, and as such, it is little wonder that Castle Rock is all but completely wrecked at the conclusion of the novel. In some ways, the complete and utter lack of critical thinking is a moral/ethical failure—a failure that King often considers in his tales. Or, in the words of Jonathan Davis, “While human beings make haste in accusing others of immoral actions, they often ignore consideration how to obtain their own moral maturity … Without moral maturity, both people and King’s characters suffer from their inability to heed the consequences of moral differentiation, therefore increasing the difficulty to act on behalf of goodness” (39). In the case of Needful Things, even consideration for one’s own role in the emerging devastation is quite rare. Although Norris Ridgewick comes to understand and embrace his own role in the proceedings that run contrary to his oath to protect and serve—“I’m responsible for that, he thought. Not completely—hell, no—but I’m a part of it. I participated”—he still hedges his bets with only a partial accounting (666). Even though Norris may be accurate in declaring that his share of the blame is not complete because there were other players involved, his cogitation still reflects a convenience of thinking, a mitigated sense of culpability that allowed Gaunt to establish firm footing for his plans from the very outset of the novel. This sense of reduced culpability further reflects an inability to be humble as well as a willful inability to engage in critically honest introspection. One’s fear of becoming a despicable and grotesque individual is certainly understandable, but side-stepping the deep thinking necessary for recognizing one’s potential for discord, particularly with respect to the potential outcomes of performing a “simple” task for a person like Leland Gaunt, is undoubtedly the foundation for counterfeit and imbecilic deliberation.

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Conclusion Ultimately, while Needful Things takes its reader into a notable marketplace of capitalistic criticism, there is also a prompt to look towards other key considerations regarding the frail human mind, particularly as it relates to how one reads a King novel. Even with perceived hyperbole behind the genesis of Castle Rock’s destruction—that a child’s desire for a simple baseball card set off a series of events that ruined an entire town—there is a startling revelation to be found within an a-theoretical reading of a Stephen King tale, and that resulting discovery is that King “prefers to take a simple truth and expand it into horrible proportions in order to create the sought effect of horror in his readers” (Qader 16). The resulting horror created within Needful Things provides the reminder that “civilization is just a thin coating over our more violent impulses” (Russell 122). Such a common-sensical comment may appear to be almost unnecessary if not too obvious; however, such a sentiment might be forgotten within the tangles of literary theory. Gaunt reveals, in plain language, that the bulk of Needful Things can be reduced to via a largely a-theoretical reading: “I dealt as I always do. I show people what I have to sell … and let them make up their own minds” (723). Gaunt has effectively promoted an outsourcing of thought through, well, “Magic—wasn’t that what this was all about? It was mean-spirited magic, granted; magic calculated not to make people gasp and laugh but to turn them into angry charging bulls, but it was magic just the same. And what was the basis of all magic? Misdirection” (685). And is this—misdirection—not what one could argue theory might (accidentally) promote? All in all, Gaunt slyly, subtly, and masterfully leads people to one of the easiest tasks on the planet—letting someone else do the dirty work. Whereas Homer Simpson promised his garbage men would do the dirty work of disposing garbage at all hours of the day so that no member of his community would have to soil their hands with filth, so too has Gaunt promised the attraction of something one would usually think of as unthinkable—someone else thinking deeply and critically, particularly when thinking seems to lessen the joy associated with acquisition. This redirection from critical thought within Needful Things is actually quite similar to a direction towards a wholly theoretical approach to reading—allowing someone else to do the “dirty work” of thinking and relying on singular methods of understanding is just as dangerous as embracing an absence of thought. But using theory as a tool rather than as a decoder ring, so to speak, allows multiple means of reading and understanding. So, while an a-theoretical reading may be impossible if not concerning, so, too, is an over-reliance upon theory. A

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delicate, intricate dance of at least considering alternative routes towards understanding instead of relying solely upon someone else to do so is, perhaps, the key lesson of Needful Things. Strict adherence to a singular way of thought might lead to discussion and debate, at least within the academic world; within a Stephen King novel, however, devastation is a much more likely outcome.

Works Cited Akdere, Çinla, Mario Cedrini, and Joselle Dagnes. “Stephen King’s Needful Things: A Dystopian Vision of Capitalism during its Triumph.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 44, no. 3, 2021, pp. 341–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/01603477. 2021.1932525. Anderson, James Arthur. The Linguistics of Stephen King. McFarland, 2017. Brunson, Doyle. Doyle Brunson’s Super System: A Course in Power Poker. Cardoza, 2021. Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Frost, Rebecca. Surviving Stephen King: Reactions to the Supernatural in the Works by the Master of Horror. McFarland, 2021. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. Translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callary. 3 vols. Columbia UP, 1992. Harsanyi, John C. Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations. Cambridge UP, 1977. King, Stephen. The Drawing of the Three. Plume, 2003. King, Stephen. Needful Things. Signet, 1992. King, Stephen. On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition. Scribner, 2010. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch. Norton, 2018, pp. 655–59. Melchionne, Keven. “Collecting as an Art.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1999, pp. 148–56. Pharr, Mary. “Only Theoretical: Postmodern Ambiguity in Needful Things and Storm of the Century.” The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to The Mist.” Edited by Tony Magistrale. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 167–78. Qader, Harem. “Innocence Lost as a Recurring Motif in Stephen King’s Horror.” Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, vol. 15, 2015, pp. 8–24. Rich, Nathaniel, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189,” The Paris Review, no. 178, 2006, pp. 66–101.

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Russell, Sharon A. Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Greenwood, 1996. Sears, John. Stephen King’s Gothic. U of Wales P, 2011. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. U of Wisconsin P, 2005. “Trash of the Titans.” The Simpsons: The Complete 9th Season. Written by Ian Maxtone-Graham. Directed by Jim Reardon. Fox, 2006. Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton, 2018, pp. 1337–50. Wilson, Robert. “Reputations in Games and Markets.” Game-Theoretical Models of Bargaining, edited by Alvin E. Roth, Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 27–62.

About the Author Patrick McAleer is an independent scholar currently residing in the Seattle area. He has taught writing and literature classes at various schools across the USA, many of which included works from Stephen King. He is also the author/ co-editor of several volumes on the works of Stephen King, including Inside the Dark Tower Series and The Modern Stephen King Canon: Beyond Horror.

3.

Stephen King and the Trouble with Poststructuralism Michael J. Blouin

Abstract: This essay analyzes multiple iterations of Stephen King’s epic IT—the novel as well as Andy Muschietti’s adaptations—to understand better King’s complicated relationship to poststructuralism. More specifically, the essay recognizes a core tension within works produced by that loose constellation of thinkers retroactively known as the poststructuralists: a tension between theories of power (see, most prominently, Michel Foucault) and theories of desire (see, most prominently, Jacques Lacan). Although its author never fully embraces a particular theoretical model, King’s IT nonetheless reflects this core tension, and by placing King’s text in dialogue with the major theoretical split, audiences might return with fresh eyes to the significance of Stephen King’s output as well as the legacy of the poststructuralists. Keywords: poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Andy Muschietti, Joan Copjec

Stephen King incessantly bemoans America’s military-industrial complex: the bloated bureaucracy that has accompanied the growth of its vast surveillance state. “Authority […] always leads to some kind of oppression,” he remarks. “Authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we’ll all need hooves” (High Times 202–03). King initially forged this fear from the fires of anti-Vietnam protests that punctuated his collegiate career at the University of Maine at Orono between the years of 1966 and 1970.1 Since his years in Orono, King’s texts have routinely portrayed impersonal systems as well as the plucky individuals who improbably elude their tentacles. Take, for instance, the 1980 novel Firestarter, in which a gifted young woman—under the tutelage of an exploited Vietnam veteran—wiggles free from her institutional fetters; or take King’s The Institute, which tracks a group of oppressed young people as they struggle mightily to untether themselves 1 For more on King’s connection to the conflict in Vietnam, see Tony Magistrale and Michael Blouin’s Stephen King and American History.

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from the powerful government structures that confine them. Examples of individuals confronting their confinement abound in King’s multiverse. Indeed, this visceral obsession might be King’s most enduring contribution to American culture. In the chapter that follows, I consider two iterations of King’s epic IT to be representative of this trend, and I demonstrate how King’s narrative concerns correspond with the concerns of a loose coalition of intellectuals known retroactively as “poststructuralists.” At the center of King’s engagement with the poststructuralists is a tension between power and desire as the primary principles that organize human existence. If one were to carbon date poststructuralism, it would make a good deal of sense to mark its birth in the year 1968, in which discontented individuals across the globe rose up in protest against the macro structures that hemmed in their imaginative horizons (military, financial, cultural, and so forth). The French intellectuals that responded to this discontentment would later be classified as poststructuralists. Broadly speaking, whereas structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss strove to chart expansive structures—social; mythological— the poststructuralists conceptualized a way for individual subjects to escape from these penitentiaries. If grand metaphysical narratives predetermine the subject’s actions, theorists like Jean-Francois Lyotard suggested that the time had come for an ambitious demythologizing. Along similar lines, if the structure of language mires subjects in unhealthy habits, the time had come for an ambitious deconstruction of the plotlines that impose order upon readerly lives. In a general sense, then, the term poststructuralism marks a wide array of projects designed to liberate the subject from chains that previously bound her. For many of these theorizers, the stakes were clear: to move beyond the oppressive weight of racism as well as the patriarchy, the stifling expectations of an Enlightenment project, and the disciplinary networks patrolled by militarized nation-states. King’s fiction, and most of its adaptations, share these aims. Although King disassociates himself from academics of all stripes (see my introduction to this volume), I would nevertheless classify his prose as part and parcel of the poststructuralist project. In the 1987 text Misery, for example, King plays with the prison house of popular fiction by depicting an author held captive by an unhinged member of his fan base; in the 1978 novel The Stand, King shows how social structures can be eradicated at a moment’s notice and how those same structures stubbornly reemerge, even as individuals commit themselves to a radical reimagining of their communal arrangements. In fact, because of his status as a popular writer, critics might classify King as one of the most influential poststructuralists, in that his books have been consumed much more broadly than, say, the

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works of Jacques Derrida. King’s fiction articulates difficult poststructuralist concepts in a manner that registers with an enormous body of readers. In content as well as form, King incessantly ruminates upon the same set of problems as his more theoretically minded contemporaries, including the notion of language as a structure that incarcerates the subject.2 Simply put, the works of King and the poststructuralists routinely (although not exclusively) vibrate at the same frequency. Yet to read King alongside the poststructuralists is not merely to name a representative of a trend in intellectual history; rather, to read King in this way involves locating major points of contention within the poststructuralist enterprise. King tracks all-encompassing institutions, and their accompanying grand metaphysical narratives, by deploying the concept of power, which appears to have total explanatory capabilities. At the same time, King recognizes that the subject’s desires enable her to slip from these fetters. King’s novels and their adaptations therefore reflect a core tension within the poststructuralist project between discursive power and subjective desire. On power: King’s characters routinely tremble before faceless corporate entities.3 Even as he elevates himself above the claustrophobic hotel featured in his novel The Shining, to take a drone shot from above, from an “overlook,” King laments the inner mechanisms of the disciplinary system that manipulates the hotel’s weary caretaker Jack Torrance. An institution’s power appears to be all-encompassing. On desire: there is a release valve in the form of individual desire, a metaphorical boiler that needs to be checked to avoid an excess of pressure. Because the Overlook Hotel cannot account for the unique desires of its human victims—their need to “let off steam”—the establishment eventually explodes. In The Shining, no totalizing schema can map desire because desire negates edicts from on high (indeed, negation remains one of desire’s cardinal functions). 2 John Sears recycles a Derridean framework to comprehend the inner workings of King’s oeuvre. King’s stories, Sears maintains, “repeatedly examine the stability and viability of conventional constructions of selfhood in postmodernity” (12). Sears convincingly posits that the best (indeed, the only) way to interpret King’s fiction is through the lens of the poststructuralist. 3 Heidi Strengell charts in detail how the influence of literary naturalism pervades King’s canon, especially via his commentary upon deterministic forces: King routinely features “protagonists who are sociologically so tightly determined and whose free will is so limited that they find violence and self-destruction as their only means to take a stand” (218). Strengell finds that King’s belief in a Puritan metaphysics releases him from the bleak outlook of the naturalists; I concur, but I would add that one must theorize in greater detail how King imagines a way out of these pre-determined frameworks. It is not merely a reliance upon a sense of a romantic cosmos, driven by a vague sense of justice, that allows King to deconstruct grand metanarratives.

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By standing at this crossroad, King’s reader must confront a crucial disagreement among prominent poststructuralist thinkers, especially Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. This chapter places King’s representative text IT, on page as well as screen, into dialogue with this hodge-podge of poststructuralists. In so doing, it teases to the surface a vital contradiction within King’s multiverse as well as the poststructuralist project. 4 While it would be an error to conflate the novel and its adaptations—there are important distinctions, and one must be careful to consider the differences between literary and cinematic form—there is something in the DNA of King’s storytelling that is readily transposed from one medium to the next. As the director of the 2017 and 2019 IT films, Andy Muschietti, notes, “I’ve been influenced by Stephen King growing up as a reader, so he has a lot to do with who I am as an artist right now. So I think his style of writing, his, you know, his narrative, was forming for me” (Muschietti). This dialogue between novel, film, and critical theory proves to be a mutually enriching one. After all, critical theory is never merely a box of tools to be utilized in textual analysis. Theory and text always speak back and forth to one another. Said another way, King’s IT, which gave rise to the highest grossing horror film of all-time (IT: Chapter 1), re-opens a constitutional debate among the poststructuralists in a manner that allows audiences to look at the discord with fresh eyes. The question of whether these thinkers would choose to adopt the moniker of poststructuralist is part and parcel of the debate to come because the haunting presence of this debate disrupts any neat-andtidy narrative of poststructuralism as a unified school of thought. And if my thesis proves workable, this type of reading could serve as a template for theorizing King’s entire corpus. What I propose is nothing less than an ur-theory with which to decipher King’s entire body of work.

The Foucaultian King IT tracks a group of outlier children in Derry, Maine, known as the Losers’ Club, as the group battles Pennywise the clown, who lurks in the shadowy underbelly of the town. The story jumps back and forth between scenes of the children fighting Pennywise to scenes of the children coming back to Derry as adults to confront once more the craven clown. The town of Derry ostensibly forces these individuals to abide by the shape in which they 4 Catherine Belsey observes, “Poststructuralism is not a system, nor even, when you look at the details, a unified body of theory. How could it be? Its key term is difference” (56).

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Fig. 3.1. The audience glimpses town schematics.

were born, which is to say, Derry corrals these characters into conformity through its multifaceted organizational elements. The real evil of IT is a discursive logic that disempowers otherwise dynamic subjects by mapping their physical and psychical possibilities without their consent. Early in Muschietti’s IT: Chapter 1, the spectator shares in the gaze of the children as the paternal authority figure takes down a map of Derry’s infrastructure (fig. 3.1). This all-too-brief glimpse of the Derry map remains crucial: the literal as well as figurative power grid in Derry can only be seen in fleeting glimpses. The submissive subject is left in the dark as she must wander a gruesome maze set up for her by her community. Foucault is best known for theorizing the concept of power. His work from the late 1970s, The History of Sexuality, describes how forms of discipline have evolved over the years, from the monarch’s heavy-handed exertion of force to the self-discipline of a liberal society. In the final tally, Foucault’s seminal study signals a societal shift to “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them” (136). In his essay “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault exposes a totalitarian machinery that mobilizes “entire populations […] for the purpose of wholesale slaughter” (260). Foucault’s theory aligns with the narrative structure of IT because they both worry about excessive discipline in the guise of the omnipresent surveillance state, and they each chart—in vivid detail—how the contemporary world

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transforms individuals into productive nodal points within a pervasive power grid. Recount once more King’s The Shining, a novel that tracks how a large, centralized power, embodied in the haunted Overlook Hotel, capitalizes upon the bodies of its caretakers, consuming them like batteries to fuel its deathless dominion. The sequel Doctor Sleep continues this line of argument by tracking a clan of vampires that feeds off “the steam” of its victims. A cosmic power source similarly feeds off the children of IT by transforming their bodies into kindling for its hateful fire. Just as Foucault sharpens and refines his account of power from the 1970s until his untimely death in 1984, King slowly shifts his gaze from macro examples of power—the epic struggle of The Stand, for instance—to micro examples of power working within the subject: the effects of a power that exerts itself in the most intimate ways imaginable, such as the self-aestheticism on display in novels like Rose Madder or Lisey’s Story. (Note to future scholars: this pivot warrants a good deal more scrutiny.) King’s original IT as well as Muschietti’s adaptation involve a thoughtprovoking comparison of aesthetics and infrastructure—a comparison that aligns well with a Foucaultian line of analysis. The two films highlight the parallels between visual and disciplinary designs. When the Losers’ Club repeatedly passes by a theater marquee that announces the arrival of horror film sequels like A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, the films foreground their metacommentary about film spectatorship. One might call to mind the image of Bev (Sophia Lillis) caught in the Deadlights, a cosmic force that powers Pennywise; her stupefied expression mirrors the look of passive spectators as they are manipulated by a film. The unwitting spectator of IT: Chapter 1 shares her vacant stare (fig. 3.1). The cinematic apparatus, like schools or prisons or hospitals, condition audiences to look as well as think in very specific ways. Just as Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) propels members of the Losers’ Club toward their imminent demise, these films propel spectators toward the film’s intended ending. Within the diegetic world, some characters find themselves quite literally institutionalized (the bully Henry Bowers in Chapter 2), while others find themselves indirectly, but still powerfully, moved by institutions like the US postal service—which magically delivers a weapon to Bowers in Chapter 1—the police-state—which enforces a strict curfew of 7 p.m. (the number seven appears in red, implying that Pennywise is already embedded within that particular institution)—the public library—a den of disturbing images and artifacts that keep Pennywise forever in circulation—and the education system that incarcerates them all. Meanwhile, the visual design of the films, like the ominous three doors that the characters frequently face (labelled Not So Scary, Scary, and Very

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Fig. 3.2. Bev, and the audience, gaze into the Deadlights.

Scary), offers an illusion of choice when, in fact, all roads lead invariably back to Pennywise. Muschietti’s films therefore posit that horror films are a dead-end pathway that trains spectators to feel fear. At one point, a Derry public school bus drives from right to left; as it passes by, the film simultaneously swipes from one scene to the next. Just as the school system ushers children from place to place, the film ushers its spectator from scene to scene. Aesthetics and infrastructure supplement one another as they enact disciplinary control over the subject. Both King’s epic and the Muschietti adaptation encourage their respective audiences to investigate how individual behaviors can be knit together through vast disciplinary apparatuses, like the Derry school system or the canal that serves as a figurative neural network for the town, and they do so not only in the content of the story but through the form with which the story is presented. Like Foucault, King and Muschietti chart how the physical organization of a society (its waterworks, for instance) shapes the discursive organization of that society’s members, that is, how that society (re)produces knowledge and makes meaning. The villain of King’s novel is ultimately Derry itself: the many-tiered penitentiary that re-creates its own terms and conditions, ad infinitum. “A special tram-car circled the historic sections of the town every hour on the hour and ended up at this gaudy and amiable money machine” (King 19). The children of Derry appear to

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have little choice but to re-write, and thereby re-live, the horrific narrative of the town, as if on autopilot. When Bill, the leader of the Losers’ Club, composes a science fiction story that captures this feeling of futility, his teacher comments, approvingly, “We see [in your story] the vicious cycle in which violence begets violence” (119). Art and infrastructure remain thoroughly entwined. The psyche of Derry imposes itself upon the psyches of its impressionable youths. Foucault’s scholarly project circles around similar relationships between institutions, discourse, and the thoroughly coerced subject. Not unlike King (or Muschietti), Foucault understood that how a narrative is told matters most. Bill writes horror novels because what else could he write? Since he is the product of a horror novel, he dutifully, if unconsciously, perpetuates that same genre to keep the fantasy structures of Derry alive and well. Foucault too focuses upon different genres of writing: the various ways that discourse circumscribes individuals. Rather than simply point to the structuralist underpinnings of America, King embeds those underpinnings within the form of his novel, and in so doing he asks his readers to confront the power of texts to govern private lives. IT is a veritable tapestry of personal stories, quilted together to demonstrate how a social order efficiently perpetuates itself through discursive means. “One [story] leads to the next, to the next, and to the next” (King 431). Foucault insists that power does not simply repress the subject from above; instead, power works through the subject, conditioning their behavior in subtle, often undetectable ways. This invisible force locks as well as unlocks Bill’s creativity. Pennywise does not always overtly lord over the children—he disciplines indirectly, by taking a variety of forms until they feel fear, self-loathing, and isolation (even when he himself is not present to re-enforce these feelings through his production of cruel spectacles). In turn, doubling as both character and narrator, librarian Mike Hanlon plays the part of the Foucaultian poststructuralist, since he alone stands at a degree of removal from the town to “show [the others] that pattern” (142). Unlike his blind companions, Mike can “pull the camera back a little … to see the whole city” (144). Everyone else complains that they have no choice but to behave as Derry wants them to behave, glued in place by “the strings that bind you tight to the map of your life” (64). The map can be glimpsed by enlightened individuals like Mike, perhaps, but it can never be fully grasped. Even Mike ends up replicating Derry’s perverse pattern by seeking total control over his surroundings through his knowledge/mastery—a point accentuated in Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two when Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) forces the

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unwitting Bill (James McAvoy) to acknowledge the cosmic design that he incorrectly believes he has detected beneath the surface of the horrible events unfolding in Derry. King’s novel thus recreates a claustrophobic Foucaultian design by ruminating upon the persistent lack of choice for his characters. The entire proceeding resembles one of Stan’s catalogs of bird species. Literally hiding behind a catalog to protect himself, young Stan does not so much organize the natural world around him as his environment organizes him, “as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined” (536). Finely attuned to his society’s disciplinary demands, Stan reproduces a certain type of knowledge/mastery and, in the process, he exists as a passive object rather than an active subject. In this sense, Pennywise merely augments a process that was already underway: Stan is always-already an obedient subject because of an undergirding logic that organizes his bird books as well as his understanding of how the world is supposed to work. In The Order of Things, Foucault outlines how a humanist moves from documenting the world around him to realizing—albeit too late—that he has turned himself into the object of inquiry. Stan exists as nothing more than “a creature of habit and convention,” and so he dies by his own hand (King 402). He has internalized well the edicts of Derry’s disciplinary apparatus. Each of the children expresses anxiety about Derry’s structural confinements, from the cycles of abuse suffered by Bev to the pharmaceutical delusions of Eddie. Bill summarizes their grim situation: “You can’t refuse to pick up your option because there is no option” (135, author’s emphasis). In the novel, the Derry trainyards lead to a dead-end sign, which then corrals traffic onto Neibolt Street as the epicenter of supernatural activity in Derry. IT: Chapter 1 visualizes this organizational mechanism in such a way that spectators must constantly interrogate their own connection to the coercive designs of the auteur—and then, to pull the camera back a bit further, to the impediments laid out by their society. The film opens with a sequence in which the spectator shares little Georgie’s perspective as he races alongside a toy boat flowing through Derry’s drainage system. A sawhorse labelled Derry Public Works suddenly appears in the frame to knock down the spectator as well as Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), as if to obstruct their joint progress (fig. 3.3). This sequence alerts audiences to the power of infrastructure to shepherd unwitting subjects into a state of compliance. Immediately following the opening sequence, the f ilm turns to Mike’s conscientious objection to slaughtering sheep on his family farm. A bleating lamb races toward the

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Fig. 3.3. Georgie runs into a sawhorse labeled “Public Works.”

Fig. 3.4. The boys jam their way through a door at school.

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Fig. 3.5. Mike picks through a dumpster in front of a Tow Zone.

camera, and then the films cuts to a shot of three children being corralled through a schoolroom door (fig. 3.4). In its enjambment of the lamb and the boys, who are similarly being led to the slaughter, Muschietti’s IT underscores the Foucaultian logic of the film: Derry’s interconnected apparatuses move characters into proper alignment with the town’s behavioral expectations. One might also consider a later sequence from IT: Chapter 1 in which the mise-en-scène heightens a sense that the world of the film has been designed to move characters unconsciously into their “proper” place. On his way to drop off a delivery, Mike (Chosen Jacobs) appears against the backdrop of a town that clearly wants to expel him. He quite literally heads down a one-way street, and when he arrives at his destination, the town considers him—a young Black man—to be nothing more than refuse, idling in a Tow-Away Zone (fig. 3.5). In sequences such as this one, Muschietti supports a Foucaultian thesis by demonstrating how the organizational structure of Derry pre-determines the physical and psychical pathways of its characters. Because the film’s visual design uncomfortably parallels the infrastructural design of Derry, Muschietti’s spectator recognizes her own helpless position at the hands of a governing auteur. In the culminating shot from the opening of the first part of IT, Georgie’s toy boat is re-directed by a strange heap of tarped materials and, more interestingly, by the director’s

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Fig. 3.6. The director’s credit diverts Georgie’s boat to the sewer (and Pennywise).

name (fig. 3.6). The director directs his characters, as well as the gaze of his spectator, into the open arms of Pennywise. In each of these pregnant moments, Muschietti’s IT f ilms display a reflexive understanding of the fictional universe that has built up around King since the late 1970s. Muschietti’s f ilms concern themselves with generic confines that condition audiences to respond in particular ways to visual stimuli (a cinematic grammar including such tropes as the jump scare, etc.). King too has butted up against the artistic structures that limit him as a branded author by flirting constantly with other genres, including science fiction, fantasy, the western, and crime fiction. Once inside the labyrinth, could spectators ever hope to evade the generic logic that controls King’s universe? Like the characters that try to outwit Pennywise by selecting the right door, they inevitably end up more embedded within the clown’s nightmarish maze. Meanwhile, Muschietti’s films habituate the spectator to re-tread familiar causeways, looping back incessantly to recognizable ports of entry. Both of the IT films are chock full of images recycled from other well-known adaptations of King’s works: a pastoral coming-of-age shot borrowed from Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (fig. 3.7); a bloody scene lifted from a bathroom stall in Brian De Palma’s Carrie; Jack Torrance’s iconic “Here’s

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Fig. 3.7. The Losers’ Club ventures across a field near a train—an homage to Stand by Me.

Johnny” from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; a shot from inside a well in Taylor Hackford’s Dolores Claiborne (fig. 3.8). For better or worse, few writers have more thoroughly given form to popular discourse in America than King. The discursive passages that move spectators through Muschietti’s IT expose travelers to the American horror film’s claustrophobic confines, especially as this corpus has been influenced by King. Following Mike’s lead, Muschietti goes down these circular roads only to pull back the camera and give spectators a glimpse of the patterns in which they have been mindlessly moving, like exhausted sleepwalkers. In his well-known assessment of the panopticon, a prison structure that teaches prisoners to discipline themselves, Foucault wonders if it would matter if the guards and inmates switched places. He argues that the disciplinary structure holds sway, not the individual psyche. Foucaultian theorists should pay better attention, then, to the structures that govern behavior and cease trying in vain to plumb the depths of individuals embroiled within these structures of control. Study the structure of language, not the biography of specific writers. Study the architectural plans of the hospital or school or hotel, not the attitudes of the laborers that caretake these sites. For Foucaultians, it is the overarching concept of power that explains the subject, not the other way around.

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Fig. 3.8. Mike stares down a well—an homage to Dolores Clairborne.

The Lacanian King Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (1994) outlines the distinctions between Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Although I previously posited that the critic who can best be used to theorize King’s works is Foucault, I will now contradict myself by contemplating how King and Muschietti resist a Foucaultian reading. In a thoughtful exchange with High Times, King muses that if ideology really worked, it would give its adherents everything that they could ever want. But it simply cannot do so: “The one thing that I could never swallow in the sixties was this idea that Nixon [was a] totalitarian, fascistic, faceless thing who wanted to take over and destroy the resistance” (High Times 205). King suggests that no system, regardless of how totalizing it may seem to be, could ever completely account for private desires, and so ideology never truly functions in the obvious ways that it is supposed to function (by brainwashing its gullible adherents). In the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s terms, ideology must leave gaps in order to persist. When one of King’s interviewers wonders aloud if a disciplinary apparatus needs “reverse psychology” to generate obedience, King enthusiastically endorses the idea. Maybe King is more Lacanian than Foucaultian after all.

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Copjec’s intervention calls to mind two crucial elements that defy a straightforward Foucaultian reading of King’s corpus: first, King’s emphasis upon blind spots, and second, King’s attention to private desires. According to the Foucaultians, “there can in fact be no secret that keeps itself from power,” Copjec observes, “no self that is not always already known” (169). Copjec undermines the omnipotence of a Foucaultian framework: there is always something within the subject that cannot be recognized, let alone capitalized upon, by the disciplinary apparatus. Because she desires, a character cannot be completely mapped in advance. Perhaps Stan does not commit suicide because he has internalized the commands of Derry’s disciplinary apparatus; perhaps his sacrificial act indicates a private wellspring, a secret reserve within the individual psyche, that can overwhelm, say, the well at the center of the house on Neibolt Street, from which Derry draws its collective nightmares.5 Admittedly, Foucault himself, particularly near the end of his career, might have appreciated the various ruptures in King’s stories. Foucault interrupted stories of continuous progress by arguing for a more genealogical sense of history, driven not by seamless continuities but by unexpected deviations from sanctioned norms. Nonetheless, Copjec maintains that Foucault’s emphasis on temporary blindness only ever elides a vision that wants for nothing. Foucault’s all-encompassing concept of power threatens to swallow King’s characters whole; in contrast, Copjec and her fellow Lacanians view blind spots—the holes that punctuate a text (the unknown elements that drive any narrative, like the question of what will happen next)—as an imperative that cannot be circumvented. Desire requires dissatisfaction: a restlessness that feeds itself not on what a subject already has, but what a subject perpetually lacks. The monstrous Pennywise commands Its victims to remember, to share in Its engorgement upon memories, visualized in the form of the detritus accumulated in Its lair; the Losers’ Club f ights back against this command by forgetting—by recognizing that it is their mutual incompleteness (as losers; as beings characterized by loss) that will save them from the totalizing vision of It. There are many things that the subject cannot know about her world or her place within it. In fact, her existence as a human being depends upon 5 Although it has been argued that King lacks the ability to leave anything unsaid, King does occasionally acknowledge the value of secrets. “[King] has major problems with [the] unseen,” Dara Downey and Darryl Jones surmise, “and with hidden things in general” (229). Yet King does not always operate in this way. King’s The Colorado Kid, for instance, refuses to resolve its own mystery, that is, to divulge the secret that orients its narrative structure.

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Fig. 3.9. Richie’s glasses sit in the sediment.

a figurative blindness because if she achieved total vision she would want for nothing and therefore cease to be human. It is one’s lack—one’s status as a loser—that defines one’s essential humanity. Consequently, attempts by orthodox Foucaultians to generate a complete index of human behavior, or to assert a key for understanding the entirety of social relations, are destined to fall short, since “the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment” (Copjec 8). King’s reader might err in thinking that the world will “lie down flat” for an audience, or in assuming that the world can be reduced to “its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge” (6, 161). King’s texts periodically illuminate that the nature of desire means that neither character nor reader can be grafted onto such a dead structure. That is, character and reader slip out of the interpreter’s grasp because they “never stop realizing” themselves (9). Blind spots mercifully stall unthinkable stasis. Near the end of Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two, Richie (Bill Hader) loses his glasses in the waters of the quarry and his friends frantically search to find them (fig. 3.9). The shot of Richie’s lost glasses, half buried in sediment, underscores that blindness, not knowledge or mastery, fosters healthy relationships—unlike the forced sight of the ever-coercive Pennywise, who demands that his supplicants stare into the Deadlights, or even Mike’s enlightened yet domineering approach when he drugs Bill and bullies him into seeing

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what he sees. Importantly, the spectator in this moment shares Richie’s blurred vision: neither he nor the spectator can see things clearly. In a related sense, King’s characters repeatedly forget their past, and it is in the forgetting, not in the remembering, that they locate their primary enjoyment. Whereas a Foucaultian approach compels spectators to pull the camera back in pursuit of an overview of the apparatus, a Lacanian approach emphasizes the lacunae that interrupt seamless understandings of the whole. Desire is the watchword of IT. One might be tempted to view “communal love” as the glue that holds together King’s cast of characters: a naïve, vague concept that requires fidelity and belief in cosmic predestination. True, there are important signs of love throughout the story’s evolution—in IT: Chapter 1, Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) revises the graffiti on his cast from Loser to Lover; in the novel, Bill uses his wife’s wedding ring to make a promise to his friend Richie. “What matters is love,” the story tells its audience. But then the story quickly adds: “And desire” (1037). I would argue that desire is ultimately more crucial to IT because the characters must learn how to lack, in multiple senses of the term, to defeat their common enemy: “Believe in the heat of that desire” (1013). The Losers can only repel Pennywise when they first experience the “strange melancholy” of being alone, of being incomplete (1041). As a paean to group unity, IT is little more than pastoral cliché. It is their cumulative emphasis upon melancholia that salvages King’s novel and its adaptation from the dustbin of nostalgic nonsense. Said another way, “The force of […] desire” liberates characters from their structural conf ines. After Richie sighs, “Nothing lasts forever,” Bev responds with a vital exception: “Desire” (1063). When King supplants power with desire as the overarching concept that drives his epic, he opens a doorway for theorizing subjectivity foreclosed by Foucaultian readings. In its closing act, IT pivots from Foucault to Lacan. “What, exactly what, was power, anyway?” the text initially inquires, revealing a Foucaultian assumption about the apparatus that holds the citizens of Derry in its sway (839, author’s emphasis). Yet the climax of King’s novel spells out the concept that matters most: “It’s always the desire” (863). Desire is not dedicated to dominion; in truth, desire depends upon an attendant vulnerability, an active unknowing. Desire is a malleable thing, both for the characters experiencing it and for the analysts attempting to explain it. Ben pens a poem for Bev, which plays a decisive role in the novel as well as its filmic adaptation: “Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too.” This poem does not merely convey the yearning of a youthful admirer—it captures,

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instead, how desire depends not upon dominion but upon absence. The proverbial fire burns in a time of stark coldness. Instead of impressing onlookers in its full bloom, the fire impresses because it emerges in the seemingly impossible conditions of January. Existential lack proves to be the salvation of the Losers’ Club. As tempting as it might be to scrub IT of its admittedly problematic depictions of sex, particularly among pubescent teens, to so do is to risk scrubbing the story of some of its most theoretically rich interpretive possibilities. Desire is the meeting place of ecstasy and absence, of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. King provides a pointed metaphor in the last section of the novel when, having resuscitated his own longing for his comatose wife, Bill sports a “huge and cheerful erection” (1089). Likewise, the novel’s orgy sequence in which the young men have sex with Bev to secure their bond with one another—a major problem for countless critics of King’s text—cannot be effortlessly excised from the story without simultaneously weakening the story’s emphasis upon desire. Undoubtedly, the orgy poses problems for conscientious readers because of how it frames the woman as a magical cure-all for impotent men; furthermore, when King’s texts view procreation as a powerful symbol of social revitalization, they leave out everyone that does not automatically associate desire with child-rearing.6 Nevertheless, if readers respond by removing desire from IT, they are left with a rather lame cosmic consensus—an all-encompassing love that enables the Losers to defeat one structure (the bureaucratic barrens of Derry) and replace it with another, albeit more palatable structure (belief in universal good). The subject’s desire in IT serves as a corrective to the Foucaultian ties that bind. To ignore this radical aspect of the narrative means forfeiting the narrative’s potency in favor of pantheistic gloss. IT contends that Foucault’s master signifier (power) is entirely too positive. For one, Foucault never satisfactorily addresses the unconscious—the unpredictable dynamism—of the subject. At the heart of a cosmic system oriented around power, King’s childless characters seek refuge in a place called the Barrens: a void that marks the literal as well as figurative blank spot at the center of Derry (a symbol of the town’s unconscious).7 Pennywise peddles in the language of power yet It trembles before the realization that 6 For more on the problematic link between child-rearing and desire, see Edelman (2004). 7 Although he is not strictly a Lacanian, Jean Baudrillard echoes the Lacanian critique of Foucault: “Seduction is stronger than power because it is a reversible and mortal process, while power wants to be irreversible like value, as well as cumulative and immortal like value … Behind

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something exists beyond Its metaphysical conception of the universe—the incalculable surplus of individual longing that gave birth to Pennywise in the first place. “Perhaps It was not eternal after all—the unthinkable must finally be thought” (King 1034). Because the monstrous It emerges from the unconscious, It too remains strikingly contingent upon something It cannot control, fed not by an ever-productive battle for power but by a volatile and unmappable drive that dependably destroys It. King’s characters cannot be completely absorbed into the disciplinary structures that surround them because they have an existential itch. And it is this itch—this existential unfulfillment—that enables King’s characters to exist outside of the borders of an otherwise prescriptive world. In response, the critic might also venture, unfettered, into an improvisational detour. When they take their cue from one of the earliest theorizers of film form, Sergei Eisenstein, filmmakers poetically combine familiar images to create alternative associations. The image of a sheep moving to slaughter; the image of children being shoved through a classroom door—in Muschietti’s thoughtful use of montage, spectators re-discover the potency of poetic suggestion. Let us reconsider, then, the sawhorse that initially knocks Georgie/the spectator down and reveals that the film IT: Chapter 1 will push the characters—and the spectators—where it wants them to go (fig. 3.10). In terms of shot composition, the sawhorse is cut off to read “Lic Works.” Lic Works: perhaps this odd image gestures at the perverse, pedophilic Pennywise, especially in Its grotesque sexualization (a Lick Works, or works driven by the act of licking; Pennywise is a particularly oral monster, with that uniquely dexterous maw). Lic Works: perhaps this odd image gestures at the root of the suffix “lic,” which in Old English means “dead bodies” (a system fueled by the accumulation of corpses, stacked neatly at the center of town). Regardless of the f ilmmaker’s intention, the coercive f ilm has a gaping blind spot: my capacity as a spectator to intervene and interpret according to my own desires. These films simply cannot dictate my desires. I never stop realizing myself; my inner life will not lie down and be mapped from a detached, clinical overlook. Indeed, the structure of the film depends upon these gaps as the locus of my desire as a spectator—that is, it is precisely because of these gaps that the fantasy works at all.8 power, or at the very heart of power and of production, there is a void which gives them today a last glimmer of reality” (45). 8 Jean-Louis Comolli writes, “What makes [the cinematic apparatus] falter makes it go” (141).

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Fig. 3.10. A close-up of the Public Works sawhorse.

Conclusion The preceding essay allows King’s Constant Reader to comprehend the paradoxical heart of the author’s corpus: the friction between a vast disciplinary system and the individuals desiring escape. Like many of his poststructuralist contemporaries, King struggles to resolve this contradiction. The critic can name at least two Kings—the Foucaultian King, intent on charting the human condition to explain its innerworkings, and the Lacanian King, intent on sustaining psychoanalytical fissures. My own preference should be clear: whereas the Foucaultian King counters one form of mastery with a subtle, more efficient form of mastery, the Lacanian King counters claims of mastery by sustaining the unresolvable quagmire of subjective desire. In a word, I prefer the King that acknowledges the invaluable part that dissatisfaction plays in human experience. Yet King readers need not issue a decisive verdict on which interpretive mode “wins out”; instead, with these contradictory impulses in mind, King’s critics might recognize how fruitful it is to place into dialogue King’s multiverse and poststructuralist theory. My ur-theory for unpacking King’s narrative logic proves to be as contradictory as the primary texts under consideration.

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Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Semiotext[e], 1987. Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP, 2002. Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Machines of the Visible.” The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa Lauretis and Stephen Heath. St. Martin’s Press, 1980, pp. 121–42. Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso, 2015. Downey, Dara, and Darryl Jones. “King of the Castle: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland, pp. 214–36. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, Knopf, 1990. Foucault, Michel. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 258–73. “High Times Interview: Stephen King,” Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Grand Central Publishing, 1989, pp. 198–210. IT: Chapter 1. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Performances by Bill Skarsgård and Jaeden Martell. New Line Cinema, 2017. IT: Chapter 2. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Performances by Bill Hader and Jessica Chastain. New Line Cinema, 2018. King, Stephen. IT. Viking, 1986. Muschietti, Andy. “Interview.” Conducted by James Kleinmann. 4 September 2017. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. U of Wisconsin P, 2005.

About the Author Michael J. Blouin, PhD is a professor of English and Humanities at Milligan University. His recent publications include Democracy and the American Gothic (2024), Stephen King and American Politics (2021) and Stephen King and American History (2020). He currently serves as the editor for the Popular Culture Studies Journal. Blouin’s primary research interests are horror, popular culture, and critical theory.

II Making Meaning

4. Reading Stephen King Religiously: Scary Stories and the Teaching of Religion Douglas E. Cowan

Abstract: Building on work first explored in America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King, this essay discusses why the work of Stephen King matters from the perspective of religious studies. This essay explores four crucial aspects, including death, suffering, socialization, and meaning. Stephen King’s work matters less because of what his storyworlds say about him, than what they say about us, and about the limitless abyss that hides in plain sight just up the stairs, just around the corner, and just under the bed. He asks the questions we ask, but answers them only contingently, with stories that make us pull the covers a little closer and maybe leave the light on when we try to sleep. Keywords: religious studies, religious socialization, belief, theodicy

Waypoints Across more than sixty novels and a dozen short story collections, Stephen King’s presentation of religion is neither uniform nor complete. It is filled with contradictions, non sequiturs, unanswered questions, ambivalent cliff-hangers, and frustrating dei ex machina—indeed, much like religious life beyond the pages of his stories. Unlike in H. P. Lovecraft, there is no coherent religious framework analogous to the Cthulhu mythos. Unlike for Philip K. Dick, it is impossible to map King’s fictionalized religious imaginings onto his own life. Some have tried, but it’s a bit of a fool’s errand. Rather, in the work of King and writers like him, we see the religious imagination at work in real time, as it were, exploring the kind of questions that we continue to ask and which all but define us as a species. Who are

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch04

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we? Where do we come from and where are we going? What is the purpose of our existence, and of the suffering that seems such an integral part of it? Is there a god and does this god care about us? Which is to say, do we matter? Although religions throughout the world claim to have answered these questions—not infrequently as though speaking for all of us—they are religious questions only by convention. More properly, they should be considered human questions. That is, “they belong to us as a function of our humanity, not our participation in this or that belief system. Put simply, questions of meaning and purpose, suffering and justice, existence and extinction, even truth and beauty—these are all properly human questions” (Cowan, America’s Dark Theologian 6).1 Here are just a few of the facets of the religious imagination that can be explored through King’s horror fiction. Obviously, there is death, the ur-fear from which so much of the religious imagination has evolved and toward which religious belief is directed. Whether told as a “caught dead” story such as “Autopsy Room Four” or “Willa,” a more extended discussion such as “That Thing, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” or “The Things They Left Behind,” whether frightening (“Riding the Bullet”; Revival) or comforting (“Mister Yummy”; Insomnia), how we think about death informs what we think about reality. Post-mortem survival of any kind implies some concept of the way reality works. However terrifying the potential, though, nowhere in King’s work is there a suggestion of nothing after death. He believes strongly that we carry on in some form, that there is an order of reality beyond the mortal—though through his stories he constantly questions the presumption that we understand anything about that unseen order. After all, at their most basic level, religions are systematized conjectures for answering our questions about death, allaying our fears when it happens, and preparing us for it when it appears on our own horizon. Religious belief and horror fiction often tread this same dark path. How we become believers, on the other hand—how we learn about our faith and maintain those beliefs in the face of option and opposition—is the problem of religious socialization. Whether religious or otherwise, socialization is the process of framing norms and expectations. Equally important, though, are the lasting effects of this process, the ways in which socialization shapes events even decades later. An often-overlooked chapter in The Shining, 1 Since each of King’s works referenced here is discussed at length in America’s Dark Theologian, I refer the reader to that volume. Chapter references for specific works are included in the sample syllabus at the end of this essay. Secondary material, however, will be referenced in the text.

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for example, illustrates this process of religious socialization as a young Jacky Torrance sits in catechism class, struggling to find the face of Jesus in an optical illusion, a picture the well-meaning Sister Beatrice proclaims as a “miracle of God” (411). One of the most important sections of IT describes how religious socialization influences the various ways in which members of the Losers’ Club understand the terrifying entity that has landed in their midst. Paul Edgecomb’s adolescent upbringing “in those churches of Praise Jesus, the Lord Is Mighty, piney-woods amen corners” continues to shape his memories of John Coffey, even many decades after he watched the gentle giant take his last walk down the Green Mile (Green Mile 191). Although it’s often a little thin on why, religious socialization teaches us what we should believe about the relationship between the seen and the unseen orders. Embedding those beliefs in the daily round is the task of ritual. “N.,” one of King’s most Kafkaesque protagonists, is confronted with an experience he cannot explain, a supernatural event for which any religious training has left him woefully unprepared. As he ritualizes his interactions with his frightening experience in Ackerman’s Field, however, we can see the various functions—almost a ritual continuum—in his actions. While “Rainy Season” is a wonderful example of how human beings so often forget the origins of ritual—even as they remain unwilling to forego the rituals themselves—Louis Creed’s journey beyond the deadfall in Pet Sematary is something of a masterclass in the ritual process of initiation. Neither “N.” nor “Rainy Season” nor Pet Sematary demonstrates much in the way of conventional religion, but each showcases certain fundamental aspects of all religious ritual, regardless where or when it has been offered, to what species of deity, or in service of what agenda: the correlation fallacy (i.e., seeing in one thing the cause of another); fear of a ritual misstep (i.e., dread of doing something wrong or leaving something undone); the process of interpretive drift (i.e., a gradual shift in the conformation of our understanding; see Luhrmann 1989); and the ambiguous power of non-falsifiability (i.e., you cannot prove my god did not save me). But, in all of this, why should we care? Isn’t this all just make-believe? After all, they’re just stories, aren’t they?

Why Stephen King Matters Pose these questions in terms of why Stephen King matters and, for many, the answer will be obvious: he does not. Not really. Indeed, any number of people would argue that, however popular King’s work has been over the

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past four-and-a-half decades (and continues to be, despite occasional claims of “retirement”), his prodigious output—more than sixty-five novels and two hundred-plus short stories, not to mention a handful of non-fiction works—amounts to little more than hastily purchased boarding lounge fare. “I don’t really think of King as a bad writer,” opined a Guardian columnist with barely concealed disdain, although “as my girlfriend is always reminding me, his portrayals of small-town America are sometimes brilliant” (Harper). Harold Bloom, the putative dean of American literary critics, once described King as “an immensely inadequate writer” and condemned his receipt of the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters as “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life” (“Dumbing Down American Readers”). Of course, this invective did not stop Bloom from editing an anthology of essays on King’s work, though even there he damned with faint praise, concluding that rather than as a writer King will be remembered principally as a “sociological phenomenon” (Stephen King 3). King himself accepts that he has been “dismissed by the more intellectual critics as a hack,” but he suggests in response that “the intellectual’s definition of a hack seems to be ‘an artist whose work is appreciated by too many people’” (Nightmares and Dreamscapes 876). Which really is the question, isn’t it? Because the fact remains that, despite the self-important delusions of both the academy and the fourth estate, millions upon millions more people will read a King novel or short story, watch a movie or miniseries based on his work, or encounter someone who is deeply passionate about the varied storyworlds he explores than will ever check out a book by Harold Bloom, browse much beyond the Guardian’s above-the-fold headlines, or, not for nothing, read this particular essay. Which is to say, popular culture matters because through it untold numbers of people learn about the world around them, wonder about the world they encounter, and then pass on their own stories of that world to succeeding generations. In the context of being human, storytelling simply is that important, and, in terms of the shadowy corner of the vast human library haunted by scary stories, reading Stephen King religiously is much more than a trite euphemism.

Reading Stephen King Religiously Long before the religious imaginings of our ancestors became encoded in doctrine, embedded in liturgy, and enshrined in ritual, they existed—perhaps

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for millennia—as stories, as tales passed around the flickering campfire and played out nightly against shadows dancing on cave walls. In fact, stories are still the most powerful means by which religious truths and sacred teachings are both reinforced for the current crop of believers and communicated to those whom teachers hope will follow in their faith-footsteps. After all, consider how many sermons, homilies, dharma talks, and sundry spiritual lessons open with some version of “Let me tell you a story …” Many of us remember stories more readily than we do facts, we recall tales and anecdotes much longer than we do mere data, and the more we hear (and repeat) a particular story, the more we come to believe the story we are telling (see Cowan, Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes; McGregor and Holmes). “Stories matter and matter deeply,” writes literature scholar Frank McConnell, and “even at the most unredeemed level of ‘escapist’ entertainment, cheap novels or trash films the didactic force of storytelling is present” (3–4; see also Boyd; Gottschall). In terms of Stephen King, I propose we take McConnell at his word. Indeed, this chapter considers King’s horror fiction from the perspective of the religious imagination, the uniquely human obsession both to envision a world beyond itself and to locate itself at the center of cosmic circumstances. Taking seriously King’s premises that he wanted to write about questions far more than provide answers, and, as Gordie LaChance insists in “The Body,” that “the only two useful artforms are religion and stories” (399), I wrote America’s Dark Theologian in such a way that, using selections from King’s literary canon, it could serve as a textbook for an introductory course in religious studies. Through his novels and short fiction we can explore most, if not all, of the kinds of questions implied by the study of religion, and we can do so free from the need to come up with the “correct answer.” After all, wrote philosopher Martin Heidegger, “Each answer remains in force as an answer only so long as it is rooted in questioning” (195)—and this is nowhere more true than in terms of our species’ religious imaginings. As far as King is concerned, when it comes to questions of ultimate meaning, the kind implied by the operation of the religious imagination, “only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable, and perhaps obtain some kind of closure” (Bazaar of Bad Dreams 268, emphasis added). Or not, as it turns out, since not every story ends the way one might hope and not every answer forecloses on the question. Don’t believe me? Just ask Charlie Jacobs or Jamie Morton (Revival), ask Margaret White or Vera Smith (Carrie), ask Piper Libby (Under the Dome) or Frannie Goldsmith (The Stand), ask Father Callahan (’Salem’s Lot) or David Carver (Desperation). For all of these individuals, and many more of

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King’s characters, the fundamental dialectic between fear and hope—what I have called elsewhere “the double helix of religious DNA” (Cowan Sacred Space, 169; see also Sacred Terror, 50–51, 259–64)—ensures that the religious imagination remains anchored less in certainty than in ambiguity, less in bedrock faith than in nervous ambivalence. How, then, to begin reading Stephen King religiously? We could, for example, discuss aspects of what various people have meant by religion or, more precisely, how we understand the religious imagination as it works itself out in many and varied storyworlds. Following on from this, we could consider the question of religious meaning which, rather than competitors in the marketplace of ideas, makes religion and horror “cultural siblings, modes of storytelling and world building that share an intimate and paradoxical concern for the same questions that lie at the fluctuating, often terrifying core of what it means to be human” (Cowan, Forbidden Body 6). While that should get us started here, there are a couple of caveats to keep in mind. First, any of the constituents of the religious imagination that I mention in this essay, while certainly important, are intended as suggestions only and barely scratch the surface of the myriad ways humans have conceptualized and responded to what William James calls the “unseen order” (61). Second, although “genre fiction has often been dismissed as unworthy of scholarly attention,” “‘popular’ must never be mistaken for ‘unimportant’” (Cowan, America’s Dark Theologian xii). To claim that popularity signals unimportance is both to miss the crucial distinction between religion and the religious imagination, and to ignore the fundamental importance of story to each. It is the case that some scholars are content to suggest that “the sacred as depicted in the world religions ought to remain the benchmark for understanding what should count as most genuinely sacred” (Grigg 11), while others readily disparage pop culture representations of the religious imagination when “facets that we might expect to see in a religion are … clearly absent” (Linford 78; see Cowan, Sacred Space 150–51). Both of these approaches, however, limit religion to a kind of sui generis phenomenon that can only be understood or appreciated through the contemporary, real-world exemplars with which audiences are most familiar. In my view, however, these perspectives could not be more mistaken, especially given the unimaginable panoply of human religious belief and practice as it has existed around the world and throughout history. More importantly, each ignores the primordial significance of storytelling to the process of being human. As Salman Rushdie reminds us, “Stories are the things that tell us who we are”; indeed, we are a species that “understands itself by telling stories” (Holdengräber). And few things tell us who we are more than the stories that

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emerge from the religious imagination. That said, let us consider a couple of aspects in slightly more depth: how human beings have defined religion, and how many of them find meaning (or not) through that imagination.

Seeing the Unseen Order: Defining the Religious Imagination Perhaps more than anything else, King’s work encourages readers to question everything they think we know about what is going on and to arch a skeptical brow at their most comforting notions about reality. In fact, every time we pronounce with confidence, “Here is the answer,” the tall man in the Red Sox gimme cap replies, “Really? Check this shit out.” And, again, nowhere is this more the case than when it comes to the religious imagination. Most of us think we know religion when we see it, that we can accurately identify “the religious” when we come across it in a novel or a short story, a film or television series. Many of us see a church and we think, “This is religion.” Maybe it’s a clapboard Methodist church in rural Maine, say, Motton (“The Man in the Black Suit”), or West Harlow (Revival), or Dark Score Lake (Bag of Bones). Maybe it’s something a little more elaborate, like Our Lady of Serene Waters Catholic parish, or simpler and more basic, like Castle Rock Baptist (Needful Things). Maybe it’s First Congregationalist or Christ the Holy Redeemer in Chester’s Mill (Under the Dome). It does not really matter, because each of these is a familiar image of “religion,” whether the reader is religious or not. Similarly, when King’s reader meets a pastor or a priest—Charlie Jacobs (Revival); “Steamboat Willie” Rose or Father Brigham (Needful Things); Piper Libby or Lester Coggins (Under the Dome), even poor Father Callahan (’Salem’s Lot), the list goes on—whether they find that character sympathetic or not, they still tend to think, “Here is religion.” Many of us respond because of our bias for the familiar (whether or not we really understand what we are seeing) and the limitations of our own religious experience (which often blind us to religious realities with which we are not familiar). One recognizes “religion” when one sees it according to the ways one has been socialized to see it. For several decades, scores, if not hundreds of attempts have been made to define religion. Some definitions are predicated on a particular belief system, rendering anything other than that either innocently misguided or knowingly fraudulent; other definitions are based on social and political considerations. That is, only “real” religions can gain tax exempt status, or qualify to be taught in public schools, or form the basis of state power. Some definitions are so philosophically obtuse that they are of value only to a

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handful of academic specialists. And still others are grounded in particular moral or ethical considerations: “real” religions are good, and their adherents decent and upright; other religions and other religionists—which we not infrequently denigrate as cults or false religions—well, not so much. The problem with each of these ways of thinking is that while it may correctly identify some familiar sliver of human religious experience, it does so only at the cost of ignoring or rejecting the vast majority of that experience with which we are unacquainted. Since writing Sacred Terror, I have relied on a def inition of religion provided by psychologist and philosopher William James, one that I find especially useful when considering religion in popular culture, and more specifically horror and science fiction. “The life of religion,” he wrote in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “is the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmonious adjustment thereto” (61; emphases added). That is it. While James may seem bit out of fashion when compared to modern scholars, his conception of religion provides several distinct advantages over any others I have encountered, particularly when used to explore the work of a writer such as Stephen King. Consider just a few of these. First, James’s definition does not presume the existence of a god, of gods and goddesses, or even of one supreme God. It does not exclude the possibility of particular supernatural or divine beings, and certainly these do show up in many of King’s stories, but it does not require their presence and it makes no comment on their nature when they do appear. James’s definition simply posits the existence of “an unseen order,” some framework of reality that exists beyond, behind, perhaps beside our own, which is hidden from us by the limitations of our senses, but to which we are bound in some way. It could be the “outside” from whence descended the terrifying It (IT 728). It could be a completely alien dimension accessed only through the trunk of a derelict sedan (From a Buick 8) or the muddy hulk of an old station wagon (“Mile 81”). It could be brief glimpses beyond the threshold of death, and the terrifying realization that what one considers the real world is “nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as an old nylon stocking. The true world was behind it,” as Revival’s Jamie Morton insists, “an insane netherworld I now know is so close to our own” (380, 382, emphasis in the original). James’s notion of an “unseen order” reminds us, as one of King’s major inspirations, H. P. Lovecraft, wrote in “From Beyond,” that “what do we know of the world and the universe around us” is extraordinarily limited. More than that, “our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only

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as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature” (24). While King has long ago given up on his “perfectly conventional Methodist” upbringing (Just After Sunset 530), he points out in Nightmares & Dreamscapes that he does still “believe that there is an unseen world all around us” (4). Indeed, from that perspective, his own short story, “N.,” is something of an homage to “From Beyond.” Next, because James’s definition does not specify the particularities of the unseen order, it also avoids the need to choose between whatever divine or supernatural forces might be at play in a given storyworld. Readers are not required to reject the potential for something simply because they do not understand it or find it unnerving. In “Children of the Corn,” then, the unseen order could as easily be populated by the “gentle Jesus” of Gatlin, Nebraska’s long-gone Grace Baptist Church as it could by the “grinning, vulpine” Christ of “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” (265). Setting aside The Stand’s rather clumsy deus ex machina, this novel’s unseen order can accommodate Randall Flagg as well as it can Mother Abigail. Desperation includes both the redemptive God of David Carver and Johnny Marinville as well as the malign supernatural power of their adversary, Tak. Duma Key, on the other hand, can reimagine the myth of Persephone, insisting, as the main character points out, “We’re not talking about Greek mythology here. We’re talking about something much older and more monstrous” (591). While one might find many of these images discomforting, that does not mean they do not fit comfortably under the umbrella of an “unseen order.” Similarly, James’s definition does not spell out either what a “supreme good” should be, or how humans must go about ensuring that they are in “harmonious adjustment” with whatever constitutes the unseen order. Of course, many of King’s storyworlds describe well-known aspects of religious belief and practice, but the point of James’s definition is that they do not have to. Although Insomnia, for example, explicitly recalls the horrific events of Pet Sematary (726), the unseen order as it plays out in Derry relies at least as much on questions around the simple inevitability of death and the near-death experience. Thus, the conceptual ambiguity in James’s definition allows King’s Constant Reader to consider a much greater range of examples than they might recognize simply on the basis of religious familiarity alone. Although James did not make it explicit, his definition points to the essential distinction between religion and the religious imagination. Put differently, all religion—from the sacrifice of infants to the Canaanite god Moloch as described in the Hebrew scriptures to the sacrifice of the Mass as laid out in the Roman Missal—emerges into history as a product of the religious imagination, but, and this is the important bit, not all aspects of

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that imagination find their way into the world as religion. Immeasurably more of our species’ religious imagination comes to us in ways that are never encoded in doctrine, reiterated in ritual, or memorialized in brickand-mortar places of worship. That is, they come through novels and short stories, through theater, film, and television, through music and stand-up comedy, through comic books and graphic novels, through visual art and poetry—just to name a few. And the stories they tell are often as terrifying as they are comforting.

Fearing the Unseen Order: The Good, Moral, and Decent Fallacy For as long as our species has imagined an unseen order, the human urge to comport with its dictates has been as motivated by fear as it has anything else. We fear the gods and will often do unspeakable things in their names. We fear those who speak in the name of the gods and those who will submit to the most abject humiliations at the zealot’s command. Put bluntly, as historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us, “Religion is not nice; it has been responsible for more death and suffering than any other human activity” (110). And this is particularly salient when one considers the works of a writer such as Stephen King because of what I have taken to calling the good, moral, and decent fallacy. Also known as “approbation bias,” this is the somewhat self-serving metanarrative that if evil is perpetrated by religious believers, either through their particular interpretation of the faith or at the alleged behest of their god, it cannot be “real” religion. In this sense, religion becomes, by definition, a desirable aspect of human culture, and works at all times for the good of humankind—both in this life and the next. It is difficult to imagine a less tenable position from which to view the world around us. Indeed, as physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg pointed out, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” (Cowan, Forbidden 51; see Weinberg)

To which King offers an enthusiastic “Amen.” Consider just some of the unseen forces of evil—malevolent orders of hidden reality—with which King’s human characters must contend: The Stand’s Randall Flagg, though it seems clear that he operates on behalf of some

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malign higher power, whether the Christian devil or not. Or the eponymous IT, who, for all intents and purposes, has been self-existent from before the creation of our universe. Or Needful Things’ Leland Gaunt, who clearly seems to be the demonic errand boy for some darker force. Or the entity Tak, particularly as we encounter it in Desperation. Tak may be defeated by what one understands as the Christian god, but it is not destroyed; it still belongs to an order of reality significantly different from one’s own. Or, returning to Duma Key, the “Perse-thing” works in our world as part of “something far older and more monstrous” (591), perhaps the same (or a similar) reality from which Revival’s Lovecraftian “Mother” peeks through, “a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms, where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts” (403). Even as powerful a being as Atropos, the chaotic Long-Timer of Insomnia, serves a higher, darker, and more powerful unseen order. In each case, these beings—whoever and whatever they are—are only defeated for the moment; they are not destroyed. The monsters always come back. Balance may have been restored for a time, but balance only and always exists alongside the potential for imbalance. Exploring how individuals can navigate this never-ending tension—especially in the face of putative religious certainties—is part of the storytelling genius of Stephen King, if for no other reason than that he does not shy away for the real experience of loss but continues to explore how many of us find meaning in the most dire circumstances.

Facing Our Worst Fears: Meaning and the Religious Imagination How we deal with the twinned problems of evil and human suffering has been as much a central question for the religious imagination as it has for practitioners of horror culture. In the study of religion, this question is often framed as theodicy: attempts to justify belief in a benevolent god in the face of undeserved adversity, which is to say, how we find meaning in the midst of the maelstrom. Charlie Jacobs, Piper Libby, and Vera Smith, for example, each respond to suffering and loss differently. Each balances the scales of theodicy in different ways. On “the day of the terrible sermon,” after the senseless loss of his family, Reverend Charlie Jacobs responds by confronting the good folks of West Harlow Methodist Church with hard questions about why a good god would allow the kind of suffering he is just experienced—the deaths of his wife and young son. He gave them “the exact, unvarnished

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truth” (Revival 69), and his obsession to understand the meaning of his pain takes him to the edge of death and the brink of madness. Under the Dome’s Piper Libby, on the other hand, when faced with an almost identical tragedy, simply drifts away from belief, her faith in the divine gradually attenuating from “The Omnipotent Could-Be” to “The Great Maybe” to the one she calls, simply, “Not-There” (157). Conversely, when trying to understand the purpose behind her son’s tragic accident, instead of retreating from belief, The Dead Zone’s Vera Smith doubles down on her own place in the Divine plan. Thus, her faith insists that, rather than the result of a terrible mishap on a mountain road, Johnny’s coma is “a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on something!” (151). That is, the accident cannot be what it is, but must be something else, something more meaningful. Something meant for her. Unlike Charlie or Piper, “Vera locates every action, every event within the purview of God’s omniscience and omnipotence” (Cowan, America’s Dark Theologian 149–50). But it gets even more interesting. Consider Insomnia, which is narratively connected to the world of The Dark Tower in much the same way Desperation is refracted in The Regulators. Sadly, in my view, Insomnia is one of King’s less well-known novels, perhaps because his heroes are ordinary senior citizens, not plucky pre-teens (e.g., IT) or eager thirty-somethings (take your pick). Through the “little bald doctors” (521), readers gain vertiginous perspective on the multi-level, multi-dimensional set of realities of which their world is nothing more than a tiny, seemingly insignificant speck. Yet, even there, they can find meaning, even if their vocabulary is limited and the experiences, for all intents and purposes, beyond description. “Above these floors” of reality, says Clotho, one of Insomnia’s benevolent Long-Timers, “inaccessible to us but very much a part of the same tower of existence live other beings. Some of them are marvelous and wonderful; others are hideous beyond our ability to comprehend, let alone yours” (523). That is, there are always new worlds to explore, a never-ending road winding into the darkness.

A Conclusion and an Invitation In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a number of mainline Protestant denominations witnessed such precipitous membership decline that it spawned a sociological specialty known as secularization theory—the (mistaken) belief that religion itself was on the decline. Tens of millions of people went on to describe themselves, somewhat vaguely, as “spiritual but

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not religious,” which was their way of retaining connection with a measure of belief in the unseen order without having to maintain membership in any organized religious community. But, as King points out, horror and religion address the same key issues, the same burning questions. “Horror fiction,” he told an audience gathered at a public library, “supernatural horror fiction, suggests that we go on. All those supernatural possibilities are there, good or bad, black or white, they suggest that we go on” (“An Evening at the Billerica Library” 19). Which is to say, once we pass the deadfall that awaits each of us, there is a There there. The last reason King gave that evening for reading horror fiction is that “it’s a rehearsal for death … We know it’s going to happen,” and “we have to do something about that awareness” (19). “Religion” is the other principal way many of us talk about these possibilities, the way we give them manageable shape and texture. Indeed, part of the appeal of both horror stories and religious myth is not simply that we still believe in the supernatural, the unseen order, but why we continue to believe. In many ways, especially in terms of the evolutionary time-scale, we are not so very far from the caves of our hominin ancestors. We may know different things, but we do not think with different brains. We may have come up with different answers, but the questions remain the same. And, however locked away they may be, their fears remain our fears, their pattern-seeking and meaning-making equipment the same as ours. To reiterate Gordie LaChance: “The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.” Both are Homo sapiens standard-issue.

“Reading Stephen King Religiously”: A Sample Syllabus NB, I have included a number of suggested readings from King’s work, which are linked here to the relevant chapters in America’s Dark Theologian. Obviously, there are far more that could be included and profitably explored, and I encourage readers to do so. Please bear in mind as well that I have included references only from King’s horror canon. Selections from, for example, The Dark Tower series, could as easily be incorporated, but were beyond the particular scope of America’s Dark Theologian.

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Readings from America’s Dark Theologian

Suggested Readings from the Work of Stephen King

Week One: Course Introduction

Introduction

“The Body,” Different Seasons “N.”, Just After Sunset The Stand (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  When you think about the work of Stephen King, what comes to mind? That is, what is your starting point for this course?  If you have noticed aspects of religion in his work, what were they and how did they fit into the plot?  Would it surprise you to learn that much of King’s work is concerned with how people have imagined “the religious”? If so, why? If not, why not? Week Two: The Importance of Religion and Popular Culture

Chapter 1: “America’s Dark Theologian: Reading Stephen King Religiously”

“The Body,” Different Seasons “The Man in the Black Suit,” Everything’s Eventual The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Sample Discussion Questions:  In small groups, discuss how you would define religion. That is, how would you explain the phenomenon of “religion” to, say, a visitor from another planet? How would you distinguish religion from other activities in which humans are deeply invested?  King wanted to write about questions rather than answers, and Cowan insists that questions are more interesting (and often more important) than answers. What do you think they mean by this? Are they correct? Why or why not?  What is “sympathetic magic”? How does King use this concept in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon? Can you think of examples from your own life (or of someone you know) that illustrates the same principle? Week Three: Defining Religion

Chapter 2: “Thin Spots: What Peeks through the Cracks in the World”

“Children of the Corn,” Night Shift “Crouch End,” Nightmares and Dreamscapes “N.”, Just After Sunset “Suffer the Little Children,” Nightmares and Dreamscapes “Mile 81,” Bazaar of Bad Dreams The Tommyknockers (selections) The Dark Half (selections) The Outsider (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  If you are religious (or at least know someone who is), how would you describe the three elements of William James’s definition in terms of your own faith?  How is what Cowan describes as “the good, moral, and decent fallacy” illustrated in each of the suggested readings for this week? How do they differ from one another, and what can this tell us based on James’s definition of religion?  Compare the elements of James’s definition in terms of “Children of the Corn” and “N.” What do you think the differences between them can tell us about the study of religion?

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Topic

Readings from America’s Dark Theologian

Suggested Readings from the Work of Stephen King

Week Four: The Origins of the Religious Imagination

Chapter 3: “Deadfall: Ghost Stories as God-Talk”

“Mister Yummy,” Bazaar of Bad Dreams “Riding the Bullet,” Everything’s Eventual “Autopsy Room Four,” Everything’s Eventual “Willa,” Just After Sunset “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French,” Everything’s Eventual It (selections) Pet Sematary (selections) Bag of Bones (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  Have you (or has someone you know) every “seen” a ghost? Have you heard stories of seeing a ghost from friends or relatives? What do you make of this, especially in terms of the many ways Stephen King talks about spirits left behind?  How do some of the religions with which you are familiar think about death? How does that compare with some of King’s stories?  Compare the ways in which King questions the concept of death in “That Feeling …,” “Riding the Bullet,” and either Pet Sematary or Bag of Bones. Does one appeal to you more than the others? Why or why not? Week Five Chapter 4: Religious Socialization “A Jumble of Blacks and Whites: Becoming Religious”

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French,” Everything’s Eventual The Shining (selections) It (selections) The Green Mile (selections) Needful Things (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  Describe young Jack Torrance’s experience in Sunday school. How does this illustrate the process of religious socialization? Can you think of similar experiences in your own life, or in the life of someone you know?  How do you relate the conception of death in “That Feeling …” with the process of religious socialization?  Religious conflict is often grounded in socialization: what we’re taught about different religions influences how we feel about them. Using examples from King’s work (e.g., IT; Needful Things), reflect on this process. Can you see examples of it in your own life, or the life of someone you know? Week Six: The Ritual Process

Chapter 5: “Return to Ackerman’s Field: Ritual and the Unseen Order”

“Rainy Season,” Nightmares and Dreamscapes “N.”, Just After Sunset Pet Sematary

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Readings from America’s Dark Theologian

Suggested Readings from the Work of Stephen King

Sample Discussion Questions:  Describe the ritual process that King takes us through as Louis and Jud go beyond the deadfall in Pet Sematary. In small groups, discuss how this compares with other religious rituals with which you may be familiar.  Compare and contrast the rituals King writes about in “Rainy Season” and “N.” How do they compare with other religious rituals with which you are familiar?  What other examples of the ritual process can you find in the different King stories so far in this course? Week Seven: The Varieties of Religious Experience

Chapter 6: “Forty Years in Maine: Stephen King and the Varieties of Religious Experience”

Carrie The Dead Zone (selections) Revival Under the Dome (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  One critic has written that King’s “portrayals of small-town America are sometimes brilliant.” In his descriptions of Margaret White, Vera Smith, Piper Libby, and Charlie Jacobs can you see reflections or refractions of people you know, and the way they have processed their own religious experience?  Cowan describes religion and horror as “cultural siblings,” ways of storytelling which are concerned with the same central set of questions. Do you agree with this? If so, why, and can you find examples of this in these Stephen King novels? If not, why not? Week Eight: Theodicy and the Nature of God

Chapter 7: “If It Be Your Will: Theodicy, Morality, and the Nature of God”

“My Pretty Pony,” Nightmares and Dreamscapes “The Things They Left Behind,” Just After Sunset “The Man in the Black Suit,” Everything’s Eventual Desperation The Green Mile (selections) Under the Dome (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions:  Suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent, is a principal challenge to what many consider the sovereignty of God. How does King explore this important question in each of these novels?  Compare and contrast the ways in which characters in two of these novels (your choice) deal with the suffering they experience. What does this say about their conception of the unseen order, and their place in it?  King called writing “The Things They Left Behind” “an act of willed understanding.” In small groups, discuss what you think he meant by that. More than that, he believes that stories are the only way to bring about this “willed understanding.” Do you agree with him? Why or why not?

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Readings from America’s Dark Theologian

Suggested Readings from the Work of Stephen King

Week Nine: Cosmology and the Importance of Questions

Chapter 8: “The Land Beyond: Cosmology and the Never-Ending Questions”

Duma Key From a Buick 8 (selections) It (selections) Revival (selections) Insomnia (selections)

Sample Discussion Questions  It is axiomatic that we fear what we don’t understand, and that religion is often a means to keep that fear under control. Discuss how King explores some of the different ways of managing our fear in this week’s readings. What does it mean that the fear doesn’t go away?  In terms of William James’s definition of religion, we have considered many versions of the “unseen order” in this course. List three of them from King’s work, then describe (a) what the “supreme good” in that story seems to be, (b) how “harmonious adjustment” is managed, and (c) what questions remain at the end of the story. Suggested Course Reading: Week Ten: To Read or Not to Read Cowan, “Once Upon a Time…,” Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” Imagining Religion Sample Discussion Questions:  In small groups, discuss your own experiences of seeing a favorite novel or short story or comic book brought to “life” on either television or the big screen. How did you feel about the adaptation, and why?  J. Z. Smith considers that the significance of comparison lies in explaining difference not in simply pointing out similarity. Comparing some of King’s literary work with their cinematic or television adaptations, how would you explain the differences? How would you explain the differences between adaptations (e.g., Pet Sematary 1989 and its remake thirty years later)?  Revisit your answer to the first question in week one. Has your view of the relationship between religion and horror changed? If so, how? If not, why not? Similarly, explore any changes (or not) in your views on the importance of popular culture in the study of religion.

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Works Cited Bloom, Harold. “Dumbing Down American Readers.” Boston Globe, 24 Sept. 2003, www.bostonglobe.com. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Stephen King: Updated Edition, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2007, pp. 1–4. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Belknap, 2009. Cowan, Douglas E. America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King. New York UP, 2018. Cowan, Douglas E. The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. New York UP, 2022. Cowan, Douglas E. Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Religion Shapes Fantasy Culture. U of California P, 2019. Cowan, Douglas E. Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television. Baylor UP, 2010. Cowan, Douglas E. Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Baylor UP, 2008. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Grigg, Richard. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Harper, Alastair. “The Only Amazing Thing about Stephen King is His Ego.” Guardian, 21 Aug. 2017, www.guardian.com. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking (1964): Revised Edition, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. Holdengräber, Paul, pres. “Salman Rushdie.” The Quarantine Tapes, episode 168, Onassis LA and dublab. 4 Mar. 2021, quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/ the-quarantine-tapes-168-salman-rushdie. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: Reprint Edition. Modern Library, 1999. King, Stephen. “An Evening at the Billerica Library.” Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, New English Library, 1988, p. 19. King, Stephen. “Autopsy Room Four.” Everything’s Eventual, Pocket Books, 2002, pp. 1–34. King, Stephen. Bag of Bones. Gallery, 1998. King, Stephen. Bazaar of Bad Dreams. Scribner, 2015. King, Stephen. “The Body.” Different Seasons, Signet, 1982, pp. 293–436. King, Stephen. Carrie: Reprint Edition. Anchor, 2002. King, Stephen. “Children of the Corn.” Night Shift, Doubleday, 1978, pp. 250–78.

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King, Stephen. “Crouch End.” Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Pocket Books, 1993. pp. 614–49. King, Stephen. The Dark Half. Signet, 1989. King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. Signet, 1979. King, Stephen. Desperation. Viking, 1996. King, Stephen. Duma Key. Pocket Books, 2008. King, Stephen. From a Buick 8. Pocket Books, 2002. King, Stephen. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Pocket Books, 1999. King, Stephen. The Green Mile. Pocket Books, 1996. King, Stephen. Insomnia. Gallery, 1994. King, Stephen. It. Signet, 1980. King, Stephen. Just After Sunset: Stories. Pocket Books, 2008. King, Stephen. “The Man in the Black Suit.” Everything’s Eventual, Pocket Books, 2002, pp. 35–68. King, Stephen. “Mile 81.” Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner, 2015, pp. 5–50. King, Stephen. “Mister Yummy.” Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner, 2015, pp. 345–62. King, Stephen. “My Pretty Pony.” Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Pocket Books, 1993, pp. 480–511. King, Stephen. “N.” Just After Sunset: Stories. Pocket Books, 2008, pp. 272–351. King, Stephen. Needful Things. Signet, 1991. King, Stephen. Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Pocket Books, 1993. King, Stephen. The Outsider. Scribner, 2018. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Pocket Books, 1983. King, Stephen. “Rainy Season.” Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Pocket Books, 1993, pp. 453–79. King, Stephen. The Regulators. Gallery, 1996. King, Stephen. Revival. Gallery, 2014. King, Stephen. “Riding the Bullet.” Everything’s Eventual, Pocket Books, 2002, pp. 511–66. King, Stephen. ’Salem’s Lot. Doubleday, 1975. King, Stephen. The Shining: Reprint Edition. Anchor, 2013. King, Stephen. The Stand. Anchor, 1990. King, Stephen. “Suffer the Little Children.” Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Pocket Books, 1993, pp. 104–19. King, Stephen. “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French.” Everything’s Eventual, Pocket Books, 2002, pp. 433–56. King, Stephen. “The Things They Left Behind.” Just After Sunset: Stories, Pocket Books, 2008, pp. 218–61. King, Stephen. The Tommyknockers. Signet, 1987. King, Stephen. Under the Dome. Gallery, 2009.

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King, Stephen. “Willa.” Just After Sunset: Stories, Pocket Books, 2008, pp. 7–41. Linford, Peter. “Deeds of Power: Respect for Religion in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” “Star Trek” and Sacred Ground: Explorations of “Star Trek,” Religion, and American Culture, edited by Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren, SUNY Press, 1999, pp. 77–100. Lovecraft, H. P. “From Beyond.” The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. edited by S. T. Joshi, Penguin Classics, 2004, pp. 23–29. Luhrmann, Tanya. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Picador, 1989. McConnell, Frank. Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature. Oxford UP, 1979. McGregor, Ian, and John G. Holmes. “How Storytelling Shapes Memory and Impressions of Relationship Events over Time.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 76, no. 3, 1999, pp. 403–19. Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. U of Chicago P, 1982. Weinberg, Steven. Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Harvard UP, 2001.

About the Author Douglas E. Cowan is Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development Studies at Renison University College. His previous books include Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen and America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King.

5.

Stephen King’s and Peter Staub’s Mythmaking: Jack Sawyer as an American Hero Daniel Compora

Abstract: This essay examines Jack Sawyer, the protagonist of two of Stephen King and Peter Straub’s fantasy works, The Talisman and Black House, as a hero in the mythic tradition. It examines Jack’s progression as an adolescent in The Talisman by using mythical theoretical approaches, including Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. The Talisman and its sequel employ several archetypes, with certain characters fulfilling different roles. At the same time, Jack’s journey draws comparisons to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, placing King and Straub’s works in the context of classic American quest novels. If King and Straub’s fantastical works are indeed mythic, then it is important to illustrate assess the myth’s cultural significance and determine what it says about America. Keywords: Talisman, Sawyer, Huckleberry, archetype, monomyth

Narratives of a hero’s quest are an ancient tradition. Dating from the third millennium BCE, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh follows the Mesopotamian ruler’s journeys, including one to find the secret to eternal life. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey build upon the tradition more than a century later. The Greek argonaut Jason faces danger in acquiring the mystical Golden Fleece; Hercules goes on quests for immortality. Later, Arthurian knights such as Percival and Galahad search for the Holy Grail. In modern times, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings epic popularized the fantasy quest narrative and inspired other writers, including Stephen King, to take up the genre. Even though King established his reputation as a horror writer, his contributions

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch05

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to the fantasy genre are substantial.1 While his The Dark Tower series is most prominent and expansive, his fantasy works include two books coauthored with Peter Straub: The Talisman (1984) and its sequel, Black House (2002). The Talisman focuses on an adolescent hero on a heroic journey, twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer, who ventures into an alternate world called the Territories to acquire the titular talisman. By incorporating character archetypes and stages of the heroic journey, King and Straub’s fantastical works follow the mythic structure originated by Joseph Campbell. Drawing on a rich tradition of quest literature and the travels of American adolescents, like Huckleberry Finn, they elevate Jack Sawyer into a legendary American character facing modern-day anxieties and concerns. The Talisman’s use of archetypes elevates the novel from a simple literary work to fulfilling a role as an American myth. Jack’s progression as a questing hero in the mythic tradition situates him in the company of literature’s great heroes. One substantial influence on King’s fantasy works is Campbell’s monomyth, a heroic journey cycle of three phases and seventeen steps. “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation--return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (Campbell 23). While the three-phase, seventeen-step model is complex, Campbell describes this journey by focusing on its core elements: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (30)

King acknowledges his admiration for Campbell’s work, crediting his The Talisman and Black House co-author for bringing it to his attention. “I was introduced to Joseph Campbell by Peter Straub several years ago, and I was particularly taken by the book Hero with a Thousand Faces. It is a wonderful book, and it definitely had some effect on me” (Magistrale, The Second Decade 3). Several scholars have examined Campbell’s influence on King’s work, most notably The Dark Tower series, but scholarship on The Talisman and Black House remains sparse. King and Straub’s debt to Campbell is apparent; they name the second section of The Talisman after one of the 1 In addition to the Dark Tower series, which contains eight books, King’s other works of fantasy include The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), Sleeping Beauties (2017), and Fairy Tale (2022).

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stages of Campbell’s model, “The Road of Trials.” “Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Campbell 81). Through the course of two novels, Jack Sawyer does, indeed, survive a succession of trials. Several models of the monomyth have been derived from Campbell’s framework, including one by Christopher Vogler, which he details in The Writer’s Journey. Once a story consultant of the Walt Disney media empire, Vogler presents eight character archetypes that feature prominently in heroic stories: the Hero, Mentor, Herald, Shadow, Shapeshifter, Ally, Threshold Guardian, and Trickster. The Talisman employs all these archetypes at various points, with certain characters fulfilling different archetypal roles at other times. Vogler also presents a more concise twelve-step journey better suited to the modern media landscape. The twelve stages of Vogler’s model fit comfortably within Campbell’s three primary phases. The steps that Vogler proposes share a great deal of common ground with Campbell’s and include 1) The Ordinary World, 2) The Call to Adventure, 3) the Refusal of the Call, 4) Meeting with the Mentor, 5) Crossing the Threshold, 6) Tests, Allies, and Enemies, 7) Approach to the Inmost Cave, 8) The Ordeal, 9) Reward, 10) The Road Back, 11) Resurrection, and 12) Return with the Elixir. Analyzing essential character archetypes and select steps from Vogler’s model contributes to a greater understanding of Jack Sawyer’s heroic journey. Douglas Winter describes this work as “a quest novel, integrating elements of fantasy and horror elements” (105). Like the Dark Tower series, The Talisman and its sequel, Black House, present a “natural world [that] coexists with another, parallel world” (Stefoff 54). The Talisman, in particular, “harkens back to the simpler times depicted in Mark Twain’s work” (Wiater et al., Stephen King 66). Both novels include allusions to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, arguably the greatest American adolescent quest novel ever written. While this series does not have the depth or length of King’s Dark Tower epic, The Talisman duology accomplishes what King’s masterpiece could not: it creates a uniquely American adolescent hero in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn. The parallels to Twain’s novel are striking and invite comparison. Tony Magistrale points out, “The literal voyage—be it westward across contemporary America, [or] downstream on the Mississippi River … becomes a metaphor for the journey into the self” (Magistrale, “Toward Defining” 195). The Talisman and its sequel carry on the tradition of the adolescent journey of the self, albeit with a detour into an alternate world called the Territories.

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For readers who grew up reading fantasy fiction, elements of The Talisman will seem familiar. As Magistrale indicates, The Talisman borrows heavily from epics as diverse as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (Second Decade 68). In a review for Village Voice, Ken Tucker states that “all the cliches of the fantasy novel are here: a mythic quest, strange creatures that help or hurt, a callow youth who grows to manhood over the course of the book” (9–10). Young Jack is searching for a mystical talisman to save his dying mother, Lily Sawyer, a B-movie actress. This item is the nexus of all worlds and possesses tremendous healing power. He takes on companions throughout his journey, including the enigmatic blues singer Speedy Parker, his sickly friend Richard Sloat, and a shapeshifting werewolf appropriately named Wolf. Jack can flip into the Territories: a non-technological, pastoral world that features twinners, doppelgänger of people from the real world. Since Jack’s twinner died at birth, he has no alter ego in the Territories—a condition King and Straub call single-natured. Because of his solitary existence, Jack’s journey is primarily one of self-discovery. Phil Sullivan believes such heroic tales usually result in discovering an inner self previously unknown to the questing hero. Regardless of what is outwardly sought, the discovery of the inner self is the real purpose of the journey. He states, “The mythic story of the questing hero (male or female) is a metaphor of the inward journey to self-knowledge” (88). Jack’s discovery of this inner self eventually leads him back home to the world he was forced to leave. The journey changes him, imbuing him with knowledge and power. He defeats the forces of evil, acquires the talisman, and saves his mother and her twinner, the Queen in the Territories, thus making him a hero in both worlds. Black House picks up twenty years later in French Landing, Wisconsin, which is being terrorized by a child serial killer, the Fisherman, a character “inspired by the real-life cannibal Albert Fish” (Vincent 102). The Fisherman works for Lord Malshun, a one-eyed monstrosity from an alternate dimension. Jack, now a recently retired Los Angeles detective, reluctantly joins the hunt for the Fisherman after the abduction of a boy named Tyler Marshall. This search reawakens his long-suppressed memories of his adventures as a twelve-year-old boy and leads him to the titular black house and back to the Territories. Jack and his hero team, consisting of the police chief and some local bikers, defeat Lord Malshun. Though the Fisherman is eventually killed, Tyler Marshall rescued, and Lord Malshun defeated, the wife of another killer, whom Jack had captured, shoots Jack, nearly killing him. Speedy’s twinner Parkus promptly whisks the mortally wounded Jack back to the Territories, where the magic of the Talisman he held as a boy allows

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him to survive, albeit only in that world. Black House relies less on mythic models than its predecessor, moving more slowly “from the ‘real’ to the fantastic” (Wiater et al., Complete 68). Still, it often refers to Jack’s heroic journey and provides the opportunity to examine how his childhood heroic quest impacted his adult life.

The Archetypes Jack Sawyer fulfills the archetypal role of the hero, which Vogler defines as “someone willing to sacrifice his or her needs on behalf of others” (31). Jack, indeed, sacrifices much during his journey. Not only is he forced to flee his home state of California, but he must also eventually leave his entire home world. His primary sacrifice, however, is the loss of his childhood innocence. He realizes his mother is dying, his uncle is a villain, and both worlds possess evil forces. He loses his beloved friend Wolf, who does not survive the journey for the talisman. While sacrifice is a significant component of the monomythic hero, Campbell’s definition provides other details. “The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently, he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolic deficiency” (29–30). Jack’s gift is his ability to move between worlds. This gift comes with a cost, however. Jack’s deficiency is loneliness. Because he is single-natured, he often feels isolated. Early in The Talisman, he realizes how isolating his journey will be. Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his outcast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. (119)

Though Jack eventually returns to his world and resumes his everyday life, isolation and loneliness remain issues for him into adulthood. Jack overcomes this deficiency by forming bonds and relationships that enable him to defeat his enemies. Though he feels isolated and alone, he rarely is. Despite regularly being in the presence of others, loneliness plagues him into his adult life. In Black House, Jack befriends the local police chief, Dale Gilbertson, and Dale’s uncle, Henry Leyden, a blind man who has created several different personas as a local radio personality. He later partners with

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five members of a local motorcycle gang, the Thunder Five.2 Near the novel’s end, Jack falls in love with Sophie, the current Queen of the Territories and the twinner of Judy Marshall, kidnap victim Tyler Marshall’s mother. Despite these relationships, Jack’s loneliness is a constant companion. “What we have here is a spectacularly lonely man. Loneliness has been Jack Sawyer’s familiar for so long that he takes it for granted” (Black House 80). Later, when he resolves to share his story with Henry, “Jack can barely imagine what it will feel like to have the dam of his loneliness so obliterated, so destroyed, but the very thought of it floods him with the anticipation of relief” (510, author’s emphasis). Unfortunately, Jack is unaware that the Fisherman has killed Henry Leyden when he has this thought. Though Jack will share parts of his story with his Sawyer Gang, loneliness is an affliction throughout his life, representing the most significant obstacle that Jack must overcome. He cannot fulfill these quests without the help of others. Jack naturally looks up to his mother, but to begin his journey, Jack needs non-maternal guidance. A Mentor is a character who shares insights and wisdom with the hero. Vogler’s Mentor archetype, adapted from Campbell’s Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman (Campbell 43), is fulfilled most prominently in both novels by Speedy Parker, a natural fit for the role because he is an older, wiser man. Since he is an African American advising an adolescent white boy during his journey, Speedy functions as the “Huck Finn prototype that has influenced many of King’s texts” (Magistrale, America’s Storyteller 158.) Jack deeply feels the loss of his father, and the Mentor archetype often fulfills the role of an inadequate (in this case, missing) parental figure (Vogler 44). By expressing his belief in Jack’s heroism, telling him about the territories, and providing him with the means to transport himself there (via a disgusting elixir), Speedy’s bond with Jack is apparent during their first meeting at Funworld, the amusement park where Speedy works: “It was as if a magical current had passed directly from the old man into Jack” (Talisman 9). Though he, or his twinner Parkus, shows up occasionally during Jack’s journey, his initial purpose is to get Jack to begin his journey to pursue the Talisman, primarily on his own. Speedy’s mentorship continues in Black House. In addition to being a mentor, Speedy fulfills other archetypal roles. By introducing Jack to the Territories, he serves the function of a herald. Vogler says, “Herald characters issue challenges and announce the coming of significant change” (61). Early in The Talisman, Speedy details what Jack must do, though Jack does not yet comprehend what is expected of him. 2 Beezer St. Pierre, Doc Amberson, Mouse Baumann, Kaiser Bill, and Sonny Cantinaro comprise the Thunder Five.

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“Talisman be given unto your hand, Travellin Jack. Not too big, not too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, old Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here’s your burden, here’s your cross: drop her Jack, and all be lost” (Talisman 54). Heraldic characters usually appear early in an adventure, but they can show up later, especially when that journey spans decades, as Jack’s does. In Chapter 9 of Black House, Speedy returns to Jack’s life, and when Jack questions whether his appearance is a dream, Speedy informs him, “In any case, you got a mite more traveling to do, Jack. I been telling you that for some time” (Black House 191). Speedy’s appearances often signal important forthcoming changes. Perhaps the most significant one occurs during the fateful press conference when Jack is mortally wounded. Speedy’s twinner Parkus’s presence alerts the readers that Jack must live out the rest of his days in the Territories. Whenever Speedy appears, either as himself or as his alter ego, Parkus, it indicates that significant changes are ahead for Jack. As such, Speedy functions as the archetypal herald throughout the saga. Speedy also fulfills the Trickster archetype. Trickster characters are often associated with mischief and comic relief, but their primary function in a narrative is to “bring about healthy change and transformation” (Vogler 89). Though Speedy does not serve as comic relief in the traditional sense, he possesses a sharp wit and often answers questions ambiguously. In Chapter 3, when Jack asks Speedy if he has ever been to the Territories, Speedy replies, “Hell, I never been outside these United States, Travellin Jack” (The Talisman 31). The response frustrates Jack, but given Speedy’s trickster nature, it is the type of response he expects. Jack would have never known about the Territories, let alone gone on his journey, without him; Speedy sets Jack on his transformative path. Jack is not, however, the only character who transforms. Wolf, a lycanthropic sixteen-year-old, is a memorable, entertaining, and tragic character who shares part of Jack’s journey. As a character who physically transforms, Wolf fulfills the archetypal role of the Shapeshifter. Vogler notes, “Heroes frequently encounter figures whose primary characteristic is that they appear to change constantly from the hero’s point of view” (67). Characters who fulfill the shapeshifter archetype are often untrustworthy. Though Wolf loves Jack, he also poses a tremendous amount of danger. Despite being Jack’s friend and nursing him back to health when he is sick, Wolf creates a burden that jeopardizes Jack’s entire quest. Wolf’s first transformation occurs when Jack transports him from the Territories into Ohio. Wolf goes from a vision-impaired, barefooted shepherd to a “medieval Charles Manson” (Talisman 100) wearing penny loafers and John Lennon-style spectacles. His

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more stunning and dangerous change occurs during the full moon, which requires Jack to lock himself in a shed for three days so that Wolf does not eat him. Wolf eventually gets the boys arrested and sent to the Sunlight Gardner Home for Wayward Boys in Indiana. Here, Wolf dies while defending Jack, proving his love and loyalty. Their bond is significant because both characters endure transformation. Wolf’s are physical—Jack’s, developmental and psychological. The destructive nature of Wolf’s transformations gets them in trouble, making Jack’s journey needlessly more complicated. Wolf’s death proves that change is indeed painful; though tragic and sad, Wolf’s death is necessary for Jack to continue his quest for the talisman. While Wolf is a physical shapeshifter, other characters fulfill this archetypal role differently. Sunlight Gardner, the evangelical preacher who runs the juvenile home in Indiana, “is as adept at administering sadistic punishments as he is in quoting scripture. Although he pretends to serve Christ’s ministry at the Sunlight Gardner Home for Wayward Boys, he is in reality one of Morgan Sloat’s most brutal henchmen” (Magistrale, Landscape 39). Black House does not feature a literal shapeshifter like Wolf or a villainous one like Sunlight Gardner, but Henry Leyden possesses several radio personas, which he shifts into periodically.3 As Jack watches Henry perform as the record-spinning Symphonic Stan, he muses, “The real magic here is Henry, that uniquely malleable creature” (Black House 159). Though Henry’s loyalty to Jack is never questioned, his ability to seamlessly shift from one persona to another provides comic relief to a novel with such weighty subject matter and demonstrates Henry’s status as a minor trickster figure. While Shapeshifters and Tricksters may pose challenges, the primary antagonist of the hero’s journey is the Shadow, the villain who is “dedicated to death, destruction, or defeat of the hero” (Vogler 75). In The Talisman, the primary shadow figures Jack must confront are his father’s former business partner, Morgan Sloat, and his twinner, Morgan of Orris. 4 Together, they are a deadly force that not only killed Jack’s father but also attempted to murder Jack when he was an infant: Sloat was able to plan murder, but it had been Orris, time and time again, who had Migrated to carry out the act itself. It had been Orris 3 Among these are the bellicose sports talk personality George Rathbun, the evening drive persona the Wisconsin Rat, and the jive-talking Henry Shake. Henry often assumes one of these personalities as the situation warrants. 4 Morgan Sloat visits the Territories, and his mind occupies Morgan of Orris’s body. Morgan of Orris’s consciousness transfers to Sloat’s body in the real world.

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in Sloat’s body who had attempted to smother the infant Jack Sawyer with a pillow … Orris who had overseen the assassination of Phil Sawyer in Utah (just as he had overseen the assassination of Phil Sawyer’s counterpart, the commoner Prince Philip Sawtelle, in the Territories). (Talisman 430)

While Sloat must keep Jack from acquiring the talisman to maintain his wealth in the real world and his power in the Territories, his anger and hatred toward the boy consume him. “Morgan hated to have to waste energy on anything at this point that didn’t bear directly on the problem of ridding the world—all the world—of Jack Sawyer” (Talisman 578). As a shadow figure who killed Jack’s father, Sloat is willing to kill his son, Richard, just to hurt Jack. Sloat robbed Jack of his father and destroyed the parental archetype by being a terrible father himself. Jack’s inherent goodness and the talisman’s light defeat Sloat and extinguish his shadowy darkness. Jack is inextricably bound to Sloat by both his friendship with Richard and his father’s connection to him. In that regard, defeating Sloat allows Jack to defeat a dark element of his past. He overcomes not only the man who killed his father but also a force determined to destroy Jack and his mother. Without this defeat of the shadow figure, true heroism cannot be attained. Jack would be just another victim of Sloat’s treachery. In Black House, the Shadow f igure is more complex and consists of three separate entities. For most of the novel, Jack and the local police are hunting for the Fisherman, a man from the real world who has a proclivity to kill children and eat them. When they cross into the Territories, the villain the Sawyer Gang must overcome is the monstrous Lord Malshun. However, the primary source of evil is the Crimson King,5 the major unseen villain from King’s The Dark Tower series. This evil force has charged Lord Malshun, who in turn has employed the Fisherman to take children with the ability to destroy the beams that hold up the Dark Tower, the nexus of all worlds. These children, called breakers, are enslaved to work on the Big Combination,6 a power plant that disseminates evil throughout all worlds. While these physical villains are tangible and menacing, the real villain in both novels is a hostile adult world that preys upon its children. During both his childhood and adulthood, and regardless of whichever dimension 5 The Crimson King is a major villainous presence in King’s The Dark Tower series, but he first appears in King’s 1994 novel Insomnia. 6 The Big Combination, or The Forge of the King, appears in The Dark Tower novel The Song of Susannah. Tyler Marshall embraces his power and destroys this infernal machine.

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Jack is in, children are in constant danger. Magistrale points out that Jack is in permanent flight from the social forces representing both the Territories and the United States (Landscape 7). While he can outrun Morgan Sloat/ Morgan Orris, at least for some time, there is no escaping the damage done by a hostile adult environment. In King’s canon, the recognition can often be found in his portrayal of an adult world that persecutes its young; King’s adults often subliminally despise both the exposure to worldliness and the access to evil brought about by their physical and mental growth, and the project that hatred to those that they no longer are: the young and innocent. (Davis 46)

While Jack does lose his youth, the villains he encounters throughout his life do not take all of his innocence. Parkus is surprised by “how much of that innocence still remained in the man the boy [Jack] has become” (Black House 622). The shadow figures in both novels, whether human or societal, seek to destroy youthful innocence. Jack and Tyler Marshall defeat these shadows, but, as Jack’s adult journey proves, evil is always present, and danger to children is a constant societal concern.7

The Call to Adventure During Campbell’s Departure phase, the hero is forced out of the ordinary world and thrust into the world of adventure (Campbell 41). Not all characters, however, want to take on such a perilous quest. Jack Sawyer initially refuses the Call to Adventure but eventually accepts the challenges presented. In fact, throughout both novels, Jack repeatedly hesitates before moving on. Vogler and Campbell discuss the Call to Adventure and the hero’s subsequent Refusal of the Call. The first call and refusal occur in Chapter 3 of The Talisman: “You got a job, Travellin Jack,” Speedy told him. “A Job that you ain’t gonna let go, and that’s the Lord’s truth. I wish it was different.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said. His breath seemed to be trapped in a hot little pocket situated at the base of his neck. 7 It could be argued that Tyler Marshall functions as a hero, but Black House is less reliant on character archetypes than The Talisman. While destroying The Big Combination is heroic, readers see too little of his journey to apply Campbell’s or Vogler’s models to his experience.

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“I wonder,” Speedy said. “There comes times, you know what I mean, you know more than you think you know. One hell of a lot more.” “But I don’t—” Jack began, and then pulled himself up short. He had just remembered something. (Talisman 31–32)

It takes Jack a few moments to realize that he knows what Speedy is talking about. His first instinct is to deny any knowledge of the Territories. This behavior is repeated throughout Jack’s long journey. Jack’s instinctual denial in Black House resurfaces as he repeatedly refuses to involve himself in the Fisherman investigation until Henry Leyden convinces him to do so. Even when he reconnects with his old friend and mentor Speedy, he tells him, “Find yourself another boy, Speedy. This one grew up” (Black House 203). Despite initial hesitation and a knee-jerk reflex to say no, Jack accepts all the various Calls to Adventure. Jack must commit fully to the journey he will undertake in The Talisman and Black House. In doing so, he engages in a critical stage labeled “Crossing the First Threshold” (Campbell 64; Vogler 151). By drinking the foul-smelling juice that allows him to flip into the Territories, Jack proves his willingness to undertake the adventure. “He swallowed and thin fire printed a snail-trail down his throat. … He opened his eyes, and further words died in his throat … He was someplace else now. He was—‘In the territories’” (Talisman 47). Following this brief, introductory trial visit, Jack returns to the hotel, packs his bags, and gets his mother’s permission to go on his adventure. Despite his initial reluctance, he fully commits to the challenges that lie before him. Twenty years later, Jack crosses the threshold again into the Territories, signaling a renewal of his commitment as an adolescent. This is Jack Sawyer, ladies and gentlemen, down on his knees in a vast field of sweet grass under a morning sky untainted by a single particle of pollution. He is weeping. He knows what has happened, and he is weeping. His heart bursts with fear and joy. This is Jack Sawyer, twenty years along, grown to be a man, and back in the Territories at last. (Black House 201)

Because of his repressed memories, Jack is reluctant to go back to the Territories—in fact, he is transported there involuntarily.8 Nevertheless, he 8 Halfway through The Talisman, Jack learns he does not need to drink the elixir to flip into the Territories.

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fully commits to rescuing Tyler Marshall and ending the Fisherman’s killing spree once he arrives. Fittingly, one stage of Vogler’s model is called “The Ordeal,” and it is the key to the heroic journey. This stage presents the hero with a life-or-death situation, which usually is resolved with a form of death experienced by the protagonist. “Heroes must die so that they can be reborn” (183). While Jack does not literally die, much of his innocence does, and he believes his death is imminent. After Sloat attacks him during the final confrontation, Jack whispers, “I think I’m dying” (Talisman 610). Of course, Jack does not die. He engages in another journey stage by claiming the “Reward” (Vogler 205). By holding the talisman, Jack can defeat Morgan and heal his mother, Richard, and Speedy, who have been injured during this confrontation. “As the talisman flashed into glorious white light again, Jack felt his own interior darkness pass from him” (Talisman 599). Once in possession of the talisman, Jack engages in the stage, “The Road Back,” during which he must return to where the journey began, at the Alhambra Inn in New Hampshire. He appropriately returns on his birthday, for Jack has been reborn. As the talisman heals his mother, Jack feels he “was being born at this minute” (Talisman 642). The conclusion of Black House follows a less conventional path, but Jack goes through many of the same stages. Jack engages in an Ordeal, defeats his enemies, and saves French Landing (and the world). His symbolic death is nearly literal and occurs in the real world, requiring that he return to the Territories to survive. There, he experiences a rebirth and gets his Reward; it is implied at the end that he will have the companionship of Sophie, Queen of the Territories, thereby ending the loneliness that has plagued him throughout his life. The appeal of this series is the reader’s love and concern for the reluctant hero. When Jack returns to the Alhambra Inn to save his dying mother, he has come full circle. He leaves an unpleasant environment, sets out on an adventure only to encounter danger, and then returns with healing power and the benefit of wisdom. The ultimate return to “reality” appears to be the goal of any quest literature. The fulfillment of Jack’s quest leads him home with the power to save his mother. The journey is incomplete without the hero returning to where the journey began. Campbell labels this the Return phase (167); Vogler designates this step as “The Return with the Elixir,” in which the hero returns with “something to share with others, or something with the power to heal a wounded land” (249). Jack does both. He shares the talisman’s power with his mother, simultaneously saving her and her twinner, Queen Laura DeLoessean. With her restoration to power, Jack also saves the Territories. With this act of sharing, the talisman, having fulfilled

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its purpose, withers and disappears. Readers feel the same relief at the end of Black House when it becomes apparent that Jack has reconciled his past with his present, allowing him to have a future to share with someone else. Another factor that elevates The Talisman and Black House to the level of American myth is the connection to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s novel proved that the American landscape was fertile ground to explore mythic narratives. While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn limits its journey to the Mississippi River, King and Straub use an alternate version of the United States as their training ground. In their respective eras, both landscapes offer unique challenges that provide opportunities for heroic development. At the time, the challenges Huck Finn faces are as remarkable as those Jack Sawyer must confront. The first section of the novel, “Jack Lights Out,” clearly refers to and utilizes Huck’s jargon: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (Twain 365). Even less discreet is the direct inclusion of passages from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that appear before the table of contents. The first of these quotes reflects Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer’s view of the great Mississippi River. These passages and this excerpt from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at the novel’s conclusion frame the text with references to Twain’s classics and hint at a sequel, one that would come seventeen years later: So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly the history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man…. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story again and see what … they turned out to be; therefore, it will be wisest not to reveal any part of their lives at present. (qtd. in King, The Talisman 646)

In addition to paying tribute to Twain’s classic adolescent tales, King and Straub illustrate what a modern journey might look like in the 1980s instead of the 1880s. Like Jack Sawyer’s journey, Huck’s voyage along the Mississippi River with the escaped slave Jim produces wisdom, maturity, and freedom. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lacks the supernatural elements in The Talisman, but such a quest likely seemed impossible to readers when Twain’s novel was published in 1884. Ben Indick posits that the debt of King and Straub to Twain’s classic is hard to ignore: The hero’s name is Jack Sawyer, and his age is 12, close to that of Huck. Jack has a single parent, his sick mother; Huck has, for a time, his father,

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a hopeless alcoholic. Jack, like Huck, is forced by circumstances on a journey. Each is befriended by a kindly, faithful black man … Both lads have goals; Jack’s is his quest for the healing talisman, while Huck and Jim seek escape from pursuit and slavery. Huck’s various adventures on the Mississippi are mirrored in the very different series of episodes Jack encounters en route to his undefined West. (226–27)

Most obviously, Jack Sawyer shares a name with Twain’s titular character (Wood 102). Jack’s travels along the desolate wasteland of the territories evoke images of the loneliness and darkness of the Mississippi at night. On the other hand, when Jack flips (using the novel’s jargon) to the Territories early in the story, the experiences are almost euphoric. Gone are some disturbing elements of society, such as pollution and noise, replaced with clean air and silence. Like Huck, the longer Jack stays, the more danger he encounters. The peace and serenity of the Mississippi are marred by Huck’s encounters with the Grangerfords and the Duke and Dauphin. Jack discovers that his “escape” world includes versions of the same people he is escaping from in the other world. These twinners know of Jack and his quest and do everything they can to prevent him from succeeding. Ironically, the twinners, particularly Morgan of Orris, are often crueler than the people in the real world. Jack, like Huck, sets out to escape the dangers of the natural world and confronts considerable terrors throughout his journey. In quest novels like The Talisman and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the youthful character sets out on a journey to shake off the constrictions of the oppressive adult society. As Magistrale states, “Almost every Stephen King adolescent is under siege; many of them must undergo rites of passage in which the innocence of adolescence must confront adult realities, a journey that is always fraught with violence and danger” (Hollywood’s Stephen King 21). Janis Stout supports this notion, pointing out the futility of Jack’s attempts to escape the oppressive adult world. “By escaping, the lone hero pronounces judgment on his society, implicitly shaking its dust from his feet in assertion of his freedom from its conventionalism or corruption” (33). Stout believes that such a journey is “doomed to failure” and that the hero must return to the real world from which they escaped. Ironically, the enslaved Jim is the only person who escapes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck experiences many adventures and learns much, yet he returns home while the formerly enslaved person moves on. Similarly, Jack returns to save his mother but experiences isolation throughout his life due to the repression of his memories. King and Straub’s allusions to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer add a layer of complexity to The Talisman. The

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authors created a memorable, questing hero that follows Twain’s archetype but is more relatable to modern readers. They succeeded in creating a story that follows a long literary tradition. Indick feels that the “debt to Twain is one of love and respect” and that the primary purpose of the quest novel is often interrupted by “little detours along the preordained path,” episodes the hero must fulfill in preparation for the greater task (227–28). The purpose of Jack’s quest is to save his dying mother; his experiences are incremental steps that lead to the growth and maturity that allow him to complete his journey. Jack must survive his “Road of Trials” to reach the talisman. Without the talisman, his mother would die, and the quest would have been worthless. Huck must overcome the blind prejudice that dominated his era before he realizes that Jim deserves to be a free man. The death of Buck Grangerford in a feud between two families and the cruel tar and feathering of the Duke and Dauphin are key events that help shape his perception of cruelty, prejudice, and slavery. Without confrontation, there is no resolution, and the resolution, good or bad, is the entire purpose of a quest.

Conclusion King and Straub’s fantastical works incorporate character archetypes and stages of the heroic journey that follows Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. Inspired by centuries of quest narratives, they create a modern American adolescent in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn. Drawing on Twain’s legacy, they create a hero facing many of the same issues—isolation, loneliness, and mistreatment, albeit in a modern context. Tom Newhouse argues, “King has devoted a substantial part of his work to dramatize the problems of growing up within circumstances of increasing complexity” (267). Like Huck’s quest, Jack’s journey consistently puts the young hero in danger, albeit facing modern evils. King and Straub, like Twain before them, illustrate how children are victims of an uncaring, or even hostile, adult society. Phil Simpson relates that “beneath the fictional horror, King constructs his novels to be about something—the real-life horrors of loneliness, cancer, disease, child neglect” (45). The Talisman and Black House deal with all these issues directly. For such fantastical tales to be compelling, readers must be able to connect them with the real world. The metaphorical meaning of the ancient journey story shows us that the questor, representing rational thought, and the companion or double, representing instinctive feeling, embark on a journey for a prize, and

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after a series of encounters with monsters and teachers, finally accept themselves in relation to the society that they left … The goal of the ancient journey, repeated in culture after culture, is to integrate the total self in the world as it is. (Sullivan 88)

Jack fulfills his quest by returning home and transferring his magical powers to the real world. He uses the diminishing energy of the talisman to save his mother and resume his life as a twelve-year-old adolescent. His victory is not permanent, however; he returns to the Territories as an adult plagued by repressed memories and loneliness. Instead of saving his mother, Jack is trying to save the local children, who are under the attack of a hostile adult world. King and Straub remind readers that the world is dangerous by employing a mythic model to tell Jack’s story and portray his evolution from child to adult. One does not have to travel into an alternate universe to encounter evil menaces—they are always present. They can be found everywhere, from the little town of French Landing, Wisconsin, to the great banks of the Mississippi River. In turn, to view King’s work from a mythological perspective enables readers to make cultural connections to some of the world’s most enduring literary traditions.

Works Cited Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008. Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Indick, Ben P. “King as a Writer for Children.” Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, NAL Penguin, 1986, pp. 219–38. King, Stephen and Peter Straub. The Talisman. Viking, 1984. King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House. Random House, 2001. Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: America’s Storyteller. Praeger, 2010. Magistrale, Tony. “Toward Defining an American Gothic.” Critical Insights: Stephen King, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 184–98. Newhouse, Tom. “A Blind Date with Disaster: Adolescent Revolt in the Fiction of Stephen King.” Critical Insights: Stephen King, edited by Gary Hoppenstand. Salem Press, 2011, pp. 267–75.

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Simpson, Philip. “Stephen King’s Critical Reception.” Critical Insights: Stephen King, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 38–60. Stefoff, Rebecca. Today’s Writers and Their Works: Stephen King. Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2011. Stout, Janis. The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures. Greenwood Press, 1983. Sullivan, Phil. “Everyone a Hero: Teaching and Taking the Mythical Journey.” English Journal, vol. 72, no. 7, Nov. 1983, pp. 88–90. Tucker, Ken. “Boo! Ha-ha, you sap,” Village Voice, vol. 39, no. 43, 23 Oct. 1984, p. 53. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Stephen Railton, Broadview Editions, 2011. Vincent, Bev. Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences. Epic Ink, 2022. Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 4th ed.., Michael Wiese Productions, 2020. Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King. Renaissance, 2001. Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006. Winter, Douglas. Stephen King. Starmont House, 1982. Wood, Rocky. Stephen King: A Literary Companion. McFarland, 2011.

About the Author Daniel P. Compora is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toledo. Dr. Compora has publications in various areas, including literature, folklore, and popular culture. He is the author of two book chapters, “Toxic Nostalgia in Stephen King’s IT” and “Dystopian Literature at a Distance.”

6. The Gospel (Paraphrase): King and Christian Epigraphs Rebecca Frost

Abstract: King frequently chooses his epigraphs from literature, popular culture, or references from within his own books, but only in two cases has he chosen to use Bible stories. King uses the narrative of Samson bringing down his enemy’s house as the epilogue to The Institute. Readers are thus positioned to approach The Institute with the story of Samson in mind, making connections between the Biblical characters and King’s characters even before a character introduces Samson into the narrative. An epigraph situates readers prior to the main text. In turn, King’s use of Christian epigraphs in these novels is not only an invitation, but a direction to read them in alignment with these Biblical stories. Keywords: Christianity, audience expectations, intertextuality, religion

A genre label such as horror or romantic comedy functions to prime reader expectations for what they are about to experience in a given narrative, be it book or movie, and what they will not experience. While the first example gives audiences an expectation of death and gore, the second does not, and stories that have been mislabeled will frustrate or anger audiences when their expectations are not fulfilled. A genre such as thriller possesses the element of a twist during which audience’s anticipations might be subverted, but even then the subversion is itself anticipated because of the genre label. Popular authors, publishers, and producers therefore work within a system of feedback from audiences so that all parties have their expectations established and met to their satisfaction, resulting in further novels, movies, and shows. A genre label is not the only way the author of a piece can inform audiences of the proper orientation to the work. Readers do not expect the same narrative beats and plot elements from an action movie as readers do from a

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courtroom drama, and thus readers approach each genre differently. Authors can further refine an audience’s mindset prior to engaging in the work by including carefully chosen epigraphs that come before the given narrative. Stephen King is a fan of epigraphs, including them at times in his short stories as well as his longer works. He makes his selections from various other authors and composers, most commonly including poems or song lyrics. At times those lyrics are references to the real world and these songs exist outside of King’s imagination, but others—such as the use of Larry Underwood’s “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” for sections of The Stand—are direct references to his storyworld. Frequently the lines chosen to preface a novel or a part of a novel turn up within the story itself as a character quotes (or misquotes) the epigraph, breaking the imagined division between epigraph and storyworld. The epigraph is not part of a novel, presented as being “written-before, or written-above” the narrative (Buurma 167). It can be easy for readers to skip over the epigraph completely as they page (or swipe) through the front matter, looking for the start of the book itself. It is expensive to buy the rights to include another’s words as an epigraph, however, to the point where even academic publishers urge authors to shift such a framing quote from outside the text to being cited within the first line, so, despite this risk of them being overlooked, such quotes clearly matter to an author who insists on putting them there. The choice of origin of these epigraphs can invoke strong feelings and complex associations, especially if taken from well-known religious works such as the Bible. The epigraph itself “emerged in the eighteenth century as one of several types of paratextual structures that organized the early novel” and began most frequently as references to classic works, often in their original languages (Hall 2). Such epigraphs perform multiple functions, including invoking the education of both the author and the reader; asking the reader to relate the work that is to come with this established classic or respected thinker, thereby assigning it a similar ethos; and informing the reader of a particular mindset to take before engaging in the text. The epigraph invites the reader to make use of individual knowledge and personal references, perhaps experiencing a moment of shared understanding, before engaging with the text itself. Thanks to its position, an epigraph “often displays a subtle craft in foreshadowing” (Ziolkowski 523). Savvy readers of recent novels who do not skip the epigraph may start to ponder how, exactly, it will relate to the story yet to be read and, in some cases, use the epigraph to make predictions that might not be supported within the novel itself. The epigraph exists for the

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author and for the reader, but not for the characters themselves. They are not aware of this touchpoint that comes before the opening of their story, although it might arise from within the storyworld naturally—or less so, as a forced reference and wink to the reader. The epigraph functions “as a kind of reference point, interpretive guide, example, or counterexample designed to orient the reader to the text” while not itself being the text (Buurma 167). If the epigraph offers a clue that the narrative will be a tragedy, the characters within that narrative still go about the plot uninformed. King therefore carefully selects his epigraphs to orient his readers prior to starting one of his books, or before the next section of a book. Even though these mid-book epigraphs can still be skipped over, as readers can quickly turn the page to Part Two to get on with the story, “epigraphs are often highly illuminating and contribute to our understanding of the text that follows” (Ziolkowski 519). They are warnings, to readers if not the characters themselves, and clues as to what readers might be able to expect or what they should fear. Part of the horror is knowing that tragedy will strike King’s characters and that there is nothing those characters can do to change their fates. In all of his novels and all of his epigraphs, King has only twice chosen to use Bible stories. Many of his characters are Christian, whether they attend Methodist Youth Fellowship, are Catholic priests, or rule over others with their own brand of religion, but King’s epigraphs are generally secular. When he does choose to return to the Bible, then, no matter how liberal his interpretation, he presents readers with two novels that they are meant to approach with the given Bible story in mind. In Pet Sematary, the story of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus is broken into pieces and offered in segments at the start of each section of the book, as well as surfacing within the novel itself as characters confront the idea of death and the desire to undo it. In The Institute, the epigraph concerns itself with the story of Samson’s death, a story referenced less realistically by the novel’s non-religious child characters as they think of revenge. In each case, there is a similar King novel with parallel themes and characters that does not begin with a Bible story as an epigraph. By using Lazarus and Samson in these two specific cases and not others, King asks his readers to approach the stories with the ideas of righteousness, power, and death—or the power over death—in mind even before readers meet the characters whose stories are (twisted) reflections of these familiar Christian tales. Because King more commonly uses poems and lyrics as his epigraphs, these two instances of Bible stories stand out and therefore reference each other because of the rarity of the reference.

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You Will Be Like God, Knowing Good and Evil Pet Sematary (1983), with an epigraph from the Bible, and Revival (2014), with an epigraph from H. P. Lovecraft, both deal with a character unable to cope with the death of his young child who then embarks on a mission to reverse, or at least uncover, the mysteries of death. In Pet Sematary this character is Louis Creed, the protagonist and main point-of-view character, while in Revival it is antagonist and onetime minister Charles Jacobs. Louis hopes to bring back his young son and return to life as a family of four as soon as possible after the accident that killed Gage, while Jacobs works for decades after the death of his wife and young son to discover where they have gone, since he no longer believes in Heaven. Both men are “obsessed with their longing for and revival of what they lost” (Reuber 140). Pet Sematary is divided into three parts and thus it has three opportunities for epigraphs. “Part One: The Pet Sematary” has only one epigraph: the first segment of his retelling of the story of Lazarus, credited as being “John’s Gospel (paraphrase)” (Pet Sematary 1). In this opening epigraph, Jesus informs his followers of Lazarus’s death and says they should go visit. Even if readers are not already acquainted with the Bible story and do not know what happens to Lazarus, the idea of death is already placed in their minds on page one—as long as they read the epigraph. The long Part One of the novel, covering more than half the book, largely concerns itself with the Creed family: father Louis, mother Rachel, daughter Ellie, and son Gage. The amount of time King spends on the family dynamics has led to some criticism of slow pacing and reader boredom, although Part One also sets up another crucial element of the narrative, and one that refers back to the story of Lazarus: when Ellie’s beloved cat is run over in the road by their house, neighbor Jud Crandall takes Louis up to a strange place behind the child-created Pet Sematary so Louis can bury Church in that strange stony ground. Before the rest of his family can return from Thanksgiving, Church shows up at the house again, alive but also changed. Part One ends with a wonderful late March day when Louis introduces Gage to the joy of kite flying. After a peaceful moment of Louis watching his son sleeping in his crib, readers turn the page to confront Part Two and the next part of the gospel retelling. This short segment ends with Jesus telling Martha “Your brother shall rise again,” but this time John’s words are accompanied by a second epigraph that is more common to King: lyrics from the rock band The Ramones (Pet Sematary 303). These lyrics are repeated by Louis later on in the section as he disinters his son’s dead body to rebury it in the mystic stony grounds.

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The story of Lazarus also enters the narrative at a handful of points in the story. Once, in Part One, Louis recalls a conversation with a fellow student who confides, “I’m not questioning that he came out of the tomb. But I wanna see the original death certificate” (265). By this point Church has already returned from the dead, and Louis, despite being a doctor, questions whether the cat was really dead in the first place. Lazarus appears within the text four more times within Part Two, after readers learn that Gage Creed died when he ran into that same road and Louis failed to catch him in time. Young Ellie, in shock over her brother’s death and her parents’ inability to cope, reminds Louis of a lesson she learned in Sunday school: that Jesus has indeed raised people from the dead, and that he was so powerful that, “if he’d just said ‘Come forth,’ probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out” (336). Louis recalls the classic “Lazarus, come forth” three more times, and two of these are accompanied by Ellie’s recollection of her Sunday school teacher’s words (340, 414, 505). He does not relate back to the Gospel of John, traditional or paraphrased, but the words of his kindergarten-age daughter. Louis and his family are not religious, and the explanation given for the strange burying ground is not Christian. In fact, Crandall ascribes the power of the burying grounds to the Micmac (King’s spelling) tribe who used to live in the area and the mysteries of the Wendigo. Crandall’s, and therefore King’s, version of the Wendigo has been updated to “play on modern human tragedy and grief” as readers watch a man struggle with the loss of his son and the secret knowledge of the burying grounds (Magistrale, America’s Storyteller 32). Although Crandall has related various incidents of animals who returned, and although readers have seen through Louis’s eyes how Church came back changed, he still contemplates a second burial for his son. Part of the tragedy is how Louis does not see that the burial grounds are “a site that remains in active opposition to his best intentions and personal needs” (Magistrale, Moral Voyages 10). Lost in his grief, he sends the mourning Rachel and Ellie away so he can return to the stony ground, haunted in part by the story of Lazarus and in part by the memories of Gage. His desire is to play Christ to Lazarus, or God to His own Son, and resurrect Gage exactly as he was, following the Biblical examples. Unfortunately for Louis, whatever the burial grounds are, they do not mimic such stories. When “Creed fails to acknowledge (his own Unpardonable Sin) the inviolable distinction between separating human idealism from the limitations of reality,” he brings on further tragedy: the deaths of his neighbor and his wife, and the re-deaths of both Church and Gage (Magistrale, Landscape of Fear 59). Attempting to hold on to rationality even in the face of this

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tragedy, Louis argues to himself that burying Rachel in the stony ground will have better results, since she will not have been dead nearly as long as the others. In the end, although readers are not allowed to see the full effect the burying grounds had on Rachel, Louis’ “obsession with death and revival and his consequential negotiation of and opposition to the natural order turn him into the monster himself” (Reuber 131). The rational doctor and a man of science has been corrupted by the burying ground’s effects and continues, it seems, to experiment with making the mysteries work for him. Although the happy conclusion of the Lazarus story is related in the epigraph for Part Three, ending with Jesus commanding that the others should unwrap the graveclothes from the now-living Lazarus, the second epigraph comes from W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902). This small section involves the mother realizing she can use the cursed item to wish for her son back, but it does not recount the wish itself or the results of that wish. Even though Lazarus’s story has been recounted completely, readers must be acquainted with the short story in order to relate it to the novel fully: the husband uses the third wish to send his son away again before either can see the condition of the figure knocking on the door. While the story of Lazarus is miraculous and uplifting, the epigraph from “The Monkey’s Paw” offers the warning that Louis Creed should have heeded from the beginning. Even though it comes only in the epigraph, Louis has received many in-novel cautions that he dismisses as dreams. “By repeating the warnings and emphasizing their serious character, King makes clear that Creed has voluntarily chosen to ignore them and is therefore responsible for the grim consequences” that befall not only him but two other members of his family, leaving his young daughter Ellie alone with her grandparents (Strengell 61). When confronted with the violent death of his son, Louis Creed acts immediately, imitating the Bible while calling upon a power of unknown origin and putting his belief in something outside of his personal experience. His scientific doctor’s mind is appeased by the fact that he has already undertaken these actions with a cat and knows the results. As such, Louis believes he is prepared for whatever comes back from the grave. Revival’s Reverend Charles Jacobs also loses his young son to a car accident, but that accident also makes Jacobs a widower and, instead of turning to his faith, he spends decades of his life focused on science and his own brand of “special” electricity. Perhaps because of the time that has passed, or perhaps because he knows better than Louis, Jacobs seeks not to bring back his wife and son but to find out where they have gone.

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Despite both the title and theme of Revival, and despite the many identities and deceptions the former Reverend Jacobs adopts in pursuit of his goal, he never rises to the hubris of attempting the work of Jesus or God Himself. Although Jacobs exalts that Mary Fay lives again as a result of his experiment, Jamie instead narrates that, when the dead woman’s eyes open, she is no longer human. After experiencing a vision of what awaits him after death, Jamie fires four bullets into “the thing trying to rise from Mary Fay’s deathbed,” only referring to her body as her body once she lies still again, acknowledging that he fired those bullets into a corpse (King, Revival 443–44). Jamie and Jacobs were there when something overtook Mary Fay’s body the way something must have reanimated Gage’s body under the rocky cairn, but whatever comes back is incomplete, or whatever comes through is simply not human. Perhaps Jacobs never references Lazarus because he fully grasps that his actions would never be condoned by the God he once served, or perhaps he no longer feels the need to hide behind his religion to justify himself. Jacobs, unlike Louis Creed, claims to fully understand the power he is putting into effect, and he has indeed spent most of his life experimenting with it on innumerable unsuspecting test subjects. Rather than attempting his experiment after a single instance of using that power, Jacobs is, it seems, as prepared as a person can be for the horrors he unleashes. Like Louis, he finds himself with results he wishes he did not know but, unlike Louis, Jacobs is no longer alive to continue experimenting.

Suffer Little Children The Institute (2019) and Firestarter (1980) each revolve around a government institution concerning itself with the capture and use of kids who are talented in more than just the five senses. The Institute seeks out children with telekinetic or telepathic abilities to strengthen those powers and then use—and use up—these children, ostensibly to keep the world safe by preventing nuclear war. In Firestarter, the Shop is after one very specific girl, Charlie McGee, who has pyrokinesis. Each book followed its given kids as they are captured by the institution, imprisoned, and eventually escape, destroying the compound that held them. There are two pages before the start page of The Institute with preparatory information on them. The first comes in the form of two epigraphs taken from the Bible: a recounting of Samson’s death as he brought down the house of his enemies, killing himself along with them, taken from Judges;

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and a verse from Matthew quoting a saying from Jesus about what should happen to anyone who offends children. Jesus is not attributed on the page, and it is not presented as a quote, so readers must bring this knowledge to the epigraph. The main child protagonist of The Institute, Luke Ellis, references the story of Samson three times throughout the book, despite being like Louis Creed and not coming from a religious family. The first time he makes the comparison, Luke knows “this was no more than the resentful, impotent fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid” (Institute 145). However, by the end of the book, his fellow telepathic children have picked up on the message: “Luke says we’re going to bring them down like Samson brought down the temple on the Philistines” (500). The other children do not know their Bible stories, but they believe what Luke thinks of them. The second page before the start of the book contains a statistic from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, reminding readers that not all children who go missing are ever found. This statistic, coupled with the Biblical references to Samson’s revenge and an admonishment against those who hurt children, prime the reader to fear for Luke’s life as soon as he graces the book’s pages. Luke is not only telekinetic, but a child genius, so any plan to bring down the child-killing Institute from the inside must start—and, one would guess, end—with him. But, despite his prominence in the narrative, Luke is not Samson. He lives, and readers’ concern for him, based on the epigraph, is misdirected, making the real death even more of a tragedy. The one who sacrifices himself to bring down the Institute (literally) by yoking the children’s telekinetic abilities to drop one building on another is Avery Dixon, a ten-year-old who conceals his intentions from his friends by dint of his natural telepathic powers. He blocks all attempts to read his mind with the repeated mantra “You’re my friends” and frees the children he can—those who are not too far gone—so they can be reunited with Luke (507). When the Institute falls, Luke is physically on the outside, having escaped and only come back in time to witness what Avery enacts. Once again King frames his narrative with a Bible story and inserts it into the book itself using a character who is not in fact religious, priming reader expectations that, once the children have been harmed, someone must rise up from inside to crush the book’s version of the Philistines. Avery does in fact bring their house down on them, but full comparisons to Samson stall. Avery was not known as a powerful warrior or hero prior to his capture, instead coming across as younger than his age and generally defenseless, and he was not betrayed by anyone close to him. He both risked and then

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gave his life to save his friends, but the child with a sixth sense whose story runs closer to the Bible tale is Charlie McGee. Charlie, whose book Firestarter begins with an epigraph from Fahrenheit 451—the first line: “It was a pleasure to burn”—has been an enemy of the Shop ever since her birth. The Shop inadvertently gave her parents inhuman powers after an experiment they took part in as college students, and the Shop carefully followed their lives as they first married and then had a child capable of setting things, such as her beloved teddy bear and her own mother, on fire. At the start of the book, Charlie is on the run from Shop agents with her father, since her mother was killed. Unlike Samson, however, the personal betrayal comes after her capture instead of before. Firestarter “evoke[s] the traditions of … ‘Beauty and the Beast’” when, during her capture and long internment by the Shop, Charlie seems to find a friend in apparent janitor John Rainbird (Winter 139). Separated from her father and still a child, Charlie falls for Rainbird’s act and begins to use her powers during the Shop’s tests to please her new friend. He encourages her to keep pushing herself and the limits of the power, knowing that these tests also give her the chance to learn the finer elements of control. In the end, Rainbird’s betrayal is the promise he exhibited from the Shop’s leader: that he would be the one to kill Charlie. As Tony Magistrale points out, “The greatest torment Charlie must undergo, however, is initiated by the Shop” and comes to a head just as Andy hopes to break them both free from their imprisonment (Landscape of Fear 34). She has to choose between Andy and Rainbird, real father and false father, and ends up losing them both. Unlike Avery Dixon, Charlie survives the final destruction of the institute that held her, managing to control her powers enough so that the buildings and the grounds burn but she survives. In this way, she is unlike Samson: the power is her own, and she turns out to be capable of withstanding it. Although she wished her powers would go away the same way that God took away Samson’s strength, her pyrokinesis is a part of her that will endure as long as she does. Although both Charlie and the children of the Institute are taken into the house of their enemies and forced to perform for them before using their special powers to triumph over those enemies, Charlie, Luke Ellis, and a handful of Luke’s friends survive. The sacrificial deaths come for Andy McGee, Avery Dixon, and further children who are not Luke’s closest friends. These are characters who have already sacrificed, or been forced to sacrifice, so much for the cause and who would likely not have survived unchanged anyway. They have used their special powers and pushed themselves beyond their limits and have no choice but to urge the ones

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who still can to leave and go on with their lives. Heidi Strengell argues that Charlie McGee’s “essential strength, however, shows in her ability to recover,” and readers see this same strength in the five child survivors of the Institute (174). There is no Samson, no God, and no Bible in Luke Ellis’ epilogue, just as there was little religion in his life. Luke, as a child prodigy, put his faith in his studies instead of in the church. He does not share Charles Jacobs’s religious background, although Luke, like Jacobs when he performed as a carnival act and then a faith healer, might be accused of exploiting religion for his own purposes. If Luke and his fellow Institute inmates are indeed Samson, then their revenge is holy and God is on their side. Whatever deaths occur during their uprising, they are righteous deaths and therefore escape the label of “murder.” Further, Luke compares himself and his friends to Samson who, while a hero of the Bible, is not Jesus or God Himself. Playing God is a sin and must of necessity come with dreadful consequences for the mortal who tries, but playing Samson—himself clearly a mortal man—holds no such danger. Luke’s in-book references to the Bible, however, make little sense for his character. Although King declares Luke’s genius, he also argues that, despite the special school and impending dual enrollment in two colleges at once, Luke is a normal preteen. He watches television, plays with friends, and even watches YouTube videos while imprisoned. But his personal reference for rising up against the Institute does not come from an action movie, a television show, or other media. When Luke imagines the destruction of the Institute, he reaches for the Biblical reference, invoking both its weight and its Godly wrath as foreshadowed by the epigraph.

Therefore be Imitators of God Although epigraphs do their work in “connecting the work to particular poetic and musical traditions and making meaning out of the comparison between those traditions,” it is not always a one-to-one connection (Buurma 170). The epigraph might encourage readers to find the direct correlation between the epigraph and the novel, but the epigraph might also function as a warning. In the case of Pet Sematary, although King invokes Jesus’ successful resurrection of his friend Lazarus, readers are not in fact primed to watch a similar story play out in his book. Even if readers are not aware that King is known for horror, and that horror is a form of tragedy, readers will still feel uneasy about the comparison between the selected Bible story and

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the characters in the book because a direct comparison means a character will have to play God. Unfortunately for Louis, he will try, and fall short. Religious practice is not a central element in Pet Sematary since the Creed family attends neither church nor synagogue, although Louis was raised Methodist and Rachel was raised Jewish and their respective childhood beliefs impact the family. Death is the central theme thanks to Louis’s job as a physician, his daughter Ellie’s curiosity about the end of life, and the trucks that bear down on the busy road outside the Creed house. The Micmac burying ground itself functions as the supernatural force that might allow Louis to reverse death, although it “remains in active opposition to his best intentions and personal needs” and it has no connection to the Christian God whatsoever (Magistrale, Moral Voyages 10). The stony soil is connected to the Indigenous tribe that, according to the book, used to live in the area—no connections are made to any living Mi’kmaq people during the course of the novel—and it gets tied rather loosely to a version of the Wendigo. If Louis paid more attention to this comparison, rather to that of Lazarus as related by his young daughter, he might have heeded the warning inherent in the creature’s story. King’s version of the Wendigo exploits Louis’s fear of exploring the concept of death further with his wife and daughter when Ellie’s cat gets killed, and then his absolute dissolution after Gage’s similar death in the road. After his son is killed, Louis cannot think of anyone else, including the best interests of his surviving family members, and refuses to listen to any and all warnings that come his way. Some are from his human neighbor, who might himself be under the sway of the mysterious burying grounds, and some come in the spirit of a young man who died near the beginning of the book. Whether or not God exists, there are forces on both sides of the grave working to stop Louis from his attempt to play God and resurrect his son. Louis does not consult with minister, rabbi, or priest, perhaps knowing the response he would receive. For him, there is nothing religious about this act. He simply disinters Gage so he can bury him in the proper place, not understanding the power he calls into use and not caring. He convinces himself that he can impartially assess the situation and make the proper decisions, no matter how Gage returns, because he cannot live with the idea of his son’s death being permanent. Louis even approaches the situation with clinical detachment, relying on logic in the face of something that is entirely illogical. After all, if—as Ellie’s teacher said—Jesus could have resurrected everyone in the cave, and not just Lazarus, surely Louis can manage to bring back a single person. Louis relies on his daughter’s retelling

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of the story rather than King’s own, with its more direct reference to the original and, perhaps, the attendant warnings. Here readers see that Louis’s intent is exactly what happens in the Bible story: the return from death of a beloved person as though he had never died. His parallel within the King multiverse, the Reverend Charles Jacobs from Revival, does not seek to bring his dead wife and son back to life, but rather to use a recently dead woman to peer behind the curtain and see how and where their spirits have continued. Jacobs, like Louis, is a lapsed Methodist but, even as a practicing minister, his interest in and fascination with electricity pushes him more toward the realm of science than religion. Jacobs, like Louis, works “to recapture what was lost, and what is needed for him to feel whole again,” and this work itself is not religious even if he uses religion as a tool to support it (Reuber 137). When Jacobs left the pulpit after the accident that killed his wife and son, he left religion completely. His later work in the revival circuit helped him refine his healing and talents not with faith, but with electricity. Perhaps it is not so simple to say that Jacobs knew what he was attempting was an affront to God, while Louis did not consider the possibility. Despite his lack of faith, Jacobs remains convinced that there is a life after this one, even if what he discovers falls neatly in line with the H. P. Lovecraft quote that serves as the novel’s epigraph. It prefaces readers with unsettling associations even when Jacobs is still the young reverend, adding weight to narrator Jamie’s negative emotions despite the characters’ apparently innocent first interactions. Associated with Lovecraft, Jacobs makes readers uneasy from the start. Ironically, the association with Jesus functions in the same way for Louis Creed, since Christian readers know that imitating God does not end well for mere mortals. Similarly, readers are meant to approach the children of The Institute as the novel’s Samson, although that role falls not to the main child character Luke, but instead to the youngest child captive, Avery. Readers are primed from before the first page, and long before readers ever meet Luke and then Avery, for the idea of a tragic death of a beloved main character that comes in tandem with the destruction of the enemy’s house. Samson’s gift of inhuman strength was given to him by God, and protected as long as he used it in service to the Lord and kept his end of the covenant. The children in The Institute are born with their powers of telekinesis or telepathy as a natural trait. According to the book’s description, these children simply score higher on a test of a molecule readers all possess, and there is no way to accurately predict which children will have higher amounts. The molecule, and thus these abilities, are therefore natural,

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although none of the characters go so far as to say they are God-given. The enemy, in this case the Institute itself, does not want to strip the children of their powers, but rather to kidnap them and increase those powers for their own purposes. The end result of the Institute’s plan is, in fact, the death of each child, which they justify to themselves by saying that such an act will save the world. Once the children have been kidnapped—and their families killed—their death seems certain. It is not Avery’s death that comes as a surprise to those running the Institute, but the survival of a handful of others. When readers look at Firestarter, however, readers also find some similarities with the story of Samson. Charlie McGee is taken into the house of her enemies and, unlike the Institute’s prisoners, she was aware that these enemies existed before she was captured. Her powers, however, are not God-given but are a direct result of the Shop’s experiments on her parents. The enemy made her in the first place, and the Shop “both engendered and refined” her powers (Magistrale, Landscape of Fear 40). Like the Institute, the Shop wanted to use the child’s powers for their own devices—and, like the Institute, the Shop taught its child subject how to control her power enough to destroy the institution itself. Although only The Institute presents readers with the story of Samson in the epigraph, each story includes a Delilah figure in the form of an apparent janitor who befriends the children. The Institute has Maureen Alvorson, who used to work for the army during interrogations in Iraq, and the Shop has John Rainbird, who fought in the Vietnam War and now works as a hitman. Each character seems to be too lowly to be a threat to the children, and each character uses a lack of surveillance—lies about which areas are not bugged and, in the case of Rainbird, a serendipitous power outage—to convince the children to talk to them. Each character is good at the job, and only Alvorson suffers a twinge of conscience about the children’s fate. Although she has contributed to the horrific deaths of so many children, she works to help Luke escape the Institute and therefore directly leads to its collapse. Rainbird, however, took his post with Charlie specifically so he could be the one to kill her. The Institute’s Delilah regrets her actions and actively helps lead to its destruction, while Firestarter’s Delilah goes down in literal flames still trying to kill Charlie and gain his own satisfactory ending. In neither case is the potential Samson figure a grown adult. Indeed, Charlie starts the book as “[t]oo young to understand controlling” her psychokinesis and she has to be led, by Rainbird more than the Shop as a whole, to understand that it can be used instead of being an uncontrollable outburst (Davis 59). Although Charlie understands she is powerful, that

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power scares her—and her parents—and she promises never to use it again. Luke, on the other hand, believes that his own ability is far too small to be of interest to anyone, because “the limit of his mind-power was pushing pizza pans off restaurant tables or fluttering the pages of a book,” but just as The Shop helped Charlie refine her own powers, the Institute worked in part to strengthen and expand the children’s innate powers (The Institute 336). Unlike the Philistines, who were only able to imprison Samson after his powers had deserted him, each institution here took the children and then shaped their abilities, eventually resulting in their own (near-)destruction. Because of the epigraph (or lack thereof), readers are not meant to approach Charlie’s story with the idea of Samson in the backs of their minds. Is it because Charlie, unlike Avery, survives her retaliatory attack on the people who came after her? Readers begin The Institute with the idea of Samson’s death in the backs of their minds and, although it is a triumphant death, the novel quickly directs readers to the conclusion that this Samson must be a child making a sacrifice for his fellow children. Charlie loses just about everything, including her father and her false friend John Rainbird, but she herself survives the final conflagration, just as Guy Montag survives her own book’s epigraph source of Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Bradbury’s novel is dystopian, but there are survivors. Prefacing The Institute with Samson’s story introduces the idea that, in this book, there might not be. Perhaps the inclusion of this Bible story is also meant to soften the climax of the book and Avery’s personal sacrif ice to save the other children. Avery knows, or at least highly suspects, that he will have to die if he helps them live, shown by the way he shields his thoughts from his friends as the end approaches. He assumes that the others, both older and longer residents of the Institute, will protest his choice, so he denies them the chance to do so. If Avery is Samson, then this means that God is on his side and supporting him in his final moments by giving him the (mental and emotional) strength to follow through with his plan. Those who survive the literal collapse of the Institute do so because of Avery’s choice. He was helped by other characters in the book, both those who meant to help him and those who were instead intent on harming him, but the f inal decision is his own. The surviving children live with the knowledge that, aside from Luke, they only escaped because of Avery’s sacrif ice, although this aligns him more closely with Jesus than with Samson. Unlike Louis, however, Avery does not equate himself with Jesus, and even when the other children think in terms of Bible stories, it is the imprisoned Samson they turn to. There is death and redemption,

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but no one tries to play God. Like the Samson of the epigraph, Avery asks for the power to move through him, but does not attempt to take on the role of the Savior himself.

You Shall Warn Them In King’s two uses of Bible stories as epigraphs, readers see his use of these likely familiar Christian tales functioning both as warnings and as framing devices. As warnings they come in two styles, presenting readers with the worry that the novel will not perfectly mimic the epigraph, and the fear that it will. In the first, readers fear that Louis Creed will be tempted to try to play God and that the result of his experiment will not match Jesus’ results with resurrecting Lazarus. In The Institute, the reader’s fear centers on the fact of Samson’s death as a necessary element of the triumph over his enemies and the reader can only hope that the characters will not directly imitate the given Bible story. As a framing device, the “epigraphical diverting of attention amounts to a redirecting of attention, towards issues that authors find to be of pressing significance” (Hall 8). King made the conscious choice for his readers to encounter Lazarus at various times in Pet Sematary and not in the similar Revival, and to begin The Institute with Samson’s death in mind but not to approach Firestarter in the same way. Likewise his characters reference the Bible stories themselves, although the insertion of Lazarus’s resurrection at various points in Pet Sematary feels more natural for a family where the father is a physician dealing with death, the mother has a complex surrounding the subject, and the young daughter is just beginning to create her own understanding of the concept. In The Institute, these sudden interjections of Samson bringing down the temple feel as if they come out of nowhere. Although a genius, Luke Ellis is still twelve years old and does not mention any other Christian references throughout the book. Even the other children who read his thoughts admit that they do not understand the implication of Samson in the temple when, perhaps, they would better grasp a popular culture reference of destruction instead. However, if the other children were indeed conversant with the story and knew for certain that Samson died when he brought the temple down on his enemies, they might have grasped Avery’s plan sooner and, in their desire to save his life, lost their own. Since readers may have access to this story, they suffer through the suspense of waiting for their suspicions about Avery’s plans to be proven true.

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These are far from the only King novels to deal with death and, as readers have seen, not even the only novels for which these Bible stories would have worked as epigraphs. However, even the characters in Firestarter do not mention Samson, and despite Jacobs’s position as a former Methodist minister, Revival never refers to Lazarus. Even if they did, epigraphs function as “a clearer type of allusion; their positioning at the opening of a work or chapter, and the author attribution they usually included, clearly identif[y] them for readers” outside of the main text, ensuring accuracy in the reference (Buurma 170). This accuracy exists as a reference point for the reader because Louis or Luke might misremember the original story or twist it for their own devices, but it exists on the pages outside of the main narrative for readers’ personal reference. Readers can compare the novel’s events to the original Bible story and form their own predictions—and worries—about the connections readers see emerging, increasing tensions between readers’ outside knowledge and reader immersion.

Conclusion Stephen King frequently includes references to Christianity in his works as characters follow, disregard, or twist the Bible and Christ’s teachings to serve their own purposes, but only twice has the Bible made it into his epigraphs. The fact that these two novels share so many parallels with others that do not include Biblical epigraphs indicates that readers are meant to approach them differently, despite these apparent similarities, and they should be primed to consider the references even before the characters bring them up. Yet these epigraphs are also an indication that King can use practically any source to introduce new levels of reader anticipation for the tragic endings that permeate the horror genre.

Works Cited Buurma, Rachel Sagner. “Epigraphs.” BookParts. 2019. Web. https://works. swarthmore.edu/facenglish-lit/375. Hall, Amelia Lee. Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the English Novel. Preview provided by ProQuest. ProQuest number 27993182. May 2020. Grace, Dominick. “From Wonder to Horror: Stephen King’s Revival and Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy.” The Modern Stephen King Canon: Beyond Horror, edited by Philip L Simpson and Patrick McAleer, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 167–80.

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King, Stephen. Firestarter. Signet, 1980. King, Stephen. The Institute. Scribner, 2019. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Pocket Books, 1983. King, Stephen. Revival. Pocket Books, 2014. Lippert, Conny L. “Traveling before the Storm: Shades of the Lightning Rod Salesman in Stephen King’s Gothic.” The Modern Stephen King Canon: Beyond Horror, edited by Philip L Simpson and Patrick McAleer, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 147–65. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Magistrale, Tony. The Moral Voyages of Stephen King. Borgo Press, 2008. Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: America’s Storyteller. Praeger, 2009. Reuber, Alexandria. “Gothic Recall: Stephen King’s Uncanny Revival of the Frankenstein Myth.” The Modern Stephen King Canon: Beyond Horror, edited by Philip L Simpson and Patrick McAleer, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 127–45. Winter, Douglas E. “Do the Dead Sing?” Critical Insights: Stephen King, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 129–41. Ziolkowski, Theodore J. “The Craft(iness) of Epigraphs.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 76, no. 3, spring 2015, pp. 519–23, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.76.3.0519.

About the Author Rebecca Frost, PhD, is an independent scholar and co-chair for the Stephen King Area of the national Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference. She is the author of multiple works, including Surviving Stephen King: Reactions to the Supernatural in Works by the Master of Horror.

7.

Excursus on Suffering, Meaning, and Metaphysics in Stephen King’s Revival Jacob M. Held

Abstract: Stephen King’s Revival is both his longest contribution to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and most poignant engagement with the philosophical problem of evil. Through the characters of Jamie Morton and Reverend Charles Jacobs the reader is persistently challenged with questions such as: Is there a God, and if so, why does an all-powerful and perfectly good God allow bad things to happen? Is there an afterlife, and if so, can it redeem the suffering of this world? Are these mysteries matters of faith, or are they open to investigation? In this essay, I draw from various philosophical perspectives and figures including J. G. Fichte, Immanuel Kant, and Albert Camus to interrogate the questions above as well as to walk the reader through Revival alongside Jamie and Jacobs, seeking not answers to these questions but a fruitful perspective from which to address our ineluctable ignorance and make this life, and the next, livable. Keywords: pessimism, compassion, suffering, faith, nostalgia

In the 1990s, before I had a career in philosophy, one could listen late, late at night, or early in the morning, to AM radio and hear Art Bell “Coast to Coast.” Art was a doorway into the world of the paranormal. Before the internet was as vast as it is now, before UFOs were UAPs, before the History Channel brought audiences The Mystery of Skinwalker Ranch and the Discovery Channel Expedition Bigfoot, Art would discuss alien abductions, bigfoot, ghosts, demon possession, remote viewing, near-death experiences (NDE), witchcraft, etc. He would have on reputed experts, and he would let them speak, often about the most fantastical things: crop circles, the Chupacabra, Area 51. He would listen, question, prod, and sometimes doubt. He would entertain ideas others considered ludicrous.

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch07

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Among Art’s many guests were those who investigated hauntings and recorded EVP (electronic voice phenomena). Regardless of the veracity of these experts’ claims and the dubious nature of their investigative techniques— and any rational human would doubt much in these areas—Art would hear them out and encourage the audience by leaning into the narrative. What was striking about these engagements was what Art took away from these interviews. Presume it is true, he would suggest. Presume these investigators had captured something on tape: a disembodied spirit, a demon, a haunting. What does that reveal about our lives and the afterlife? This question haunts me, as much as it haunted him. Perhaps what investigators think are ghosts are really pockets of residual energy imprinted on a place or an object. But what about cases where the entity seems conscious, where it responds in real time in context-relevant ways? Would such phenomena imply that this entity is trapped in a localized space, doomed to roam this cemetery or delipidated house for all eternity? Is this the afterlife? To paraphrase Art Bell, let us hope that what we perceive as ghosts are merely the echo of what was and not the remainder of what is. And what about violent spirits, or demon possession? If what his frequent guest, Father Malachi Martin, reported was true, the world is a much scarier and more haunted place than even Stephen King could imagine. What would the existence of such entities say about the nature of evil? Can there be cosmic justice if such evil is allowed to exist? What Art took away from these conversations, something of which we ought to be mindful, is that the evidence and accompanying explanatory narratives surrounding paranormal phenomena may paint a darker picture of the afterlife or the underlying metaphysics of reality than given metaphysical or religious worldviews suggest. The questions above reflect the mysteries that form the backdrop of King’s Revival. The desire to know the “true” nature of reality is a classic metaphysical/epistemological project of philosophy, one often motivated by an existential longing to validate this life, to find meaning and purpose in a world of seemingly arbitrary suffering. Moving through the entangled life stories of Reverend Jacobs and Jamie Morton, the reader of Revival is provided two alternative responses to our shared human condition.

A Terrible Sermon on the Problem of Evil The metaphysical thought experiment of Revival is the backdrop against which King places the all-too-human struggles of Reverend Jacobs and Jamie Morton. After experiencing the tragedy of the death of both his young son,

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Morrie, and his wife, Patsy, Jacobs seeks to break through the veil of this world to see into the next, to find evidence that his beloved wife and child carry on in the afterlife, and perhaps find vindication of his theological worldview. He pursues his quest through investigations into the secret energy, “that power which binds the universe into one harmonic whole” (King 142), a power that also offers glimpses into a world beyond death. Tragedy befalls us all, and philosophers and theologians have spilt a lot of ink explaining how such tragedies are consistent with an all-powerful and loving God. Thus, they confront the “problem of evil,” or how to reconcile our vision of a perfect God with a world full of seemingly undeserved misery. “Deaths—like those of my wife and son—seem so cruel and capricious. Christ ascended into heaven in his body, we are told, but all too often poor mortals here on earth are left with ugly heaps of maimed meat and the constant reverberating question: Why? Why? Why?” (69). This is how Reverend Jacobs begins his last sermon at the pulpit of the First Methodist Church of Harlow. When he first came to town and entered Jamie Morton’s life, he was a young pastor with a wife and small child. But his wife and son are killed in a car accident. This loss could be seen as senseless or capricious; in any case, such a loss is hardly unique to Reverend Jacobs. During his “terrible” sermon he regales the congregation with tragedy after tragedy. There’s no dearth of pain and suffering in this world if one is so inclined to seek out these stories. What does the Bible have to say about such things? He recounts Saint Paul and Job’s lessons: one cannot understand, or “in the language of our younger parishioners … ‘Buzz off, Bunky’” (70). He notes that humans are supposed to take it all on faith; it’s part of God’s plan. But, he laments, there is no evidence, no reason to believe it will be OK in the end. We are offered hollow assurances, but no insurance. Jacobs’s sermon is a classic recapitulation of the philosophical problem of evil. David Hume (1711–76) notes in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (100). The classic conception of God – omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent – is tested by the existence of evil. Alongside Reverend Jacobs, King’s reader might ponder what conceivable value can be derived from the death of a child. How can such a tragedy be reconciled with the all-loving, all-powerful God of Jacobs’s faith? And if evil does provide evidence against God, then for what may we hope as we struggle through this life? Throughout history there have been myriad attempts to resolve the problem of evil. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) offers the argument that

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what one perceives as evil, and what in fact may be truly bad, is redeemed through God’s perfect plan (Maritain). St. Augustine (354–430), reiterating the denouement of the Book of Job, notes that what one calls evil is in fact not, and that the problem of evil is generated by one’s own perspective. Augustine reminds his reader that she cannot see the whole. It is a human being’s limited perspective that leads her to believe that what is truly good in God’s grand scheme is evil. Suffering as “evil,” in this regard, is more indicative of human ignorance than a flaw in creation. In addition, Augustine would remind his reader that she has been created as mutable, she is subject to suffering, and God does not owe her an account of creation and its goodness (Mann). From this point of view, the problem of evil could also be articulated as an expression of resentment. Humans resent being mortal. They resent being finite and limited. They despair of their inability to be anything they want or everything they desire, and so they lament their finitude and resent creation. But Augustine reminds us that we are ineluctably human. We cannot change the fundamental reality of our condition. Reality is recalcitrant to our wants and desires. To resist is to invite despair, as the character of Reverend Jacobs aptly demonstrates. Philosophically, one can address the problem of evil by leaning into the definition of divinity or emphasizing human ignorance. To oversimplify: God is by definition good, so what we perceive as evil must not be. In fact, we are limited in our understanding, so the problem of evil is more reflective of our shortsightedness than a limitation of God or flaw in creation. The problem with any philosophical response, no matter how well articulated, is that those already prone to faith will accept any remotely plausible rationale and those prone to skepticism will reject even the most robust account. Humans are rarely moved by metaphysical argumentation when the meaning of their lives is at stake. The existential despair attendant on the problem of evil precludes a purely academic account from satisfying the psychic need for assurance. Consider Reverend Jacobs. He lost his family, and thereby his faith. He lost his non-rational response to the mysteries of the universe that grounded his identity, solidified his place in the cosmos, and thereby provided his life with meaning and purpose. No argument will assuage his grief. No syllogism can reaffirm his faith. Yet he still needs to believe that life is “worth it.” King presents Reverend Jacobs as an exemplar of human despair to illustrate the human need for assurance, as well as to illustrate how simple knowledge, how “proof,” will fail to provide it. How does Jacobs respond to tragedy? He seeks answers in secret energy. He believes, mistakenly, that if he can garner a glimpse beyond this reality, he will be able to justify this life with reference to the next.

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The problem human beings face, religious and irreligious alike, is the problem of suffering. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest … comes afterwards” (Camus 441). Whether the grief of losing a loved one, as in the case of Reverend Jacobs, a battle with cancer, as in the case of Astrid, or the existential angst of a drug-addicted, directionless life, as exemplified by Jamie, all humans seek a narrative in which their daily struggles are not necessarily resolved, but contextualized into a cogent and meaningful story—one that comprises a praiseworthy and valuable life. To appreciate the gravity of the situation, let us turn briefly to Arthur Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is, if not the first, then arguably the most influential philosophical pessimist. According to Schopenhauer, the one thing that marks the essence of human life, and life in general, is the will-to-life. This will is the unconscious motive force that drives humans unrelentingly onward. Humans are always striving. Yet striving necessarily brings failure, and with failure disappointment and pain. Schopenhauer draws the following conclusion. We have long since recognized that striving … where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal … satisfaction … all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting … it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving … Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering. (World 309)

All victories are small victories, temporary victories, leading inevitably to new failures. To put it more poetically, “life swings like a pendulum to and from between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents” (World 312). At the end of all this pointless suffering: death. “Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care, although he knows that, even when he succeeds with all his efforts and ingenuity in struggling through, at every step he comes nearer to the greatest, and total, the inevitable and irredeemable shipwreck, indeed even steers right into it, namely death” (313). Reverend Jacobs voices his despair at this realization near the end of his final sermon. “There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science;

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there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe … Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam … when you need the benefits you paid for … you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist” (73). One can see why God, or a religious mindset, would be reassuring. One can also appreciate why, once that mindset is found to be untenable, as in the case of Reverend Jacobs, one is left with a need to find a new answer. If the solution to the suffering of human life was God, there is little that can fill this void other than a new metaphysics, a new “God.” If one begins from the acknowledgement that life contains a great deal of pain, enough that it can overshadow all joy, then one will find a need to either explain it away with reference to some greater good or reframe it as ultimately good in itself. “The problem of existence is very great and very close to us; this existence is dubious, questionable, tormented, fleeting, and dream-like. It is so great and so near that, the moment we become aware of it, it overshadows and hides all other problems and purposes” (Schopenhauer, “On Thinking” 499). Many of us shrink from this realization. We fill our days with distractions to avoid confronting this reality. But the loss of his wife and child is an inescapable tragedy he cannot avoid, and that leads to a loss of faith. Without his metaphysical tether, the reverend is thrown into an existential crisis.

An Answer of a Kind Before tragedy strikes, Jacobs knows his faith is tenuous. He worries that miracles, like Jesus walking on water, might be mere tricks (22). But he also knows science can only take one so far. “Science is fine, but it’s also finite. There always comes a point when knowledge runs out” (31). When it comes to metaphysical inquiries, such as the nature of the afterlife, or the eternity of the soul, as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) noted in a slightly different context, one may find “it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (30). As Jacobs notes, “Everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave” (King 19). We seemingly need faith, or hope, to provide purpose to what might otherwise seem pointless drudgery. But if science is finite, and its answers limited, and God an untenable belief, as Jacobs indicates, then to what can one turn? At the beginning of Revival, Jamie denotes Reverend Jacobs as his “fifth business,” “the joker who pops up out of the deck at odd intervals over the years … the change event. When he turns up in a film, you know he’s

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there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screen writing our lives? Fate or coincidence?” (2–3). The “fifth business” is a narrative device that provides a framework against which to understand otherwise unrelated events. The fact that Jamie ponders who writes the narrative of his life underscores his need for such a framework, for narrative coherence. Humans try to connect the disparate episodes of their lives into a cogent whole, a story of their life: Who can you blame for an unfortunate turn of events, for your less than desirable circumstances? Who are the protagonists, the antagonists in your story? The idea of narrative is crucial to personal identity; it forms the foundation of one’s character. Through these stories people are tied to communities, friendships, and family. These bonds orient us to reality. These bonds are constitutive of who we are. Jamie recounts his past in terms of his connections, for example, his bond to his brother Conrad (whom Reverend Jacobs heals with his first experiment with the secret energy). He recounts his teenage years and the pivotal role Astrid played in his life, which explains how later in life she could play a crucial role in his relationship with Reverend Jacobs. These are key components of his life that connect him to his past. They also contextualize his present. These connections form the coherent narrative of Jamie’s life, and thereby his personal identity. Without these bonds, without these connections, Jamie’s motivations would be opaque. Why would a comfortable middle-aged man leave his life to assist a clearly deranged former reverend with ethically dubious experiments? Because they involve his ex-girlfriend, because they are tied to his past. His story provides the rationale for his behaviors. Cicero (106–43 BCE) recognized that human beings need stability over time, that is, integrity throughout their life lest they “fail to have a life, or to be a person at all” (Gill 145). A sense of self is rooted in relations to others. J. G. Fichte (1762–1814) states, “The human being … becomes a human being only among human beings; and since the human being can be nothing other than a human being and would not exist at all if it were not this—it follows that, if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one … Thus the concept of the human being is not the concept of an individual—for an individual human being is unthinkable” (37–38). Human beings define themselves in relation to one another; the limits and boundaries against and within which one forges an ego. Yet when Reverend Jacobs experiences tragedy, he withdraws. Some in similarly tragic situations, however, “maybe not right then, but when the shock wears off … expand as a result of the experience” (King 225). Jacobs turns inward; he contracts, isolating himself with only his experiments to occupy him. His identity, comprised of his relationships to Patsy, Morrie, and God, has been obliterated. He fails to

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take up the charge of rebuilding a sense of self. He rejects all contact with what makes a human being in an obsessive quest for knowledge, which he anticipates will fill the void left when his connections to humanity are broken. Jamie, on the other hand, is surrounded by people: band mates, family, friends, colleagues, lovers, etc. Between Jamie and Jacobs, the reader is shown two very different responses to the problem of human suffering. Through Jamie, King’s reader sees how connectedness and relationships are one attempt to resolve existential anguish, and through Jamie they can appreciate how certain dispositions, like loyalty and even a penchant for nostalgia, play a role in the formation of one’s identity—an essential component to a meaningful life.

After All This Time Jamie’s “fifth business” continuously insinuates himself into Jamie’s life. Near the end of Revival, Jacobs uses Astrid as leverage to “force” Jamie’s hand in assisting him with his experiments. Jamie learns that his high school sweetheart, Astrid, is dying of cancer, and Jacobs has offered to help her by means of the secret energy. But he will only assist if Jamie agrees to work as his assistant. Perhaps it takes the experience of a midlife crisis to appreciate King’s move here, but it speaks to the role of nostalgia in our lives: a force more potent as we creep towards the twilight of our lives and the drive for meaning is more poignant as each moment becomes more precious. It should not be surprising that what motivates Jamie to do what appears on its face counterintuitive is a connection to his past. Our identities are constituted by our pasts. The people we were are the preconditions of who we are. So of course, for Jamie, it would be “Astrid … after all these years” (299). Why would a high school sweetheart lure a middle-aged man out of the comfort and stability of his present life? Simply put, for Jamie, the past calls out to him. “Nostalgia is possibly the greatest of the lies that we tell ourselves. It is the glossing of the past to fit the sensibilities of the present. For some it brings a measure of comfort, a sense of self and of source” (Salvatore 120). Perhaps not so much a lie as an idealized retelling, the past is a story we tell ourselves about who we were in order to assure ourselves about who we are. When one recounts the past fondly, glossing over unappealing aspects, one attaches value to a version, a vision, of oneself and one’s relationships that reinforces one’s current self-image. There is always the potential for this to be self-delusory and distorted: a retroactive

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hagiography where no one struggled and sacrificed more, no one was more wronged, and yet, still we, the noble martyr, endured. But our identities are tied to our memories. Thus, valuing a specific gloss on the past, that is, nostalgia, is essential to crafting and curating a narrative, or timeline, of our lives that provides the context by which we orient ourselves to the present world. In this way, “Nostalgia is a necessary thing … a way for all of us to find peace” (Salvatore 124). A middle-aged Jamie would be vulnerable to his high school sweetheart. Even though they had not spoken in ages and there was no desire to rekindle their romance, Astrid speaks to who he once was, which is a component of who he is and always will be. She speaks to a younger, optimistic Jamie. Astrid speaks to an idealized Jamie, before his eyes were opened to the horrors of reality and the nightmare world behind Reverend Jacobs’s secret energy. She speaks to a past Jamie, one distant from the middle-aged man he finds staring back at him from the mirror every morning before he trudges off to record another has-been or never-will-be at Hugh’s studio. Jamie may consciously comfort himself with reassurances that his present life is good, reminding himself that “I did still play—plenty—and had work I liked and was good at. If a man or woman wants more … that man or woman is tempting the gods” (185). But Astrid is a reminder of another Jamie. She connects him to this past, and he finds solace and meaning there. Beyond mere psychic comfort, Jamie’s nostalgia connects him to other people, and in so far as these connections are not trivial, they place obligations on him that require he adopt a particular disposition towards himself and these relationships. “It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told – except in the case of fiction” (MacIntyre 212). Jamie is tied to Astrid by a shared past and in so far as this past is constitutive of who he is, he is bound by ties of loyalty to her. He is connected, intimately to her, and thus they are bound together, their identities intertwined. This is a bond as strong as Jamie’s commitment to himself, and his connection to Astrid is exemplified through a feeling of loyalty to her. “Loyalty acknowledges the critical place of sociality in our identity and protects our settled identity from the erosions of short-term advantage” (Kleinig 80). Astrid asks Jamie, “And you came … After all these years, you came. Why?” Jamie replies, “Because I had to. I can’t explain any better than that, except there was a time when you meant the world to me” (329). Of course he “had” to. Jamie envisions himself as a whole, coherent person, and that self is connected to his past through narrative, witnessed in

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nostalgia, which reinforces past relationships. These relationships constitute his character and so bind him. One may def ine loyalty as a “thoroughgoing devotion” to a cause or something outside oneself. This could be a nation, a family, community, religion, etc. The value of loyalty is in the relationship of the self to something not of the self, something external, objective, beyond the “private self” (Royce 16–20). These connections serve an existential purpose by orienting one in the world. “I inherit the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations, and obligations. These constitute the given of my life … Without those moral particularities to begin from there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good … consists” (MacIntyre 221). We are the children from our hometown; we are the friends of our childhood classmates. We often maintain these relationships throughout adulthood, even though should these individuals have been introduced to us later in life, we would not have cultivated these relationships. But as childhood friends they made an indelible mark on us. Perhaps this connection is more deeply forged since we were new, then. We were vulnerable and only beginning to craft ourselves, so each experience bore a deeper imprint on our psyche. Perhaps this is why friendships later in life seem to lack an intimacy, or a permanence, that those earlier friendships possess. Regardless, we are the ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends of high school crushes and lovers. We are the humans who rode those timelines, who crafted personalities around those experiences. When we read Revival from this perspective, we can appreciate why Jamie simply cannot abandon his ex-girlfriend. As he navigates this world, his past makes claims against his present, and integrity demands he respect those obligations. Notice the difference between Jamie’s approach to his past and Jacobs’. Jamie derives meaning from this past relationships; Jacobs severs himself from his past. After his loss, Jacobs fails to cultivate relationships, he travels this world, changing his name frequently, directionless seeking external validation from his experiments and what they might tell him about the afterlife. He believes meaning will be granted him if he can merely learn enough. In contrast, Jamie crafts a meaningful life through cultivating relationships. Walking Jamie’s path and witnessing Jacobs’s obsession, King’s reader is presented with two very different pictures of how people struggle with the existential problem of life. Jacobs demands certainty about the metaphysical nature of reality, as if that will assuage his need for place and purpose, obsessively pursuing the secret energy while foreclosing the possibility of

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authentic human connection. Jamie, on the other hand, builds a life. Both men seek meaning; they seek the “good” life. “The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man” (MacIntyre 219). And this seeking is done in relation to others, in community. Jamie and Jacobs have taken two very different paths toward life. Both men seek meaning in the face of despair. One finds horror, the other hope.

No Death, No Light, No Rest Revival climaxes when Jacobs finally has in place all the pieces necessary to conduct his greatest experiment. He has a source of electricity powerful enough: an electrical storm. He has a patient, Mary Fay, so ill that her death is imminent. And he has Jamie, his assistant. With all the pieces in place, Jacobs hopes to finally garner a glimpse into the beyond, evidence of an afterlife. Will he see his wife and son? Will he see paradise? Throughout Revival, those who have been subjected to Jacobs’ experiments—Jamie, Hugh, and Astrid, among his many patients—have suffered various aftereffects. Hugh describes seeing “prismatics,” but also ants. Jamie has similar experiences. All of these experiences are accompanied by something additional, an indication of something lurking in the background, something malevolent and female (King 184). By tapping into the secret energy Jacobs has, in some manner, opened a doorway into the world humans ostensibly occupy after death. This was Jacobs’ goal. His faith was shattered after the loss of his family, and philosophical/theological accounts left him unsatisf ied. Thus, amidst his existential despair, he sought, obsessively, to peer beyond the evil of this world and into the next for some vindication of this life. Yet what he learns about the afterlife does not afford him solace. When Mary Fay is newly dead, Jacobs applies massive amounts of electricity to “cure” death, bring her back, and thus learn from her about what lies beyond. But what he and Jamie experience is not heaven, or even hell, in any conventional sense. It is a Lovecraftian world of chaos and suffering. When Mary Fay comes back, her eyes blank, Jacobs asks her, “Where have you been, what did you see there? What awaits beyond death? What’s on the other side?” (379). But this is not Mary Fay anymore. As she bloats, the world fades and Jacobs and Jamie see through the illusion of this world. “Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars … a vast ruined city … A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it … Driving the humans were antlike creatures … some the dark

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red of venous blood … young men and old women … teenagers with babies … on every face was the same expression of blank horror” (379–80). This is apparently what awaits humans upon death: not just for evil-doers as divine retribution, but for us all. “The howling stars weren’t stars at all. They were holes, and the howls emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane” (380). This Lovecraftian nightmare is the beyond that Jacobs discovers. It is a far cry from his Christian theology. Speculative theologians attempt to understand the afterlife and the supernatural. Using analogy and metaphor, they seek to explain the ineffable. Heaven and hell, at least as described by humanity’s religious traditions, are ordered in a way, structured by a notion of cosmic justice. If the beyond were heaven or hell, at least Jacobs could have expectations. But meaningless suffering and divinities unknown, like Mother, are something new entirely. Mother tells Jacobs what became of his wife and son, and what he might expect as well: “Gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest” (382). How does one orient oneself to this reality? Jacobs spent a life looking for answers and was offered a horrific vision of a fatalistic future of eternal pain. The investigation of Reverend Jacobs can be boiled down to two interrelated queries: 1) What constitutes the afterlife, and 2) Can the afterlife redeem existence? Jacobs is effectively trying to ameliorate his nascent nihilism with metaphysical assurances. He thus needs to know that a world after this one exists, that we persist in it in some meaningful way, and that this existence is valuable enough to justify the suffering experienced here and now. Unfortunately, Jacobs’s program to resolve these conundrums through experiments with secret energy fails, and not simply because it opens up a window onto a dystopia of cyclopean ruins populated by humanoid ants, enslaved souls, and Mother. There are epistemic limitations endemic to the human condition that delimit what he can experience. Jacobs’s experiences, as ours, will always be limited to what is humanly perceptible and conceivable, and these limitations necessitate that there will always be doubt when it comes to metaphysical quandaries that reach beyond human comprehension. Jacobs can never “know” what lies behind our world. Any experience he has will have to fit within the perceptual apparatus with which a human mind is outfitted, and so will be conditioned by these limitations. His mind is structured, as are all human minds, to perceive in specific ways: linear time, causes precede effects, and three-dimensional space. His consciousness is predicated on this structure. Whatever lies outside of this form of perception is forever

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outside of his sphere of possible knowledge. Just as there are wave lengths we can’t see and frequencies we can’t hear, there may be other realities we can’t perceive, that the very constitution of our consciousness precludes us from experiencing. So any “assurances” or “proof” he might dredge from his experiments will be insufficient to his ultimate task: understanding and knowing the nature of what lies beyond the human realm. One must start by understanding better the problem of speculative metaphysics. Metaphysics is, simply put, what lies beyond physics, that is, speculation on the nature of reality beyond what empirical science can comprehend. A great deal of ink can be spilt contemplating the possibility of such knowledge. But, the discipline is, by definition, beyond empirical validation, beyond verification. After all, if its queries were potential areas of knowledge, it would be physics, not metaphysics. Its territory is delimited by what one does not and cannot know by means of experimentation. When Jacobs tells Jamie, “Everyone wonders at one time or other what lies beyond the wall of death. Today … we’ll see,” Jamie responds, “We’re not meant to see” (367). Jamie might mean by this that the human mind cannot grasp what is beyond, as noted above. Or, Jamie might mean that seeing would be unhelpful and perhaps detrimental. Regardless, the result is the same: seeing what lies beyond the wall of death will not assuage the concerns that drive Reverend Jacobs, it will not change the fundamental nature of human existence and so it will not impact how we live our lives. The afterlife and related questions, the greatest mysteries of human existence, are beyond understanding, aside from in an abstract or figurative way. In some areas humans can gain greater certitude, or at least explanatory fullness. We can learn about dark matter or quantum physics. We can explain phenomena through empirical means that used to be accounted for by religious or speculative accounts. But there are some phenomena that, by their very nature, do not admit proof or evidence. There will always be areas that cannot be grasped by limited human intelligence and cannot be proven or verified through scientific means. Jacobs’s desire to know the deep structure of reality and wrest the meaning of creation from it is impossible by means of experiment. Beyond the epistemological problem, one might ask the more poignant existential question: What could Jacobs see that would ease his mind? Imagine he saw his family. Is that vision veridical? Can he “know” it is accurate? Does this prove he will go wherever they are upon his death? Imagine he does not see his family? Lack of evidence is not evidence, and so what would that prove? Not seeing what he hoped to find would only fuel his obsession further. The crux of the problem is, simply put, that Jacobs’s obsession is a manifestation of a neurotic inability

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to deal with grief. He cannot deal with loss, so he pursues secret energy as a shibboleth against despair. Reverend Jacobs concluded his career in the ministry with a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13. Here we are told that even if we have knowledge, foresight, and faith, but not love, we are nothing. Jacobs sought to discover the mysteries of the universe, but he failed to tend to his soul, he failed to love his neighbor, to cultivate rich relationships, and so he dies, alone and terrified. At the end of Revival, Mother states that ultimately there are only the Great Ones in the Null. Jacobs cannot handle this answer. It is the “wrong” answer. Jamie, however, is a bit more circumspect. Either Mother is, as Jamie hopes, lying, or she is telling the truth, as far as she knows it. In this scenario, the epistemological/metaphysical and existential issues dovetail. Assume Mother is telling what she understands to be the truth, namely, that when humans die, the soul, or whatever haecceity defines a person, travels to her dimension where it suffers in perpetuity. To be sure, this outcome is undesirable. But consider the following: Mother is not alone as a divinity; she is one among many gods in the Null (401). She is not the alpha and omega. She is not what we conceive to be God. She is simply a powerful being in a dimension to which we travel upon bodily death. But it is still reasonable to ask what lies beyond her dimension. Can human beings “die” in Mother’s world? She claims there is “no rest,” but could she be mistaken? Mother herself, as one among many, seems to not be a necessary, omnicompetent being. Thus, all the usual metaphysical quandaries still apply in Mother’s realm, they are simply pushed back a level. We may still wonder, what lies beyond her world? There may be hope after Mother. Mother shows Jamie the truth as far as she knows it, but there is potentially more. To maintain his sanity, as an act of psychological defense, Jamie responds with doubt. “The thought of going to the place I saw has done more than cast a shadow over my life; it has made that life seem thin and unimportant … every life. So I hang onto one thought. It’s my mantra … Mother lied” (395, author’s emphasis). This reaction is not merely a psychic response to trauma, it is a legitimate epistemological response to a metaphysical problem.

Conclusion: So far, so good… What Jamie and Jacobs illustrate is that the search for the metaphysical is an attempt to satisfy existential needs, and these needs are not met by knowledge alone. Instead, one must adopt a proper perspective towards

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life. Defining life as suffering, Schopenhauer’s response is not despair. His response is compassion: “Injure no one; on the contrary, help everyone as much as you can” (Morality 92). One cannot eliminate suffering; it remains endemic to the human condition, in this world and the next, apparently. One may not be able to expect justice in the afterlife, but what individuals like Jamie do have, right now, is each other, their fellow sufferers—the bonds of loyalty they have forged and the loving relationships they form. Imagine alongside Jamie and Jacobs that we too have gazed into Mother’s world. We have seen the agony that awaits us upon our earthly demise. We can work through possible reactions. Presume that the vision is veridical, that Mother is not lying, and what we see is what awaits us. Then, either that is the end of our existence and we will suffer in perpetuity, or it is not, and there is something beyond Mother. If the former is true, then an appropriate response is not despair, for that serves no purpose. “(I)f all distress is powerless to alter a fate that is unchangeable and fixed for ever … let sorrow, which runs its course, cease” (Seneca 59). Instead of despair, we might emphasize compassion, as does Schopenhauer. In a world of suffering, Schopenhauer encourages us to act out of the virtue of philanthropy. If we are inevitably bound for Mother’s realm, then lamentation is fruitless. We ought to foster the virtue of philanthropy within ourselves, developing a compassionate disposition towards others. We are going to need it. On the other hand, if there is more beyond Mother, then we are back where we started, with hope borne of doubt. Metaphysical investigations may fail to provide psychic succor. C. S. Pierce (1839–1914) decried the study itself: “Almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish—one word being defined by other words, and they still by others, without any real conception ever being reached—or else is downright absurd” (259). Being more charitable, I would stress that if the result of an investigation, whatever it may be, fails to provide any additional information upon which a decision or judgment may be based, then it is effectively worthless. At the end of Stephen King’s Revival, Jamie ponders what he has seen. Yet he still must live, and so he does so, caring for his brother Con, and finding meaning in the day-to-day work and relationships that constitute his life. As 1 Corinthians 13 reminds us, among faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love. It is not only that the study of metaphysics enriches the analysis of King’s fiction, then, but the study of King’s fiction also allows readers to reconsider the potential as well as the pitfalls of ongoing work conducted by metaphysicians. Through his horrific visions of the world, King pushes the limits of our understanding of the universe and ourselves, thereby laying bare for the reader assumptions

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about the nature of reality, fundamental aspects of the human condition, and the values from which we derive meaning.

Works Cited Camus, Albert. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Basic Writings of Existentialism, edited with an introduction by Gordon Marino, The Modern Library, 2004. Fichte, Johann Friedrich. Foundations of Natural Right: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, edited by Frederick Neuhouser, translated by Michael Baur, Cambridge UP, 2000. Gill, Christopher. “Peace of Mind and Being Yourself: Panaetius to Plutarch.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 36, no. 7, p. 4626, quoted in Brian E. Johnson, The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life, Lexington Books, 2014. Hume, David. “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.” Principal Writings on Religion Including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Natural History of Religion, edited by John Charles Addison Gaskin, Oxford UP, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, unabridged edition, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, St. Martin’s Press, 1965. King, Stephen. Revival. Gallery Books, 2014. Kleinig, John. On Loyalty and Loyalties: The Contours of a Problematic Virtue, Oxford UP, 2014. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 1984. Mann, William E. “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin.” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, edited by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, Cambridge UP, 2001. Maritain, Jacques. St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil. The Aquinas Lecture, Marquette UP, 1942. Peirce, Charles Sanders. “The Essentials of Pragmatism,” Philosophical Writings of Pierce, Dover Publications, 2020. Royce, Josiah. The Philosophy of Loyalty, Norwood Press, 1908. Salvatore, Robert Anthony. Streams of Silver. Wizards of the Coast, 2005. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, translated by Eric F. J. Payne, Dover Publications, 1969. Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Basis of Morality, translated by Eric F. J. Payne, Berghan Books, 1995. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Thinking for Oneself.” Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 2, translated by Eric F. J. Payne, Oxford UP, 2010.

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Seneca. “Consolation of Marcia,” Dialogues and Essays, translated by John Davie, Oxford UP, 2008. William of Ockham. “God’s Foreknowledge and Future Contingent Facts,” Readings in Medieval Philosophy, edited by Andrew B. Schoedinger, Oxford UP, 1996.

About the Author Jacob M. Held is Professor of Philosophy and Assistant Provost for Academic Assessment and General Education at the University of Central Arkansas. He has edited several books at the intersection of philosophy and popular culture including Stephen King and Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

III Adapting Stephen King

8. Cinematic Skeleton Crew: Adapting Stephen King in the Mid-1980s Joseph Maddrey and Carl H. Sederholm

Abstract: From the late-1970s to the mid-1980s, Stephen King expanded his brand from bestselling horror novelist to the Master of Horror as the numbers of film adaptations, original screenplays, and television adaptations increased dramatically. This essay argues that, during the mid-1980s, a handful of horror writers, including Dennis Etchison, Harlan Ellison, and George Romero, helped to develop the cinematic Brand Stephen King by showcasing different qualities of King’s work. Together, these writers and their adaptations pushed audiences to experience the wider possibilities of King’s work and why it continues to capture the attention of millions to this day. Keywords: adaptation, television, Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison

In a pair of 1984 essays published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, novelist Harlan Ellison praised Stephen King as the “undisputed, hands-down, nonpareil, free-form champ” of dark genre fiction, but also complained that film adaptations of King’s stories “look as if they’d been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home for the Terminally Inept” (Watching 172–73). Ellison’s comments are characteristically hyperbolic, but they underscore a common challenge when it comes to Stephen King adaptations—namely, that many of them fail to capture something integral to King’s overall tone, voice, or purpose. Ellison’s remarks appeared at a time when King’s popularity was growing so much that he seemed like a new kind of phenomenon—a celebrity author with an endless supply of ideas that worked in multiple formats. King was not only one of the bestselling authors in the United States, but he was also a discernible brand, one that publishing executives, filmmakers, and audiences hoped they could rely upon for years to come. However, in the fall of 1984

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Dino De Laurentiis’s production of Firestarter, the ninth feature-length King adaptation in eight years—and the least commercially successful so far—faltered in ways that threatened to tarnish King’s seemingly spotless brand. In his book Screening Stephen King, Simon Brown explains that the idea of a “cinematic Brand Stephen King” developed between 1980 and 1985, bookmarked first by Stanley Kubrick’s successful but polarizing adaptation of The Shining, and second by the lesser-valued King-scripted films Cat’s Eye and Silver Bullet (Brown 61). In the interval, filmmakers struggled with the question of how to adapt King’s stories, as well as his distinct voice, in ways that would satisfy his fans and capture his hybrid literary-cinematic brand. The struggle began when King spoke out against Kubrick’s adaptation, claiming the director had “screwed up” his story and characters, even as he conceded that The Shining was “scary” (Chute, “King of Horror” 86; Chute, “King of the Night” 164). In contrast, King observed that screenwriter Stanley Mann’s script for Firestarter was “very close” to the plot of his novel, but he was dismayed that it resulted in a somehow “flavorless” film (Ewing 109). Fans and critics generally agreed with King, suggesting that the success of film adaptations, for those familiar with the author and his source stories, has more to do with capturing certain ineffable qualities than with achieving a generalized or even static fidelity to plot. Put differently, adaptation combines interpretation and transposition in ways that generate lots of risk and uncertainty. As Kamilla Elliott puts it, “Adaptation does not care if is it true or untrue, ethically good or bad, aesthetically pleasing or distasteful, politically correct or incorrect: it is concerned only with adapting—only with its processes of repetition and variation that adapt entities and environments to each other to foster survival” (304). Given King’s own style of reworking horror tropes within constantly shifting contemporary settings, adapting his work—and turning the author’s extremely successful literary brand into an equally successful cinematic brand—meant capturing the increasingly dynamic qualities of his voice and vision without reducing them to predictable or clichéd Hollywood tropes. An abstract goal, to be sure. If there is a consistent set of main themes in King’s fiction, it is that human beings are so caught up in their own contradictory drives and passions that they are rarely prepared to face, let alone explain, the terrors and tragedies they experience. This is not to suggest that King’s characters are necessarily weak, stupid, or distracted; instead, it is to say that King tends to explore the range and complexity of human behavior precisely when his characters are at their worst—or their most vulnerable. Capturing this range, however, is

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as difficult as it is broad, especially since King has routinely pushed himself beyond writing predictable variations on clichéd horror elements. According to Heidi Strengell, King’s brand is best described as a series of “generic hybrids” that, even if they appear to start with Gothic or horrorthemed ideas, are quickly added to various features of “realism, literary naturalism, myths, fairy tales, romanticism, and other elements of the fantastic” (22). Such blending is central to King’s work precisely because it gives him new ways of exploring and expanding what he can do. As Strengell writes, King’s “blend of genres and modes has added to his versatility as a writer and contributed to his popularity” (22). This blending can also make his work difficult to adapt. Given all these complexities, King naturally believed that the strength of his hybrid brand was based on the overall quality of his character-based storytelling, and he theorized that successfully adapting his stories to the screen might mean hiring the right screenwriters, people who understood his larger vision. Judging by King’s influence on the development of several early adaptations of his work, we can infer that he believed the “right” screenwriters were horror novelists like himself, writers who could capture the humanity of ordinary people struggling to survive in extraordinarily horrific situations, rather than Hollywood screenwriters like Stanley Kubrick and Stanley Mann, who maybe did not hold the horror genre in such high esteem. His theory was not unfounded. Prior to the release of Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie (1976), producers and executives at Warner Brothers had tapped Oscar-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant to adapt King’s second novel ’Salem’s Lot. Silliphant’s stated goal was to write and produce “the most terrifying vampire picture ever made without showing a vampire or the teeth and neck bit” (Crawley 22–23). Although Silliphant’s idea could have increased the focus on characters and their fears, his plan was quickly dashed by the success of Brian De Palma’s bloody and bravura adaptation of Carrie, which led the brass at Warner Brothers to conclude that taking the teeth out of King’s novel might not be the way to go. The producers decided to approach several veteran horror filmmakers, including William Friedkin and Larry Cohen, to take up the project, but it quickly became mired in development hell. Eventually, the project made its way to Night of the Living Dead writer/ director George A. Romero, who reflected that the Hollywood studio system simply did not know how to handle King’s material. Romero griped that studio producers routinely hired filmmakers “who have no kinship or affection for the horror genre,” then set out to adapt King’s stories by making them “more accessible and less … less horrible!” (Gagne 123). In the case of ’Salem’s

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Lot, King suggested a solution to that problem: “Get Richard Matheson to do it” (Ketchum 122). Matheson was tremendously successful as both a horror novelist and a horror screenwriter, but the studio declined to hire him.1 Finally, according to Romero, “Warner Brothers got scared” and “decided to make ’Salem’s Lot for television,” a lower-risk option, and turned to Carrie producer Paul Monash to take over the screenwriting duties (Seligson 47). Tobe Hooper, a proven horror filmmaker who’d scored a major success with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, took the reins as director. Even though ’Salem’s Lot went to television, it drew in a large audience and helped to prove King’s argument as producers began developing several other King-related projects, including Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Children of the Corn. King wrote screenplays for each of these films, hoping he could transpose his own voice into a different medium more effectively than others. The distributors of all three films ultimately gave King a possessory, above-the-title credit on the films—thereby acknowledging the importance of his name and his brand—but none used his scripts. King had better luck with Romero, who directed Creepshow (1982) from the author’s original screenplay, and, later, with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who hired King to write Cat’s Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), and Maximum Overdrive (1986). In the meantime, the cinematic Brand Stephen King was defined by other writers—in a battle between mainstream Hollywood screenwriters and some of King’s favorite horror writers. Essentially competing with the mainstream screenwriters behind Cujo (Barbara Turner and Don Carlos Dunaway), The Dead Zone (Jeffrey Boam), Firestarter (Mann), and Christine (Bill Phillips), several horror fiction prose writers took shots at adapting King, presumably based on the author’s recommendations. Dennis Etchison adapted The Mist as a feature film for King and Dino De Laurentiis. George Romero tackled “The Raft” for Creepshow 2. Novelist Michael McDowell adapted “The Word Processor” (retitled “The Word Processor of the Gods” when it appeared in King’s collection Skeleton Crew) as an episode of the TV series Tales from the Darkside. Finally, Harlan Ellison put his money where his mouth was, turning “Gramma” into an episode of the new Twilight Zone TV series. Each of these writers had their own ideas about how to adapt Stephen King. Collectively, they constituted a kind of professional workshop devoted to defining and strengthening the cinematic Brand Stephen King. Though their efforts have often gone 1 King also might have recommended Psycho author Robert Bloch to write the pilot episode of the ’Salem’s Lot TV series spinoff. Unfortunately, that series was never produced. Bloch’s script is synopsized in Maddrey (2021).

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overlooked, they need to be revisited for the ways they captured important qualities of King’s brand and thereby showed others what could be done with it.

The Mist: Visualizing the Unthinkable King’s novella The Mist was written in the summer of 1976, after much prodding from King’s literary agent Kirby McCauley. King took inspiration from a real-life summer storm that descended on his home in Bridgton, Maine, and a subsequent trip to the local grocery store. He remembered, “I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way toward the meat counter at the back.” The “what if?” scenario continued to grow in his imagination, morphing into a “mildly funny” monster movie idea. King later described it as a variation on The Alamo in the style of low-budget, big-bug filmmaker Bert I. Gordon (King, “Notes” 568). Eventually, he decided to subtract the silliness and try to “really scare people” (Stewart 82). Shortly before The Mist appeared in Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces anthology, King and McCauley began vetting candidates to turn the novella into a screenplay. McCauley recommended his client Dennis Etchison, a longtime sci-fi writer and UCLA film school graduate who was carving out a place for himself in the horror fiction market while also pursuing his goal of becoming a filmmaker. In the early 1980s, he found common ground for both aspirations by writing novelizations of films by John Carpenter (The Fog, Halloween 2, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch) and David Cronenberg (Videodrome). Reflecting on the adaptive qualities of novelizations, he suggested, “The art of the movies is visual selectivity. A director will zero in on a specific detail of the scene to reveal the character’s emotions or to further the plot. If you can do that in fiction—describe a tiny physical detail that somehow summarizes the whole scene—you are going to make a strong, vivid impression” (Winter, Faces 60). Etchison put his theory into practice with his screenplay for The Mist, aiming to transform the novella into an artful low-budget film “with most of the terror and suspense arising from what is not shown but only suggested by unearthly sounds and shapes moving just out of sight in the mist” (Jones 141). Emulating filmmaker Roger Corman instead of Bert I. Gordon, Etchison eschewed the possibility of featuring expensive special effects to instead “focus on the relationships” between the characters, which he recognized as a defining strength of King’s writing (“Foreword” 3).

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King’s prose version of The Mist is a first-person narrative divided into eleven distinct parts. Etchison’s adapted screenplay (undated, 120 pages) closely reproduces the plot of King’s story and imports much of the author’s dialogue, but the screenwriter made some substantial changes to the beginning and ending of the story. The initial changes reflect a filmmaker’s need to establish their own storytelling rhythm, tone, and style—turning voice into vision. In the beginning of King’s novella, narrator David Drayton experiences vague, possibly supernatural, premonitions of horrific things to come. When he encounters monsters in the mist, he barely has time to ponder the cause as he struggles to survive the effects. Fear of the unknown becomes a driving narrative force. The overarching question of what created the mist, and what exactly lurks inside it, remains unanswered until the very end of the story. In contrast, Etchison’s screenplay quickly reveals the cause, by visualizing a leak at a top-secret government facility. Etchison adds a new narrative voice by introducing a radio deejay to explain that a historic summer heatwave has caused brownouts in the New England town. Apparently, the brownouts have caused the leak, which produces the mist and the monsters inside. Etchison then playfully pivots to an image of a giant potato bug crawling out of the earth—a cinematic optical illusion that turns out to be a normal-sized bug viewed by David Drayton’s five-year-old son. Having dispensed with mystery of what created the mist, Etchison proceeds to generate suspense in other ways. In King’s story, David Drayton fearfully imagines the storm blowing out a large picture window in his living room, impaling his wife and son with shards of glass. Etchison initially presents the same scene for shock value, as if it is happening in real life. In a subsequent scene, Etchison manipulates the audience again with an added beat in which Drayton sees hundreds of glowing eyes in the living room. This too turns out to be an illusion: David (and the would-be moviegoer) is actually seeing the image of a candle flame reflected in the countless shards of broken glass. Etchison continues to employ sleight-of-hand storytelling techniques while streamlining King’s story to fit a two-hour time frame. He combines characters and scenes, condenses action, and puts pertinent narrative details into dialogue. He also introduces Mrs. Carmody, the story’s main (human) villain, earlier than King did, adding a new scene in which David and his son meet the religious zealot at her antique shop before the mist descends on the town. Departing again from the source story, Etchison delays Mrs. Carmody’s calls for human sacrifice until late in the screen story, building her character as a subtler menace, and enhancing the screen story’s overall atmosphere of dread.

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Although Etchison excises the existential ponderings of King’s prose version, his script follows the major beats of King’s plot until David and his friends flee the grocery store to escape the mist. In the prose version, the survivors encounter a God-like, “Cyclopean” monster—seemingly hundreds of feet tall—walking through the mist, then take refuge at a Howard Johnson hotel. There, a faint, almost indecipherable AM radio transmission offers the possibility of hope for survival, and Drayton concludes his first-person account with what he dubs “an Alfred Hitchcock ending … a conclusion in ambiguity that allowed the reader or viewer to make up his own mind about how things ended” (King, The Mist 152). Apparently unsatisfied with King’s ambiguous ending, Etchison developed one of his own. For practical (read: budgetary) reasons, the survivors do not see any part of the giant Walker in the mist; they only hear its booming footsteps. Once they arrive at the Howard Johnson hotel, however, they encounter the same type of (smaller) monsters that attacked them in the grocery store. The screenplay ends with a proposed aerial shot of giant bugs and prehistoric bird-creatures perching ominously on the roof of the hotel. Etchison said this ending was his homage to Hitchcock’s original ending for The Birds (Jones 141). As Hitchcock describes it, “I toyed with the idea of lap-dissolving on them in the car—looking—and there is the Golden Gate Bridge—covered with birds!” (Bogdanovich 535). So, The Mist still got its “Alfred Hitchcock ending,” albeit a much less hopeful one. In the end, Dino De Laurentiis decided not to produce Etchison’s adaptation of The Mist, deeming it too expensive. Instead, the script provided some inspiration for a three-part radio play that aired in syndication on National Public Radio in October 1984. The radio play was credited to playwright M. Fulton, but it utilized many of Etchison’s story embellishments, including most obviously the radio deejay voiceover at the beginning. King expressed some enthusiasm for the result, suggesting that the audio drama was “a lot closer to the mind of the writer” than a film adaptation would have been, because it preserved the narrative voice (Beahm 133). What got lost in both translations was King’s overall theme. Essentially, the prose version of The Mist is about how different people respond to what King terms a “section-eight experience,” something so surreal that it overwhelms one’s ability to think like a rational adult. When King’s characters look into the mist, a metaphorical abyss, some people deny what they see, some commit suicide, some distract themselves by focusing on mundane tasks, and others take “black comfort” in primitive and dehumanizing behavior. According to King, everyone makes “mental compromises” under the circumstances (King, The Mist 112). Even Drayton succumbs to a

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coping mechanism: he sleeps with Amanda Dumfries, a relative stranger, presumably to feel human, feel alive, and ward off the threat of madness. The author explained his theory by holding up one of his own stories as an example: “There’s this scene in Creepshow where the professor starts to laugh at his crate underneath the stairs. He can’t control himself anymore. To me, this is a moment of transcendence—he’s made up his mind to push his wife under the stairs so that the thing can eat her up.” In that moment, King says, “the tale transcends its genre because he actually begins to laugh. He thinks this act of murder is actually funny. He even asks the viewer to laugh along with him” (Magistrale 8). In contrast, Pet Sematary’s Louis Creed takes the plunge and gets swallowed by the abyss. The Losers in IT also take the plunge, but their regression to a state of childlike open-mindedness allows them to fight their fears as storytellers—and to survive with their sanity intact. Drayton hovers around similar moments of transcendence in King’s prose version of The Mist, occasionally breaking into madcap laughter but never surrendering his survival instincts. Dennis Etchison, however, eliminates most of these moments from the screen story. It is no accident that George Romero, the director of Creepshow, was initially attached to direct film adaptations of Pet Sematary and IT. King knew Romero understood these core ideas. Speaking about his seminal zombie film Dawn of the Dead (1979), Romero said, “In the same way that we’ve learned to live with the bomb and with the reality that we can walk down the street and get mugged, and yet we’ve been able to ignore that and go on with the rest of our lives hoping that it doesn’t get us, I’m kind of playing around a little bit to see if the violence can be that dominant a factor in the film and still enable the audience to get past it and experience the story line and the allegory” (Swires 47). King and Romero’s shared approach to horror storytelling would inform the screen version of “The Raft.”

“The Raft”: Putting the Gore in Allegory In his “Notes” at the end of Skeleton Crew, Stephen King explains that he wrote the first version of “The Raft” (as “The Float”) in 1968 and used the money from the publication to pay off a pressing legal fee. Although he received payment for the story, he never saw the story in print and subsequently lost the original manuscript. Years later, during postproduction on Creepshow, he decided to rewrite the story from memory. By setting “The Raft” at a rural lake near Pittsburgh, George Romero’s home, and identifying the four characters as students of Horlicks University (a fictional version of Romero’s

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alma mater, Carnegie-Mellon University, which also appears in Creepshow) he earmarked the story as a potential adaptation project for his friend. Tony Magistrale suggests that “The Raft” is metaphorical, “a study of the rite of passage from childhood freedom to the terrors of adulthood” (Magistrale 87), as well as “an allegory of the human heart” veiling “subtle truths about the dark realities of the human condition” (Magistrale 89). The third-person narrative begins with the four students arriving at rural Cascade Lake one evening in early October. The time and place—a setting reminding one of the characters that summers “seemed to last forever when she was a girl”—hints at a tragic theme of loss and death (King, “The Raft” 275). Another character refers to their jaunt as a “goodbye trip,” a melancholy grasp at “a little bit of summer that somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year” (276). Except, for these four characters, there will be no next year. King quickly flashes back to a scene a few hours earlier, as the four friends plan their trip, setting up character dynamics. Deke and Randy are “The Jock and the Brain,” Rachel is Deke’s girl, and LaVerne is Randy’s girl—but not for long. By the time they get to the lake, Randy has realized that his muscle-bound best friend is more interested in LaVerne than in Rachel. And what Deke wants Deke gets. Jealousy creeps into the tale as quickly as a flesh-eating oil slick glides across the surface of Cascade Lake, trapping the characters on their island raft. Tensions rise as the blob hypnotizes and eats LaVerne, then Deke, then Rachel, and leaves Randy alone with the increasingly-mad voice in his head. In a Creepshow 2 script dated January 10, 1984, George Romero simplified King’s story even further and made his ending more abrupt. He also modified the story’s character dynamics slightly. In an opening scene of the four friends driving to Cascade Lake, Romero turned LaVerne into Deke’s bombshell girlfriend and Rachel into LaVerne’s demure friend. The latter remains quiet and pensive throughout the ride, while the others smoke marijuana and act rowdy. It seems as if Romero is setting up Rachel to be the story’s Final Girl, the stereotypical slasher movie formula’s sole survivor. Although film critic Carol J. Clover would not popularize the term “Final Girl” for a few more years, the trope—built around a thoughtful, somewhat shy girl-next-door type whose natural strengths and reservations allow her to survive the night—was well-established by 1984. Against expectations, however, Rachel becomes the first to die shortly after they all arrive at the lake. The horrifying message of Romero’s adaptation, echoing King’s source story, is that death does not play by anyone’s rules, that it does not recognize Hollywood tropes, and that it does not play nice.

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Romero’s script adheres to King’s description of the killer blob as a luminescent entity, luring victims into its maw with a multi-colored light show akin to H. P. Lovecraft’s “color out of space” (or, at least, the psychedelic “color out of space” from Roger Corman’s 1970s Lovecraft adaptations, Die, Monster, Die! and The Dunwich Horror). In the short story, Randy warns, “The colors make you loopy” (King, “The Raft” 288). Although Deke heeds his friend’s warning, the blob still sucks him down through a thin crack in the raft, one inch at a time. No filmmaker could hope to achieve such a mind-boggling visual set piece in the mid-1980s era of practical special effects, so Romero changed Deke’s death into a more practical sight gag: the blob’s pull folds Derek in half, driving one leg straight up against the victim’s face. Romero suggests that the unnatural juxtaposition makes it look as if Derek is “doing a can-can kick” (Romero). Moments later, the blob pulls the rest of Derek through cracked floorboards, like “a Kleenex being pulled through the small opening of an econo-pack” (Romero). These descriptions serve as evidence that Romero shared King’s dark sense of humor—and that he was inviting the audience to laugh with them in the hope that they can also transcend the horror of the situation. In King’s short story, the two surviving characters (Randy and Rachel) have sex on the raft in the middle of the night—apparently using sex to stave off death, much like David Drayton did with Amanda Dumfries in The Mist. Romero’s script retains that idea but changes the details. In the screen story, LaVerne becomes catatonic and Randy succumbs to the blob’s hypnotic power. Entranced by the colors, he begins to fondle LaVerne’s body while she sleeps, seemingly forgetting the danger of their situation. But as the blob violently pulls LaVerne away from him and proceeds to eat her alive, Randy realizes he has been tricked. King and Romero’s vivid descriptions of LaVerne’s being ingested then become a potential showcase for Romero colleague Tom Savini’s cutting-edge practical special effects and providing another opportunity to transcend the horror of the scene by inviting moviegoers to marvel at the spectacular illusion of a gruesome death. Afterward, Romero’s screen story departs radically from King’s source story. Seizing the moment of opportunity, Randy jumps off the raft and swims for shore, trying to escape the blob while it is preoccupied with LaVerne. The monster follows but Randy manages to beat it to shore, then celebrates his victory. With perfect comic timing, the blob responds by rising out of the water and grabbing Randy’s feet. As before, death does not play by the rules. As Randy begins to scream, Romero’s script indicates that the image freezes and dissolves into an animated segue-way featuring the

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Cryptkeeper, Creepshow’s host, who declares the story “slick”—another invitation to embrace sardonic humor as a means of preserving sanity in an insane world. By the time Creepshow 2 was produced in 1986, Romero had already left the project, but he would go on to adapt King again with the 1992 film The Dark Half. King continued to trust Romero because he knew Romero appreciated his stories on a deeper level because he was also a largely allegorical storyteller. The director also clearly understood the value of preserving King’s voice within his visions. Remembering his time with Romero on the set of Creepshow, King explained, “I found a lot of times when we were making that film, I was arguing from a directorial standpoint and he was arguing from a writer’s standpoint. In other words, he wanted to keep the words” (Pirani 19).

“The Word Processor”: Deleting Words without Losing the Voice Around 1981, while preparing for a collaboration with author Peter Straub (on the novel The Talisman), Stephen King bought his first word processor, a Wang System 5. In the “Notes” on the stories in Skeleton Crew, the author says this new toy inspired him to write about a troubled author whose own word processor magically grants him the power to manipulate reality by adding and deleting key phrases. According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, King’s story was the “first extended fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author written in a realist manner” (Kirschenbaum 77). King’s story took up the metaphor of author-as-god in ways that give real teeth to imagined horrors. At first glance, “The Word Processor” can be read as a simple allegory about the potentially destructive powers of technology, but the story also turns to questions about how creativity shifts away from imagined spaces and impacts lived experience. This is a theme King addresses in several other texts, including The Dark Half, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, “Umney’s Last Case,” “Obits,” and The Dark Tower series. In the case of “The Word Processor,” King shows how new technology like word processors can suggest new ways of thinking about—or even obliterating—reality. In his introduction to Skeleton Crew, King detailed his particular fascination with the INSERT and DELETE buttons on his Wang, which gave him an idea: “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?’ […] Then I thought of having him insert things and having

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those things just pop into the world” (21). Kirschenbaum observes, “The eraser on the pencil leaves its shavings, ink leaves stains, the white-out brush deposits its rough film; a manuscript page always bore the scars that had been inflicted on it in the course of the rough surgery of revision. But (with a word processor) words on the screen vanished instantly, utterly, if indeed they had ever really been there at all” (Kirschenbaum 81). King sensed something potentially uncanny about that ability. In interviews over the years, he has often described adaptations of his work in equally intriguing ways. In a 2013 post on his website, for example, King compared his novel Under the Dome to the TV series derived from that novel, characterizing them as “fraternal twins” or “alternate versions of the same reality” (King “Letter”). From his perspective in 2013, a worthy film or television adaptation in no way DELETES the prose version; rather, it re-imagines the story in ways that make it both something borrowed and something new. As Kamilla Elliott argues, “Adaptation is the ultimate form of the uncanny—that disconcerting merger of the [un]familiar, the varied, and the repeated. Adaptation never completely lets go of the past or entirely embraces the new: it refuses to forget, even as it moves on. It never allows anything to die completely or to be completely reborn” (306). While scholars increasingly describe and embrace these various complexities, King initially saw adaptation more in terms of what it removed than what it could contribute. In 1979, after writing his own screenplay for a feature film version of The Shining, King suggested that adapting meant stripping a story of various layers of depth: “[Y]ou know that sliced bologna that you get at the supermarket? Imagine that package of bologna with five slices in it; what I did was just peel off the top two slices, and they were my screenplay. The rest of it was all underneath, it was all what (the characters) thought” (Chute, “King of the Night” 171). He seems to be implying that his process completely deleted the inner lives of the characters, which also suggests a loss of authorial voice. His comments suggest that the challenge for adapters is to re-imagine a story while retaining as much of the author’s tone, voice, or purpose as possible. Failing that, an adapter might have to provide a new tone, voice, or purpose. By the time Michael McDowell was hired to adapt “The Word Processor” for the screen, King had already praised McDowell’s authorial voice—and might have recommended him for the job. Reviewing McDowell’s second novel Cold Moon Over Babylon for Adelina magazine in August 1980, King wrote, “In his merciless, funny, affectionate, tough and bizarre depiction of the Old South hiding just beyond the city limits of the New South, only Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor come to mind as his peers” (“Books” 12).

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McDowell had also proven that he could write in different voices. Between 1979 and 1986, he wrote and published at least twenty novels and six novellas under four different names, rationalizing that “when I find a writer I like, I want him to have written 50 books so I can read every one of them […] so, for those people who do like me, I’m trying to put out as much as possible.” He also noted that he used a word processor, because “you have to have one when you do as much as I do” (Wiater 56). In the 1986 essay “The Unexpected and the Inevitable,” McDowell analyzed King’s authorial voice and declared that the strength of his writing came not from his plotting but from the rhythm of his storytelling. King, he wrote, articulates a series of “crushingly mundane” details that ground the reader in the reality of a tale, building up to a “stupefyingly unnatural” payoff that feels both unexpected (because it stands in sharp contrast with the mundane) and inevitable (because the reality of the story is so convincing that the reader cannot doubt the twist) (107, author’s emphasis). In adapting “The Word Processor,” McDowell set out to duplicate that formula by deleting the inner thoughts of Richard Hagstrom and re-imagining that character’s arc in a new medium. McDowell wrote his initial treatment for the episode in mid-July 1984, conforming King’s short story to the Tales from the Darkside series formula (a prologue plus three acts, allowing for commercial breaks) while also economizing story elements (paring things down to two settings and four onscreen characters). On July 25, he completed a first draft teleplay, which deleted perhaps a dozen minor scenes and explanatory flashbacks and added three new scenes to the story. In McDowell’s adaptation, most of Richard’s inner thoughts about his cruel, alcoholic brother, his brother’s tragically doomed wife, and their son are expressed in the first scene in Richard’s initial dialogue with Mr. Nordhoff. Whereas King’s story offers detailed memories of Richard’s childhood to illustrate his brother’s cruel nature, McDowell’s teleplay sums it all up with a single line of dialogue: “He never did a terrible thing in his life that he didn’t try out on me first” (“Word”). Richard’s infatuation with his brother’s wife, the subject of another elaborated memory in the short story, is expressed in the teleplay’s second scene, when Richard types a message into his new word processor, identifying Belinda as “the woman I loved.” Finally, Richard’s relationship with his nephew Jonathan is conveyed by a flashback scene, essentially drawn from King’s story, in which Jonathan promises to build his uncle a word processor. Once Richard begins experimenting with the nephew’s magical gift, both versions of the story focus on his reaction. First, Richard orders up a small

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sack of gold coins, which materialize on the floor of his study. In King’s short story, Richard responds to this strange turn of events by running from the study “as if all the devils of hell were after him” (“Word” 311). In the screen story, his reaction is subtler. In McDowell’s initial treatment, Richard “saunters happily” out of his study, then goes to the kitchen to assess his newfound wealth. In the first draft script, he merely grins his way to a commercial break, and the story resumes in the kitchen. The screen version takes its f irst dark turn when Richard receives a phone call from Mr. Nordhoff, who warns—as in King’s story—that although Jonathan created the word processor to help his uncle, “love can be misdirected” (“Word” 312). The ominous statement articulates a potential theme for King’s story, suggesting that it is a cautionary tale about new technology. Speaking to biographer Douglas Winter in the early 1980s, King articulated the potential theme as follows: “Our technology has outraced our morality. And I don’t think it’s possible to stick the devil back in the box” (Winter, Faces 253). Stories like “The Word Processor” and King’s 1987 novel The Tommyknockers express King’s anxiety, while stories like “The Word Processor” and the 1983 novel Pet Sematary echo his moral concerns. Speaking to Winter about Pet Sematary, King explained, “It is a book about what happens when you attempt miracles without informing them with any sense of real soul. When you attempt mechanistic miracles—abracadabra, pigeon and pie, the monkey’s paw—you destroy everything” (Winter, Stephen 151). A King reader might naturally assume, then, that Richard Hagstrom is doomed. But they would be wrong. After gleefully chasing mechanistic miracles—getting rich and (in McDowell’s “twin” version of the tale) ordering up twenty ideas for bestselling novels—Richard confronts the moral implications of his actions. After deleting his son, he guiltily hallucinates an encounter with his wife Lina, who accuses him of murder. Richard insists that “deletion” is not the same thing as “murder,” then proceeds to delete Lina. When the character returns to his magic word processor, he then restores the lives of his beloved sister-in-law and nephew—and removes the “sense of doom” that hovers around Jonathan in King’s story—thereby creating a new blended family that can live happily ever after. Maybe. This could have been King’s way of suggesting that a person can use the power of imagination to transform reality not only through wish fulfillment but also by setting right things that seemed out of balance. Instead of a cautionary tale about powerful technology, “The Word Processor” turns out to be a romance, and therefore a surprising counterpoint to Pet Sematary. Commenting on his grimmest novel in 1985, King said, “I don’t like it. It’s

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a terrible book—not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don’t really believe that” (qtd. in Modderno 145). Perhaps more to the point, such pessimism did not fit the author’s evolving brand—especially the cinematic Brand Stephen King—which promised more hopeful endings to even the bleakest tales. The best evidence of this point is the film version of Cujo, in which Tad Trenton, the doomed boy of King’s novel, survives the ordeal of being trapped in a car and stalked by a rabid dog. Like King’s earliest short stories, many of McDowell’s own horror novels often ended on grimmer notes, but here he explores King’s growing tendency toward hope and thereby underscores King’s shifting brand. In a private note to King, sent on July 25, 1984, McDowell wrote that he felt “peculiar” about substantially altering another writer’s work, “intrusive” but not “particularly guilty” (Michael M. McDowell Collection, Bowling Green State University, Box M25, Folder 8). On August 5, King responded with a postcard—from The Happiest Place on Earth—approving the adaptation without offering any critical feedback whatsoever.

“Gramma”: Expanding the Stephen King Universe Like “The Word Processor,” King’s short story “Gramma” was adapted to the small screen in the mid-1980s as a half-hour episode of an ongoing anthology series. Unlike “The Word Processor,” “Gramma” deviates from the details King’s source story in substantial ways. Nevertheless, it is remarkably consistent in tone and purpose. King’s original story is about a boy named George who is left alone with his bedridden grandmother while his mother takes care of a family emergency. Although George is afraid of his grandmother, he tries to bravely endure the situation—until he realizes, after careful consideration of a few specific memories, that his grandmother is a witch. The story charts George’s thought process as he unravels the mystery of Gramma’s life and confronts premonitions of his own death at her hands. Eventually, the old woman emerges from her bedroom and takes possession of her grandson’s mind and body. Apart from that final scene, all the action takes place in George’s mind—making “Gramma” a particularly difficult story to adapt to the screen. Harlan Ellison stumbled across this problem when he began working as a creative consultant on the new Twilight Zone TV series in 1985. He recalled, “It was clear to me why no one had been able to beat the problem:

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‘Gramma’ was an internal monologue by an eleven-year-old child, in which virtually nothing happened. At least, nothing that could produce a visual sequence” (qtd. in Jones 151). He then explained to the show’s producers that new scenes would have to be invented to make the story work onscreen, thereby talking himself into the job of adapting King. Ellison believed that the secret to King’s success was not the author’s nightmarish plots—“the least of what King has to offer” (Watching 167)—but the effective way he developed characters and his often allegorical writing style. Ellison suggested that King adaptations usually failed because the adapters ignored King’s “mythic undercurrents,” “dumbed-up” his characters, and reduced the stories to “bare bones, blood and cliché” (167). With “Gramma,” he intended to do the opposite: to “externalize everything,” and transform King’s internal monologue into a series of evocative images that would convey “the essence of what Stephen was talking about” (Herndon 10A). King reportedly saw two drafts of Ellison’s teleplay for “Gramma,” one emphasizing the “interior story” and one “dramatizing the background” (Herndon 11A). An April 16, 1985 draft, with revisions dated April 24 and May 5, appears to be the final shooting script, as it is broken down into specific camera shots. The opening scene establishes the normalcy of the kitchen, where George sits at a table with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. As in the short story, the daylight streaming in through the windows symbolizes the safe and staid nature of George’s life with mother, and the slow incursion of nightfall sets up his coming encounter with Gramma. After his mother leaves the house, George’s focus (and the camera’s gaze) shifts toward the ominous-looking hallway and the closed door to Gramma’s room, where shadows are already gathering. Ellison worked closely with the episode’s intended director, William Friedkin, to design a seventy-foot-long hallway set, with tilting walls, that would add a “Kafkaesque” menace to the story (Herndon 10A). Friedkin also requested a Louma crane, which would allow the camera to shoot from extremely high and low angles, make 360-degree turns, and drift freely throughout the set. The goal was to make the director’s vision as fluid and rhythmic as the writer’s voice. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, Friedkin did not end up directing the episode, but replacement director Bradford May adhered to the original director’s plan. In the short story, King expresses George’s mounting fear by conjuring fragmented thoughts and memories of overheard conversations between his mother and her siblings about dead children, terrified neighbors, and Gramma’s strange books. King writes that George “felt as if someone had

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dumped all the pieces to a puzzle in front of him and that he couldn’t quite put them together” ( “Gramma” 474). Instead of dumping those same puzzle pieces into his screen story, perhaps as flashback scenes, Ellison conceived several new images to concretize George’s fear and process of discovery. In Ellison’s script, George stands at the edge of the hallway and observes his shadow on the floor. He watches as it breaks away from him and slides under the door to Gramma’s room. In the DVD commentary for the episode, Ellison says that image was the first idea he came up with while re-imagining the story. He knew he could not save all the action for the final scene—TV audiences would expect to see something scary before the first commercial break—so he decided to “front load” the story with this literal foreshadowing of the story’s ending, in which George’s spirit becomes separated from his body as Gramma takes over (Ellison “Commentary”). In the meantime, the screen story imports King’s all-important narrative voice, turning George’s inner thoughts into audible voiceover commentary on Ellison’s new story beats. Next, George enters Gramma’s room to bring her some tea. Startled by a sudden movement of her hand, he drops the tea, which spills and seeps down between the floorboards, revealing a hidden compartment. Driven more by curiosity than fear, George pries up one of the boards and finds two mysterious books, including a copy of the Necronomicon—evidence that Gramma is a practicing witch. The new scene not only conveys King’s mystery/backstory in a concise way, but it also suggests a new theme for the story. King’s story is about a boy who bravely faces his fear of Gramma and of old age, death, and dark family secrets, only to fall victim to those forces in the end. Ellison’s theme is more straightforward: curiosity kills the cat, a theme that King mentions countless times throughout his fiction. George brings Gramma’s books into the kitchen and begins to read out loud from the Necronomicon (the title extrapolated from the content of Gramma’s Lovecraftian chanting in King’s story), and thereby seals his fate. Arguably, this added detail takes Ellison’s adaptation in a slightly different direction from King’s text, but it also makes his adaptation extra-faithful to King’s text. By ignoring certain details from King’s story, and instead highlighting the “mythic” Lovecraftian “undercurrents” present in the source story, Ellison creates a version of “Gramma” that demonstrates a common substratum between the fictional worlds of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. The result is an expansive adaptation that takes up core components in King’s work and hints at the future of cinematic Brand Stephen King as a worldbuilding franchise.

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The Legacy of Skeleton Crew By the time “Gramma” aired in February 1986, King was already attempting to take control of his cinematic brand. Embracing the adage that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, he wrote the scripts for Cat’s Eye and Silver Bullet, then made his directorial debut with Maximum Overdrive. The first two films were commercial duds, earning about $13 million and $12 million, respectively. The third was an outright box-office bomb, earning less than $8 million against a reported $9 million production budget. After the failure of Maximum Overdrive, Hollywood’s infatuation with Stephen King cooled off. Somewhat surprisingly, however, two off-brand (non-horror) King adaptations—Stand by Me (1986) and The Running Man (1987)—performed well at the box office, even though they had very little direct input from King or any overt association with his brand as a horror writer. The marketing materials for Stand by Me, in fact, deliberately avoided using King’s name, as if the filmmakers were afraid that his name might turn audiences away (Brown 16). Despite these changing attitudes toward King, producer Richard Rubinstein actively continued to develop Stephen King horror stories, helping to realize Creepshow 2 in 1987 and “Sorry, Right Number,” the King-scripted episode of Tales from the Darkside, that same year. He also hired Michael McDowell to adapt King’s 1985 novel Thinner, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and spent years trying to raise financing for a feature film adaptation of Pet Sematary. In 1989, Rubinstein’s persistence paid off. Pet Sematary was made on King’s terms, used King’s script, and filmed in King’s home state. Earning nearly $90 million at the domestic box office, it became the highest grossing King adaptation to date, and re-set the stage for cinematic Brand Stephen King. Since then, King has maintained a second career as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter, while also allowing trusted writers and directors to expand his fictional universe. And the approaches to adapting King that were pioneered by Dennis Etchison, George Romero, Michael McDowell, and Harlan Ellison are still being heeded today.

Conclusion There is no direct or obvious path to a successful adaptation. Filmmakers, television executives, and others who transpose stories from one medium to another must weigh a host of important decisions, including how to present

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familiar material to a new (and often skeptical) audience. For nearly five decades, adaptations of Stephen King’s work have appeared with enough regularity that they have become an industry to themselves, spawning all manner of franchises, sequels, reboots, television series, and so forth. While some of those adaptations have exceeded all expectations, some have failed in ways that caused audiences to sour on King—at least until the next big adaptation came along. During the 1980s, as Stephen King transitioned from bestselling author to a global multimedia brand, a handful of horror authors attempted to capture just what made King’s fiction original by focusing on its range, its interest in children’s experiences, its sense of everyday horrors, and its occasional shift into outright gore. Though several of these adaptations were made for the small screen or were unappreciated when they appeared, they deserve recognition because they also came from the minds of horror writers who admired King and who wanted to explore how well King’s voice could be captured in other media.

Works Cited Beahm, George. The Stephen King Companion. Andrews McMeel, 1989. Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It?: Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet. Ballantine, 1998. Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. U of Texas P, 2018. Conner, Jeffrey. Stephen King Goes to Hollywood. Plume, 1987. Chute, David. “The King of Horror Novels.” The Boston Phoenix. 17 Jun. 1980. Reprinted in Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Warner Books, 1993, pp. 83–86. Chute, David. “King of the Night.” Take One. Jan. 1979. Reprinted in Adapting Stephen King, Vol. 1: Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, and The Shining from Novel to Screenplay, Joseph Maddrey, McFarland, 2021, pp. 164–171. Crawley, Tony. “Salem’s Lot: A Starburst Preview.” Starburst vol. 3, no. 1, 1980, pp. 22–25. Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford UP, 2020. Ellison, Harlan. Commentary. “Gramma.” The Twilight Zone: The Complete ’80’s Series. Paramount, 2020. DVD. Ellison, Harlan. “Gramma.” 16 April, 1985, Rev. 4/24/84, Rev. 5/2/85. Teleplay. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ellison, Harlan. Harlan Ellison’s Watching. Underwood-Miller, 1989.

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Etchison, Dennis. “Foreword.” Reign of Fear: The Fiction and Films of Stephen King, edited by Don Herron. Underwood-Miller, 1991, pp. 1–5. Etchison, Dennis. “The Mist.” Undated draft, 120 pages. Screenplay. Ewing, Darrell, and Dennis Myers. “King of the Road.” American Film. June 1986. Reprinted in Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Warner Books, 1993, pp. 108–11. Gagne, Paul R. The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh. Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987. Herndon, Ben. “Real Tube Terror.” Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, vol. 5, no. 5, December 1985, pp. 10A–11A. Horsting, Jessie. Stephen King at the Movies. Starlog, 1986. Jones, Stephen. Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide. Billboard, 2002. Ketchum, Marty, Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner. “Shine of the Times.” Shayol. vol. 1, no. 3, summer 1979. Reprinted in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Warner Books, 1988, pp. 119–23. King, Stephen. “Books: Two for Terror.” Adelina, August 1980, p. 12. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1981. King, Stephen. “Gramma.” Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 464–94. King, Stephen. “Introduction.” The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, Arbor House, 1981, pp. 11–19. King, Stephen. “Introduction.” Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 17–23. King, Stephen. “A Letter from Stephen.” https://stephenking.com/promo/utd_on_tv/ letter.html Accessed on the web 16 Aug. 2023. King, Stephen. The Mist. Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 24—154. King, Stephen. “Notes.” Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 567–73. King, Stephen. “The Raft.” Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 278–306. King, Stephen. “Word Processor of the Gods.” Skeleton Crew. Signet, 1985, pp. 307–25. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Belknap, 2016. Maddrey, Joseph. Adapting Stephen King, Vol. 1: Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, and The Shining from Novel to Screenplay. McFarland, 2021. Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. Twayne, 1992. McDowell, Michael. “Word Processor.” Undated, 11 pages. Treatment for a Teleplay. Courtesy of Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University. McDowell, Michael. “The Unexpected and the Inevitable.” Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Signet, 1987, pp. 93–108.

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McDowell, Michael. “The Word Processor.” 1st Draft. 25 July 1984. Teleplay. Courtesy of Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University. Modderno, Craig. “Topic: Horrors!” USA Today. 10 May 1985. Reprinted in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Warner Books, 1988, pp. 142–45. Pirani, Adam, and Alan McKenzie. “A Starburst Interview with Stephen King.” Starburst #61, Sept. 1983, pp. 16–19. Romero, George A. “Creepshow II.” First Draft. 10 Jan. 1984. Screenplay. Seligson, Tom. “George Romero: Revealing the Monsters Within Us.” Twilight Zone, vol. 1, no. 5, August 1981, pp. 12–17. Stewart, Bhob. “FLIX.” Heavy Metal. vol. 3, no. 11, March 1980, pp. 80–83. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Swires, Steve. “George Romero: Master of the Living Dead.” Starlog #21, April 1979, pp. 44–47. Wiater, Stanley. “Horror in Print: Michael McDowell.” Fangoria #40, Dec. 1984, pp. 54–56. Winter, Douglas E. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. Berkley, 1985. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. Signet, 1986.

About the Authors Joseph Maddrey is the author of more than a dozen books, including Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (2004) and two volumes of Adapting Stephen King (2021–22). He has written or produced over a hundred hours of documentary television, including episodes of Discovery Channel’s A Haunting. Carl H. Sederholm is professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is currently the editor of The Journal of American Culture. He has published essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sederholm has also co-edited several academic anthologies, including Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture.

9. Towards Infection: Viral Adaptations of King Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels

Abstracts: Though a prolific writer, Stephen King’s track record of adaptation from book to screen is even more impressive compared to his peers. With such volume comes the opportunity for infection, as adaptations begin to infect one another. This essay explores the concept of “viral adaptation,” a term we use to define examples where the adaptations mutate beyond the scope of the original text, while still adhering to the imagined worlds of the source authors. In particular, we look to the example of the television show Haven (2010–15), which is adapted from Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid (2005). Haven provides a useful starting point, because in The Colorado Kid King provides an invitation for infection via the novella’s unanswered mystery. Keywords: genre, multiverse, fandom, Haven, Colorado Kid

In the 1984 novella Thinner, originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, Stephen King traces a short lineage from the venerable to the everyday, god of the shepherds to the head shop—a typical move for King. It is no surprise that King reads Robert Chambers, given his influence on generations of horror writers, but The King in Yellow is an instructive well of inspiration for King, particularly in relation to adaptations of King’s expanded universe. Most readers of Chambers’s work in his time (published 1894–1938) would have known him for his romance novels, despite the enduring influence of The King in Yellow as shown by its recent adaptation in Season 1 of True Detective. This recent, popular adaptation is just one example in a long history of literary adaptations of Chambers’s work, including stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Karl Edward Wagner, and Alan Moore. The infectious nature of The King in Yellow, even while a minor work of Chambers in terms

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of volume, provides a model for considering the viral nature of King’s fiction, particularly where film and TV adaptations are concerned. This is not merely a question of literary influence in the traditional sense, however, as suggested by T. S. Eliot. In a discussion of what makes each writer unique, Eliot argues that “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [the author’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, [the author’s] ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (885). In this argument, the writer becomes a “catalyst … storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (888). Eliot’s argument frames authors as belonging to respective teleological traditions of growth in their craft, which he frames as a general critique of the readerly desire to find something that is unique to each author. Though Eliot uses the analogy of metallurgy, here we might frame the literary tradition as a healthy, growing organism. The present study of King, however, looks towards infection, which is to say, the viral nature of his work in relation to adaptation. While our argument is not an outright critique of Eliot’s argument, we contend that the work of the author is not wholly their own. Infection runs through King’s adaptations in a more specific way. Viral adaptation is a key concept for our consideration of King, which features a specif ic style of adaptation that focuses less on f idelity and more on mutability, spread, and even the lack of agency appropriate to the genre of horror. King takes on the question of virality in a number of his works, probably most explicitly in The Stand (1978), but the same could be said of any of his vampire-inspired work, such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), or his apocalyptic novel Cell (2006). In this essay, we focus on the viral as a logic of literary production and media adaptation. A biological virus spreads and mutates, inserting itself into hosts, breaking them down and changing them when the virus is pernicious enough. Similarly, a computer virus inserts itself into code, propagates via networks, and changes the behavior of the affected programs. When marketing “goes viral,” it disseminates wildly, forcing a product into the consciousness of its hosts. In this exchange, something of the preceding viral logic is mapped onto the new text in unexpected ways. The King in Yellow is an early example of this literary logic. Published in 1895, it revolves around a play, “The King in Yellow,” which causes those who read it to lose control of themselves and go mad. In “The Yellow Sign,” the romantic interest and painterly subject of the narrator, Tessie, pulls the play down from the narrator’s bookshelf against his cries of protest. He later finds the book next to her sleeping form, and despite his earlier warnings,

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she “opened it and read it through from beginning to end.” Then, there is a caesura in the text, signaling a complete loss of agency: When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me … We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! (King in Yellow)

As extra-diegetic readers, we access this caesura only in fragments: poems or snippets from the titular play provided in epigraphs, offering brief glimpses into the maddening content. From a formal standpoint, the more literary emergence of this viral logic occurs when the contents of the play erupt unbidden in the narration in sprays of uncontrolled poiesis. Typically, in the four core short stories that contribute the most to the mythos of The King in Yellow, a character picks up the play in an idle moment and sometime later the supposed contents of the play will suddenly interrupt the narration: Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow. (King in Yellow)

These “feverish” thoughts arrest the character, drawing them into another world that infects them, as illustrated by the way in which these visions of “Carcosa” erupt unbidden, typically leading to some sort of cognitive decline—or horrific enlightenment—of the trespassing reader. Adaptations of King’s work develop this strategy further, however, for in The King in Yellow, the source of infection is signposted fairly clearly as a physical book that a character picks up and reads, even when they know they should not. In adaptations of King’s work, on the other hand, a larger network is created between his multiverse—which refers to the connections between his various works and fictional worlds—and the artistic interventions of the screenwriters. Take Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), for example. Flanagan’s last three films, counting The Life of Chuck (in production in 2023), are adaptations of King’s work. As a novel, Gerald’s Game (1992)

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was originally written alongside Dolores Claiborne (1992) to be potentially released as a single text. The two novels reference each other, but there is no direct reference to the center of his larger multiverse, The Dark Tower series (1982–2012). In the adaptation, however, Flanagan introduces the line, “all things serve the beam,” spoken by the hallucination of Jessie’s recently-deceased husband. The line is brief, and the purpose of this essay is not to speculate on what this means in the context of Gerald’s Game, but to note the sudden eruption, like in The King in Yellow, of this other world within Gerald’s Game. In both examples, there is a literary source for this other world that infects and interrupts the continuity of the storytelling. The important difference, in the case of King’s adaptation, is that this is not the internal logic of the narrative, but an introduction by way of adaptation. In this respect, there is a level of fandom involved in these manifestations in King’s adaptations. The writers must not only know King’s work more broadly, but desire to thread connections through his multiverse. Henry Jenkins’s work, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), explains the social element of these derivative texts. He finds a representative example in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, where hysteria and irrationality emerge from a virus that jumps the barrier between digital machine and human (17). Snow Crash is important for Jenkins, because many uses of “viral” don’t acknowledge user agency—they suggest that we “can’t help” being sucked in or transmitting. This is similar to the mistake of thinking of viruses as self-replicating. Audiences are not passive, but more importantly for the present argument, the production of films/TV is an active process, where an infected host actively inserts the viral content. This phenomenon raises a compelling question for the work of Stephen King: why are adaptations of his work particularly infectious? And if the analogy of infection does not suggest a lack of agency, what encourages the desire to spread these connections across his work? There are potentially some pretty banal answers to this question, such as: King’s fans are particularly rabid. King does seem to encourage this rabidity through his Dollar Baby program, where he makes short stories not currently under contract available for adaptation by f ilm students for a dollar. One could also point to how prolific King is, both in his own writing and adaptations of his work, and as such there are more opportunities for cross contamination. A little bit more convincingly: King himself encourages it by setting the dark tower at the center of his literary universe, to which he often returns. Such arguments risk Roland Barthes’s critique, however,

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with their focus on intention, and the point remains: the work of Stephen King infects. Literary infection is not new, as illustrated by The Hastur Cycle (2006) and Under the Twin Suns (2021), both anthologies that collect the stories infected by Chambers’s work. Mark Fisher notes that “not only Derleth but also Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and many others have written tales of the Cthulu mythos,” the literary manifestation of H. P. Lovecraft (25). Fisher continues, “By webbing his tales together, Lovecraft loses control of his creations to the emerging system, which has its own rules that acolytes can determine just as easily as he can,” a process King himself contributes to in his 2022 novel Fairy Tale (25). Mutability is a hallmark of authors investing in the old worlds of the original writers. In this chapter, we will primarily discuss the case of the television show Haven (2010—15), which is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid (2005). With its open-ended nature, The Colorado Kid invites its readers to speculate, whereas The Dark Tower series invites its readers to make connections between King’s literary worlds—the first text a host, the latter the infectious agent. In this setting, all it took was a screenwriter to sneeze.

Adaptation: The Invitation for Infection Considering adaptations of King’s work turns us to medium specificity, which in the case of a viral adaptation, influences how the text becomes infected, or given the audiovisual nature of the medium, what that infection looks like. For some, the specifics of adaptation to film and television raise the recurring question of fidelity—how faithful or true a film or television adaptation is to the “original” text. While fidelity-based approaches to adaptation persist, one of the points of rebuttal concerns the privileging of the written word over the specifics of film/television as audiovisual mediums. Robert Stam writes that “the demand for fidelity ignores the actual process of making films, the important differences in modes of production” (16). Or as George Bluestone writes, “Changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium” (6, author’s emphasis). More significantly, Stam argues against fidelity as a lens for examining the book to film based on medium specificity. For Stam, “the shift, in adaptation, from a single-track, uniquely verbal medium such as the novel to a multitrack medium like film, which can play only with words (written and spoken) but also with music, sound effects, and moving photographic images, explains the unlikelihood, and I

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would suggest even the undesirability, of literal fidelity” (17). In other words, focusing on how faithful an adaptation is to the original creates both an unnecessary privileging of the source text (written word) but also ignores the potential for the specific elements of film and television to develop or mutate, rather than replicate, through exploration or variation. Significantly, the link in adaptation is often assumed to be narrative. Rather than any attempt at fidelity in adaptation, however, Haven instead seeks to answer a question posed by its source material through the integration of elements from other parts of King’s work. In other words, The Colorado Kid invites readers, and screenwriters, to speculate upon the mystery of its murder, and while it is not answered through any internal logic of the novella, the screenwriters do so by networking its narrative with other examples of King’s work. In other words, to solve the mystery the writers turn to the resources of King’s other texts. The emphasis on f idelity and its connection to medium returns the discussion of adaptation to the larger debates about the relationship between the novel and film. For Kamala Elliott, debates around fidelity are illustrative of the perceived rivalry between literature and film, which are the result of a longstanding hierarchy that places literature above the moving image and pits word against image. She responds to this false dichotomy by arguing that films include words and novels include images, but both discourses tend to reject these similarities in favor of emphasizing what the film or novel can or cannot do. Elliott writes that “the novel’s retreat from its own pictorial aspirations is followed by a taunt that film cannot follow” (11). Instead of placing the two mediums in opposition, Elliot suggests that they might be “reciprocal looking glasses,” which offer “an endless series of inversions and reversals” (209–12). This view of the relationship between word and image, which Stam and others might see as an intertextual approach to adaptation, emphasizes the interdependence of texts in the adaptation process. In this case, while King might author the “original” text that provides a starting point for an adaptation, each adaptation is also informed by other adaptations that have tackled similar subjects. This “reciprocal looking glass” creates the context for infection, where King’s works in particular lend themselves to the eruption of the multiverse we see in Gerald’s Game or the introduction of thinnies in Haven, as we will discuss later. Haven is based on King’s novella The Colorado Kid, and while there are some clear narrative connections between the two, our interest in the present essay is in the open-ended nature of the novella. The story focuses on an intern named Stephanie at a newspaper, The Weekly Islander, and its two

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editors, Dave and Vince. The entire narration takes place as one conversation between Stephanie and the editors, with the editors testing Stephanie’s powers of deduction as a budding investigative reporter. After she passes their first test, Vince and Dave present Stephanie with the mystery of the Colorado Kid, a potentially unsolved crime based upon a man’s body found near the shore in the Maine town in which the story takes place. Vince and Dave name the case “the Colorado Kid,” because they find evidence that the man was from Colorado via a tax stamp on a pack of cigarettes. Using this clue, Vince and Dave are able to locate the spouse of the Colorado Kid and find out his last whereabouts before traveling to Maine. The crux of the story depends upon the five-hour window between the Colorado Kid’s last sighting in Colorado and the time the body was found in Maine, a seemingly impossible transit time. Dave and Vince hold this particular mystery close to their vests, because it resists simple explanation and they are wary that should another news outfit get a hold of it, they might try to give the story a neat, false resolution. While they have worked out that it would be possible to charter a plane that could travel from Colorado to Maine in five hours, it would be extremely unlikely that such an event actually explains what happened. The novella ends with Dave and Vince telling Stephanie everything they know about the unsolved case. Ending this way conflates the form of the novella with its narrative content: it is about an unsolved mystery and it formally presents an unsolved mystery rather than solving it to arrive at a conclusion to the narrative. Earlier we referred to the open-ended nature of The Colorado Kid as an invitation. Along the lines of the thematics of this essay, this is an invitation for infection, but also more literally an invitation for the showrunners Jim Dunn and Sam Ernst and the screenwriters working on the television show Haven. Rather than attempt to match this open-ended nature in a form of fidelity, which as we have already noted is rarely the goal of adaptation, the open-ended nature of The Colorado Kid presents an opportunity for the adaptation to solve the mystery itself, in a form of collaborative writing forming a network that spans King, Dunn, and Ernst, The Colorado Kid and the five seasons of Haven. With five seasons, the writers had plenty of time to provide potential answers to the mystery of the Colorado Kid. The first season establishes the generic formula of the show: FBI agent Audrey Parker takes the place of the intern Stephanie, but she remains the newcomer to Haven who must root out its secrets with the help of local newspaper reporters Dave and Vince. Rather than leave the mysteries unanswered, in the way of The Colorado

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Kid, however, Haven follows a “monster of the week” structure—or what we will refer to here as the “trouble of the week” formula, given the television show’s focus—whereby in each episode a supernatural mystery is solved. The source of these mysteries is “troubles,” or supernatural abilities with a monkey’s paw twist that cause trouble for the town. Usually they can be solved by discovering the emotions that cause these abilities to manifest in an individual, making the main task of Audrey Parker and cohort to provide some type of emotional support for the affected individuals. It is important to note that this supernatural element, while a staple of King’s work, is totally absent from The Colorado Kid, except by way of readerly speculation into the novella’s mystery. Yet, like the novella, the season ends with Parker finding a home in Haven, Maine, with the police department, just as the intern Stephanie finds a home at the local newspaper after proving herself to Vince and Dave. Though the lingering promise of discovering the cause behind the troubles persists throughout the following seasons, they largely follow the trouble of the week formula. Season three makes a brief nod to the original novella, with characters traveling to Colorado to investigate a similar mystery. It is not until seasons four and five, however, that the show begins to make a significant departure from its monster of the week conventions (though even when focusing on the merging central narrative, a weekly mystery is still typically built into the narrative). To develop this central narrative, the writers return to King’s larger body of work through its focus on a multiverse and the even more specific idea of thinnies. Thinnies are spaces where the separation between worlds is weak, allowing passage between the worlds. Like Gerald’s Game, but in a much more robust fashion, the networking of King’s own texts illustrates the infectious nature of the process of adaptation where King’s work is concerned. We have been using the term multiverse: the name fans have given to the connections between King’s various short stories, novels, and fantastical worlds. Often these connections manifest in surprising ways, but with enough consistency that various worlds have been named, such as All-World, Keystone Earth, Prime Earth. Towards the end of the first book of the Dark Tower series, Gunslinger (1982), as a boy is sacrificed in the name of the protagonist’s larger quest, he says, “Go then, there are other worlds than these” (King 222). This establishes the premise of King’s work: there are many worlds, realities, and/or timelines that King’s characters must pass through to achieve their goals. And while this is not present directly in The Colorado Kid, wider readers of King’s work would certainly make the (internally) logical leap that such passage between worlds explains the mystery of the

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Colorado Kid. Whereas the novel never confirms this possibility, Haven’s narrative arc depends upon it. The infection in Haven manifests formally through editing, cinematography, sound design, and mise-en-scène. The multiverse, or a thinny, must take audiovisual form through adaptation, and this presents a potential point for mutation. For example, the end of season four wrestles with conflation of FBI agent Parker and another version of herself named Mara, who is trying to assert control over Parker. This struggle, which leads into season five, is framed as a battle of the wills, whereby Parker must resist Mara’s influence, the suggestion being that if she succumbs Parker will die, consumed by Mara’s burgeoning consciousness. This plot line is developed through the show’s editing and mise-en-scène, in a process that transposes a few elements of King’s larger oeuvre not present in The Colorado Kid. An example of the audiovisual nature of the multiverse occurs halfway through episode 13 of season 4 (“The Lighthouse”), as the villain of the season, William, urges Parker to use her (until that point) unknown supernatural abilities. After banishing a couple of otherworldly henchmen, he says, “Just like Mara would have done. You can feel her, can’t you? You can feel us.” With those words, a bright flash of light—very kitsch—hides a cut to another time/space. Perhaps the most compelling element of this invocation of King’s multiverse is that the transition is mostly communicated through costuming and performance. William and Parker/Mara reappear dressed vaguely as pirates, in the setting of some unrecognizable woods. Actress Emily Rose takes on the somewhat sinister affect of Mara, signaling the transition to a new character. The show never divulges the whereabouts of this when/where, nor are the cryptic contents of this sequence ever revealed by the time the television show wraps, but the editing and mise-en-scène clearly tell us that “there are other worlds than these.” These sequences are a prelude for the introduction of thinnies in season five, which are a longstanding facet of King’s work. The protagonist of the Dark Tower series, Roland, is constantly moving between worlds. They are the premise of the collaborations between King and horror writer Peter Straub in Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001). He has returned to them as recently as 2022 as the premise of Fairy Tale. Unlike the more cinematic illustration of the multiverse noted earlier, Haven presents the thinnies as a light shimmer, which rejects Mara with a shock when she tries to touch or pass through one (the viewer learns that they have been locked). In episode 2 of season 5, however, Mara is able to tear open a thinny using the trouble (supernatural power) of another character, and the viewer can see into another world in this visual manifestation, confirming that the thinnies

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are, like the longstanding figure in King’s other novels, passages to another world. Any reader of King would be ready for their introduction in Haven and with this final season the show seems to give at last its most concrete, if indirect, answer to the mystery of The Colorado Kid: one could get from Colorado to Maine in five hours by way of a thinny. As we have argued previously, Haven shows little interest in narrative fidelity. And while Haven begins with a general extrapolation of the smalltown newspaper in a coastal village in Maine encountering an unsolvable mystery, it mutates well beyond this initial narrative with exposure to other concepts from King’s work. Previously, we asked the question: what is particular to King’s work that seems to generate a desire to makes connections across his work in adaptation? We suggest, in other words, that our viral metaphor is more appropriate to adaptations of King’s work, rather than adaptation more generally, particularly where questions of fidelity are introduced. In 2005, he responded to a review of The Colorado Kid on his own blog: “The review of The Colorado Kid in TODAY’S ISSUE OF USA TODAY mentions that there was no Starbucks in Denver in 1980. Don’t assume that’s a mistake on my part. The constant readers of the Dark Tower series may realize that that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue” ( “Continuity Clarification”). Though The Colorado Kid is written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842–43), focusing on the careful deduction of a crime, King’s approach is more ambitious. Unlike Poe, King asks his readers to create their own answer to the mystery. And while we have argued his oeuvre provides the viral context for the adaptation, the paratextual materials of his own blog are an infectious sniffle.

Genre: From Horror to Stephen King King’s work in the horror genre is also significant in creating a context for infection, in that a consistent and specific hybridity in genre across his work, particularly those adapted for film and television, serves to increase the “viral load.” In other words, the generic connections create a further invitation for infection. This begins with King’s own commitment to genre, but it is extended by the life of his own adaptations, which mutate from the Gothic, in King’s own words, towards an ecosystem more specific to his own work. The television show Castle Rock (2018–19) is a case study in the becoming-King of genre, or the becoming-genre of King, as it provides a representative example finally untethered from the author himself.

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Like conversations about f idelity and medium specif icity, there are often implicit value judgments in considering popular genres, particularly horror. Tracing horror back to Gothic novels illuminates how the genre has always been “tainted” (or infected) by the popular. As King himself writes in Danse Macabre, Gothic novels—here he is discussing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, and Dracula—“live a kind of half-life outside the bright circle of English literature’s acknowledged ‘classics,’ and perhaps with good reason […] In the most unkind of critical lights, all three can be seen as no more than popular novels of their day” (50). King’s own popularity has arguably impacted the reception of his adaptations in critical scholarship, as Tony Magistrale suggests that “perhaps King’s extraordinary popular reputation has spilled over to defray efforts to treat these films as serious works of art” (5). Simon Brown extends this point to consider how “King’s popularity and his connection to horror mark him as being part of the ‘cotton candy of entertainment’” (5). The categorization of horror, and King’s work as part of the genre, as popular has historically led to its marginalization in critical conversation, but it also created a cinematic space uniquely identified with King. Lorna Jowett and Stacy Abbott note that “genre itself is a process of adaptation,” and it is important to situate King in terms of genre to see how adaptations of his work have taken on the viral quality we argue for in this chapter (57). In tracing the development of King as a “brand,” Brown points to how Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie, released in 1976, “drew attention to King as a writer and launched his rise to literary best-seller status” as well as “tied King to the mainstream through its production history as an incarnation of the cinematic horror genre packaged for a mass-market audience” (49). While Carrie was significant to the King “brand,” the film’s success, and impact on King’s success as a writer, did not translate into a series of similar horror films to match the genre’s trajectory on in the late 1970s and 1980s. The next two big screen adaptations of his work, The Shining in 1980 and Cujo in 1983, were positioned through marketing and reviews as “psychological” rather than slasher horror, and neither film traded heavily on King’s reputation as a horror writer (Brown 61). Following Cujo, the next crop of film adaptations in 1984–86 “established Stephen King as a form of specifically cinematic horror branding, alluding only to other film adaptations rather than to the books or indeed to TV’s Salem’s Lot” (Brown 65). The evolution of these adaptations of King’s written horror works are not only part of a larger generic landscape in film and television, but also illustrate the viral spread in adaptation not as a linear move from book to film (or television) but between films and as part of larger trends in the horror genre.

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Significantly, there is a shift from horror toward science fiction in the resurgence of King adaptations in the 2000s, beginning with Under the Dome in 2014. Brown argues that the show “allowed the focus on place and people—an essential part of King’s literary brand—to take center stage …[adapting] the spirit, rather than the letter, of King” (185). While there are still horror adaptations (the 2013 remake of Carrie, as a notable example) emerging, the “brand” of King is no longer singularly associated with horror as “the contemporary cycle of adaptations is both shedding genre connections and delving in to the back catalogue,” which Brown argues is representative of the strongest connection between these works: a “connection with the mainstream” that “appears to be unshakeable” (192). Likewise, Haven is not really a conventional horror series, and, if anything, is more melodrama with potential love triangles driving the dramatic tension of the series. Nonetheless, Brown’s point that “place and people” take center stage is clearly evident in the adaptation. The people, Dave and Vince, and their relationship to the reporter/investigator are the elements that make it through the adaptation most clearly. Further, Castle Rock is comprised only of place and people from King’s other works. In terms of Haven, the conversation about genre is influenced both by its connection to King’s work beyond The Colorado Kid (the introduction of thinnies, multiverses, and the “troubles”), but also the way the genre conventions of the show are specifically set by the medium of television. As Max Sexton argues, “Haven makes use of television’s illusion of simultaneity … to craft the impression of immediate, intimate and continuous contact with the reality of the everyday while issuing an invitation into a magical world that transcends the real: the invitation is a call to make ‘direct’ contact with the power of the supernatural” (256). More specifically, the episodic structure of the show, particularly in its early “trouble of the week” seasons, sets up a play between the everyday world, with humorous small-town interactions, and the supernatural manifestations of the often terrifying and deadly troubles. Sexton further notes that the way that Haven develops the mythical universe of the Void “cannot be identified in the same way with a single author” as more straightforward (or faithful) adaptations of King’s work (254). While Sexton connects these aspects to influences like Michael Moorcock or H. P. Lovecraft, we would further argue that this is also indicative of the way that King’s work goes viral. The specific choice to include thinnies, as one example, is a direct connection not to The Colorado Kid but to other works by King and the larger multiverse of The Dark Tower and, significantly, the popular horror genre that King and the adaptations of his work work within.

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Between the Gothic and other popular genres, adaptation to serialized television, and finally through the manifestation of a more King-specific psychological horror focused on character and setting, the viral load increases, which makes mutability increasingly likely in a turn not towards the classically Gothic, but a re-turn towards the work of King himself. In Stephen King and American Politics, Michael Blouin addresses the release and recapture of identity in Rose Madder (1995) and the role self-fashioning plays in neoliberal economies. In particular for our study here, he notes that “popular culture responds with a number of prominent tropes to convey the idea of radical release ‘at odds with’ unprecedented methods of recapture, including computer viruses and the spread of AIDS through perceived sexual promiscuity” (124). This logic is aligned with Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of the unchecked whirl of capitalism, but the viral logic being associated with a dual process of release and recapture is particularly instructive for Castle Rock, as it entails the release of elements from King’s novels and their eventual recapture into new configuration of a serialized television show. Blouin points out that King fictionalizes the very process at work in the actual rapid—or unchecked whirl of—consumption and production at work within the contemporary media market with adaptations of his work. Castle Rock becomes the ultimate manifestation of this viral logic as a petri dish of King’s generic approach and literal characters and settings from his other novels.

Autophagy: Death of the Author Redux The Hulu television series Castle Rock begins with Alan Pangborn, a recurring character in King’s writing, including The Dark Half (1989), “The Sun Dog” (1990), and Needful Things (1991), searching for a missing boy in the frozen woods of the recurring setting of Castle Rock, Maine. Already, place and people take center stage governed by a referentiality that spans King’s corpus. But the proliferation of King’s work extends, following closely on the heels of Haven, to the incorporation of the multiverse via thinnies, here communicated on a more sophisticated audiovisual register. Pangborn stops on the edge of a frozen lake, to take a break from his search. He hears an eerie sound, echoing across the lake—eerie in the sense of Mark Fisher’s eerie cry, which intimates “some kind of intent at work,” prompting Pangborn to peer across the lake (62). Following Pangborn’s startlement, the next six shots follow: a close-up of the startled Pangborn; a static shot of the empty lake, birds flying away; a medium shot of Pangborn surveying the lake, heading turning left to right; another empty shot of the lake; a close-up of Pangborn

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searching with his eyes; a reframed angle, on the 180-degree line as Pangborn’s eyes widen in another close-up; a final shot of the lake, this time with a boy standing in the middle of it. How can a boy appear suddenly in the middle of a frozen lake, as a man watches? The episode repeatedly returns to the originary moment, offering a few more details—one shows Pangborn holding the boy’s hands, saying, “No frostbite. You’ve been inside somewhere?” This, and other details throughout the first season, confirm that this moment was indeed the work of a thinny, the meeting place between two worlds heralded by that eerie cry. We conclude our discussion of viral adaptations with Castle Rock, not to provide another example of the embellishment of King’s ideas via adaptation, but because King never wrote Castle Rock. Castle Rock provides the natural conclusion of viral adaptation, if the virus continues to introduce mutations beyond the scope of its source/hose material: the point at which adaptation, in a form of autophagy, does away with the author itself. This process stems from genre and adaptation, the specific type of literary and cinematic virality we have discussed here, rather than something like fan fiction. It seeks not to rewrite King’s stories, to put characters into new romantic configurations, but to gather the components and transfer them to a new host in a form of zoonosis, or to kill off the original elements and reanimate the corpse like one of King’s own undead. The conditions for Castle Rock were made possible by the previously discussed viral load that started with the generic backdrop of King’s stories, but they became more virulent through the development of a King-specific genre as Brown argues in Screening Stephen King. It allowed showrunners Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason to create a generic TV show that was not just horror, nor even the psychological-horror closer to King’s work, but a generic King TV show that recycles characters, settings, tropes, and other ideas from King’s oeuvre. To be clear, this is not a critique of Castle Rock, but an exploration of the necessary conditions for the emergence of such a unique take on adaptation. For the study of adaptation, this approach entails a broader recognition of the network of texts that the translation from text to screen takes place in—from multiple published texts and the proliferation of readings in forums and other forms of social media. For the study of King, it acknowledges the infectious enthusiasm of the author for his own auto-metatextual exploration.

Conclusion We began with the examples of Robert Chambers and H. P. Lovecraft, whose works have generated sustained interest leading to multiple collections of

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stories set in the universes of the original writers. While there is a viral logic at play here, neither of these authors have reached the same degree of infectiousness as King. In the beginning of this essay, we posited some hypotheses regarding the popularity of King, but ultimately King’s work exists in a context in which adaptation itself, introducing the possibility of contamination, has become far more widespread. It is true that King has written a great deal of content, but he also wrote during a time when network television matured and continued into the proliferation of streaming media. Producers have turned back to the popularity of Chambers and Lovecraft to adapt their work, as noted earlier, but this was always an archaeological project, whereas for producers King has always had something recent, and popular, to adapt. He even seems particularly amenable to it, providing the invitation of The Colorado Kid and sanctioning Castle Rock as executive producer. Each adaptation provides another chance for mutability whereby the generic becomes both more specific, but also takes agency from the original author, leading to a point in which the host has been forever altered by the course of the virus, even if still recognizable in traces inscribed in each text.

Works Cited Bierce, Ambrose. Can Such Things Be? Boni and Liveright, 1918. Blouin, Michael. Stephen King and American Politics. U of Wales P, 2021. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Johns Hopkins UP, 1957. Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. U of Texas P, 2018. Chambers, Robert. The King in Yellow. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/8492/pg8492-images.html. Haven. Created by Jim Dunn and Sam Ernst. Performances by Emily Rose and Lucas Bryant. Entertainment One, 2010–15. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: Third Edition, edited by William E. Cain et al., W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, pp. 885–91. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge UP, 2009. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016. Gerald’s Game. Directed by Mike Flanagan. Performances by Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. Netflix, 2017. Jenkins, Henry, et al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York UP, 2013

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Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels

Jowett, Lorna and Stacey Abbott. TV Horror: investigating the dark side of the small screen. I. B. Taurus, 2013. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Pocket Books, 2011. King, Stephen. “Continuity Clarification from Stephen.” Stephen King, https:// stephenking.com/news/continuity-clarification-from-stephen-64.html. King, Stephen. The Colorado Kid. Hard Case Crime, 2005. King, Stephen. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. Scribner, 2016. Magistrale, Tony. The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to The Mist. Palgrave McMillan, 2012. Sexton, Max. “Navigating Uncertainty: Trouble in Haven.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 10, no. 2, 2017, pp. 251–65, https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2017.16. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 1–52.

About the Authors Chelsea Wessels is an Associate Professor in the Literature and Language Department and Co-Director of the Film and Media Studies minor at East Tennessee State University. Her research interests include local cinema history and archives, global film genres, media pedagogy, and feminist film. Matthew Holtmeier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Language and Co-Director of the Film and Media Studies minor at East Tennessee State University. He is author of Contemporary Political Cinema (2019), and his research interests include political cinemas, environmental media, and film-philosophy.

IV New Critical Interventions

10. “Is Zelda dead yet?”: Disability, Mortality, and Narratives of Appropriation in Pet Sematary Melissa Raines

Abstract: In Pet Sematary, a young Rachel watches her ten-year-old sister Zelda die from spinal meningitis. For Rachel, Zelda’s illness turns her into a hateful thing, othered by her family’s perception of the effects of the disease. In these unsettling descriptions of Zelda, King shows the dangers of conflating monstrosity with disability. Rachel’s response to her dying sister’s body blocks her ability to empathize. The crucial danger, though, is the proliferation of blocked empathy in social reality. Zelda’s death story forces King’s characters—and arguably his readers—into a very personal encounter with impairment and mortality that rejects narrative attempts at repression, while also engaging with the complicated relationship between disability, pain, and death within disability studies. Keywords: disability studies, pain, death, abject, adaptation

In the midst of a novel riddled with death, the elderly Jud Crandall provides the reader of Pet Sematary with a kind of solace. As he tells his friend and neighbor, Dr. Louis Creed, death “is where the pain stops and the good memories begin” (181). Shortly thereafter, Jud and his wife Norma present the doomed Creed family with a relatively idealized version of what he described. After suffering from the debilitating pain of arthritis, Norma dies of “a brain embolism, sudden, and probably painless”; one of Louis’s medical colleagues actually responds to the news by saying “he wouldn’t mind going out in just that way” (215). Jud grieves deeply but he is not broken by Norma’s passing, for she has lived a long life and now she is free of pain and at peace. But if Jud and Norma’s respective experiences as mourner and mourned present readers with a death story that is bearable, death in Pet Sematary

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usually positions the living and the dead very differently. The fate of twoyear-old Gage Creed provides the central disturbing example of a way in which Jud’s aphorism fails miserably, but it is not the only one. As a child, Louis’s wife Rachel watched her ten-year old sister Zelda die from spinal meningitis. Zelda’s name is whispered throughout the first half of the text, but Rachel does not divulge the traumatic details of Zelda’s final days until the book’s midway point. For Rachel, Zelda’s illness turns her into a “foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom,” othered by her family’s perception of the effect of the disease on her mind and body (226, author’s emphasis). Rachel fixates on her sister’s physical transformations and perceived malice, calling her a “monster” (224). Guilt and grief are then carried into adulthood, resulting in Rachel’s intense fear of both the subject of death and a nightmare version of Zelda, who seeks out vengeance. In these unsettling descriptions, Zelda becomes an example of what Alan Gregory describes as the “Gothic’s uncomfortable conflation of disability with monstrosity” (92). Ria Cheyne explains the damage that comes from aligning disability with evil, arguing that by doing so, many Gothic and horror texts could be seen as “perpetuating an ongoing cycle of prejudice and discrimination” (33).1 This is played out to an extent within the narrative of Pet Sematary as Rachel’s response to her dying sister suggests, to adapt David Punter’s statement, that her own “empathies are blocked by (Zelda’s) deformed body” (45). However, the crucial danger is the proliferation of blocked empathy in social reality, as there exists a disturbing “continuum between limiting literary depictions and dehumanizing social attitudes toward disabled people” (Mitchell and Snyder 18). This chapter will examine representations of disability in this one of King’s earliest novels as well as its film adaptations. In light of Petra Kuppers’s assertion of “the value of nonrealist embodiment” (83), Pet Sematary becomes a case study of the extent to which the frequently “toxic, limiting, and corrosive” images of disability in Gothic and horror in particular can, as Sara Wasson posits, “effectively indict suffering ensuing from social and environmental maladaptation” (70). Many characters in Pet Sematary attempt to turn Zelda into a kind of “metaphorical shorthand for narratives that ultimately support a nondisabled imaginary” (Wasson 71). However, Zelda’s death story forces the characters—and arguably the readers—into a very personal encounter with impairment and mortality that rejects narrative attempts at repression, 1 While there are distinctions between Gothic and horror, in this chapter I will consider Pet Sematary and its adaptations as examples of both genres, building on critical work that examines similarities in representations of disability within Gothic and horror literature and films.

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while also engaging with the complicated relationship between disability, pain, and death within disability studies.

Pain and Perspective Zelda dies twenty years before the commencement of the novel, and thus she is not a central character in the primary storyline. However, she is literally central to the novel because of the timing of Rachel’s compulsion to share the memory of her: the eleven pages over which Rachel relates the story of Zelda’s death to Louis take readers over the midway point of the narrative. In their seminal work on disability representation in literature, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder discuss the ways in which disability becomes a narrative prosthesis, “a crutch about which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). Rachel’s telling of Zelda’s death story does disrupt, coming shortly after the relatively peaceful death of the elderly Norma, reminding both characters and readers that the unthinkable does happen, and foreshadowing the death of Louis and Rachel’s own child. Because Zelda’s severe impairment was the result of terminal illness, readers are left only with Rachel’s perspective, and thus Zelda’s “representational power” in particular is problematized by its unwilling appropriation by her sister. Rachel’s long silence is the result of both the trauma associated with Zelda’s death and her family’s unhealthy coping mechanisms. As Rachel explains: (S)he was in the back bedroom like a dirty secret, Louis, she was dying in there, my sister died in the back bedroom and that’s what she was, a dirty secret, she was always a dirty secret! (223)

Just as the frantic run-on sentences indicate the potency of a story that demands its belated telling, the repetition of “dirty secret” suggests that even at the age of eight, Rachel had an awareness that her family’s response to Zelda was inadequate and cruel. The Goldmans, the girls’ parents, seem to care for Zelda themselves, with Rachel playing a key part, and Rachel is alone with Zelda when she dies. Rachel notes that Zelda’s sick room is “cleaned and fumigated” and reduced to “a bare box” within a few hours of her death and that only two pictures of her remain—one in her father’s study, one in her mother’s purse (231). Perhaps most damning of all is Louis’s furious, unvoiced, and medically informed opinion that the Goldmans

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should have had a nurse to care for Zelda. The implication is that in not doing so, Zelda and Rachel’s parents were abusive to both of their daughters, perhaps hastening Zelda’s death and intensifying her suffering, and certainly exposing Rachel to scenes that caused irreparable psychological damage. Rachel’s attempted repression is far from successful; when she does find the strength to tell Zelda’s story, her memories are vivid: We watched her degenerate day by day and there was nothing anyone could do. […] Her body seemed to shrivel … pull in on itself … her shoulders hunched up and her face pulled down until it was like a mask. Her hands were like birds’ feet. (224)

Zelda’s disease seems to propel her once healthy ten-year-old body into premature age through the shriveling and the hunching of her shoulders. The likening of her hands to birds’ feet—an image similar to that used to describe the arthritic hands of Norma Crandall (16)—is evocative of the dehumanizing nature of her family’s changing perception of her, but the inversion of her hands as like feet also suggests what Rachel tells readers more explicitly soon after: Zelda is incapable of caring for herself. Her family must feed and change her. However, the mask is perhaps the most telling simile of all. John Sears notes that “Pet Sematary’s scrutiny of death is closely connected to its scrutiny of how people interact facially” (201). Zelda’s mask could be seen as a barrier between her family and her suffering self—the barrier of imminent as opposed to eventual death. It also signals what Rachel discerns as a change in Zelda’s identity: “She was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster” (224–25, author’s emphasis). The shift from comparison to perceived actuality is significant here, as Rachel begins to, as Sears expresses it, “‘read’ her sister Zelda’s face as a register of malicious deceit” (201). She accuses Zelda of various spiteful acts, such as claiming that Zelda would refuse the bedpan only to then wet the bed. Rachel calls Zelda “demanding” and “hateful,” going on to say that Zelda would claim each incident was “an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it” (225, author’s emphasis). Rachel’s reading of her dying sister is questionable on many counts, including in her tendency to demonize Zelda’s actions and appearance and to see them largely in terms of their impact on Rachel herself. This outlook would seem to align the novel with the most damaging of Gothic and horror narratives—what Ruth Bienstock Anolik describes as “the monster-creating conservative and even repressive Gothic” (10). Of course, Rachel was a child when this happened, as was Zelda. The perhaps understandably reductive

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lens of Rachel’s childhood memory forces King’s reader to consider perspective in a way that they may not if Zelda’s death story had been narrated from a more detached point-of-view. Whatever readers feel for Rachel, I would argue that her version of Zelda’s death story also compels readers to think of what it must have been like for Zelda herself within the fictional reality of the novel. Rachel tells readers that Zelda was “in constant pain” in spite of the drugs she was given, going on to say that eventually, “the drugs stopped working” (224), and Zelda “would scream” (226). In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry claims that “(p)hysical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion […] to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). Thus Rachel describes Zelda’s “twisting and knotting” back “with the horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power” (226), but Zelda’s words are lost in screams, a detail that speaks to the extent of her suffering. While Rachel’s vivid descriptions of Zelda might be seen as an attempt at “objectification of the spectacle” of her sister’s dying body that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson sees as central to many “literary narratives of disability” (12), I would suggest that the audience’s questioning of Rachel’s words and concern over Zelda’s wordlessness complicates the experience of Zelda’s death story. King’s readers are placed in the uncomfortable nexus of sympathy for both the dying child and the child watching her die, for if Rachel’s terror is palpable, so too is Zelda’s agony. Louis attempts to assuage Rachel’s guilt by drawing again on his medical experience, asserting that Rachel’s perceptions of her sister were likely true—that the image of “the saint-like, long-suffering patient is a big romantic fiction” (225). To an extent, Louis’s statement aligns with critical views that the Gothic tendency to equate disability and victimhood is just as prejudicial as its connection between disability and deviance (Cheyne 27–28, Longmore 134–35, Mitchell and Snyder 17). But Louis’s engagement with medical realism also raises the issue of the history of palliative care, an area that was undergoing extensive research in the UK and the US over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. Cicely Saunders, the key driver in the shift in mid-century social perceptions regarding the care for dying patients, explains how the conceptualization of total pain, which “include(d) not only physical symptoms but also mental distress and social or spiritual problems”; the recognition of deficiencies in both home and institutional care; and the increased availability of effective analgesics all helped to facilitate this shift (430). However, the impact was not felt in the United States until the late 1960s—after Zelda’s death in 1963 (Saunders 430). Interestingly, even with these advances, recent clinical research into the actual experience of

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families with terminally ill children suggests that communication remains a problem. John Rolland notes that honest exchanges are often prevented due to the parental compulsion to protect and reassure, and that “this pattern can easily continue into the terminal phase, when the child desperately needs to talk about his fears with his family” (189). Rachel says that “everyone knew (Zelda) wasn’t going to live”, but was this communicated to Zelda (224)? It seems unlikely that there were open exchanges when one considers that the language of Rachel’s retelling consistently separates Zelda from her family: think of “we wished for her to die” (224, author’s emphasis) and “none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother,” all building to the aforementioned description of Zelda as a “thing” (226, author’s emphasis). With all of this in mind and reflecting on Rachel’s claims of her sister’s vindictiveness, one could argue that Zelda’s potential vindictiveness would be understandable, that her acts of anger humanize her, and that they provide her with a level of agency—however small—that she otherwise lacks. In her examination of Stephen King’s 2008 novel Duma Key, Ria Cheyne argues that by positioning the disabled protagonist in relation to “a series of highly conventional disability narratives, flipping between them in a veritable kaleidoscope of reductive images,” King is able to “undermine them” (37). As she goes on to explain, “The very invocation of these reductive images of disability […] highlight(s) their inability to encompass the complexities of disabled lives” (37). The fact that over the course of a few pages Zelda is aligned with two of those narratives— “a pitiful cripple” and “a rage-driven monster”—has a similar effect (37). Zelda’s death story is also a story about the reality of pain, “perhaps the most subjective of phenomena” (Siebers 60). Zelda’s understandable response to pain is central to her alienation from her family, but it is important to remember that pain and illness are still contested issues within disability studies. As James Berger argues, “Disability studies has not yet conceived a way of thinking the negative” (160). This attitude is linked directly to the prominence of the social model of disability. Wasson explains that (A) medicalized view of disability defines it in terms of somatic, cognitive, or emotional impairment of function, seeing the cause of disability in terms of an individual’s flawed body or mind […] The social model of disability, by contrast, understands disability as a function of a stigmatizing society. (70)

The distinction between impairment (for Zelda, the severe pain and compromised mobility caused by her disease) and the disabling aspects

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of her environment (her family’s negative response to her, her isolation, and insufficient palliative care) are important because they make explicit the role of society in disabling those with impairments. As social model proponents might say, Zelda’s impairments are the result of spinal meningitis, but she is disabled by her family, social institutions, and the society that shapes them both. In recent decades, the fact “that disability rights activists wrested exclusive control of the understanding of disability away from medicine and toward a broader social conceptualization” has been crucial to furthering the rights of disabled people (Berger 160). Medicalization of disability narratives is problematic because it makes political mobilization more difficult, but also because, as Wasson points out, “(d)isability and illness are not the same thing, and neither inevitably involves suffering” (78). However, Couser reminds us that “impairment may cause chronic pain, progressive degeneration, and early death” (“Illness” 107, emphasis mine), and it does cause all three for Zelda and for many disabled people in reality. Susan Wendell notes that for all of the political benefits of the social model, it “can reduce attention to those disabled people whose bodies are highly medicalized because of their suffering, their deteriorating health, or the threat of death” (18), a concern that has been voiced by a growing number of disability theorists.2 In the context of Pet Sematary, this is why Zelda’s final days and death can be seen as such contentious issues: they force consideration of what Wendell terms the “unhealthy disabled” while also presenting a deeply troubling death story—not one that involves death and the impairments that often precede it at a seemingly acceptable point much later in life, as with Norma Crandall, but one in which disease disrupts the narrative of childhood as irrevocably as the speeding Orinco truck does for Gage Creed (18). Zelda’s deterioration and Rachel’s responses make for difficult reading, but Leslie Fielder would argue that this is part of the necessary experience of disability narratives. He explains how literature “provide(s) us with a way of acting out vicariously, and thus harmlessly, attitudes that our avowed principles […] tell us are sociologically harmful” (59). Fielder goes on to say that it should not “persuade us of the innocence of such impulses” but that it should reveal “disquieting truths about our response to traditionally stigmatized segments of the population” (60). The reader’s encounter with the complexities of Zelda’s death story from Rachel’s perspective not only provides a space in which “readers can project, imagine or otherwise sympathize with, fictional pain” (Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic 17), but it could 2

See Crow (2013), Shakespeare (2006), and Siebers (2008).

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also force acknowledgement of “disquieting truths” that might inspire a reconfiguration of reader responses to disability. Indeed, Wasson argues that the genre-specific “preoccupation with distress can itself be a useful counter to forms of positivity that can lead to excluding some people’s experience of disability and chronic illness” (74). In a sense then, Rachel’s reductive narrative about her sister, with its “visceral appeal to affect and sensation” (Kuppers 83) so characteristic of the Gothic and horror genres, could allow for the increased understanding of what Tobin Siebers describes as “the ‘blunt, crude realities’ of the disabled body” (qtd. in Berger 161).

Abjection Rachel’s appropriation does not stop with Zelda’s death: in fact, she begins to shape the story of Zelda’s afterlife before her death story is complete: I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live … I started to imagine she wanted to kill me […]. I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don’t really think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body in some way … turned me out of it like a fairy story … I think she would have done that. (227 author’s emphasis)

Rachel’s compulsion to reassert herself as an often italicized “I” throughout this passage is indicative of what the experience of caring for her sister has done to her own sense of self. In “A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited,” Julia Kristeva posits that “the disabled person has inevitably an absolute companion, a permanent body-double: the pain of mortality” (225).3 By watching her sister die and struggle with the impairments of her final days, Rachel also begins to become conscious of the “pain of mortality”—for herself as well as Zelda. Given their closeness in age, there is almost a sense that they are each other’s “body-double” until Zelda becomes ill and their lives drastically diverge. The fact that the novel provides no explanation for why Zelda has spinal meningitis and Rachel does not is a manifestation of the seeming randomness of impairment and death themselves in their alternating preference for youth or age, illness or accident, brutal swiftness 3 Melinda Hall has also analyzed disability representation in King adaptations in relation to Kristeva, but she does not consider Pet Sematary.

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or slow degeneration, one sister or the other. In disability studies terms, I would argue that Rachel has begun to recognize herself as a “Temporarily Abled Body, a complication of the binary of abled and disabled that suggests that the abled body might, at any random moment, become disabled” (Anolik 4–5)—indeed, Couser points out that “barring sudden or accidental death, most people will eventually become disabled to a significant degree” (“Disability” 602). While pain and early death are not part of all disabled experience and should not be seen as such, the (temporarily) abled person’s association of disability with old age and the eventuality of death is another reason why ten-year-old Zelda’s death story is seen as so disruptive. Yet Kristeva views this burgeoning awareness of near-inevitable disability for many as a potentially transformative moment—an encounter that could be viewed as a concrete version of Fielder’s discussion of literary encounters with disability. After describing the complexities of the initial response, in which “the disabled person opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled” and “inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death” (“Liberty” 252, author’s emphasis), Kristeva contends that by recognizing these anxieties and vulnerabilities as something already within them, the (temporarily) abled person can begin “to construct a common life project” with the disabled person based in “attention, patience, and solidarity” (266). But as we have seen, Rachel cannot make this transformation—even in retrospect. To further complicate her response to her sister, because Rachel strains her back trying to lift Zelda in her final moments, her initial thought on waking in the middle of the night after Zelda’s death with severe back pain is that Zelda has taken her body. The family doctor assures her that this is not the case and scolds her for what he calls her “childish play for attention” (232). But Rachel’s childishly rational and simultaneously subtly perceptive shift from “she could be me” to “she is me” almost certainly assures, if Zelda’s death on its own did not, that she will experience her own disability: a severe anxiety surrounding death. It also assures that in a novel so focused on the desire to bring loved ones back, Zelda the unloved one will be brought back as well. Josh Dohmen has identified compelling links between Kristeva’s work on disability and one of her most famous studies, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. He states, “It is surprising that Kristeva does not use the terms abject or abjection in […] her articles on disability because her language in these resonates with Powers of Horror” (770–71, author’s emphasis). Dohmen pays particular attention to the unease surrounding boundaries in these two strands of Kristeva’s work, especially the boundary between life and death (771). Kristeva describes the abject as “a reality that, if I acknowledge

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it, annihilates me” (Powers 2). Xavier Aldana Reyes explains Kristeva’s conception that “the process of abjection is an implicit assertion of the self and its boundaries” (“Abjection” 394). Rachel will spend the rest of her life attempting to reassert the boundary breached by the death of her sister, “to permanently thrust (Zelda) aside in order to live,” in Kristeva’s terms—significantly, these are terms in which Kristeva refers to a corpse (qtd. in Aldana Reyes, “Abjection” 394). If Rachel were to do otherwise, she would have to accept the inevitability of her own annihilation, and thus she forges her monstrous version of Zelda in order to bury her true fear. For Rachel the most distressing aspect of the ghost of Zelda is that she “wouldn’t be stuck in bed” (King 228–29), and so Zelda becomes an impossibility, at least in a world without cursed burial grounds: the corpse of a person who appears severely impaired but is supernaturally mobile. That final detail bypasses the reality of Zelda’s pain in its attempt to turn her into something that Rachel can attempt to outgrow in phases, from an invasive fairy-tale force, to a monster that leaps from the closet, to a phobic reaction to death. What readers can infer from this is that the answer to the question that will haunt Rachel’s sleepless nights into adulthood—“Is Zelda dead yet?” (226)—would be terrifying to Rachel regardless of whether it were yes or no. Rachel’s appropriation of her sister’s death story as her own trauma is problematic but also somewhat understandable, precipitated by the parental abuse portioned out to both sisters. While the story becomes Rachel’s in its telling, what her fixation on her dying sister’s perceived monstrosity makes patently clear is that the source of evil within the text is not Zelda; indeed, I would argue, in conversation with Cheyne’s analysis of Duma Key, that Pet Sematary “explicitly rejects the collapsing together of disability and evil conventional in the horror tradition” (39). King’s exploration of Rachel’s experience with Zelda helps to elucidate the complex psychology of familial responses to terminal illness and severe impairment. Even more importantly, by telling Zelda’s story through the voice of a woman who was damaged by it as a child, he forces a comparison between Rachel’s traumainduced bogeyman and Zelda as she lived and died. But Rachel’s focus on Zelda’s appearance introduces additional complexities when adapted into a visual medium.

Zelda in Adaptation The 1989 film Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is a largely faithful adaptation, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Stephen King himself wrote

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the script. However, there are important departures in the representation of Zelda, the most obvious being the fact that she is played by Andrew Hubastek, a young man. Lambert explained the casting decision based on her feeling that the young girls who were auditioning were neither thin nor frightening enough to manage the part, whereas Hubastek, with the help of extensive prosthetic makeup, threw himself into the role. An immediate impact is a Zelda who, even when lying in bed, dwarfs her younger sister, making her seem physically menacing in spite of her immobility. However, the slightly blurred images of the f irst Zelda sequence are obviously positioned as Rachel’s memories, raising the question of whether the audience is seeing Zelda as she was—or Rachel’s fearful reconstruction of her. In either case, it is telling that the face of Zelda in this memory cannot be “read,” in Sears’s terms, “as a register of malicious deceit” (201). The shots of Zelda’s face only show her eating, coughing, or choking; her expression in each is one of pain or fear, while the child Rachel cannot hide her disgust. The severity of the image of the 1989 Zelda is juxtaposed not only with the intensity of her suffering, but also with a softening of her perceived feelings towards Rachel. The descriptions of Zelda acting out within the novel, as well as Rachel’s claim that Zelda hated her, are not included. Instead, the only use of the word “hate” comes through Rachel’s lines just as Zelda is dying: “They’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true.” If a “horror audience ideally identifies with the protagonists and is horrified by what those characters find horrifying,” then the age and size disparities between the actors could be said to intensify the potential identification with Rachel, even before the consideration of Zelda’s unsettling appearance (Hall). However, Zelda’s appearance is ultimately at odds with the agonized facial expressions of a character who does nothing to harm her younger sister—a character too absorbed in her own pain to register anything else. The omission of Zelda’s spiteful behavior in this adaptation suggests, as is discernible throughout Rachel’s retelling in the novel, that one of the strongest feelings that remains for Rachel is guilt. Interestingly, Zelda is never seen interacting with anyone but Rachel in the film, making the parents conspicuous in their absence. Once again, audiences are reminded that there are two victims here. The demonization of Zelda does emerge later in the film, but these images are grounded in Rachel’s internal reconceptualization of her sister after her death. In Zelda’s next scene, the soft focus through which spectators initially viewed her is replaced with something jarringly different: chaotic, sinister music and a low, snakelike camera movement skimming backwards down a hall that is scattered with family photos in obvious disarray. When the adult Rachel, who spectators later learn is dreaming, finally enters the

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room that was Zelda’s, she sees Zelda lying on her bed. The effective jump scare provided by Zelda’s forceful jolt into a sitting position has deeper implications. Zelda tells her sister, “I’m coming for you, Rachel, and this time, I’ll get you” with openly malicious, even sadistic, intention. Not only does this version of Zelda confirm Rachel’s childhood suspicions of jealousy and hatred, but she also confirms the other childish fear that “(Zelda’s) ghost wouldn’t be stuck in bed.” This Zelda seems capable of everything she promises. I noted the jump scare within the scene, and in arguing that it is possible to feel sympathy for Zelda in both novel and adaptation, I do not mean to ignore that the Zelda of Rachel’s nightmare—and indeed, that the earlier versions of Zelda within the film and the novel itself—might be a source of fear for readers and viewers as well. If one accepts Aldana Reyes’s definition of body horror as “fiction or cinema where corporeality constitutes the main site of fear, anxiety and sometimes even disgust for the characters and, by extension, the intended readers/viewers” through “the inscription of horror onto the human body” (“Abjection” 393), then even the suffering Zelda is an uncomfortable and intentional source of horror. Cheyne has noted that one of the most inimical aspects of disability representation in horror is “the resonance between the affects disability is used to generate in horror and the affects involved in interpersonal disability encounters” (32). However, like Aldana Reyes, I would argue that “the exploitative aspect of such texts (and films) should not preclude them from commenting successfully on the body, the self and society” (Body Gothic 9). As Cheyne explains, texts that feature disability and produce ‘negative’ feelings such as fear or discomfort, and even texts that use disability to produce feelings of fear and discomfort, might actually have positive effects in terms of shifting readers’ perceptions of disability through the creation of reflexive representations. (52)

As with the troubling aspects of Rachel’s narration within the novel, the wildly conflicting images of Zelda in the film produce “fear and discomfort,” but they simultaneously complicate Rachel’s, and the viewer’s, conception of Zelda as this nightmare version is so unlike Zelda in everything but her appearance. The inconsistency cannot be resolved. Rachel’s skewed perspective and appropriation of Zelda’s story are highlighted again in her continued attempt to avoid the fear at the root of her reactions, compelling reader or viewer to question what they see and reflect on their own

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potentially “disquieting truths,” in Fielder’s terms. This response is arguably roused less effectively in the 2019 adaptation. The original script for the more recent film did not include Zelda, but directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmeyer insisted on her inclusion, in spite of being “in awe of the actor from the first movie” (Stroeber), and committed themselves to producing something “that honor(ed) the book” but was also original (Evangelista). What emerges is an homage to the 1989 version of Zelda—from the blue nightgown to the distinctive appearance of her back—that also claims to be more invested in “the reality of the Zelda situation,” as Widmeyer puts it: for instance, Alyssa Brooke Levine, the actor cast, was in her early teens when she played the role (Breznican). Rachel stumbles across a photo of her sister before her illness while unpacking boxes in the Creed family’s ill-fated new home, early in the film. This image of a pretty girl is later brought in line, again in flashback, with the child Rachel’s entry into what is clearly a young girl’s room, an interesting contrast to the nearly bare room in the 1989 film. The camera pans over Zelda’s filthy blue nightgown and deformed back, and as she begins to turn her face slowly to the camera, we see the subtle detail of a pink bracelet on her wrist—as if the dying girl is clinging to some sense of her life as it was. The authenticity of a younger actress playing Zelda, and presumably the increased horror of the suffering of someone who still appears to be a child, are balanced by a hostile version of the character, at least as Rachel describes her: She hated me because my spine wasn’t twisted like hers. She promised me that one day, I’d end up just like her and never get out of bed again.

Rachel’s fears regarding her sister’s vindictiveness, omitted in the representations of Zelda when still alive in the 1989 film, are revived in this adaptation, but when compared to the parallel passage from the novel, the hedging language in the text (“I had started to think,” “I started to imagine,” “I think she would have” [227]) is noticeably absent from the voiceover. Here the angrier version of Zelda is presented as a certainty—an immovable fixture in Rachel’s mind. But if this Zelda is angrier, this Rachel is more culpable: rather than watching her sister choke and being unable to save her, Rachel’s fear of Zelda compels her to try sending Zelda’s food up in a dumbwaiter, although she was explicitly told not to. Zelda dies when she falls inside. Even the girls’ parents are thus exonerated, at least to an extent. The 2019 film expends significantly less effort blaming the Goldmans for leaving Rachel alone with Zelda.

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As mentioned previously, Sears has noted a connection between “Pet Sematary’s scrutiny of death” and “its scrutiny of how people interact facially” (201). This remains significant in relation to the 2019 film, but due to obfuscation. Dawn Keetley points out that it is often difficult to see the 2019 Zelda’s face; shots of her back take precedence, a choice that Keetley feels leaves Zelda “utterly dehumanized” (“Erasing Empathy”). Instead, there is an emphasis on the petrified face of Rachel in the flashbacks. Rachel’s terror eclipses all else, and so Rachel cannot mitigate the horror of Zelda’s situation in the retelling. Significantly, the ghost version of Zelda is also not distinctly different from Rachel’s memory of her sister, which furthers the problematic streamlining of Zelda as monstrous in the 2019 film. In Zelda’s final appearance, a hallucination brought on by the Mi’kmaq burial ground’s manipulation of Rachel’s fear, she crawls from the dumbwaiter towards Rachel: Rachel is in Zelda’s bed, wearing Zelda’s nightgown. While Rachel’s feet, hands, and back are twisted like her sister’s, her face is noticeably unaffected. Zelda limps towards the bed, whispering “Now you’ll never get out of bed again,” as Rachel cowers under the blankets. The monster-victim dynamic, established from the outset, is carried through to the end.

Conclusion: Appropriation and Afterlives Pet Sematary is ultimately a story about the stories human beings tell themselves to avoid the annihilating reality of death, as Kristeva might express it. Remember Jud’s aphorisms: “(Death) is where the pain stops and the good memories begin” (181), or the famous “sometimes death is better” (180). Even Louis’s claim “that death is, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world” (52) cannot be accepted as truth when his son is killed. These stories only function at a distance or at the most quotidian personal level: for instance, in the case of painless death coming in old age as it does for Norma Crandall, and even a death such as Norma’s is devastating for the self and loved ones in actuality. Zelda, Gage, and many other deaths within the novel present readers with almost unbearable death stories—those that cannot be made to fit into a proverbial narrative. After hearing Zelda’s death story, Louis demonstrates that he too is beginning to find his comforting adages much less so. One evening shortly before Gage’s death, he puts his son to bed and then notices that the closet door is ajar: (Louis’s) heart took a lurch in his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace. He opened the closet door, thinking (Zelda it’s Zelda

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in the closet her black tongue puffing out between her lips) he wasn’t sure what, but of course it was only Church, the cat. (250, author’s emphasis)

King makes frequent use of italicized, mid-sentence interruption throughout his works, but it is particularly fitting here. The disturbing memory of Zelda intrudes on Louis’s moment with Gage, and so Louis attempts to rework Zelda into a monster he can flinch at but ultimately dismiss; he appropriates Zelda’s death story as his wife did, perhaps unsurprising in a text wherein the central conceit (a cursed Native American burial ground) involves appropriation of Native American identity and lands (Corstorphine 82). After Gage’s death, Louis takes his appropriation further. Rachel tells Louis that she remembers little of Zelda before her illness, except Zelda’s love of The Wizard of Oz, or more specifically, of a particular picture of Oz the Great and Terrible. As Rachel says, “Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and Tewwible because she couldn’t make that sound” (King 228). Zelda’s childish mispronunciation becomes Louis’s characterization of death at its cruelest and most random: People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think. Oz, the Gweat and Tewwible. God of dead things left in the ground to rot. (389–90, author’s emphasis)

In Louis’s intense grief and increasing mania as he prepares to rebury his son, he infuses Zelda’s words with a meaning she never intended. This culminates in the two-page, near stream-of-consciousness-style narration of a dream Louis has while waiting for the undead Gage’s return. In the dream, Louis imagines Oz the Gweat and Tewwible meting out death sentences with abandon and even enthusiasm, from cancer to forest fires, congestive heart failure to suicide, the implication being, of course, that one of the many listed causes of death will be Louis’s own, as well as that of King’s Constant Readers (424–26). This register of death stories—some of which would involve disability—are spawned by the appropriation of Zelda’s death story. They emerge as the unavoidable truth of annihilation that attempted abjection or well-meant aphorisms cannot erase, in narrative or otherwise. If Zelda does function as a narrative prosthesis in Pet Sematary, then she also refuses to be subsumed “back into a dominant ideology” (Berger 152). Instead the novel serves “to expose, rather than conceal, the prosthetic relation” (Mitchell and Snyder 6), as Zelda forces abled readers to consider the actuality of their own temporarily abled bodies and accept that the narrative of a “non-disabled imaginary” is just that: imaginary for

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most (Wasson 71). Thus Zelda is powerful not as a symbol, but as a fictional mirror of potential reality—something that Rachel and Louis’s attempts at monstrous appropriation cannot match. Perhaps f ittingly, the revenants of the appropriated Mi’kmaq burial ground appropriate in turn, using the livings’ worst fears against them. Thus in Rachel’s encounter with her undead son in both the novel and the 1989 film, he first appears as Zelda: Zelda was wearing the suit they had buried Gage in. But it was Zelda, all right, her eyes alight with an insane glee, her face a raddled purple; it was Zelda screaming, ‘I finally came back for you, Rachel, I’m going to twist your back like mine and you’ll never get out of bed again never get out of bed again NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN—. (439, author’s emphasis)

In her final appearance, Rachel’s monstrous Zelda finds embodiment in a form that speaks at once to her near absurdity. But the actual Zelda never speaks within the novel and says very little in either film. In the novel, Rachel remembers this Zelda moments before seeing Gage as her sister: (A)ll at once images of her sister Zelda began to creep into her mind, blurring thought. How her hands had twisted. How she used to slam her head against the wall sometimes when she was angry—the paper had been all torn there, the plaster beneath torn and broken. (437)

Again, King uses juxtaposition: Zelda the shrieking vengeful monster of an eight-year-old’s nightmares and Zelda the ten-year-old girl so furious at the unfairness of her life that her only expression is to beat her head against the wall. There is something particularly poignant about the passage, especially when considered in light of King’s history of the Gothic and horror genres, Danse Macabre (1981). As he mentions in his introduction to Pet Sematary, Danse Macabre was based in part on work he did for his lectures at the University of Maine, where he taught for a year while living in Orrington, the location that would inspire Pet Sematary. In Danse Macabre, King makes frequent use of biographical detail and, at one point, discusses his aging grandparents. He says that his grandmother, “far gone into senility,” sometimes “talked to Flossie, one of (his) mother’s sisters”; King goes on to explain that “Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago” (115). I do not mean to suggest that Zelda and Stephen King’s aunt, Flossie Pillsbury, who died twenty-eight years before his own birth, are one and the same, nor that his mother or any of her other siblings had an experience

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like Rachel’s in caring for their dying sister. However, King has been very open about the autobiographical aspects of Pet Sematary, including the location of his family’s house in Orrington, beside a busy road; the existence of the pet ‘sematary’ itself; the death of his daughter’s cat; and the time his son almost ran into the road and King caught him just in time. That final detail forms the novel’s central “terrible what if ” (Pet Sematary xiii, author’s emphasis). Thus it seems plausible that King’s awareness of his aunt’s death may have become the source of another “terrible what if.” While this might be viewed as an appropriation itself, I would argue that it is one that has allowed for what Cheyne terms “reflexive representations of disability” (50) within the novel. The complex, genre-inflected portrayal of Zelda’s painful experience provides an “opportunity to dis-identify with ableist culture” (Hall) while also unearthing “the real-life horrors lying beneath fictional horror” (Mulvey Roberts 1), and in doing so, reminds readers of the significance of the reality of disabled lives, which remain so central to disability studies. Flossie Pillsbury died on November 15, 1919, at the age of four—even younger than Zelda.

Works Cited Aldana Reyes, Xavier. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. U of Wales P, 2004. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. “Abjection and Body Horror.” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Horror, edited by Clive Bloom, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 393–410. Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. “Introducing: Diagnosing Demons: Creating and Disabling the Discourse of Distance in the Gothic Text.” Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, McFarland, 2010, pp. 1–18. Berger, James. The Disarticulate. New York UP, 2014. Breznican, Anthony. “Zelda Creeps Forth in New Trailer for Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.” Entertainment Weekly, https://ew.com/movies/2019/01/17/ trailer-stephen-king-pet-sematary/. Cheyne, Ria. Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2019. Corstorphine, Kevin. “‘Sour Ground’: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and the Politics of Territory.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 84–98. Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability, Life, Narrative, and Representation.” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 2, 2005, pp. 602–06.

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Couser, G. Thomas. “Illness.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. New York UP, 2015, pp. 105–07. Crow, Liz. “Including All of Our Lives.” Roaring Girl Productions, www.roaring- girl. com/ wp- content/ uploads/ 2013/07/Including- All- of- Our- Lives.pdf.. Dohmen, Josh. “Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance.” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 4, 2016, pp. 762–78. “Erasing Empathy: Talking Pet Sematary (2019).” Horror Homeroom, from Horror Homeroom Conversations with Elizabeth Erwin, Gwen Hofmann, and Dawn Keetley, 13 April 2019, podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/horror-homeroom/ episodes/Erasing-Empathy-Talking-Pet-Sematary-2019-eh4sui/a-a2p5jd9. Evangelista, Chris. “Pet Sematary Remake Directors Discuss Zelda, Cats, Stephen King Easter Eggs, and Other Horrors.” Slashfilm, https://www.slashf ilm. com/564119/pet-sematary-remake-directors/. Fielder, Leslie. “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled in Literature and Popular Arts.” Salmagundi, no. 57, 1982, pp. 57–69. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. Gregory, Alan. “Disability and Horror.” The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel. Palgrave, 2018, pp. 91–99. Hall, Melinda. “Horrible Heroes: Liberating Alternative Visions of Disability in Horror.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.18061/ dsq.v36i1.3258. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Hodder, 1981. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Hodder, 1983. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity … and Vulnerability,” translated by Jeanine Herman, Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 1–2, 2010, pp. 251–68. Kristeva, Julia. “A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited.” The Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 3, 2013, pp. 219–30. Kuppers, Petra. “Contemporary Horror and Disability: Adaptations and Active Readers.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Alice Hall, Routledge, 2020, pp. 82–93. Longmore, Paul K. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Temple UP, 2003. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Mulvey-Roberts, Rosemarie. Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester UP, 2016.

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Pet Sematary. Directed by Mary Lambert. Performances by Denise Crosby, Andrew Hubastek, and Elizabeth Ureneck. Paramount, 1989. Pet Sematary. Directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmeyer. Performances by Sonia Maria Chirila, Alyssa Brooke Levine, and Amy Seimetz. Paramount, 2019. Punter, David. “‘A foot is what fits the shoe’: Disability, the Gothic and Prosthesis.” Gothic Studies, vol. 2, no .1, 2000, pp. 39–49. Rolland, John S. Helping Couples and Families Navigate Illness and Disability: An Integrated Approach. The Guildford Press, 2018. Saunders, Cicely. “The Evolution of Palliative Care.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 94, no. 9, 2001, pp. 430–32. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985. Sears, John. Stephen King’s Gothic. U of Wales P, 2011. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. U of Michigan P, 2008. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. Routledge, 2006. Stroeber, Jenna. “Pet Sematary Directors Almost Cut One Major, Memorable Death.” Polygon, www.polygon.com/2019/4/7/18297208/pet-sematary-zelda-death-scenedumbwaiter-prequel. Unearthed and Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary. Directed by John Campopiano and Justin White. Oceans Light Productions, 2017. Wasson, Sara. “Spectrality, Strangeness and Stigmaphilia: Gothic and Critical Disability Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Alice Hall, Routledge, 2020, pp. 70–81. Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities.” Hypatia, vol. 16, no. 4, 2001, pp. 17–33.

About the Author Melissa Raines is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and has research interests at the intersection of literature and psychology, with a particular focus on the Victorian novel, crime fiction, and the Gothic. She is currently researching representations of disability and trauma in contemporary horror.

11. “For you the sun never came back out”: Theorizing Traumain IT and Gerald’s Game Laura Mulcahy

Abstract: Stephen King’s Gothic narratives can be seen as a challenge to the Caruthian idea that the conventions of horror are incapable of representing trauma. This essay examines the way in which King’s conventions of horror are utilized to explore various facets of trauma fiction. In particular, the essay interrogates the supposed unrepresentability of trauma being represented through the deadlights in IT. The essay also acknowledges gendered trauma, with references to theoretical work by Laura S. Brown, and how female trauma is represented as insidious and consistently recurring in Gerald’s Game. This essay aims to show how King successfully represents trauma through genre fiction and how trauma will return in supernatural forms when repressed. Keywords: trauma theory, popular f iction, supernatural, gendered violence, childhood

The relationship between trauma theory and speculative fiction has been gaining recognition as theoretical understandings of trauma continue to expand. Trauma theory has been an emerging field of study since its recognition in the third Diagnostical Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980 and through studies that emerged in the 1990s, particularly the theories developed in Cathy Caruth’s essay “Unclaimed Experience.” Caruth provides insight into the representation of trauma through literature, claiming in her essay that “For a history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, a history that can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (187). The Caruthian understanding of

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trauma is based in the idea of trauma being unrepresentable. Alan Gibbs notes, “Trauma in art and literature is considered by Caruthian theory to be unrepresentable, or only representable through the employment of radically fragmented and experimental forms” (14). Because of its less experimental nature, proponents of Caruthian theory have overlooked genre fiction in favor of experimental literary works. As such, horror fiction, and Stephen King’s novels, have been largely excluded from discussions concerning literary representations of trauma. With the progression of trauma studies, particularly Judith Herman’s work acknowledging complex post-traumatic stress disorder, Caruthian theory has been challenged. King’s work contributes to the question of representing trauma, as his novels provide an exploration of various experiences of trauma. Despite the prevailing idea that trauma can only be represented through radical literary forms, King’s novels have shown how the horror genre can be effectively utilized in order to convey the supposed unrepresentability of trauma. Two of King’s novels in particular, IT (1986) and Gerald’s Game (1992), explore the overwhelming qualities of childhood trauma and the damaging effects of leaving this trauma unconfronted in adulthood. In IT, trauma is represented both through childhood abuse and through the supernatural— for example, King utilizes the supernatural shapeshifter to manifest the characters’ repressed fears. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie Burlingame’s unresolved childhood trauma is unearthed as she is forced to explore her repressed memories in order to find a way to escape her unexpected captivity. Both of these novels utilize conventions of horror in order to explore repressed childhood trauma and its manifestations in adulthood, thereby showing that King’s accessible genre fiction is capable of exploring trauma. This realization challenges ideas of King’s work as reductive, as seen in Harold Bloom’s observation that King will be “remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader” (3). The dismissive treatment of King’s work shares a correlation with the way that experimental fiction is perceived as the primary way to convey trauma in literature. Through an analysis of the two aforementioned novels, this essay will demonstrate how King’s genre fiction explores trauma in close relation to theories put forward by theorists such as Judith Herman.

Childhood Trauma In Trauma and Recovery, Herman claims that “The language of the supernatural, banished for three hundred years from scientific discourse,

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still intrudes into the most sober attempt to describe the psychological manifestations of chronic childhood trauma” (96). In both IT and Gerald’s Game, childhood trauma is represented as incomprehensible to the child, and the victims are often unable to accept the occurrence of their abuse. In Gerald’s Game, the occurrence of Jessie’s childhood trauma is grounded in the sexual abuse she faces at the hands of her father; in IT, the occurrence of the protagonists’ trauma is conveyed through both abuse at the hands of humans as well as the supernatural manifestations of their repressed fears. King utilizes the supernatural to create a tangible form for the protagonists’ repressed fears, thereby conveying how supernatural manifestations can act as a form of language to convey the so-called unspeakable quality of childhood trauma. There is a requirement to explore the occurrence of trauma at the hands of human abusers—which will be explored in relation to Gerald’s Game—but an understanding of King’s relationship between human and supernatural evil resulting in trauma is essential. The primary narrative of IT is concerned with the Losers’ Club and its members’ encounters with the titular shapeshifter, but the fragmented narrative is interspersed with interludes that provide an overview of Derry’s violent history. The novel’s structure opens with Pennywise’s murder of Georgie Denbrough, followed immediately by a chapter that takes place twenty-eight years later and depicts the murder of Adrian Mellon. The latter murder explicitly establishes a connection between human and supernatural evil, as Pennywise feeds on Adrian only after he has been brutally beaten by a group of teenagers. The novel places an emphasis on the idea that the supernatural entity thrives on human evil and prejudice, and therefore the victims of It tend to be more vulnerable members of society. In the case of child victims, the novel does not always present explicit abuse or prejudice towards them; rather, it presents the apathy of bystanders that fail to intervene when It targets children. The significance of the bystander in allowing traumatic occurrences to prevail is noted by Herman, who argues that “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, her, and speak no evil” (7). The damaging effects of remaining a bystander are seen through the isolation experienced by the protagonists of King’s novel as It terrorizes them, which leaves them solely responsible for confronting the perpetrator of their trauma. One of the primary differentiations in traumatic experiences are between single-event and insidious trauma. Caruthian theory is strongly concerned with single-event trauma, as her theories often deal with trauma

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being forgotten and remembered only belatedly: “In trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness” (6). The concept of traumatic events being remembered belatedly does not encapsulate all experiences of trauma, as some traumatic events are experienced repetitively throughout the lives of victims (particularly the loves of individuals in marginalized groups). John Marzillier differentiates between single-event and insidious trauma, claiming that single-event traumas “are experienced by a person going about their ordinary business” while complex traumas “occur repeatedly over a period of time” (7). IT presents these two different types of trauma through the varying experiences of the main characters. Insidious traumatic experiences are explored through the characters of Beverly Marsh and Mike Hanlon— their traumatic childhoods are the result of discriminatory antagonizations or chronic abuse. By contrast, Bill’s experience of trauma is arguably single-event, as Georgie’s death is presented as an event outside the range of the Denbroughs’ daily lives. The supernatural shapeshifter’s murder of Georgie results in the profound disruption of Bill’s familial model, with his parents acting coldly towards him. The portrayal of the familial home as cold and unwelcoming furthers Bill’s self-blame following his brother’s death: He did not like the thought that he was to blame, but the only alternative he could think of to explain their behavior was much worse: that all the love and attention his parents had given him before had somehow been the result of George’s presence, and with George gone there was nothing for him. (334)

Essentially, the death of Bill’s younger brother has disrupted the Denbrough family’s everyday life and the hostile home environment has inspired selfloathing and further guilt about his role in his brother’s death. Therefore, Bill’s trauma can be read as a result of a single event, which serves as one of the varying types of trauma that King explores in the novel. King’s white, male, heterosexual protagonists in IT for the most part experience what has been defined as single-event trauma. The concept of single-event trauma has dominated understandings of trauma theory, as highlighted by the first definition of post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM-III. The initial definition claimed that post-traumatic stress disorder was a response to a “traumatic event that is generally outside the range of human experience” (236, emphasis mine). Caruthian theory is primarily

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concerned with trauma outside the realms of everyday life, as shown through her general definition of trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (181). While Caruth does acknowledge that trauma can be the result of frequently recurring events, she remains primarily concerned with inaccessible histories. Therefore, defining trauma as inaccessible is complicated by accounts of frequently recurring trauma. Theorists such as Laura S. Brown have criticized the way in which the initial understandings of PTSD were based solely in single-event traumatic experiences. In relation to women’s traumatic experiences, she questions: “How could such an event which happens so often to women, so often in the life of one woman, be outside the range of human experience?” (120). Both IT and Gerald’s Game provide in-depth explorations of insidious trauma in female characters as a result of predatory behavior from the girls’ fathers. Both novels explore the anxieties associated with embodying a developing female body—a study that King has previously explored in Carrie (1974), albeit with a focus on the strained relationship between a mother and daughter. While the relationships between Beverly, Jessie, and their fathers differ in some ways—Beverly’s father is physically abusive, while Jessie’s father acts in a more subtle predatory way until he sexually assaults his daughter—both of their traumas are based in their inescapable female bodies. Both novels provide varying ways of exploring the fear of their changing bodies—Beverly through a literal intrusion of blood in the home and Jessie through the assault taking place during a moment when the sun is blacked out during an eclipse. Their trauma cannot be considered outside the range of human experience or the result of a catastrophe, as both of their traumatic experiences are heavily associated with their changing bodies. In IT, the abuse Beverly faces at home conveys the insidious nature of her trauma, as the novel depicts her trauma not as the result of a single catastrophic event, but rather as the result of frequent abuse at the hands of her father. Anne Rothe notes in Popular Trauma Culture, “The earlier notion that cruelty to children is immoral resurged [in the 1960s] and child abuse currently constitutes the embodiment of ultimate evil, particularly in American culture” (115). King’s writing reflects this ultimate evil, as the characters that face abusive households in the novel view the terror inflicted by the supernatural shapeshifter as an extension of the terror they already face within their daily lives. The shapeshifter is not seen as a disruptive force; instead, a connection is drawn between Beverly’s abusive father and the supernatural being:

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And some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good-fuckingriddance. (403, author’s emphasis)

The fact that the intrusion of these thoughts occurs when her father is peering down into the sewer suggests a connection between him and It, as both act in a predatory way towards Beverly. However, she subconsciously views the shapeshifter as a potential way to erase her father from her life, thus freeing her of the physical abuse she faces. Her reaction of horror at what she thinks suggests she considers her own thoughts of obtaining freedom to be more abhorrent than the physical abuse her father inflicts on her. Even when her father examines the drain following her fears of being preyed on by a supernatural entity, she is unable to escape the repressed hatred for her abuser. Herman contends, “Chronic childhood abuse takes place in a familial climate of pervasive terror, in which ordinary care taking relationships have been profoundly disrupted” (98)—and this definition is applicable to the ways in which King depicts chronically abusive homes. Therefore, there is a difference in the way in which the shapeshifter’s terrorizing is perceived based on contrasting experiences with trauma. For Bill, who experiences trauma as a single event, he perceives It as an intrusive, outside force, but for Beverly, It shares a familiarity with her abusive home life. The insidious nature of Beverly’s trauma is further explored through her f irst encounter with the shapeshifter. It f irst appears through a voice in the sink, and when she leans in, blood begins to spurt out of the sink. When she calls her father for help, he is unable to see the blood, leaving her momentarily isolated in her terror. Blood is presented as an intrusive presence, and while it does have an association with the violence inflicted on Pennywise’s previous victims who speak to Beverly through the drain, it can also be viewed as a manifestation of the way her body will soon begin to develop. Aspects of the developing body such as menstruation and developing breasts, which possibly lead to further harassment, are tied to the female body and therefore cannot be repressed. Menstruation itself has been considered taboo and abject. Elizabeth Arveda Kissling describes menarche as “[a]n event that symbolically marks initiation and welcome into a community of women is frequently experienced as a moment of isolation, embarrassment, or shame” (5). The occurrence of blood spurting from the sink can be read as a disruption to childhood, bringing her into a transitory period

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where the female body is developing and thus must be covered up. The text depicts blood as a distressing reminder of the way in which Beverly will soon be required to conceal her body; its corporeality will be seen as abject once she begins menstruating. Both IT and Gerald’s Game explore anxieties surrounding the developing female body through the concept of men preying on girls. Both novels portray the female protagonists’ trauma as insidious and tied to repeating traumatic events that are associated with womanhood. In Gerald’s Game, this concept is explored as Jessie reflects on her childhood trauma. In relation to her father’s assault on her, she blames her developing body as a result: “She started when she was only ten and a half. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he smelled blood, just like that dog out in the entry. Maybe it made him frantic” (93, author’s emphasis). As Jessie reflects on her childhood trauma, the language used implies a displacement of blame—her father assaulted her due to primal instincts upon smelling blood. Here, the fragmented internal voice indicates the struggle in accepting the occurrence of trauma of an insidious nature. The portrayal of young girls’ bodies as sites of abjection helps to convey the way in which patriarchal standards impact their view of their corporeal bodies. Gender theorist Sherry B. Ortner states that men are viewed as the “cultural” while women are associated with the “natural,” stating that “Since it is always culture’s project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it ‘natural’ to subordinate, not to say oppress, them” (73). Indeed, this is reflected in the process of viewing trauma, wherein Jessie has difficulty recognizing her father’s assault on her as traumatic in comparison to white male characters, who often experience trauma in King’s work as a disturbance to their everyday lives. The depiction of trauma correlated with the female body in his work indicates that female characters’ traumatic experiences are more insidious, as the cause of their trauma is linked with their consistently lived experience. Importantly, their traumatic experiences challenge the Caruthian idea of trauma being defined by single catastrophic events—King’s female characters re-experience abuse and harassment because of their female bodies, which is something irrepressible. Gerald’s Game further explores the insidious nature of women’s trauma by contrasting the portrayal of the abusive father. While Beverly’s father is portrayed as physically abusive, Jessie’s father is portrayed as her closest confidant within the family. Her relationship with her parents is summarized as such: “Her father stuck up for her, and her mother stuck it to her” (172, author’s emphasis). Throughout the exploration of Jessie’s childhood, it is

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made apparent that she and her mother have a distant relationship. Their distant relationship allows for her father to assert himself as the more caring parent. The inappropriate intimacy of their relationship is recognized by her mother, who exclaims during an argument, “I swear to God, sometimes you behave as if she were your girlfriend instead of your daughter!” (174, author’s emphasis). Her mother’s recognition of her father’s inappropriate behavior but lack of action, similar to the events IT, shows the damage caused by the bystander not aiding vulnerable groups—in both cases, children. Due to the nature of their close relationship, Jessie does not view her father as a potential predator—unlike the shapeshifter in IT, who is recognized as predatory as It is involved in creating traumatic experiences outside the range of everyday life, such as Georgie’s murder. Jessie’s father, however, is seen as a welcome part of her everyday life, and therefore as a child she does not recognize when her father has sinister intentions. As an adult, she will continuously shift between blaming her father for the assault and blaming herself for her supposed promiscuity. In one scene, the voice she deems as “Ruth” after an old college friend draws attention to the signs that he had planned to prey on her: He planned it, Jessie. Don’t you understand? It wasn’t just some spur-of-the moment thing, a sex-starved father copping a quick feel.[…] Who knew you’d be listening—and admiring—while he maneuvred around your mother? Who had his hands on your tits the night before, and who was wearing gym-shorts and nothing else on the day of? (227, author’s emphasis)

The internal dialogue between Jessie and the voice known as Ruth indicates that she has an unrecognized awareness of the fact that she is a victim. This fragmented section of her mind shows a logistical understanding that her father had planned her assault in advance, but she resists the conceptualization of herself as a victim. This correlates with Kali Tal’s observation that “women and girls are taught to believe that they provoke men into assaulting them, and that they will bring pain and humiliation upon themselves by dressing, speaking, or acting in a provocative manner” (20). Indeed, the subordination of women and the relegation of blame for sexual assault on the victim is reflected in King’s novel when Jessie actively resists blaming her father for his assault. Her refusal to acknowledge herself as a victim emphasizes the way in which victims of sexual harassment struggle to recognize their experience as traumatic, as popular understandings of trauma often focus strongly on single-event traumatic occurrences.

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The occurrence of the traumatic event in private aligns with the secrecy associated with sexual assault. The secrecy associated with these types of traumatic events also challenges the Caruthian notion of trauma’s primary association with events such as war and disaster, which are within public knowledge. Laura S. Brown notes that the aforementioned type of trauma occurs in secret: “They happen in bed, where our fathers and stepfathers and uncles and older brothers molest us in the dead of night; behind the closed doors of marital relationships where men beat and sometimes rape their wives and lovers” (120). In Gerald’s Game, this secrecy is shown through the fact that the assault happens not only when the rest of the family is away, but also through the occurrence of the eclipse. Later on, the voice of Ruth claims, “For you it never ended. For you the sun never came back out” (140, author’s emphasis). While the traumatic event is commonly understood to be a shift from the everyday experience, the eclipse is turned into an insidious, repetitive experience for Jessie, as shown through her eventual marriage to a man who nearly sexually assaults her. Therefore, the fact that the sun had never come back out following her father’s assault shows how the traumatic occurrence sets a precedent for the misogyny and sexual harassment she will later face at the hands of other men. Child characters who experience trauma as a single event outside the range of human experience later repress their memories in adulthood, as shown through the majority of white male characters in IT, but marginalized characters in King’s novels relive their childhood traumas throughout their lives, leaving them unable to repress their memories fully.

Remembering Trauma in Adulthood Both novels explore single-event and insidious trauma. A notable contrast between the two novels is that IT depicts a shared trauma amongst a group of friends, therefore giving them a supportive community, while Gerald’s Game depicts Jessie’s trauma as wholly secret. When discussing depictions of literary trauma, vital aspects include the assimilation of traumatic memories as well as an exploration into how childhood trauma is dealt with in adulthood. The question of memory is integral to differentiating Caruth’s and Herman’s theories, as it has been noted that Caruth is primarily concerned with exploring trauma that is remembered belatedly. Herman, on the other hand, proposes the term complex post-traumatic stress disorder: “The current formulation of post-traumatic stress disorder fails to capture either the protean symptomatic manifestations or prolonged deformations

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of personality that occur in captivity” (119). From this observation, it is apparent that popular ideas of trauma that stem from both Caruthian theory and the initial definition of trauma do not adequately account for universal understandings of traumatic experiences. King’s novels provide varying experiences of remembering trauma based on the nature of the trauma as either single-event or frequently recurring. Both novels convey that adult victims have repressed or not properly dealt with their trauma in some form, with the Losers forgetting their childhood experiences in Derry and Jessie actively resisting a confrontation with her childhood trauma. It is only when they are placed in urgent situations, with the return of It and Jessie having to explore her childhood memories in order to escape her confinement, that the characters seek out healthy ways to acknowledge their trauma and assimilate their memories. This section will explore how King conveys the repetitious cycles of childhood traumas, shown through examples such as marrying people that resemble their childhood abusers. It will then examine how King depicts traumatic memories as urgently requiring confrontation and assimilation, at the risk of either the next cycle of Pennywise’s preying on children in IT or the possibility of death in Gerald’s Game. I have noted that the traumatic experiences of characters such as Beverly and Jessie are rooted in their developing female bodies, which are inescapable. Therefore, in adulthood, they are unable to forget their experiences like most of the male characters in IT. In adulthood, King’s female characters marry men that resemble their fathers. Gerald and Tom are both depicted as controlling and continue to act in authoritative roles in the absence of the women’s fathers. Tom is depicted as physically abusive towards Beverly, while Gerald comes close to sexually assaulting Jessie during the novel’s titular “game” before his fatal heart attack. The parallels between the women’s husbands and fathers show that they are trapped in a repetitious cycle that stems from their childhoods. This aligns with Herman’s observations that “repeated abuse is not actively sought but rather is passively experienced as a dreaded but unavoidable fate and is accepted as the inevitable price of a relationship” (112). Essentially, this observation is reflected in King’s novels as both women struggle to conceive a life outside of the traumatic occurrences of their childhoods, therefore making them vulnerable to men who aim to control and abuse them. When Beverly is called back to Derry, she receives the call as a way to escape her abusive husband, which once again emphasizes that the terror inflicted by Pennywise is seen as a secondary source of trauma compared to her experiences with her father. Defying Tom and returning to Derry is a significant moment for

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Beverly as an adult because it reveals a deviation from the cycle of abuse wherein she cannot say no to the authoritative men in her life. The parallel drawn between her father and Tom indicates that her marriage has been an extension of her abusive childhood. Notably, she views the community she built with the boys, who are also victims of It’s antagonizing, as a form of escape and support. This is the primary contrast between Beverly and Jessie’s experiences—whereas Beverly has a community to rely on to escape from her cycle of abuse, Jessie remains isolated. The importance of secrecy in depicting women’s trauma is further emphasized through Jessie’s isolation, which is shown to have begun after her father manipulated her into hiding the occurrence of her sexual assault. He blames the assault on his failing marriage with her mother, before convincing her to keep the encounter between them a secret: How well he had manipulated her—first the apology, then the tears, and finally the hat-trick: turning his problems into her problems […] Until, finally, she had been swearing to him that she would keep the secret forever, that torturers couldn’t drag it out of her with tongs and hot coals. (221, author’s emphasis)

Through her father’s manipulation, she is subjected to keeping her trauma a secret and grows up with the belief that she is to blame for her father’s actions. This correlates with Herman’s observations on childhood trauma, in which the child inevitably “concludes that her innate badness is the cause” and that, “If she is bad, then she can try to be good. If, somehow, she has brought this fate upon herself, then somehow she has the power to change it” (103). The formation of the traumatic event in secrecy allows for the idea of Jessie’s innate badness to fester, forming a reluctance to confront her trauma until she is urgently required to do so. The novel details her brief encounter with a women’s support group in college that presents her with the opportunity to confide in others about her trauma. The importance of a supportive community in dealing with trauma is provided in this section, which can also be seen in IT through the Losers’ role as a supportive group. Particularly in relation to women’s trauma, Emma Tseris observes that “Feminist social work aims to empower women and reclaim the voices that were silenced within a context of trauma, so that they may tell their own stories” (161). Through the creation of support groups such as the one explored briefly in Gerald’s Game, there is an exploration of the legitimacy of forms of trauma outside of the popularized single-event type. However, Jessie does not recognize the women’s group as a support system, as she

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views the stories of rape, incest, and physical torture as a glimpse into the reality of adulthood, describing college as a carnival that disguises bleak reality: “To think that only this lay ahead of her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable” (96–97). Her fear of the support group unleashing her repressed memories and providing a glimpse into a future of the cycle of her trauma reoccurring—which is proven through the depiction of her future marriage—hinders her from availing of the support offered to her. Her refusal to acknowledge her victimhood is connected to her avoidance of support groups—her trauma does not entirely fit into the original idea of trauma as a result of catastrophe. Her trauma occurs in secret, and with her father’s manipulation, she believes herself to be responsible for her father’s assault. She is isolated in the secrecy of her trauma established in childhood. Her perspectives on her trauma are fragmented between a “goodwife” that displays internalized misogyny and “Ruth,” an internal voice named after her college friend who implored her to confront her traumatic memories. The issue of remembrance of traumatic memories is an important aspect of discerning the difference in trauma representation between Herman’s and Caruth’s theories. Caruthian theory places emphasis on the inaccessibility of memory, as she claims that traumatic history “can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (187). As noted, Herman’s theories challenge the idea of trauma being categorized solely as inaccessible, as she notes that “Survivors of prolonged abuse develop characteristic personality changes, including deformations of relatedness and identity” (119). If trauma is something that is frequently re-experienced, therefore, it cannot be defined as a history that is entirely inaccessible. King’s novels explore the various experiences of traumatic memory, with IT in particular confronting the varying experiences of remembering trauma. The speculative aspects of his fiction are utilized in order to create an urgent requirement for exploration of repressed childhood memories. For protagonists who experience trauma mainly as a single event through Pennywise’s targeting of them, their traumatic memories are suppressed through a kind of amnesia, but they are nonetheless continuously haunted by a past they cannot remember. After waking from a nightmare, Stan remarks: “I wake up from these dreams and think, ‘My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand.’ I’m afraid. But then it just … fades” (52, author’s emphasis). What is seen here is a form of repression: the traumatic event appears to have been forgotten, but it continues to haunt the adult survivor.

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The calls received from Mike result in them re-examining their lives and reactivating seemingly forgotten traumas. Henry Krystal records, “The adult traumatic state is initiated by the recognition of inevitable danger, and the surrendering to it” (99). When applying this concept to the novel, the form of surrendering can be seen through both Stan’s suicide and the Losers’ initial fear of death upon returning to the town. The return of It causes an unleashing of repressed memories, which have not been properly assimilated, therefore resulting in a mishandling of childhood trauma. Stan chooses death over returning to the source of his childhood trauma, and the other protagonists return to Derry, where they inevitably confront previously repressed memories. However, the depiction of grown-up survivors who endured unhealthy upbringings such as Eddie and Beverly suggests that the Losers’ experiences of traumatic memory are not universal. While the majority of them experience trauma as a single event, Eddie and Beverly cyclically perpetuate their childhood trauma through their marriages, and this perpetuation reveals that victims of insidiously traumatic experiences do not experience trauma as a belated reoccurrence. The uniting factor in the Losers’ trauma is the urgency of healthily dealing with their childhood trauma in order to healthily move forward in their adult lives. The novel also handles the question of trauma as unrepresentable through the form of the deadlights. The fragmented narrative of IT results in the full narrative of 1958 not being told until the novel’s near completion. As a result of this, the form of the deadlights is alluded to but not described in full detail until the adults have returned to It’s lair. As previously discussed, the shapeshifter is capable of providing a physical, tangible form of the protagonists’ personal fears, but the form of the deadlights has the capability of mentally destabilizing anyone who views them. The deadlights are described as “Something much worse than a spider. Something that was all insane light” (1068). The concept of the deadlights as insane light builds on Lovecraftian ideas of certain monstrous creatures as incomprehensible to human comprehension. Within a framework of trauma theory, it can be argued that the deadlights represent the concept of trauma as seemingly unrepresentable. Tal argues that “Accurate representation of trauma can never be achieved without recreating the event since, by its very definition, trauma lies beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ conception” (15). The form of the deadlights represents an encompassing of the traumatic experience, and It’s shapeshifting forms represent the individual traumatic fears of the protagonists. It’s forms continue to hold power as the Losers have mainly repressed their traumatic experiences, therefore giving the shapeshifter strength to reawaken and take on the monstrous forms of their repressed traumatic

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memories. The shapeshifter creates tangible forms of their repressed fears, and because its true form is the incomprehensible deadlights, King effectively utilizes conventions of horror in order to explore the difficulty in representing trauma within a physical form. The importance of community and support within the attempt to healthily process trauma is emphasized through the Losers’ final confrontation with It. While it has been noted that characters like Mike and Beverly experience trauma in a more insidious manner in relation to their identities, the seven protagonists have a shared traumatic experience. King’s adult characters must return to Derry and confront repressed memories if they are to recover from their childhood traumas. As It has the ability to create a physical form of the protagonists’ traumatic experiences—and of its victims it targets in the town—the fight against It cannot be handled by just one person. Herman notes, “Restoration of the breach between the traumatized person and the community depends, first, upon a public acknowledgement of the traumatic event and, second, upon some form of community action” (70). The wider community of Derry has failed the victims of the shapeshifter, resulting in the Losers forming their own private community. They take on the task of killing It in order to end the cycle of trauma that It perpetuates. Through their group effort, they are successful in killing both It and its offspring. Following their success, they view the supernatural as something more manageable and less daunting: But a spider was, after all, only a spider. Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope. That was a heartening thought. Anything except (the deadlights) whatever had been out there, but perhaps even that unspeakable living light which crouched at the doorway to the macro-verse was dead or dying. (1092, author’s emphasis)

What is seen here is a rationalized understanding of the supernatural. King presents the process of confronting and uncovering traumatic memories throughout the novel through its fragmented format and through the deadlights as a form of representing trauma, but his acknowledgement that the deadlights are either dead or dying indicates that the characters have successfully codified their childhood memories and have made progress in overcoming the overwhelming nature of trauma. It can be argued that by the time It is dead, the narrative of the protagonists’ initial fight against It has been fully narrated, and thus integrated into their adult minds. As an

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adult, the protagonists must learn how to process their childhood traumatic memories in order to move forward healthily in adult life. Krystal writes, “We come to the point where our past lies unfolded before us and the question is what should be done with it? The answer is—it must be accepted or one must keep waging an internal war against the ghosts of one’s past” (96). In the adults’ portion of IT, the major challenge that the Losers face is learning to accept the occurrence of their trauma. It is only by acknowledging the occurrence of the trauma and confronting the shapeshifter that they are capable of killing It and preventing the next cycle of terror inflicted upon vulnerable members of the community.

Entering the Recovery Process In both novels, once the protagonists have successfully confronted their traumatic memories, they are capable of moving on. In relation to Herman’s theories of trauma, the recognition of traumatic memories as well as acknowledging victimhood is integral to moving forward and reclaiming agency over traumatic memories. In IT, the Losers slowly begin to forget their time in Derry again, allowing them to begin moving forward with their lives outside of Derry. Their success in childhood against It has been tarnished by their repression of their traumatic memories, but by making the active choice to return and confront their trauma, they have prevented It’s cycle from resuming. Herman notes that in recovery, “The person has authority over her memories: she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside” (213). In this case, the Losers put aside their memories, but with It dead, the haunting quality of their repressed memories—the “storm” that Stan describes—is no longer a threat. Derry has maintained the trauma faced by vulnerable residents for as long as It has existed, and as the protagonists defeat It, they also contribute to destroying the society that has promoted this culture of trauma for so long. The storm indicates a finality to It’s reign over Derry, and this finality is shown through Bill approaching a young boy in a rain slicker, remarking, “‘It’s all right n-now” (1126). The boy is a stand-in for Georgie, emphasizing how Bill has protected this boy from suffering the same fate that his brother did. Bill’s recognition of his success in preventing history from repeating is important in showing the healing process of trauma, as he has overcome the self-blame he inflicted on himself in childhood following Georgie’s death. The action taken by the Losers is both a remedy for their own traumatic occurrences and a measure that prevents children and

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vulnerable members of society to continue to be victimized because of the inaction of adults in Derry. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie is also shown to exert power over her memories and who has access to them. Following her degloving and escape from the space cowboy, she tells police and reporters that she cannot remember her experiences. This fits in with Caruthian understandings of trauma, but as Jessie reflects on her traumatic memories, it is clear that the novel follows Herman’s understandings of traumatic memory: “She remembered it all […] But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not cover an obligation to tell about a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream” (340–41, author’s emphasis). The way in which Jessie’s memories are described indicates that she vividly remembers the occurrence of the traumatic event, but unlike her childhood trauma, she holds agency over her decision to disseminate this information. Herman argues, “Helplessness and isolation are the core experiences of psychological trauma. Empowerment and reconnection are at the core experiences of recovery” (197). This is reflected in the novel, as Jessie is not bound to secrecy and can choose who can be told about her traumatic experiences. Her agency over her narrative is particularly emphasized because the final chapters take place in a first-person narrative in a letter to Ruth, indicating that she is open to forming connections with those individuals she previously pushed away in her attempts to keep her traumatic memories a secret. The ability to acknowledge her traumatic memories and the willingness to confide in others about her traumatic experiences showcases a healthy integration of traumatic memories with her regular memories, which aligns with Herman’s theories regarding the recovery process. The importance of acknowledging trauma in order to move forward is emphasized by Jessie’s confrontation with the space cowboy following her escape. Following her escape, she has access to resources that allow her to research the seemingly supernatural presence, and through her stronger state of mind following her acceptance of her trauma, she discovers that the space cowboy is a real man named Raymond Andrew Joubert—a necrophile who has a condition that causes the enlargement of his features. By the time she discovers his identity, he is under arrest, and she makes the decision to approach him in court. She acknowledges in her letter to Ruth that she viewed him as her undead father: “And you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he’d wanted to do before” (380, author’s emphasis). As long as she viewed Joubert as a representation of her father, she would not fully be at peace with her traumatic experiences. As Tal argues, “On social as well as

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an individual psychological level, the penalty for repression is repetition” (7). She views Joubert as another man that desires to control her body, following in the tradition of her father and husband, and her final confrontation with him is a way of fully gaining closure for her insidious traumatic experiences. When she approaches him, she describes seeing him again as “the total, final eclipse. After all these years, the stars are once again shining in the daytime. They are shining inside her head” (388). The mental return to the eclipse—a moment of darkness in the middle of the day, which showcases the secrecy of women’s trauma both here and also in Dolores Claiborne— emphasizes the connection between her childhood and recent traumatic experiences, which aligns with Herman’s observation, “[Reconstructing trauma] requires some slackening of ordinary life demands, some ‘tolerance for the state of being ill’” (176). By allowing herself to return to the eclipse, she is capable of taking control over one of the men who tormented her by spitting in his face. The final confrontation with Joubert gives her the opportunity to regain the autonomy that was taken from her when handcuffed to the bed.

Conclusion IT and Gerald’s Game engage effectively with trauma theory through both an exploration of childhood trauma and the confrontation of repressed memories in adulthood. IT engages with single-event as well as insidious childhood trauma through the disruptive nature of Georgie’s death as well as the trauma Mike and Beverly experience because of their identities—and these experiences are reflected through the supernatural, which creates physical forms out of their repressed fears. Gerald’s Game focuses on the insidious traumatic experience that takes place during an eclipse, focusing on the control exerted over Jessie’s body in childhood. In adulthood, the unhealthy effects of repression are shown and cycles of repetition are perpetuated, resulting in the grown-up victims having to revisit their trauma in the hopes of moving on. In both of these novels, conventions of horror are utilized in order to create tangible forms to showcase the traumatized mind. King thus utilizes horror and the supernatural—particularly the deadlights and the appearance of the space cowboy—to create urgent circumstances where readers must confront trauma. In turn, by reading King through the various methodological approaches to studying trauma, critics might open new channels of inquiry into King’s corpus (indeed, into the horror genre itself) and, at the same time, theorizers of trauma might discover in the author’s oeuvre a veritable treasure trove of informative material.

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Works Cited Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Stephen King, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998. Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 1, 1991, pp. 119–33. Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies, vol. 79, 1991, pp. 181–92. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: First Edition. American Psychiatric Association, 1980. Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 2015. King, Stephen. Gerald’s Game. New English Library, 1993. King, Stephen. IT. Scribner, 2017. Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda. “On the Rag on Screen: Menarche in Film and Television.” Sex Roles, vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–12. Krystal, Henry. “Integration and Self-Healing in Post-Traumatic States: A Ten Year Retrospective.” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 1, 1991, pp. 93–118. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008. Marzillier, John. To Hell and Back. Constable & Robinson, 2012. Rothe, Anne. Popular Trauma Culture. Rutgers UP, 2011. Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt. Cambridge UP, 1996. Tseris, Emma Jane. “Trauma Theory Without Feminism? Evaluating Contemporary Understandings of Traumatized Women.” Affilia, vol. 28, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153–64.

About the Author Laura Mulcahy is a PhD candidate at University College Cork researching representations of trauma in the works of Stephen King. She has previously completed an MA thesis on representations of trauma in IT and an undergraduate dissertation on good, evil, and grey morality in a select number of works by King.

12. Choosing to See: Gardening IT within The Upside Down without a Cord Michael Perry

Abstract: This essay uses creative non-fiction to explore the parallels that run between Stephen King’s IT, the film The Black Phone (based on a short story by King’s son Joe Hill), and the Duffer Brother’s Netflix series Stranger Things. It connects these works to issues surrounding the role that Artificial Intelligence plays within academic publishing. The essay forces the reader to wrestle with what it means to “see” rather than blindly accept what is expected. Such an approach eschews predetermined meanings and value to encourage readers to deny complacency and seek action. Keywords: artificial intelligence, creative non-fiction, evil, academia, sight

1 The world has changed since I was asked to contribute an essay to the collection of Stephen King scholarship you are reading at this moment. And while I am writing this, the wheels of publication and print slowly grind; the world will no doubt have changed once again by the time you sit in your spot on the old recliner with too much dog hair, the shade over the lamp tilted to provide extra light to the page to aid your aging eyes (you will leave it that way, and will be reminded of that decision), reading this essay, which is one of several essays, and maybe with a wry smile as you wonder what the man himself thinks of this scholarship thing. It is easier when the author is dead, of course. And at least as I write this, King still lives. At least some version of himself, as I am not one to disregard the possibilities of portals, other worlds, turtles, and realities converged. Back to the recliner. It is not a recliner. No. More of a lush chair with a lush footstool. Lush: defined as very rich and providing pleasure—possibly connected to sexual attraction. So the word itself may not be the most appropriate of choices. Although sex

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and furniture are not entirely out of the realm of feasibility—even when dog hair over the years has woven itself into and through the very fabric of the chair itself. And it is the same animal who leaves hair behind whose bark/whine compels you to get up and off the aforementioned chair to open the patio door. Outside that door, beyond the deck with the loose railing and two-toned stain (some of which is splattered on the white siding) is a garden already filled with giant cucumbers constantly fighting off the encroachment of the surrounding forest: vines and branches, seeds and squirrels, and water from deep below pumped out and over to the south creating a temporary marsh. And beyond that, darkness and light. Funny thing: I spoke of worlds changing. Of multiple worlds. Maybe I speak of worlds beyond this one. But peering just a bit further and a bit closer into myriad worlds beyond your deck, you observe the deep brown soil writhing with life that crawls, tunnels, reproduces, and dies. Life green that reaches toward the sun yellow and may the strongest survive. But not necessarily. For you intervene. You had already put down this essay—this collection. You let the animal who leaves behind hair back inside, and you are compelled to descend the deck, leave the fenced-in mowed carpet, and enter your garden. And what you see is the beginning of a crown of broccoli. But it is losing its battle with a persistent vine as well as what can only be described as water-stalks with leaves. They are quick to the sun. The strong survives. But you are stronger. Or at least more adept. You rip the vines and water-stalks from the brown earth and discard them into the trees. In this world, you decide who lives and who dies. Not through force of will or thought or by right—but through action.

2 Now, you think there must be some metaphor happening here. Some type of “aha,” this is where the real literary analysis begins. Were you not promised an essay on childhood trauma, ultimate evil, connecting to works of and inspired by Stephen King? But remember I said the world has changed, and that as you are reading this, the world has most likely changed again. This may be too on point, but we all understand that this is simply another trip to the tower—another cycle—because we can never leave Yeats behind who inevitably and often and always reminds us of the image of the widening gyre and that the center will, indeed, not hold. And we will begin again. The broccoli is not safe. The animal who leaves behind hair will bark and shed again. And an academic such as the author whose words you are reading

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right now will publish another scholarly analysis of the work of a great author thereby adding to the discourse and furthering thought and understanding, and adding just a little something to the world. And now, you realize, we are finally getting to it. Stephen King’s IT, the film The Black Phone, based on a short story by Joe Hill, and the Duffer Brother’s Netflix series, Stranger Things: these texts share certain thematic elements and evoke a sense of nostalgia for different eras. The three narratives explore the power of childhood friendships. And each work delves into the realm of horror and supernatural within the aforementioned exploration. IT focuses on an ancient, shape-shifting entity that preys on the fears of children in the town of Derry. Stranger Things features a parallel dimension, the Upside Down, filled with monstrous creatures. And The Black Phone introduces a serial killer who has a connection to the supernatural. Both the film The Black Phone and the series Stranger Things employ nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s respectively as they embrace the aesthetics, music, and cultural references of their respective time periods. The novel, IT, does the same in print for the 1950s, and splits time with the 1980s (the recent film adaptation makes the 1980s the nostalgic past). Finally, all three works delve into the impact of childhood trauma on the characters. Overall, these works share the thematic elements centered around childhood, friendship, supernatural threats, and the exploration of trauma. They captivate audiences by blending horror, nostalgia, and a sense of camaraderie, allowing readers and viewers to connect with the characters’ journey as they face terrifying forces beyond their understanding. But I need to rewind for a moment. About the time I was approached regarding this collection, I had just had the good fortune to see The Black Phone at the local theater. The connections between the f ilm, IT, and Stranger Things were screaming inside my head. Paper idea! But it is not enough to just say, “Hey, look at these connections, aren’t they cool”? Then I started to think about blindness. Not actual blindness, but the type of blindness that we choose (consciously or sub-consciously) that leads to mis-seeing the world. Think for a moment of the troubling and privileged concept of colorblindness. Similar to colorblindness, it struck me that the larger communities in each of these narratives seemed to willfully and deliberately choose blindness rather than see, accept, and deal with the evil before them. And more often than not those that chose said blindness were those in positions of power, positions of normativity, and, interestingly, positions accepted by and adopted by the mainstream, both children and adults. The popular kids and well-to-do parents are often depicted as being caught up in their own world of superficiality, conformity,

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and materialism. They prioritize maintaining their image and social standing, which can blind them to the underlying horrors and truths lurking beneath the surface. On the other hand, those that exist on the margins—those individuals that had experienced “othering” and trauma, those individuals who refused to blindly accept normative, mainstream narratives—chose to see. The marginalized kids who see ambiguity and live on the margins of society have a different perspective. Due to their outsider status, they are more attuned to the hidden undercurrents of darkness and danger. They are intimately familiar with adversity, hardship, and the harsh realities of life. Their experiences on the fringes of society grant them a heightened awareness and understanding of the existence of ultimate evil. In fact, these marginalized characters often possess a unique ability to question authority, challenge societal norms, and recognize the signs of impending doom. Their outside status allows them to see through the illusions and facades created by popular culture, social hierarchies, and material wealth. They are more inclined to confront the uncomfortable truths and confront the ultimate evil head-on. The choice to see is not something that comes easily and most certainly comes with risk. Indeed, it is the acceptance of risk, which entails the acknowledgment of a loss of control paired with the unknowable, that makes the decision to see so potentially powerful. And for those who live a life wherein risk is part of the everyday, the choice to see is not only brave but also necessary and, one might say, inevitable.

3 You are back in your spot by now, having left your garden to the whims of nature for the time. The animal who leaves hair behind rests at your feet. You may be wondering: 1) Is this first or second person? 2) What is with all the italics? 3) Who am I and who is the you? 1) Yes; 2) Soon to be revealed (foreshadow?); 3) Going to have to answer that one yourself (or myself?)

I will approach the second question with an observation: it is no surprise to the avid King reader that Stephen King is not a fan of technology (social media being the exception that proves the rule)—that he may even be somewhat of a self-proclaimed luddite. However, the job of the literary

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analyst is not to offer speculation as to the thoughts of the author. In my own training, even when they are not, the author is dead. Whether of old age, violent plane crash, disembowelment by a rabid clown, or just poof, gone, it does not matter. I have the text before me. And only the text. Just as you have this text before you. And for a good long while it has been the work of the literary analyst to guide her reader through analysis via close reading. But what happens when all the texts are before you? All at once. Texts both published and unpublished. At times, texts not even written but in a strange way imagined (sometimes inaccurately) and built upon the universal subconscious and fed by the sum total of our written expression. Words vetted and edited alongside words uttered and sputtered. Suddenly you put forth a clearly defined marching order that is broken down into 1s and 0s. And in the time it takes you to rescue two cucumbers before they grow unwieldly large, ideas and connections and observations are generated and laid at your feet. What entity, you ask, what new evil, what new power, what new savior has arrived? And just as Pennywise rises from the sewers trailing red balloons, and the Demi-Gorgon leaks through the Upside Down, leaving behind what can only be described as dead, static snow-flakes, we turn around and suddenly the unsuspecting man in a van—again with balloons far and weee—has us chained to the basement with only a phone that appears disconnected. So let me say the following: everything and nothing changes and remains the same all at once and never and always. You read this and you think how profound. And you read this and think what utter nonsense. Or udder? And then think Derry, or maybe dairy and what is better almond, oat, or coconut milk? (Because we all know that soy is so yesterday.) You read this and you are just about to set it down for good because you picked up this collection to read about others writing about their reading of Stephen King, whom you presumably have read yourself and you are curious as to what others experience when they read him—or rather, when they read the words that he has written (and in this case, watched the words and actions of narratives inspired by him). You can no longer see your garden. You are locked in the basement next to a phone with a cut cord. There is a small window but the world outside is upside down and filled with red balloons. You reflexively check your pocket for your Google machine—you know, the one that confirms your bias within an echo-chamber of safe (to you) thinkers and writers. The same machine that simplifies complex issues and allows you to eschew ambiguity and uncertainty. Indeed, people are more likely to react emotionally to information that confirms their preconceived beliefs, while dismissing or

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ignoring contradictory evidence. This emotional polarization hinders our ability to tolerate ambiguity and paradox, as we tend to gravitate towards information that supports our existing worldview. Such thinking can result in digital tribes wherein the pressure to conform to group norms and maintain a consistent identity can discourage the exploration of paradoxes or the acceptance of ambiguity. At the same time, this Google machine that you long for while you ruminate upon ways to get to that window despite the horror you see on the other side (anything is better than where you are) offers you untold power and support like nothing prior. Indeed, you have time as you sit trapped and reflect upon your childhood, and you think to yourself what could I have done with such a tool. Imagine: a space for children on the margins, including those who are not popular or have experienced childhood trauma, to share their stories and perspectives. A space wherein they could express themselves, raise awareness about their experiences, and advocate for their rights in a public forum, thus amplifying their voices tenfold. This space could lead toward the building of support networks, outlets for creative selfexpression, avenues for awareness and advocacy, and access to information heretofore unheard of. Members of the Losers’ Club, the name affectionately given to the group of kids from King’s IT, almost inconceivably appear to be the only people in the town of Derry to look in the face of evil, the face of Pennywise, and accept its existence. And not only that, but they decide, against all rationality, to combat and attempt to quash said evil. Similarly, the kids from Stranger Things, when confronted with the reality of the Upside Down, along with a few key adults, look in the face of the impossible and accept its existence and decide to act. Not altogether similar, and on a smaller scale, upon being abducted by The Grabber, Finney Shaw accepts the impossible in that he carries on conversations with the dead via a phone with no connection. And this enables him to bring an end to the cycle of violence perpetrated by “The Grabber.” In all three, they choose to see and choose to fight. To summarize: the previously italicized sections of this article addressed some of the similarities between the three stories, even pointing out the positionality of the children within society as a determining factor in their being able not only to see but also to accept the existence of the ultimate evil. And here I am repeating with different words what has already been said. But what was said in italics was actually a collection of words (which were a collection of 1s and 0s) generated via a free trial of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool.

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4 You spit out your coffee—just like in the movies—and then wipe the spit from your screen (because you are reading an electronic version of this chapter), and think to yourself, while we have theoretically accepted the “death of the author,” this new world threatens the very death of not only “the writer” but of writing itself. I am right (write) with you. On a lark, early in the process of writing this essay, I inserted several inquiries and observations into the artificial intelligence generator (?) and the italicized passages are what I received. And much of it corroborates what I had expected to discover via old-fashion analysis. Or, as I started to consider further, was I simply starting with an assertion and then seeking evidence to support what I found? And if that was the case, then what, exactly, was I actually creating? To what discourse am I adding? I said to myself: if a computer program could do the work for me—with issues and errors, of course—then my response should not simply be: computer evil and writing dead. No, instead I thought to myself: challenge accepted. What can I create that AI cannot? Because “academic” speak—“academic” language—seems to be one of AI’s fortes. Indeed, you understand what I am talking about: you recall asking for a list of supporting documents for a research paper. You received a list of resources, with academic titles—including the ever-important colon—and citations. And as a good scholar, you search them out only to have the AI admit: I made those up. But what irks you more than the fact that the AI made these up is that it so readily created titles and citations, and even summaries, that on the surface level read clearly as the fruits of academic publishing. And at that point you begin to have an existential crisis that is paired with a sense of excitement and freedom you have not felt in a long long time. We can safely say (using a cliché) that AI is a gamechanger. And one of the myriad ways in which it has the potential to change the game is in the disruption of academic publications (not to mention how it will/is changing writing instruction, which is a subject for another day). Maybe, finally and at long last, we have come to the end of the exclusive “club” wherein the “game” is to publish in peer-reviewed journals read only by a select few who primarily seek to assure that one is playing the game as it has always been played. To me, that is Pennywise, the Demi-Gorgon, and The Grabber all rolled up into one. For them to succeed, the other characters in the narrative need to proceed in predictable, careful ways that React rather than Act; for them to succeed, characters in the narrative need to choose not to see until it is too late and then simply run screaming until they meet their end having

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asserted no agency and no creative thought. The ultimate evil before us is nothing less than a status quo that privileges and caters to just a few and seemingly encourages us to React rather than Act. One of the central ironies within academia is as follows: for all its talk of inclusiveness, the very nature of how we assign value within higher education rests within an institution’s ability to exclude people from attending; similarly, the higher the rejection rate for a journal, the larger number of people excluded from contributing to an academic journal, the “better” the publication is deemed to be. What is only available to a few must be good—must be what we strive for. But were The Losers’ Club, the kids from Stranger Things, and Finney Shaw to have lived lives wherein they accepted such a narrative, Evil would have prevailed. In each narrative, the heroes of the tale eschewed “exclusion” as a reason for assigning value. In each narrative, the heroes of the tale pushed against normative narratives and Acted in ways that invited disruption to the narratives purported by those in power. In each narrative, Evil was conquered simply by a group of individuals having the courage to acknowledge its existence by choosing to see and then choosing to Act. Now, while earlier I mentioned the author is dead, and I would refrain from speculation as to authorial intent, I will contradict myself and assert that King himself is not one to embrace academic elitism. King is not one to accept blindly the assignation of value that the literary world would have one embrace. He references as much in his acceptance speech upon being awarded the 2003 medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation: “I’m asking you, almost begging you, not to go back to the old way of doing things. There’s a great deal of good stuff out there and not all of it is being done by writers whose work is regularly reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. I believe the time comes when you must be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Herein, King problematizes the gate-keeping of the literary canon to not only expand beyond “dead white guys” but to include literature of all types. I will take it a step further, and assert that problematic in its own right is any theoretical movement that assumes correctness without discussion—that blinds itself to its own ambitions. Pennywise, The Demi-Gorgan, and “The Grabber” all proceed from a perspective of inevitability that relies upon a society that accepts blindness in order to uphold long held beliefs that such evil simply cannot and does not exist, as acceptance of such evil would call into question the power dynamics from which those in power benefit. And across the academic landscape, scholars and teachers and students are now faced with the inevitability of AI.

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5 Now you start to see the threads and at the center a terrible blindness that enables and creates fear, hypocrisy, and a world of victims. Consider the Losers’ Club’s true enemy was not the evil entity housed within the sewers of Derry—rather, what if the true enemy was a community too willing to accept blindness, a community too ready to accept clearly defined and clean definitions that support absolutes, and a community too insecure to allow belief in those absolutes to be challenged? An evil such as Pennywise only grows due to the inaction of the community. This is more complex in regards to the Upside Down, where the growth of that evil stems from hubris and the twisted need to weaponize that which we do not fully understand. Finally, the Grabber appears to have no knowledge and/or awareness of the supernatural; indeed, the phone calls from the “other-side” that empower Finney Shaw to fight back and stop the serial killer never enter into the Grabber’s reality as a possibility. However, what is a possibility, you imagine, is that somehow those two rescued cucumbers will come back into play as well as the animal that leaves hair behind. And you full well expect that anything AI has to offer on that front will be utter gibberish. To be safe you are choosing not to ask at the moment. Rather, you are looking for parallels. Analogies. Metaphors. Some sort of connection that you imagine must exist. But you are also worried that this entire experiment may lean too closely to the academic speak that was derided not too long ago. So you return to your garden and realize the broccoli has been harvested, the cucumbers are on the downside, and the tomatoes have arrived in such force that no amount of canning, eating, and sharing will do them justice. But you will try, because tomatoes are awesome. And time does not cease but it is most certainly relative. AI continues to evolve. Will we? Back inside, you grab an awesome tomato and take a bite. Juice (not spit) splatters on your screen, bubbling the very word you are currently reading. But you anticipate the word and read through the distortion. And then it comes to you: if AI truly does spell the end of writing—the end of creating—then it only happens because the community allows it to do so. Moreover, AI itself is not the evil entity but rather the staid foundation upon which it grows that struggles to imagine another way forward. Moreover, if AI is weaponized, it is only done so out of fear that is borne from the inability to accept ambiguity and the shortsightedness to accept absolutes. Finally, the only way to pick up a phone with a cut cord and speak to the dead is to live entirely in the present moment—forgetting what you know

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and believe, disallowing doubt and fear to rule, and simply accepting that there will always be hair on the chair. But what you will not accept are the academy’s outdated modes of value assignation that have, at their core, methods of exclusion. It is this impulse that currently wrings its hands over the inevitable birth of AI. In the same way the blind community allows Pennywise to grow and the same way bureaucracy weaponizes the Upside Down, the academy continues to look at the phone on the wall without the cord and simply cannot imagine how and/or why one would bother even answering it. And your fear, my fear, concerns the question of what will happen if we continue to do the same with the rise of AI within the rapidly evolving world of higher education. And maybe, just maybe, we can take a cue from the Losers’ Club, Winona Ryder and her kids, and Finney Shaw.

6 I mentioned in the opening paragraph that the world is changing. And that by the time you read this, the world will have changed even more. But what I did not mention explicitly is the fact that the presence of AI, for me, began simply as a curiosity. Then I went all Skynet and was lost in a rabbit hole for a time. Then I recalled myriad failed attempts to continue Skynet’s tale. And I thought: what an amazing opportunity and challenge! Even more so, for me, how we respond to the rise of AI means something akin to life and death. I do not mean to delve into hyperbole. As I near the end of the first full draft of this essay, writers and actors are on strike. And while the heart of the strike revolves around compensation, what is underneath the desire to re-address compensation is reconciling the role AI plays within the profession. And while academic publication is hardly the purview of Hollywood, there is an important connection. With each increase in technology, there always lies potential for danger and potential for loss. But there is a simultaneous opportunity for growth and the birth some “something” heretofore unconsidered. And while I will not venture into creative works writ large, I would argue that in the world of writing—in particular, writing about writing and what we call literary analysis—that within that very specific world, AI has the potential to blow up the system and allow a path for those willing to take on the inherent hypocrisy of an institution that claims inclusiveness while adhering to exclusive practices. And this is where the parallel exists. And, simultaneously, where the analogy starts to fall short, as all analogies inevitably do.

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A passive relationship with AI spells the end of everything. A passive relationship with AI is akin to the Losers’ Club siding with the community of Derry and deciding to become blind to the existence of Pennywise. A passive relationship with AI is akin to ignoring the encroachment of the Upside Down until it is too late, leaving one side indiscernible from the other. A passive relationship with AI is to look at the phone on the wall, see the cut cord, and simply remain in bed waiting for the worst to happen. Because learned behavior tells us that phones without cords do not work. To explicitly use hyperbole (which is not hyperbole): a passive relationship with AI spells the end of everything.

7 But you are not ready for the end. The animal who leaves hair behind sleeps at/on your feet. You dare not leave your chair despite the empty coffee. And the garden, while it beckons as always, will survive. You think of the time spent with the Losers’ Club, and the unfilmable ending of the novel itself, and you wonder what it takes to be able to be someone who sees beyond, someone who sees contradiction and ambiguity and simply continues. You think of your friend Eleven (not Seven), whose terrible power is at once beautiful and confusing and messy and inevitable. Then you decide to wake the animal only to find yourself back in that basement and you wonder: do I have the wherewithal to answer the phone? Even if it means pointing the lens of inquiry inward? With the lens of inquiry faced inward you find yourself within a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin titled “She Unnames Them.” Upon unnaming all the animals, Eve (she of Adam and Eve in the Garden) gives her name back as well. Then as she moves forward, she realizes she is at a loss for words and muses: “I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.” And this is what happens if we put the lens of inquiry inward. It is quite possible that is why the characters in the three stories referenced throughout this piece were able to accomplish mighty acts—they approach life with the lens faced inwards. Even though the writing style of King is more conventional, and the language he employs more direct, the sentiment from Le Guin’s Eve resonates here insofar as his characters (and those inspired by) decide to approach the

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Evil before them—not in a conventional way that accepts predetermined meanings and value, but rather in a careful and deliberate way that seeks understanding, and in their case, survival. They face the world before them, with the understanding that adaptable sight and complicated minds paired with slow, careful language enables them to challenge predetermined assignations of value and meaning. This radical restructuring of knowledge and communication, however, need not be driven out of fear but out of growth, possibility, and healing. Answers lie not in policing and issuing punishment in order to uphold a paradigm, and structure, that no longer suffices. That is exactly what the Losers’ Club understood. It is what brought them together and what made them mighty. Do not simply accept that we live in a world with evil and inequity and accept the roles one is given. Seek ways to upend the system. Even if twenty-three years later, it is back to where it is in a different way and you have to do it all over again. Because like Pennywise, who is never really gone, AI and, yes, learning and knowledge itself will never remain static (even while, stubbornly, so much of the academy does). In addition, the entities that seek to corrupt, create shortcuts, and weaponize the other—in the case of Stranger Things by opening the doorway to the Upside Down in an attempt to gain power on this side)—will continue to surface. And when they do, we must choose to see and then to act. You know how to act. While you were never in a play, you play roles every day. Your current role (of course) involves you heading to local hardware store that also sells Dog Bones. You purchase a bag—chicken and peanut butter flavored. You purchase that along with new gardening shears and a bag of cheap gloves. The sun yellow is already behind the trees green beneath the sky blue and clouds white. The author at this point is still living but dead to you. Or maybe that is something worth questioning? The animal that leaves hair behind has joined you as you play the role of Eve in your own garden (you left Adam and his father and their garden behind) as you help shape, form, and harvest; you end life and encourage life and consume life. You create, build, construct, and deconstruct. You breathe and grab a balloon and whistle far and wee both consider annotation (thank you ee cummings) and who owns a tomato? And that our passages are created from words—our words—and that what is artificial is anything but. And then the Falconer loses his ward only to begin again amen. As I said: you know how to act. And you know how to read. And you know how to write. But you have no idea how to confront an evil clown or navigate a mirror universe enveloped in Lovecraftian horror or how voices from the other side find their way through dead phonelines. But that is not

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the point. The point is to proceed, forward, with eyes open and minds ready to do what Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that writers do: we are going to say in words what cannot be said in words and we will do so with words. And you recall that she is, in fact, dead. And you are alive. But as the world changes, and this experiment finds its way to you, the jury is still out on the author you are reading, the author who is the “focus” of this collection, and pretty much everyone with the exception of you. Because remember, like the tomato, you are awesome. You exist as one but many on a vine until you are not. You are green yellow orange purple or red. You are tiny huge round and misshapen. You are harvested at your peak left on the vine to wilt and picked too early only to mature on newspaper in the garage. Possibilities abound. You need only to choose to see. Once you make that choice, you may find yourself wondering how one concludes an essay such as this. Maybe the author asks AI to write one but the growing power in the shadows does not yet have access to this particular essay. Maybe you already ended it in the paragraph above but the powers that be asked for something more traditional so this is your attempt. And maybe you toy with the idea of telling the reader what it is they just read—but that is something you tell your student not to do. To be honest, you are not sure. And if you were, then you missed the point. So you return to Le Guin and King and ask yourself: WWLKD? And then you just repeat what you said in your first …

“Conclusion” … remember, like the tomato, you are awesome. You exist as one but many on a vine until you are not. You are green yellow orange purple or red. You are tiny huge round and misshapen. You are harvested at your peak left on the vine to wilt and picked too early only to mature on newspaper in the garage. Possibilities abound. You need only choose to see.

Works Cited cummings, ee. “[in just].” The National Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation. org, May 1920. Derrickson, Scott, dir. The Black Phone. Universal Pictures, 2022. Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer. Stranger Things. Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment, 15 Jul. 2016.

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King, Stephen. IT. Scribner: 1986. Le Guin, Ursula K. “She Unnames Them,” The New Yorker, 21 Jan. 1985, p. 27. Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The National Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org, November 1920.

About the Author Michael A. Perry is a Professor of English at Rockford University in Illinois. He has presented papers connecting Stephen King to Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce.

13. “the tongueless voice of the temple whispered”1: Delirious Voicesin Rose Madder Theresa Mae Thompson

Abstract: Unfortunately, King’s depiction of women’s experiences of domestic violence, even of the caliber depicted in Rose Madder (1995), is not just fiction. Women’s voices have often been violently silenced. Rosie/ Rose’s ability to escape domestic violence centers around the married woman’s legal ability to voice dissent with her husband. Rose Madder’s exploration of the struggle regarding whose voice can legally define the parameters of “normal” marital relations recalls Gayatri Spivak’s dilemma of the abused subaltern woman. The subaltern woman was subject to systems wherein her voice did not have authority before the law. What this essay explores, then, is how voice functions as a trope to reinforce entrapment narratives in Rose Madder. Keywords: New Historicism, domestic violence, entrapment, subaltern

“The whole world is waking up, she thought. It isn’t just me”2 From Carrie (1974) to the present, Stephen King’s fiction has explored and exploited—directly and allusively—dysfunctional family dynamics. Why not? Where better to situate his “top ten” fear “bears” than in the domestic space where one should feel safe (King, Horror Writer 193)? It would be hard for King to ignore issues of domestic violence since, as Carol A. Senf argues, of the “twenty-nine novels” King had published prior to 1998 “seven feature women (or girl) protagonists” (91). Unfortunately, King’s depiction of 1 Rose Madder 323. 2 Ibid. 28, author’s emphasis.

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch13

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women’s experiences of domestic violence, even of the caliber depicted in Rose Madder (1995), is not just fiction. According to decades of research by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), the American family is a primary site for “physical violence, sexual violence, threats, economic, and emotional / psychological” horrors, mostly perpetrated against women. On average ten million adults every year in the USA experience domestic violence at the hands of an intimate partner, and one in four women compared to one in seven men will be “victims of severe physical violence (e.g. beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime” (NCADV). As of July, there were already 350 gun-related domestic violence fatalities in 2023. Amy Canfield points out that the publication of Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder coincided “with increased levels of reported domestic abuse as well as the nation’s growing counterattack against feminism” (393). The increase in “reported domestic abuse,” however, was not necessarily because more domestic violence occurred. That increase in reported abuse reflects multiple societal changes, but one thing is clear: more victims were willing to report domestic abuse in the 1990s. That willingness to report abuse decreased the number of women and men murdered by intimate partners. According to Rennison’s Bureau of Justice report, between 1976 and 1993—key years in the Rose Madder timeline—approximately 1600 women per year and 1400 men per year were murdered by intimate partners. However, between 1993 and 1998, the number of deaths related to intimate partner domestic violence dramatically decreased: “Intimate partners committed fewer murders in each of the 3 years 1996, 1997, and 1998 than in any other year since 1976” (Rennison). Reporting domestic abuse and violence saved lives that might otherwise have been lost. So, what changed for women in the early 1990s? Two watershed moments, one in 1991 and one in 1993, provide a partial answer: Anita Hill publicly voiced her experience of Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment and a jury found O. J. Simpson not guilty of the violent murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.3 3 The significance of the O. J. Simpson murder trial’s effect on domestic violence awareness cannot be overstated. The morning after O. J. Simpson’s death The New York Times published this article: “O. J. Simpson Trial Served as a Landmark Moment for Domestic Violence Awareness” (April 4, 2024). The article asserts that the “dramatic trial, which prompted national conversations about race, celebrity, policing and discrimination, also served as a landmark moment in America’s evolving understanding of domestic violence. Media coverage of domestic abuse surged afterward, and the fervent attention encouraged many abuse survivors to reach out for help, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.”

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Hill’s testimony on national television about what was at that time a virtually unspeakable topic, sexual harassment in the workplace, was significant. That Nicole Brown Simpson did not press charges against her husband after making a 911 call indicating her husband posed a clear and present danger to her life was significant. Both women’s voices impacted public awareness, even though neither voice ultimately mattered. Gayatri Spivak, in her (in)famous 1980s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” argued that the subaltern woman could not speak. Shetty and Bellamy contend, however, that Spivak’s answer was not a simplistic no. Of course, a woman can speak about sexual and domestic violence but Spivak held that “no discursive space can emerge from which [a subjugated woman] could formulate an ‘utterance’” that would be legally recognized (Shetty and Bellamy 25). In law, the authority of the speaker’s voice matters. In the end, Anita Hill’s testimony proved toothless and Nicole Brown Simpson’s 911 tape was silenced entirely. As Michael Blouin demonstrates, Rose Madder exposes an identity crisis in contemporary society. Blouin effectively argues that King’s “tale of female liberation” ends in failure (122) because Rosie does not establish an identity free of the “totalising logic of human capital” that dominated the “roaring nineties” (135). In the end, she “submits all facets of her life to a cost/benefit analysis” (135). Norman Daniels usually identifies his wife as Rose. After she leaves him, he thinks of her as “Raaamblin’ Rose,” someone he “can cling to” (RM 195, author’s emphasis). Throughout the text, this song competes with “Carole King’s voice” because the protagonist asserts “I’m really Rosie” (47, author’s emphasis). For clarity, I use Rose when discussing her as Norman’s wife and Rosie in other situations, except when (which happens) the two identities cannot be distinguished. However, the demanding question Rose Madder confronts predates modern concepts of identity. Rosie/Rose’s problem centers around a woman’s legal ability to dissent. The struggle between whose voice can legally disagree with prevailing opinions regarding “normal” sexual relations recalls Spivak’s dilemma of the abused subaltern woman. The subaltern woman, Spivak argued, is subject to systems wherein her voice was not part of the legal official record and therefore does not (cannot) have authority. This essay does not explore whether Rosie gains a singular voice or a unique identity. Neither is possible. What I explore instead is how voice functions as a trope to reveal and reinforce entrapment narratives in Rose Madder.

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“the days when folks knew how to mind their own business were apparently over”4 Both the Anita Hill hearings and the O. J. Simpson trial demonstrated that what was once considered unspeakable could gain a public voice. Although I do not treat Insomnia here, I find it noteworthy that this 1994 publication centers around a man’s waking-nightmares revealing the horrors that occur behind the closed doors of his neighbors. In 1991, then-Senator Joe Biden was head of the US Senate judiciary committee that oversaw the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. One woman’s voice impacted Biden’s decision to hold a public hearing: the voice of Nina Totenberg, who reported Anita Hill’s allegations of Thomas’s sexual harassment. The Senate committee allowed Hill’s voice to be heard publicly. She spoke about her personal experience of sexual harassment before an all-male committee on national television. Sukari Hardnett, a third woman who spoke out, was not given a public hearing. Hardnett had “worked for Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission”; she submitted a sworn affidavit in 1991 affirming she witnessed “young, black women in particular … being inspected and auditioned as a female” by Thomas and others (Hardnett). Biden and the Senate committee suppressed Hardnett’s affidavit and interrogated Hill before they rendered their unanimous decision to appoint Thomas to the Supreme Court. The decision to dismiss Hill’s testimonies and support Thomas was bipartisan: the Democrat Biden urged the Senate committee not to delay its vote for Thomas and the Republican President George Bush, Sr. publicly proclaimed his “total confidence” in Thomas (Glass). Thomas took a seat on the court that would pass judgment on subsequent cases regarding violence against women. Twenty-seven years later, Christine Blasey Ford would publicly testify during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings about her experience of young Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault. The media recalled Hill’s testimony and Hardnett’s 1991 affidavit finally surfaced in the media. Neither influenced the outcome. Throughout the Kavanaugh hearings men and women excused Kavanaugh’s behavior with “boys will be boys” logic, dismissing Ford’s experience as that of a hysterical teenage girl. Yet again a man accused of sexual predation took a seat on the Supreme Court. The second watershed case in the early 1990s was the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1993. As Hanna points out, “One of the defining moments in the 4 Ibid. 20.

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O. J. Simpson murder trial came when the prosecution introduced the 911 tape from October 1993 that vividly illustrated prior abuse in the Simpson marriage” (1850). Although the “tape would have been particularly damaging” had it been accompanied by Simpson’s arrest and indictment for spousal abuse, it was not permitted as evidence of prior violence. Nicole Brown Simpson had refused to press charges: her voice was not part of any prior legal indictment. Without the 911 tape, prior acts lacked legal authority. O. J. was acquitted. Narrative voyeurism, a mainstay of Gothic horror like Rose Madder, sells books, and the Simpson case revealed a public willingness not only to endure the intimate details of domestic violence but to wallow vicariously in graphically salacious details through forty-one days of witness testimony. Like Nicole Brown Simpson’s domestic nightmare, Rosie’s intimately brutal marital history provides an intense voyeuristic experience for King’s readers. Perhaps as a consequence of its extreme sexual violence, Rose Madder remains a poor candidate for any movie adaptation, in spite of King’s own view that Rose Madder “would’ve made a great movie” (Tuna para. 2). King’s fiction of the early and mid-1990s reflects and refracts the Thomas Clarence appointment hearings and the O. J. Simpson murder trial. In 1992, a year after Anita Hill’s testimony, King published Gerald’s Game, in which Jessie must free herself from the handcuffs—part of her husband’s sadistic sexual game—that bind her to the conjugal bed. She is the only person willing and able to free herself from bondage. In Dolores Claiborne, also published in 1992, Dolores—accused of murder—narrates a first-person tale of physical brutality and incestuous abuse. Again, she alone can free herself and her daughter from marital bondage. According to Senf, both Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne have a female protagonist who discovers quite “literally her own narrative voice” (94). Canfield states that Rose Madder, like Dolores Claiborne, is “written from a female’s point of view,”5 but that is not quite accurate (392). King does not allow Rosie to use her own tongue in a first-person narrative. Instead, the third-person narrative and free indirect discourse offer mediated insights into her thoughts and experiences. Like a refracted transcript of a criminal trial, the narrative provides readers with the perspective of the female protagonist and the perspective of the sadistic husband who hunts his Ramblin’ Rose. Like a defense attorney, it offers justif ications for Norman’s “familiar 5 Heidi Strengell makes the same assertion about narrative point of view in Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism, p. 48.

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rage” (RM 262). Norman is the product of domestic violence and sexual abuse. His father, “if you were lucky and he was drunk,” would send “a hand creeping in between [Norman’s] legs” (262). This personal family history indicates that Rose Madder’s slaughter of Norman will not free Rosie from the monster that haunts the text: the patriarchal structure of family in which a male progenitor wields unquestioned authority over women and children.

“Anywhere he isn’t, the voice returned”6 King’s narrative reinforces the patriarchal entrapment Rosie seeks to escape: who controls what the narrative reveals. His use of indirect discourse allows him to violate Rosie’s privacy. The voice trope develops as voices other than Norman’s or Rosie’s become more present in their thoughts. Rosie disregards an internalized voice, Ms. Practical-Sensible, when she decides to leave Norman. This voice screams at her not to take the ATM card. This voice acts like that of the Chorus in some Greek tragedy. It speaks in situations in which Rosie takes actions that disregard the common sense of her patriarchal society. Rosie, in her first act of rebellion against Norman’s authority as a patriarch, takes the ATM card. She does this not just for money but primarily to silence “the voice of Ms. Practical-Sensible” (RM 27). Of course, that voice finds it difficult to remain silent. When Rosie investigates the painting of Rose Madder seeking answers for its mystical properties, “Practical-Sensible … was moaning. Please don’t do this, please leave well enough alone. Except that was ridiculous advice, when you thought about it; if she had followed it the first time … she would still be living with Norman. Or dying with him” (248, author’s emphasis). When she ignores “the voice of Practical-Sensible,” she discovers that the commonsense world and her experiences may be intricately intwined but they are not identical (249). She also discovers crickets, symbols of good fortune. Rose Madder begins with Norman beating Rose to miscarry nine years before she takes that ATM card. After five years of marital rape Rose becomes pregnant—seemingly without Norman’s consent. When he beats her into a miscarriage, readers know Rose should tell medical and legal authorities what has happened. But Norman provides the only report that will enter into any legal record and uses Rose’s voice to deliver his tale of “an accident” (RM 11). The explicitly detailed “Prologue: Sinister Kisses” reveals what Rose’s 6 Rose Madder 23, author’s emphasis.

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flesh knows already: “Her very blood has taken up for her husband’s side of it” (9). Before she takes the ATM card, Rose listens to Ms. Practical-Sensible and survives a total of “fourteen years of that. A hundred and sixty-eight months of it, beginning with his yanking her by the hair and biting her shoulder for slamming a door on their wedding night” (23). We should not be surprised that she takes the card to spite that voice. Practical-Sensible has kept Rose from leaving any legal crumbs to follow. No record of abuse exists. Even though Rose was “cornholed with the handle of a tennis racket” until her mind “began to slip a little” (218), she did not call 911 or bring any legal charges. Rose’s silence about the cause of the miscarriage broaches a question that haunted the Simpson trial: why didn’t Nicole press charges after calling 911? King’s third-person narrative directly answers the question of what motivates Rosie to leave Norman: “What woke her up was a single drop of blood, no larger than a dime” (RM 18). However, it does not directly address the question as to why the now “woke” Rosie does not generate any legal record of the abuse. In a narrative that otherwise explicitly details every vile and disgusting aspect of marital rape and violence, readers must infer why Rosie remains silent. Fear, while genuine, is only part of the reason. I infer that it was not just a reasonable fear of Norman’s vengeance but mortification that controlled Rose’s voice and continued to control Rosie’s voice. King’s predominantly female readership would understand the multiple levels of mortification that influenced this silence. Mortification has come to mean humiliation, but the obsolete meaning refers to a “Deadening or destruction of vital or active qualities … a state of torpor and insensibility preceding death” (“Mortification”). After a miscarriage in which even her own flesh is made to speak using Norman’s voice, the narrative states that “Rose McClendon Daniels slept within her husband’s madness for nine more years” (13). Her flesh has been mortified into submission. King’s female readership would recognize both types of mortification, as Mary E. Atkins affirms in her review for “the longest surviving feminist newspaper in the United States … run by a collective where all decisions are made by consensus markets” (Atkins 34). According to Atkins, Rose Madder provides “a realistic nightmare … true to what many women live through” (34). The narrative provides detailed depictions of the violence women like Nicole Brown Simpson endure: “On the [911] tape, Ms. Simpson’s terrified voice begs the operator to send the police, as Mr. Simpson had just smashed the door. She says she fears that he will ‘beat the shit’ out of her. O. J. Simpson is heard screaming in the background—threatening her, taunting her” (Hanna

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1850). In spite of—or perhaps because of—this evidence of a six-foot one inch, 220-pound former football star physically threatening his five-foot five-inch wife, Nicole did not press charges. Worse, according to much public opinion, then and after, she stayed in the marriage until she was murdered. Rose Daniels, like Nicole Brown Simpson, fears further violence if she calls the police and even worse mortification. So, she remains silent even if silence indicates consent. The third-person narrative and indirect discourse reveal Rosie’s mortification but do not respect it. A first-person narrative would never speak the unspeakable details that cause Rosie’s mortification. Mortification itself makes it impossible for Rosie to speak openly the way Dolores Claiborne speaks. Worse, like Dolores, Rosie would be forced to speak to a policeman. Between 1987 and 2007 the “percent of female off icers in local police departments increased steadily … from 7.6% in 1987 to nearly 12% in 2007” (Langton 3). This statistic includes major US cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles, indicating that Rosie’s chance of speaking to a female officer, while becoming increasingly possible, was in practice not at all probable. Rosie cannot tell Norman’s fraternal “brothers” (RM 286, author’s emphasis) that “six months after her miscarriage” he “anally raped her” using the tennis racket he usually used to spank her (207). This humiliating act of mortification she will not even tell Bill, her future husband. It is something “she would take to her grave” rather than speak to any man (279, author’s emphasis). Cops scare Rosie. She worries that Hale, an honest male detective, “would remind her this was a family thing” and “she should keep her mouth shut” (511). Instead, Hale says, “You know a lot about cops … but most of what you know is wrong” (512). That she remains silent announces the reality of what the flesh knows that language cannot express.

“Long fucking arm of the law, coming for you.”7 King does not resist representing what Rosie’s flesh experienced. Her real experience is conf ined within King’s “objective” third-person narrative and intrusive indirect discourse. Textual narrative in Rose Madder reinforces the entrapment of patriarchal social narratives of the 1990s. In 1993, legal precedence constrained the criminal court’s refusal to play Nicole Brown Simpson’s 911 tape at her murder trial because she never 7 Ibid. 133.

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f iled criminal charges. In 1991 the Senate committee that adjudicated Anita Hill’s hearing permitted the Thomas appointment because nothing in the legal archives provided precedence for what they heard; Hill had f iled no legal charges against Thomas prior to the hearing. In 2018, twenty-f ive years later, nothing had changed. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of assault came without previous legal documentation and could be justif iably disregarded. The dominant logic of the legal system is founded in the patriarchal social narrative refracted in the horror of Rose Madder. Western patriarchy has its roots in the historical record, in the legal archives and their intricate connection to the domestic space. According to Jacques Derrida, “Archive” refers to the arkhe in the nomological8 sense, to the arkhe of the commandment. As is the case for the Latin archivum or archium … the meaning of “archive,” its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signif ied political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house (private house, family house, or employee’s house), that off icial documents are f iled. The archons are f irst of all the documents’ guardians. … It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the non-secret. (10)

In Rose Madder, Rose McClendon experienced domiciliation (legal settlement) in Norman’s house by virtue of a marriage license and wedding vows in which, according to Norman, she “promised to love, honor, and obey” him as her husband (RM 92, author’s emphasis). The license and the vows, the state and the church, had the power to transform Rose McClendon, a possession of her parents, into Rose Daniels, a possession of her husband. According to this narrative, Rose does not “possess the right to make or to 8 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defines nomological as “Relating to, concerned with, or designating laws, esp. (Philosophy) ones which are not logical necessities.” All definitions, unless otherwise indicated, are from the OED online.

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represent the law” as mandated by Norman Daniels in his house (Derrida 10). Acts of intimate partner violence that occur against any person inside the home—including torture, rape, and murder—are legitimated (if not legal). They are subject solely to the authority of the patriarch, the archon. This ancient mandate of patriarchy maintains that “intimate” domestic acts remain private if not secret, especially if they are violent. This unwritten law operated throughout “most of the 1900s” when “domestic violence was acknowledged but treated as a private family matter” (Johnson 60). This unwritten law enables Norman’s mortification of Rose’s flesh, his right to subjugate her physical body to his authority. As the voice trope reveals, Rose has little choice but to agree with Norman’s authority: in his house his voice is the law. As previously discussed, the central scene of “this institutional passage from the private to the public,” of how Norman as archon determines what goes in the legal record, occurs in the “Prologue: Sinister Kisses.” It explains why, when Norman calls the police, Rose thinks the action is nonsensical because “he is the police” (RM 5, author’s emphasis). As archon, he determines the official story of the “accident,” making sure it will “come out” of Rose’s mouth in accord with the wishes of not just Norman but God: “I didn’t have anything to do with it. And that’s the way it better come out when you talk to them. So, help you god.’ So help me God, she thinks” (12, author’s emphasis). God’s archon has spoken and “If you mind [him], everything will be f ine” (12). Norman alone constructs the legal precedence over which he will sit in judgment. He also makes it clear that Rose can “take it to the bank” that she will “be f ine” and “have another baby” but only if and when he permits it. Even as Rose thinks “I can have another baby … and take it beyond his reach,” her voice and body remain under house arrest until “the idea of leaving him … slips away” (12, author’s emphasis). Her domiciliation seems complete. I infer from the modification of Norman’s “So help you God” into “So help me God” that if there is a god, that god’s voice has been (legally) lodged in Norman’s mouth. Rose’s miscarriage happens in 1985. In 1994 Rosie wakes up to her real situation. She can only take it to the bank that everything will be fine when she literally takes the bank represented by “the bright green Merchant’s Bank ATM card” (RM 27). Norman’s bankcard, as Blouin contends, “defines his status” (125). Financial control embodies part of the power the husband’s voice wields in American society. Rosie can tell herself “it was her card, too” (27) and Anna Stevenson can agree the card represents her “money as well as his” (80), but the sociohistorical narrative does not support their perception.

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“but the mask wouldn’t budge”9 Even though Norman’s brutality aborts a fetus not a child, it’s a child that haunts the narrative of Rose Madder. When Rosie leaves Norman she converts her polyvocal consciousness into a paying profession: “Rosie … was stunned to temporary silence when [Lefferts] cleared his throat and offered her a job” making audio books (RM 124). Rosie reads primarily Gothic romances that require she speak using at-risk women’s voices and the voices of the men who put them at risk. Although Rosie cannot narrate her own trauma, she enacts the distressed words of Gothic fiction better than other voice actors. At first she manages this by thinking about “Rose Madder,” the painting she purchased with her wedding ring in a pawnshop. She specifically envisions “the gold circlet the woman in the picture wore on her upper right arm” (RM 176). Ironically the circlet on the woman— “And she was a woman … Not a lady, and most certainly not a gal”—is a much heavier, larger and more expensive version of the cheap wedding ring Norman gave Rose (178, author’s emphasis). Her worthless wedding ring symbolizes the domiciliation experienced in Norman’s house, but Rose Madder’s solid gold circlet symbolizes the complete tapestry of the family drama that plays out as a result of the miscarriage. The painting and its attendant supernatural events connected to that aborted fetus reinforce narratives of domiciliation that entrap Rosie from beginning to end. While much can be said about these supernatural events, only two key elements underscore how the voice trope reinforces the historical and textual narratives of this entrapment. First, when Norman causes Rose’s miscarriage, he comes toward her with his head lowered and his hands hanging at his sides and the long muscles in his thighs flexing. Before the kids called people like him fuzz they had another word for them, and that’s the word that comes to her now as he crosses the room with his head down and his hands swinging at the ends of his arms like meat pendulums, because that’s what he looks like—a bull. (RM 7, emphasis mine)

Barbara Walker points out that “Nearly every god of the ancient world was incarnate sooner or later in a bull” (125). Norman is equated with the bull image fifty-two times in Rose Madder—many of those references invoke ancient myths regarding masculine virility. Rosie’s first descent into the 9

RM 552.

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depths of the Rose Madder painting leads her into the “Temple of the Bull,” a building with “curiously twisted perspectives,” a labyrinth (RM 317). The Temple of the Bull replicates the labyrinthine patriarchal narratives that enforce Rose Daniels’s domiciliation and legitimates Norman’s unquestioned mortification of her body. However, the word labyrinth means “‘House of the Double Ax,’ from labrys, the ceremonial ax used to sacrifice bulls to the Cretan Moon-goddess” (Walker 523). The Minotaur symbolizes “the worship of the bull … The beast who embodied the virile principle” (Grant 340). As in the myth of Daedalus, this temple contains a bull with characteristics remarkably similar to Norman’s. Everything about the one-eyed bull Rosie evades in this section resonates with Norman’s authority as an archon of patriarchal law. Rose Madder tells Rosie again and again to “bring me my baby” (RM 321). In the labyrinth, Rosie finds a lost baby she calls Caroline and carries the “child in her arms” up the stairs and out of the labyrinth (350). Norman has acted as if he is a god who can control life and death. He has brought death to the baby Rosie brings to Rose Madder. Although the final section of Rose Madder will replace that lost baby with Pamela Gertrude, who “weighs in at eight pounds, nine ounces” (RM 631), Norman’s destructive arrogance cannot go without penalty. Rose Madder, however, does not provide justice. She provides poena, the ancient Greek concept of punishment and retribution played out in fertility myths involving the sacrifice of the bull. On this first descent into the Temple of the Bull Rosie journeys naked, leaving pomegranate seeds—a symbol of both fertility and death—to guide her out of the labyrinth. Not surprisingly, since the labyrinth is an archival space of sorts, she passes eidolons10 of the men whose voices have violated her. She also encounters a teenage revenant of Norman, who she thinks of as “the Ghost of Beatings Yet to Come” (RM 319). The bull in this labyrinth is blind and one-eyed. Wendy Yarrow (a woman Norman raped and murdered) calls it Erinyes (345), conflating this bull with the three women who administer punishments for family crimes, as determined by the “infernal judges” of Hades (Rose 83). As with many of the events connected to the painting, the narrative distorts and refracts the facts. While Norman sees Rosie as violating their marriage contract, it is Norman who committed infanticide. Interestingly enough, although not surprising, “prophets of the kings of Israel put on bull masks to represent the king while casting spells for his victory over his enemies” (Walker 126). Masks have long served as a way for gods to possess humans. Norman—who stole a Ferdinand-the-Bull mask 10 Insubstantial phantoms that, according to Greek mythology, reside in Hades.

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to conceal his identity—has been killing everyone in his path like a mad bull. Norman enters into conversations with the voice of the mask until it dominates his thoughts. Even when the mask is not covering his face, the bull god controls Norman as “the actual skip in his thoughts” indicates (RM 546). When Norman and the bull arrive at Rosie’s tiny apartment, she dislocates “their” jaw and flees into the Rose Madder painting, dragging Bill Steiner with her. What Norman finds inside the apartment is “moonlight spilling out of a second-floor closet”: something the internalized patriarchal voice of Norman’s “poor excuse for a father” and the other voices inside his head cannot explain (550). However, once Norman steps inside the painting, he cannot remove the mask of the bull and its voice is no longer outside but is inside his head. The bull god has possessed him. Both Rosie (who wears Rose Madder’s chiton) and Norman (who wears the bull mask) have historical roles to play. What is relevant about this first katabasis is that Rosie feels and relishes a righteous anger—an anger that lets her shed a “lifetime of self-training” and release the “piercing playground yell” that as a girl made her “feel” like a superhero (RM 339, author’s emphasis). She relishes the anger and the freedom to be herself that accompanies it. However, the second element that underscores how the voice trope reinforces historical and textual narratives of entrapment connect to anger. Rose Madder is “the mirror image” of Rosie (RM 309). This madder Rose, as discussed, was obsessed over the loss of a baby (RM 342). Both indicate that Rose Madder embodies nine years of grief and anger Rose Daniel repressed after the miscarriage. But long after Norman has been sacrificed, that voice still speaks “in a voice so deadly clear” that “Rosie Steiner” momentarily believes “that Rose Madder is in this room with her” (630–31). This mad Rose tells her to “keep her temper” and “remember the tree” (631, author’s emphasis). Why should Rosie do either? The answer, I believe, lies in the connection between Rosie and the “Vulpus fulva—the red fox,” a vixen she first sees on her picnic with Bill (RM 412). Rosie associates the vixen to distemper, rabies, because Bill tells her that “a vixen can carry rabies a long time, and they keep getting worse” (415, my emphasis). I can infer that Rosie, like a vixen, carries repressed anger like a hidden form of distemper. Anger over her domiciliation and the unchecked authority of Norman as an archon might prevent her finding lasting happiness in her second marriage. She worries that her (dis)temper will eventually overpower her ability to enjoy a normal life. She “begins to look obsessively at her hands and her arms and her face … but mostly at her hands, because that is where it will start” (634). To control this anger over her previous marriage might put “the new one … in danger” (639). She plants the last pomegranate

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seed taken from the painting “at the base of the fallen tree” where she first saw the vixen and her kits (639). In Christian art, the pomegranate tree symbolizes resurrection. She prays, according to King’s indirect discourse, that planting this seed and throwing out “the last part of her old life” will help her find “her way back to what she hopes is her life” (641). Resurrection refers to revitalization, the miraculous restoration of the dead. Norman mortified Rose’s body; he caused her insufferable pain that deadened her flesh. Although the narrative replaces Norman’s domestic violence with a kinder, gentler version of domiciliation, this is not resurrection. Rosie marries Bill “in a civil ceremony … ten days after Rosie’s decree of nonresponsive divorce from Norman Daniels becomes final” (RM 630). This replacement marriage provides no resurrection, no new life for Rosie. Rosie returns to marriage and gives birth, but she is reborn into the same state of domiciliation. After she plants her seed, she “pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground” (639). Even though the third-person narrative reveals her “rages have departed” (641), her new life simply revises her old life. She remains entrenched in the narrative of domesticity more strongly than before. She now has no “reason” to escape her captivity.

Works Cited Atkins, Mary E. “Books About Partner Abuse Enter Mainstream Fiction.” Off Our Backs: A Women’s News Journal, vol. 31, no. 11, December 2001, pp. 34–36. Blouin, Michael J. Stephen King and American Politics. U of Wales P, 2021. Canfield, Amy. “Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder: A Literary Backlash against Domestic Violence.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 30, issue 4, December 2007, pp. 391–400. Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 9–63. Glass, Andrew. “President Bush Defends Clarence Thomas.” Politico, 9 Oct. 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/president-bush-defends-clarence​ -thomas-oct-9-1991-243573 Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. Mentor Books of the New American Library, 1962. Hanna, Cheryl. “No Right to Choose: Mandated Victim Participation in Domestic Violence Prosecutions.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 109, no. 8, Jun. 1996, pp. 1849–1910.

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Hardnett, Sukari. “Anita Hill Testimony: The Witness Not Called.” All Things Considered Interview conducted by Michael Martin, NPR, 23 Sept. 2018, https:// www.npr.org/2018/09/23/650956623/anita-hill-testimony-the-witness-not-called Johnson, Richard. “Changing Attitudes about Domestic Violence.” Law and Order, vol. 50, no. 4, April 2002, pp. 60–62, 64, 65. King, Stephen. “The Horror Writer Market and the Ten Bears (1973).” Reprinted in Legends of Literature: The Best Articles, Interviews, and Essays from the Archives of Writer’s Digest Magazine, edited by Philip Sexton, Writer’s Digest Books, 2007, pp. 192–203. King, Stephen. Rose Madder (RM). Pocket Books, 1995 (reprint in 2016). Langton, Lynn. BSJ Statistician. “Women in Law Enforcement, 1987—2008.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime Data Brief, US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, June 2010, https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/ publications/women-law-enforcement-1987-2008, pp. 1–4. Lant, Kathleen Margaret, and Theresa Thompson. Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Lant and Theresa Thompson, Greenwood Press, 1998. “Mortification.” Oxford English Dictionary online. Revised 2002. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), ncadv.org. Perron, Bernard. “Survival Terror.” Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, edited by Mark J. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2012, pp. 10–32. Rennison, Callie Marie. “Intimate Partner Violence, 1993–2001.” Bureau of Justice Statistics: Crime Data Brief, February 2003, https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/ intimate-partner-violence-1993-2001 Rose, H. J. A Handbook of Greek Mythology. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1959. Senf, Carol A. “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Lant and Theresa Thompson, Greenwood Press, 1998. 907–25. Shetty, Sandhya and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy. “Review: Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever.” Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring, 2000, pp. 25–48. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Strengell, Heidi. “King, His World, and Its Characters.” In Critical Insights: Stephen King, reprinted from Dissecting Stephen King, Salem Press, 2010, pp. 142–56. Thompson, Theresa. “Rituals of Male Violence: Unlocking the (Fe)Male Self in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Lant and Theresa Thompson, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 47–58.

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“Transitional Housing Programs and Empowering Survivors of Domestic Violence.” The United States Department of Justice Archives, Office of Violence Against Women, 1 Nov. 2019, https://www.justice.gov/archives/ovw/blog/ transitional-housing-programs-and-empowering-survivors-domestic-violence. Tuna, Thomas. “Stephen King: Rose Madder Would Make a Great Movie.” Horror News Network, 12 Oct. 2022. Walker, Barbara G. The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper Collins Publishers, 1983.

About the Author Theresa Mae Thompson, PhD, is Professor of Literature at Valdosta State University. Her publications include the introduction to Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, co-edited with Margaret Lant, and “Chapter 4: Rituals of Male Violence: Unlocking the (Fe)Male Self in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne” included in that collection.

14. A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King Greg Littmann

Abstract: Seminal horror author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) offers an account of the requirements for good “weird” fiction. Maintenance of “weird” atmosphere is essential for Lovecraft, to the point that no elements that might distract from this, like comedy or romance, are permissible. King’s work satisfies many of Lovecraft’s requirements: Lovecraft would approve of the unnatural feel of supernatural events, of the mysterious nature of the supernatural, and of the realistic background against which King depicts supernatural wonders. On the other hand, Lovecraft would disapprove of the way that King tends to make his characters, rather than the supernatural elements themselves, the focus of the story. He’d also disapprove of King’s tendency to depict morality as being objective, and the belief of his characters in their own divine support. Keywords: H. P. Lovecraft, cosmic fear, morality, realism, the unnatural

American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is unique among philosophers of art because of the popularity and influence of his fiction. He was a pioneer in the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and his works remain popular almost a century after his death. Other artists have used his work as the basis for stories, novels, games, and films. Recent popular examples include the computer game The Sinking City (2021), the film Color Out of Space (2019), and the HBO TV series Lovecraft Country (2020). From 1975 until 2015, the World Fantasy Award was a bust of Lovecraft. Stephen King writes: “H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre” (On Writing 181). Commenting on Lovecraft’s legacy, King states, “It is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since” (Danse 90). Regarding Lovecraft’s influence on his own work, King states:

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch14

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“Lovecraft … opened the way for me” (90). This essay asks the question of how well King’s work affirms Lovecraft’s theories of the requirements for good art.

The Supremacy of Weird Fiction Lovecraft believed that the best sort of fiction is what he calls “weird fiction,” which is fiction in which there is a sense that natural law has been violated.1 This type of fiction doesn’t require supernatural elements. King’s science fiction novel The Tommyknockers (1987) is weird fiction because alien technology does things that look impossible from our perspective, like transforming humans into aliens. For Lovecraft, weird fiction is the best type of fiction because the nature of the universe is a more awesome theme than anything concerning humans. Lovecraft dismisses art that focuses on human relationships as requiring a “primitive myopia which magnifies the Earth and ignores the background” (CE Vol. II 53).2 Lovecraft explains that anyone who doesn’t like weird literature must lack “a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life” (Supernatural 12). The appeal of the weird tale, he writes, “must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness” (12). King agrees that appreciating imaginative fiction may require more imagination than many people possess. He writes, “The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in [Lovecraft’s god] Nyarlathotep” (Danse 128). If the best art must be weird art, that rules out fiction dealing only with humans interacting with humans, such as Misery (1987) and Mr. Mercedes (2014), or about humans interacting with animals, such as Cujo (1981). Of King’s sixty-five novels, about fifty-two can be classified as “weird,” along with many of his shorter works.3 1 For more on the definition of “weird fiction,” see Littmann (2018). 2 This essay will be citing non-fiction works by Lovecraft from his Collected Essays (hereafter marked as CE). 3 I would categorize King’s novels (necessarily simplistically) as horror, weird, and weird horror as follows. Horror: Cujo, Gerald’s Game, Misery, Rage, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Long Walk. Weird: 11/22/63, Billy Summers, Blaze, Delores Claiborne, Elevation, Fairy Tale, Gwendy’s Final Task, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower, The Dead Zone, The Drawing of the Three, The Eyes of

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Lovecraft is explicit that good science fiction must be weird fiction. In all science fiction, the mood is to be cultivated through a “violation of what we know as natural law” (CE Vol. II 178). Science fiction novels Carrie (1974), The Tommyknockers (1987), and The Institute (2019) would be legitimate according to Lovecraft because they are weird fiction. On the other hand, science fiction novels The Long Walk (1979) and The Running Man (1987) would be illegitimate because they are not weird.

Horror Art and Weird Art Lovecraft argued that the best horror art, in particular, must be weird art. He asserts, “The essence of the horrible is the unnatural” (CE Vol. V 48, author’s emphasis).4 The most powerful horror fiction, in his view, relies on an emotion he calls “cosmic fear,” caused by violations of nature. This would count against a horror novel like Misery (1987), which harnesses fear of the mentally ill, Cujo (1981), which harnesses fear of animals, or a short story like “The Ledge” (1976), which harnesses the fear of falling from great heights. I would classify thirty-six of King’s sixty-five novels as horror novels (see footnote 3). I would classify thirty of these horror novels as weird fiction. Most of King’s shorter works are weird horror. Just as the best horror art is weird art, in Lovecraft’s view, so the best weird art is horror art. This is because no other weird art can have the psychological power of horror art. Lovecraft explains, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear” (Supernatural 12). He equates “the literature of cosmic fear” with “the true weird tale” (15). This counts against weird tales like The Stand (1978), The Green Mile (1996), and Under the Dome (2009), which aren’t primarily horror stories. It would likewise disqualify King’s Dark Tower saga from the highest levels of art, since the saga, though containing plentiful horror elements, is primarily a tale of adventure and the Dragon, The Green Mile, The Gunslinger, The Running Man, The Stand, The Talisman, The Wastelands, The Wind Through the Keyhole, Under the Dome, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla. Weird horror: Bag of Bones, Black House, Carrie, Cell, Christine, Cycle of the Werewolf, Desperation, Doctor Sleep, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, End of Watch, Finders Keepers, Firestarter, From a Buick 8, Gwendy’s Button Box, Insomnia, IT, Joyland, Later, Lisey’s Story, Mr. Mercedes, Needful Things, Pet Sematary, Revival, Rose Madder, ’Salem’s Lot, Sleeping Beauties, The Colorado Kid, The Dark Half, The Institute, The Outsider, The Regulators, The Shining, The Tommyknockers, Thinner. 4 Lovecraft presumably gets the idea from Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Damned Thing” (1893), in which the narrator notes, “We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a warning of unthinkable calamity” (16).

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wonder. Of King’s sixty-five novels, I would classify twenty-two of them as weird but not horror. If he were alive today, Lovecraft might have mixed feelings about King’s use of the unnatural. This is clearest in the case of King’s non-human creatures. Lovecraft’s own creatures are highly unnatural. For instance, the “colour” from “The Colour out of Space” (1927) is just a color, one outside our spectrum, which obeys “laws that are not of our cosmos” (40). Lovecraft’s aliens routinely violate physics. When traversing space, they may fly by flapping their wings, or cross dimensions by walking, burrowing, or swimming. When King writes about unnatural beings, he produces aberrations that would delight Lovecraft. For instance, the creature from IT (1987) can appear in any form It likes and can do physically impossible things like vanish down drains and manifest in old photographs. The creatures that emerge From a Buick 8 (2002) are similarly unnatural. The one-eyed “bat thing” is little like a bat, and the tentacle-headed “fish thing” little like fish, while the intelligent, three-legged, one-armed tentacle-headed “humanoid thing” could have come from Lovecraft’s own pen. In The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004), Roland is chased by a giant subterranean worm with many eyes, and a mouth full of long teeth and squirming tentacles. The serpentine “long boy” from Lisey’s Story (2006) is biologically strange, with one “dead” eye and a mouth that is a “straw of flesh” (450). It moves unnaturally, speeding upright through the forest, sometimes passing through solid objects. A psychic beast, if it sees you, it can track you forever, can cross dimensions to get to you, and can make use of reflective surfaces to find you. The god Gogmagog from Fairy Tale, who makes Charlie Reade think of Lovecraft’s gods, is a “humped, twisted thing” of which we glimpse an oily black wing and huge golden eyes in “a bubble of alien flesh” (555). Sometimes, Lovecraft presents creatures that are almost human, rather than outright alien. Examples include the corpse-eating ghouls introduced in “Pickman’s Model” (1927), the fishlike Deep Ones, introduced in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), and the god Cthulhu, introduced in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), who looks roughly like a gigantic human with tentacles for a face. In such cases, the sense of the unnatural is produced not by making the creature as strange as possible, but by the contrast between human nature and the inhumanity of the monsters. King is even more likely than Lovecraft to produce a sense of the unnatural by mixing familiar natures with unfamiliar ones. For instance, the “lobstrosities” who attack Roland in The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987) look like a cross between a lobster and a scorpion, but have strangely human voices. Mordred, Roland’s son, is half-spider. The Taheen

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and Can-toi who serve the Crimson King have animal-heads on human bodies. The “phoners” of Cell (2006) are living humans with psychic abilities who behave in bizarre ways. Though King is building on the zombie genre, he reinvents the monsters to make them mysterious again by giving them the ability to coordinate through a reliance on music. Elden Gallien of Fairy Tale, judged by Charlie to be another world’s version of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, is a horribly distorted human head and torso atop a mass of tentacles. King often generates a sense of natural law being violated by depicting weird entities as ordinary, familiar things that produce strange effects. The evil entity of The Shining (1977) presents as a hotel. In Christine (1983) and From a Buick 8, the monster has the form of a car; in “The Mangler” (1972), it is a washing mangler. In Carrie, the weird entity is a bullied teenage girl. In Pet Sematary (1983), it is a cat and a toddler. Lovecraft may have found some of King’s creatures insufficiently unnatural. King is more liable than Lovecraft to base a monster’s body closely on that of a real animal. The physical form of the creature from IT is much like a large spider. (In another dimension it appears as the more Lovecraftian “Deadlights,” a crawling orange luminescence.) The extradimensional creatures that pour out of the “The Mist” (1980) include spider-like animals, animals like wasps with scorpion tails, and four-winged pterosaur-like creatures. Demonic entities that torment humans in the afterlife in Revival closely resemble ants. Most animals in Empis are ordinary Earth animals, or enormous versions thereof. Lovecraft might have also criticized King’s tendency to give his aliens human personality traits. For instance, the leatherheads from Under the Dome act like children, keeping a human town for amusement as kids might keep an ant-farm, while the Taheen and Can-toi have odd senses of humor and strange tastes in food but behave like humans and enjoy human entertainments, having no distinct culture of their own. The demonic Tak has a very human disgust at the process of defecation. He’s also got a sense of humor: when asked how a possessed body became so tall, he replies, “Wheaties!” (Desperation 495). Likewise, in Dreamcatcher (2001), the alien Mr. Gray appears to Jonesy as if he’s lying in a hospital bed, with a card next to him signed by “Stephen Spielberg and all your pals in Hollywood” (306). In Fairy Tale, the undead night soldiers behave like ordinary bullying thugs. On the other hand, Lovecraft would approve that in Lisey’s Story, when Lisey has telepathic contact with the Long Boy, she finds that “its thoughts aren’t human, aren’t in the least comprehensible” (349). Sometimes the primary threat in a King weird story is something not far from an ordinary human being. Carrie White from Carrie, for all her

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telekinetic power, is essentially an ordinary teenager. Jack Torrance of The Shining may be driven by malevolent supernatural forces, but there’s nothing unnatural about the threat he poses as a mallet-wielding killer. The Crimson King is undead by the end of the Dark Tower, and insane enough to seek the end of the universe, but seems physically normal. The king’s servant Randall Flagg, central antagonist of The Stand and the Dark Tower saga, has magic powers allowing him to do whatever the plot calls for, but he is also physically normal and can pass for a sane human. The robots of Mid-World, like Blaine the monorail and Andy the android, have human, if insane, personalities. In contrast, the robots in Lovecraft’s The Mound (1940, with Zealia Bishop) are mindless and silent composites of machinery and human parts. Lovecraft might also have urged King to use more unnatural locations. Lovecraft gives us glimpses of bizarre alien worlds like the planets of the flame-creatures of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919), the conical Yithians in “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936), the monster-filled dimension of “From Beyond” (1934), and the degenerate underground civilization of The Mound. King’s stories sometimes acknowledge the existence of worlds that, judging by their inhabitants, are just as bizarre. Examples include the alien dimension opened by the Arrowhead Project in “The Mist” (1980), the world accessed through a Buick in From a Buick 8, and the chaotic Todash Space, from which monsters emerge from “thinnies” into Mid-World. However, while King opens these doors enough to let the horrors out, he doesn’t let us in. The alien worlds we do visit in King’s stories tend to be less strange than Lovecraft’s. The parallel Earth visited in “The Langoliers” (1990) is our world without people. In Lisey’s Story, the parallel world of Boo’ya Moon, “really only this world turned inside-out” (293), is a beautiful forest, though populated by strange nocturnal creatures. Lovecraft might consider these missed opportunities to feature weirder, and so artistically superior, settings. Lovecraft might be more impressed with Mid-World. While Mid-World is built from familiar elements like the Old West, European-style monarchies and modern cities, they are woven together in bizarre new ways. Wizardry co-exists with advanced technology. Mid-World is “moving on” and as the social order falls apart, so do the laws of nature. Distances and locations are not constant; the movements of the sun are unpredictable. Mid-World even permits outright contradictions, as when Jake Chambers dies in The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982) but survives the same events in The Drawing of the Three. Lovecraft might also be impressed by the city of Lilimar from Fairy Tale, where angles are out of kilter and buildings seem to move when

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you are not looking at them. Appropriately, Lilimar reminds Charlie of a setting out of Lovecraft. In Lovecraft’s work, human bodies are violated in unnatural ways. In “From Beyond,” it’s revealed that invisible, gelatinous creatures constantly pass through us. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), botched resurrections leave people’s bodies incomplete, while “Cool Air” (1926) and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) feature characters trapped in rotting bodies. The “colour out of space” turns living things gray and brittle until they crumble. These violations of human biology rely for their effect, at least partly, on what King calls the “gross-out,” an effect he claims to employ only as a last resort. In Danse Macabre, King identifies three emotional levels on which horror art operates: terror, horror, and the gross-out. Terror is produced by suggestion, engaging readers’ imagination rather than revealing the terrible thing. Unlike terror, horror is “not entirely of the mind. Horror […] invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong” (41), as exemplified by a corpse arising from the dead. The gross-out relies on “the gag reflex of revulsion” (43), as exemplified by an alien bursting out of a human body, or a game of baseball played with human parts. King states: “My own philosophy as a sometime writer of horror fiction is … to avoid any preference for one over the other on the grounds that one effect is somehow better than another” (43). Yet King does prefer to write terror over horror, and horror over gross-out. He continues, “I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud” (43). King is so dismissive of the literary gross-out that he denies it is art at all, writing that “it is only in the horror movies that the gross-out … sometimes achieves the level of art” (151). King writes, “The gross-out serves as the means of a last-ditch sort of identification when the more conventional and noble means of characterization have failed” (153). Lovecraft would likely encourage King to be more willing to engage in gross-outs as a tool to heighten the feeling of the unnatural. King’s most disturbing gross-outs tend not to break any natural laws. Examples include Annie Wilkes’s use of Paul Sheldon’s severed thumb as a birthday candle in Misery, or a marooned surgeon’s self-cannibalism in “Survivor Type” (1982). Having said this, he does provide some cases of weird bodily violation that might please Lovecraft, such as the “gypsy” curse in Thinner (1996) that consigns lawyer Billy Halleck to lose all of his weight and the “grandfather” vampires in The Dark Tower series, with their emaciated bodies, overgrown teeth and tumorous skin. The most obvious examples come from the physically degenerating humans of Mid-World: the deformed

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“slow mutants” like the Children of Roderick and the spider-infested “Mudmen” of The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). A similar disfiguring plague, “the gray,” sweeps Empis in Fairy Tale. In short, Lovecraft should find much to admire in King’s use of the unnatural to cultivate cosmic fear. Yet he would likely also think that King’s fiction would be better if it dealt with even more unnatural, alien events.

The Importance of Mystery Lovecraft believed that the scariest threats are mysterious ones. He writes, “[T]he oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Supernatural 12). Lovecraft would likely appreciate much of King’s use of mystery. In the novel IT, the children of the Losers’ Club are hunted by a monster of undefined powers which assumes varying appearances. As they investigate, they learn progressively more about “It’s” nature, finally meeting It at the climax. While King criticizes Lovecraft for revealing too little about the physical form of Lovecraft’s monsters (Danse 102), King himself sometimes leaves unanswered mysteries about the form of his own monsters. In “The Mist,” a gigantic six-legged creature walks by, its body obscured by the mist. Later, a tentacle invades the supermarket where humans are hiding, though what the tentacle is attached to, we never learn. Likewise, we never see “He Who Walks Behind the Rows,” the mysterious intelligence behind the events of “Children of the Corn” (1997), nor the thing that haunts “Room 1408” (1999). However, Lovecraft could criticize the lack of mystery in King’s use of familiar supernatural figures such as ghosts, vampires, and witches. Lovecraft rarely uses traditional monsters, preferring original creatures who operate by unknown rules. When he does use traditional figures, he heavily reinvents them. The witch Keziah Mason of “Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) uses geometry to access alien dimensions, the vampire of “The Shunned House” (1937) is a gigantic, fungoid creature, and the ghosts in The Mound turn out to be robots made of corpses. Although King’s creatures are usually original and unfamiliar, he enjoys playing literary games with pre-established tropes, and when he does use traditional monsters, his interpretations usually stay closer to tradition. The ghosts of The Shining are slaves of an evil hotel, but they are not much different in nature from the intangible apparitions of folklore. The vampires of ’Salem’s Lot (1975) have powers and weaknesses like Count Dracula’s; the witch Rhea of the Cöos from The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997) is an archetypical fairytale witch.

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Lovecraft might also have had mixed feelings about King’s mysterious locations. Lovecraft’s stories almost always involve mysterious places. He was fond of glimpses of, or visits to, alien worlds. “Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities” (Supernatural 14). Weird events that do not take place in other worlds or dimensions tend to take place in old ruins, as in “The Lurking Fear” (1923) and “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), in secretive, isolated communities, as in “The Festival” (1925) and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), on isolated farms, as in “The Colour out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), or in distant wildernesses, as in “Dagon” (1919) and “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936). Lovecraft would surely approve when King uses highly mysterious locations. The Overlook Hotel of The Shining is a strange old place hiding secrets. The small town of Gatlin, Nebraska, from “Children of the Corn” (1977) initially seems deserted, but proves to be home to a bizarre, murderous cult. Much of Dreamcatcher (2001) takes place in an isolated lodge in woods that are hiding aliens. In Desperation and the Regulators (both 1996), the protagonists visit the town of Desperation, Nevada, a town dominated by the demon Tak. Lovecraft would likewise approve when King uses mysterious worlds. Society has disintegrated in the post-apocalyptic novels The Stand and Cell, leaving survivors to explore the resulting anarchy. In “The Langoliers,” airline passengers land to find the world empty of people, but not of monsters. In Lisey’s Story, the parallel world of Boo’ya Moon is an unknown forest hiding weird creatures. In Revival (2014), we glimpse afterlife in a barren hell, where innocent humans are tormented by demons. King’s most well-developed mysterious world is, of course, Mid-World, the epicenter of the Dark Tower saga. As Roland traverses a land of magic and technology, almost anything could be around the corner. Yet while King does employ mysterious locations, he generally prefers familiar settings for horrific events, presumably to enhance a sense of reality. Of King’s thirty-six novels that I would classify as horror, twenty-three are primarily set in ordinary small towns. Two, Rose Madder (1995) and Later (2021), are set chiefly in large American cities, while Firestarter (1980) follows a father and daughter fleeing across America. Misery and Gerald’s Game take place in ordinary secluded houses in the woods. Lovecraft might judge that the mundanity of King’s settings limits the power of many of his stories, or he might judge that the mysteries King weaves through these settings are strong enough to outweigh the uninteresting nature of the settings themselves.

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The Importance of Suggestion The point of mystery is to engage readers’ imaginations by inviting them to fill in the details for themselves. But mystery alone is insufficient to fire a reader’s imagination. If readers are told nothing at all, the mystery is complete but they have been given nothing to think about. Both Lovecraft and King emphasize the importance of suggestion in weird horror, of giving readers enough hints that they are able to f ill in the details for themselves. Lovecraft writes, “Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion—imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal” (CE Vol. II 177, author’s emphasis). The emotion King calls “terror,” which he primarily aims at in his horror art, is produced by suggestion. King makes heavy use of suggestion to unnerve his readers. Readers do not know what happens to It’s victims after death, but they are assured “Down here we all float” (IT 34). The nature of the Pet Sematary and the things that rise from it can only be guessed from the strange state of Church the cat and Gage the toddler. Mid-World from the Dark Tower saga is largely left to the imagination, aided by glimpses of characters passing through it; readers must build their idea of Mid-World from a handful of towns and ruined cities. Who exactly were North Central Positronics, how did they build the beams that support the universe, and how was their technology lost? Readers have only artifacts like old robots and railway stations to judge them by. What is the nature of Roland’s (and the Crimson King’s) legendary ancestor Arthur Eld, depicted by later generations both as a champion of righteousness and a champion of wickedness?

Realism Lovecraft stands out among his contemporary weird writers for his efforts to be realistic. He contends that “inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel” (CE Vol. II 177). This statement isn’t intended to imply that fantasy literature, such as the Dark Tower saga, is necessarily deficient. Lovecraft notes:

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Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy. (Supernatural 87)

Lovecraft sets numerous stories in the Dreamlands, his own fantastic realm. Maintaining realism requires maintaining realistic characters. Lovecraft argues, “The characters … must be consistent and natural” (CE Vol. II 177). Lovecraftians should be delighted with the realism of King’s characters. In general, characters in weird fiction have grown more believable since Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Even so, the believability of King’s characters has been a signature of his weird fiction. His characters are relatable to readers because they feel real. King states that the job of building fictional characters “boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see” (On Writing 189). King apparently enjoys mastering the speech patterns of different groups. His Depression-era characters in The Green Mile (1996), “The Death of Jack Hamilton” (2001), and “1922” (2010) ring as true as his modern youth dialogue in The Institute and “Mr. Harrington’s Phone” (2020). King invents realisticsounding slang and speech patterns for the various peoples of Mid-World. One way in which King’s work has failed to be realistic, however, is in his use of the “magical minority” trope, repeatedly introducing Black characters who are simple and uneducated but good and wise, and arrive like fairy godmothers to solve other people’s problems. Examples include Dick Halloran of The Shining, Mother Abigail from The Stand, and John Coffee from The Green Mile. At least King is more realistic than Lovecraft, whose non-white characters are almost all members of horrible religious cults. Lovecraft would likely criticize what he would see as a lack of realism in many of King’s characters’ reactions to unnatural events. Lovecraft asserts, “In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life” (CE Vol. II 177). Lovecraft’s characters frequently respond to horrors by fainting or becoming hysterical. Memory loss, psychological scarring, and temporary or permanent insanity are routine. Meanwhile, King’s characters show levels of courage in the face of the unnatural that, while not unusual in horror literature, is much greater than one would expect from real people. Frequently, King’s characters fight back against supernatural evils, even after witnessing several violations of nature. Rarely are they psychologically damaged to a significant degree by their encounters.

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This level of courage and resilience is most remarkable in King’s child characters. Every member of the Losers’ Club in IT has the guts to face the monster. Eleven-year-old Ben Hanscom in particular comes out stronger and more confident from his experience. In The Shining, five-year-old Danny Torrance does not fall to pieces in the face of numerous terrifying encounters with spirits. More realistic characters would likely never enter a hotel again, or any room with a bath in it. Perhaps most dramatically, Jake Chambers, eleven years old in The Gunslinger, turns into a questing gunslinger like Roland, more able than the natives to face the monsters of Mid-World. Lovecraft contends, “It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being” (CE Vol. II 179). Yet in King’s writings, characters are frequently more concerned with their loved ones and relationships than they are with violations of natural law. For instance, in Carrie (1974), Carrie White is less interested in her own psychic powers than in her relationships with her mother and classmates. In Pet Sematary, Louis Creed is more concerned about getting his dead son Gage back than with the miracle of resurrection itself. In The Stand, the survivors of the plague accept that Mother Abigail has supernatural powers, but they are more concerned with how those powers can help their community than they are with the fact that the powers exist. Nobody tries to investigate her powers, nor does anyone radically change after learning about them. Though she claims that her miracles come from God, she causes little religious excitement. Lovecraft condemns the unrealistic cliché of “invincible heroes” (CE Vol. II 180). In general, he would have been pleased with some of King’s protagonists, who are mostly vulnerable, frightened individuals. The likes of the Torrance family from The Shining or the Losers’ Club from IT seem more than outmatched by the forces arrayed against them. On the other hand, one King protagonist whom Lovecraft might not like is Roland Deschain. Roland does struggle and can be badly hurt, as when he loses two fingers in Drawing of the Three. All the same, he is hypercompetent: a supreme warrior, a repository of lost knowledge, a skilled diplomat and, as much as King emphasizes how slowly Roland thinks, brilliant at conceiving practical plans.

Realism and Human Unimportance Lovecraft believes that realism requires that the f ictional universe be impartial to human wellbeing. He writes: “Now all my tales are based on the

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fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” (“Letters” 7). He describes Edgar Allan Poe as the first of “the real weavers of cosmic terror” (Supernatural 25), largely because Poe did not warp his depiction of reality by having reality favor “good” people. Lovecraft wrote: Before Poe the bulk of weird writers [were] hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority’s artificial ideas. (Supernatural 53)

Lovecraft’s fictional universe is governed by gods who—except for the little-seen minor god Nodens—have no concern for humanity’s wellbeing. Of Lovecraft’s four most powerful gods, Azathoth is mindless and knows nothing of humanity, Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath know about humanity but they do not care, and Nyarlathotep is mockingly hateful and wishes to see humanity suffer and be destroyed. The greatest threat to Earth, the god Cthulhu, wants to eradicate humanity but it is nothing personal. He just wants the Earth. Departing from Lovecraft, King “takes sides” to ensure that humans, especially “good” humans, are saved. King is willing at times to give his tales tragic endings. Carrie ends in tragedy: Carrie White dies, along with many other people, most of them innocent. Pet Sematary also ends badly, with Louis Creed turning his wife Rachel into an undead monster. Revival’s ending is even bleaker, with all of humanity doomed to spend their afterlife in an alien hell. Yet King’s sympathetic characters frequently win against the odds. In IT, the monster is defeated by a group of children. In ’Salem’s Lot, a novelist and a child defeat the vampires of Jerusalem’s Lot, including Kurt Barlow who, if he is to be believed, has survived for over 2000 years. In The Stand, the forces of good and evil face off, and good wins when divine powers detonate villain Randall Flagg’s nuclear warhead. In The Dark Tower saga, readers learn that the multiverse is slowly improving as Roland improves himself each time he relives the part of his life covered by the novels. Perhaps it should be no wonder that things frequently end well in King’s stories, given that in his default fictional multiverse, good and evil are objective forces. The White is the force of good, opposed to the force of the Outer Dark, which seeks the destruction of all universes. But in Lovecraft’s

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mind, depicting good and evil as objective involves projecting human values onto a universe that cares nothing for them. Lovecraft insists, “Good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws” (CE Vol. V 69). Strikingly, while Charlie in Fairy Tale thinks of Gogmagog as a Lovecraftian god, encountering Gogmagog doesn’t undermine Charlie’s belief in objective morality, but reinforces it. He contends, “[I]f I had ever doubted the existence of evil as a real force, something separate from that which lived in the hears and minds of mortal men and women, I didn’t now” (542). King’s gods are distant but more benevolent than Lovecraft’s. Gan, creator of all universes, is never shown as a loving God, but he does oppose the forces of chaos. He is never seen to act directly but “denies the Crimson King” (Song 318). Maturin the Turtle is a benevolent deity though he has limited power to help. A Mid-World nursery rhyme explains, “His thought is slow but always kind … He sees the truth but may not aid. He loves the land and loves the sea, And even loves a child like me” (Wastelands 30–31). Yet Maturin does sometimes offer aid, as when he advises the Losers’ Club about the Ritual of Chüd, through which the monstrous It can be destroyed. King is much more likely than Lovecraft to produce weird creatures who are malicious (and demonstrably human-like). Lovecraft did write malicious aliens, such as the sadistic ghoul-torturing moon-beasts of “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” or the night-gaunts, who love to terrify humans by carrying them through the air while tickling them. But such entities are rare in his writings, while many of King’s non-human entities are cruel, feeding off suffering or just enjoying tormenting people. In “If it Bleeds” (2020), detective Holly Gibney reflects on just how similar an outsider, which “lives off grief and pain,” is to a human: “This rare creature was only doing what all the people watching the news do: feeding on tragedy” (“If It Bleeds” 250). Lovecraft is much more likely than King to write aliens who show neither compassion nor maliciousness, but rather do not give a damn about humanity. To the degree that the wellbeing of humans does not figure into the reasoning of these aliens, they more realistically reflect humanity’s place in the universe. Just as Lovecraft would find King’s multiverse too accommodating to humans, he would find humans too influential on the King multiverse. It is only human technology, in the form of the Dark Tower’s beams, that keeps the multiverse from collapsing. That collapse is accelerated by the psychic human “breakers” working in Devar-Toi and can only be stopped by human heroes like Roland and his ka-tet.

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Maintenance of Focus Lovecraft claimed that weird stories rely on building an appropriate atmosphere. Crucial to maintaining the right atmosphere in a weird story is ensuring that the mood is consistent and properly focused. “The more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is” (Supernatural 16). Drama, adventure and action are permissible in a weird story, but not to the point that they detract from the atmosphere. “Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood” (CE Vol. II 177, author’s emphasis). He adds, “The emphasis … must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself ” (CE Vol. II 179, author’s emphasis). For Lovecraft, social and political satire are unacceptable distractions in weird fiction. Lovecraft writes: “Social and political satire are always undesirable, since such intellectual and ulterior motives detract from the story’s power as the crystallization of a mood” (CE Vol. II 181). If social and political satire are unacceptable, the same presumably goes for social commentary. Lovecraft would rule out, for instance, the focus on the cruelty of teen culture in Carrie, on domestic violence in Rose Madder, on racism in Susannah’s story in the Dark Tower saga, on homophobia in “A Very Tight Place” (2008), and on the public’s love of violence and suffering in The Long Walk, The Running Man and “If it Bleeds.” All of these stories encourage readers to consider problems humans have with other humans, which could distract them from the weird elements of the story. King lists his recurring themes as: How difficult it is—perhaps impossible!—to close Pandora’s technobox once it’s open (The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Firestarter); the question of why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen (The Stand, Desperation, The Green Mile); the thin line between reality and fantasy (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, The Drawing of the Three); and most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people (The Shining, The Dark Half ). I’ve also written again and again about the fundamental differences between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination. (On Writing 207)

The question of why terrible things happen if God exists would bore Lovecraft, who regarded it as obvious that God does not exist. The interesting question to Lovecraft is how humans are to come to terms with a godless

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universe. All of the other themes that King lists deal with human relationships that distract from Lovecraft’s weird mood. Lovecraft believes that humor disrupts the mood of weird art and should not be present. Contrary to Lovecraft’s advice, some characters in King’s weird fiction love to crack jokes. Examples include Cuthbert Allgood and Eddie Dean from the Dark Tower novels and Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier from IT, not to mention Tak and Mr. Gray. It is odd that Lovecraft both champions realism and regards humor as unacceptable; presumably, Lovecraft did not find much funny about human behavior. King understands that people can be funny. According to Lovecraft, too much characterization can distract from the focus on the violation of nature. He writes that “The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true ‘hero’ of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena” (CE Vol. II 179, author’s emphasis). King, in contrast, emphasizes characterization. In The Shining, King paid detailed attention to the personal relationships of Jack, Wendy, and Danny Torrance. King similarly gave a good deal of his attention to the relationship of Carrie White with her mother and fellow students in Carrie, and to the personalities, relationships, and private lives of the Losers’ Club in IT. Lovecraft would say that the focus of Carrie should be on Carrie’s powers and the focus of IT should be on the monster. Contrary to Lovecraft, the “heroes” of King’s tales are humans rather than sets of weird phenomena. The haunted Overlook provides a means to watch Jack Torrance battle his own demons and to watch Wendy and Danny try to survive. Carrie’s powers provide an expression for her rage. IT is a story about friendship and how a group of friends find extraordinary courage together. Under the Dome is not about the leatherheads who put the dome in place, or even about the miracle of the dome itself. It is a character study of the humans who are cut off from the outside world, akin to Lord of the Flies. Obviously, the weird elements have value or they would not be there. We could watch the Torrance family disintegrate without involving ghosts and Carrie could express her rage by other means than psychic homicide, but these elements are important to King. While the dead woman in Room 217’s bath is used to explore Danny’s fear and resilience, she is also there to give the reader a good scare. All the same, for King, it is always the humans that exist as the heart of the tale, with weird phenomena serving as a support. Even in a weird-phenomena f illed short story like “Room 1408,” King focuses on Mike Enslin’s thoughts and reactions more than on the phenomena themselves. The story is more about how he copes with

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his nightmarish situation than it is about whatever monster lies behind it. Lovecraft likely would have covered the same events in the form of a dry news report.

Conclusion Overall, Lovecraft would likely find much to admire in the work of Stephen King, but also much to criticize. He would have been impressed by King’s use of suggestion in his weird and horror fiction and, mostly, by the realism of King’s characters. On the other hand, he would have criticized the way King’s fiction revolves around humans rather than around weird events. Firstly, King’s stories tend to be more about human characters than about weird events. Secondly, most events in King’s stories unrealistically unfold in ways that favor the wellbeing of humans. Humans are braver, more capable, and more successful than is likely, given their situation. Thirdly, King’s humans are unrealistically important in the great scheme of things. The fate of King’s multiverse hangs on humans saving or destroying it. Non-human entities tend to care about humanity. Such anthropocentrism, to Lovecraft’s mind, relies on the aforementioned “primitive myopia which magnifies the Earth and ignores the background” (CE Vol. II 53). That King outsells Lovecraft can only be explained, in this view, by the supposition that much of the reading public lacks the required sensitivity to appreciate stories reflecting what Lovecraft considered to be the real place of humanity in the universe. By reading King in dialogue with Lovecraft’s aesthetic theories, readers come to understand better King’s writerly choices and to gain a deeper appreciation for King’s relationship to fellow artists of the horrifying and the weird.

Works Cited Bierce, Ambrose. “The Damned Thing.” The Damned Thing: Weird and Ghostly Tales, Pushkin Press, 2023, pp. 7–27. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Gallery Books, 2010.King, Stephen. The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands. Scribner. 1991. King, Stephen. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah. Scribner. 2004. King, Stephen. Desperation. Gallery Books, 2018. King, Stephen. Dreamcatcher. Gallery Books, 2001. King, Stephen. Fairy Tale. Scribner, 2022.

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King, Stephen. “If It Bleeds.” If It Bleeds, Scriber, 2021, pp. 153–343. King, Stephen. IT. Scribner, 2016. King, Stephen. Lisey’s Story. Scriber, 2006. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New English Library, 2001. Littmann, Greg. “H. P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Science Fiction Horror,” Science Fictions Popular Cultures Academics Conference Proceedings, vol. 1, no. 2, 2018, pp. 60–75. Lovecraft, H. P. “The Case for Classicism.” Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft: Vol II, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2008, pp. 36–39. Lovecraft, H. P. The Colour Out of Space. Fantasy and Horror Classics, 2011. Lovecraft, H. P. “In Defense of Dagon.” Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft: Vol. V, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2008, pp. 47–69. Lovecraft, H. P. et al. “Letters to Farnsworth Wright.” Lovecraft Annual, no. 8, 2014, https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/lovecraft-annual/lovecraft-annualno.-8-2014, pp. 5–59. Lovecraft, H. P. “Nietzscheism and Realism.” Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft: Vol. V, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2008, pp. 69–72. Lovecraft, H. P. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft: Vol. II, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2008, pp. 175–78. Lovecraft, H. P. “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction.” Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft: Vol. II, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2008, pp. 178–82. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Dover Publications, 1973.

About the Author Greg Littmann is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. His research interests include public philosophy, philosophy of art, evolutionary epistemology, and the philosophy of logic. Recent work has focused on the philosophy of science fiction, particularly the aesthetics of science fiction horror and the ethics of commercial science fiction art.

15. “A certain rough justice”: Stephen King, Digital Activism, and Donald Trump Philip Simpson

Abstract: When controversial billionaire Donald J. Trump declared his improbable candidacy for President of the United States in 2015, it did not take long for best-selling author Stephen King to begin lambasting candidate Trump on Twitter (now X). King quickly utilized Trump’s preferred social media outlet to lob his own rhetorical bombshells right back at Trump. King’s invectives against Trump go beyond serving immediate gratification to those who despise Trump; indeed, King can be viewed as part of an online collective identity, otherwise known as digitally networked action, engaged in activist resistance to the political power wielded by Trump. This essay explores how King’s “certain kind of rough justice” operates within the long American tradition of political protest. Keywords: Donald Trump, digital activism, Twitter (X), MAGA, social media

As Donald J. Trump marched inexorably toward the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, hundreds of authors became signatories to “An Open Letter to the American People,” written by Andrew Altschul and Mark Slouka in protest of Trump’s ascendancy. The letter led off with a strong statement of principle and concluded with a ringing denunciation of the soon-to-be-nominee: Because, as writers, we are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power … Because the rise of a political candidate who deliberately appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society, who encourages aggression among his followers,

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch15

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shouts down opponents, intimidates dissenters, and denigrates women and minorities, demands, from each of us, an immediate and forceful response; For all these reasons, we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States. (“An open letter to the American people”)

The signatories to this letter included such well-known writers as Amy Tan, Richard Russo, and Stephen King. Of course, anyone who had already been following King’s Twitter feed would not have been surprised to see his name among those writers engaging in digital collective resistance against Trump’s candidacy. Once Trump declared in 2015 he was a presidential candidate, it did not take long for King to begin lambasting candidate Trump on Twitter, the social media and microblogging website where registered users posted real-time, limited-character short texts, or “tweets,” to their followers.1 A famous and influential registered user, such as a Donald Trump or a Stephen King, would be followed by millions and assured that their tweets are retweeted by tens of thousands of followers. Additionally, given that Twitter is searchable by hash-tagged topic keywords, registered users could follow breaking news and other substantive content—all of which has helped make the online forum/megaphone irresistible to headline-maker Trump, who has used it both as his direct communication pipeline to his political base (without being filtered through traditional media outlets) and a brutally effective way to bait those millions more who were horrified by his inflammatory and often insulting rhetoric. Though Barack Obama used social media to great effect during his presidential campaigns and presidency, J. Scott Granberg-Rademacker and Kevin Parsneau identify the 2016 presidential campaign as the first that “substituted Twitter and personal notoriety for traditional resources and gained massive amounts of free coverage to win the White House” (94). In response to this unprecedented campaign, King utilized Trump’s preferred social media outlet to lob his own rhetorical bombshells right back at candidate and, later, President Trump. 1 A short explanatory note about microblogging nomenclature is necessary, given that Twitter was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in October 2022 and has been rebranded as “X” at the time of this writing. Part of the rebrand involved removing the iconic blue “Twitter bird” logo in favor of a stylized “X” and the changing of “tweet” to “post” and “retweeting” to “reposting.” Most of the discussion to follow here centers on events that transpired before the summer of 2023; accordingly, the nouns “Twitter,” “tweets,” and “retweets” will be privileged throughout.

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King’s use of Twitter as a platform to denounce Trump in a much more overt way than through his fiction can be best understood as a type of political resistance to Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that evolved from Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan (originally used by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s) of the same name. For many, King was their celebrity champion who fearlessly (and often profanely) called out Trump at every opportunity; as a result, King became one of the most well-known public figures in a counter-MAGA political movement called The Resistance: a loose coalition of Democrats, “Never Trump” Republicans and other disenchanted conservatives, the formerly apolitical, and independents who found common ground in protesting Trump’s presidency. Hashtags such as #The Resistance and #Resist quickly proliferated on Twitter, “becoming one way for people to share relevant information and identify like-minded others” (Chhor). King’s status as one of the foremost Twitter “Resisters” was highlighted when in 2018 he received the PEN America Literary Service Award, which not only honors critically acclaimed and popular work but work that opposes “repression in any form and (champions) the best of humanity” (qtd. in Trombetta). Past recipients of the award include Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, also known for their social activism. The PEN America announcement pointed specifically to King’s use of Twitter as a major factor in his receiving the award: “His outspoken defense against encroachments on free speech and pointed public criticism of policies that infringe on this and other rights have resulted in his being blocked by President Trump on Twitter” (Tubb). Andrew Solomon, president of PEN America, further reinforced that King’s social media activism had just as much to do with the recognition as his literary achievements: No stranger to the dark side, Stephen King has inspired us to stand up to sinister forces through his rich prose, his generous philanthropy, and his outspoken defense of free expression. Stephen has fearlessly used his bully pulpit as one of our country’s best-loved writers to speak out about the mounting threats to free expression and democracy that are endemic to our times. His vivid storytelling reaches across boundaries to captivate multitudes of readers, young and old, in this country and worldwide, across the political spectrum. He helps us all to confront our demons—whether a dancing clown or a tweeting president. (qtd. in Trombetta)

Though protesting the political and cultural influence of Donald Trump takes many forms in both the physical and virtual world, King’s body of

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anti-Trump tweets collectively serve as an illustrative case study in how the Twitterverse in particular can serve as a site of resistance, albeit one that “is hardly a well-oiled machine with one clear goal” (Davidson 4). Though King’s presence on Twitter is pervasive, he is of course much better known as one of America’s bestselling authors of horror, suspense, crime fiction, supernatural thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. As a storyteller, King is not so stridently political as he is online. That said, most of his novels that have published since 2016 deal with the shadow of Donald Trump and MAGA-ism in some way or another, a trend which has not been lost on his reviewers and readers.2 For his part, King disputes those critics who read a political agenda into his work, calling such readings “a fucking reach” (qtd. in Peitzman). However, while it would indeed be fallacious to label King’s published work “protest” or “political activist” literature, the case can certainly be made that, as King himself said in Danse Macabre many years ago, the horror genre with which King is most often identified “has often been able to find national phobic pressure points, and those books and films which have been the most successful almost always seems to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people” (4–5). In the same passage, King points out that these fears include the political and that the best of horror has an allegorical feel precisely because it is informed by collective anxiety. Over decades of American political life, King’s fiction consistently uses allegory to probe these national pressure points to elicit strong responses from his readers. In that sense, then, Trump is only the latest in a long line of polarizing political figures (Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush) to find himself called out in a King novel as part of a framework of topical references that grounds otherwise fantastical narratives in the lived sociocultural reality of the reader. If we are to take King at his word, politics are not subtext in his fiction so much as cultural touchpoints that will be familiar to most American 2 The following King novels specifically invoke Trump (usually in the thought process of a character in the narrative) at least once: End of Watch (2016), in which a nurse thinks a hospitalized mass murderer is being catered to like Donald Trump; Sleeping Beauties (2017, co-written with son Owen King), in which a character places Donald Trump on the same level as cannibals; The Outsider (2018), in which a character is thought of contemptuously as someone who probably voted for Trump; Elevation (2018), in which a character negatively characterizes a county as one that went for Trump three-to-one in 2016; The Institute (2019), wherein a character claims that Trump and his political allies do not understand culture any more than a donkey understands algebra; Billy Summers (2021), in which the Trump presidency is frequently mentioned; Gwendy’s Final Task (2022, co-written with Richard Chizmar), in which the titular character runs for Senate against a Trump ally; and Holly (2023), which foregrounds the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6 Capitol riot, and Donald Trump in a very deliberate fashion.

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readers, like references to historical events (9/11, for example) or brand names (say, McDonald’s). To charges of literary liberal bias, King responds: “I’m a storyteller basically, and that’s apolitical, and I try to jettison as much of the politics as I can … What I really don’t want to do is write something that’s got an agenda that’s anti-Trump or pro-Elizabeth Warren or anything political. I want to tell a good story” (qtd. in Peitzman). In another interview, King insists he does not foreground contemporary politics in his novels, even if specific politicians are name-checked: “The thing is, I have a soap box on Twitter … I was horrified by Trump as president for all kinds of reasons, but number one was, as president, he was incompetent and lazy … I used to tweet about that quite often during the whole Trump presidency. But when I write books I try to get down off my soap box” (Collis). Indeed, King’s enduring success and appeal as a writer across the ideological spectrum lends credence to the argument that his work is mostly apolitical, or at least perceived to be. If King is truly as apolitical as he claims to be in his work, why then do so many readers and critics continue to insist that King’s novels since 2016 (and in many cases long before that) are political? Louis Peitzman offers an explanation when he paraphrases, perhaps unintentionally, the previously cited passage in Danse Macabre that people “often gravitate toward horror in times of dread … King’s work feels uniquely suited to comprehending the national nightmare those who reject the [Trump] administration are facing. His stories tap into the hard truths of what’s lurking behind idyllic images of Americana” (“National Nightmare”). However, Michael Blouin’s study Stephen King and American Politics is to date the most incisive analysis of the tension between King’s supposedly apolitical authorial agenda and the clear political themes and allegories that inhere within his fiction. Blouin argues that there is a spectre haunting Stephen King’s America, and that spectre is the concept of the political. King’s stories repress this concept, but it eternally returns. Consequently, as we track the ways in which the political has been repressed in his page-turners, we consider how this repression serves as a necessity in efforts to release America’s stifled political energies. Precisely because of its ardent anti-politics, King’s fiction preserves the political as a fantastic force as horrifying as it is hopeful. (4)

The eternal return of the repressed political in King’s fiction, to take a cue from Blouin, is one of the most useful ways to understand how King in good faith can claim an apolitical approach to storytelling and yet write fiction that is arguably political. Additionally, a logical inference to be drawn from

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King’s own words in the Peitzman piece is that he indeed on at least some occasions infuses politics into his fiction. Whether King wants his work to be read politically or not, then, the subtext is there for the mining by anyone inclined to look for it. Which, in these polarized times, means a lot of people. It was probably inevitable that any author as openly partisan on social media as Stephen King would find many readers from both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum conflating his left-leaning online political persona with his fiction. Nor is it as much of a stretch as King insists to do so. He has written sharp-elbowed political allegory before; for example, Under the Dome (2009) is undeniably a critique of the presidential/vice-presidential administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Practically any King novel from any phase of his career, including at the beginning, lends itself well to a political reading. The Dead Zone (1979), in which a clairvoyant Johnny Smith has a vision of rising conservative political star Greg Stillson triggering a future nuclear war as president, is the most well-known of King’s politically themed novels.3 The Running Man (1982), another early novel published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, is a dystopic science fiction thriller that Douglas W. Texter goes so far as to call “a Vietnam-era protest novel” (44). Based on this established precedent, it is certainly not far-fetched to read King’s post-2016 novels, at least in part, as critiques of an American society already historically predisposed to hatred and mob violence becoming virulently more so—whether one links this spread to Trump’s influence or not is the subject of much heated debate. One can reasonably conclude that in fiction, interviews, and social media, King is engaged in a multi-modal rhetorical campaign, using every dimension of his well-honed wordcraft against a politician and a movement that he views as much more dangerous than any of the supernatural villains who haunt his fiction.

King v Trump on Twitter: 2015–2023 A tipping point in the public perception of King as a social media political commentator, if not activist, can be dated with some degree of confidence 3 Several commentators have drawn comparisons between the fictional populist Stillson and the real-world populist Trump, a view that was especially prevalent in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Anthony Breznican, for one, writes that King’s “life work seems to be coming to life around him” in the eerie parallels between Covid-19 and Captain Trips, the fictional super flu depicted in The Stand (1978), and Stillson and Trump. Breznican quotes King: “It’s like, okay, the worst thing that could happen, in terms of my career, is that somehow, in our society, we’ve cross-pollinated our Greg Stillson with The Stand” (Breznican).

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to early 2015, as the Republican field for the 2016 presidential election began to form. King’s tweets on a range of political topics (the presidential candidates, Governor Paul LePage, the Tea Party, the Affordable Care Act, and gun control, among others) drew the attention of Washington Post blogger Hunter Schwarz, whose April 21, 2015, entry was headlined: “The scariest thing Stephen King tweets about is politics.” Notably missing from King’s tweets in the spring of 2015 are mentions of Trump. However, once Trump announced he was running for president on June 16, King took notice. A few months into Trump’s candidacy, King tweeted the following on August 6: “Donald Trump: there hasn’t been a novelty act this annoying since Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Given where King’s level of invective against Trump would eventually go, the August 6 tweet sounds relatively bemused, as if, like millions of other Americans, King thought the novelty act would quickly fade as Trump continued to issue what likely would have been career-ending statements for any other politician. However, by December of that same year, as it became clear that the Trump act was catching on across the country, King’s tone changed markedly from bemusement to irate incredulity, as evidenced in this tweet on the 8th of the month: “I can no longer tweet about Trump. That anyone in America would even CONSIDER voting for this rabid coyote leaves me speechless.” Needless to say, King did not stop tweeting about Trump. King has to date posted many tweets—ranging in tone from anger to the kind of ironic literary humor King infuses into his fiction—attacking Trump’s politics, behavior, morality, and values at every level; an informal count shows that King tweeted his thoughts about Trump over one hundred times between 2017 and 2018 alone. Some of the tweets link King’s legacy as a teller of horror tales to Trump’s political legacy, such as this tweet dated October 21, 2016, wherein King refers to the Trump phenomenon as a dark fairy tale: “My newest horror story: Once upon a time there was a man named Donald Trump, and he ran for president. Some people wanted him to win.” Rather uncharacteristically for a public figure/politician famous for returning fire ten-fold on critics, Trump never verbally attacked King, but instead blocked him. In response, King tweeted on June 13, 2017: “Trump has blocked me from reading his tweets. I may have to kill myself.” And again on August 24, 2017: “Donald Trump blocked me on Twitter. I am hereby blocking him from seeing IT or MR. MERCEDES. No clowns for you, Donald. Go float yourself.” Of course, being blocked by the target of his invective had no impact whatsoever on the frequency or tone of King’s broadsides against Trump. Throughout 2018, King tweeted many anti-Trump insults, ranging in tone from the wry (“Anyone who has to call himself a genius …

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isn’t”) to the impassioned (“Legislators, you need to impeach Blabbermouth Don or force him to resign before he kills us all. He is no longer competent to serve as Chief Executive, if he ever was”). During Trump’s re-election bid in 2019, King’s tone became more strident as he pleaded with the country through Twitter to deny Trump a second term. King turned one of Trump’s best known pre-presidential signature catch phrases on him—from Trump’s role as host of the NBC reality-TV program The Apprentice—in this tweet on July 19, 2019: “I think we all agree that Donald Trump is a vile, racist, and incompetent bag of guts and waters. How happy I would be to tell him ‘YOU’RE FIRED’ next November.” On November 7, 2019, King tweeted this earthy fusion of colloquialisms and profanity: “Sometimes I feel like screaming, ‘Everybody knows that Trump is crooked as a broken nose and dumb as a fencepost. Just quit shitting around and get him the fuck out of there.’” As the calendar turned the page into the election year of 2020, King cast aside all rhetorical artifice for this plaintive tweet on January 5: “America, please don’t re-elect this ignorant, dangerous man.” King’s mood, as inferred from these representative tweets, became more anxious as election day approached. The presidential election date of November 3, 2020, came and went without a declared winner in the contest between Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Trump, given the large number of mail-in ballots (larger than usual because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic) and resulting delays in swing state vote counting and reporting. Presumably, this delay did nothing to soothe King’s nerves, even as the incoming vote counts in important swing states—especially Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—began moving in Biden’s direction. Due to the reporting delays, major news outlets did not project Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris as victorious until November 7. Even after the media projections, Trump refused to concede the election, leading King to tweet this angry message on November 8: “You lost, you miserable self-entitled infantile fucker. Concede and get the hell out.” The post-campaign Trump campaign to make unfounded claims the election was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats culminated on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters gathered for a rally in Washington, DC, on the day of the election certification by the US Congress—a rally that quickly turned into a violent riot or insurrection, depending on who’s defining terms, on the grounds of the Capitol building. King was characteristically outspoken on the topic, tweeting on October 31, 2021: “January 6th wasn’t a peaceful protest. It wasn’t a riot. It was an insurrection meant to overthrow the electoral process and install Donald Trump as an American dictator.”

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Because of the events of January 6, King’s presence on Twitter outlasted Trump’s when Trump was banned from Twitter. 4 Though Trump had been removed from both the Oval Office and Twitter, his hold on the media and public attention remained dominant. Therefore, King did not let up on posting about him. Once Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election (his third run), King’s tweets about Trump took on a new urgency, such as this one from August 12, 2022: “Was there ever, in all of American history, a man less fit for the presidency than Donald Trump?” King turned to saltier language to tweet the same sentiment on October 2, 2022: “Based on his recent Truth Social blasts, I have to say Donald Trump is as crazy as a shithouse mouse. The only thing crazier would be to let him have access to the levers of power ever again.” King even infused the specter of apocalypse into this tweet on March 18, 2023: “Donald Trump is a sociopath and a criminal. To let him near the nuclear codes again would be insane.” In response to looming criminal indictments against Trump because of several concurrent investigations, King turned Trump’s own oft-repeated refrain about his former 2016 presidential opponent Hilary Clinton against him when King tweeted this on March 22, 2023: “Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up! I’ve been waiting 7 years to say that. Karma sucks, doesn’t it, Donald?” Mere days later, Trump was indicted by a grand jury and surrendered himself to face arraignment in a Manhattan courtroom on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. In quick succession, more indictments followed throughout the summer of 2023. As result of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal investigations, Trump was indicted in June 2023 on forty criminal counts of mishandling sensitive documents and conspiracy to obstruct the government’s retrieval of said documents and again in August 2023 on four criminal counts related to attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In August of 2023, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump (along with eighteen others) on thirteen criminal counts alleging attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Georgia in 2020. Going into the fall of 2023, as summarized in an article in Business Insider by Laura Italiano, Jacob Shamsian, and Jake Swearingen, Donald Trump 4 This ban led Trump Media and Technology Group to create a social media platform called Truth Social, billed as an uncensored alternative to Twitter and Facebook where Trump could continue to post in his signature unfettered style. Trump’s expulsion from Twitter only lasted until Elon Musk bought Twitter and reinstated Trump’s account in 2022. However, as of this writing Trump has only posted once on the site since then. On August 24, 2023, following his booking in Georgia on conspiracy charges to overturn the state’s election results, he posted his mug shot above these words in all caps: “ELECTION INTERFERENCE. NEVER SURRENDER!” Truth Social remains Trump’s preferred communication channel to his followers.

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faced four criminal indictments and a total of ninety-one felony counts (“Trump Court Cases”). He was subsequently found guilty and proceeded to run for president as a convicted felon. King’s tweet thus foreshadowed the collective weight of the legal blow against Trump in 2023.

Twitter, Activism, and Collective Identity For many, King’s barrage of Twitter insults to Trump and everything he stands for has some element of karmic or poetic justice to it, in that Trump himself often used Twitter to attack and demean his political adversaries (all while insisting that he was the real victim). In a tweet dated January 11, 2017, King called using Trump’s own language against him “a certain rough justice.” In deploying incendiary language against a politician he despises, King deliberately provoked the passions of his followers as much as Trump does with his own base. The rhetorical utility of Twitter insults in stirring up people’s emotions cannot be overstated. For example, Ahdab Saaty, in his study of the Aristotelian appeals found in the rhetoric of Twitter, identifies pathos, or the appeal to emotion, as particularly well suited to “microblogging in general and Twitter in particular” (119). Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson maintain that since “every communication medium trains us to think and speak in particular ways …(,) Twitter trains users to devalue others, thereby cultivating callous and often hateful discourse” (609). Ott and Dickinson point to the following defining features of Twitter as contributory factors to this negative rhetoric: – Character limitation does not permit detailed or complex messages. – No real effort on the part of the user is required to communicate, which results in impulsive (and often obsessive) posting. – Informality of grammar and style undermines norms that contribute to civility. – Interactions are depersonalized, which makes it easier to insult someone not present. Ott and Dickinson conclude that since “simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility are structural biases of Twitter as a platform of communication, one regularly finds evidence of these traits in the habits of frequent Twitter users” (613). Certainly, the evidence of these behaviors is strong for Trump—but also for King. With that point being acknowledged, King’s Twitter invective against Trump transcends serving immediate gratification to those who despise

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Trump and provocation of those individuals who support him. Indeed, King can be viewed as part of an online collective identity, participating in what is known as digitally networked action and engaged in a counter-social activist movement, e.g., the Resistance, against the political power wielded by Trump and the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement. While no prevailing consensus definition of digital activism is found in the literature, some general principles can be applied to the significance and possible impact of King’s political tweets. Although one could argue whether digital activism is the most effective mode of activism, when King takes to the platform, he intentionally does much more than air his personal grievances. I will begin by placing King’s tweets into the broad context of social movement/protest. Manyu Li et al. define a social movement as “collective interactions based on a group of people who share common identities and views to address political or cultural conflicts,” which in turn generates social actions such as protest with the end goal being to promote or oppose social change. Extending this definition into the digital realm, Li et al. observe that social media users become digital activists engaged in social movements “in various ways, including reading and learning about the movements, performing actions that increase popularity of posts relating to the movements (i.e., liking, commenting, sharing, and retweeting), and creating their own materials (i.e., words, photos, and videos)” (856). While such actions, frequently called “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” are removed from the kind of collective social change favored by some activists and scholars, these actions constitute a connective action “based on personalised content sharing through personal narratives rather than collective structures and identities,” which in turn can lead to a cumulative pressure on governments to effect change (Castillo-Esparcia et al. 3). From this perspective, then, King most frequently takes part in digital activism—in this case, the Resistance as a broadly anti-Trump collective—by creating his own materials (Twitter posts) in opposition to the kind of social change that Trump and MAGA-ism embody. Social media and social movements/political activism are inextricably linked in the twenty-first-century digital world, e.g., the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Occupy Wall Street; for instance, Ayesha Karamat and Ayesha Farooq in their groundbreaking study of Pakistani graduate students’ move toward political action as a result of online engagement call social media an “essential source of political activism” (381). In the context of American presidential politics, Kem Gambrell et al. find that, following the 2016 election, “focused activism, in this case via social media, could improve one’s sense of control and safety” (162), which certainly makes sense given

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how many millions of Americans felt deep unease and anxiety (even fear) in the political climate following Trump’s victory. The anti-Trump Resistance that arose from this collective fear is one more example of social activism, and King one of its most notable celebrity Resisters. The rhetorical theory of collective identity and digitally networked activism provides a valuable lens through which to scrutinize how King’s “certain kind of rough justice” on Twitter operates within the long American tradition of political protest.5 Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, for example, distinguish between two broad organizational patterns of digitally enabled action networks, wherein one pattern is “coordinated behind the scenes by networks of established issue advocacy organizations … using interactive digital media and easy-to-personalize action themes” that can be readily adopted by many on their own media platforms, and the other pattern “entails technology platforms and applications taking the role of established political organizations” to create a network in which “political demands and grievances are often shared in very personalized accounts that travel over social networking platforms” (80–81). King’s Twitter tirades against Trump can be best understood as fitting within the second organizational pattern of digitally networked action as defined by Gordon and Mihailidis. In other words, King is not a formal member of an issue-based organization making use of a social media platform to assist others in spreading activist themes; rather, he is a one-person advocate of anti-Trumpism who uses his Twitter megaphone to express his personal grievances to anyone who has access to either that social media platform and/or other forms of media that quote from or otherwise share King’s tweets. Given King’s on-the-record claims that he is for the most part apolitical in the brand of storytelling that has made him famous, perhaps this form of personal expression of political grievance through social media both allows him to vent and put some distance between his political voice and his fiction. The risk of this kind of approach, however, is that those who follow his social media activism may well conflate that voice with his storyteller’s voice, thus defeating the purpose of King reserving his most outspoken statement of belief for Twitter.

5 Theoretical explanations of how and why individuals come together to from collective identity based on common values and interests can be traced back to classical psychological concepts, notably Marx’s focus on class consciousness and revolution, Durkheim’s notions of consciousness and solidarity, and Weber’s theory that collective action depends upon class, status, and party (Hunt and Benford 434).

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As one of America’s most prolific and well-known writers, King is ubiquitous in the American media ecology. One does not have to be part of Twitter to find out how King views the presidency and post-presidency of Donald Trump. King does not shy away from blasting Trump in broadcast interviews, such as when he called out Trump for minimizing the Covid-19 threat and reversing quarantine mandates to Brian Stelter on CNN’s Reliable Sources in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down much of the world. King is equally outspoken in print interviews. For example, after Trump’s loss of the presidential election and the events of January 6, King said the following to Richard Osman in The Sunday Times: “I happen to think that Trump was a horrible president and is a horrible person. I think he actually engaged in criminal behavior and, certainly, I felt that he was a sociopath who tried to overturn the American democracy not out of any political wish of his own but because he could not admit that he had lost.” Of note in this interview, however, is not so much King’s bashing of Trump (as we have seen, that is par for the course) as what he next says about the role social media plays in cultural and political issues. He calls the totality of platforms such as Twitter “a poison pill … it’s social media that has magnified the idea that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. And there’s millions of people who believe that, and there are millions of people who believe that the COVID vaccinations are terrible things. Some of the things are good, some are not so good, and some are downright evil.” These words about the inherently poisonous structure of social media are startling coming from someone with the Twitter presence of Stephen King. But these words also highlight the paradox that anyone with a political or social agenda must face in the twenty-first-century digital ecosphere—to make that agenda known, let alone to effect change, one must first find an audience. For better or for worse, a huge percentage of that audience is found on social media.

American Political Anxiety, Protest Art, and Stephen King Of course, the main reason anyone follows Stephen King on Twitter is because of his fame as a best-selling author whose career has spanned decades. Few critics or general readers think of Stephen King as a novelist in the Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck tradition who writes novels of social protest with the specific intent of compelling governmental reform. However, it is fair game to argue that King inserts political elements into his fiction in a way that expresses what Tony Magistrale calls “the major social, political

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anxieties of our time. The subtextual issues present in his films and fictions explore the landscape of the national unconscious … As a critical sociologist of his culture, Stephen King is concerned with creating cautionary tales about a nation under siege from within” (149). Magistrale’s insightful labeling of King as a sociologist mining the deepest strata of American political anxiety to provide his work with its signature atmosphere of dread provides the key to understanding how a writer who claims to be interested first and only in storytelling nevertheless undergirds his novels with strong political subtexts and engages in a full-throated social media campaign embraced wholeheartedly by the anti-Trump Resistance movement. King’s multi-year campaign against Trump is evocative of another author’s crusade decades ago against an American president he believed to represent the worst and darkest impulses of the American character—Hunter S. Thompson’s New Journalistic literary takedowns of Richard Nixon. King may be acknowledging that precedent in one of his Tweets when he calls out those who voted for Trump as responsible for America entering “the Age of Dumb,” a term echoing Thompson’s “the New Dumb” label in his book of collected essays Kingdom of Fear. Granted, Thompson’s antipathy to Nixon and all that he represented predated King’s toward Trump by decades, and Thompson did not live long enough to see Twitter (he died two years before the company was founded). Yet in the sense that both authors are expressing in their own idiosyncratic vernaculars and chosen medium a condemnation of presidential leadership they believe to be irrevocably flawed or even evil, however, they engage in a type of protest art—a howl of rage against corruption and injustice. In his foreword to the book American Protest Literature, John Stauffer proffers a definition of the genre that relies on the rhetorical strategies of empathy and shock value, the former because of the humanitarian connection and the latter as a source of outrage and a desire to correct social injustice. The third rhetorical strategy is textual ambiguity and “indeterminacy of meaning … which goes beyond the author’s intent … (and) prevents protest literature from becoming an advertisement, or propaganda” (xiii). Thompson’s anti-Nixon polemics and King’s two-front (fiction and social media) anti-Trump campaign may, under Stauffer’s definition, evoke empathy and shock value. The third element of Stauffer’s definition is arguably applicable to King’s f iction, whose political elements can feel at odds with King’s oft-stated intent to separate his Twitter soap box from his writing. To put it simply, King’s subtext escapes his conscious control.6 6 It should be noted that Scott Saul sees Stauffer’s definition as “so loose as to admit a vast number of American novels written over the last 200 years” (410), which is a fair enough caveat

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Stauffer, while acknowledging that protest literature does not directly lead to social change, contends that its “primary effect is to empower and transform individuals. This is a crucial first step toward a broader social transformation” (xv–xvi). Writers like Thompson and King who speak out against political corruption and demagoguery put the opposition on notice that alternative viewpoints not only exist but will not be silenced, no matter how oppressive the means used to silence such protestations. King’s anti-Trump tweets, or King’s storylines that can be plausibly interpreted as allegories critical of Trumpian policies, may not change any hearts and minds.7 In fact, it probably loses him readers from the “shut up and write” crowd. But these posts surely do remind even those who disagree with King’s politics that the Resistance continues to speak in a society that, at least for now, remains democratic in principle, if not always in practice.

Conclusion King’s status as the premier American writer of horror fiction uniquely positions him to assume the mantle of one of Trump’s most relentless critics on social media. For millions of Americans, horror is the most apt label for their emotional reaction to Trump’s rhetoric and actions. Justin Chang speaks for those millions when he says that “you might say the Trump presidency is itself a horror movie come to life—and a very bad one, at that. Cheap jolts and jump scares abound: personal insults on Twitter, divisive attempts at policy change, embarrassing blunders in response to major crises at home and abroad … All this comes at us daily with the jabbing, sadistic rhythm of someone, or something, that many believe will bring an end to our grand democratic experiment” (Chang). The memory of this presidency, and the specter of a second one in 2025, haunts and thus compels King to use his public platform and considerable skills as a writer and communicator to deploy every rhetorical weapon in his power to prevent such an outcome. Is this strategy an effective one to produce social change? Individually or directly, not so much. But does it contribute to the loud collective voice of when determining whether any of King’s work can be classified as political/protest literature. 7 For example, The Institute’s depiction of children being forcibly removed from their parents is often read as a metaphor for the “zero tolerance” family separation policy of the Trump administration beginning in 2018. William Sheehan’s review of the novel, for example, argues that it “turns out political moment into gripping horror” by inviting “us to ponder the image of children separated from their parents and forced to live in brutal circumstances, all to serve the purposes of powerful men … the real world peers out from behind the curtain of King’s fiction” (Sheehan).

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the many Americans who regard Trump and his allies with nothing less than profound horror and fear for the future of democracy? Absolutely. On November 6, 2024, Donald Trump won enough electoral votes over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to be re-elected President of the United States. In response that same day, Stephen King posted the following on X: “There’s a sign you can see in many shops that sell beautiful but fragile items: LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT ONCE YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT’S SOLD. You can say the same about democracy” (“There’s a Sign”). As of November 11, 2024, this post had 4.3 million views and had been reposted nearly 11,000 times.

Works Cited Altschul, Andrew, and Mark Slouka. “An Open Letter to the American People: Writers Speak Out Against Donald Trump.” Literary Hub, 24 May 2016, https:// lithub.com/an-open-letter-to-the-american-people/. Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics.” Civic Media: Technology/Design/Practice, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, MIT Press, 2016, pp. 77–106. Blouin, Michael J. Stephen King and American Politics. U of Wales P, 2021. Breznican, Anthony. “Even Stephen King Thinks We’re Living in a Stephen King Book.” Vanity Fair, 28 Apr. 2020, www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/04/stephen-king-trump-quarantine-the-standif-it-bleeds. Castillo-Esparcia, Antonio, et al. “Evolution of Digital Activism on Social Media: Opportunities and Challenges.” Profesional de la Informacion, vol. 31, no. 3, April 2023, pp. 1–16. Chang, Justin. “Has Horror Become the Movie Genre of the Trump Era?” Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mnhorror-movies-trump-20171013-story.html. Chhor, Khatya. “Wonder Who’s Fighting Trump? Meet the #resistance.” France 24, 31 May 2018, www.france24.com/en/20180530-who-fighting-trump-oppositionmeet-resistance-resist-twitter-hashtag-grassroots-usa. Collis, Clark. “Stephen King Talks Thriller Billy Summers and Why the Pandemic Isn’t That Different from The Stand.” EW.com, 15 Jul. 2021, ew.com/books/ stephen-king-interview-billy-summers/. Davidson, Cynthia A. Women’s Voices in the Bluewave Resistance on Twitter: Cruel Optimism. Lexington Books, 2023.

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Gambrell, Kem, et al. “Following the 2016 Presidential Election: Positive and Negative Mood Affect and the Impetus Towards Activism.” Journal of Hate Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2019, pp. 153–72. Granberg-Rademacker, J. Scott, and Kevin Parsneau. “Let’s Get Ready to Tweet! An Analysis of Twitter Use by 2018 Senate Candidates.” Congress & the Presidency, vol. 48, no. 1, 2021, pp. 78–100. Hunt, Scott A., and Robert D. Benford. “Collective Identity, Solidarity, and Commitment.” The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 433–58. Italiano, Laura, Jacob Shamsian, and Jake Swearingen. “Trump Court Cases: A List of All Current and Pending Legal Cases on the Ex-President’s Docket.” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-key-cases-civil-criminalinvestigations-lawsuits-updates-2022-7. Karamet, Ayesha, and Ayesha Farooq. “Emerging Role of Social Media in Political Activism: Perceptions and Practices.” South Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, January–June 2016, pp. 381–96. King, Stephen. “America, Please Don’t Re-elect This Ignorant, Dangerous Man.” Twitter, 5 Jan. 5, 2020, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1213868882626301952. King, Stephen. “Anyone Who Has to Call Himself a Genius … Isn’t.” Twitter, 6 Jan., 2018, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/949689460484173824?. King, Stephen. “Based on His Recent Truth Social Blasts, I Have to Say Donald Trump Is as Crazy as a Shithouse Mouse. The Only Thing Crazier Would Be to Let Him Have Access to the Levers of Power Ever Again.” Twitter, 2 Oct. 2022, twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1576695313699860483. King, Stephen. “The Current Trump Allegations May Not Be True, but Seeing Him Fed a Dose of His Own Nasty Medicine Has a Certain Rough Justice.” Twitter, 11 Jan. 2017, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/819164292431941633. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Simon & Schuster, 2010. King, Stephen. “Donald Trump Blocked Me on Twitter. I Am Hereby Blocking Him from Seeing It or Mr. Mercedes. No Clowns for You, Donald. Go Float Yourself.” Twitter, 24 Aug. 2017, twitter.com/StephenKing/status/900899429242343427. King, Stephen. “Donald Trump is a Sociopath and a Criminal. To Let Him Near the Nuclear Codes Again Would Be Insane.” Twitter, 18 Mar. 2023, https://twitter. com/StephenKing/status/1637117312548368386?lang=en. King, Stephen. “Donald Trump Is a Vile, Racist, and Incompetent Bag of Guts and Waters. How Happy I Would Be to Tell Him ‘YOU’RE FIRED’ next November.” Twitter, 19 Jul. 2019, twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1152380414620778497?lang=en. King, Stephen. “Donald Trump: There Hasn’t Been a Novelty Act This Annoying since Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Twitter, 6 Aug. 2015, twitter.com/StephenKing/ status/629354529557979136.

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King, Stephen. “I Can No Longer Tweet about Trump. That Anyone in America Would Even Consider Voting for This Rabid Coyote Leaves Me Speechless.” Twitter, 9 Dec. 2015, twitter.com/StephenKing/status/674417548650225664. King, Stephen. “January 6th Wasn’t a Peaceful Protest. It Wasn’t a Riot. It Was an Insurrection Meant to Overthrow the Electoral Process and Install Donald Trump as an American Dictator.” Twitter, 31 Oct. 2021, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1454765906123444225?lang=en. King, Stephen. “Legislators, You Need to Impeach Blabbermouth Don or Force Him to Resign before He Kills Us All. He Is No Longer Competent to Serve as Chief Executive, If He Ever Was.” Twitter, 3 Jan. 2018, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/ status/948532688264351745. King, Stephen. “Lock Him up! Lock Him up! Lock Him up! I’ve Been Waiting 7 Years to Say That. Karma Sucks, Doesn’t It, Donald?” Twitter, 22 Mar. 2023, twitter. com/StephenKing/status/1638654294973972483. King, Stephen. “My Newest Horror Story: Once Upon a Time There Was a Man Named Donald Trump, and He Ran for President. Some People Wanted Him to Win.” Twitter, 21 Oct. 2016, https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/789505900604260352. King, Stephen. “Sometimes I Feel like Screaming, ‘Everybody Knows That Trump Is Crooked as a Broken Nose and Dumb as a Fencepost. Just Quit Shitting around and Get Him the Fuck out of There.” Twitter, 7 Nov. 2019, twitter.com/ StephenKing/status/1192530555331661827. King, Stephen. “There’s a Sign You Can See in Many Shops That Sell Beautiful but Fragile Items.” X, 6 Nov. 2024, http://x.com/StephenKing/status/1854115853840593251. King, Stephen. “Trump Has Blocked Me from Reading His Tweets. I May Have to Kill Myself.” Twitter, 13 Jun. 2017, twitter.com/StephenKing/status/874646427091251201. King, Stephen. “Was There Ever, in All of American History, a Man Less Fit for the Presidency than Donald Trump?” Twitter, 12 Aug. 2022, twitter.com/StephenKing/ status/1558088168540356608. King, Stephen. “You Lost, You Miserable Self-Entitled Infantile Fucker. Concede and Get the Hell Out.” Twitter, 8 Nov. 2020, https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1325452188303433728. Li, Manyu, et al. “Twitter as a Tool for Social Movement: An Analysis of Feminist Activism on Social Media Communities.” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 49, no. 3, 2020, pp. 854–68. Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ott, Brian L., and Greg Dickinson. “The Twitter Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Tweets Undermine Democracy and Threaten Us All.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 135, no. 4, 2019, pp. 607–36.

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Peitzman, Louis. “National Nightmare: Stephen King Just Wants to Tell Stories. His Readers Want Trump-Era Resistance.” BuzzFeed News, 14 Jun. 2018, https:// www.buzzfeednews.com/article/louispeitzman/stephen-king-the-outsiderdonald-trump-resistance-twitter. Schwarz, Hunter. “The Scariest Thing Stephen King Tweets about Is Politics.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 25 Nov. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ the-fix/wp/2015/04/21/the-scariest-thing-stephen-king-tweets-about-is-politics/. Sheehan, William. “Stephen King’s ‘The Institute’ Turns Our Political Moment into Gripping Horror.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 Sept. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stephen-kingsthe-institute-turns-our-political-moment-into-gripping-horror/2019/09/09/ fae7d094-cf521e9-87fa8501a456c003_story.html. Stauffer, John. “Foreword.” American Protest Literature, edited by Zoe Trodd, Harvard UP, 2006, pp. xi–xviii. “Stephen King’s Sharp Critique of Trump’s Mixed Messaging.” CNN. com, 29 Mar. 2020, https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/03/29/stephen-kings-sharpcritique-of-trumps-mixed-messaging.cnn. Texter, Douglas W. “‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Dystopia’: The Culture Industry’s Neutralization of Stephen King’s The Running Man.” Utopian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2007, pp. 43–72. Trombetta, Sadie. “Stephen King Is Receiving the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award for Being a Champion of the Resistance.” Bustle, 12 Jan. 2018, www.bustle. com/p/stephen-king-is-receiving-the-2018-pen-america-literary-service-awardfor-being-a-champion-of-the-resistance-7874021. Trump, Donald J. “ELECTION INTERFERENCE. NEVER SURRENDER!” Twitter, 24 Aug. 2023, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1694886846050771321. Tubb, Nathaniel. “PEN America Literary Service Award.” PEN America, 15 May 2018, pen.org/literary-service-award/.

About the Author Philip L. Simpson is provost of the Titusville campus and eLearning at Eastern Florida State College. A national popular-culture expert, Simpson has served the Popular Culture Association as Vice President, 2006–07; President, 2007-2008; and Area Chair, since 1997, of the following areas: horror, Stephen King, and the vampire in culture, literature, and film.

16. Dead Is Better: Pet Sematary and Animal Studies Sarah D. Nilsen

Abstract: The imaginative space of many of Stephen King’s fictional works is inhabited by a wide variety of nonhuman animals, and in particular, domesticated companion animals. King’s frequent use of pet representations is consistent with the dominant role that pets occupy within the majority of homes within the United States. This essay will use animal studies to examine how Stephen King portrays pets, how he characterizes and evaluates their lives and their interests, and how they stand for human interests and concerns. This essay argues that by understanding how King’s pets are represented, we can articulate animals’ place in human imaginaries, animals’ actual material lives across time and space, and changes in how the value of animals is understood. Keywords: Terror Management Theory, road kill, pets, domesticated companion animals

Stephen King’s real and imaginary worlds are inhabited by nonhuman animals, particularly companion animals, popularly referred to as pets. Pets have been coevolving with humans for tens of thousands of years. Humans value them predominantly for the social relationships they have with them rather than their instrumental value. Humans assign companion animals a special status relative to other animals and they play a vital role in the lives of their owners. Interest in pets has consistently increased over the past several decades. Pet ownership in the United States continues to grow and it spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic. As of 2023, according to the American Pet Products Association, 66% of US households (86.9 million homes) own a pet, a 56% increase from 1988. In 2023, these households spent $136.8 billion on their pets, including supplies and care (Megna). Surveys by the American Veterinary Medical Association show that 85% of dog

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owners and 76% of cat owners consider their pets to be members of their family (Burns). The United States is a society preoccupied with companion animals in a variety of ways, including in its popular culture, and yet these animals receive minimal academic attention or critical analysis. Stephen King, like the vast majority of his readers, grew up with companion animals, continues to live with them, and frequently appears in photographs with them. King’s childhood dog, Queenie, proudly sits in his lap in one of the few photos from his childhood (Winter). The cover photography for his 2010 nonf iction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, shows one of his Welsh Corgi dogs walking under King’s legs as he works at his office desk. Like the majority of Americans, King’s ownership of companion animals reflects a personal and meaningful connection with nonhuman animals. King, in his own biographical records, provides important details about how his experiences with nonhuman animals directly impacted his writing and storytelling. In On Writing, King recalls that the first story he wrote as a child in 1954 was about four magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping children. Their leader was a large white bunny named Mr. Rabbit Trick. This memory is presented as the origin tale for King’s development into a best-selling author. According to King, he gave the story to his mother, who said “it was good enough to be a book. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel happier. I wrote four more stories about Mr. Rabbit Trick and his friends” (On Writing 29). Starting with Mr. Rabbit Trick, King’s fiction has been populated with companion animals who play central roles in the lives of the human characters within his tales of horror.1 But unlike most animal horror stories that rely on nonhuman predators to be the monsters that “slither, run, and swoop their way through a mythic landscape in search of human flesh,” reminding readers that “humans are good to eat” (Lennard 11), King’s integration of nonhuman animal characters into his diegesis reveals a deeper engagement with human and nonhuman relations. Rather than simply reinscribing the basic conceptual separations of the human and the animal in society, King explores their emotional and psychological connections in a way that has proven immensely popular with his audiences. Pet Sematary (1983) is King’s fifth best-selling novel, and the original film version of the novel released 1 Doctor Sleep, Azreal (cat); The Stand, Kojak (Irish Setter), Joyland, Milo (Jack Russel), Sleepwalkers, Clovis (cat), Cujo, Cujo (St. Bernard) and cat; Pet Sematary, Churchill (cat) and other pets, The Green Mile, Mr. Jingles (mouse), Cats Eye, General (cat), Mr. Mercedes, Odell (cat), “L.T.’s Theory of Pets,” “The Cat from Hell” (cat).

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in 1989 and the sixth highest-grossing adaptation of a King novel, has led to a forty-year-long franchise series that includes Pet Sematary 2 (1992), a 2019 remake, and the recent release of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023). As a writer of horror tales who frequently turns to the quotidian aspects of the lives of average Americans, King often uses nonhuman animals as vehicles for exploring their fears of death and he does this by portraying animals in both typical and atypical ways. Traditional film studies’ approaches to animal horror do not have the resources to unpack this phenomenon. Animal studies, though, can provide new insight into how animals function in his films by examining the social and cultural uses of animals and how they function as objects, property, “family members,” and even personal therapeutic tools. Furthermore, Terror Management Theory (TMT), which was developed in response to social concerns about death and dying, provides a framework for understanding how humans use animals literally and symbolically to manage the human fear of death. For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed telling the tales of nonhuman animals. King’s fiction taps into this need in distinct ways that cry out for greater critical analysis.

Stephen King and Animal Studies In his writing, King uses human and nonhuman relationships to help elucidate human behavior and individual characters’ psychological mindsets. The deliberate inclusion of nonhuman animals in much of his work is noteworthy. Yet, within the interdisciplinary field of Stephen King research, and in King’s own discussion of his work, there is a notable lacuna of recognition and analysis of the role of nonhuman animals. This is noteworthy because his representations of nonhuman animals are imbued with great significance and are complex and revelatory in their exploration of human and nonhuman animal relations. Many writers use animal figures anthropomorphically, “eliding the subjective character and independent reality of the animal.” This usage of nonhuman animals frequently points to “authorial blindness or silence when animals are treated merely as background objects rather than subjective presences” (Donovan 38). King, however, develops nonhuman animal characters that function beyond the standard zoomorphs, or nonhuman animals used as symbols for human behavior. Nonhuman animal metaphors and symbols are frequently negative and are intentionally uncomplimentary when applied to humans. “This common and widespread usage of nonhuman animal characters in narratives functions to reinforce

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the elevated position that humans assign to themselves within the animal kingdom” (Sommer and Sommer 247). In Cujo, for example, King’s extensive use of nonhuman animals provides these animals with the agency and complexity of mind that forces readers and viewers to question and problematize their own speciesism—the “discrimination against or exploitation of animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind’s superiority” (Oxford English Dictionary). As Donovan persuasively argues, “An anesthetized animal or person—that is, one turned into a trope of one kind or another—is objectified, no longer a subject. For there to be an ethical response, empathy is required on the part of the author and sympathy on the part of the reader. Neither response is possible unless there remains a subject to whom the reader can relate. Animal ethics in literary criticism therefore must look to literature in which animals are treated as subjects” (42). Posing the question of how non-human animals function in adaptations of King’s works raises another issue: what resources are available to a media studies scholar to adequately capture the complexity of this topic? The interdisciplinary field of animal studies provides a theoretical framework to evaluate King’s exploration of human and nonhuman animal relations and interactions in his storytelling. Unlike the anthropocentric focus of critical media studies and cultural studies, the f ield of animal studies calls for an ethical reflection on human relationships with nonhuman animals. Critical media studies, arising out of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced “critical theory” into studies of mass media and culture. This approach has focused on “determining whose interests are served by the media, and how those interests contribute to domination, exploitation, and/or symmetrical relations of power” (Ott and Mack 15). Critical media studies have produced significant scholarly inquiry into the ways that “cultural, social, political, and economic practices relate to wider systems of power (classicism, sexism, racism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, etc.).” Scholars working in this field are united by their “skeptical attitude, humanistic approach, political assessment, and commitment to social justice” (Ott and Mack 14). However, critical media studies have remained biased in the social sciences and humanities by “the positioning of humans at the very center of meaning, value, knowledge, and action” (Almiron et al. 369). This anthropocentric approach is, however, problematic for two reasons: first, because it prevents scholars from addressing a remarkable feature of being human—our relationship with the rest of life on the planet; second, because it forgets that the object of study of this field is not the

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human being itself but the communication processes by which humans interact with each other and with nonhuman animals and, more particularly, how these processes prevent or perpetuate domination and oppression conducted by humans (369). As Claire Molloy argues, “Media discourses are important in sustaining a range of constructions of animals that are connected, appropriated or co-opted by other systems of production and so play a role in the normalization of particular practices and relations” (13). Often the nonhuman animal in popular culture is the “sign of all that is taken not-very-seriously in contemporary culture; the sign of that which doesn’t really matter. The animal may be other things besides this, but this is certainly one of its most frequent roles in representation” (Baker 174). The term “critical animal studies” also eschews the use of “human” and thereby questions assumptions about human primacy over other species and asserts human kinship as animals alongside, but not superior to, other species. As Almiron states, critical animal studies argue for an engaged critical praxis and for political stances that provide a much-needed deconstruction of the binary opposition between human and nonhuman animals. These critics can strive to dismantle structures of exploitation, domination, and oppression (372).

Critical Animal Studies, Domestic Pets, and Pet Sematary Scholarly research on King is vast and now comprises a field in and of itself. Yet, like most humanities-based work, the methodological approaches employed are inherently and fundamentally speciesist, even in texts that contain dominant nonhuman animal characters. To my knowledge, no critical essay on the subject of Pet Sematary engages in a systemic or critical way with either the pets or the animal cemetery central to the narrative or its use of human and nonhuman animal relations. This essay redresses this absence by focusing on and analyzing the human and nonhuman animal relations that occur in both King’s real life and the fictionalization of those relations in his novel and the subsequent filmic versions. The companion animal that was the original creative inspiration for King’s novel was his daughter’s cat, Smucky, who was killed on a road. According to King, in 1979 when he was invited to be a writer-in-residence at his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono, the family rented a large old house in the nearby town of Orrington, which was located next to a major truck route. King described the road as one that “seemed to consume stray dogs and cats”; in the woods behind the house, up a small hill, local children

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had created an informal pet cemetery. King’s daughter’s cat, Smucky,2 was killed on the road by a passing truck. King decided to bury the cat in the pet cemetery and was tempted at first to “tell her that (he) hadn’t seen (Smucky) around,” but his wife told him no, that his daughter needed to “have that experience.” When he did tell her she cried and cried, and the next day they heard her in the garage, “jumping up and down, popping these plastic packing sheets and say, ‘Let God have His Own cat. I want my cat. I want my own cat’” (qtd. in Winter 146). King’s daughter, Naomi, was nine years old at the time of Smucky’s death, while in the novel and 1989 film, the daughter, Ellie, is five years old and identified as the owner of Church, the fictional Creed family’s cat. As previously discussed, surveys show that a majority of owners of companion animals claim that they consider them members of their family. And, yet, as domesticated animals, companion animals were intentionally bred to be dependent on humans for care and to work for humans. Their status within the family is not equivalent to human members because companion animals are considered property, both legally and socially. King’s own companion animals as well as his fictional character’s companion animals are completely dependent on humans, who control most aspects of their lives. Unlike human children, who typically become autonomous, non-humans never will. This is the entire point of domestication—many human beings want domesticated animals to depend on them. The ethics of pets3 is a widely discussed issue within philosophy and legal studies, with most animal rights debates concerning companion animals focused upon concepts of property. As the philosophers Gary Francione and Ann Charlton explain, “The reason for this is that if animals matter morally—if animals are not just things—they cannot be property. If they are property, they can only be things … If animals are property, they can have no inherent or intrinsic value. They have only extrinsic or external value. They are things that we value. They have no rights; we have rights, as property owners, to value them. And we might choose to value them at zero.” Because of their status as property, companion animals are often granted 2 According to the Urban dictionary, like most zoomorphs, smucky is a derogatory and misogynistic term, meaning an annoying, stuck-up girl, more commonly used for Caucasian teenagers. King chooses in Pet Sematary to make the fictional cat, Church, into a male whose castration becomes a major thematic concern for Louis. 3 Note the etymology of the term pet, typically not used by animal studies scholars: a “domesticated or tamed animal kept as a favorite,” originating in the 1530s, originally in Scottish and northern England dialect. This implies ownership of the “pet” and also its trifling status as a “favorite.” For more on etymology of the word, see Online Etymology Dictionary (2024).

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a utilitarian value, even though theorists have typically defined pets as “nonhuman animals whom we take into our homes and accept as members of the household. It assumes that cats and dogs are happy living in human households and have better lives than they would if they were in the wild” (Bok 769). But the reality is that most companion animals are acquired so that they can fulfill a variety of implicit and explicit productive functions, both social/emotional and physical, within the family that would never be expected from the other human members. Like many owners of companion animals, the real King and the fictional Creed family acquired their pet cats as “companions” for their children and also as tools to teach their children about care, discipline, compassion, responsibility, and, importantly, the reality of death, providing them the emotional skills they will need for human relationships. This attitude suggests an “instrumentalization of affectivity,” in which emotional bonds do have value, but only, or at least primarily, insofar as they augment human-human relationships (Cole and Stewart 85—86). Companion animals therefore become a training tool to help children prepare for “authentic” relationships with fellow humans. To focus on the treatment of the cat in King’s Pet Sematary is to address ethical issues concerning the ownership of companion animals and related issues of quality of life within individual households, neighborhoods, and communities. Pet Sematary makes clear that when young children act as “owners” of a nonhuman animal, the result is regularly significant suffering and death. Why would a child be the primary caregiver for a companion animal? Children are meant to learn about compassion by realizing that their pet can suffer pain when its tail is pulled, or it is kicked, or electrocuted by its “shock” collar; they can learn about caregiving when the child decides they would rather play with a different “thing” than the pet, often leading to companion animals not being fed or watered properly, being left alone or crated for long hours, and even allowed to stray, leading to injury and death. King further implies, by equating the killings of Church and Gage as products of parental neglect, that the notion that another human would be expected to experience pain, suffering, neglect, and eventual death as a way to teach a child how to develop the emotional skills necessary to be a better human should strike many readers as absurd. Smucky and Church’s lives closely replicate that of many companion animals in the United States. Church was given as a pet when Ellie was two years old to become her toy and playmate while her young parents struggled with the challenges of parenthood. The father Louis was an emergency room physician, and his demanding schedule required him to leave his wife, Rachel, home to take care of Ellie, a toddler, and a new baby, Gage.

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A move to another state meant the family was leaving behind the support they had received. The family becomes dependent on each other and their companion animal, Church, for emotional and physical support. Church, though, is not accorded the same position within the family as the human members. Church is forced into a small, plastic cage during the family’s drive across the country to get to their new home in Maine. Church’s restlessness and stress during the drive leads Louis to dream of dumping him at the side of the road. When the Creeds finally arrive at their new home, Church is locked into the cage in a hot car while the family gets to explore. When a neighbor warns the family about the number of pets that have been killed on the busy road in front of their house, the Creed’s response is to let the cat out of the cage, thus freeing to roam directly into the road. As Louis states in the novel, “Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight … violent lives, violent deaths … There were a great many who never grew old by the fire” (36). Church is left uncared for except for a crisis over whether or not he should be castrated in order to keep him from wandering into the kill zone in front of their house. Since the cat is solely under the care of a young child, there is no attempt to keep the cat indoors. When the cat is soon run over, Louis’s primary concern is about how his death will upset his daughter. Furthermore, Louis, in both the novel and film, uses the cat as a target for his emotional insecurities and frustrations with family life, causing him to dream of abandoning Church on a roadside, to kick him, to throw him, and, horrifyingly, in one of the most graphic scenes of dying in the original film, to enthusiastically euthanize the resurrected Church, whom spectators watch die a slow, agonizing death, writhing around as Louis holds him in the air. The only time Louis, whose sexual relations with his wife affect his own self-esteem, shows any sign of empathetic identification towards Church is when he is castrated against his will. Louis perversely ratchets up the pet learning theme by taking the extraordinary and horrific step of bringing Church back from the dead, rather than dealing with one of the typical utilitarian purposes of companion animals: teaching his young daughter the reality of death and dying. When Church returns from the dead, his bodily form is in a state of decay and bears the scars of his gruesome death on the road. Though both the King and Creed families were fully cognizant that the road directly next to their household was a “kill zone” where companion animals had been cruelly and brutally run over by an endless stream of trucks, neither family attempted to protect their pets by keeping them indoors. Jud does plant the seed of castrating Church under the assumption that it will keep him closer

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to home and off the road. The low status many people accord nonhuman animals is evident in the 350 million vertebrate animals killed by traffic in the US every year (Schilthuizen). In Pet Sematary, the resurrected, damaged, and dying Church is never provided any veterinary care, even though his decrepit state is noted by many characters. This is again typical of many companion animals who are treated as property by their owners. In fact, in the United States, half of cat owners never bring their pets in for routine or preventive care (Torella). So, in Church’s short three-year life, he was given to a two-year-old as his caregiver, he was caged, castrated, left mostly unattended, killed, and brought back to life in order to be kicked, abused, and violently killed again. King’s Pet Sematary thus provides an accurate portrait of how companion animals are frequently treated because of the status as “property” assigned to them. These companion animals are thought to make their owners into better humans. As Francione and Charlton argue, even if you treat your companion animals as members of your family, the law will “protect that decision because we may choose to value our property as we like …We are property owners. They are property. We own them. The reality is that in the United States, most dogs and cat do not end up dying of old age in loving homes. They have homes for a relatively short period of time before they are transferred to another owner, taken to a shelter, dumped or killed … If you have the legal right to take your dog to a kill shelter, or to ‘humanely’ kill your dog yourself … Your dog is your property” (n.p.). According to King, Pet Sematary started off as a “lark” in the wake of Smucky’s death. While the accidental killing of a companion animal is typically a sad event, their death and burial or disposal are an expected and unremarkable aspect of pet ownership. The killing and the burial of pets in Pet Sematary were considered an accepted and familiar community practice—a childish ritual that had been practiced for generations. King’s novel deviates from social norms in terms of its treatment of death and dying in its paralleling of the accidental killing of a companion animal with the death of Creed’s young son on the same road and by their burial within the same cemetery. When King equates nonhuman animal death with human death, he problematically implies that humans do not consider the lives of their companion animals equal or even comparable to the lives of their children. In addition to the approximately 5.4 million cats and 1.2 million dogs that are killed on roads each year, in 1979, when King was writing Pet Sematary, 7.6 to 10 million cats and dogs were being euthanized each year in animal shelters. Comparatively, there were 1,291 pedestrian deaths in 1979 for children younger than thirteen (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Fatality Facts 2021 Pedestrians). As a society, Americans tend to

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consider the lives of human children of significant intrinsic moral value, and consequentially children are treated and protected in a very different way from companion animals. While the very real possibility of the killing of Church on the road in front of their house was openly discussed by woefully inadequate caregivers, there was no attempt to hinder his death. When his anticipated killing does occur, it is the social norm to immediately inter him in the Pet Sematary, adding his name to the list of childish inscriptions marking the passing of another supposedly valuable and beloved companion animal. But the killing of their son, Gage, on the same road is considered to be an egregious act of parental and social neglect. As an emergency room doctor, Louis was very familiar with the devasting impact of vehicle accidents on the bodies of all mammals, including the obvious road kill splattered across their road. Louis, after retrieving Church’s dead body, thinks to himself about “all the woodchucks and cats and dogs he’[d] seen strewn all over the highway … their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as Loudon Wainwright sa[id] on that record about the dead skunk” (131). 4 To emphasize the destructive power of vehicular accidents on human bodies, King introduces the character of a university student, Pascow, struck by a car while jogging. Louis immediately diagnoses the impact of the vehicle on the runner’s body, “Half his head was crushed. His neck was broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet” (56). And yet, rather than being constantly vigilant about the possibility of Gage’s death on the road, especially after Gage is almost killed when they first arrive at their new house, the parents not only do little to protect him. Louis practically leads him onto the road and into the path of an oncoming truck when he races with his laughing son. As the truck (inevitably) crushes Gage, Louis remembers his neighbor, Jud Crandall, “speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow: You want to watch ’em around the road, Missus Creed. It’s a bad road for kids and pets” (247). Smucky’s death created anxiety for King because it required that he discuss the topic of death with his daughter—a key social aspect of companion 4 “Dead Skunk” by Loudon Wainwright III was released in November 1972 and peaked at 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1973. The song indicates human indifference towards the widespread killing of nonhuman animals by cars. “Dead skunk in the middle of the road/And it’s stinkin’ to high heaven/Yeah you got your dead cat and you got your dead dog/on a moonlight night and you got your dead toad frog/got your dead rabbit and your dead raccoon/the blood and the guts they’re gonna make you swoon …./All over the road, technicolor man/Oh, you got pollution/It’s dead, it’s in the middle/And it’s stinkin’ to high, high heaven” (Wainwright).

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animal ownership, especially with children. But the actual topic of death did not become salient for King until he began to imagine the death of his own child as he wrote Pet Sematary. Famously, at a panel discussion, King was asked if he had ever written anything too horrible to be published, and he immediately thought of Pet Sematary. King considered it a “nasty book,” that it would not have been publishable because of its “subject matter and theme,” and “maybe (he didn’t) have the guts for that end of the business of horror fiction—for the final truths” (qtd. in Winter 148). While writing the book, King realized that he had never had to “deal with the consequences of death on a rational level. I have always been aware of the things that I didn’t want to write about. The death of a child is one … And I always shied away from the entire funeral process—the aftermath of death. The funeral parlors, the grief, and, particularly where you are dealing with the death of a healthy child, the guilt—the feeling that you are somehow at fault. And for me, it was like looking through a window into something that could be. I decided that, if I was going to write this book, perhaps it would be good for me—in the Calvinist sense—to get through with it, to find out everything, and to see what would happen. But in trying to cope with these things, the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind; it never ceased to trouble me. I was trying to teach school, and the boy was always there, the funeral home was always there, the mortician’s room was always there. And when I finished, I put the book in a drawer. (qtd. in Winter 147)

Pet Sematary makes the process of death and dying central. Memories of the many deaths of both human and nonhuman animals that occurred in this small Maine town are retold, alongside tales of other deaths including suicide, vehicular death, death from old age, euthanasia, and murder. Route 15 is a Killer Road. The narrative is propelled by unrelenting cycles of death, mourning, and burial of human and nonhuman animals. King thought “all horror fiction (all of the good stuff, anyway) is an attempt to carry the reader from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and that this journey becomes a kind of easily graspable, but nevertheless surreal mystic allegory for our own life passage toward death. Seen in this light, the writer of horror fiction is a little like the boatman ferrying people across the river Styx” (Pet Sematary 112). In Pet Sematary, although Louis “had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career,” he had never once felt “the passage of

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a soul” (149). King injects his horror-based exploration of death and dying with concerns about the impact of religious practices and beliefs on our understanding of death. The Creed’s cat’s name is Church and the family name is Creed: a system of religious belief or, more directly, the Nicene Creed. The cycles of death that structure Pet Sematary, initiated with the killing of Church, provoke an existential crisis for Louis, causing him to try to deny its existence and defy death. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Louis’s rational creed cannot hold up against the preternatural energies alive in the burial site, even as he attempts to approach this power like a scientist who can control the experiment he unleashed. As Douglas Winter explains, “Pet Sematary makes clear, the horror story—at its most penetrating, important moments, those of immaculate clarity of insight which we call art—is not about make-believe at all. It is a literature whose essence is our singular certainty—that, in Hamlet’s words, ‘all the lives must die’” (152). King makes explicit in Pet Sematary the ways that the death of nonhuman animals is directly linked to human anxieties and fears about death and dying. King states in both the novel and screenplay for Pet Sematary, “Dead is better.”

Terror Management Theory As King knows all too well, widespread interest in death and dying “emerged as a number of the baby-boom generation contemplated the mortality of their parents as well as their own” (Doka 547). Here one finds the confluence of two important elements in King’s oeuvre: anxiety and concern about death and the role of animals in mediating this concern. Ernest Becker’s influential book on death and dying, The Denial of Death, formed the basis for the development and implementation of research in the social psychological study of Terror Management Theory (TMT). In general, TMT proposes that “people are highly reactive to thoughts of their own mortality and animality, and thus invest in culture and shared worldviews to mitigate death concerns. The rationale is that, when mortality is made salient, we psychologically distance ourselves and push away from animals (who are mortal and have no culture and worldviews, at least in mainstream thinking), in ways that make us feel superior to animals” (Dhont et al. 774). For Christians, the promise of eternal life through the salvation of Jesus Christ provides comfort from human anxieties about mortality. King was brought up in a very religious Christian family, he attended Methodist church two or three times a week, and he later claimed that his religious beliefs had not changed much over the years and that they were as traditional as the

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stuff that he writes. King has said that the Bible has been the most important influence on his fiction. “I believe in God,” King wrote. “I believe what I write when I say that we live in the center of a mystery. Believing that there is just life, and that’s the end of it, seems to me as primitive as believing that the entire universe revolves around the earth” (qtd. in Winter 17). Christianity considers the human body sacred, and it maintains that only humans, made in the image of God, are capable of possessing a soul and achieving immortality in heaven. “For the ensuing Christian world, there was simply no place in the symbolic realm of heaven for nonhumans. Augustine argued that in heaven ‘there will be no animal body to weigh down the soul in its process of corruption’” (Marino and Mountain, 12). Louis is much more agnostic than King, “a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult” (King, Pet 58–59). In the first Pet Sematary film, Louis explains to Ellie that “some people think we just wink out … like a candle flame when the wind blows hard … I think we go on. I’m not sure what happens after we die, but yeah—I have faith in that.” Winter argues that Pet Sematary is very Christian because it is a “book about what happens when you attempt miracles without informing them with any sense of a real soul. When you attempt mechanistic miracles—abracadabra, pigeon and pie, the monkey’s paw—you destroy everything” (Winter 151). King links these miracles directly to the primitive, animalistic cannibal practices of the Mi’kmaq (in King’s rendering, Micmac) and their responsibility for the “soured” ground of nature. The trigger that causes the collapse of Louis’s certainty about death is the killing of Church; his lack of faith in the power of Christian burial to restore life, and his inability to deal with his daughter’s and wife’s anxiety surrounding death, ironically forces Louis to resort to the “unnatural” practices of the indigenous people, the Mi’kmaq. TMT research is often utilized by animal studies scholars to argue that the denial of death can explain how and why human relationships with other animals are fundamentally exploitative and harmful (Marino and Mountain 5). King’s frequent use of nonhuman animals in his storytelling, and in particular in Pet Sematary, is directly linked to human death. The killing of Church forces the Creeds to confront their own denial of death and because of their lack of a religious belief system that would provide them with the spiritual comfort of immortality, Louis resorts to abominable and sacrilegious actions. Jud explains to Louis that the reason he decided to resurrect Church was because his daughter had not been properly prepared for the death of her favorite pet. In the Pet Sematary, Ellie realizes that all these pets had died and that Church would also have to die, and “if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby

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brother” (32). For King, “the issue at the heart of Pet Sematary is that of the rational being’s struggle with modern death—death without God, death without hope of salvation” (Winter 149–50). According to TMT, much of human behavior is motivated by largely unconscious anxiety about mortality, and in response human beings use “mortality salience” to attempt to alleviate this anxiety. Mortality salience characterizes situations that remind individuals of their personal mortality or that makes the idea of mortality more cognitively or emotionally accessible. In Pet Sematary, Rachel’s terrifying fear of death, which results from her experiencing her sister’s death from spinal meningitis while left alone as a small child to take care of her, inhibits her ability to function fully as a mother and wife.5 In the novel, when the Creed family initially visits the Pet Sematary, Ellie questions the mortality of Church, causing Rachel to attack Louis for even discussing the topic of death with his daughter. “(Ellie) knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It’s perfectly natural,” Louis explains. In response, Rachel screams, “Will you stop saying that!” “The anger in her voice was outmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in his eyes—I don’t want to talk about this, Louis, and you can’t make me.” Rachel then demands that Louis stop talking to Ellie about death, and that there was “nothing natural about death. Nothing” (42). Rachel’s denial of death and Louis’s inability to deal with his own uncertainty, coupled with a secular belief system that fails to provide comfort in the face of death, undermines the Creed family’s ability to recognize the mortal threat of the road in front of their new home. While many companion animals are killed on roads because of their human owners’ neglect, very few parents who witness their toddler almost stumble onto an extremely busily trafficked road would not respond by taking clear action to guarantee their safety. But in the opening of the film version of Pet Sematary, when Gage walks towards a massive tanker roaring past a few feet from their house, his parents respond in horror, but they do nothing to prevent this same event from happening again, and with deadly consequences. Arguably, they are distracted and disabled by their repressed anxiety. Their inability to foster a healthy relationship with their companion animal leads to devastating consequences. 5 King had a similar experience, when as a child he was left alone to watch his grandmother and he discovered she had died in her sleep. King recalls of the incident: “I remember sitting on the bed beside her, holding my mother’s compact near to her mouth because it was something I had seen in the movies. And there was nothing” (qtd. in Winter 18).

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A pet cemetery, like all cemeteries, is a space created to memorialize the death of a beloved companion animal while marking the inevitability and f inality of death. While many humans intentionally acquire companion animals to teach children about death and ideally alleviate their own anxiety, according to TMT any reminder of corporeal existence and creatureliness is also threatening, creating anxiety about one’s own imminent death. Anxiety is created by reminders that humans are, in many ways, no more than animals and subject to the same biological conditions and limitations as other life forms (Beatson and Halloran 74). A material body reminds individuals of their animal limitations, in particular their assured mortality. In Pet Sematary, the impact of a vehicular collision on all animals’ physical bodies is catastrophic, and all these reminders of the fragility and impermanence of human and nonhuman animal bodies are central to its horror. Jud’s view of the Pet Sematary as a benevolent space for children to memorialize their beloved companion animals serves to obfuscate the much more sinister burial ground of the Mi’kmaqs. Companion animals similarly function to assuage anxiety but they never wholly allow individuals to keep that anxiety repressed. King’s graphic descriptions of the explosion of bodily flesh due to vehicular impact are repeated multiple times in the novel and the f ilms. King creates in Pet Sematary a killing zone where tanker trucks, dump trucks, and cars “go all day and night … on the frigging road,” greatly amplifying the audience’s mortality salience by reminding its members of their personal mortality as human animals.

Conclusion: Stephen King and the Acceptance of Death In June 1999, King’s writerly understanding of road kill as a source of mortality salience became a reality when he himself became the victim of a vehicular collision while taking his daily four-mile walk from his summer home in Maine. In a short steep section of the road, there was no sight line, making it a regular spot for road kill. Three-quarters up this hill, King was almost killed, by a “character out of one of my novels” (On Writing 260), who was recklessly driving a van and had nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses. This Stephen King character/driver, Bryan Smith, was not looking at the road because “his Rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van into the back-seat area, where there was an Igloo with some meat inside … The Rottweiler, Bullet, started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push Bullet away … when he

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stuck me. Smith told friends later that he thought he’d hit a ‘small deer’ until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van” (255). The impact of the crash shattered King’s physical body. As King notes, “the horror story is our rehearsal for death,” and that rehearsal, like in Pet Sematary, is habitually practiced with both human and nonhuman animals (Danse 380). The tendency of scholars to ignore the significance of the nonhuman animals that populate King’s work is consistent with the notion that “we have become more and more conscious of our mortality, we have tried to disconnect from other animals, relating to them increasingly as little more than commodities, resources, and spare parts that can gain us a few more years in which we fight off the specter of death” (Marino and Mountain 16). While being flown to the hospital in a LifeFlight helicopter, King realized that he did not want to die but like all human and nonhuman animals he was “actually lying in death’s doorway” and that “someone [was] going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it [was] mostly out of my hands” (On Writing 260). According to TMT, much of human culture, and in particular the horror genre, can be seen as an attempt to confront and transcend biological nature and reach for some elusive form of immortality. Though King’s writings about human and nonhuman relations force the reader to confront their own denial of death, King at this late stage in his life appears to have been able to reconcile his own earlier anxiety and denial of death that permeated Pet Sematary—in his nonfiction work and interviews, at least. As one of America’s most successful and popular authors, who has been able to transform the real world into the imaginative space of a Stephen King world, his global recognition has provided him with the immortality of those whose influence will live on after their death (Marino and Mountain 9). King’s fiction thus features nonhuman animals to challenge readers to address their fears of death.

Works Cited Almiron, Nuria, Matthew Cole, and Carrie Freeman. “Critical Animal and Media Studies: Expanding the Understanding of Oppression in Communication Research.” European Journal of Communication, vol. 33, no. 4, 2018, pp. 367–80. Amiot, Catherine, Brock Bastian, and Pim Martens. “People and Companion Animals: It Takes Two to Tango.” BioScience, vol. 66, no. 7, July 2016, pp. 552–60. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. U of Illinois P, 2001.

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Beatson, Ruth, and Michael Halloran. “Humans Rule! The Effects of Creatureliness Reminders, Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Attitudes towards Animals.” British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 46, 2007, pp. 619–32. Beers, Diane L. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal RightsActivism in the United States. Ohio UP, 2006. Bok, Hilary. “Keeping Pets.” The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey. Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 769–95. Burns, Katie. “Pet ownership stable, veterinary care variable,” AVMA.org, 31 Dec. 2018, https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2019-01-15/pet-ownership-stableveterinary-care-variable Cole, Matthew, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Ashgate Publishing, 2014. Dhont, Kristof, Gordon Hodson, Steve Loughnan, and Catherine E. Amiot. “Rethinking Human-Animal Relations: The Critical role of Social Psychology.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 22, no. 6, 2019, pp. 769–84. Donovan, Josephine. “Tolstoy’s Animals.” Society and Animals, vol. 17, 2009, pp. 38–52. Francione, Gary, and Ann Charlton. “The Case Against Pets.” Aeon, 8 Sept. 2016, https://aeon.co/essays/why-keeping-a-pet-is-fundamentally-unethical. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkley Books, 1982. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Doubleday & Company, 1983. Lennard, Dominic. Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies. State U of New York P, 2019. Marino, Lori, and Michael Mountain. “Denial of Death and the Relationship Between Humans and Other Animals.” Anthrozoos, vol. 28, no. 1, 2015, pp. 5–21. Megna, Michelle. “Pet Ownership Statistics 2024.” Forbes.com, 25 January 2024, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/pet-ownership-statistics/. Melson, Gail. Where the Wild Things Are. Harvard UP, 2005. Molloy, Claire. Popular Media and Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Online Etymology Dictionary. “Pets.” Accessed 9 Oct. 2024, https://www.etymonline. com/word/pet Otto, Brian, and Robert Mack. Critical Media Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Schilthuizen, Menno. “Roadkill Literally ‘Drives’ Some Species to Extinction.” Scientific American, 12 April 2022, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ roadkill-literally-drives-some-species-to-extinction/#:~:text=The%20hazel%20 grouse%20(Tetrastes%20bonasia,in%20the%20next%20few%20decades. Sommer, Robert, and Barbara A. Sommer. “Zoomorphy: Animal Metaphors for Human Personalities.” Anthrozoos, vol. 24, 2011, pp. 237–48. Torello, Kenny. “The Case Against Pet Ownership.” Vox, 11 Apr. 2023, https://www.vox. com/future-perfect/2023/4/11/23673393/pets-dogs-cats-animal-welfare-boredom.

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Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Wainwright, Loudon. “Dead Skunk.” Lyrics.com, Accessed 19 Oct. 2024, https:// www.lyrics.com/lyric/125354/Loudon+Wainwright+III/Dead+Skunk. Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: from Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, 2000. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. Signet, 1984.

About the Author Sarah Nilsen is an Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Projecting America: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958 (2011) and coeditor with Sarah E. Turner of Critical Race Theory and the American Media (forthcoming).

17. Author Functions: Stephen King’s Writers Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Abstract: This essay investigates the ways King’s own writing theorizes the writing process through a focus on King’s author protagonists and the roles that writing (or failures to write) plays in his fiction. These theorizations of writing in King’s work are addressed in relation to two interconnected categories: identity and creativity. Identity has to do with explorations of the nature of the self and expressions of individual history and personality. Creativity has to do with the author’s expression of original ideas and their relation to genre. Taken together, King’s depictions of authors, writings, and the act of literary creation theorize what we may call authentic literary expression as a revelatory articulation of truth with the power to shape experience in restorative ways. Keywords: creativity, identity, truth, writing

What is an Author? In “What is an Author,” French philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1969 response to Roland Barthes’s famous 1967 proclamation of the “death of the author,” Foucault asks what may seem a question with an obvious answer: What is an author? Not surprisingly (at least to anyone with even a passing familiarity with French poststructuralist philosophy), the answer turns out to be more complicated than simply someone who writes and/or publishes writing. Perhaps counter-intuitively, for Foucault, the author does not precede their works. Instead, what Foucault calls an “author function,” rather than being a flesh-and-blood human being, is a kind of fantasy formation generated by an author’s statements (their works, interviews, social media presence), reviews of and critical writings on their work, understandings of genre, general ideas about art and artists, and so on. Taking Stephen King as an

Blouin, M.J., Theorizing Stephen King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025 doi 10.5117/9789048559619_ch17

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example, very few of us know him personally—instead, our respective ideas of Stephen King arise out of his novels, short stories, non-fiction writings, and other texts; interviews with him; adaptations of his works into various media; reviews and critical analyses of his writing; stories about him; and so on—together with our shared contemporary understandings of what an author is and what authorship entails. All of these ideas combined form the concepts attached to the name Stephen King. What is particularly fascinating about the author function Stephen King, however, is the frequency with which King, in his writings, metatextually reflects on and theorizes authorship. A number of King’s protagonists are authors and writing (or the failure to write) plays an important role in King’s fiction. Part of Stephen King as author function is thus his meditations on the functions and functioning of authors. These theorizations of writing in King’s work can be divided into two broad and, at times, interwoven categories exploring identity and creativity. Identity has to do with explorations of the nature of the self and expressions of individual history and personality. Creativity has to do with the author’s expression of original ideas and their relation to genre. Taken together, King’s depictions of authors, writings, and the act of literary creation theorize what we may call authentic literary expression as a revelatory articulation of truth with the power to shape experience in restorative ways. This repeated theorization of writing then feeds back into the Constant Reader’s mental impression of Stephen King.

The Author’s Many Selves Authors and the act of authorship in King’s f iction often function as psychoanalytic tools to explore the nature of the self, as means to express personal anxieties, and as vehicles for reflecting on and processing history. The representation of authorship as a mechanism to explore the constitution of identity is perhaps most evident in King’s twin riffs on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886): the novel The Dark Half (1989) and the novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” the latter included in his 1990 collection, Four Past Midnight. In each of these two psychological works, King explores where original ideas come from and, in particular, the source of gruesome and grotesque story lines and scenes. The conclusion in each is that human identity is not singular and consistent, but rather composed of different parts, which are sometimes at odds with one another. Writers—especially writers of

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horror—possess the unusual ability to tap into and channel the “dark side” of human identity, creating violent and unsettling content in their work. The question of whether or not this is a good thing is interestingly left unresolved in both works. The Dark Half presents us with a meditation on literary genre and authenticity right from the start. Protagonist Thad Beaumont is an author (and, with autobiographical overtones, recovering alcoholic) whose literary work published under his own name has achieved minimal popular success, but whose series of gritty crime novels published under the name George Stark has been a big hit. Once Thad is outed as the author of the book series about psychotic killer Alexis Machine, he and his wife stage a mock funeral for his alter ego, George Stark. Stark, however, then materializes as an actual physical entity and embarks on a killing spree, targeting everyone he considers to be tied to his “death.” The plot of The Dark Half, in keeping with much supernatural fiction, follows a two-step process: first, the threat must be identified, which means accepting the violations of the rules that govern our consensus reality. Thad and, eventually, his wife, Elizabeth, and the sheriff of Castle Rock, Maine, Alan Pangborn, must accept that George Stark is the real-world personification of Thad’s fictional identity. Second, a strategy to address the threat must be devised, which, in this case, involves Thad’s awareness of a psychic connection with Stark. In conjunction with this two-step process, however, Thad and Pangborn frequently reflect on the act of literary creation. Writers, explains Pangborn, act as spiritual mediums, channeling ghosts. They “make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite (readers) to join them in their fantasies” (418). This process of essentially giving birth to that which does not exist (George Stark’s emergence as physical entity is a literalization of this phenomenon) leads to a consideration of the duality of the author. Reflecting on one of the novel’s plot twists—that Thad apparently absorbed a twin in utero—but then generalizing it as the condition of all authors, Pangborn contemplates, “He is two men—he has ALWAYS been two men. That’s what any man or woman who makes believe for a living must do. The one who exists in the normal world … and the one who creates worlds. They are two. Always at least two” (414). Thad himself raises the question of the writer’s identity earlier in the text. On the one hand, Thad theorizes the act of literary creation as a means to give shape to experience: “[H]e was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one—including himself—who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything. He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark

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against confusion, maybe even insanity” (137).1 On the other hand, however, he wonders about himself, about the part of himself that is able to create horror: “Inside him a voice whispered for the first time: Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?” (137). The answer to Thad’s question is an uncomfortable one: he is Thad Beaumont and he is George Stark and part of him is psychotic killer Alexis Machine. In Freudian terms, the Stark who materializes as antagonist in the story can be considered as an expression of Thad’s Id—the part of himself driven by desire that refuses to accede to social expectations. “I will call it my William Wilson complex” (144, author’s emphasis), thinks Thad, waking up from a dream of Machine, here referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “William Wilson” (1839), in which the titular Wilson confronts his conscience in the form of an uncanny doppelgänger. Later, Thad acknowledges of Stark, “They were twins, halves of the same whole” (236)—or, to put it in terms of the title of the novel, “My dark half” (282). It is not hard to relate this metatextual reflection on the process of horror creation back to King himself, perhaps wondering if it is healthy or good to give birth to tales of horror and despair—and it is worth noting in this respect that Thad Beaumont does not have a happy outcome. In the novel’s epilogue, Sheriff Pangborn wonders if Thad’s wife will ever be able to make peace with him because, he thinks, “Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of” (511). We learn in King’s later novel, Needful Things (1991), that Elizabeth took their kids and left Thad and then, in Bag of Bones (1998), protagonist Mike Noonan (himself an author) recalls that an author named Thad Beaumont—with overtones of Henry Jekyll who, in Stevenson’s story, kills himself to prevent Hyde from taking control—committed suicide. King’s The Dark Half thus builds on the premise foundational to Freudian psychoanalysis and creatively developed in stories by Poe, Stevenson, and all following in their wake who riff on Jekyll and Hyde that human identity is multiple and that we have repressed aspects of ourselves that we prefer never see the light of day. Authors, particularly of horror, are the ones willing to hold a lantern out over the chasm of the unconscious and to try to see what is down there. It is a perilous perch, though, and one is in danger of toppling in or of allowing something to claw its way up out of the darkness. The danger of peering into the darkness is where King begins his revisitation of The Dark Half in his novella, “Secret Window, Secret Garden.” In his 1

Unless otherwise indicated, italics should be presumed to be present in the original.

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headnote to the story, King contrasts his novel Misery (1987) with The Dark Half, noting that the former was his attempt to illustrate “the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader,” while the latter was where he “tried to illustrate the converse: the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer” (321). “Secret Window, Secret Garden” will try to tackle both aspects of what he refers to as his “strange and dangerous craft” (321), he explains, by returning to The Dark Half from a different angle. Using the metaphor of a window offering an unusual perspective on something familiar, King ends his headnote by observing that the role of the writer is to “gaze through that window and report on what he sees” (322). “Sometimes,” however, “windows break” and that, he proposes, is the concern of his story: “What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?” (322). The glass is already broken at the start of “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” although the reader does not know it yet and the different angle offered in the tale is a different perspective on the nature of identity. Whereas the monster in The Dark Half is the Id incarnate, the antagonist in “Secret Window, Secret Garden” is arguably the superego run amuck. If The Dark Half theorizes that fictional stories emerge from depths of the writer’s unconscious, “Secret Window, Secret Garden” instead proposes that everything, in a sense, has already been written and the job of the writer is to try to find an original approach to well-worn material. Anxieties related to this act of creation are foregrounded through the novella’s focus on plagiarism. The protagonist of “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” Morton Rainey, is a successful novelist living in Maine. When he is accused by a Mississippi man named John Shooter of having plagiarized Shooter’s story, he dismisses the accusation as insane since his story was apparently published two years before Shooter’s. The accusation of plagiarism, however, precipitates meditation within the tale on the nature of literary originality. “Mort himself,” notes the narration, “believed there were at least six stories: success; failure, love and loss; revenge; mistaken identity; the search for a higher power, be it God or the devil” (429). Because all stories consist of variations on these same master plots, Mort, we learn, “felt guilty because writing stories always felt a little bit like stealing, and probably always would” (340). Mort, it is important to add, is particularly sensitive on the issue of originality. This is, f irst, because “a good many reviews of his books had suggested that he was not really an original writer; that most of his works consisted of twice-told tales” (429). This is, second, because he has previously been accused of plagiarism—falsely, if we can trust the narrative—which scuttled a potential movie deal. For most of the novella,

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however, Mort steadfastly insists that his work has always been his own: “Plagiarism, he decided, was outright theft. And he had never done it in his life” (429). Except we learn in the end that he has. As the story progresses, what emerges is that, at the very start of his career, Mort plagiarized a story from a fellow student in a college creative writing course and that story became his first published tale. His career as an author therefore can be traced back to this original act of theft. What we further learn is that John Shooter is the external projection of Mort’s guilt, come to hold him to account for what he has done. Mort, in the end, is revealed to suffer from a split personality and, in a kind of fugue state, to have killed two men and burned down his own home. Whereas Alexis Machine in The Dark Half is an external manifestation of Thad Beaumont’s tabooed wishes and desires—his violent, appetitive side—John Shooter in “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” in contrast, is the incarnation of Mort’s ethical lapses. In addition, whereas The Dark Half concludes that the author’s material emerges from within (and that the author must take care not to stare too long into the abyss at the heart of the subject), “Secret Window, Secret Garden” proposes that no author writes free of external influences and that a handful of master plots or archetypes are unavoidable in the act of literary creation. Both stories, however, reach the same Freudian conclusion concerning the nature of human identity: We are strangers to ourselves as there is a part of us—the unconscious—that we cannot access and know fully and this part of ourselves directs literary creation. As with The Dark Half, it is difficult not to make connections back to King himself. In the headnote to “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” he makes a point of highlighting that authors often revisit, rewrite, or revise existing works—both their own and the works of other authors. King notes that John Fowles did it with The Magus (1965) and that he himself has done it with The Stand (1978), and then explains that his ’Salem’s Lot (1975) was his “restructuring and updating (of) the basic elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (“Secret” 321). A point that I will develop more fully below is that King has frequently addressed the relationship of his writing to the horror genre tradition. King himself has been accused of plagiarism on several occasions (although never found legally guilty) and, no doubt, found it aggravating. As with The Dark Half, it is notable that “Secret Window, Secret Garden” ends unhappily—in this case, with the author dead before his alter ego can harm his wife. The stories in this way seem to be cautionary tales about the need for the writer of horror fiction to erect sturdy barriers between reality and fiction.

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Expressing the Self That King’s personal frustrations and concerns should find their way into his fiction is not surprising, of course, and speaks to another way in which King’s fiction theorizes authorship: as a more or less disguised means to channel personal history and express individual identity—particularly, where the writer of horror is concerned, personal anxieties. Misery offers an effective illustration here as it seems very much grounded in King’s anxieties concerning obsessive fans, his own struggles with addiction, and the difficulties he experienced trying to step outside the borders of the horror genre. Misery features as its antagonist a deranged woman named Annie Wilkes who is an obsessive fan of author Paul Sheldon and his romance series featuring character Misery Chastain. After rescuing Paul in the wake of a car accident, Annie becomes enraged when she learns that Misery dies in what Paul had conceived as the final installment of the book series, she keeps Paul prisoner to force him to continue the series. While King has explained that the inspiration for the novel was a short story by Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (1933), about a British man held captive by an Indigenous Brazilian tribe and forced to read Dickens’s stories to the chief (see the online discussion of inspiration at “Misery”), as noted in a Washington Post article from 1987, Misery also certainly reflects King’s various unpleasant encounters with obsessive fans (Streitfeld). King in one instance signed a polaroid photo for an insistent fan named Mark Chapman—the name of the man who would shoot John Lennon (although not likely the same Mark Chapman)—and “the incident helped plant a seed in King’s mind,” the result of which was Misery (Streitfeld). Part of the inspiration for Misery may well have been “toxic fans” (Boyle); at the same time, King has been forthright about how the novel reflects his own struggles with substance abuse. Within the book, Paul has problems with alcohol right from the start—his drinking is what leads to his car crash in the first place. And then, while held captive by Annie, he becomes hooked on a painkiller called Novril. Beyond this, there is Annie herself, the force within the novel that holds him captive. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King states baldly, “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one-fan” (Greene). In his 2000 memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he adds that, as he was writing Misery, on some level he knew he was in trouble and that “the part of (him) that writes stories … began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through (his) fiction and through (his) monsters” (96). The author’s productions thus

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Fig. 17.1. James Caan as author Paul Sheldon in Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of Misery.

function as a conscious or unconscious means to convey the author’s very personal anxieties and struggles. Jessica Avery adds that Misery represents one other form of addiction: writing itself. Avery notes that, for Paul, writing parallels the highs and lows of addiction. This is perhaps most clear with Paul’s contemplation of “the gotta”—the shared compulsion of readers and writers to see things through to the end. As explained by Paul, the writer knows when they have nailed it—when they have crafted something that will hook the reader. The vivid language King uses in describing the gotta certainly reflects the euphoria of drug use: “The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was like the Jacksons said on that record—don’t stop til you get enough” (319). As Avery puts it, “The Gotta: A craving, a compulsion, an undeniable need for more” (Avery). Annie Wilkes may well represent cocaine; at the same time, she is also the force that compels Paul to write. She is brutal and unrelenting; and, in this light, she represents a different reflection on the act of literary creation: writing as a form of compulsion (fig. 17.1). In addition to reflecting King’s anxieties regarding obsessive or deranged fans and addiction, it has also been suggested that Misery reflects King’s frustrations at the response of his fans to his attempt to write outside the horror genre. As George Beahm notes in The Stephen King Story, King’s fantasy novel, The Eyes of the Dragon, first published in a limited edition in 1984 and then in a mass market paperback edition in 1987, was received

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poorly by some fans because it lacked the horror elements they expected and relished from King. Misery, a novel about an author who seeks to write beyond his established parameters and is attacked for it, seems to illustrate that situation. “Certainly King’s readers,” explains Beahm, “the ones who had avoided The Eyes of the Dragon because it wasn’t horror … saw themselves lampooned in Misery, and didn’t find it funny at all” (138). Misery in the end serves as both an expression of the writer’s personal anxieties and a more general metatextual consideration of authorship. In a possibly therapeutic way, it allowed King to express concerns about toxic fans and how their expectations of him made deviations from established generic conventions challenging—this, it is worth noting, offers a concise articulation of the nature of the author function: a set of expectations derived from everything the public has read by and heard about the author’s private struggles. At the same time, King became increasingly aware, as he was writing the novel, that it was a reflection on his own relationship to literary creation. About halfway or three-quarters through … I thought to myself, you’re talking about The Thousand and One Nights, and you’re talking about what you do. The more I wrote, the more I was forced to examine what I was doing in the act of creating make-believe; why I was doing it and why I was successful at it; whether or not I was hurting other people by doing it and whether or not I was hurting myself. (qtd. in Beahm 138)

In The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade tells stories to prolong her own life and this is also the situation of Paul in Misery, who realizes that Annie will not kill him as long as he is continuing to write as she demands. King, too, finds himself relating to Scheherazade, by telling stories as a means to process experience and express anxieties: writing if not as therapy then at least as a means to relieve the pressure of repression through expression in disguised form. King never really answers directly the questions that occurred to him while writing Misery about why he writes, why he is successful at it, and whether it hurts others or himself. He has, however, often been quick to defend the horror genre. In Danse Macabre (1981), for example, he references a horrific incident in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in which a woman was set on fire, to acknowledge that horror can inspire acts of violence, but he insists that horror does not create the initial will to do harm. If the perpetrators of the immolation had not been inspired by a TV show episode, King argues, “stupidity and lack of imagination might well have reduced them to murdering her

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in some more mundane way” (441). He then famously goes on to describe the horror genre as being as “conservative as an Illinois Republican in a threepiece pinstriped suit” because “its purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands.” “Within the framework of most horror tales,” continues King, “we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile” (442–43). Nevertheless, as The Dark Half; “Secret Window, Secret Garden”; and Misery suggest, King is not without his qualms on this point.

Taking Control As much as writing raises questions for King about motivation and effect, writing is also theorized by King as a way back and through—as a tool to process experience and find meaning in existence. Among the works in which this is most effectively expressed is King’s novella, “The Body,” published as part of Different Seasons in 1982 and subsequently adapted for film by Rob Reiner as Stand By Me in 1986. Narrated by successful author Gordon “Gordie” Lachance, “The Body” explores a turning point in his childhood: the journey to see a dead body. In 1960, Gordie and three friends—Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio—having learned that local hoodlum Ace Merrill and his cronies had discovered but not reported the body of a missing boy named Ray Brower—set off to find it themselves and become famous. Gordie himself had recently suffered a loss as his older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a jeep accident during Army basic training and his parents were too grief-stricken to pay Gordie much attention. In this way, “The Body” pairs two seemingly non-sensical accidents—the death of Dennis and the death of Ray Brower (and later supplements these with the premature deaths of Chris, Vern, and Teddie)—and the journey becomes for Gordie an attempt to find meaning in loss. What Gordie is forced to accept in the end, however, is that there is no meaning to it. Accidents happen and sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the boys reach the body and confront the irrefutable material reality of death made manifest, Gordie spends a while processing the fact, repeating it several times and in various permutations, that “The kid was dead” (408). The grown-up Gordie Lachance continues to try to work through the significance of this encounter, noting, “There were things that bothered me about the body of Ray Brower—they bothered me then and they bother me now” (420). At one point, he confuses his own adolescent self with Ray Brower, thinking “That boy was me,” symbolically

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marking the discovery of the body as the death of his childhood (422, author’s emphasis). What compensates for meaningless death are occasional moments of unexpected sublime beauty, the writer’s act of creation, and the community it inspires. In the midst of death in “The Body,” a deer steps out of the woods on a quiet morning, surprising Gordie. “What I was seeing,” writes Gordie, “was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling” (393). Countering accidental death is “careless,” unintentional beauty. Gordie remembers this encounter as “the best part of that trip, the cleanest part”—and the hardest to express: “The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them” (393–94). More important in the context of this consideration of authorship in King, however, is the role that writing plays within “The Body” as a tool to organize and find meaning in experience and to create community. Gordie himself foregrounds the first aspect of this theorization of the purpose of writing when he thinks to himself after selling his first novel, “The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality” (398). “The Body” certainly functions in this capacity for Gordie as he tries to work through the trauma of seeing Ray Brower’s corpse and to make some sense of out seemingly senseless death—and, to a certain extent, perhaps “The Body” functions that way, too, for Stephen King, who has described the story as substantially autobiographical (Kennedy). But what is also true is that writing plays an important role within the story in the form of two embedded tales by Gordie: “Stud City,” about a man whose older brother has died, and “The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan,” about an overweight boy who gets his revenge on those who bully him. “Stud City” is presented as itself an important moment in Gordie Lachance’s literary development. Following an ironic critique of the story in which Gordie highlights its misogyny, Gordie notes that, nevertheless, it is the first story of his that felt like his story: “Even now when I read it,” he explains, “I can see the true face of Gordon Lachance lurking behind the lines of print” (326). Crucially, what he experienced with it “was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control” (336). And there it is: writing as way to impose order over the haphazardness of existence. Equally significant is the role of “The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan” in theorizing the role of authorship in Stephen King’s fiction. As the boys are sitting around their campfire, Chris requests that Gordie tell the story and, after some reflection by the narrator on the “masturbatory pleasure”

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of writing (365), the story itself is presented to the reader. Having been mercilessly teased and bullied for his weight, David “Lard-Ass” Hogan swallows down most of a bottle of castor oil and then enters a pie-eating contest. After some furious pastry consumption, everything comes back up, setting off a chain reaction of regurgitation among both participants and spectators. The story, of course, is ridiculous and crude—and a moment of bonding among the boys that leads Chris to prophesize that Gordie will one day be a great writer. “Maybe you’ll even write about us guys if you ever get hard up for material,” he suggests (379)—which, of course, is exactly what “The Body” is. In contrast to “Stud City,” which Gordie reflects on as an achievement in control on the part of the writer in a universe that frequently seems to lack it, “The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan,” is about letting go and embracing moments of carnivalesque enjoyment. It is about “letting loose” and reveling in the power of shared laughter to create bonds among friends. If the body of Ray Brower represents a nihilistic rejection of order and purpose in the universe and Gordie’s secret encounter with the deer represents a moment of accidental sublime beauty, the story of Lard-Ass Hogan represents authorship as a way to spew laughter in the face of the hopeless absurdity of existence.

The Source of Creativity “The Body” in the end is insistently reflective on the act of writing as the grown Gordie reflects on the experiences of his youth and how they are connected to his developing career path: writing as a way to confront mortality, writing as a way to process the past, writing as a way to impose control, writing to entertain friends, writing for the sheer hell of it. And King makes sure to remind us that grown-up Gordie Lachance is really just a thin façade for King himself, having Gordie note that he had “parley[ed] all those childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars” (353), and that, among his books, are ones “about people who can do such exotic things as read minds and precognit the future” (358)—topics that King’s novels have addressed. “The Body” closes with Gordie reflecting on his current situation— which, again, reminds us that it is really King talking: “I’m a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right” (435). Gordie tells us that his first three books were made into movies and that it all happened by the time he was twenty-six years old, which makes his timeline slightly more precocious than King,

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who was thirty-three when Kubrick’s adaptation of his third novel, The Shining, came out in 1980. And then he tells us that writing is not as easy or as much fun for him as it once was and that sometimes he wonders “if there is really any point to what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing ‘let’s pretend’” (436)—but the story concludes with the line, “The trestle upstream is gone, but the river is still around. So am I” (436). Writing may not give him the same thrill it once did, he may not be the critics’ darling, and he may question whether writing stories really has any purpose in the larger scheme of things, but it has served him well as a survival strategy: The trestle is gone, but he remains. King’s work insistently theorizes authorship, as introduced above in the discussion of Misery, as a kind of compulsion. It may be a vocation the writer chooses to pursue but, it is fair to say, in King’s stories the writing chooses the author—Gordie Lachance wrote stories even though he felt ashamed of writing them and, when “the gotta” moment comes, as Paul explains in Misery, the writer cannot help but continue on to see what happens next. The damming of creativity in King’s fiction, therefore, inevitably signals something amiss with the author’s psyche. Writer’s block is always a symptom in King of a deeper, more profound psychological issue. Mike Noonan, for example, in Bag of Bones (1998), is melancholic over the death of his pregnant wife; Mort Rainey in “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” as addressed above, is unconsciously riddled by guilt over an act of plagiarism; Jack Torrance in The Shining (1977) is a recovering alcoholic who once broke his own son’s arm while violently pulling him away from his work. The inability of these writers to develop ideas suggests that, in King’s work, creativity is stymied by denial or obsession. Creativity, like a deer emerging unexpectedly from the woods on a quiet morning, is a gift only visited upon those who are in a receptive frame of mind.

Authentic Writing Connected to the flow of creativity is what I refer to as the distinction in King’s work between “authentic” and “inauthentic” writing. Authentic writing is a true expression of the author’s history, experience, and vision and, ironically, in King it is often presented as a commercial and sometimes critical failure; in contrast, inauthentic writing is work that may be a popular success but that the author regards as hack work or just something to pay the bills. This is the case in Misery with Paul Sheldon, who has made a lot

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of money off of his Misery Chastaine romances but who craves the critical acclamation that has escaped him; it is the situation in The Dark Half in which the book by Thad Beaumont published under his own name had been nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, but whose bestsellers are the gritty crime novels published under the pseudonym George Stark (20). Among the most compelling variants on the theme—one that brings together many of the ideas concerning writing above—is its deployment in Mikael Håfström’s 2007 cinematic adaptation of King’s short story “1408” (1999), starring John Cusack.2 Within the film version (which offers a much more developed narrative than King’s short story), protagonist Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is the author of a popular series of guidebooks to purportedly haunted places. Enslin, audiences learn, once held legitimate literary ambitions and published a novel called The Long Road Home that sold poorly. At a book signing for his latest “10 scariest …” volume, he is surprised by a young woman with a copy of The Long Road Home who expresses how moved she was by the book and how authentic the complicated relationship between father and son seems. When asked if he will write another book like it, Enslin responds that that period of his life is over. Later, when he arrives at the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, the hotel’s manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), who has researched Enslin’s works, draws a contrast between Enslin’s guidebooks and his novel: “Your books aren’t hard to find—they’re on the bargain shelves of any paperback novel store. Full of cynicism written by a talented, intelligent man who doesn’t believe in anything or anyone but himself.” After Enslin attempts to end the conversation, Olin continues, “In fact, you surprised me. You’re not the hack and slash I expected. I rather like the first one … I rather thought the father was a bastard.” What we learn subsequently is that Olin’s assessment is very much on target. After the death of his daughter from a form of cancer, Enslin separated from his wife and put aside his literary ambitions. While disbelieving in any higher power or force, Enslin nevertheless visits purportedly haunted places desperate for some sign of an afterlife, some evidence that a part of his daughter still exists somewhere in the universe—which is what his stay in room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel provides affords him.

2 Håfström’s adaptation of King’s short story, it must be acknowledged, departs from and expands upon the framework of King’s story in significant ways. Nevertheless, it is to my mind remarkably true to the role of writing in King’s work in general. As such, attention to it can help illustrate the ways in which King theorizes writing.

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Fig. 17.2. Mike Enslin encounters his father in 1408.

As part of the room’s torment of Enslin, preceding his apparent reunion with his daughter, he confronts a vision of his father in a cold and sterile hospital space (fig. 17.2). His aged and wheelchair-bound father wonders disorientedly how he got there and mutters that he hates this place and wishes he was dead. When Enslin attempts to get his father to recognize him, his father, with a kind of leer, remarks that he is a picture of Enslin’s future and then Enslin finds himself back in the hotel bathroom. This brief scene seems to confirm the earlier suggestions that Enslin’s The Long Road Home accurately portrays his complicated relationship with a difficult father. The scene also highlights the distinction between his literary novel and the kind of guidebook writing he does now: the novel, which did not sell well but that those with the requisite taste or sensitivity can appreciate as a reflection of true talent, is an authentic expression of Enslin’s history and an attempt to work through his feelings for his father; his guidebooks, in contrast, are fake through and through. They are crass commercial cash grabs in which Enslin lies about his responses to and experiences of haunted places. They may dupe the rubes, as King might put it, but perceptive readers can see right through them. In the end, all Enslin’s psychic defenses are demolished and the walls he has built around himself crumble. He is literally engulfed in his past as water floods his hotel room and his survival depends on acknowledging and accepting his grief. In the conclusion to the theatrical release, he comes out the other end and is able restore his relationship with his wife. They are also packing up their belongings, suggesting a fresh start. Whether Enslin will resume writing with more literary intentions is unclear, but his horrific experience in room 1408 has clearly been therapeutic for him. The walls of repression crumbled relieving him of his neurotic symptoms: melancholia, cynical misanthropy, and an inability to sustain bonds with others.

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King’s representations of authentic and inauthentic writing, however, leave us with a sort of conundrum: hack writing sells while more authentic, literary writing is appreciated only by a small percentage of readers. What then is the writer to do—pursue financial reward and public popularity while privately acknowledging the depthlessness and mediocrity of their work, or put their heart into the authentic expressions of personal history and talent that only critics and a small percentage of readers will be able to appreciate? King offers no clear answer to this question and is indeed inconsistent on his position—at times he seeks critical approbation and acknowledges the insight of critics and sophisticated readers and, at other times, he disdains critics and literary snobs as pretentious fops. The elusive dream in King is to have it all: an authentic expression of literary talent that is both a critical and popular success. It appears that most authors, however, will need to choose one or the other.

On Genre There is one last aspect of King’s theorization of authorship to remark briefly here and it in some ways is the obverse of creativity—and that is the relationship to genre. King in various places and at length in Danse Macabre has discussed his relationship to the horror genre, highlighting the recurring plots and motifs at the heart of the genre—the vampire, the werewolf, the haunted house, and so on. Noting that he “cannot divorce himself from a field in which [he is] morally involved” (82), he describes his own introduction to horror and then goes on to discuss important contributions to the genre in different media. King’s considerations of genre work in concert with Mort Rainey’s belief in “Secret Window, Secret Garden” that there are a limited number of master plots for fiction, so writing is always on some level a bit like stealing. Danse Macabre is King “coming clean” about the fact that no writer works free of external influences and that contributions to a given genre are always part of an on-going conversation. The author’s works, then, are a combination of their personal experiences and insights and the writings of others. King often alludes to works of other horror writers in his work—Poe, for example, is referenced multiple times in The Shining, while the vampire tradition in literature is rehearsed in ’Salem’s Lot as the protagonists attempt to formulate a plan to address the vampiric threat to their town. King thus presents the acknowledgment of one’s influences as part of the author’s honest expression of ideas.

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Conclusion: From Writers to Author Functions In the end, authorship is theorized in the works of Stephen King as a complicated negotiation of personal history and expression and generic conventions. True originality is impossible; genres are characterized by recognizable conceits and motifs, and fiction in general is defined by a handful of archetypal master plots. However, unique and authentic expression is still possible when the author brings their personal history to bear on their subject, connecting with the reader through the work. For King’s authors, writing remains a kind of compulsion—beyond even a calling, it is an irresistible force emerging from within; yet, for true creativity to flow, the author must provide it with an hospitable reception, which entails exploring one’s history and present anxieties and desires honestly. Repression is presented as the antithesis of creativity. Honest expression can serve as a form of therapy for the author, allowing them to “work through” complicated feelings and traumatic histories. Readers, for their part, will create expectations of the author based on their works—Foucauldian author functions—and deviations from established form are often received with hostility. Writing only to satisfy one’s fans, however, is a prison—and a betrayal of creativity; authors must be brave enough to follow their muse wherever it leads. Telling the truth, even in fantastic or impossible scenarios, remains the author’s most important goal. These theorizations of authorship, derived from King’s expansive body of work, then fold back into the reader’s perceptions of King: part of King as author function consists of his recurrent meditations on the functions and functioning of authors. He frequently writes about writing and, in doing so, he directs how his audience conceptualizes him. Stephen King’s meditations on writing are a crucial part of the way we think of Stephen King.

Works Cited 1408. Directed by Mikael Håfström. Performances by John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Dimension Films and Di Bonaventura Pictures, 2007. Avery, Jessica. “Writing and Addiction in Stephen King’s Misery.” Bookriot, 19 Jun. 2019, https://bookriot.com/writing-and-addiction-in-stephen-kings-misery/. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 142–48. Beahm, George. The Stephen King Story: A Literary Profile. Little, Brown, and Company, 1993.

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Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford UP, 1973. Boyle, Michael. “How Miser y Echoes Stephen K ing ’s Rea l E x per iences,” Slashfilms.com. 6 May 2022, https://www.slashf ilm.com/855359/ how-misery-echoes-stephen-kings-real-experiences/. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 101–20. Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, 31 Oct. 2014, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ stephen-king-the-rolling-stone-interview-191529/2/. Kennedy, Michael. “Stand By Me True Story: Was It Inspired By Stephen King’s Childhood?” Screenrant, 26 Nov. 2022, https://screenrant.com/ stand-by-me-movie-stephen-king-childhood-true-story/. King, Stephen. Bag of Bones. Scribner, 1998. King, Stephen. “The Body.” Different Seasons, Signet Books, 1982, pp. 335–507. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkley Books, 1981. King, Stephen. The Dark Half: Digital Edition. Scribner, 2016. King, Stephen. The Eyes of the Dragon. Viking, 1984. King, Stephen. IT. Pocket Books, 1986. King, Stephen. Misery: Digital Edition. Scribner, 2016. King, Stephen. Needful Things. Viking, 1991. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of Craft. Scribner, 2000. King, Stephen. ’Salem’s Lot. Doubleday, 1975. King, Stephen. “Secret Window, Secret Garden.” Four Past Midnight: Digital Edition, Scribner, 2016, pp. 297–481. King, Stephen. The Shining. Doubleday, 1977. “Misery.” StephenKing.com, n.d. https://stephenking.com/works/novel/misery.html. Streitfeld, David. “Stephen King’s No.1 Fans,” The Washington Post, 8 May 1987. ht t ps://w w w.wa sh i ng tonpost .com/a rch ive/ l i fest yle/19 87/05/0 8/ stephen-kings-no-1-fans/2dd56424-92a7-46c9-ace2-4391cf55b0bb/.

About the Author Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, the general editor for American Gothic Studies, and the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic. He is the author or editor of thirty-two books and more than a hundred essays and book chapters.

Index Abbott, Stacy 191 Activism / activist 22, 205, 285‒290, 294‒299 Adaptation / adaptation studies 11, 13‒14, 60, 62, 64, 70, 159‒177, 181‒196 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 103‒105, 115‒117 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 115‒116 Aldana Reyes, Xavier 205, 208, 210 Almiron, Nuria 308‒309 Altschul, Andrew 285 Ambrose, Jeff 26 Anderson, James 44 Animal studies / critical animal studies 11, 17, 305‒322 Anolik, Ruth Bienstock 202, 207 Anthropocentric / Anthropocentrism 283, 307‒308 Apolitical 22, 287, 289, 296 Aquinas, St. Thomas 141 Archetype / Archetypal 17, 21, 27‒30, 104‒105, 107‒112, 247, 328, 339 Aristotle / Aristotelian 294 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 242‒243 Atkins, Mary 257 St. Augustine 142, 317 Authentic / authenticity 211, 311, 324‒325, 335‒339 Author function 13, 323‒324, 339 Avery, Jessica 330 Bachman, Richard 30, 42, 176, 181, 290 Barthes, Roland 184, 323 Baudrillard, Jean 76, 193 Beahm, George 165, 330‒331 Becker, Ernest 316 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane 253 Belsey, Catherine 62 Berger, James 204‒206, 213 Bettelheim, Bruno 29 Biden, Joe 254, 292‒293 The Black Phone 239 Bloch, Robert 162 Bloom, Harold 10‒11, 14‒15, 86, 220 Blouin, Michael 10, 22, 193, 253, 260, 289 Bluestone, George 185 Body horror 210 Brand / branding 13, 70, 159‒163, 173, 175‒177, 191‒192, 296 Breznican, Anthony 211, 290 Brown, Laura S. 219, 223, 227 Brown, Simon 14, 160, 176, 191‒194 Bush, George W. 288, 290 Buurma, Rachel 122‒123, 130, 136

Campbell, Joseph 21, 24, 27‒30, 103‒108, 112‒114, 117 Canfield, Amy 252, 255 Carpenter, John 163 Carrie (1976 film adaptation) 70, 161‒162, 191 Carrie (2013 film adaptation) 192 Caruth, Cathy / Caruthian 219‒236 Castle Rock 190‒195 Chambers, Robert 181, 185, 194‒195 Chang, Justin 299 Charlton, Ann 310, 313 Cheney, Dick 290 Cheyne, Ria 200, 203‒204, 208, 210, 215 Christianity / Jesus Christ 89, 91, 93, 110, 121‒137, 264, 316‒317 Chute, David 160, 170 Cicero 145 Clinton, Hilary 293 Clover, Carol 167 Cocks, Geoffrey 29 Comolli, Jean-Louis 77 Copjec, Joan 72‒74 Corman, Roger 163, 168 Counterculture / 1960s 10, 23‒24, 94, 203, 223 cummings, e.e. 248 Curran, Ronald 27 Critical media studies 308 Creepshow 162, 166‒167, 169 Creepshow 2 162, 167, 169, 176 Davis, Jonathan 54, 112, 133 Death / dying 133‒136, 140‒144, 149‒152, 167‒168, 199‒208, 212‒215, 222, 307, 311‒320 “Death of the author” 193, 243, 324 De Laurentiis, Dino 160, 162, 165 De Palma, Brian 70, 161, 191 Derrida, Jacques / Derridean 61, 259‒260 Desire 59‒61, 72‒78 Dickinson, Greg 294 Dick, Philip K. 83 Disabilities / Disability studies 35, 199‒217 Disney 105 Dohmen, Josh 207 Dolores Claiborne (1995 film adaptation) 71‒72 Domestic violence 251‒266 Downey, Dara 73 Dracula 191, 274, 328 Émile Durkheim 296 Ecocriticism 21, 29 Edelman, Lee 76 Eisenstein, Sergei 77 Eliot, T.S. 16, 182

342  Elliott, Kamilla 160, 170, 186 Ellison, Harlan 159, 162, 173‒176 Epic of Gilgamesh 103 Etchison, Dennis 159, 162‒176 Fahrenheit 451 129, 134 Farooq, Ayesha 295 Feminism / feminist 21, 25, 30‒33, 229, 252, 257 Fichte, J.G. 145 Fielder, Leslie 205, 207, 211 Figliola, Samantha 36 “Final Girl” 167 Firestarter (film adaptation) 160, 162 Fisher, Mark 185, 193 Fish, Stanley 12 Flanagan, Mike 14, 183‒184 Foucault, Michel / Foucaultian 13, 62‒79, 323 1408 (film adaptation) 336‒337 Fowles, John 328 Francione, Gary 310, 313 Frankenstein, Victor 316 The Frankfurt School 308 Freud, Sigmund / Freudian 15, 24‒27, 29, 326, 328 Friedkin, William 161 Gambrell, Kem 295 Game theory 50 Genre 43‒44, 66, 70, 88, 103‒104, 121‒122, 136, 159, 161, 166, 182, 190‒194, 200, 206, 214‒215, 219‒220, 235, 288, 298, 320, 323‒325, 328‒332, 338‒339 Gibbs, Alan 220 Gordon, Eric 296 Granberg-Rademacker, J. Scott 286 Gregory, Alan 200 Groupthink 23 Hackford, Taylor 71 Håfström, Mikael 336 Hall, Amelia 122, 135 Hall, Melinda 206 Hamlet 316 Harsanyi, John 50 Haven 185‒193 Heidegger, Martin 87 Herman, Judith 220‒221, 224, 227‒235 Hill, Anita 252‒255, 259 Hill, Joe 239 Hitchcock, Alfred 165 Hofstadter, Richard 11 Homer 103 Homosexuality 33‒34 Hooper, Tobe 162 Horner, Avril 27 Hume, David 141 Id 29, 327 Iliad 103 Infrastructure 63‒67

Theorizing Stephen King

Intentional fallacy 12 IT: Chapter 1 (film adaptation) 62‒69, 75, 77 IT: Chapter 2 (film adaptation) 66, 74 Jacob, W.W. 126 James, William 88, 90, 96, 99 Jenkins, Henry 184 Jones, Darryl 73 Jowett, Lorna 191 Jung, Carl 27‒29 Kant, Immanuel 144 Karamat, Ayesha 295 Keetley, Dawn 212 Kennedy, Lois 34 Kennedy, Michael 333 Kent, Brian 35 The King in Yellow 181‒184 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 169 Kolsch, Kevin 211 Kristeva, Julia 206‒208, 212 Krystal, Henry 231, 233 Kubrick, Stanley 14, 29, 71, 160‒161, 335 Kunzru, Hari 24 Kuppers, Petra 200, 206 Labyrinth 262 Lacan, Jacques 72‒79 Lambert, Mary 208‒209 Lant, Kathleen 32 Lazarus 123‒127, 130‒131, 135‒136 Lee, Spike 35 Le Guin, Ursula 247, 249 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 60 Li, Manyu 295 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 60 The Lord of the Rings 103, 106 Lovecraft, H.P. / Lovecraftian 15, 83, 90, 93, 124, 132, 139, 149‒150, 168, 175, 181, 192, 194‒195, 231, 248, 267‒284 MacIntyre, Alasdair 147‒149 “Magical negro” (trope) 35 Magistrale, Tony 23‒24, 59, 104‒106, 108, 110, 112, 116, 125, 129, 131, 133, 166‒167, 191, 297‒298 Make America Great Again (MAGA) 11, 285, 287‒288, 295 Mann, Stanley 160‒162 Marx, Karl / Marxism 21‒24, 41‒45, 296 Marzillier, John 222 Masculine Studies 32 Matheson, Richard 162 Maximum Overdrive 162, 176 McCauley, Kirby 163 McDowell, Michael 170‒173, 176 Metatextual 194, 324, 326, 331 Mihailidis, Paul 296 Military-industrial complex 60 The Mist (film) 162‒166, 168

343

Index

Mitchell, David 200‒201, 203, 213 Modleski, Tania 35 Molloy, Claire 309 Monomyth 28, 103‒105, 107, 117 Moorcock, Michael 192 Multiverse 32, 60, 62, 78, 132, 183‒189, 192‒193, 279‒280, 283 Muschietti, Andy 59‒79 Musk, Elon 286, 293 Myth-and-symbol 12 Nicene Creed 316 Nixon, Richard 72, 288, 298 Obama, Barack 286 Odyssey 103 Ortner, Sherry 225 Ott, Brian 294 Parsneau, Kevin 286 Pet Sematary (1989 film adaptation) 176, 208‒212 Pet Sematary (2019 film adaptation) 211, 307 Pet Sematary: Bloodlines 307 Pet Sematary 2 307 Pharr, Mary 30, 52 Pierce, C.S. 153 Plagiarism 327‒328, 335 Poe, Edgar Allan 16, 190, 279, 326, 338 Poststructuralism 59‒79 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 220, 222‒223, 227 Punter, David 200 Qader, Harem 48, 55 The Ramones 124 Reader-response theory 12 Reagan, Ronald / Reaganomics 22, 42‒44, 287‒288 Reiner, Rob 70, 330, 332 The Resistance / #Resistance 287, 295‒299 Reuber, Alexandria 124, 126, 132 Rolland, John 204 Romero, George 159, 161‒162, 166‒169, 176 Rothe, Anne 223 Rubinstein, Richard 176 The Running Man (film adaptation) 176 Rushdie, Salman 88, 287 Russell, Sharon 52, 55 Russo, Richard 286 Samson 121, 123, 127‒130, 132‒136 Saul, Scott 298 Saunders, Cicely 203 Schopenhauer, Arthur 143‒144, 153 Schwarz, Hunter 291 Sears, John 48, 61, 202, 209, 212 Seneca 153 Senf, Carol 251, 255

Sexton, Max 192 Sheehan, William 299 Shetty, Sandhya 253 The Shining (1980 film adaptation) 29, 71, 160, 191, 335 Silliphant, Stirling 161 Simpson, Nicole Brown 252‒258 Simpson, O.J. 252‒258 Sinclair, Upton 297 Skal, David 25 Slouka, Mark 285 Snyder, Sharon 200‒203, 213 Solomon, Andrew 287 Spivak, Gayatri 251, 253 Stam, Robert 185‒186 Stand by Me 70‒71, 176, 332 Stauffer, John 298‒299 Steinbeck, John 297 Stephenson, Neal 184 Stevenson, Robert Louis 324, 326 Stoker, Bram 328 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 324 Stranger Things 239, 242, 244, 248 Straub, Peter 103‒106, 115‒118, 169, 189 Strengell, Heidi 52, 61, 126, 130, 161, 255 Sullivan, Phil 106, 118 Superego 327 Tan, Amy 286 Terror Management Theory (TMT) 307, 316‒320 Texter, Douglas 290 Thomas, Clarence 252, 254 Thompson, Hunter S. 298 The Thousand and One Nights 331 Tolkien, J.R.R. 103, 106 Trigg, Dylan 26 Trump, Donald 11, 285‒303 Tseris, Emma 229 Tucker, Ken 106 Twain, Mark 35, 103, 105, 115‒117 Uncanny 15, 24‒27, 29, 170, 326 University of Maine at Orono 22, 59, 214, 309 Utilitarian 23, 311‒312 Vietnam (conflict) 22‒23, 28, 31, 59, 133, 290 Vincent, Bev 106 Violence against women 251‒266 Vogler, Christopher 105, 107‒110, 112‒114 Wainwright, Loudon 314 Walker, Barbara 261‒262 Wasson, Sara 200, 204‒206 Waugh, Evelyn 329 Weber, Max 296 Wendell, Susan 205 Widmeyer, Dennis 211 Williams, Linda 35 Williams, Raymond 44, 47

344  “William Wilson” 326 Wilson, Robert 50 Winter, Douglas 105, 129, 163, 172, 306, 310, 315‒318 Wood, Robin 22 Woods, Scott 36

Theorizing Stephen King

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 30 Ziolkowski, Theodore 122‒123 Žižek, Slavoj 72 Zoomorphs 307, 310

Texts by Stephen King 11/22/63 29, 268 “Autopsy Room Four” 84 Bag of Bones 31, 89, 269, 281, 326, 335 Bazaar of Bad Dreams 87 Billy Summers 28, 33, 268, 288 Black House (with Peter Straub) 30, 103‒119, 189, 269 “The Body” 332‒334 Carrie 41, 223, 251, 269, 271, 278, 281‒282 Cat’s Eye (screenplay) 160, 162, 176 Cell 182, 269, 271, 275 “Children of the Corn” 91, 274‒275 Christine 31, 162, 269, 271 The Colorado Kid 73, 181, 185‒192, 195, 269 Cujo 51, 162, 173, 191, 268‒269, 306, 308 Danse Macabre 14, 27, 191, 214, 267‒268, 273‒274, 288‒289, 320, 331, 338 The Dark Half 51, 169, 193, 269, 281, 324‒328, 332, 336 The Dark Tower (series) 27, 29‒31, 35‒36, 94‒95, 104‒105, 111, 169, 184‒185, 188‒190, 192, 268‒270, 272‒276, 279‒282 Dark Tower VI: The Song of Susannah 111 The Dead Zone 24, 51, 94, 162, 268, 290 Desperation 23, 87, 91, 93‒94, 269, 271, 275, 281 Different Seasons 332 Doctor Sleep 14, 23, 64, 269, 306 Dolores Claiborne 15‒16, 23, 31‒32, 184, 235, 252, 255, 258 Dreamcatcher 30, 269, 271, 275 Duma Key 91, 93, 169, 204, 208, 269 Elevation 42, 268, 288 End of Watch 269, 288 The Eyes of the Dragon 104, 330‒331 Fairy Tale 10, 27, 29, 104, 185, 189, 268, 270‒272, 274, 280 Firestarter 23, 27, 33, 59, 127, 129, 133, 135‒136, 160, 269, 275, 281 Four Past Midnight 324 From a Buick 8 90, 269‒272

Gerald’s Game 24‒25, 31‒32, 183‒184, 186, 188, 219‒236, 255, 275 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 96, 268 “Gramma” 162, 173‒176 The Green Mile 35, 85, 269, 277, 281, 306 Dark Tower I: Gunslinger 188, 269, 272, 278 Gwendy’s Final Task (with Richard Chizmar) 269, 288 Hearts in Atlantis 23, 31‒32 Hearts in Suspension 22 Holly 10, 288 “If It Bleeds” 280 Insomnia 84, 91, 93‒94, 111, 254, 269 The Institute 59, 123, 127‒136, 269, 277, 288, 299 IT 27, 33‒34, 36, 59‒79, 85, 90, 94, 219‒236, 239, 242, 269‒271, 274, 276, 278‒280, 282, 291 Joyland 15, 269, 306 Just After Sunset 91 Lisey’s Story 9, 64, 169, 270‒272, 275 “The Man in the Black Suit” 89 Mr. Mercedes 35, 268‒269, 291, 306 “Mile 81” 90 Misery 31, 60, 268‒269, 273, 275, 327, 329‒332, 335‒336 “The Mist” 23, 271‒272, 274 “Mister Yummy” 84 “My Pretty Pony” 98 “N.” 85, 96‒97 Needful Things 23, 41‒57, 89, 93, 193, 269, 326 Nightmares and Dreamscapes 86 Night Shift 96 “Obits” 169 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft 9, 42‒43, 267, 277, 281, 306, 319‒320, 329 The Outsider 96, 169, 288

345

Index

Pet Sematary 31, 33, 36, 85, 91, 123‒137, 166, 199‒217, 172, 269, 271, 276, 278‒279, 305‒322 “The Raft” 162, 166‒169 “Rainy Season” 85 The Regulators 94, 269, 275 Revival 94, 124, 126‒127, 132, 135‒136, 139‒155, 269, 271, 275, 279 “Riding the Bullet” 84 Roadwork (as Richard Bachman) 30, 33, 42 “Room 1408” 274, 282 Rose Madder 31‒32, 64, 193, 251‒266, 269, 275, 281 The Running Man (as Richard Bachman) 269, 281, 290 Salem’s Lot 87, 89, 161‒162, 182, 269, 274, 279, 328, 338 “Secret Window, Secret Garden” 324, 326‒328, 332, 335, 338 The Shining 25‒27, 31, 33‒34, 36, 61, 64, 84, 249, 271‒278, 281‒282, 335, 338 Silver Bullet 160, 162, 176

Skeleton Crew 162, 166, 169, 176‒177 Sleeping Beauties (with Owen King) 104, 269, 288 Sleepwalkers 306 “The Sun Dog” 193 The Stand 22‒24, 27, 31, 34, 36, 60, 64, 87, 91‒92, 122, 182, 269, 272, 275, 277‒279, 281, 290, 306, 328 Storm of the Century (teleplay) 23 The Talisman (with Peter Straub) 17, 27, 29‒30, 35, 103‒119, 169, 186, 269 “The Things They Left Behind” 84 Thinner (as Richard Bachman) 33, 176, 181, 269, 273 The Tommyknockers 9, 23, 172, 268‒269, 281 “Umney’s Last Case” 169 Under the Dome 9, 87, 89, 94, 170, 192, 269, 271, 282, 290 “The Word Processor” 162, 169‒173