Stephen King (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

STEPHEN K IN G Updated Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Stephen King, Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stephen King / Harold Bloom, editor—Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9317-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-1348-7 (e-book) 1. King, Stephen, 1947—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title III. Series. PS3561.I483Z878 2006 813’.54—dc22 2006025199 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Allison Stielau Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © Robert Galbraith/Reuters/CORBIS Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents EditorÕs Note

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Introduction 1 Harold Bloom King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural Ben P. Indick

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Stephen King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic Don Herron Stephen King: Powers of Horror Clare Hanson

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Tracing the Gothic Inheritance: Danse Macabre Tony Magistrale

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ÒThe Face of Mr. FlipÓ: Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King Douglas Keesey Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone Michael N. Stanton

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The Sin Eater: Orality, Postliteracy, and the Early Stephen King Linda Badley

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Contents

Needful Things (1991) Sharon A. Russell

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The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen KingÕs Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery 141 Kathleen Margaret Lant Postmodern Gothic: Stephen KingÕs Pet Sematary Jesse W. Nash Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Stephen KingÕs Christine Edward Madden

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ÒScreaming While School Was in SessionÓ: The Construction of Monstrosity in Stephen KingÕs Schoolhouse Gothic Sherry R. Truffin Afterthought Harold Bloom

Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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Editor’s Note

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar WildeÕs remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of KingÕs Þctions. Ben P. Indick relates King to such precursors as Poe, Stoker, and Lovecraft, while Don Herron insists that King is Òliterature,Ó a judgment I might deplore, but why blow sand against the wind? Horror Þction, KingÕs included, is judged by Clare Hanson to have a masculine psychic function, after which Tony Magistrale invokes KingÕs Gothic heritage. Douglas Keesey attributes a subtle remedy for homophobia in King, while Michael N. Stanton Þnds a critique of American politics in The Dead Zone. Early King is regarded by Linda Badley as a shamanistic healer, after which Sharon A. Russell interprets Needful Things as a fusion of natural and supernatural horror. Kathleen Margaret Lant discovers in KingÕs Misery a supposed rape of the female reader, while Jesse W. Nash argues that popular American culture and King both decline to confront the necessity of dying. The sexual panic represented in Christine is seen as a national malaise by Edward Madden, after which Sherry R. Truffin attempts to deÞne KingÕs contribution to the American genre of Schoolhouse Gothic. My Afterthought credits King as the appropriate Þgure for our Age of Information.

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Introduction

In a brilliant study, Nightmare on Main Street (1997), the critic Mark Edmundson attributes the immense popularity of Stephen King to our universal Gothic obsessions as we approach the millennium. Edmundson is very shrewd in surmising a quasi-religious source for the latest wave of American Gothic: Yet if I were pressed to submit one reason for the contemporary proliferation of Gothic, that reason would in a certain sense be religious. Though most of us Americans claim to believe in God, few of us seem able to believe in God’s presence. That is, we do not perceive some powerful force for good shaping the events of day-to-day life in accord with a perceptibly benevolent master plan. Most of us don’t have a story that we can believe about the way God’s designs are unfolding among us. Whatever God is up to, he is not busying himself unduly with worldly events. Many of us have, I think, turned from hope in benevolent religion to fascination with the Gothic. There is something to gain in accepting the harsh belief that the world is infested with evil, that all power is corrupt, all humanity debased, and that

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there is nothing we can do about it. With the turn to contemporary Gothic—no-fault, dead-end, politically impotent though it may be—we recover a horizon of ultimate meaning. We recover something of what is lost with the withdrawal of God from the day-to-day world. With the Gothic, we can tell ourselves that we live in the worst and most barbaric of times, that all is broken never to be mended, that things are bad and fated to be, that significant hope is a sorry joke, the prerogative of suckers. The Gothic, dark as it is, offers epistemological certainty; it allows us to believe that we’ve found the truth. On this persuasive account, our lust for Gothic is a parody of Gnosticism, which is a major strand in the American Religion. Stephen King is not at all Gnostic, whether in religious persuasion or in temperament. Edmundson notes a Wordsworthian strain in King: he exalts children, and severely distrusts adults. I suspect that Mark Twain and not Wordsworth is the source: many of King’s heroes are very diffuse versions of Huckleberry Finn. Though King manifestly derives from many major storytellers in the American tradition, he has much the same relation to them that television and film scripts frequently possess: a waning out of imaginative energies. I find King very hard to read, even when I can discern redeeming social values in his narratives. There are depths beneath depths, and clearly King is preferable to the sadistic Anne Rice, whose fictions are profoundly unhealthy, and whose style is even more tedious than King’s. Nothing intrinsic in King’s work is nearly so important as the overwhelming fact of his popularity. Like television, motion pictures, and computers, King has replaced reading. Hundreds of thousands of America schoolchildren, who will read nothing else that isn’t assigned, devour King regularly. They turn to King as their parents resort to Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy. I see no point in deploring this, and yet we ought not to deceive ourselves: the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education. I will confine this brief introduction to just two of King’s works, Carrie and The Shining, equally famous, and clearly representative of his achievement, whatever that is. With great effort, I have just reread both, after an interval of some years. The narrative line of each book has a certain coherence and drive; the prose is undistinguished, and there is nothing much that could be termed characterization or inwardness, or even vivid caricature. And yet there is an imagistic strength in both tales, by which I do not mean individual images, but rather the heaping-up of events to constitute giant or central images. King’s most authentic continuity with Gothic masters like

Introduction

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Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, and Poe in his stories, is his ability to concentrate upon what the reader is compelled to see. Carrie and The Shining have nothing to match Mary Shelley’s grand vision of the daemon’s (or monster’s) self-immolation as an arctic funereal pyre, or Poe’s nightmare evocations of the shades of deceased beauties. And yet Carrie at the prom, first humiliated as a scapegoat, and then horribly triumphant as a fiery avenger, is a marvelous culmination of popular melodrama. She will not survive as a figure of American literature, but she seems to have entered our folklore, as the apotheosis of the wallflower, and a caution to many. Similarly, the image of a mother and her boy pursued by a crazed husband-father, himself victimized by demons, outlasts the tired tracts of The Shining’s prose. A prolix storyteller, generally trapped by his own facility, King nevertheless has a kind of archetypal power of the image. As I understand what I have learned to call the American Religion, no American truly feels free unless she is alone, and no intensely spiritual American believes that she is part of the creation. Though he has a secular sensibility, King implicitly endowed the boys of his earlier novels with the conviction that the best part of their selves was older and wiser than the corrupt adult world, whether manifested by individuals or by institutions. A perpetual contrast between youthful value and mature depravity enabled King to fashion a sequence of persuasive images of sympathetic horror. In his recent work, this most popular of writers has retreated from boyish protagonists, perhaps out of an uneasiness at repeating himself. Yet the later books rarely sustain the enormous images summoned up by Carrie and The Shining. I cannot locate any aesthetic dignity in King’s writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he. There is a palpable sincerity to everything that he has done: that testifies to his decency, and to his social benignity. Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.

B E N P. I N D I C K

King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural

I.

A

s one of the most successful writers in the history of the horror tale, Stephen King has constructed his work on a sure knowledge of the fiction of his predecessors. References to authors and titles abound in the pages of his novels. Even more important, he has absorbed and utilized those qualities which characterize the different types of stories in the horror genre. In his own distinctive style are mirrored the major traditions he has inherited. The ghost in fiction is at least as old as the Graeco-Roman era, but Pliny the Younger’s chained ghost is merely a plaintive creature seeking proper interment. Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” tells of a traveler who dreams of seeing his companion’s wounded and bleeding body, but the purpose is to help him discover that murdered friend. With the Witches of Macbeth and the ghosts within Hamlet and Macbeth, Shakespeare added a sense of fright to Elizabethan theatre, in which the ghosts’ purpose was largely the furthering of the mechanics of the play. It was the dawning era of Romanticism which gave birth to the supernatural story as we know it: an anti-rationalism accepting essentially unknowable and hidden aspects of nature. A very real world was busy exploring, geographically and industrially; in response, poets and storytellers looked for mystery, and found it in strange islands and weird creatures

From Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, pp. 171–185. © 1982 by Underwood-Miller Publishers.

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of imagination. For Horace Walpole, a devotee of Medievalism, what better period could there be than that era called the Gothic? Others obviously agreed. The novel Walpole wrote in 1764, The Castle of Otranto, precisely caught the mood. He populated his decaying castle with an array of noble lords, helpless females, scheming villains and a battery of supernatural forces, all of whom were manipulated through real as well as fantastic dangers directly menacing the heroes. The story itself was frequently absurd and the plot melodramatic. The narrative style was ponderous and the dialogue, which would influence a century of stage melodramas to come, was formal and stilted. (A friar speaks: “The will of heaven be done! I am but its worthless instrument. It makes use of my tongue to tell thee, prince, of thy unwarrantable designs. The injuries of the virtuous Hippolita have mounted to the throne of pity.”) The style did not bother the reading public. The book became a best-seller. Its weaknesses are excusable, for it was, after all, the first Gothic novel. Issued under a nom-de-plume, the novel’s enormous success quickly persuaded the author to have his true name appended. Walpole’s ingenuity resulted in an endless flow of similarly inspired Gothic novels, which offered better characterizations as well as more sensational fears. Moral tone was usually present, to justify the excesses. Thus, Clara Reeve concludes in The Old English Baron (1777): “All these ... furnish a striking lesson to posterity, of the overruling hand of Providence and the certainty of RETRIBUTION.” Sometimes, as in the very popular The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, weak explanations for the supernatural events were offered; fortunately for her readers, these rationalizations came too late to dilute the action. Sensationalism reached early heights in Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis’ work, particularly his lurid Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795). To the mysterious knights and swooning maidens of his predecessors, he added explicitly personal terms of fear with strong sexual overtones and violence. Lust, matricide, incest and murder are ladled up with many fantastic elements, upon none of which he wastes a word of rationalization. The style and manner of the Gothic would begin to appear in fiction distinguished by grace and honesty in writing. Charles Dickens used ghosts effectively if sentimentally in A Christmas Carol (1843) and quite unsentimentally in such stories as “The Trial for Murder” (1865). Charlotte Brontë employed the essence of the Gothic form powerfully in her nonfantastic novel Jane Eyre (1847) with the castle, the mysterious owner and his dark secret, and a suffering but courageous heroine. Her sister Emily eschewed the trappings but retained the potency of ghostly images with her ill-starred lovers of Wuthering Heights (1847).

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While the broad outlines of the original Gothic style withered, the supernatural elements, particularly the ghost story, prospered. The 19th and 20th centuries have been rich with lastingly effective examples of the genre. The external ghost as limned by Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” wherein a figure composed of the crumpled linens of a bed suddenly rises, remains potent. Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) made equally feasible the presence of a Satanic mystery and willing human followers in “Ancient Sorceries.” The tradition of the ghostly tale is well exemplified in the stories of such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkens Freeman, J. S. Le Fanu, E. F. Benson and H. R. Wakefield. Their prose is characterized by subtlety and avoidance of the sensational. The castle of the Gothic novel, with its ghostly accoutrements, would survive in humbler form as The Haunted House, beloved alike to fictioneers and spiritualists. Perhaps the most distinguished modern example is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), a subtle work with ghosts so tenuous that the reader must decide whether or not they truly exist. A half century and many haunted houses later, the form still retained its potency in The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) utilizes a huge apartment house, gothic in its architectural details, as a fine counterpoint to his lively New York scene. Peter Straub fills a mansion with a ghost’s vindictive terror in Ghost Story (1979). Stephen King himself displays a splendidly classic haunted house in ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and the haunted house to end all haunted houses, the craggy Overlook Hotel of The Shining (1977). But the Gothic held little validity for serious writers of the 19th century. In the hands of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) for the first time the point of view was significantly altered. The weird tale would not merely provide fear for the characters of the story, but would provide the reader the greater fear of self-identification. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” have no Satan, no externally influential force, no abstract presence of Evil to direct the characters. The vengeance that is so much a part of Poe’s fiction always stems directly from the actions of his actors, and they must later bear full responsibility for their acts. Their own decisions will finally destroy them. In this sense, Poe’s writing is of true psychological content; the grotesque behavior actually represents the normal distorted by emotion to the extreme. Even his allegorical tales follow a line of inevitability and deterministic logic. His weird stories are as rational as his detective stories, and his use of the fantastic must be understood as the ultimate extension of this logic. As a poet, his language was both natural and important to him; his

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favored themes of murder, retribution and dissolution are couched in a florid and gorgeous tapestry of words so evocative of mood and place that in themselves they heighten the tension. The characters are intense, humorless, compulsive and expressive. This vein of psychological insight which Poe added to the supernatural tale was exploited by others. Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862) wrote what was basically science fiction to create terror in “What Was It?”: an invisible, inimical creature is discovered in a hotel room and is finally beaten to death. Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) offered a more subtle approach in “The Horla.” His narrator is threatened also by something unseen; it may be of extraterrestrial origin, or it may indicate his own growing madness. Ambrose Bierce (1842–?) had insight as sharp as Poe, tempered by cynicism. The psychological power of his stories derives from the eternal hope of his characters, who eventually discover it to be a futile snare. Fate, to Bierce, is not only blind but cruel. The inner psychiatric maze Poe opened lies at the heart of the Victorian world of Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1891) and Stevenson’s schizophrenic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888), each a study of internal evil. May Sinclair, Walter de la Mare, Oliver Onions and numerous others continued the tradition. With one notable exception, the Vampire Tale, the course of the weird tale would not change again until the advent of H. P. Lovecraft. In 1816 at Lake Leman, Switzerland, three travelers had a ghoststory writing contest. They were Lord Byron, John William Polidori, his traveling companion, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of the poet. Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein would become immortal; Byron’s “Fragment” would be completed by Polidori as “The Vampyre, A Tale,” the first popularization of the vampire theme. Byron later disowned any part of it, professing to dislike “Vampires,” but no doubt the attribution to him helped the work, as it achieved great popularity in print as well as in a stage adaptation. The first modern treatment of the vampire theme, in plot, writing and characterization, is “Carmilla” (1872), a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Its turns, plot surprises, and sexual undertones hint at the potentials of the vampire novel. Yet none of his successors surpassed the sensitivity of Le Fanu, as expressed in his concluding lines: “To this hour, the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alterations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a novel written entirely in the form of letters and journals, scarcely had a “light step.” The trappings of the Gothic

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novel are notable here: the sepulchral castle, the brave heroes, the weak, helpless women, and a frightful, nearly insuperable villain. Yet the book soars beyond the limitations of the Gothic and its own self-imposed style of narrative. The action is continuous, and the book is packed with excitement and sexual allure (satisfying a Victorian preoccupation, yet remaining within the bounds of propriety). Stoker combined genuine pathos with a satisfactory psychological development in the characters. Innocent at the outset, they suffer deepening fear and a sense of guilt because of their increasing, if involuntary, complicity and debasement. The combination of these elements renders Dracula truly the first “Neo-Gothic” novel, indebted to the romantic past, yet contemporary in its characterizations and mores. It is interesting that Count Dracula himself has very few actual lines to speak in the book (he can only be quoted by others) yet emerges unforgettably. In the Twentieth century H. P. Lovecraft reached into space and time to give horror new dimensions. If Poe was the Newton of the weird tale, Lovecraft was its Einstein, bringing it into the Atomic Age. Horror in his writings arises from the helplessness of his protagonists before the awesome forces they have called up or else inadvertently encountered. These mysterious entities antedate Man, are extraterrestrial in origin, and survive, hidden and dormant, yet possessing limitless power. The pantheon of “gods” associated with Lovecraft represent more, however, than a “mythos” of squirming, tentacled creatures: they are inimical forces which taint man and his earth. This taint is an irreparable demeaning of the self and the ego, and the initial horror is in the realization of it. This leads to the final horror, which is death or capitulation, the surrender of one’s humanity. II. That King was aware of his genre and its beginnings is clear from the numerous references to writers and titles in so much of his writing. In Carrie, an interviewer on the west coast is described as having “an odd, pinched look that is more like Lovecraft than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.” The first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is utilized to hint at the horror of the Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot. A passage from Poe illuminates the living-dead nature of the final state of the doomed Lot, while Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” is inspiration for and encapsulation of The Shining, and is subliminally referred to in its climactic pages. H. G. Wells, Washington Irving, Algernon Blackwood, J.R.R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker and others roam his pages. Even King himself is present, when, in The Dead Zone, a hysterical woman accuses his hero of having started a fire “by his mind, just like in that book Carrie!”

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The Dead Zone is, significantly, a tribute to one of King’s most important inspirations, Ray Bradbury. Bradbury’s early weird fiction had initiated the use of a natural vernacular and ordinary individuals in their own homes and small towns. The knowledge that horror could be local and the victim a common man produced a more personal fear in the reader. King’s novel not only owes much of its carnival ambience to Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, but it acknowledges the debt in mentioning the title and author, and, in another reference, yet another Bradbury title, Dark Carnival. (It even features a character who sells lightning rods, an occupation much discussed in Bradbury’s first chapter!) The heroes of The Shining and Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” bear valid comparison. Each carries within him the seeds of his fate. For Lovecraft, it is the taint of the decadent subhuman followers of the fish-god Dagon; in King, it is Torrance’s connection with the evil essence of the hotel: “It laid its Jack Torrance hands on the valve ... ‘I WIN!’ it cried.” The “it” is Torrance, lost forever to the hotel. King’s references to other writers in the field are not strictly in emulation. He has succeeded because he has forged his own style. Nevertheless, there are influences upon his thinking and his writing, and these may be examined, as follows: 1. T H E P O E S Q U E King is not about to become a poet, however much he enjoys quoting poets and lyricists. The feverish prose of Poe is antithetic to King’s terse and rapid narration, although he is capable of expressive imagery: “The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and malignant child” (a metaphor for cancer in The Stand); “The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes” (the convulsive, final gesture of the vampire in ’Salem’s Lot); “Overhead, the moon rode the sky, a cold sailor of the night” (a moment of foreboding mood from The Dead Zone). Such passages are uncommon. Action, not metaphor, moves King’s stories. Even in The Shining, which is so directly affected by atmosphere adapted from Poe, the writing is devoid of any self-conscious attempt at beautiful prose. Poe’s influence lies in the psychological honesty of his writing, which discarded worthless labels of Virtue and Villainy, and in the subsequent burden of introspection which Poe gave his heroes. King, always a storyteller first, is not above having villains to spice the action; however, with the exception of a fantasy villain such as Barlow, the vampire of ’Salem’s Lot, there is a measure of explanation for such destructive individuals as Greg Stillson and Frank Dodd of The Dead Zone, in early maternal acts of harshness and

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even cruelty. (In a sense King offers us the opportunity of seeing Dodd, the compulsive rapist, from another view, in his short story “Strawberry Spring.” Here the narrator is a compulsive murderer much like Dodd, but is sensitive and aware of his acts—too late. It is pure Poe.) King’s more normal characters such as Larry Underwood (The Stand) and Charlie McGee (Firestarter) tend to deliberate their future courses of action carefully, rueing past actions which resulted in grievance to others. The heroine of Carrie, no more mature than most of her fellow teenagers, nevertheless tries to understand herself and particularly her mother. Her destructive acts come only because she has no way to respond emotionally and intellectually. The psychic powers of Carrie, Johnny Smith (The Dead Zone), Danny Torrance (The Shining) and Charlie McGee are thus in no way employed for deus ex machina pyrotechnics. To some degree they are a curse to the characters, who must try to control the powers, and to understand that they can never be a magic carpet of escape. It is the Fantastic made Real, instead of being accepted as simply fantastic. This is the triumph of Poe. 2. T H E V A M P I R E T A L E Stoker’s Dracula opens in the romantic, Gothic-inspired setting of the hills of Transylvania. King’s ’Salem’s Lot, his major contribution to the vampire genre, is set, characteristically for the author, in a typically small New England town. Its inhabitants are stereotypical; major characters receive individual chapters, titled for themselves, the others are covered broadly by chapters titled “The Lot.” In a sense this repeats the individual epistolary and journal-entry division of Dracula. Stoker wastes little time establishing his fantasy; Jonathan Harker quickly realizes he is a prisoner of the Count and then almost at once encounters three female vampires. When Dracula deprives them of feasting on the hapless Harker, he gives them instead a bag “which moved as though there were some living thing within it.” They vanish with the bag, and “Then,” writes Harker, “the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.” King likewise moves quickly into the horror of his story, although not revealing at once the presence of vampirism. Hints of terrifying acts mount in the brief sub-chapters, usually commencing prosaically and concluding ominously. Only pages after a child has vanished, a “dark figure” appears at the cemetery, bearing the body of a child. An obscene prayer to a “Lord of Flies” is offered, along with the body. The subsequent lone line, “It became unspeakable,” is the commencement of a crescendo of horror, which quickly becomes very explicit.

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Once the presence of a vampire is suspected, the balance of Stoker’s baggage is brought out, the garlic, the crucifix, the heroine who has been despoiled by the vampire and must be given the ritual absolution, the great Vampire himself. King actually attempts to avoid linking the fate of the vampire to the counter-power of Christianity; to a priest of insufficient faith, the vampire Barlow says “The Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents ... I was old when it was young ... My rites were old when the rites of your church were unconceived.” Nevertheless, the crucifix remains a potent weapon for young Mark against a vampire, who hisses “as if scalded” when confronted with it. At the climax, King’s monstrous Barlow must die as did Stoker’s Count, each still helpless at sunset, with the strength of immortality moments away, each in his coffin. King, however, is true to his own emotional style. Whereas Stoker’s hero, Jonathan, sweeps a knife across the helpless but vindictively staring body, and causes it to “crumble into dust”; King’s Ben Mears is far more physical. Barlow, conscious, screams: “Let me GO!” Mears must climb into the coffin, knees planted on the vampire’s chest for a solid perch to hammer in a stake. “Here it comes, you bastard ... here it is, leech” and he “brings down the hammer again and again,” while the dying Barlow, blood gushing wildly, screams through a graphically described dissolution into dust. King’s villain manages more mayhem than Stoker’s, and furthermore leaves his flock of Un-Dead behind him in the Lot, where fire may finally destroy them. (Perhaps not. In a related short story, “One for the Road,” from King’s collection, Night Shift (1978), a family traveling through the Lot during a blinding snowstorm experiences vampirism in a terrifying and poignant way.) The credibility of so fantastic a tale in a setting so mundane is remarkable. Nevertheless, ’Salem’s Lot must remain a footnote to its inspiration, Dracula. By choosing to portray a town’s entire population, described individually to a great extent, King is forced to utilize readily recognizable types; the result is predictability in hero, heroine, villain. Without the fully rounded individuality which creates memorable characterizations, the danger of overkill and eventual ennui in the reader’s mind is strong. Only King’s most powerful allies, relentless pace and devastating shock, prevent this. Finally, King cannot escape the sense of pastiche. Aware of this, he has his hero muse: “One was taught that such things could not be; that things like Coleridge’s ‘Cristabel’ or Bram Stoker’s evil fairy tale were only the warp and woof of fantasy. Of course monsters existed ... hijackers ... mass

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murderers....” It is true enough, but still cannot disguise the essential imitation. ’Salem’s Lot becomes one more of the Un-Dead in the train of the evil Master. 3. H.P. L O V E C R A F T Except in deliberate pastiche of Lovecraft’s style and thematic material,1 King seldom emulates a writer he obviously knows. The influence of Lovecraft is in his creation of horror wherein the fantastic element has a basis in scientific reality. The intrusion in such fiction of purely imaginative elements (ghosts, elves, demons and the like) would destroy the fabric of truth which sustains it. Lovecraft’s book of formulae, “The Necronomicon,” is no mere medieval rune-book, nor are the powers it is capable of summoning such fantasies as Asmodeus or Beelzebub. The powers are “like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign forces.” In his “The Colour Out of Space” such a force appears on a New England farm, no more tangible than an eerie color, but leaving desolation and death in its wake, “a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it.” These forces are real, and the horror which results from their intrusion into mundane life is real. King employs no extra-terrestrials and no arcane books. Novels such as Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Firestarter, however, are dependent on reader acceptance of various extra-sensory abilities, a theme as unproven as any of Lovecraft’s imaginings. Like the latter, King must establish a scientific basis for credibility. It is entirely the opposite of such outright fantasy as “The Turn of the Screw” and Ghost Story, which need offer no such basis in reality. King asks no indulgence from his readers; he offers “evidence” to make the remarkable powers acceptable. By setting Carrie a few years into the future, King is able to refer to articles, books and the work of governmental commissions of inquiry which have already acknowledged Carrie’s telekinetic powers. One such book, The Shadow Exploded, states “It is now generally agreed that the TK phenomenon is a genetic-recessive occurrence.” By comparing it to the genetically transmitted disease of hemophilia, King makes it an apparent fact. Johnny Smith of The Dead Zone has precognitive powers. We learn that he suffered an injury as a child which gave him “a very new human ability, or a very old one.” A “tiny part” had “awakened.” In an epilogue, a physician states that Smith “had an extremely well-developed brain tumor,” and then,

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in a letter written to his father, Smith writes that this tumor was probably part of the accident which was coincident with the beginnings of his “flashes.” In The Shining, the boy Danny Torrance possesses telepathic/ precognitive powers. No scientific basis is offered other than the cook Hallorann’s explanation that it is shared by him and others. “I call it shinin’ on, the Bible calls it having visions, and there’s scientists that call it precognition.” In this instance, the strength of Danny’s visions is so intense that the reader accepts the explanation. (Inasmuch as this novel is actually a ghost-tale, it operates within emotional rather than rational parameters.) With Firestarter, King develops his strongest scientific basis for a psychic power. The terrifying ability of Charlie McGee to create fires is the result of chemicals administered to the young man and woman who would become her parents. The altering of their germ-plasms results in a unique child. If it is a stage beyond drugs such as Thalidomide, which affects an embryo, it is nonetheless credible. 4. T H E G H O S T S T O RY The Shining, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s allegorical “The Masque of the Red Death,” is Stephen King’s consummate ghostly tale. The palace of Poe’s Prince Prospero becomes the Overlook Hotel, and his “assembly of phantasms” is played by the vast number of shades who have occupied its many rooms and left behind their evil essence. In time they will hold their “gay and magnificent revel,” but they are peripheral to the heart of the novel. This is the conflict of a man bent on self-destruction and his son, a telepath, who sense the horror of the hotel and the evils which will come upon them. The story is constructed with extreme care, inexorably moving toward the terrible climax which it continually foreshadows. Almost at once the boy’s apprehensions create a foreboding fear, which is enhanced by his mother’s distrust of her unstable husband. With the episode of the wasps, badly stinging the boy when, by all rights, the wasps should have been dead, the family further disintegrates with fears and doubts. The abrupt fantasy is in the tradition of M. R. James, as Reality is unhinged and disbelief is challenged. Torrance’s encounter with the hedge animals of the topiary, apparently alive and threatening, is subtle in its psychological significance (“NO NO I WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS NOT AT ALL!”) It is, after all, a delusion which might happen to anyone. An hallucination, thinks Torrance, “a bad scare but it was over now.” It is, in its implications, quite in the spirit of that other James, Henry.

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It is the beginning of Torrance’s breakdown, his absorption into the Hotel, and the Supernatural will now complement the final playing out of the family conflict. A rotting corpse of a woman in a bathtub appears not only to the sensitive child but to his father, who refuses to acknowledge it. Torrance is now able to discover the deceased caretaker and bartender as well as the many revelers of the Hotel’s past. The horrors mount swiftly, ghostly as well as human, as the man deteriorates, until the Walpurgisnacht of the climax. For an instant the bloodred presence of Poe’s Red Death, in the persona of the Hotel itself, promises to “hold illimitable dominion over all,” but it dies of its own weakness and evil. “The party was over.” The Shining is a tour de force, dependent like any good ghost story and supernatural tale upon neither science nor explanation, but only on its own inner logic and compelling narrative voice. 5. T H E G O T H I C The ancient Greek philosophers preached the virtues of moderation. Their playwrights knew better. Scandal, murder, hair-rending and railing against the gods sold tickets. King is not a philosopher. He knows how to sell tickets. He manages in his novels to encompass the desolation of a school, most of its students and much of the town as well by one distraught girl. He turns a village into a nest of vampires. He unleashes an army of ghosts, then utterly destroys their huge home. He polishes off New York City’s teeming millions as well as 90% of the world’s population. He uncovers a nuclear bomb and explodes it, but tops that by finding a child who has the ability of “creating a nuclear explosion simply by the force of her will.” King revels in excess on more private levels as well: the public menstruation of Carrie, followed by its reflection in her drenching with pig’s blood; Frank Dodd as raincoated rapist, killing and dying with frightening violence; bodies literally torn to pieces by the monsters of The Mist. Nevertheless, excess is only one element King inherited from the Gothicists. There is another, far more important. For Stephen King, who remembers shuddering through monster films as a child and claims he still cannot sleep without at least one light glowing in the house, the indispensable mainspring in his stories is Fear. Its origins may be psychological, physical, or even supernatural, but the fear itself is real, and his horror stories succeed because his readers share it. Walpole’s school had foundered when fear lost its rationality. Drs. Van Helsing and Freud rediscovered it beneath Prince Albert coats. King has put

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it into the shopping basket, next to the tomato sauce, the Sanka and the Tab. Fear has become a commonplace, no longer the evil dispensation of noble or supernatural villains. No one can be trusted, not teenaged school kids, not a cop or a prosaic motel-keeper, not even a small baby. It is a world with neither security nor stability. We all live in Otranto. NOTE 1. King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” in Night Shift, 1978, ably recaptures the style and ambience of a Lovecraft story. His “Crouch End,” in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1980, adds an original tone to an addition to Lovecraft’s “Mythos” cycle.

DON HERRON

Stephen King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic

Emerson wrote once that even a corpse is beautiful if you shine enough light on it. But that is horseshit. —Charles Willeford, The Burnt Orange Heresy

Prologue—Summer, 1985: For the first time in my life I visited one of Crown Books’ discount stores, to pick up a copy of Stephen King’s SKELETON CREW. I figured any book that cost $18.95, issued in first printing of half a million copies, would never be worth more than cover price—no matter how much money the guy’s earlier books now sell for. Better get it at a discount. As I stood before mammonian stacks of top-ten bestsellers, with King’s book first in line, a little guy with dark hair, dark eyes, came over and grabbed up a copy of SKELETON CREW, interrupting my idle reveries about the sorts of people who actually buy and read the current top ten. “Stephen King—this is a great writer,” the guy said. “Yeah?” “Yeah! Really great. This man can scare the death out of you.” The guy gave me a searching look with his dark eyes. “There must be some meaning in that.” “Yeah?” I took the book to the cashier and paid for it.

From Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, pp. 129–157. © 1982 by Underwood-Miller Publishers.

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Two used-book catalogues from fantasy dealers came in the mail. Terence McVicker of Riverside, California offered a truckload of King titles; in his description of a first edition of CHRISTINE (1983), he rhapsodized about King’s writing: This book is the epitome of Stephen King’s success, and talent; here we have damn near every cliché in the book; the highschool kid nobody likes, the highschool football player who befriends him, the beautiful girl who falls for the nerd and then when things are tragically breaking apart, falls in love with the football hero, and the focal-point of the story, that which every highschool boy wants, (yes! even more than the Girl!) a CAR! King takes all these overused and abused plot gadgets, puts them in his cranial blender, and, voila! we have our freshly polished and expertly mixed clichés which appear as new and original ideas. King’s handling of characters, especially youthful ones, are the reason so many early teenagers can read him and say ‘Yeah, I can get into that’… the tone in which he writes of those times, we of his generation can say ‘Yeah’…the timelessness of his crises, appeals to everyone. CHRISTINE is one of his very best! In his 55th catalogue, Dave McClintock of Warren, Ohio offered merely four King items, noting: As those of you who follow the antiquarian book market are well aware, the Stephen King tulip bulb mania continues unabated. Even the local specialist in railroad books and literature gets his hands on a jacketless, water-damaged, and warped copy of the book club edition of CARRIE and thinks his ship has come in. Meanwhile, if one more teeny-bopper daughter of one more of my customers comes in this place and regales me, as she is in a state of pseudo-sexual arousal with glazed eyes and moist lip smackings, with each tiny details, each writhe, of the death agonies of a character in the latest King book I shall STRANGLE the sweet little innocent with these bare little bookseller’s hands. *

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Shortly after it opened I caught the Chevy Chase film Fletch in which Chevy as the investigative reporter-hero hesitatingly enters a darkened, menacing house, and as he stumbles through the living room ad libs, “Cujo…?” *

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Not long ago, I was listening to San Francisco’s KRQR (The Rocker!) during DJ “Nasty” Nancy Walton’s nightshift. Nancy usually poses a survey question to her listeners—where can you find the best pizza in the Bay Area? Who’s the best songwriter on the rock scene today? This night she surveyed literature, specifically, what is the most recent book you’ve read? And what is the best book you’ve ever read? Titles I remember as favored by some listeners were EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, popular stuff like that, with one guy recalling CATCH-22 as being the best of all time. But most of the call-ins came from teenage girls, and the majority of them voted for Stephen King’s THE STAND as the greatest, and King himself unquestionably the greatest writer to ever live. One girl said the most recent book she had read was PET SEMATARY and the best book she’d ever read was PET SEMATARY. *

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Driving around San Francisco, I noticed in a couple of places a standing sidewalk sign for something called “John Lennon Murder Facts.” Did it signal passersby to a lecture on the Lennon killing, a la the various conspiracy speakers on Kennedy-Kennedy-King (Martin Luther, Jr., not Stephen)? Or, more likely, was it just the name of one of our local punk rock bands (after the style of San Francisco’s sassy “Dead Kennedys”)? Frankly, I didn’t have enough interest to find out. But I loved that sign. It featured Tricky Dick Nixon in his classic stance, arms raised in a V. On his right hand, dexter, is a hand puppet of Mr. Conservative himself, Ronald Reagan, while on his left hand, sinister, is a puppet of who else but Stephen King? *

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I began to have a recurring dream in which I walked into a bookstore to buy something to read and saw piles of ’SALEM’S LOT, FIRESTARTER, THE DEAD ZONE, DIFFERENT SEASONS, CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF, and DANSE MACABRE heaped from floor to ceiling. There was even a THINNER DIET BOOK. Every book in the store was written by

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Stephen King, with one exception—HUMAN CEMETERY, a novel of horror by Stephen King’s dog. I bought a copy. I. T H E A C A D E M I C When I first essayed the fiction of Stephen King for FEAR ITSELF (1982), King was immensely popular—today he is even more so. In those days if Sidney Sheldon had a novel at the top of the bestseller lists, a new book by King would not immediately replace it. But recently, to no one’s surprise, SKELETON CREW shot straight to the number one spot on release, even though most story collections today are considered nothing but dead meat, in publishing circles. I don’t think even a Sheldon novel could have stopped its momentum. By 1982 there had been several films adapted from King novels, but the “newest Stephen King film” was not as yet a staple of our annual summer movie fare. Who knows, in a couple of years the present level of King activity may seem tame. The article “An Unstoppable Thriller King,” Newsweek, June 10, 1985, reports that “Book companies traditionally publish no more than one book a year by a major author, for fear of diluting his audience.... But now [King] is about to challenge the system. Beginning in October 1986, King will release four books in just 15 months—IT, MISERY, THE EYES OF THE DRAGON and THE TOMMYKNOCKERS. King’s publisher is confident this risky experiment will pay off. ‘His fans have an insatiable appetite for his books.... This will be a Stephen King firestorm.’” That ace drive-in movie critic out of Texas, Mr. Joe Bob Briggs, best summed up this incredible rush of interest in King in his review of the film version of FIRESTARTER for the week of May 27, 1984: “This is only Steve’s second movie in two months and the fourth and fifth one in the last year. What’s wrong, big guy, you send the typewriter out for repairs?” Now Joe Bob would not have noticed, nor did Newsweek comment upon another aspect of the King phenomenon, in its way as interesting as the number of film adaptations and the strength of the book sales: the unprecedented surge of critical interest in King and his work. It’s one of my great regrets that I missed a chance to be recognized as a prophet in my own time when some material got trimmed from my first essay, especially the paragraph where I wrote: ... the academic impulse in general should serve King well. I can see papers in senior English classes on “High Schools as Settings in the Fiction of Stephen King” and “Strange Mental Powers in

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the Writings of Stephen King.” I can imagine even a Masters thesis—hell, make it a Ph.D.—on “Wasps as a Symbol of the Sub-conscious in Stephen King’s THE SHINING.” Since then no less than ten books concerning King’s work have seen print, including a STEPHEN KING CONCORDANCE, and a large number of essays with snazzy titles like “Apocalypticism in the Fiction of Stephen King.” “Stephen King and the Lovecraft Mythos,” and “The Ultimate Horror: The Dead Child in Stephen King’s Stories and Novels.” I saw it coming, you see. I have never read fiction as ready made for critical explication as King’s. He has taught English at both high school and college levels, and he loads his work with themes, recurring motifs, crossreferences. In essays and books he endorses the idea of the “sub-text”— important adult concerns about politics, relationships, or economics which invest an otherwise popular novel or film with serious intent. Thus, in DANSE MACABRE he sees 1950s alien invasion films as parables about the threat of Soviet takeover. The horrors experienced by the family in “The Amityville Horror,” he suggests, are not really as worrying as any young family’s concerns over buying a house—or, think of blood oozing from the walls as a badass case of broken plumbing. King’s first novel CARRIE—which I think is a fine picture of the anguish the unpopular suffer during the teen years, and a rocking ballad to high school, prom night, and life here in the good old U.S.A., when read for sub-text—is actually about the effects of the Women’s Liberation movement on modern society; Carrie White, King says, is “also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time, and like Samson, pulling down the temple....” It is an interesting phenomenon, this critical response to King, perhaps more interesting because it has not come thus far from the major mainstream critics or the working professors but from the same people who have been writing essays such as “Cats in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” and “Lovecraft and Music” for the past couple of decades—the fantasy-horror fans who would like other people to know that the stuff they’re reading is real literature too. As far as I know, none of the major critics—whoever has inherited the mantles of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound or Edmund Wilson—has yet done anything more than perhaps mention King’s name in passing, in much the same way a serious American historian might mention a popular figure such as Davy Crockett. The mainstream press has given King a lot of attention, but in terms of his mass appeal and the speed at which he is breaking barriers as to amount of money a person can actually make writing books. Generally, they have not taken King very seriously as a writer.

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John Bloom, the man who writes the “Joe Bob Briggs” movie columns, in a feature article accompanying his review of Firestarter, was quoted as saying: When I first started as film critic, I felt it was my responsibility to review everything that opened in this market. I was turning out columns with four or five straight reviews and then a couple of films like Dead and Buried. After a few weeks, it struck me as silly to review these as art. I wanted to find a way to treat them as they were meant to be treated, as product. Joe Bob was the result. In this context, we find King’s novels treated largely as product, with Time calling him “a master of post-literate prose.” Syndicated in early June, 1985, the Cox News Service article by Patrick Taggart comments on the news that Richard Bachman IS Stephen King in this fashion, “... if you are a longtime subject of Stephen’s literary Kingdom, you weren’t at all misled by the Bachman ruse. THINNER is King through and through—from the premise, which involves a Gypsy’s curses and hideous transformations of the human body—to the style, which remains a paragon of high hackery.” Janis Eidus in The New York Times Book Review describes THINNER as “so burdened with cardboard characters that the terror and suspense never fully materialize. Instead, it becomes far more suspenseful to guess whether Mr. King/Bachman will ever tire of using the brand names he incessantly tosses about. We learn far more about Lacoste shirts, Rolex watches ... than the people wearing them.... THINNER, for all its padding, can be seen for what it is—a pretty thin book.” Even in Twilight Zone, the fantasy-horror field’s own representative on national newsstands, the reviewer of SKELETON CREW in the August 1985 issue seems singularly bored with the task of describing another King book, saying it ranges from “the elegant ... to the dumb ... to the forgettable ... to Yecch City.... And there’s the scary, too. Of course, of course. Go ahead and read it—everyone else will. You’ll like it.” The reaction against such indifference by the fantasy-horror King critics has been intense. In his introduction to DISCOVERING STEPHEN KING (1985) Darrell Schweitzer says, “In fact, King seems to have pleased almost everyone except conventional mainstream critics, who are immediately suspicious of anything which isn’t theirs and which is successful (i.e., if Philip Roth sells, that’s okay; if King does, his work must be trash).... But, as often happens in these cases, nobody is listening to the conventional critics. On the scale King operates, The New York Times Book Review is a ridiculous provincial backwater. So, too, is the book review section of Time.”

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King, as the bestselling horror writer of all time, has been claimed as ours by fantasy-horror critics; a big gun they can whip out and blow away the opposition with. Even the relatively few horror critics who don’t care for his work still seem to accept the validity of loading a horror novel with sub-texts centered in realistic human concerns. King is a writer who has plainly indicated that his fiction is about more than mere horror, he has explained his methods and his major concerns, and most critics in the field have taken these statements to heart, I think sometimes naively. I have profound doubts about the ultimate artistic value of the “sub-text” and even more suspicions regarding the current critical passion for King’s work; in his CAVALCADE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL (1943), Professor Edward Wagenknecht, in effect, summed up these feelings: For many of the people who pretend to be studying literature in America today are not really interested in literature at all. They are interested in “ideas”: they are interested in propaganda. They simply cannot believe that the mind of a great creative writer does not work exactly like a professor’s. To the extent that anyone with critical aptitude can waltz through King’s fiction and pull out major and minor themes with ease, then King’s work is much like what you’d expect from a professor. A professor, as well, who has many students listening with complete deference—Douglas Winter’s STEPHEN KING: THE ART OF DARKNESS strikes me as remarkable because Winter never once disagrees with a King dictum, he does not suggest that one of the novels under discussion might, just possibly, have a minor flaw or two. In this respect it is typical of most of the new criticism, where the critics, like the audience of teenage girls who buy so many of the King books, find everything to be just wonderful. Since they are able to read of King’s intentions in DANSE MACABRE or in his many published interviews, or even phone him up if need be to find out what a particular scene might mean, they become reporters instead of critics. Roger C. Schlobin wrote about the problems facing fantasy criticism in the 25th anniversary issue of Extrapolation, a leading critical journal on science fiction and fantasy; one observation he made struck me as particularly applicable to the writers on King: “Yet another factor that hampers quality scholarship is the sanctity accorded anything said by an author.... The impetus for such error, many might say, lies in the ‘fan’ tradition and in authors who have been worshipped and encouraged to pontification by the numerous fan conventions.” Here we need not deal with symbols or

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meaning, we can actually deal with business. In his thirteenth footnote to the section on DIFFERENT SEASONS, Winter notes, apparently seriously, that As a result of money-oriented reviews, King sold the North American publication rights for CHRISTINE to Viking Press and New American Library in the spring of 1982 for an advance of royalties of one dollar from each publisher: “I’ll take the royalties, if the book makes royalties, but I don’t want to hear any more about Stephen King’s monster advances.” Interview with Douglas E. Winter, May 3, 1982. Acceptance of this statement from a writer whose books earn millions of dollars seems incredible, since it conveniently ignores the more likely premise that the deal was made to effect a tax break, even possibly for the millions of dollars worth of publicity it would generate (more recently Scott Meredith has sold one of Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to 2001: A Space Odyssey for an advance of 10¢, and what do you know, that deal got a lot of press coverage too). At this writing the latest news is that King recently sold two new books for $10,000,000—that’s five million each, not one dollar, in case your math is shaky. The conclusion that most of these critics seem to reach is that King, because he obviously is the most popular horror writer in history, must therefore be the best horror writer in history. Nine out of the top ten bestselling mystery novels of all time were written by Mickey Spillane. Would you want anyone who actually thinks Spillane is a better hard-boiled mystery writer than Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler to teach your children in school? From at least one critic coming out of the fantasy-horror field, I think a few points should be made, clearly. II. T H E B A D In his enthusiastic blurb for CHRISTINE, bookseller Terence McVicker put forth an opinion which most of the King critics somehow seem to agree with: Stephen King is such a talented writer that he can transmute clichés into “new and original ideas.” The general feeling among these critics seems to be that if King writes a story in imitation of H. P. Lovecraft or DRACULA or E.C. comics then he is only paying tribute to his predecessors in the horror field, to stuff that was good in its day, you understand, though clearly not in a class with a modern master such as King.

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I think this notion is nonsense. After reading over a dozen books in which King seldom sidesteps clichés, I think perhaps it is more likely that he just has very little original to say. “When I conceived of the vampire novel which became ’SALEM’S LOT,” King writes in DANSE MACABRE, “I decided I wanted to try to do the book partially as a form of literary homage.... So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker’s DRACULA.... At the same time, because the vampire story was so much a staple of the E.C. comics I grew up with, I decided that I would also try to bring in that aspect of the horror story.” In my essay for FEAR ITSELF, I called ’SALEM’S LOT a grand catalog of every vampire situation and cliché, and it is—deliberately so. Douglas Winter in his THE ART OF DARKNESS notes that King repeats only one line of dialogue from DRACULA directly in his own vampire novel; obviously, he was putting a lot of effort into which elements he would borrow directly, which obliquely. I ran off a long list of the scenes recycled from DRACULA and various vampire films in that first essay, plus a few of the many other allusions to horror material scattered throughout the book. I knew there was a ton of such stuff in ’SALEM’S LOT—it’s like a Masters thesis on traditional uses of the vampire in western literature and film—, but I’ll admit that I was actually staggered one night when I finally saw the most likely source for the scene in which Mrs. Glick rises from the dead in the Cumberland County Morgue. I figured it was fairly creative for King to have this chunky, average women rise from the dead—a neat counterpoint to the usual beautiful women preyed upon by the vampires. Then I finally caught a late-night screening of Blacula on Oakland independent KTVU’s “Creature Features,” with its scene of a similarly average woman coming back to unlife on a morgue table and nabbing Elisha Cook, Jr. “Mrs. Glick!? Jesus!” I said to the TV set. And later in the same film, that scene where hordes of the undead come boring out from behind boxes in a warehouse also struck me as being more like the plague of vampires in ’SALEM’S LOT than anything you’ll find in one of the regular “Dracula” movies. Imagine. A writer who may have been influenced by Blacula! Give that guy a Pulitzer! THE SHINING, of course, does pretty much the same sort of thing for haunted house lore, with added tributes to Poe, Robert Bloch, and others mixed in, while THE STAND admittedly is King’s attempt to write something like Tolkien’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS occurring in America. CHRISTINE is a King variant on the idea of animate evil machines—such as Theodore Sturgeon’s earlier story Killdozer, once made into a movie for TV, or the 1977 film The Car, which King describes in DANSE MACABRE. King’s film Creepshow is his acknowledged imitation of and tribute to those E.C. comics he read as a kid. In the last episode of the film, however,

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you’ll find some borrowing from Bloch’s story The Beetles, which ends as a dead man’s “lips part, allowing a rustling swarm of black Scarabaeus beetles to pour out across the pillow.” In the Creepshow sequence entitled “They’re Creeping Up on You,” King characteristically piles it on by having a swarm of cockroaches burst from the mouth, and then explode from the chest and eyes. It is a definitive example of King’s dictum: if you can’t achieve terror, go for horror; if you can’t get horror, then gross ’em out—the sort of scene and theory that once prompted one horror critic in conversation to label King “The Gothicist as Gross-Out Artist.” In his “Notes” at the end of SKELETON CREW, King talks about his short novel THE MIST, and the rhythm of that story; he says “The real key to this rhythm lay in the deliberate use of the story’s first line, which I simply stole from Douglas Fairbairn’s brilliant novel SHOOT.” Fairbairn is one of the many writers King has expressed admiration for—another is Jim Thompson, known for noir paperback originals such as POP. 1280. In a review of Elmore Leonard’s GLITZ for The New York Times Book Review King singled out Thompson as his favorite in the noir-suspense mode of which Leonard is now the star practitioner. For any King critic seeking the origins of the rapist-killer Frank Dodd sequences in THE DEAD ZONE, I’d suggest a glance at Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel THE KILLER INSIDE ME. Examples of this sort are endless—either acknowledged borrowing, scenes which King may easily have read and borrowed, or a premise so hackneyed—the gypsy curse in THINNER—that no one need claim to have originated it. That cat returning on awkward feet from the dead in PET SEMATARY may be found, more succinctly developed and I think more effectively used, in T. E. D. Klein’s novelette The Events at Poroth Farm, first published in 1972. That striking image of a boy emerging from a swimming hole with a bloated leech attached to his testicles in King’s novelette The Body derives from a Faulkner story. King’s The Monkey plays the same theme as W. W. Jacob’s more famous The Monkey’s Paw. And remember Thomas Tryon, one of the writers who pioneered modern bestselling horror novels with his first two books THE OTHER and HARVEST HOME? When Tryon decided that he wanted to break away from the horror genre, with his fourth book he gave us CROWNED HEADS, four loosely connected novelettes based on famous Hollywood personalities. When King in 1982 decided to break away from the horror field and head toward the mainstream, at least for a moment, he gave us DIFFERENT SEASONS, four loosely connected novelettes of modern American life. Tryon’s are much more skillfully woven together, and it’s worth noting that one of them is based on Rita Hayworth—in view of King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption in DIFFERENT SEASONS.

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King disarms criticism frequently—being the first to call his prose style the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries in his afterword to DIFFERENT SEASONS. What else can you say? Yet it is also in that afterword where King writes that he would be happy to be labeled a horror writer, along with Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, and others: “... I decided that I could be in worse company. I could, for example, be an ‘important’ writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a ‘brilliant’ writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.” In DANSE MACABRE he comments further on his position as a highly paid and enormously popular writer: “You’re not a writer at all,” an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. “You’re a goddamn industry. How do you expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?” Well, in point of fact, I’m not “a goddamn industry” (unless its a cottage industry); I work steadily, that’s all. Any writer who only produces a book every seven years is not thinking Deep Thoughts; even a long book takes at most three years to think and write. No, a writer who only produces one book every seven years is simply dicking off. Now I don’t doubt that even a long book may take only three years to write, but I would say it depends on what the writer is doing in the book. Everyone in the fantasy field knows it took J. R. R. Tolkien something like sixteen years to write his THE LORD OF THE RINGS (which is not much longer than King’s THE STAND), but then Tolkien was creating a complex secondary worldscape, complete with its own histories, languages, and genealogies. He was using his readings in medieval and epic literature to pull out enduring myth types and then integrate them into his work. Today any reasonably adept professional writer in the fantasy field can sit down and, following Tolkien’s example, turn out a “trilogy” modeled on THE LORD OF THE RINGS. We know that they can because we’ve seen their many imitations on the newsstands. It was just as easy for competent hacks in the 1930s and 1940s to turn out a hard-boiled detective novel, after Dashiell Hammett and other writers for Black Mask magazine had established the formula. I’m sure it didn’t take King sixteen years to write THE STAND; he wouldn’t have time. Instead, he borrowed Tolkien’s plotline and just moved that already-pictured epic conflict of Good and Evil to America, where you

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don’t need invented languages or new history: Mordor became Las Vegas, Gollum became Trashcan Man, and voila! he had a “new and original” book. Even his archcritic Douglas Winter notes that King’s description of Randall Flagg at the moment of the big showdown “strongly echoes that of Sauron in the final confrontation of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.” If you’re not going to originate new material, how long can a novel take? As for the framing device of THE STAND, the plague that wipes out most of humanity, King credits that to George R. Stewart’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel EARTH ABIDES. No, it won’t take sixteen years to write even such a lengthy book as THE STAND, if its component parts have been previously written elsewhere. How long might it take to write something like King’s recent CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF? A couple of days? This short novel is notable only in that it provides an excuse for some more of Berni Wrightson’s excellent illustrations, otherwise it has absolutely nothing new to offer. The description of the seasonal changes are nicely done, but how many millions of times have the seasons been described since man put pen to paper? The werewolf elements are completely standard issue. The fact that the werewolf is really a priest, and that a crippled kid is the one who must save the day, only add to the list of clichés. I find it interesting that Joseph Heller answered King in advance, as it were, in his Playboy interview, June 1975. He commented that “There is a reading public in America that wants good, challenging books. That public is one of our national treasures.” Playboy then asked his opinion about the “rest of the reading public and the ‘popular’ authors they support.” Heller replied: There are two kinds of people doing what we’ll call popular fiction. One kind is a hack, the producer of quick pornography, quick mysteries—opportunistic books. The hack knows he is writing junk. The other kind may not be an “intellectual” writer but believes that he or she is producing works as good as anything that has ever been written. This type of writer puts as much effort into the work as Beckett or Mann or any conscientious writer does. The readers of that type of book are not to be looked down upon, either. They’re reading what, to them, is good literature. Of course, in fairness to King, it should be noted that a writer as great as Shakespeare borrowed plots—Hamlet, for example: not bad for an imitation. Likewise, H. P. Lovecraft is deeply indebted to Poe and Lord Dunsany for many basic aspects of his work. Everyone who writes fiction has

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debts, no doubt about it. It may well be true that “there’s no such thing as a new plot.” I think too that for a writer to reach King’s level of popularity, his material must consist of the already familiar. Spillane’s first Mike Hammer novel, I, THE JURY, obviously borrows from Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON and swipes stylistic mannerisms from Chandler, and Spillane has said that the character of Mike Hammer is modeled very much on Race Williams, a gumshoe created by the lesser known Carroll John Daly, a contemporary of Hammett and Chandler from the detective pulp Black Mask. Spillane added some heavy sexual breathing and a little wholesale sadism to an already familiar formula and became the bestselling author of the 1950s, just as King has added the contemporary scene and the gross-out to standard horror fare to rival the bestselling writers of the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of content, films such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark offer little except clichéd material, though they’re done up in such a fever pitch of technical expertise that the audience really doesn’t care. I do not find King’s expertise in horror effects as overwhelming as many other critics. In THE DEAD ZONE I believe he wrote a great novel— it has all his major interests and themes, even (an archetypical King device) a bad guy who, when introduced, is seen kicking a dog to death: the Kingian works, in short, but done with a sure hand, with no false notes, no characters forced into action to stimulate a sagging plot. My favorite example of King being egregious comes from ’SALEM’S LOT. Look at the paperback. It isn’t until page 172 that school teacher Matt Burke tells hero Ben Mears that vampires are attacking the small Maine village they’re living in. Mears has a crucifix, borrowed from his landlady at Burke’s insistence, which he gives to the teacher. He listens to the man’s story, but tells him by page 176 that people will think he’s nuts if he makes this tale about vampires public. Nonetheless, Mears is willing to help Burke test this theory. After suggesting a plan or two, he returns to his rooming house, and begins musing over the many disappearances being reported. Matt Burke has a heart attack after fighting off a vampire. In the hospital Ben Mears sees the teacher’s recently acquired cross hanging with his clothes. “I’m putting his cross around his neck,” Ben said. “Is he a Catholic?” “He is now,” Ben said sombrely. (p. 229) By page 237 Mears is urging his girlfriend Susan Norton to get a cross, “even if it only means gluing two sticks together.”

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“Ben, I still don’t believe this. A maniac, maybe, someone who thinks he’s a vampire, but—” “Believe what you want, but make the cross.” At this point Mears still had had no firsthand encounter with a vampire, but he was taking the idea seriously—he talked a doctor into examining bodies in the morgue and was trying to get the village priest into the affair. Obviously, this is a smart guy, not about to take any chances. Then comes page 265. Mears and Dr. Jimmy Cody are waiting at twilight in the morgue to see if the late Marjorie Glick will spring into undead animation. It was 7:02. Jimmy suddenly said, “Where’s your cross?” Ben started. “Cross? Jesus, I don’t have one!” Ben Mears, a man who has for several chapters been more crossconscious than Jerry Falwell, doesn’t have a cross? Right. ’SALEM’S LOT is an early novel, of course. In the more recent THINNER King presents us with only one competent character: Ginelli, a Mafia-style hit man, a man with a plan, a guy who hogties gypsies to trees with one hand, a fellow who never makes a false move. But toward the end of the book he wanders offstage for awhile; we learn later that he’s been cut down and cut up by the gypsies. Sorry, I didn’t believe it. I might have been persuaded if the author had made some effort to show how it could have been done, but King didn’t bother. King related to Douglas Winter that the main complaint made about CHRISTINE comes from the disruption of narrative voice. In parts one and three the story is told in first person by Dennis Guilder, the football player, a convincing evocation of the way teenagers talk and think, another great portrait of high school life—King at his best. But the book’s middle section simply doesn’t work. It is rendered in third person so we can watch the car running over people at times Dennis wouldn’t have been available as a witness. King says he intended to have the whole work in Guilder’s voice, but the technical problems involving the second section proved too much for him, so he added the third person narration and published the book as is. Considering the quality of the first and third parts, I can wish that he had just sat on the book a la Heller for a few years, until he had figured a way to do it all up right. I lost most hope for any sort of consistent improvement in King’s creations of horror after seeing his appearance on “Late Night with David

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Letterman” a few years ago. Letterman asked him for the scariest scene in all of his books—you know, the scene that scared even you. King said that happened while he was writing the dead woman in the bathtub in THE SHINING— which I think is the highpoint of terror in his work to date, the credit that allows King serious consideration among the genuine masters of the terror tale. But King added that this was the only scene he’d written which actually scared him at the time of writing—almost as if he wasn’t writing it, it was simply happening to him. I thought to myself, “Oh, no. This means he can’t control it.” I thought of Tobe Hooper and his incredible Texas Chainsaw Massacre—a film he has not since come within ballpark range of. I thought of all those mainstream literary figures such as F. Marion Crawford or Charles Dickens who would write just an occasional ghost story, usually to good effect. The entire notion of a “professional horror writer” is a recent one. Most of the writers associated with horror were either amateurs such as M. R. James or H. P. Lovecraft, for the love of the art, or professional writers such as August Derleth or Robert Bloch who made a living largely by writing in other fields—Bloch, in particular, soon branched off from Weird Tales magazines in the 30s, to science fiction and mystery pulps and finally to film and television. The best horror stories, the recognizable classics, have not yet come from the newer crop of writers who apparently wake up every morning, drink coffee and eat breakfast, then sit down at the typewriter and attempt to get weird. Primarily, King’s comment to Letterman bothered me because I was greatly looking forward to PET SEMATARY, a novel King in interviews had been calling the most frightening thing he’d ever written, a book about burial practices, too terrifying to publish—a novel that sounded just terrific! I cried in print, “Bring it on!”, figuring I might be able to give King the ultimate compliment on his work, to be found dead from a heart attack, slumped over some horrid chapter. Now I began to have doubts. I bought PET SEMATARY as soon as it appeared, full cover price plus tax. I’d said I wanted to read the book, so I put my money down. I figured King had in this book a chance to create anything at all, something as original and unnerving as William Hope Hodgson’s THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND. But what do we find? Yet another invocation of the Wendigo, introduced to horror literature by Algernon Blackwood in 1910 and later incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by August Derleth. The possibilities for horror in funereal details and the American obsession with burial were by no means exploited to the fullest—if you doubt that, read Jessica Mitford’s THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH, a non-fiction book on the subject. It has a gross-out chapter that puts King to shame. And I do think that these always-doomed families we find in Kings’s novels, however

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realistically portrayed, may have already become as familiar and in their way as wearying as the doomed narrators in the Lovecraft-style horror story. The last page of the novel is extremely well done, though—I think it’s one of the best horror crescendos in the literature. I know, of course, that King is just reworking the dialogue from ’SALEM’S LOT, part three, The Lot (IV), section 31, which ends: “Darling,” she said. Reggie screamed. But in PET SEMATARY King is really doing it right—a professional writer earning his money. In reviewing PET SEMATARY for Twilight Zone June 1984, Thomas Disch noted that King’s “conventional spatter-movie resolution” to the novel’s theme of the dead living again was regrettable, but acknowledged that “It’s doubtful, of course, whether the public wants to be harrowed. The blustering denouement King does provide is reassuring to readers precisely to the degree that it’s conventional; it’s King’s way of telling us not to be upset: it was only a ghost story, after all.” Disch strikes close to King’s notion of sub-text in his remark, “If the dead child had returned from the grave ... disensouled, the horror would have been infinitely greater, because that loss would be a vivid correlative to a parental fear of a fate truly worse than death, the fear that one’s child may be severely mentally impaired.” The Disch review seems especially important because he broaches the main issues and problems with King as a horror writer; he suggests that King should be writing something other than a typical horror novel to achieve the maximum effects that might come from his sub-text of reanimating your own dead child. I’d think everyone would agree that the issue of a retarded child is more important, because it is more realistic than the doubtful idea that people may rise from the grave—but should that make it a more important concern than the horrific conception of a corpse that walks in a novel aimed at creating terror? I think not. The idea of sub-text as a desirable buttress for horror material in fiction or film seems to be serving two functions: it appeases the academic mind Wagenknecht spoke of, which seeks propaganda in everything it reads, and gives material which cannot carry its own artistic load something to fall back on. Tony Magistrale in Extrapolation vol. 26, no. 1, Spring 1985 offered the essay “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children” in which the story Children of the Corn is seen as a comment on Vietnam. The hero is a Vietnam vet, the calendars in the village he and his wife drive into by accident end at 1964, the year we began active involvement in Southeast

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Asia, and “the ‘disease of the corn’ in this tale,” Magistrale states, “while ambiguous throughout, can be interpreted in terms of American defoliation of the Vietnamese landscape, as well as the more symbolic cultural ‘illness’ of moral guilt and spiritual taint that accompanied American war involvement.” This is a clever explication—I like it, and it may well be the intended deeper meaning King had in mind, if he had a deeper meaning in mind—but it reminds me of Raymond Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and his notion that “writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.” If you’re good enough to write about Vietnam, why not write about Vietnam? Several people in the horror field were convinced that INVASION by “Aaron Wolfe”—the ninth imprint of the now defunct Laser paperback books—was actually written by King. “Wolfe” was said to be a penname in the introduction. I certainly thought King was the author, and still would like to think so—despite the recent news that Dean Koontz is holder of the copyright and therefore the actual writer. It would be nice to think that King and Koontz are part of some elaborate and delightful coverup, because the book has so many King trademarks, such as a rural Maine setting with people listening to a radio station out of Bangor. The plot is the basic plot for King’s THE SHINING: a man, his wife, and their young son are isolated alone in a remote place by winter snows, with an outside menace threatening them— and the man has a little history of mental unbalance. I was convinced King wrote it when I hit chapter 20 and the narrator thinks “I understood the symbology—both natural and psychological—that was operating in this affair. I had seen the parallels between these events in northern Maine and certain things I had endured in Southeast Asia.... It was like the war! It was Vietnam. It was, there in Maine, Vietnam all over again, the same pain, the same misunderstandings, the same mistakes, dammit!” If Koontz is the author, he was writing a novel of horror set in Maine, complete with subtext, very much in the King mode (yet before King had established that mode). Give that guy a World Fantasy Award. King in DANSE MACABRE devotes a lot of his attention to films which can be scanned for sub-text—Dawn of the Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers—wasting much space on mediocrities such as The Amityville Horror or I Was a Teenage Werewolf, while giving almost no notice to several of the truly great horror films. He writes, “There are films which skate right up to the border where ‘art’ ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field’s most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its

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redeeming social merit in any court in the country.” Oddly, this is about all he has to say about Chainsaw. For my money The Chainsaw Massacre is the greatest horror film thus far—horror as pure art. It has no sub-texts; it does not need any. Could you justify a film portraying murder by chainsaw by suggesting that it dramatizes the plight of hungry crackers down in Texas? It does not require justification. Chainsaw puts horror on the front line, where it belongs in a horror film, and becomes a buzzing, sweating, utterly relentless nightmare you live through in a darkened theatre. I know many, many people, especially among the more refined or intellectual circles, who refuse to see this movie—most of them simply because of its title. That is one of the finest tributes to terror that can be made: the name alone is frightening. I was equally curious to hear what King would say about an earlier landmark of grotesque horror, Tod Browning’s film Freaks. After a quick Cliff Notes-like summary of the plot (omitting the best scenes, such as the eery wedding feast or the moments when the dwarf blows a weird air through an ocarina), King concludes, “Browning made the mistake of using real freaks in his film. We may only feel really comfortable with horror as long as we see the zipper running up the monster’s back, when we understand that we are not playing for keepsies.” I could not disagree more. By using real freaks, by divesting his film of any weak-kneed sub-texts, Browning created a masterwork that resonates powerfully, typified by its unforgettable line, “dirty, filthy, freaks!” Browning is not Stephen King; his film is about freaks, not about having a bad case of acne. Public response to it through the years demonstrates that it succeeds in its art. It was banned in America and England and has never been widely shown, but art does not need a large commercial audience to succeed in its own right. Neither does great art need a sub-text. When Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space appeared in Amazing Stories in 1927, it was instantly recognized as one of the scariest pieces he, or anyone, had written. Fritz Leiber has recalled that coming across such a depressing tale in a magazine otherwise devoted to the adventures of science genuinely rattled his perceptions, gave him the creeps. The inexplicable phenomenon portrayed in this tale, which rots away the countryside and the farmers living there, did not then have contemporary analogies in radiation sickness and nuclear blight. If anything, Lovecraft was prescient—he created a text to which a sub-text would be added years later by events in the real world. Typically, King chooses his subtexts from events of the moment—as when he suggests that ’SALEM’S LOT, written in the Watergate era, is as much about America’s dread of political corruption as it is about vampires swarming into your living room. I think anyone can see that the roster of uptown brand names King rolls out in

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THINNER is a comment upon yuppie lifestyle and the substitution of merchandise for stronger emotional or social values. The sub-text in THINNER is much more interesting than the main text of gypsy curses and wasting doom, but I think neither will carry the novel very many years into posterity. Taking its sub-text from the moment, it becomes a book for the moment—what does it have to offer readers in a few decades except a list of brand name products and an uncompelling plot? The underlying philosophy in King’s works often does not seem supportive of his role as a master of horror. I noted in my earlier essay that King ends his best horror novel, THE SHINING, with a lame moral—when the cook Hallorann says to the young boy: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain.... The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I ... see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.” In the novelette The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet from SKELETON CREW, King is a bit more brutal on this same theme in the lines, “YOU may wonder about long-term solutions; I assure you there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what’s given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope, but the rope always has an end. So what. Bless the slack and don’t waste breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows in the end that we all swing.” This sentiment was expressed even better on a T-shirt recently, that declares, “LIFE SUCKS AND THEN YOU DIE.” For any sentiment other than the clichéd, you must look outside King’s fiction. It struck me as ironic that Douglas Winter would end his introduction to his book on King THE ART OF DARKNESS with a quote that perfectly encapsulates the entire appeal of King’s work: “We all had some fun tonight, considering that we’re all going to die.” Great thought— piercing, pithy, original. A quote from Stephen King? Well, no, comedian Steve Martin said it. SKELETON CREW features a half-title page with the simple question, “Do you love?”—a question repeated in different tales in the book to varying effect. Still, it suggests a Rod McKuen of horror, a suggestion reinforced by a couple of really terrible poems King allows into the book. His poem to his son Owen is overly sweet, the sort of thing people write for local poetry contests, loading their verse with sentiment and love. Many of King’s best

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stories in this collection—Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, Word Processor of the Gods, The Reach—have a similar gentle tone and message, practical if unoriginal advice from an obviously nice man. One of those teenage girls who called in to local radio station KRQR said that she liked THE STAND so much because it presented a positive picture of humanity—there may be hate, fear, and the threat of nuclear war, but there are a lot of okay people out and about, trying to do the best they know how. This is not a despicable sentiment. For purposes of horror fiction, however, this emphasis is not one I can approve of. I once took part in a panel about horror at a Bay Area science fiction convention and almost gagged when the moderator stated, “I don’t think horror should be too scary.” But I note that King in DANSE MACABRE says something equally ridiculous: “Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life.... By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives.” How utterly banal. In his use of the routine and the clichéd, I find the most fault in King’s fiction. Yet I note an odd reference in THINNER which produces much the same response, in context. Amid all those uptown brand names that mount up into terrible weight of useless materialism, what should we find but this allusion from King writing as Bachman: “And, Billy, I don’t exactly consider pimples off-the-wall. You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there....” Amid the Rolex watches and popular rock songs, the roll call of the safe and normal life most Americans lead today, why should the name of a man supposedly dedicated to the weird and horrific fit in so snugly, securely—and as Disch has suggested, reassuringly? III. T H E G O O D If King stood to horror only as Rod McKuen stands to poetry or as Mickey Spillane stands to mystery fiction: the bestselling modern representative in his respective field, then he would not be worth writing about. Few things are as completely uninteresting as most of the top ten bestsellers of yesteryear. King has done some excellent work, however. The dead lady in the bathtub in THE SHINING, she’s already received my accolades. THE DEAD ZONE is fine; I think too that it points to one of the most interesting features of King as a writer in the 1980s—in an era when fundamentalism is strongly

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on the rise, when an archconservative like Ronald Reagan roars into the Oval Office twice on incredible landslides, we find King writing in a liberal humanistic mode to a huge readership. THE DEAD ZONE, from the man who supported Gary Hart in the 1984 elections, is a needed antidote to the prevailing political climate. When King is not suggesting he’s better than Joseph Heller, I find his lesser stories have their moments. The entire sequence with Ginelli rousting the gypsies in THINNER was neatly done, good popular entertainment—the sort of competent nuts-and-bolts writing you expect from a pro writer. King’s best colloquial voice is fun to read too—I don’t think it will put him in the ranks with Shakespeare, but I’m sure it is why so many people read him today. I’d say a comment like the following from THINNER is one type of definitive Stephen King: ... Now he was sixteen years older and a lot heavier. And, as jolly old Dr. Houston had so kindly informed him, he was entering heart-attack country. The idea of having a heart attack halfway up the mountain was uncomfortable but still fairly remote; what seemed more possible to him was getting stuck in one of those narrow stone throats through which the trail snaked on its way to the top. He could remember that they’d had to crawl in at least four places. He didn’t want to get stuck in one of those places. Or ... how’s this, gang? Ole Billy Halleck gets stuck in one of those dark crawly places and then has a heart attack! Heyyyy! Two for the price of one! I think King also is aware of the dangers of becoming too saccharine with his “Do you love?” rhetoric. In DANSE MACABRE he notes that Ray Bradbury’s “style, so attractive to me as an adolescent, now seems a bit oversweet.” He reacts against the happy ending in some books with notes of profound despair—CUJO, PET SEMATARY, THINNER. It was King, though, who suggested that the young boy be allowed to live when CUJO was adapted for film. Otherwise, when only one or two of the characters meet bad ends, King is simply functioning at the norm for the horror field— as Disch said, a slasher finale is very much expected, and therefore safe. Still, in a story like Survivor Type King steps beyond your typical unhappy ending into what I’d call relentless horror, as he strands a guy on an atoll where he is forced to auto cannibalize himself in hopes of staying alive until he’s rescued. This is not a story from a man who thinks horror shouldn’t be too scary. It is more like the real thing. Survival Type is one of the tales in

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SKELETON CREW the Twilight Zone reviewer characterized as “Yecch City”—an indicator that the mass market, even the mass market for the horror story, does not want relentless horror. But I’m glad King wrote this one out and got it published, for those of us who are devotees of that sort of thing.... King generally is not subtle, but in two cases I’ve noticed he was, brilliantly so. His Lovecraft imitation Jerusalem’s Lot from NIGHT SHIFT is your typical Cthulhu Mythos tale, with all the references to arcane books, tainted ancestry, and other trademarks of that form. Yet the protagonist of the story, living in Maine, is a northern abolitionist, publishing anti-slavery tracts. It is a fine twist on the well-known racism of Lovecraft, who occasionally signed his letters “Yrs. for cheaper niggers.” And, in The Breathing Method from DIFFERENT SEASONS, King creates an exclusive men’s club where members come to read, relax, and tell stories. Inspired perhaps by the Grolier Club in New York, the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, or similar institutions, King evokes just the right air of comfort and clubbiness—again, a professional writer doing his job well. I find it refreshing, however, that he introduces into this traditional bastion of male companionship a tale based on feminine concerns—what happens when you get pregnant and there’s no father in sight? Do you have the baby anyway? The juxtaposition of the solidly male club atmosphere and the woman facing pregnancy alone is deft; King never once jumps out and yells, “Look, gang, see this sub-text?!” I’d say that King is at his best when he deals with small, personal matters. The depiction of what it is like to be a boy in the country in The Body is wonderful—not earthshaking material, not writing that is likely to make you forget any of the highpoints in world literature, but wonderful nonetheless, recalling many memories. I stand beside my original roster of “the best” from NIGHT SHIFT: Children of the Corn and Sometimes They Come Back selected as fine work by a writer hitting his stride; The Boogeyman selected because it so obviously had King’s major concerns up front—in fact, in interviews since I wrote the first essay, King has repeatedly said his greatest fear is walking into one of his children’s rooms and finding death; and The Woman in the Room, chosen because it was the most moving, and one of the few truly personal pieces in the book—written soon after King experienced the death of his mother, I’ve since learned. I do think that much of this stuff with man-eating trucks and unexplainable witless doom is complete bullshit, but with The Woman in the Room King approached the realm of serious literature, and perhaps it is not coincidental that a short film made from this story won an Oscar nomination as best short film of the year

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in 1984. I have no expectations that King’s upcoming movie Maximum Overdrive about killer trucks will garner a nomination, or rate one. As best from SKELETON CREW I’d select Survivor Type, where King lets loose, and Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, King’s great love letter to his wife. In Apt Pupil from DIFFERENT SEASONS I find those qualities I’d most expect from a writer interested in both horror literature and what is called mainstream literature, but also a writer capable of appealing to the mass market in America. King features a ghoulish young all-American boy in a small California town, a boy who happens to learn that an old man living nearby is a fugitive Nazi war criminal, a “death doctor” in charge of concentration camps. What else would this boy do than come sucking around, plaguing the German for details of the Holocaust? The plot sounds like a great gimmick for a story, like Bradbury’s gimmick for The Small Assassin—hey, let’s have a baby crawl around killing people. I can see how The Small Assassin appealed at first to the audience of teenage boys who originally read it in its pulp magazine appearance, and to the succeeding generations of teenage boys who discover it in some printing or another of a Bradbury book or an anthology. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the story until after I had had a baby, and I found it hopelessly stupid—a great gimmick for a story, but only a gimmick. Of course, I see the parallels between King’s story of a boy’s infatuation with a “real monster” and Peter Bogdanovich’s film Targets (1968) which stars Boris Karloff in one of his last great roles, as a man who has played movie monsters all his life. The theme of sniper killers in both is obvious too. Many people in America, many people we’d consider all-American—such as King—do love monsters. What could be better than to have a monster, a Nazi war criminal, for your very own? In the notes at the end of SKELETON CREW King calls Apt Pupil “a particularly good example of this disease I have—literary elephantiasis,” indicating the story is too long. True, if it had been shorter it would have had more impact strictly as a gimmick story—I think THINNER is a great short gimmick story lost in novel-length packaging. But what King does in Apt Pupil is worth the added wordage. He goes beyond the mere idea of the gimmick to establish a mythic picture of the mental decay of the American boy, a boy interested in monsters who in due course of time becomes interested in murder, and the parasitic relationship of the Nazi and the monster fan. It is one of the few King stories in which the material he normally presents as sub-text becomes the text: we may become monsters too—here’s how. It is Stephen King, bestselling horror writer, working with material I think no one else could exploit as well,

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creating a tale of such large proportions and such resonance that it will defy easy pigeonholing by the academic hordes. In a word, it is the story where King takes the material which seems most uniquely his own, and makes literature out of it.

CLARE HANSON

Stephen King: Powers of Horror

PREFATORY MATTERS

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n order to approach the power of horror in Stephen King’s work we must move circuitously, towards the glimpsed abyss via accounts of the origins of personality offered by psychoanalytic theory, specifically by Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva. King’s fiction is concerned above all with origins, with the grounds of being. His work betrays a fascination with those primary/primal movements and experiences which impel or force the construction of the self as a gendered social being. I shall argue that his work itself displays or follows an exemplarily “masculine” trajectory, moving as it were from “mother” to “text”: in order to show this I must reverse this experiential order to follow the epistemological order of psychoanalytic theory, which developed from a concentration on “text” to a concentration on “mother” in its movement from Freud to Kristeva. I begin with Freud, and his account of the development of the self. According to Freud, one of the most striking and distinguishing features of the human animal is its extreme and extended dependence on its parents after birth. The human being is born, so to speak, prematurely, and requires unceasing vigilance and care before it is able to function independently of its parents. The “family situation” is thus more or less “given” in the construction of human personality, although the nature of the family will

From American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, ed. Brian Docherty, pp. 135–154. © 1990 by The Macmillan Press.

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vary from society to society. Freud also suggests that, while we are born with certain fixed biological needs, such as our need for food, these needs soon become “perverted” as they become associated/confused with sensations of pleasure (for instance, the pleasure which the infant derives from sucking at the breast). A drive to pleasure is thus established existing independently of need: the object of desire in this sense is by no means fixed (unlike the object of biological need—the breast, for instance). Displacement is thus an inherent part of desire from its inception as part of human experience. The child in this early stage of development is asocial. She or he cannot be a social animal without a preliminary sense of the self as distinct from others. The movement into social life occurs, according to Freud, via the Oedipus complex, or Oedipal moment. In the early months of life the child exists in a dyadic relationship with the mother, unable to distinguish between self and (m)other. The child is forced out of this blissful state through the “intervention” of the father. The shadow of the father falls between the child and the mother as the father acts to prohibit the child’s incestuous desire for its mother. At this point, the child is initiated into selfhood, perceiving itself for the first time as a being separate from the mother, who is now consciously desired because absent, forbidden. The origin of self thus lies for Freud in this absence and sense of loss. It is too at the point of repression of desire for the mother that the unconscious is formed, as a place to receive that lost desire, and it is at this point of repression that the child’s early transgressive drives become organised and forced towards genital (and gendered) sexuality. It is now generally agreed that Freud’s account of the little boy’s passage through the Oedipus is much more satisfactory than his account of the little girl’s: it is hard to escape the conclusion that this was because the theory was originally founded on the case of the boy, the theory for the girl being something of a lame extrapolation from an already gendered theory. Yet we must look briefly at Freud’s account of both the male and female passage through the Oedipus, as it provides the basis for almost all subsequent theories of the origins of sexual identity. For the male child at the Oedipal moment, it is the father’s threat of castration which forces him to abandon his incestuous desire for the mother. As the desire is repressed the child has to move away from the mother, but, in giving up the hope of possessing the mother now, the male child does not give up the hope of at some time occupying the place of the father. He is able from this moment to aspire to fatherhood himself, to train himself to occupy the position of father/patriarch. For the little girl the case is far different. The first effect of the intervention of the father is that she will perceive herself as different/castrated, and will thus turn from her mother, perceived as similarly castrated and inadequate, to her father. When she finds that her attempts to

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“seduce” her father are unsuccessful, the girl will turn back to the mother, to identify, albeit unhappily, with the mother’s feminine role. In place of the penis which she can never possess, suggests Freud, she then posits as an object of desire a baby which will, she hopes, come from the father. Freud does not explain how the girl will ever progress from this incestuous position: the implication is that female sexual desire remains “blocked,” compromised by an ineradicable desire for a father-figure. The importance of the work of Jacques Lacan lies for us in the further connections which he establishes between the Oedipal moment and the child’s entry into language, which he terms the “symbolic order.” For Lacan, the moment in which the unconscious is created, via the repression of desire for the mother, is one and the same as the moment in which language is acquired, for it is only on perceiving the mother as absent/different from heror himself that the child will need to name her. Language, like the unconscious, is thus founded upon loss and absence, upon a lack for which it will try endlessly to compensate. This brings us to a further important insight. Lacan sees a fundamental opposition between the languageless preOedipal state which he terms the “imaginary,” and the post-Oedipal world constituted by the entry into a network of social relations and into language. This opposition will be central to our understanding of Stephen King’s fiction. The symbolic is that whole network of family and social relations which the child must “master” in order to be adequately socialised, and it is a network which leads the child away from the mother to the father. The father represents for the child the “first term” in the social network, for it is his prohibition of desire for the mother which is the first social force or coercion which the child experiences. The father’s role is also crucial in the child’s entry into language, which Lacan sees as particularly important in facilitating the child’s passage through the Oedipus complex. Lacan suggests that the phallus, the emblem of male sexuality and power, constitutes the “transcendental signifier.” While the child may already have experienced lack and absence before her/his first perception of sexual difference, sexual difference “takes up” all previous differences. The primary marker of difference becomes sexual difference, perceived in terms of fullness in the father (possession of the phallus) and lack in the mother (absence of the phallus). Lacan stresses the importance of language as a means of controlling and marking one’s social and sexual identity: in his view, in order successfully to negotiate the Oedipus complex the child must not only order and repress libidinal drives, but also, as it were, fasten onto language as the only means by which we humans may console ourselves for the absence of “the real.”

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Language offers our only source of power over all that (such as the mother) which we cannot have, all that which must be consigned in its “real” excess and radical energy to the unconscious. This swift summary of the work of Freud and Lacan will serve to highlight the importance of certain fundamental elements in the construction of the social being: the parents, the unconscious, the symbolic order. The “narrative” of Freudian and Lacanian theory is of a journey from the chaotic “other” of the unconscious to the symbolic order of language, which is clearly characterised as male-dominated. The work of Julia Kristeva leads us back, however, from a male-dominated symbolic to the mother, and to areas of her dominion and influence which have, Kristeva argues, been underestimated in (male) accounts of the construction and maintenance of human personality. Kristeva is best known for her concept of the semiotic, which she mobilises as a means of locating and inserting “the feminine” back into the exclusively masculine post-Oedipal world described by Lacan. Kristeva fully accepts Lacan’s account of the symbolic order by means of which social, sexual and linguistic relations are regulated by/in the name of the father. She suggests, however, that the symbolic is oppressive because it is exclusively masculine—that is, because it is limited, not just because it is limiting (in terms of the actual social and sexual practices which the symbolic order licences). Against the symbolic Kristeva thus sets the semiotic, a play of rhythmic patterns and “pulsions” which are pre-linguistic. In the preOedipal phase the child babbles, rhythmically: the sounds are representative (though not by the rules of language) of some of the experiences which the child is undergoing in a period when she or he is still dominated by the mother. This semiotic “babble” thus represents/is connected with “feminised” experience, which is of course available at this stage to both male and female children. Kristeva argues that this feminised experience is not completely repressed either by male or by female children, but that it resurfaces in adult life as a kind of disruptive influence moving over ordered language/texts. It is in the breaks and “pulsions” of language and text that we can identify the “feminine” in all of us breaking up and challenging the symbolic order. But it is Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” which will be of greatest concern to us in our consideration of horror in Stephen King: indeed, the concept was first formulated in the book called Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Powers of Horror).1 Here Kristeva reaches “back” before the Oedipus complex and the constitution of the self as a subject defined by an object, the (m)other. She posits an earlier “splitting-off ” from the mother which takes place in early infancy: this splitting-off may be defined as the merest preliminary turning-away from the mother. The child is not yet a subject

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nor the mother an object, but the moment of abjection is that in which a space first appears between the two, a space created, necessarily, by a slight movement of rejection or withdrawal. The abject is described in this way by Kristeva: The abject is not an ob-ject in front of me that I name or imagine. Neither is it this “ob-jeu,” petit “a” indefinitely fleeing in the systematic quest of desire. The abject is not my correlate which, by offering me a support on someone or something other, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject shares only one quality with the object—that of being opposed to I. But if, in being opposed, the object offers me equilibrium within the fragile web of a desire for meaning which in fact makes me indefinitely and infinitely homologous to it, the abject, on the contrary, as fallen object, is what is radically excluded, drawing me towards the point where meaning collapses. She speaks of This massive and abrupt irruption of a strangeness which, if it was familiar to me in an opaque and forgotten life, now importunes me as radically separated and repugnant. Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A “something” that I do not recognise as a thing. A whole lot of nonsense which has nothing insignificant and which crushes me. At the border of inexistence and hallucination, of a reality which, if I recognise it, annihilates me.2 Here Kristeva is suggesting that the abject, representing the primary “turning-away,” can return and rise up through the surface of adult life, welling up to announce its own meaning—which is meaninglessness or fear. Because it is outside (or before) the symbolic order, the abject has no apprehensible meaning, and leads us “towards the point where meaning collapses.” It is relatively easy to relate this “whole lot of nonsense which has nothing insignificant and which crushes me” to horror as we associate it with the traditional iconography of horror fiction or horror films. As Kristeva explains, the abject in this sense can be represented by any kind of transgressive state, or any condition which challenges the limits and boundaries of being. She focuses on filth, refuse, cloaca: these “entities” challenge the limits of being because they are ever on the border of living

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existence, verging on death or decay. The corpse is the ultimate example of refuse which works in this way to destroy limits; as Kristeva writes, The corpse—seen without God and outside science—is the height of abjection. It is death infesting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one is not separated, from which one is not protected as is the case with an object. An imaginary strangeness and a menace that is real, it calls to us and finishes by devouring us.3 However, it is important to note that Kristeva’s theory of abjection is founded on a specific turning-away, from the mother. The images of abjection which she mentions (blood, faeces, and so on) suggest a preoccupation with the body splitting from itself, but this is a later “version” or image of the original source of anxiety, the split with the mother, which inspires, both fascination and horror, for the abjected mother both is, and is not, “me.” In the moment of abjection, “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself in the same movement by which ‘I’ claims to be me.” “I” oscillates between a “pole of attraction and repulsion.” Hence the compulsive fascination of horror: what I am concerned particularly to explore in this essay is the corresponding sense of repulsion or distaste for the mother and the maternal body, as this is expressed in a variety of texts. CARRIE: ABJECTION Carrie is concerned with an apparently trivial incident—the onset of menstruation in a sixteen-year-old girl—and with its monstrous, far-reaching consequences. The onset of menstruation in Carrie White is traumatic: this trauma releases her latent “telekinetic” powers and results in the virtual destruction of the small town in Maine where she has lived all her life. After the disaster we are told that the town is “waiting to die.” Why should such a trivial-seeming incident have such consequences? And why should Carrie White be endowed by her creator with “telekinetic” powers? To answer such questions we have only to turn to Kristeva’s developing account of the abject in Powers of Horror. As we have seen, Kristeva associates images of waste with abjection. She suggests further than this waste falls into two categories: the excremental, which threatens identity from the outside, and the menstrual, which threatens from within. Menstrual waste is for obvious reasons also connected particularly closely with the body of the mother and with “memories” of the primary abjection of that body.

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In Carrie we as readers are placed as voyeurs, forced(?) to witness an extreme distaste/horror inspired by the menstrual blood of others. The novel thus functions for its readers as what Kristeva would call a “defilement ritual,” but on a massive scale. The whole novel acts as a purifying rite of passage, exorcising the power of the abject and of the loved/hated maternal body. In Carrie the exorcism sets a whole town ablaze, with a fire the fierceness of which mirrors the force of feeling stirred by the menstrual/maternal. Revulsion from the menstrual “fires” two of the strongest scenes in the novel. The first is a scene among schoolgirls showering after volleyball. Carrie, showering with the others, sees blood trickling down her leg: she does not yet know what menstruation is and screams, significantly, “I’m bleeding to death.” The other girls crowd round her with a true herd instinct, chanting “period, period,” “you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding”: Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins.... They flew like snow and the chant became; “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it—”4 We are told that the girls felt first a “mixture of hate, revulsion, exasperation and pity,” then “welling disgust”: the meaning and force of the group reaction is deepened when this scene is linked metaphorically with a second “shower” scene. We see this second scene from various points of view, but the full force of the horror is this time felt by Carrie alone as she is once again horribly exposed in front of her peers. As they sit (incongruously) on the “thrones” set up for the “King and Queen” of the May Ball, Carrie and her escort Tommy are suddenly drenched in pig’s blood. We are shown the childish vindictiveness of the teenage conspirators who have set this ritual scene of defilement up, but there is something deeper than childishness in the boy Billy’s chant “Pig’s blood for a pig,” and, especially, in Carrie’s apprehension of the horror of the scene: Someone began to laugh, a solitary, affrighted hyena sound, and she did open her eyes, opened them to see who it was and it was true, the final nightmare, she was red and dripping with it, they had drenched her in the very secretness of blood, in front of all of them and her thought (oh ... i ... COVERED ... with it)

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was covered a ghastly purple with her revulsion and her shame. She could smell herself and it was the stink of blood, the awful wet, coppery smell ... she ... felt the soft pattern of tampons and napkins against her skin as voices exhorted her to plug it UP, tasted the plump, fulsome bitterness of horror. They had finally given her the shower they wanted. (167) The surface of life is peeled back in such a scene to show the abject which lies “behind” it, that which is “secret” (blood should remain within). Carrie feels “revulsion” and “shame,” but more significant is the phrase “the plump, fulsome bitterness of horror.” King suggests through this the primary and affective nature of abjection through its connection with primary sense impressions (here taste) and suggests too the mingled fascination and horror with which we view the abject which is so nearly a part of ourselves. So his almost oxymoronic phrase “fulsome bitterness” gives us the particular feeling of this kind of horror, the abject as a source of horror. This quality makes us experience an almost vertiginous sense of existing on a borderline between sense and non-sense, meaning and non-meaning. Carrie thus pivots on the reader’s horror of the abject as it resurfaces in adult life, but also exploits the reader’s potential pleasure in contemplation of the abject. As one is drawn back to a point before entry into the symbolic order, one may experience pleasure on two grounds. First, one may experience pleasure in breaking the taboos which surround and constitute the symbolic; one may experience the pleasure of transgression as one reaches back to experience and to a mode of being which is forbidden. Secondly, one may be placed back in touch with the pleasure which one originally felt in the pre-symbolic state, pleasure derived from unmediated experience of the maternal body and of one’s own bodily functions. If Carrie as text puts us back in touch with the pre-symbolic it does so despite (or because of?) the fact that for the character Carrie herself there can be no proper connection either with the maternal semiotic or with the paternal symbolic. Carrie, like her mother, is doomed to exist as what Kristeva would call a “borderline case,”5 tied to the ambiguity of abjection, blocked or thwarted in her development. It is significant that both Carrie and her mother have an absent father. Mrs White’s father was killed in a “barroom shooting incident” and immediately after this she began to attend “fundamentalist prayer meetings”: the connection between the loss of the father and the turn to extreme religious fundamentalism is made clear. Mrs White’s marriage was brief, for Carrie’s father was killed, in another accident, before she was born. Mrs White, unstable herself, takes over the role of the father in Carrie’s upbringing, acting as a kind of crazed, overstated

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representative of the symbolic. Uncertain of her own identity, she finds relief in a “false” identification with the masculine role, and this has the effect— vital of course to the power of the novel—of intensifying Carrie’s feelings of disgust and shame towards the feminine and the maternal. Carrie is brought up to fear and distrust the generative sexual powers of the female body: it is impressed on her not only that sex is sinful, but that sex has its origins in the sinfulness of the mother, in her lust and desire. Her mother tells of her own pleasure in the sexual act in a kind of retrospective frenzy of repudiation, and then moves into a ritualistic chant, the main theme of which is again the sinfulness of Eve, who “loosed the raven on the world” and who was visited by “the Curse of Blood.” In the absence of a real father, the image of a “kind, vengeful” God, to use her mother’s happy phrase, takes the place of the father in Carrie’s childhood. Godfather, God-the-father instills revulsion from the feminine semiotic but offers no way into the masculine symbolic. Carrie is haunted through childhood by dreams in which she is pursued by a “mutilated Christ,” “holding a mallet and nails, begging her to take up her cross and follow Him.” Towards the end of the novel, having destroyed an entire town through the force of her telekinetic powers, Carrie makes a last, desperate appeal to God/the masculine/the symbolic, confronting what she sees as “the abyss.” Her appeal falls into nothingness and she takes the only option left to her if she is going to come to terms with the abjected mother-figure. Carrie and her mother must destroy each other in order to put an end to an intolerable relationship in which each perceives the other as an aspect of herself. Carrie and Margaret White perceive each other as aspects of the self which they reject but from which they can never be freed. Margaret casts her daughter as her own mother, projecting onto the child Carrie the disgust/need which she felt for her own mother, and Carrie returns these ambiguous feelings with interest. Margaret White has, however, moved beyond both a sense of need and the possibility of help by the time we reach the climactic scene of the novel, in which she murders Carrie with the same knife with which she had cut the umbilical cord at the time of Carrie’s birth. The weakening Carrie has time only to “will” the death of her mother before she drags herself off to die in an anonymous parking-lot. Carrie’s is a death in which we participate, via the consciousness of a witness, Sue Snell, who finds herself being drawn unwillingly into Carrie’s mind at the point of death. What is most striking about this “horrid” death scene, with its “orthodox,” so to speak, vision of the abject corpse, is the way in which the mother, not the father, is presented as the ground of all meaning and being. Sue Snell is overcome by her sense of Carrie’s need for her mother, and feels a terror which she cannot name as she feels that without the mother she/Carrie cannot

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complete her thought. The mother seems to be at least as important as the father in the mastery of the symbolic as well as immersion in the semiotic: (momma would be alive i killed my momma i want her o it hurts my chest my shoulder o o o i want my momma) (carrie i) And there was no way to finish that thought, nothing there to complete it with. Sue was suddenly overwhelmed with terror, the worse because she could put no name to it. The bleeding freak on this oil-stained asphalt suddenly seemed meaningless and awful in its pain and dying. (o momma i’m scared momma MOMMA) Sue tried to pull away.... (211) THE SHINING: THE OEDIPAL The Shining is one of King’s most powerful and haunting novels, bearing comparison with Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” the story which provides an epigraph and a central image for King’s text. In The Shining King is concerned again with the origins of being, with the construction of the subject in the unconscious and conscious mind, with the interplay between what Lacan would call the symbolic, the imaginary and the real in the construction of that subject. The text plays with images of disintegration and doubling, images of the dissolution and dispersal of the individual subject, but what is striking about the text overall is its strong recuperative thrust. The story is concerned with the entry into the symbolic of the young boy Danny, and with the difficulties he experiences because of a disruption of the symbolic caused by his father. The whole project of the novel is to place Danny securely in the symbolic order and to insert him equally securely into the social world. The power of the text stems from the tension between Danny and his father, the tension between the nightmare images produced by the (joint) unconscious and the everyday world of narrative and action. Jack, the father, has been disturbed by dreadful images coming from the shadow world of the unconscious: these images must be “mastered”; and Danny must take a different path from his father if he is, literally, to survive the story. The novel is concerned very obviously with an opposition between image and text: text, or language, must be preferred over the fatal image. In this preoccupation with language (which offers a direct road, so to speak, to the symbolic and the social order), in its concern to establish Danny in a particular (white, American, male) social and symbolic order, The Shining might be considered a “conservative,” regressive text. Yet, paradoxically, the

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strong drive to the symbolic in The Shining is of course founded precisely on the overwhelming power of those oppositional images which haunt reader, writer and protagonist. The Shining follows a male journey through the Oedipus complex, the journey of Danny, who is endowed with supersensory powers of second sight and telepathy. These powers are, as it were, symbolic, and, rather like Carrie White’s telekinetic powers, suggest the power of the collective unconscious. (One of the themes of The Shining is the way in which our lives, conscious and unconscious, interrelate and intersect with others; also the way in which we are doomed to double and repeat the lives of others. Here Danny’s relationship to his father is particularly important.) Danny is locked in the Oedipal moment, unable to progress through it, and his situation is explicitly related back to the Oedipal position of his parents. We are told of his mother’s inability to move beyond the “blocked” Oedipal relation to her father which Freud described: we are told that she had been her father’s from the beginning and that she, as the father’s primary love object, was responsible for her parents’ divorce. Jack at one point asks her whom she wants to marry, her father or him. Wendy is particularly sensitive to the threat of repetition patterning, and to the life-or-death dangers which surround children as they struggle to establish a free, stable self. She knows that “to children adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why”6—which makes them of course like us, an emblem of the vulnerability of humanity. Endlessly, restlessly, Wendy links her own past and Danny’s past and future—“Oh we are wrecking this boy. It’s not just Jack, it’s me too, and maybe it’s not even just us, Jack’s father, my mother, are they here too?” It is, however, Jack’s inability to free himself from his father which poses the greatest threat to Danny. Jack’s early closeness to his father ended when his father (associated repeatedly with phallic emblems: a gold-headed cane, an elevator) “suddenly” and for “no good reason” beat his mother, his cane whistling through the air. From that point on Jack exists in an ambivalent relation to his father, who still has power over him despite (or perhaps because of) his alcoholism: after his father’s death he is haunted by him, as an “irrational white ghost-god.” Through all this we can detect a repeating pattern going back from Jack to his father and so on, in which feelings of social insecurity combine with or give rise to irrational behaviour and drunkenness. The father, in other words, seems to be insecure in his place in the symbolic/social order, and this seems to be obscurely linked with a revulsion from the feminine or more specifically from the wife as mother.

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So Jack thinks of the relations between his mother and father with a kind of savage black humour: The thing he’d never asked himself, Jack realised now, was exactly what had driven his daddy to drink in the first place. And really ... when you came right down to what his old students had been pleased to call the nitty-gritty ... hadn’t it been the woman he was married to? A milksop sponge of a woman, always dragging silently around the house with an expression of doomed martyrdom on her face? A ball and chain around Daddy’s ankle? ... Mentally and spiritually dead, his mother had been handcuffed to his father by matrimony. Still, Daddy had tried to do right as he dragged her rotting corpse through life. (355) What threatens Danny is Jack’s insecure hold on the symbolic: this insecurity is expressed through his rejection of his wife, Wendy, and his failure to hold down his job as a teacher, to fill his appointed social role. Jack resists what Sartre would call the “thetic,” the “real” world of propositions and action. Almost consciously he embraces the unreal, the irrational, the “sleep of reason” which, as Goya says, “breeds monsters.”7 Significantly, Jack has been a writer, but as The Shining progresses he literally begins to lose his hold on language. He finds it increasingly difficult to write, daydreams, becomes overinvolved with a kind of degraded text, a scrapbook full of old newspaper cuttings through which he searches for some kind of lost meaning. As he declines in this way, be begins to act the part of the father in an overstated way rather reminiscent of Carrie’s mother: this hollow acting is reflected in Danny’s nightmare dream-visions, in which he is pursued by a mysterious “shape” or “monster,” wielding a mallet which echoes with a “great hollow boom.” Meanwhile Danny works, patiently to master the symbolic: he is desperate to learn to read in order to decipher the riddling words which have flashed before him in his dreams: He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked.... He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father had made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach, the word apple written beneath in Jack’s large, neatly made printing.... And their son would stare from the word to the picture, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out. (117)

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As his hold on language becomes stronger, Danny becomes better and better able to confront the nightmares which pursue him. At first he represses the meaning of his dreams—“It’s like I can’t remember because it’s so bad I don’t want to remember”—but gradually he is able to confront the dreams and relate them to through the symbolic. At the crisis of the book it is through language that he overcomes his father. As the father, transformed into a maniac figure with a swinging (phallic) mallet, looms above him, Danny has only words with which to oppose him—but words are finally enough and everything as Danny brings to the surface and into speech that which his father had forgotten: (you will remember what your father forgot) ... Sudden triumph filled his face; the thing saw it and hesitated, puzzled “The boiler!” Danny screamed. “It hasn’t been dumped since this morning! It’s going up! It’s going to explode!” (400) Danny is now through, so to speak, his unbearably fraught passage through the Oedipus: he has, unlike his father, established a proper relationship between the pre-symbolic (imaged in the typography of the novel through everything in “the basement” including the boiler), and the symbolic. He achieves his place in the symbolic at great cost because his father has offered no stable or proper model for him. As a result, he has to split his own image of his father, blending all the beneficent aspects of his father into an image of the good father which can be split off from the crazed maniac who faces him in the final scene. The split father guarantees the healing of the split(s) in Danny, guarantees the establishment of a stable and unified self. The Shining has a complex and shifting meaning which “is” more than the sum of its parts. Much of the power of the text derives from the fact that the images of death in it—images which form the stock-in-trade of most horror fiction—function precisely as images. King sees that their power lies in their ability to evoke our most secret and fundamental terrors, terrors which are not of death itself, but of the extinction of personality, of which death itself is an image. We may never overcome these terrors; we may remain always “overlooked” (“The Overlook” is the name of the vast hotel in which the main action of the novel takes place) by forces beyond our control, which continue to threaten our fragile, vulnerable constructions of self. MISERY: TEXT Misery is a highly sophisticated and self-conscious text. It constitutes an exploration of itself and an exploration of the genesis of all King’s fiction, of

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the origins of what he calls his “Gothic” horror. The novel’s protagonist is a writer (compare Jack, in The Shining). Paul Sheldon has written a string of best-selling detective novels featuring an aristocratic nineteenth-century Englishwoman, Misery Chastain (the name itself is a little image complex, combining the words “misery,” “chastise,” “chain,” “stain,” etc.). After a bad car accident in which he is nearly killed, Paul finds himself, by a series of bizarre coincidences, not in hospital, but locked up in the isolated house of his “number one fan,” an ex-nurse, Annie Wilkes. Annie holds him as a prisoner, “caring” for him by splinting his legs in an amateurish fashion and dosing him up with illegally obtained pain-killing drugs. She then strikes a strange bargain with him. In his last “Misery” novel Paul has finally, and to his great relief, killed Misery off—he wants to get on with more “serious” writing. Annie has been waiting to read this particular “Misery” novel, and does so just after Paul has come into her power. Finding that Misery has been killed, she accuses Paul of “murder,” and dictates that he shall write another novel, immediately, bringing Misery back to life. Paul is in no position to argue: he senses that the underlying threat is that of a different murder, of himself by Annie, if he does not “restore” Misery to her. Paul is thus placed in the position of literally writing for his life, a latter-day Scheherazade; all the time he is needed to write this text and tell this story, he will live—but he understands that he will die when “his tale is told” (the closing lines of King’s “real” novel). The text thus explores the relation between “misery” as a common noun (defined by King as “pain, usually lengthy and often pointless”) and the generation of texts, stories. The access to misery must be there, King seems to suggest, in order for the text to be: indeed, it is indicated in the second half of the novel that Paul actually needs (and perhaps courts) the hellish circumstances in which he finds himself in order to write well, convincingly. The worse his situation becomes, the better he writes, and so, ironically, he colludes with Annie in his captivity. The writer too is a “borderline” case in the Kristevian sense, not so fixed in the symbolic as would appear—he has to have or to generate access to the pre-symbolic too, to forms of feeling which in this case are acutely painful. King’s writing would seem to suggest that the production of a Gothic/horror text is connected with an ability to reach down to experience before the symbolic, “stirring up,” so to speak, some of the horrors which (can) attend the birth of the self: the text works in this way as an exorcism. The central opposition in Misery is between Paul and Annie: an opposition between masculine and feminine, between writer and muse. Annie is the mother; she is the monstrous feminine, the castrating female. At the very beginning of the novel we are told of her “maternal” feelings for

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Paul: we hear of her “maternal love and tenderness”; she is “Annie the mom.” She is presented as monstrous from the opening of the novel too. She is described as an idol, and this image is developed through the novel, her implacability being stressed. She has a curious sexual quality: she is at once very feminine in the obvious physical sense, having large breasts, for example, and yet she is at the same time “defeminised” in the social-sexual sense, unsubdued and unsubduable to the feminine as it is viewed/ constructed by man: “Her body was big but not generous. There was a feeling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus.”8 She operates as the castrating female in the most horrifying scene in the text, when she amputates Paul’s foot, wielding an axe and a blowtorch. The castration image is underscored: we are told that Paul is sure, in this scene, that Annie will castrate him, and later Annie coyly confesses that she had thought of cutting off Paul’s “man-gland.” There could hardly be a clearer image, then, of the feminine as monstrous. Annie is to Paul an image prompting only one response, “a feeling of unease deepening steadily toward terror.” Yet Annie, like the mother, must exist in order for the self/the text to begin to be born, in the primary movement of abjection. Like the mother she must be there in order that she may be abjected: in Misery that is the role of woman; she has no other function. There are no positive images of the feminine in this misogynistic text. Annie is particularly closely associated with the pre-symbolic and the movement of abjection because she is herself a “borderline” case, one whose problems are situated on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis. Paul describes her in this way: Because of his researches for Misery, he had rather more than a layman’s understanding of neurosis and psychosis, and he knew that although a borderline psychotic might have alternating periods of deep depression and almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity, the puffed and infected ego underlay all, positive that all eyes were upon him or her.9 Her psychosis leads her towards self-mutilation, i.e. to a breaking-down of the divisions between self and world, and her hold on language is also weakened; she speaks a kind of nursery English which is frighteningly at odds with the realities of her situation and actions. Annie and Paul have in common a skewed relation to language. Overall they exist in a close, symbiotic relationship in which Annie acts, as we have seen, as Paul’s hellish muse, leading him back into the past and his personal

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prehistory in order that he should write. For, although Paul has fantasies about a miraculous escape from Annie, he knows that the only way out of the situation he is locked in is through writing: he must, as it were, write himself into the symbolic. In this way he will gain control not only over language, but also over plot. For “writing,” in the widest sense, does not just give us control over language as understanding—the kind of control Jack is seeking in The Shining. “Writing” also gives us control over plot, action, endows us with the power to intervene in the life and destiny not just of ourselves but of others too. Paul, in bringing Misery back to life, has to find a parallel way of writing/plotting himself back to life, away from Annie. The connection between the plotting he undertakes for Misery’s Return and the plotting of his own escape is underscored in the text; also, when Paul first realises that Misery’s Return is turning into a better novel than any of his others, a “Gothic” novel, he notes that the book was “thus more dependent on plot than on situation. The challenges were constant.” Paul’s successful completion of the new novel occurs immediately before the successful completion of the plot to murder Annie, the “Dragon-lady.” We may thus read our text Misery as signifying this: Paul, a writer, has tried to kill “Misery,” to banish misery in the sense of “lengthy pain” from his life. He had thought that this would lead to better writing. Yet Annie’s intervention, her insistence that he should bring “Misery” back to life, and her production of “lengthy pain” lead Paul to write a book which is better than any of his other “Misery” novels. Paul begins to wonder whether Annie may not have done him a favour in insisting on the resurrection of Misery, and he reflects on his astonishing productiveness as a writer under the stringent, painful conditions she has imposed. It is thus as though Paul is driven to master the symbolic when he is impelled by fear, when he is in flight from images and situations which recall painful experiences (usually repressed) from the presymbolic, semiotic world. The text Misery, opening with Paul’s “second birth” after the car accident, thus has a double dimension. On one level is the apparent text, telling of Paul’s incarceration with Annie and his eventual escape. On a second level the text constantly comments on itself, drawing attention to the processes of its own production as a horror text as Paul moves from the darkness of his first awakening after the accident (analogous to the “darkness” of early infancy) to the daylight clarity of his final vision and production of text and situation at the close of the book. Annie, the monstrous feminine, has acted as the necessary catalyst to bring him from the darkness of infancy (Latin infans, “unable to speak”) to the wielding of textual power.

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FEMINIST AFTERWORD: GENDER AND GENRE Horror fiction is, primarily, produced and consumed by men. Why should this be? It would seem that the experience derived from horror fiction (as opposed to the experience of horror in “real life”) is peculiarly fascinating to men, or rather to the masculine subject, i.e. the subject constituted as masculine through the particular nature of his/her experience, particularly in early childhood. For the masculine child, the movement away from the mother, expressed as it is through abjection and the passage through the Oedipus complex, seems to be more traumatic than for the feminine child. For the feminine child there remains at least a possibility of reunion with the mother through identification; also, the feminine subject is actively encouraged to retain links with the maternal semiotic through the cultivation of such qualities as “intuition.” The masculine subject by contrast depends for his very identity on the effectiveness of his repression of the maternal semiotic and of desire for the mother. Horror fiction is constituted of images designed precisely to stir “memories” of the early abjection of the mother and of the later traumatic passage through the Oedipus to the symbolic. As we have seen in the work of Stephen King, images of the monstrous feminine are common in horror fiction, as are images of castration, and fearful phallic power. The “horror of horror” overall, however, seems to lie in the (r)evocation of the experience of abjection. Horror fiction is dominated by those images of waste, putrefaction and decay which Kristeva associates with abjection: these are, so to speak, the staple of horror. When we think of “the horrid” we picture blood, corpses, the violation of bodily limits. Via these images horror fiction returns us to the scene of primary horror in the abjection of the mother, a scene which, however, particularly for the masculine subject, possesses fascination, the power of the taboo. Images of abjection lead the masculine subject back not only to the movement away from the mother but also to the original repressed desire for the mother, which returns with all the force of the repressed, of that which can be allowed no place in adult life. Horror fiction thus seems to be designed to work for the masculine subject as an exorcism: it offers a way of repassing through abjection and of distancing oneself once again from the power of the mother. Horror fiction works in this sense as a kind of obverse of romance. For the feminine subject, the most painful aspect of early development is not the abjection of the mother but the movement into the masculine symbolic. It can and has been argued that romantic fiction exists precisely in order to “cover up” the painful nature of the female insertion into the symbolic/patriarchal order.

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Romantic fiction offers a way of “repassing” that insertion, “tricking it out” with compensatory fantasies which are gratifying to the (feminine) ego. Horror fiction, we might argue, has a similar compensatory function, giving the masculine subject the opportunity to revisit and to “repass” the crisis points of his early development. The masculine subject is thus allowed, via horror, to revisit forbidden realms in recompense for the day-to-day repression of certain desires. Horror fiction is, no less than romance, a genre which is tied to gender: awareness of its gender bias and of the role which it plays in social-textual terms as what Kristeva would call a “rite of defilement” is long overdue. NOTES 1. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 2. Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection”, tr. John Lechte, in Oxford Literary Review, 5, nos 1–2 (1982) 125–6. (See Pouvoirs de l’horreur, pp. 9–10.) 3. Ibid., p. 127. (See Pouvoirs de l’horreur, pp. 11–12.) 4. Stephen King, Carrie (London: New English Library, 1974) p. 13. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 5. Kristeva takes the term from psychoanalysis: it denotes patients whose problems are on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis. The “borderline,” according to Kristeva, has “foreclosed the Name of the Father” and thus remains in an alienated relation to language and the symbolic. 6. Stephen King, The Shining (London: New English Library, 1977) p. 18. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 7. One of the epigraphs for The Shining is from Goya: “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.” 8. Stephen King, Misery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987) p. 17. 9. Ibid., p. 59.

TONY MAGISTRALE

Tracing the Gothic Inheritance: Danse Macabre

This is the fuming, volcanic country of the Dark Lord, and if the critics who have seen it first hand are few, the cartographers are fewer.1

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anse Macabre is King’s 1981 nonfictional analysis of the horror genre in literature, film, and television. Many critics have cited this text, but usually only to support interpretations of King’s fiction. Danse deserves appraisal on its own merits as a critical study worthy of comment and as a sourcebook for better understanding King’s philosophy of composition. It offers the author’s trenchant reflections on art, aesthetics, politics, folklore, mythology, and modern American society. In spite of the fact that Danse is one of the few examples of nonfictional prose in King’s canon, it shares the inimitable writing style of his fiction. On the positive side, the author’s voice remains accessible and personal throughout. King’s interpretations are rendered in thoughtful and unpretentious language that draws the reader directly into the material under discussion. Although his tone suggests a late-evening dialogue with the reader, his relaxed and often humorous persona is somewhat undercut by the seriousness of the book’s pursuit. For Danse attempts to trace the modern evolution of an American Gothic tradition, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present. It is clear that King has drunk deeply from this wellspring; he is certainly on intimate terms with a wide range of Gothic films and literature, and generally treats these texts as legitimate artistic enterprises. From Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half, pp. 20–26. © 1992 by Twayne Publishers. Note: this section is part of a larger chapter.

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Less positively, Danse suffers from several of the stylistic liabilities that have plagued King’s fictional work. Too often the critical focus of the book is blunted by careless language, a convoluted and unorganized structure, the repetitive raising of issues, and thoughts randomly brought together without significant concern for the sequential development of speculations or theses. Danse was conceived and partly written during King’s tenure as a writer in residence at the University of Maine (1978–79). The book shows the influence of the classroom environment, but while ideas are often raised with passion and freshness, they are seldom rigorously pursued or revised. King appears to justify the stylistic looseness of Danse in his strong anti-academic denunciations, acknowledging that “literary criticism and rhetoric aren’t forms I’m comfortable with” (DM, 386). His contention that scholars and literary critics tend to over-analyze art (DM, 268) is certainly well taken, but King might have performed a greater service for both the reader and the material under consideration had he mastered a more disciplined and scholarly approach. One longs at times for the intervention of a steely, oldfashioned editor who would pitilessly red-pencil the run-on sentences, the awkward metaphors, and the careless prose. Thus improved, Danse would be a dense but magnificent undertaking—a tribute to the underrated, untidy, and overlooked material it seeks to capture. Interviews and published conversations with King indicate that he is aware of the disturbing tendencies in his prose style, but generally he chooses either to blunt the criticism by interpreting it as a personal affront or to view it as an issue of authorial prerogative: “Those avatars of high culture hold it almost as an article of religious faith that plot and story must be subordinated to style, whereas my deeply held conviction is that story must be paramount, because it defines the entire work of fiction. All other considerations are secondary—theme, mood, even characterizations and language.”2 This is a troublesome remark, for it suggests that it is somehow possible—even preferable—to separate content from the manner in which it is presented. And while this is hardly justification for dismissing King as a writer of serious literature, as so many of “those avatars of high culture” have done with great alacrity, it does underscore a principal liability in King’s canon. In his insistence that the “story must be paramount,” King sometimes appears to be swept away by the events he is narrating, and the story is weakened by his failure to maintain sufficient control over it. STEPS

IN THE

DANSE

Part of King’s motivation for writing Danse was to posit several explanations for the popularity and importance of the modern horror genre.

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Such speculations occur and reoccur at various points throughout his analysis of American film, literature, and television. These ruminations may be summarized as follows (in order of increasing degree of aesthetic complexity): (1) It allows us to prove our bravery: that we are not afraid of fear itself. (2) It enables us to reestablish feelings of normality: that nothing we do and no way we look can be as ghastly as what we read or view on the screen. (3) It confirms our good feelings about the status quo: by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternatives might be, horror makes us see that our personal lives and society may not be so bad after all. (Thus King’s assertion that the horror genre “appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us” [DM, 391.]) (4) It lets us feel we are part of the larger whole: we identify with the puny human forces seeking to regain control over the malevolent powers of the irrational and the supernatural. (5) It provides an opportunity to penetrate the mystery of death: we are drawn to the horror story because we wish to explore a forbidden realm, to learn more about the “only truly universal rite of passage, the only one for which we have no psychological or sociological input to explain what changes we may expect as a result of having passed through” (DM, 194). The tale of terror scrapes the cosmetic mask off the face of death, forcing us to consider the Reaper’s handiwork from a myriad of perspectives. The horror genre explodes the civilized lies we use to insulate ourselves from death. Horror serves as the ultimate deterrent to hubris, reminding Western man in particular that his ability to conquer nature’s barriers extends only so far. As Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest voices ever to speak on the aesthetics of terror, was often to concede, human life is a fragile and tenuous state of being, and in spite of our conscious efforts at denial we only truly begin to apprehend existence in the appreciation of its loss: It’s coming—the postponeless Creature— It gains the Block—and now—it gains the Door— Chooses its latch, from all the other fastenings— Enters—with a “You know Me—Sir”? Simple Salute—and certain Recognition— Bold—were it Enemy—Brief—were it friend— Dresses each House in Crape, and Icicle— And carries one—out to God—3 While King believes that horror provides readers with a variety of opportunities to witness vicariously the “great irreducible x-factor of our

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lives, faceless father of a hundred religions, so seamless and ungraspable that it usually isn’t even discussed at cocktail parties” (DM, 194), the genre’s treatment of death also provides assurance that there is indeed something beyond the mortal coil. Whether it be in the form of Dracula’s restless sleep or the immortality of a benevolent spirit that participates in the struggles of humankind, the horror story relies on the existence of an afterlife featuring rewards and punishments directly related to the lives we have fashioned out of flesh and blood. This last point provides further explanation for the popularity of this fiction: the genre has helped fill the modern spiritual vacuum created in the absence of religious belief. (6) It permits us to indulge our darkest collective cultural and social anxieties: the subtext of horror, which will be considered in greater detail later in this chapter, allows us to confront symbolically the weakening or collapse of social values and the consequences of economic instability. (7) It lets us return to childhood: putting away our civilized and adult penchants for dismissal and disbelief, we become children again, seeing the world through clear definitions of good and evil. This point has two conflicting corollaries. First, the horror genre frequently capitalizes on repressed phobias that have been with us since childhood (e.g., fear of enclosed spaces, the dark, isolation, the unknown). Second, in the horror genre, children possess elements of endurance and innate goodness, which qualify them for hero status; they fill in for parents who have capitulated to the evil their offspring must now eradicate (DM, 42). The concept of the hero-child has held King’s fascination for decades. This is amply evident in his characters, beginning with Sue Snell in Carrie and culminating with the members of the Losers’ Club in It. “The job of the fantasy-horror writer,” King writes, “is to make you, for a little while, a child again” (DM, 407). Children may eventually grow up to become adults, but before this process is completed, King implies (in theory reminiscent of Wordsworth), they gain insight into a set of intuitive ethics that adults eventually forfeit. Thus the importance of the child as the being most susceptible to the horror monster yet also the one most capable of destroying the creature. King develops this issue throughout the body of his fiction as well as in Danse. (8) It enables us to transcend the world of darkness and negation: the horror story and film paradigmatically end with some sort of reconciliation that renders the powers of destruction manageable once more. Since this thesis (which King illustrates through a plethora of examples) represents a notable break from the stereotypical perception of the horror genre as a domain of bedlam and destruction exclusively, it is worthy of further commentary. King’s premise that the tale of horror is a survival exercise presupposes that the audience is provided with the opportunity to gain deep insights into

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its fears and, by extension, to acquire an array of coping skills. Like an audience witnessing a dramatic tragedy, we are often pained by the loss of human life in the horror story and, if the story has been aesthetically successful, stunned by how swiftly and ruthlessly the gods affect the human world. Moreover, the horror story, like classical tragedy, frequently educates us morally, suggesting vicarious methods for avoiding a correspondingly tragic fall in our own lives while inspiring a feeling of relief that we have been spared the actual experience. King appears to be critically aware that both horror and tragedy rely upon phenomena that Aristotle recognized—that pity and fear must serve as inspiration for the audience, and that in the production of these emotions the possibility for reintegration, or catharsis, is born: Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber’s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety.... Because in the final sense, the horror movie is the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts. (DM, 198–99) King’s evaluation of the modern American horror film echoes the overall perspective that animates his own fiction and surely represents a partial explanation of why that fiction is so popular. The citation above illustrates King’s commitment not to the forces of negation (as claimed by those who have thought insufficiently about his work and its genre4) but to the powers of self-knowledge and moral development—the inheritance bestowed on men and women who experience personal tragedy but refuse to be overwhelmed by it. King’s sense that the horror genre embodies songs of “health and energy,” even as it does so by means of perversity and fear, is best represented by the Apollonian/Dionysian mythological paradigm to which he frequently alludes. Throughout Danse King refers to this Greek construction as a metaphor for defining the mechanics of modern horror. By necessity the order and light associated with an Apollonian world-view come under assault by the Dionysian forces of destruction and chaos. For a period the Dionysian elements thwart the rational inclinations of society and self. When these forces are in control, the supernatural inflicts its fury on the human world in the form of either mass disorder (e.g., a whole

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community under siege) or a highly personal assault upon the protagonist’s psyche. Thus, argues King, the human world finds itself at the mercy of forces larger than itself. Nonetheless, if the Apollonian urge toward survival and reintegration is strong enough, or the Dionysian powers weak enough, the horror story concludes in a manner reminiscent of classical tragedy. Although diminished as a consequence of what it has lost in this struggle, the human world retains its capability for reasserting priorities and values. “The melodies of the horror tale,” King explains, “are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration ... but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again” (DM, 13). The Apollonian impulse, which King affiliates with “the hearts and minds of men and women of good will” (DM, 402), eventually overcomes the powers of negation. King thus appears to share Robin Wood’s assessment of horror as “the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism—in a period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, [it] alone offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding.”5 This optimistic and affirmative defense of a genre that has long been attacked by conservatives and liberals alike for its perceived abdication of moral and artistic responsibilities is the single most eloquent contribution of Danse. King understands that horror is frequently condemned—usually by readers who view themselves as too sophisticated to read it—because it emphasizes themes that are fundamental and uncomplicated: pain, loss of control, death. But it is the honesty of this pursuit that so impresses King; this is an art that refuses to conform itself to the conventions of the “acceptable.” And because of its stubborn independence, horror has forced us to face the great monsters of our times—monsters that are new, like nuclear war, and those that have been around for quite some time, like death. But for King the great truth of horror is not that we must always be devoured by these monsters or that we must face them alone. Instead, as evidenced by the last third of Danse and by novels as diverse as The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Stand, It, and Misery, King sees the horror tale as an essentially visionary experience. Within the eternal perimeters of death and decay, from which neither Danse nor the horror tale tend very far to stray, the possibilities for transformation remain limitless: “It’s not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third level here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It’s a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination— just one more pipeline to the infinite” (DM, 409). For King, the horror

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genre’s danse macabre is not about meaningless pain and suffering in an absurdist’s universe. The true aesthetic of terror, in his analysis, emphasizes not destruction and violence but reintegration and moral evolution. King stresses throughout Danse that the role of the fiction writer is that of moral guardian (DM, 402–3). He appreciates that the writer’s struggles are tied directly to the search for truth and that this search is perhaps as close as mortals get to moral perfection. The horror narrative may be only a small, underrated subgenre of mainstream art for many cultural historians and critics, but it is still art, and all the attributes of an artistic text are therefore present: conflict and crisis, tension and resolution, violence and death, love and life, ethical choices and their consequences. Perhaps the greatest service King affords the Gothic tradition in this book is to convey his belief that the genre is worthy of serious examination and that the real issues at work in these films and narratives have less to do with grotesque perversions of reality than with reality itself. NOTES 1. Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley, 1981), 385; hereafter cited in text as DM. 2. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, eds., Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 53; hereafter cited in text. 3. Emily Dickinson, poem 390, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), 186. 4. See Tim Underwood’s essay, “The Skull Beneath the Skin,” in Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (New York: New American Library, 1986). The author argues that “There’s not much concern with beauty in any of King’s works, it doesn’t seem to inspire him.... Before kids can grow up and control their own lives, their youth is ruined. This apparently for King is part and parcel of the human condition. He offers no solutions or alternatives to this sad situation, just a few laughs along the way” 261, 258; hereafter cited in text. 5. Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14 (July/August 1978), 28; hereafter cited in text.

DOUGLAS KEESEY

“The Face of Mr. Flip”: Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King

A

ll fear is more or less social. If there is such a thing as the transhistorically and crossculturally monstrous, it can still only be manifested in socially specific monsters. One idea of horror fiction sees it as a politically conservative force, identifying threats to the social order as monstrous and celebrating the story of their successful elimination. Stephen King has said that “Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings ... the creator of horror fiction is above all else an agent of the form” (DM, 50, 58). Recently, Noel Carroll has used King’s remarks to form the basis of a Philosophy of Honor: What King may have in mind here ... is that the horror narrative appears to proceed by introducing something abnormal—a monster—into the normal world for the express purpose of expunging it. That is, the horror story is always a contest between the normal and the abnormal such that the normal is reinstated and, therefore, affirmed. The horror story can be conceptualized as a symbolic defense of a culture’s standards of normality; the genre employs the abnormal, only for the purpose of showing it

From The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, ed. Tony Magistrale, pp. 187–201. © 1992 by Anthony S. Magistrale.

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vanquished by the forces of the normal. The abnormal is allowed center stage solely as a foil to the cultural order, which will ultimately be vindicated by the end of the fiction. [Carroll, 199] Carroll’s temptingly lucid theory seems like a fair extrapolation of King’s comments, until we notice that Carroll has solemnized King’s playful irony. Is “the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit” really the major part of us? How “normal” is that part? Is such “normality” really “always” reinstated and reaffirmed at the end? And finally, is “the conservative Republican” in us really the only part to which monstrosity appeals? More recent comments by Stephen King would indicate that his philosophy of horror is rather more complex: “one thing that reviewers and scholars have missed so far is that I have tried to have some fun in these novels and that I’ve tried to poke some fun along the way. I guess that if people have missed one glaring point it is that fantasy and horror can be wonderful tools of satire” (Magistrale, Stephen King, ms. 28). Perhaps the “conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us” is as much object as subject of satire; maybe the deadly serious business of culturally conservative horror is being made fun of as one of the monsters! King himself believes that critical interest in his fiction is due largely to the fact that his “work underlines again and again that I am not merely dealing with the surreal and the fantastic, but more important, using the surreal and the fantastic to examine the motivations of people and the society and institutions they create” (Magistrale, Stephen King, ms. 23). It would seem that any full study of the relationship between King’s novels and society’s norms would have to be ready to find examination as well as affirmation, satire as well as reinstatement. The monstrous may appeal to both the conservative and the radical within us, alternately and sometimes simultaneously. One of the socially specific fears most often represented in King’s horror is homophobia. Variously defined as a fear of homosexuality, homoerotic excitement, effeminacy, passivity, or weakness in other men or in oneself, “homophobia” is clearly so overdetermined as to be practically an umbrella term covering any threat to male gender identity. Interestingly, when King reaches for an example of effective horror, he comes up with a scene that plays on homophobia. Calling Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door “the best” horror novel he’s read lately, King describes a scene where “There’s this one guy who’s very proud of his masculinity, and the house makes him sort of sexually ‘hot’ for this other guy, and everybody’s at this party, and these two people are making love! And the guy later— POW!—blows his brains out.... it’s nasty; it’s a nasty book. A NASTY

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BOOK!!!” (Van Hise, 20). King goes on to explain how the terror of this fiction draws its power from the social: The essence of the horror in this scene ... lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces.... much of the walloping effect of The House Next Door comes from its author’s nice grasp of social boundaries. Any writer of the horror tale has a clear—perhaps even a morbidly overdeveloped—conception of where the country of the socially (or morally, or psychologically) acceptable ends and the great white space of Taboo begins. Siddons is better at marking the edges of the socially acceptable from the socially nightmarish than most. (DM, 264) One might say that in this novel, which King considers the epitome of horror, heterosexual society is frightened to death by the spectacle of homosexuality: when “They find Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott embracing, naked,” Buddy’s father-in-law “expire[s] of a stroke,” Buddy’s wife “screams on ... and on ... and on,” and Buddy himself commits suicide (DM, 264). Does Siddons’ novel show the elimination of (homosexual) abnormality and the reinstatement and reaffirmation of the (heterosexual) norm? Perhaps; homosexuality is expunged, but so is much of society along with it! It seems just as likely that the novel shows the self-destructive consequences of homophobia, that this horror fiction may be read as a satire on heterosexist society, with its “morbidly overdeveloped” conception of what is and is not socially acceptable. Which is more horrible, a heterosexual husband’s gay attraction or his and others’ homophobic response? Is it the homosexuality or the homophobia that leads to death? In a scene prominently placed near the beginning of It, a group of young men beat up two homosexuals and throw one into a canal. Asked why he wrote this scene of homophobic destruction, King responded by saying that he based his horror fiction on social fact: during Bangor’s 150th anniversary celebration, a gay man did die after being thrown into the Kenduskeag Stream. “If the chapter strikes you as homophobic,” King said, “please remember that this is a case of ‘We don’t make the news, we just report it!’ ” (SK, 5). Here King refuses to let his attitude toward homosexuality be confused with that of his homophobic characters; it is not he but the society he writes about with reportorial accuracy that fears gays. King makes a similar distinction in countering the charge that his “fictional violence,” even if modeled on actual events, may yet serve as a model for further violence in “real life.” After recalling a “homosexual-murder case”

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that may have been influenced by a scene from The Shining, King admits to some concern, but argues that “these people would all be dead even if I’d never written a word. The murderers would still have murdered. So I think we should resist the tendency to kill the messenger for the message” (Beahm, 42; italics added). King’s comments imply that, if society is disturbed by the homophobic violence in his fiction, it should recognize and criticize its own homophobia rather than blaming the writer for it. In such accusations, the writer becomes the scapegoat for homophobic attitudes that society can continue to hold unconsciously as long as scapegoats make self-recognition unnecessary. But how does It read without King’s spirited extratextual defense? Does the novel come across as a satire on homophobic society or as a demonization of homosexuality and a consequent reaffirmation of heterosexuality as the norm? Michael R. Collings describes the “treatment of homosexuality” in It as “more openly vicious” than in any of King’s previous fiction. Collings believes that King as author shares his characters’ homophobia: “Not only do the characters react negatively and strongly to the suggestion of homosexuality, but the narrative links (i.e., the narrator’s voice itself) continue that harsh, stereotypic attitude. The gay man killed never rises above the slickest of stereotypes, nor do reactions to his death ever overcome the hurdle of his sexual orientation” (Collings, 23). While it’s true that the relationship between gay Don and Adrian is presented largely in terms of butch/femme stereotypes, it should be noted that King seems to have more on his mind than the perpetuation of heterosexist clichés. King makes Adrian effeminate in order to show up the homophobes’ attitudes and actions as all the more deplorable. Garton, Unwin, and Dubay are exposed as cowards when they pick on the less “masculine” Adrian because they think he will be less able to defend himself. Garton’s hatred for Adrian is represented not as a natural fear of the unnatural (the effeminate man), but as a childish inability to resolve his own gender insecurities. When Adrian makes a flirtatious remark, Garton believes that “His masculinity had borne an insult which he felt must be avenged. Nobody suggested he sucked the root. Nobody” (It, 22). A nearby policeman realizes that Garton’s defensiveness (“He called me a queer!”) is rooted in the fear that he might really be gay (It, 23). Bashing gays and dressing tough, Garton is desperately trying to find a proper male role model with which to identify but is ever fearful that he is acting “queer”: “Like his two friends, he was dressed in unconscious imitation of Bruce Springsteen, although if asked he would probably call Springsteen a wimp or a fagola and would instead profess admiration for such ‘bitchin’ heavy-metal groups as Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, or Judas Priest”—groups which are themselves gender benders, an irony King may have intended (It, 20).

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Garton is like the local citizens who won’t enter a gay bar “for fear all the muscles would go out of their wrists, or something”; he wields a switchblade to assure himself of phallic prowess and “punches Adrian in the groin” to fix the latter as feminine in relation to his own masculinity (It, 26, 32).1 King extends his satire on homophobia from three boys to the town as a whole, closing off society’s option of using them as scapegoats for its own homophobic beliefs. King writes of the “town’s tightly homophobic attitude, an attitude as clearly expressed by the town’s preachers as by the graffiti in Bassey Park,” thus equating the words of the town’s most respected members with the crudest anti-gay threats scrawled by the likes of a Garton (It, 28). No one in town helps Don or Adrian as they’re being beaten; this negligence amounts to a tacit condoning of the act. Finally, in his most uncompromisingly satiric touch, King describes the gay bashing and killing as an unwritten part of the town’s anniversary celebration, “one final event which everyone had somehow known about but which no one had quite dared to put down on the Daily Program of Events.... Ritual sacrifice of Adrian Mellon officially ends Canal Days” (It, 21). Here what Noel Carroll described as characteristics of horror fiction—the expulsion of the abnormal in order to reconfirm the norm—is revealed by King to be a real life ritual exposed in all its horror by fiction. Gay Adrian is eliminated so that the townspeople can feel more at home with their gender and sexuality. After all, what really rankles Garton is that he is unable to win the town’s celebratory hat (“I Love Derry!”) that Adrian had successfully won at a carnival game: how can a gay man express and “win” a town’s love while he is shut out? (It, 30). Never mind that, as the one Derry resident who really knows them realizes, “these men, fags or not, seemed to have learned a secret of getting along with each other which their heterosexual counterparts did not know” (It, 26). The most important thing to the townspeople is to ensure their own sense of belonging (to the town, to their sex), even if they become in the process the very alien sex perverts they fear.2 It should now be clear that, unlike Collings, I do not see It’s implied author or narrator as homophobic; on the contrary, homophobia would seem to be the target of the book’s satire. It’s true that the policemen from whose perspective much of this chapter is written have no special liking for gays (“About the bum-punchers I’m neutral” [It, 23]), but, in addition to King’s extratextual defense of his novel’s real-life accuracy (“I took notes on the police interrogation ... a lot of the conversation in the chapter is reputedly what was said” [SK, 5]), there is also the fact that even the police and the D.A. in the novel feel that gay bashing is wrong: “Averino did not like gays, but this did not mean he believed they should be tortured and murdered”; “The guy was a fruit, but he wasn’t hurting anyone; Boutillier said” (It, 24, 38). In

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a bizarre thought that both expresses and struggles to transcend homophobia, the police imagine the gay bashers’ retribution as occurring in the form of what they most fear and desire: “I’m going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I’m gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS” (It, 38). The gay bashing, the police interrogation, even this imagined retribution: all of these form what might be called the “realistic” background to what is essentially a surrealistic or fantastic novel. When the veritable monster, the supernatural horror is introduced, what does It represent? Does It challenge or defend social norms? Is It the threat of homosexuality, the danger of homophobia, or some indefinite combination of both? We might begin by noting that It finishes the job begun by the gay bashers: It kills Adrian. This continuity may suggest that It is largely the supernatural embodiment of human evil: It is the boys’ and the town’s own homophobia monstrously out of control. This supposition receives some confirmation in the fact that It seems to have been the author of the particularly inhuman anti-gay graffiti in Bassey Park (It, 28–29). It is also associated with “thousands” of “I Love Derry” balloons, which remind one of the hat for which Garton jealously beat Adrian. Don says that “‘ It was Derry ... It was this town,’” suggesting that in his mind It is the monstrous embodiment of the town’s homophobia (It, 36). With “great big teeth,” It takes a bite out of Adrian’s armpit, “‘Like it wanted to eat him, man. Like it wanted to eat his heart’” (It, 35). Does It carry out in a horribly literal sense the metaphorical threat made by Garton to Adrian earlier on in the chapter? Garton: “I ought to make you eat that hat, you fucking ass-bandit!” Adrian: “If you want something to eat, hon, I can find something much tastier than my hat” (It, 22). Does Its penetrating teethwork give It the sense of potency and sexual satisfaction Garton craves? Noting that “there was a big chunk of meat gone from [Adrian’s] right armpit,” an officer speculates that “One of the [gay bashers] really liked to bite. Probably even got himself a pretty good boneon while he was doing it. I’m betting Garton, although we’ll never prove it” (It, 38). Is It the town’s unacknowledged homophobia, the responsibility they all share for Adrian’s death, a culpability they deny by scapegoating Garton and the other two boys as the only ones deserving conviction? Well, if It is the town’s homophobia wreaking havoc on Derry’s gays, then why does It manifest Itself in the form of a clown whose uncertain sex mirrors that of Its victim? It “looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn,” much as Don and Adrian are first seen as a “couple of girls,” their gender difficult to determine (It, 13, 21). Is It homophobic other

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or homosexual double? The D.A. thinks that It might be “Kinko the Klown or a guy in an Uncle Sam suit on stilts or Hubert the Happy Homo” (It, 37). Later on in the novel, the police speculate that It may be a “sexfiend,” a “fiend for boys” (It, 180). And, as if in response to young boys’ fears (“It’s one of the queers the big kids are always talking about”), It appears as a hobo, frightening the boy Eddie with the proposition, “Come back here, kid! I’ll blow you for free” (It, 260, 309)—an invitation disturbingly reminiscent of Adrian’s words to Garton.3 The other guys tell Eddie that the hobo has syphilis, “a disease you get from fucking ... another g-g-guy if they’re kwuhkwuh-queer.... Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks” (It, 309–310). Eddie thus comes to associate homosexual contact with castration and death. Not surprisingly, when another boy meets the hoboclown, he hears It say, “Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer?” (It, 590). If It was formerly the town’s monstrous homophobe, the embodiment of gays’ worst fears, now It would appear to be the monstrous homosexual, heterosexual society’s worst nightmare. Has King moved from gay rights’ activism and social satire to heterosexism and cultural conservatism? Certainly, It can be read that way. In one subplot, a boy is edged toward insanity by the sexual advances of another boy. Led in a circle jerk and then masturbated by Patrick (“You liked it! You got a boner!”), Henry balks at fellatio—but it is too late. He is finally overcome by doubts about his own sexuality: “On the day when he had allowed Patrick Hockstetter to caress him, that bridge [over some mental abyss] had narrowed to a tightrope” (It, 823, 914). Henry goes crazy, trying to eliminate his own fear of effeminacy by projecting it onto others and cutting it out (“Okay, fag,” Henry calls Eddie, planning to knife him) and attempting to prove his manly strength by thrusting his knife into women (“Kill her”) (It, 967, 914). The circle jerk and masturbation scenes are both viewed through the horrified eyes of Beverly, female and representative of the natural (social) order. She thinks of the circle jerk as something “so strange, so ludicrous and yet at the same time so deadly-primitive that she found herself, in spite of the giggling fit, groping for the core of herself with some desperation” (It, 816)—as if trying to get a hold on normal (hetero)sexuality? The thought of her boyfriend’s penis makes her “flush” and “almost sick to her stomach,” but this is the natural modesty and maidenly excitement expected in a young girl when she dreams of what (hetero) sexuality will be like; in contrast, Beverly’s response to the circle jerkers’ “things” and to Patrick’s masturbation of Henry’s “thing” is “terror,” seemingly the proper attitude toward (homo)sexual perversion (It, 815). Not coincidentally, Beverly figures prominently in the book’s main plot: she is the girl who saves Eddie, Richie, and other boys from Henry’s

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fate; by making love to all of them, she guides them successfully through their gender insecurities and into a safely normal (hetero)sexuality (“I made love to all of you?”/”That was y-y-your way to get us o-out” [It, 931]). Thus, in one reading of It, homosexuality (effeminacy, perversion) is the monster, the gender-indefinite hobo-clown that can only be destroyed by heterosexual experience-“this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity” (It, 1082–1083). Michael R. Collings finds a “certain justification” (logical reasoning or moral rightness?) in what he considers to be King’s homophobic “attitude in the novel”: “By its nature, homosexuality opposed heterosexuality, the linking of man and woman in the deepest emotional bonds. And that intense bonding lies at the center of It” (Collings, 23). Does same-sex attraction “naturally” “oppose” heterosexual bonding? Are homosexuals by their very nature a threat to the security of heterosexual couples, their sexual orientation and their gender identity? Let us see if It can be read in another way, one that does not ratify society’s homophobia. The answer to the question of whether It represents the threat of homosexuality or the danger of homophobia can be found late in the novel, where we learn that It depends. It takes the form of whatever Its victim at the time most fears: “all of [Its] glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrified viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind” (It, 1015). So gay Don sees it as the town’s homophobia, while insecurely heterosexual Eddie and Richie fear it as a gay advance threatening their masculinity. It, it turns out, is afraid of any Otherness, “that maddening, galling fear ... that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have ... but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and it could only kill the fear by killing them” (It, 1015). It tries to project Its fear of Otherness onto specific others because others can be eliminated, but the trick doesn’t work: the Otherness It fears is within Itself, an inner insecurity, that cannot be allayed through the murder of outsiders. In this too, It mirrors Its victims, whose own insecurity leads them to see Otherness as monstrous. Richie’s vision of a threatening gay hobo— “How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer?”—seems to say more about his own sexual anxieties than about predatory homosexuality; from an adult perspective, the threat is ridiculous, the product of adolescent nightmare (It, 590). Patrick may be something other than a gay fiend who gets a sexual charge out of molesting another boy; instead, he might be seen as a psychologically disturbed youth unable to feel much of anything. After all, he does not even get an erection from masturbating Henry; Patrick is so insecure that only the feeling of being in complete control, as when he kills, gives him a “hard-on” (It, 831). And

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Patrick does not drive Henry insane so much as Henry’s fear that “he had allowed” Patrick to caress him; Henry is driven crazy by his own fear of the Otherness within, his inability to live with his own homosexual impulses (It, 914). Finally, Beverly’s terrified reaction to the circle jerk may be more complex than a heterosexual girl’s natural repulsion for perverted, quasihomosexual behavior. Beverly’s strongest fear is not that the world will be tainted by the boys’ homosexuality, but that their homophobia will lead them to rape or kill her if they discover her watching. The circle jerkers feel guilty about their act, knowing what (homophobic) society thinks of males masturbating together; if a girl were to see them, they might have to prove their heterosexuality by raping her, or kill her to ensure her silence about what she has seen.4 If It represents a fear of the Otherness within and the monstrous desire to kill that fear by killing others, then It may well be the embodiment of homophobic society: men who would kill each other (and women who see too much) in a desperate attempt to deny the effeminacy within. Just as It mirrors Its victims, so It will to some extent mirror It’s readers: as I have shown, homophobes can certainly find monstrous confirmation of their worst fears and a ratification of their heterosexist world view, while those more sympathetic to gays can find social satire, homophobia demonized and exorcized. My own sense, as I have tried to demonstrate, is that readers who look closely won’t miss the social satirist behind the three-piece suit, the radical inside the conservative republican. As a child, King himself suffered under the rules of a homophobic society and felt compelled to conform to its macho prescriptions: “I had to play football, because I was big. If you didn’t play football and you were big, it meant you were a fucking faggot, right? That’s what it’s like when you come from a small town” (Winter, 18). Many of King’s fictions address the problem of how one can be something other than a football player—say, a writer—and still retain respect for oneself as a man. The Stephen King stand-in or author surrogate in ’Salem’s Lot is Ben Mears who, because he is a writer, is suspected of being a “sissy boy” or a “faggot”: the people “distrusted the creative male with an instinctive smalltown dislike” (SL, 191, 106). Ben has come to write a book about the town’s evil Marsten House which frightened him as a child; readers of It will recall that gay Adrian, also an author, “had come to Derry to write a piece about the Canal” into which he is eventually dumped (It, 27). Ben’s first book included a “homosexual rape scene in the prison section,” which the town reads as “Boys getting together with boys” (SL, 21). Ben’s arrival coincides with that of Straker and Barlow, two men who “may be queer for each other”; at the same time, young boys start disappearing, and the town can’t make up

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its mind which one of the three—Straker, Barlow, or Ben—is the “sex pervert” that did it (SL, 142, 139). How can a writer defend the manliness of his vocation in a homophobic, anti-intellectual society? First, he can do so with what he writes. Ben’s first novel sounds a lot like an early Stephen King novella, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” In this fiction, Andy is raped by the prison’s “sisters” or “killer queens,” but, instead of letting himself ‘just get taken’ he decide[s] to fight” (DS, 21, 23). Through his financial genius, Andy gains power over the men who raped him; rather than allow himself to be beaten or “turned” gay, Andy breaks out of prison through a “hole” he has dug behind a girlie poster, thus escaping to freedom and heterosexuality (DS, 21, 80). The narrator and author of Andy’s story is a fellow prisoner and rape victim who learns from Andy’s example. Andy may have been forced to “bend over” by the rapists and the guards who searched his anal cavity upon his entrance to prison, but he fought back, defeating his enemies using the money he secreted in a part of his anus that remained inviolate (DS, 19). Similarly, the narrator smuggles his story out “the same way,” thus triumphing as a writer and as a man over a violently intrusive world (DS, 95). In a tale that obviously contains certain homophobic elements, King does take pains to portray the prison rapists as able to find joy only in violence, as more antisexual than homosexual, as, in fact, homophobes, preying on “the young, the weak, and the inexperienced” in order not to feel so effeminate themselves (DS, 21). And the relationship between the narrator and Andy is described as involving mutual concern and the exchange of “pretty” rocks, as if to claim sympathy and beauty as manly occupations in spite of what homophobes might say (DS, 29). If Ben’s first novel is like “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” it might almost have been written to counter suspicions like those entertained by the homophobic townsfolk of ’Salem’s Lot concerning a writer’s manliness. Not only what he writes, but also his purpose in writing seem part of his masculine defense. Ben plans to write about the Marsten House as a way of “Confronting my own terrors and evils”; with the writing he hopes will come “control of the situation, and that would make all the difference” (SL, 113). Numerous passages in King’s work make it clear that he sees the writing of fiction as a means of gaining control over his fears, of shaping amorphous anxiety into manageable form. In “The Body,” fledgling author Gordie remembers “the first time I had ever really used the places I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there 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” (DS, 336). And many years later, in a recent interview, King himself still describes the

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advantage of writing in similar terms: “Fiction is in my hand, and that means I can control it” (Magistrale, Stephen King, ms. 13). In ’Salem’s Lot, Ben plans to wield his writer’s pen as proof that he is man enough to overcome the town’s suspicions about his effeminacy and his own doubts concerning possible inner weakness. Like It, the vampire Barlow plays on his victims’ worst fears—Ben’s terror that he is nothing but a bookish wimp; that, as a writer and as a man, he is impotent: Look and see me, puny man. Look upon Barlow, who has passed the centuries as you have passed hours before a fireplace with a book. Look and see the great creature of the night whom you would slay with your miserable little stick. Look upon me, scribbler. I have written in human lives, and blood has been my ink. Look upon me and despair! (SL, 411) But Ben succeeds in taking pen and stake in hand and vanquishes the vampire; by giving his fears fictional form, he is able to overcome them. In the beginning Ben’s imaginative capacity as a writer may have contributed to his fear of effeminacy, but in the end it helps him prove his masculinity.5 Perhaps King is hinting that those, like writers of horror fiction, who can win the war against sexual fears in their imaginations are stronger than the unimaginative who end up fighting and killing real others in a desperate attempt to destroy the Otherness within. In “Graveyard Shift,” Hall, unable to handle being ridiculed by a foreman who continually denigrates his manhood by calling him “college boy,” turns his phallic hose on the man and causes him to be eaten by rats (NS, 50). In the end, however, Hall’s macho display gets him nowhere; his hose isn’t strong enough to stop the rats (his own insecurities) from eating him up too. In “I Am the Doorway,” an astronaut, returned from a failed mission to the planet of love, finds himself giving a beach boy the eye (“He was tanned almost black by the sun, and all he was ever clad in was a frayed pair of denim cutoffs”), but the eyes turn out to be peering from the astronaut’s hand, as if aliens had entered his body and were looking through him (NS, 67). What the alien eyes see is not a beautiful boy, but something horribly other, hateful, and “they” kill the boy: “I didn’t kill him, either—I told you that. They did. I am the doorway” (NS, 63). And when the astronaut looks into his own face through the eyes, he sees a “monster” which must be destroyed (NS, 70). One can read this tale as the story of a man whose inability either to accept or deny his homoerotic impulses leads to murder and suicide, or one can take it as a more abstract parable about a man’s failure to live with Otherness outside or within himself.

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King’s longer works develop these same themes in revealing depth. The Stand gives us Kit Bradenton, whose homoerotic dream of “the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, ... wearing lemonyellow bikini briefs” is horribly interrupted when the boy’s face turns out to be that “of a Goya devil and from each blank eyesocket there peers the reptilian face of an adder” (St, 268–269). Kit’s fear is that the 1960s are over and the country has since turned conservative and homophobic, that some macho man (like the Walkin’ Dude) will come and stab him for his homosexuality, and that Kit himself is now too old and decrepit to attract anyone but a monster: “The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself. My God, am I dying?” (St, 269). In The Shining, Jack Torrance finds himself looking at another boy: Tall and shaggily blond, George had been an almost insolently beautiful boy. In his tight faded jeans and Stovington sweatshirt with the sleeves carelessly pushed up to the elbows to disclose his tanned forearms, he had reminded Jack of a young Robert Redford, and he doubted that George had much trouble scoring—no more than that young football-playing devil Jack Torrance had ten years earlier. (Sh, 110–111) Like Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, Jack, though he refuses to admit it to himself, is jealous of George’s good looks, athletic and sexual prowess, and unselfconscious masculine identity. Like Claggart, Jack allows his own gender insecurity to lead him to defame another: using George’s stutter as an excuse (as if that made the boy less of a man), Jack drops him from the debating team (for his impotence as a debater). When George attempts to reassert his manhood by taking a knife to Jack’s tires, Jack cannot bear the affront to his masculine authority and viciously strikes out at the boy. Jack is, not coincidentally, a failed writer.6 Again and again, the defeated characters in King’s fiction are revealed to be men who cannot imagine a constructive resolution to the battle of the sexes raging within them. Sometimes King seems almost callous about their fate, as if he were afraid that their effeminacy might threaten him or as though he were imaginatively killing off his own fear of weakness. In The Tommyknockers, a mama’s boy named John Leandro manages to break his mother’s injunction against eating fast-food cheeseburgers (“Microbes, his mother’s voice spoke up in his mind. Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick”), but eventually he succumbs to his fear of her disapproval and is killed by contact with a Coke machine (TK, 438). King considers the

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passage detailing Leandro’s death “a scene that I like as well as anything I’ve ever done”; his attitude toward the victim: “One of the main characters is a real wimp. I was glad to see him go” (Underwood, 83). But King can also be extraordinarily sympathetic toward the “wimps” of this world, as if he himself were feelingly engaged in their struggle and did not take their loss lightly. This is the Stephen King whose art rises above kneejerk homophobia and the demonization of Otherness. In a scene from ’Salem’s Lot, which may be viewed as paradigmatic of the (self-) confrontations in King’s fiction, Father Callahan comes face to face with the vampire Barlow, a face which, though “strong and intelligent and handsome,” also “seemed almost effeminate”; Callahan thinks: “Where had he seen a face like that before? And it came to him, in this moment of the most extreme terror he had ever known. It was the face of Mr. Flip, his own personal bogeyman, the thing that hid in the closet during the days and came out after his mother closed the bedroom door (SL, 352). “Flip”: flip out, flip side, flippant; Mr. Flip, now suddenly “out of the closet” and “staring ... with his clown-white face and glowing eyes and red, sensual lips,” is Callahan’s own fear of his other side, the side that mocks his attempts at manly action, the exterior embodiment of an inner effeminacy that threatens to drive him insane (SL, 352). And, like many another brave but insufficiently hardy souls in King’s fiction, Callahan has faith in his identity (religious, adult, male)— but not faith enough: “The cross [held by Father Callahan] flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished [the vampire, his own fears] if he had dared to press forward” (SL, 353). From the moment Callahan gives up fighting to resolve his insecurities, from the moment he lets his childhood fear of weakness get the better of him, he is lost. Again and again, and most insistently near the end of ’Salem’s Lot, the male reader is implored to recognize that the “transvestite,” the “strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paints,” is “his own face” (SL, 417–418). Only by facing up to one’s fear of effeminacy, only by acknowledging the monstrousness of homophobia, can one learn to live with others and with the Otherness in oneself. NOTES 1. Garton is just one in a long line of macho, homophobic, and sexually insecure characters, in King’s fiction. Other examples include the 1950s-imitation tough-guy Billy Nolan in Carrie (“he was going to have her until every other time she’d been had was like two pumps with a fag’s little finger” (Ca, 164]) and that “miniature streetpunk from hell,” The Kid in The Stand, who rapes Trashcan with his “.45” (St, 608). 2. Derry’s “ritual sacrifice” of gay Adrian, all but outlined in the sermons of the “town’s preachers,” reminds one of the homophobic scapegoating called for by the boy

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evangelist in “Children of the Corn”: “No room for the defiler of the corn. No room for the hommasexshul” (NS, 263). 3. Compare King’s novella, “Apt Pupil,” in which a wino proposes to the boy Todd, “For a buck I’d do you a blow job, you never had better. You’d come your brains out, kid” (DS, 198). Todd later has a wet dream in which he stabs the wino, thus getting a sexual charge out of violently proving his masculinity. Todd’s gender anxiety is exacerbated by his relationship with the former Nazi Dussander, a bad father who encourages Todd to take pleasure in inflicting pain. In another wet dream, Todd tortures a Jewish girl with a combination dildo/cattle prod supplied by Dussander; under the Nazi’s tutelage, Todd attempts to straighten out his confused sexual orientation through rape. The fact is, as Tony Magistrale points out, “Dussander is symbolically raping Todd”—fucking with the boy’s mind in a desperate attempt to restore the sense of potency he lost with age and the Third Reich (Magistrale, Landscape, 87). In a later scene, Dussander actually masquerades as the “old faggot” he fears he is, propositioning a wino and then, as if trying to project and eliminate his own effeminacy, kills the bum (DS, 209). 4. The fear that male bonding will be seen as gay attraction—what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed “male homosocial panic”—is pervasive in King’s fiction. See Dennis’s concern about embracing Arnie in Christine (Ch, 58) and Gordie’s and Chris’s embarrassment at their warmth for each other in “The Body” (DS, 430). Bookish, nerdy, diminutive, or overweight young males troubled by the fear that they may be—or be perceived as—gay include Charlie in Rage (BB, 106); Harold in The Stand (St, 971, 978); Randy in “The Raft” (SC, 279); the narrator in “Nona” (SC, 377); and (the only one in this list who overcomes his homophobia) Garraty in The Long Walk (BB, 179, 288). 5. Given the theme of this essay, perhaps something should be said about the critical controversy surrounding the relationship between Ben Mears and the boy Mark Petrie in ’Salem’s Lot. King has made his position clear: “People say to me ... that what I wrote there was a classical sub rosa homosexual relationship. I say bullshit, it’s father–son” (Underwood, 122). King’s response may seem less homophobic if one remembers that in the novel Ben is under suspicion of being a gay fiend, a child molester: this may be the charge that King is really repudiating. One should also remember that King has written often on the theme of the bad father who takes advantage of his son (Jack and Danny Torrance in The Shining, for example); King may want to make certain that readers view Ben as he was intended to be seen—as a good (surrogate) father to Mark. Probably the most detailed and determined reading of the Ben–Mark relationship as containing homosexual undercurrents is Joseph Reino’s. It seems that, where King claims to have meant only paternal love, Reino sees (also or instead?) homoerotic attraction. The trouble with Reino’s interpretation is that it is based almost entirely on verbal ambiguity: King’s “fairy-light” is read “subsurfacely” as a reference to the “fairy-feelings” between Ben and Mark; King’s “the moment seemed to undergo a queer stretching” becomes an “ithyphallic innuendo,” a reference to gay erection (Reino, 27, 29). These readings seem strained to me, despite the fact that I elsewhere find Reino to be a subtle and perceptive critic of King. 6. Beating George does not help Jack feel like any more of a man, because fears of effeminacy cannot be dispelled through attack on another. This, however, is a lesson Jack never learns, for his jealous assault on George is unconsciously repeated on his son Danny when Jack begins to suspect that the hotel prefers the boy’s masculinity to his own. Jack’s greatest fear is that his relation to the hotel is like that of the man in the dog suit trying to fellate his impotent master: submissive and yet unrewarded (Sh, 334). The point of the servile dogman as representative of Jack’s fear of unmanliness is lost in Stanley Kubrick’s

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film version of the novel, where the dogman becomes a pigman and the connection with Jack is not made. A bewildered Pauline Kael commented, upon seeing the film, that “Kubrick has an odd sense of morality: it’s meant to be a hideous debauch when [Wendy] sees the two figures in the bedroom—one of them, wearing a pig costume, looks up at her while he or she is still bent over the genitals of a man in evening clothes on the bed” (Kael, 4). In addition to using the dog to symbolize man’s fear of effeminacy (the cowardly cur subject to another man’s phallic rule), King also employs the dog as a figure for the sexually insecure man who overcompensates by acting like a hypersexed animal, even if this leads him to raping men. Consider the rapist Frank Dodd whose vicious spirit inhabits the rabid dog Cujo and assaults George Bannerman: “Hello, Frank. It’s you, isn’t it? Was hell too hot for you? ... What’s he done to me down there? Oh my God, what’s he done?” (Cu, 285).

REFERENCES Works by Stephen King [BB] [Ca] [Ch] [Cu] [DM] [DS] [It] [NS] [SL] [Sh] [SC] [St] [SK] [TK]

The Bachman Books. New York: New American Library, 1985. Carrie. New York: New American Library, 1975. Christine. New York: Viking, 1983. Cujo. New York: Viking, 1981. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. Different Seasons. New York: Viking, 1982. It. New York: Viking, 1986. Night Shift. New York: Doubleday, 1978. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: New American Library, 1976. The Shining. New York: New American Library, 1978. Skeleton Crew. New York: New American Library, 1985. The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1990. “Stephen King Comments on It.” Castle Rock (July, 1986): 1, 5. The Tommyknockers. New York: Putnam, 1987.

Criticism Beahm, George. The Stephen King Companion. Kansas City: Andrews & McMeel, 1989. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Collings, Michael, R. The Stephen King Phenomenon. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1987. Kael, Pauline. Taking It All In. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. ———. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New York: Macmillan, forthcoming, 1992. Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Underwood, Tim and Chuck Miller, eds. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. Van Hise, James. Stephen King and Clive Barker. Las Vegas: Pioneer, 1990. Winter, Douglas E. “Talking Terror: Interview with Stephen King.” Twilight Zone Magazine 5 (February, 1986).

M I C H A E L N . S TA N T O N

Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone

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t is dangerous to speak of Stephen King’s novels in superlatives, especially now that what was once his longest novel has been reissued, expanded by some 350 pages. Nonetheless, many readers have found in the quiet achievements of The Dead Zone some of King’s finest work. Coming between the apocalyptic destruction of The Stand and the pyrotechnic madness of Firestarter, The Dead Zone seems to strike a softer note than either. It is a richly human novel, and it is the more so for its relative compactness. In what is for him a mere 370 pages, King has managed to write both a narrative of one man’s personal ordeal and an inquiry into the nature of American government. Still, read as I propose to read it here, The Dead Zone is one of King’s most disturbing novels, for although John Smith’s famous ability is to see the future, much of the novel concerns what has already happened in America, or to America. The keynotes that King strikes in The Dead Zone are fear, inadequacy, and loss of faith, nerve, and integrity, and they are sounded in the reactions to John Smith’s strange mental power and in the reactions to Greg Stillson’s political aspirations. The Dead Zone can be read on at least four levels, or in four aspects: the symbolic, the historical, the personal or psychological, and the political. These aspects of the novel are richly intertwined, and separating them for examination necessarily creates a distortion: but it does

From The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, ed. Tony Magistrale, pp. 61–72. © 1992 by Anthony S. Magistrale.

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enable us to see how and why John Smith dies for his country, and why it may already be too late. On the symbolic level, we can begin with an apparently inconsequential vignette that seems almost an interpolation into the narrative line. On a hot summer day about two years before Johnny Smith comes up out of his coma, a travelling salesman stops at Cathy’s Roadhouse near the Maine–New Hampshire border. This man is not the travelling salesman of smutty anecdote; he sells lightning rods. He manages to quench his thirst; he does not manage to sell the owner of the roadhouse his quaint product. What the man sells is continually emphasized; again and again King calls him the “lightning rod salesman,” or, with curiously formal diction, “the seller of lightning rods” (King, 78–80). He is an anomalous figure, since the commodity he vends was obsolete long before 1973. He is in fact more a prophet than a pedlar, for as he drives away, he thinks that “Maybe someday he [the owner] would be sorry” (King, 80). And he will be, when lightning strikes his building and fire consumes a fair fraction of the Durham High School Class of 1977, celebrating its graduation there. The episode of the seller of lightning rods is a fairly obvious bit of plot foreshadowing, and if his appearance were only a plot device it would be almost painfully transparent. But it is more than that: it symbolizes the function or position of characters in the novel. Johnny Smith, for example, is a lightning rod. The mind of John Smith is a conductor of energetic flashes of information from the anywhere to the here and now. His psychic power operates without respect to time, drawing from the past (the fate of Sam Weizak’s mother), the present (the fire in Eileen Magown’s kitchen), and the future (the roadhouse tragedy). And like lightning striking, John’s power is almost everywhere associated with burning: “Two rubber tires burned sootily” (King, 1) at the edge of the pond where Johnny had the boyhood skating accident that brought into being his psychic power, and although he scarcely remembers bumping his head, the association remains. Just before the accident that renders him comatose, his run of luck at the county fair has “the strangest goddam associations for me ... burning rubber” (King, 42). That heavy smell of burning lurks always just below the surface of Smith’s life. For example, when Johnny pulls in the information that Dr. Weizak’s mother is still alive, he gets images of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw: the refugees are fleeing, “the city’s on fire” and “Poland has fallen before the lightning warfare” (King, 107).

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In his next revelation, Johnny sees his therapist’s kitchen curtains afire miles away. In the face of Eileen Magown’s disbelief, he summons help and her home is saved. Fire and lightning seem to surround John Smith. Even Dr. Strawns, his first attending physician, later dies of burns when his house catches fire (King, 81). When John gets a job tutoring young Chuck Chatsworth, who has a reading problem, he thinks of the verbal disability of the man who could not shout “Fire!” in a burning theatre; the high-impact fiction he sets Chuck to reading is Max Brand’s Fire Brain. And of course the rod-less Cathy’s Roadhouse burns on the night of Chuck’s graduation, the fire “caused by a bolt of lightning” (319); one “cannot buy off the lightning” (319) as Chuck’s father observes, but as the seller of lightning rods might have observed, one could have. Enough actual fire and lightning are associated with John Smith to be worth noting, but the lightning rod is symbolic in another way too. Johnny is an emotional lightning rod, through whom is discharged the fear in those whose lives he touches. It is a universal ironic fact that whenever John Smith’s psychic power enables him, or forces him, to do a good deed, the general reaction to him is one of dread and loathing (when it is not outright disbelief). When John tells Eileen that her curtains are on fire but that her house will be all right, she blesses him and kisses him but “the expression on her face was very much like superstitious dread” (King, 41). Meanwhile the nurses at the duty station where Johnny has called in the fire are “lined up ... staring at him” like “crows staring at something bright and shiny, something to be pecked at and pulled apart” (King, 41). When Johnny predicts the fire at Cathy’s Roadhouse during a lawn party at the Chatsworths’ earlier in the day, Chuck’s girl friend faints and her mother screams at Johnny, “What’s wrong with you?” The other guests stare “like crows strung out on a telephone wire ... looking at him as if he were a bug, a freak” (King, 312). That evening when the radio carries the news of the actual fire, Chuck’s girl friend again becomes unstrung and screams at Johnny (in what seems to be a paroxysm of self-referentiality): “It’s his fault, that guy there! He made it happen! He set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book Carrie. You murderer!” (King, 320). Despite the girl’s accusation, Johnny’s power is of course purely passive, not kinetic, and it is not solely predictive; but it sets him apart from the bulk of mankind. He flees it but it seems to pursue him (Roger Chatsworth’s reference to “The Hound of Heaven” [321] is not unapt). He hates what his mind can do, but always his refusal or reluctance to use his power when he has that option, as when Sheriff George Bannerman asks for his help in finding a serial killer, puts him in a dilemma where refusing to act is ethically

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worse than acting, whatever the cost to himself of action (and it always is costly). Drawing upon himself the fear and hatred of the community by his power, John Smith becomes both a scapegoat and an exile. His gift is indeed rather a “curse” as Dr. Vann observes much later (King, 367). There are exceptions to this pattern, of course; it is not merely mechanical. Johnny’s very first exercise of power is such an exception. Unlike all the visions that follow, it brings a piece of good news. He tells his nurse Marie that her son’s eyesight will be restored after an operation on his impacted cornea. The tiny episode is a pleasant introduction to a troublesome gift, perhaps because its subject is the gift of sight itself. Johnny Smith’s early revelations are not just news flashes from nowhere meant to disturb and dazzle their hearers. At the level of history, one at least is significant not merely in its own right, but also as creating a historical matrix for events that develop later in the novel. The importance of the circumstances in which Sam Weizak became separated from his mother seems to escape Johnny himself. It is not just “the Nazi invasion of Warsaw” that estranges mother and child; that invasion belongs in the larger context of the very beginning of World War II. The German invasion of Poland in September, 1939, marked the opening of a great conflagration and also marked the end of an era of uneasy and waning peace littered with promises broken, treaties breached, and faiths betrayed. Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact that enabled them to divide Poland between them like a wishbone; a year later, Hitler broke that pact and invaded Russia. All of this, and more, is implied in Johnny’s vision of a burning city and fleeing people. Several years after this remarkable reach into the past, John Smith has Hitler on his mind again, as he considers what to do about Greg Stillson. Johnny has had an oddly blurred, but not ambiguous, vision of Stillson’s presidency and consequent nuclear war. The more Johnny researches Stillson’s background and studies Stillson’s present actions, the more he is convinced that his vision is accurate and that Stillson is a fascist in populist’s clothing. King’s account of Stillson’s political behavior may be heightened (for effect) but for Johnny the question of how to deal with the man remains. He takes a kind of informal survey: “just suppose you could hop into a time machine and go back to the year 1932. In Germany. And suppose you came across Hitler. Would you kill him or let him live?” (King, 306–7). The responses are interesting. One old man, who served in World War I and lost a son in World War II, would kill Hitler without hesitation. Roger Chatsworth, the successful businessman and deal-maker, would not: “I think

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I’d join the party instead. Try to change things from within” (King, 308). Roger, who fancies himself a realist, thinks Johnny’s question is “pointless but interesting” (King, 308). His 17-year-old son Chuck asks questions of his own which are closer to the bone: Would they catch me? Could I escape in my time machine back to 1977? To both these inquiries, Johnny must posit a no. “Well, it wouldn’t matter [says Chuck] I’d kill him anyway” (King, 309). These responses provide only ironic guidance. Johnny is in the moral equivalent of 1932, with his own potential Hitler, and must act on his own to prevent a tragic future. (Still more ironically, perhaps, as Johnny compares Stillson to the Hitler who began World War II, Stillson’s future war will begin with nuclear weapons—the means by which World War II was ended.) At all events, historical analogues and the sense of history, which subsumes issues of war, politics, and the presidency, loom over the consciousness of John Smith and the progress of events in The Dead Zone. Large historical events, both past and future, are by no means the only concerns of this novel. As in every King novel, personal history matters greatly. The surface topics of politics and war are richly underlain by the humus of ordinary lives. The implication of rot is unpleasant but it is not inaccurate: lives decay through the novel in an atmosphere of fear, fanaticism, and irrationality, and each life contributes its mite to the rank social and political air of the mid-1970s, which John Smith and others must breathe. To say that John Smith and Greg Stillson are the twin poles of The Dead Zone is to state the obvious; they are everywhere juxtaposed. Still, in the opening pages, King shows us more of Greg Stillson. Of Johnny, we learn little more than that a rather odd power has been made manifest in his mind. By contrast, King paints the young Stillson with fairly broad strokes; he is a flimflam artist travelling the roads of Middle America, selling a dishonest product (the Bible), arrogant in his assumed superiority, a coward, and a bully—a perfect little demagogue in embryo. Greg Stillson did not acquire these unlovely traits by happenstance. One strongly implied contrast between the two opening scenes of the novel is in the nature of Johnny’s and Greg’s boyhood. Johnny’s, while not vividly realized at the outset, is at least normal: two loving parents (Vera Smith’s religious fanaticism not yet having surfaced) with whom he has an affectionate relationship in a stable small-town setting. Greg’s, by contrast, is nomadic; his father, a roughneck oil-field worker, shows only contempt for the runty little kid, a contempt that Greg returns, with interest, as hatred; the mother is a nonentity. “The domineering father and the laxly approving mother,” is King’s description of this charming couple (King, 304). It seems

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clear that even as he hates his father (who, as it happens, dies by fire) Stillson seeks the dead man’s approval by emulation: his campaign gimmick of wearing a hard hat “cocked at a rakish angle” (King, 267) on his head reproduces the father’s “hard hat cocked jauntily back” (King, 296) in the photograph of father and son that Johnny sees. In fact, even though it is the one King novel that does not have a child as a major figure (although children are important in it), The Dead Zone is greatly concerned with relations between parents and children, and the keystone of many of these relationships is fear or hatred. Frank Dodd’s mother, for example, that crazy reptilian woman, teaches her son to hate and fear his own sexuality. Her punishment of his innocent presexual interest in his body contributes largely to Frank’s fear and loathing of women and to his subsequent career as a rapist and serial killer. Frank’s father, a drunkard, died many years ago, and for whatever kind of substitution it might imply, Frank never wanted to be anything but a policeman. And his boss, Sheriff Bannerman, refuses to believe that Frank is the killer, because, as Johnny points out, he is the “man you think of as your own son” (King, 226). Chuck Chatsworth’s fear arises from a very different source: he wants to please and fears failing his successful father, whom he idolizes; his reading disability is a symptom of that fear: he is overanxious to succeed and thereby please Roger Chatsworth. He is “overswinging” as his tutor, Johnny Smith, puts it (King, 254). Just these three examples show that in The Dead Zone the relationships between parents and children are a network of fear and inadequacy. Parents fail their children; children fear failing their parents. Living fathers, for example (like Herb Smith or Roger Chatsworth), get fairly high marks for caring, while dead ones, blameable by their very absence, are seen as mean or weak. Mothers, living or dead, are usually neutral figures (Shelley Chatsworth), or weak (the late Mrs. Stillson), or strangely warped (Vera Smith, Henrietta Dodd). Moving beyond questions of characters’ intrafamilial relations with each other to questions of their own value systems, we see the same kinds of shortcomings and failings at work. People ask themselves, What can I believe? or, How can I make sense of my life? and their answers are inadequate to the extent that they arise from ideology or dogmatism. The litmus test for such dogmatism is John Smith, or rather two events in his life: his unlikely recovery from a years-long coma and the revelation of his psychic power. We see at once that those characters who respond most inadequately to the phenomena presented by the existence of John Smith are those whose beliefs are most fixed. Such rigidity shows the mind, constrained

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by its own belief-sets, unable to handle actuality. Dr. James Brown, for example, is a scientific materialist. Because he cannot explain Johnny’s peculiar power according to his own principles, he refuses to admit that it exists. As Brown’s colleague Sam Weizak explains to Johnny, “He thinks you are having us on.... His cast of mind makes it impossible for him to think otherwise.... He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces with his scalpel and found no soul. Therefore there is none” (King, 119). Brown dislikes Johnny Smith because the fact of him threatens Brown; John possesses something that Brown’s medical training cannot explain or deal with, that training having been wholly within the rational order. Quite irrational, but equally rigid and inadequate, is Vera Smith’s belief that her son is specially marked by God. Herb and Vera know nothing of Johnny’s psychic power (“neither of them had any idea,” says Johnny [King, 150] on the night of Vera’s stroke), but Vera firmly believes that an interventionist God brought Johnny out of his four-and-a-half-year coma to do something. During that period Vera has been moving toward cultic, fundamentalist beliefs, and now she has arrived at the lunatic fringe. If Dr. Brown’s view of reality has essentially only one dimension, Vera’s has two— good versus evil. On the one side are the rapture, the miracle-working God, the deus ex flying saucer, and the apocalypse; on the other are the agents of Satan who run this world (doctors mostly). It is easy to make fun of Vera and her beliefs, but that is only because she has taken her rejection of human will and human responsibility to an extreme. She refuses to take her blood pressure medicine because if God wants her to live He will see to it, and if He wants her to die He will see to that: “It was a seamless argument and Johnny’s only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestants alike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works his will through the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man” (King, 133). Poles apart as they are, Vera’s views and Dr. Brown’s view are alike in the inadequacy of their response to complexity. Still, Vera’s views at least have consequences for Johnny: her last words to him are “Do your duty, John” (King, 158), and soon enough John finds the duty he must do. In a secular sense, Vera’s command continues to haunt the novel and John Smith’s life. Discovering what John Smith’s duty is brings us to the political aspect of the novel, and closer to its core. Many things have been established at this point in The Dead Zone. For the character of John Smith, these are established: his essential decency and humanity; the pain he suffers whenever he must use his gift or power; and the loss of other, purely human, satisfactions (such as the rewards of his skill as a teacher) his power brings

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with it. As to the power itself, it has been established that it is unpredictable in its appearance, accurate, verifiable and always verified, and almost without exception takes as its subject matter loss, crime, and disaster. John Smith’s gift does not change in character or quality as the novel proceeds, but the scope of its operation does: from dealing with individual matters like the fate of Sam Weizak’s mother or the whereabouts of Sarah Hazlett’s ring, to dealing with the problems and concerns of entire communities such as Castle Rock, Maine, or Durham, New Hampshire. In its final manifestation, Johnny’s vision rises to the national level in predicting the career of Greg Stillson. Equally well-established is the social context in which John Smith’s power is operating. The America of 1975 into which John reawakens is seriously wounded. We have seen this in the physically disabled characters who haunt the novel, and in the absurd belief systems to which individuals cling. We have seen deformity of personality or character, and craziness of tenet, as expressions of a pervasive atmosphere of loss, fear, and inadequacy manifested in a variety of ways (not least against John Smith himself). All this malaise sets the stage for the emergence of Greg Stillson as a major figure. Our memory of him has been refreshed periodically throughout, but he emerges as the chief architect of evil only in the last one hundred pages or so of the novel. Still, the convergence of John Smith and Greg Stillson is fated or destined in an almost Hardyesque way (not for nothing do we find Chuck Chatsworth, once he has graduated from Max Grand, reading Jude the Obscure). An unsympathetic observer might find the collision of protagonist and antagonist almost mechanically arranged, but it is the most significant if not the most poignant encounter in the novel. By it, King raises the focus of Smith’s power, as well as the ethical questions surrounding its use, to the highest levels of public life. He thus forces us to ask ourselves what makes a Greg Stillson possible. Can fears, doubts, and inadequacies previously shown in individuals and communities be operating at a national level? Will a diseased nation embrace a would-be dictator as its savior and future president? In illustrating how such a situation can come about, The Dead Zone becomes a shrewdly observed and thoroughly pessimistic novel. To make his point about national loss of faith, King skillfully times the events of his protagonist’s life. He puts John Smith to sleep in October of 1970 and reawakens him in May of 1975. The world around Johnny has changed immensely, as he keeps learning to his dismay. Much is new besides Flair pens and hair styles. For example, Johnny’s coma began a few months after students at Kent State University, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and its extension into Cambodia, were shot and killed. It ended a

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few weeks after the fall of Saigon and the takeover of all of Vietnam (and Cambodia, too) by a Communist government. John’s sleep encompassed the beginning of the troubles in Northern Ireland, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Wounded Knee, the Yom Kippur war, the bizarre adventures of Patty Hearst, and a great deal more. None of these events gets so much as a passing mention, and even Vietnam is treated as a background event. This is not a sin of omission on King’s part; it is rather an act of selection. Foregrounded, thrown into high relief, brought to Johnny’s attention at once, is the fate of the American presidency. When Herb Smith says that Richard Nixon has resigned because he was about to be impeached, “Johnny suddenly realized that there had been some great and fundamental upheaval in American politics.... How much had things changed? He was almost afraid to ask” (King, 111). Johnny begins to learn the extent to which Nixon had failed and abused his trust (a few days later we find him reading Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men); he learns about Watergate, the tapes, the Saturday night massacre. He learns that for the first time in our history men never elected nationally are serving as president and vice president. He learns, in short, that while he lay comatose the United States had undergone its worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. In the relative stability of 1990, it is hard to remember how dreadful an ordeal the American Constitution went through in 1973–74.1 But King was working on The Dead Zone only a couple of years after those events. The memory of constitutional crisis barely weathered was still fresh; the betrayal still hurt. Johnny’s intuition that this fundamental upheaval was “almost surely a result of the war in Vietnam” (King, 111) is almost surely right. As the veteran observer of the Presidency, Theodore White, writes, in 1968 “Americans were confronted with a new reality—they were engaged in the first major war they would not win. By the time Nixon came to power, that realization had split the country at every level, and resentment at ... Vietnam had spilled out ... in ... violence and ... bloodshed” (White, 330). Nixon’s betrayal of his obligation to lead and heal a divided nation, his betrayal of his office, and his forced resignation from that office “left a nation [whose] faith was shattered” (White, 324). I do not mean to suggest that all of the fear and inadequacy portrayed in The Dead Zone, all of the lack of belief and rigidity of belief and madness of belief shown there springs from the trauma of America’s belief in its leadership having been destroyed. I mean to suggest only that King’s presentation forces us to look in the direction of the White House. The soiling of the presidency took place during Johnny Smith’s long sleep; when

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he awakens, the greatest menace he must confront is a man who would be president—Greg Stillson—one who manipulates people’s fears and hopes and inadequacies to further his presidential ambitions, to whom things such as constitutional guarantees seem elegant trifles, and who, according to Johnny’s oddly occluded vision, is capable of destroying his country entirely. “His ruthlessness, vengefulness, nastiness were the characteristics of a man who has seen himself as underdog for so long that he cannot distinguish between real and fancied enemies, a man who does not really care whom he slashes or hurts when pressed, who cannot accept or understand when or what he has won.” This description of a political figure of a certain kind could be Stephen King’s, or any reader’s, of Greg Stillson. It is in fact Theodore White’s description of Richard Nixon (White, 333). Once again King operates selectively: he keeps our attention focused on the intermingled fate of the presidency and Vietnam by concentrating on the presidential campaign of 1976 (only incidentally mentioning the concomitant Bicentennial) and Greg Stillson’s parallel congressional campaign, and by providing a commentator on the political scene in the person of a Vietnamese refugee, Ngo. The substance of Ngo’s comments is in two stories he tells Johnny, both about tigers. One is about a game children in his village played, in which one child dressed up in an animal skin and “the other children tries to catch him as he runs and dances. The child in the skin laughs, but he is also growling and biting because that is the game” (King, 273). Johnny feels later “as if Stillson might have taken the game of the Laughing Tiger a step farther: inside the beast-skin, a man, yes.” “But inside the man-skin, a beast” (King, 277). In his second tale, Ngo tells about a real tiger that “went bad near my village. He was ... [an] eater of men.... And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman.... I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad tiger” (King, 293). What separates Ngo’s story of the child’s-play tiger from that of the man-eating tiger is the rally in Trimbull, New Hampshire, where Ngo and Johnny see Greg Stillson in action, and Johnny actually shakes his hand. Greg Stillson the campaigner is magnetic, attractive, energetic, has a way with words, knows all the right buttons to push. He, like Johnny, is a lightning rod and through him is discharged all the fear, disgust, and desire for change, any change, of a politically disillusioned people. And (metaphorically at least) it is a terrifying thing when one lightning rod touches another: the rally was “all mass confusion. Excitement was humming through the crowd like a series of high-voltage electrical cables” (King, 282). When Johnny and Stillson actually shake hands, Johnny’s vision of a

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nightmare future, with Stillson at its center, is the strongest he has ever had. It was “like burning high-tension wires,” a “sweet, coppery scent” (King, 284), and then Johnny blacks out. One of the underlying paradoxes of the novel is that while John Smith is essentially a good and honest man, his mysterious power of knowing attracts fear, distrust, and even hatred; by contrast Greg Stillson is essentially an evil man whose quite unmysterious power of communicating attracts popularity, affection, and something not far short of idolatry. John Smith accurately perceives that each of Stillson’s campaign stops is not so much a political gathering as “a love feast ... or a group grope” (King, 278). With uncanny prescience King portrays in Stillson’s highly orchestrated love-ins that appearance of spontaneity without the reality of it, which has increasingly characterized America’s encounters with its politicians over the last decade-and-a-half. Greg Stillson appears to be the type of politician America can produce, and lovingly endorse, once its faith in its own constitutional system has been breached. People like Roger Chatsworth—people who are steady, sensible, and above all comfortable—tend to laugh off Stillson. Roger tells Johnny that Stillson might serve one term, but then will lose his seat because he hasn’t learned the lesson: “Don’t fuck the people over for too long” (King, 271). But Johnny’s horrible vision of the Stillson presidency shows that in post-Nixonian America the people have apparently forgotten that this lesson is in their power to teach. As frightening as any element of Johnny’s vision of Stillson as president are the “scared fieldmouse eyes” (King, 283) of the chief justice administering the oath of office. Those eyes show that Stillson has trampled law, custom, and constitutional process to gain his high office. Johnny’s vision shows that the corruption and betrayal of America by those who govern it, a process begun during his sleep, is now complete. The meeting between John Smith and Greg Stillson at the Trimbull rally is in a sense the climax of The Dead Zone. Every subsequent happening flows from it: John Smith has found the duty his mother said he had, and he must do it, even knowing he will pay the ultimate price. And when his brain tumor appears, he knows that his responsibility is no longer years in the future, as he had once thought. And yet, although John himself dies, he is spared the crime of murder he had thought he must commit. Greg Stillson’s character as a self-interested bully has been so carefully and thoroughly built up through the novel that it comes as no surprise to see him grab a child in a blue-and-yellow snowsuit to shield himself from John’s bullets. In that act, the final puzzling detail of Johnny’s vision falls into place—the blue or striped filter across it is

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explained. Stillson’s impetuous act is highly characteristic, and, thanks to the photographs of it (another sort of vision), finally ruinous to his career. Stillson lives but the would-be dictator dies along with John Smith. Johnny had nearly died several years earlier, but instead he fell into the deep sleep of coma, and we can now see that his coma had two functions: it not only activated his dormant psychic power, but it also preserved his innocence. He is the only man in America capable of having the actual vision of a Stillson presidency, and, thanks to his preservation in sleep from the corruption of American constitutional government, he is the only man in America capable of acting to prevent it. The rest of us were awake and gave our assent in a fashion to the breach of faith that was the Nixonian presidency; Johnny slept and was absent from our fall from grace. All the many facets of The Dead Zone that we have examined bear the imprint of the character of John Smith. Except for his one extraordinary gift, he is an ordinary (hence his name) decent man, and with his decency he has courage—courage not only to bear the burden of his power, but more importantly, to act upon the implications of his vision. Unlike Greg Stillson, who is a self-made man, John Smith is a destined man. Stephen King is careful not to specify whence John’s destiny comes (although we can probably rule out the irate Father of Vera’s zealotry), but he is equally careful to show us John Smith fulfilling it admirably. NOTE 1. As I write this, on July 19, 1990, the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, is being dedicated with great fanfare and praise for the now-statesman-like, unindicted coconspirator.

REFERENCES King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. New York: Viking, 1979. White, Theodore, H. Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

LINDA BADLEY

The Sin Eater: Orality, Postliteracy, and the Early Stephen King

STEPHEN KING AND THE ORAL TRADITION

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tephen King may have found his calling in a college poetry class in which his teacher (Burton Hatlen) introduced him to Eldridge Cleaver’s concept of black “soul.” “Is there such a thing as white soul? Is there suburban soul?” Hatlen asked the class. “Something in all of that reached out to me,” King says, “because I liked McDonald’s and the Dairy Queen [and things like that].... You’d see people bopping in there, and it seemed ... they did have white soul.”1 He has since made it his lucrative business, through the less than subtle powers of horror, to articulate the “soul” of American consumer culture. In the process, King has accomplished what Jane Tompkins calls “cultural work” (200). When he posed the question about “white soul,” Hatlen was thinking of something like cultural consciousness or nomos, defined by Eric Havelock as “the custom-laws, the folkways, the habits of a people” (Havelock 24). White soul is a contradiction in terms. It refers to mass culture as opposed to racial or ethnic identity. Its roots are in the corporate body, not the spirit of a people. But, if such a thing as a white—dominant culture, WASP, mass produced, Disney World, consumer culture, materialist—soul exists, King surely possesses it. As he realized when he called himself a “brand-name author” (“On Becoming”) and described his fiction as the literary equivalent

From Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice, pp. 15–43. © 1996 by Linda Badley.

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of “a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s” (“Afterword,” Different Seasons 504), this confusion of material abundance, frisson, and nostalgia with transcendence is the soul of American culture. King embraces that confusion and contradiction in his horror fiction, which often reads as a scathing attack on the materialist culture of which it is a preeminent example. King’s fast-food version of the “plain style” smells of commercialism, but that fact makes him the middle-American storyteller without peer, the Homer of “white soul.” In less than flattering terms in 1982, Time critic Paul Gray pronounced him “Master of Postliterate Prose.” He meant that King wrote “prefabricated” or mass mediated prose, fiction that “short-circuits thought,” sending readers mentally to the movies and television rather than stimulating imagination. King was truly scary, Gray argued, because he appealed not to readers but to people for whom reality was “at its most intense when it c[ould] be expressed as an animated drawing.” In a 1983 Playboy interview, King had a rebuttal ready: “I am writing about a generation ... grown up under the influence of the icons of American popular culture, from Hollywood to McDonald’s, and it would be ridiculous to pretend that such people sit around contemplating Proust all day.” He tied off the comment with Henry James’s observation “that a good ghost story must be connected at a hundred different points with the common objects of life” (Norden 54). King was hardly unaware of what he was doing. When he was an English major, “good” literature was considered “difficult,” psychological, experimental and self-conscious. Burton Hatlen’s classes, in contrast to most, suggested that academic, folk, and popular cultures were bridgeable (Winter, Art 22). King’s role models were the unfashionable American naturalists, who plodded on about the material and social aspects of things and whose style he described as ranging “from the horrible to the nonexistent” (“Afterword,” Different Seasons 504). He emulated them as part of his rebuttal to the Modernists, their postmodern descendants, and other “avatars of high culture” (King, qtd. in Norden 53). Postmodernists of the 1960s such as Pynchon, Barthelme, Fowles, and Barth incorporated popular culture into their fiction but were notably literary in going about it. King wanted the opposite qualities: a strong storyline, typifying characters, Rabelaisian excess and repletion, a transparent style, and a strongly physical reading experience. Gray was correct in relating King’s appeal to “postliteracy” and thus with visual literacy, technological and cultural change. James Twitchell has found it the “inevitable result of advances in publishing, increasing literacy, shifting demographics, advertising culture, and electronic media” (Preposterous 103). In a 1982 foreword “On Becoming a Brand Name,” King suggested his own best analog in Charles Dickens, “the first brand-name

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writer” (42). Dickens reconstructed the novel for the emerging nineteenthcentury middle class by drawing on the popular mediums and formulas of the day—the crime sheet, the music hall ballad, pantomime, burlesque, melodrama, marchen, the political cartoon, and the serial installment. The great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called Dickens the first “cinematic” author for engaging the fantasies of a half-literate mass audience. His novels “appealed to the same good and sentimental elements” as film, caused them to “shudder before vice,” and like film could “mill the extraordinary, the unusual, the fantastic, from ... everyday reality” (206). In the 1982 foreword, King slyly commented on how Americans “used to line the docks when the ship bearing the next installment of Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due” (42). Dickens’s popularity was viewed not as a sign of a decline in literacy but rather the reverse, as the sign of a new kind of literacy. King’s should be viewed similarly for our time.2 The King “phenomenon” represents another phase in our present and ongoing “technologizing of the word,” as Walter Ong calls it in Orality and Literacy (1982). Ong and Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write, 1986) argue that contemporary mass culture is increasingly a culture of “secondary orality”: although based in writing, it functions, for most practical purposes, through the electronic sensorium. In several respects, postliterate culture is more like the oral culture that produced the Homeric epics than the chirographic and Gutenberg ages that immediately preceded it. King’s career is an important response to this shift. Gray notes that while academic writers like Barth and Vonnegut parodied and ironized mass culture, King took it “dead seriously.” In fact, he assumed the mantle of its high priest or bard. He appealed to electronically literate children (and their parents and even grandparents) who were “more familiar” (as King was one of the first to point out) with “Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, and the Easter Bunny than ... with, let’s say, Jesus or Peter or Paul or any of those people” (King, “An Evening” 11). Absorbing the images, sounds, and textures of consumer culture seamlessly into his style, his texts managed to do what nothing else could do quite so well: they made readers forget they were reading. In “short-circuiting thought,” King also bypassed the alienated or “dissociated sensibility” that is the inheritance of print culture. Himself a product of an increasingly technologized culture, and lacking the father, both literal and figurative, that literate culture presumed, King partly found and partly created a new literacy and a new literalism, one that reflected the changing consciousness of our time. As opposed to chirographic culture, which was analytical, historical, self-reflective, and speculative, postmodern culture tends, like oral cultures, to be intuitive, spatially organized, intensely participatory and simultaneous,

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communal (a global village), and conservative. In preliterate cultures, the sounded word was power and action: to name was to create, to animate; with literacy the printed word was fact; in postliterate culture, a composite of image and sound bite will move or soothe the world. We have moved from language as representation to language as iconographic speech act. For Paul Gray, King’s popularity is a symptom of crisis; for Walter Ong and Eric Havelock it is probably an example of successful adaptation. In this chapter, I view King as the global village’s answer to the oral storyteller—in fictions that have been compared to campfire stories, fairy tales, epics, and ballads. King has himself asserted as much in 1983 when he claimed, “My kind of storytelling” belongs in the “long and time-honored tradition dating back to the ancient Greek bards and the medieval minnesingers” (Norden 55). In personal style and tone he affects the manner of the storyteller, who was an entertainer, philosopher, historian and chronicler, schoolmaster, doctor, and priest in one. King brought that oral bard’s mystique to the global village. In the process, his dark fantasy reveals to postliterate culture its far from lily-white soul. Five characteristics of oral literature are relevant to the King phenomenon: (1) story as situation or scene (visualized by King’s uncannily cinematic “Third Eye”), (2) formulaic and repetitive structures, (3) homeostatic as opposed to historical perspective (King’s nostalgia tripping), (4) an aural–acoustical dimension, and (5) agonistic and empathic modes.3 Together, these constitute a newly embodied language and are the real basis of King’s appeal. THE THIRD EYE According to Walter Ong, in preliterate and oral cultures language is “a mode of action rather than a countersign of thought.” The Hebrew dabar, which means word, means also event. In Trinitarian theology, God the Father “speaks” the Second person, his son; he does not inscribe him (Ong 75). People in oral cultures view words as powered and magically potent (Ong 32). Words envision and enact, possessing speaker and listener and becoming a field of action. Our electronic hearths possess an equivalent authority and power. We absorb film, television, and computer texts much as oral peoples responded to sounded words, immediately and viscerally. Electronic texts have shamanic power to effect virtual “events” as King knows well, and his books are often called “cinematic.” “The books are visual,” King explains. “I see them almost as movies in my head” (Kilgore 108). He envisioned each chapter of The Shining as a scene in a different place until “near the very end, where ... [as]

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Hallorann is coming across the country on his snowmobile ... you can almost see the camera travel along beside him” (Stewart 127). “The Raft” (1985), a story in which four teenagers are stranded in the middle of a Maine lake, is a one-scene encapsulation of the splatter film, complete with a four-page, slo-mo rendering of the monster’s ingestion of one deserving jock, foot first, through the cracks of the raft. King “saw” Cujo as a single scene rendered in ABC’s “Movie of the Week” formula: “everything just flowed from that situation, the big dog and the Pinto” (qtd. in Winter, Stephen King 96–97). King’s fiction, which is almost too easily transferred to film, makes the reader’s body a projector, the story a scene, the text a screen.4 Preliterate cultures had no categories for abstracting knowledge, as concepts; these remained “embedded within the human lifeworld,” the world of action (69). In “Imagery and the Third Eye,” an article in The Writer, King advises aspiring authors to focus on “story,” situation, and scene. For King, books “happen”: “first a situation will occur, then an opening scene.... Then I can write the book. The characters don’t matter” (Schaffer 115). The essential thing is “story,” that “simple caveman invention (‘I was walking through the forest when the tiger leaped down on me’) that held [an] audience spellbound around a fire.... But ... story springs from image: that vividness of place and time and texture” (King, “Imagery” 11). “Story” is not a linear plot but an existential situation or locus. Drawing on the postJungian psychology of James Hillman and others, Edwin Casebeer explains King’s characters in comparable terms: “A writer such as King does not create personas. Instead, his psyche becomes a locus available for personas to emerge and interact with one another.... The resulting text is a nexus upon which King and his readers converge for psychic dialogue” (128). Character is “coextensive with the archetypal. We are visited (or possessed) by identity” (Casebeer 129). It does not hurt King’s image that he characterizes himself as a medium, a writer who draws on primary instincts and deeply embedded memories—and with a direct (Jungian) line to our national crisis center. Or that he says he writes out his nightmares, disdaining notes and outlines (Winter, Stephen King 202, n. 38). Or that he writes to stay sane. (“I’m in therapy every day. People pay $135 an hour to sit on a couch. I’m talking about the same fears and inadequacies in my writing” [King, qtd. in “The Novelist Sounds Off,” 80].) In a 1980 Rolling Stone interview, King described the “actual physical act” of writing as being “like autohypnosis, a series of mental passes you go through before you start” (Peck 101). Thus, in The Dark Half (1989), professor-author Thad Beaumont performs a ritual (smoking, drinking, picking up a pencil), enters a trance, and becomes the best selling writer of gruesome pulp thrillers.

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Beaumont also has a special visionary faculty to which he attributes animistic power, a “third eye.” King described his own third eye in 1980 as “the eye of imagination and memory” (King, “Imagery” 13). This “inner” eye has evocative power much like that of the spoken word. The third eye does not record events—it projects them, with the reader completing the act: “Imagery does not occur on the writer’s page; it occurs in the reader’s mind” (King, “Imagery” 12). The first sentence of “The Mist” “starts the reader’s internal projector humming,” writes reviewer Susan Bolotin. The mist itself descends upon a supermarket as the environment for an infinite number of species—from two-foot-long pinkish bugs, to “flying albinos things” with leathery wings, to huge tentacles attached to things that must be recalled from our own private catalog of Grade B creature features. The supermarket windows provide a screen for this phantasmagoria show. The mist (linked to the Arrowhead Project across the lake) has the combined attributes of the old 1950s technohorror films, which ought to turn it into harmless parody. But the familiarity, like that of fairy tales (which “regress us instantaneously” [qtd. in Magistrale, Second 4]), disarms readers and lends the story a scary immediacy. Readers are positioned with the characters, who are looking at a window that turns out to be a screen. What you see (the mist) is all there is: “We watched the fog overlay her and make her insubstantial, not a human being anymore but a pen-and-ink sketch ... on the world’s whitest paper, and no one said anything” (410). A Lovecraftian obscurity envelopes everything: “she could not see the underside of it ... only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight” (490). King’s characters, as Gray says, are always watching movies in their heads. A character in “The Raft” tells the monster to “go to California and find a Roger Corman movie to audition for” (305). King gives postmodern substance to the validated nightmare cliché. Applying naturalistic methods to an environment produced by popular culture, King creates the sense of a shared nightmare. It is no dream; it is a consensual or culturally produced virtual reality. The “guiding impulse” of horror stories, says Terrence Rafferty in a review of George Romero’s film adaptation of King’s The Dark Half, is an ancient “literal-mindedness.” Ideas of evil “take on the bodies of large beasts with powerful jaws; memories ... become ghosts; and unwholesome impulses and animal instincts tend to pop into being as doubles” “Bad Blood” 106). As the preliterate mind objectified internal states, projecting fears and desires in archetypal monsters, gods, and heroes, King projects internal conflicts directly on to the big screens of his early texts, from Carrie to The Dark

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Tower. Carrie projects her righteous rage telekinetically into conflagration; Arnie Cunningham in Christine takes revenge by means of a 1958 Plymouth Fury; incipient domestic violence explodes in Cujo, the Trenton family dog gone rabid. It (1986) entraps each of the six protagonists in a series of hallucinations, projections of his or her greatest fear in forms directly from horror special effects. Ultimately It was a roll call of “all the monsters one last time[.] Bring them all on Dracula, Frankenstein, Jaws, The Werewolf, The Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space, and call it It,” as King explained the book to Time. The monster was a Tulpa, a creature projected by the mind (Kanfer 83). An effects wizard (like Spielberg or, again, Dickens), King can bring machines to an appearance of primordial life or give them the powers of gods in the old animistic world. The story “Trucks” (1973) projects fears of dehumanization and extinction brought on by the fuel shortage of the early 1970s. Like the dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the trucks just suddenly are: omnipresent in a universal “stench of petroleum” (141), headlights popping on “in unison, bathing the lot in an eerie, depthless glare.” The trucks have the “squared-off shoulders of prehistoric giants” (130). The human race takes a time trip back to the caves, to “Drawing pictures in charcoal. This is the moon god. This is the tree. This is a Mack semi overwhelming a hunter.” No, even further back than that, to a race of production line zombies “in Detroit and Dearborn and Youngstown, and Mackinac” (Night Shift 142). Christine (1983), whose monster is a 1958 Plymouth Fury, a literal metaphor for the deadly American romance with the automobile, possesses her teenage driver Arnie Cunningham. Behind the wheel, he transforms in effects sequences adapted from The Howling (1980) and An American Werewolf in London (1981): his face “twisted and sunken” until “only the nose is thrust forward,” he changes into an “ancient carrion eater” (322). In King, things do not “fall apart”: they come alive, run amok, implode, and explode. As Twitchell notes, pyrotechnic destruction is central to Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), and Christine (1983), thereby displaying his special ability to “anatomize explosive violence from the inside out” (117), slowing it down “as do films shot in slow motion” (116). Reviews of King’s novels typically alternate between praise (for the author’s direct treatment of serious themes) and excoriation for “gratuitous grisliness” (Doniger), for the machine that gets going and won’t, for two hundred or so pages, stop. But repetition is the point. King’s novels return to a very old form that relied on externalization, ritual reenactment, redundancy through accumulative and rhythmic structures, and agonistic struggle.

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F A I RY T A L E S , F O R M U L A S ,

AND

CHILDREN

The concept of “oral literature” is an anachronism, a contradiction in terms, Ong reminds us. The spoken word was subject to instant decay, so that oral literature had imposed on it a mnemonic burden. Parry described the Homeric epics as consisting of “devastatingly predictable formulas and equally standardized themes or functions.” To rhapsodize (from the Greek Rhapsoidein) meant to “stitch songs together” (Ong 132). Oral organization was formulaic, accumulative (episodic rather than “plotted”), and redundant, taking shape as the existential context (current events, setting, and audience) demanded. The oral storyteller drew from a repertoire of proverbs and other set expressions, or scenes grouped loosely in catalogs or aggregates. Because the oral specialist performed speech acts, repeating formulas on demand to fulfill a contract with an audience, he or she was less the inspired genius than an assembly line worker or court clerk. Originality was unthinkable; reliability mandatory. King’s readers have contracted to be frightened in exchange for catharsis and the illusion of control, which contract King fulfills every few months after turning out his daily quota of 1,500 words. King seems to enjoy characterizing himself as a hack, a whore, a “brand name” author who produces a commodity. He is the only writer to have had five books simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller lists, which he has headed for twenty years.5 “The Breathing Method” (Skeleton Crew, 1985), in which a group of men gather periodically to recite tales of the uncanny, is one of King’s metaphors for the author’s role. Above the fireplace in the library are the words of the toast raised as each tale is begun: “It is the Tale, not he who tells it” (Norden 55). Tales preexist and preclude tellers, who are “authors” only as they subsist within the marketplace. Their work is a matter of conserving culture. King exploits the power of archetypes. He tells ancient stories, filtering them through modern Gothic and fantasy conventions. His fictions, opening in suburban or small-town America—Castle Rock, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven. The characters have the trusted two-dimensionality of kitsch; they originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, readers move through a densely rendered atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology: advertising, MTV, and comic books as well as traditional sources. When he “plug[s] directly into mass-produced images,” using language the way a baseball fan “behind the home-team dugout uses placards, to remind those present of what they have already seen” (Gray), he is repeating formulas as the oral performer did. King’s redundancy is purposeful, as in preliterate cultures, in which an event existed in the event

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of remembering. Ong suggests an analogy with the preschool child who requests the same stories over and over: for both ancient and modern preliterate listeners, the tale exists only in the oral–aural continuum, and gains resonance and meaning through repetition. Ben P. Indick had the right idea, in his essay on King’s The Eyes of the Dragon (1987), when he imagined “the wide eyes and open mouths” of children listening to “tales told around fires” and later to Homeric histories and still later to the “lays of the minstrels” and the “vivid pictorial dramas ... we call the mystery, Miracle and ... Morality plays” (189). King writes from all of these oral traditions—campfire stories, epics, romances, and allegories—often at the same time. King writes from within a consumer culture that is as transitory as oral culture, but also far more self-conscious of its ephemerality, and whose distinguishing trait is uncertainty. Media technology makes hype possible; it also ensures that the star or trend that is here today will be gone tomorrow. We are subjected to constant shock: “More information washes over us than washed over any other generation in history—except for the generation we’re raising.... This flow of information—it makes you very nervous about everything,” King says (qtd. in Spitz 183). Horror responds to this anxiety by intensifying it, by “mak[ing] us children”: “That’s the primary function of the horror story—to knock away all of ... the bullshit we cover ourselves with, to take us over taboo lines” (Peck 93). “We” are like the primitives huddled in the darkness—the chaos of signals that we call the information age—waiting for a clear and indisputable sign. “None of us adults remember childhood,” says King, whose hyperrealism attempts to recapture its intensity: “Colors are brighter. The sky looks bigger.... Kids live in a constant state of shock. The input is so fresh and so strong.... They look at an escalator, and they really think that if they don’t take a big step, they’ll get sucked in” (qtd. in Peck 95). In King’s version of the Romantic tradition, “losers,” the infirm or “challenged,” minorities, and children are privileged with insights and powers—the alcoholic poet Jim Gardener, mentally disabled Tom Cullen, deaf-mute Nick Andros, stutterer Bill Denbrough, underdogs Carrie White and Arnie Cunningham, AfricanAmericans Dick Halloran and Sister Abagail, “special” children Danny Torrence and Ellie Creed. The survivors in The Stand, who are divested of social conventions, recover the “state of nature.” The child is the father of the man. By way of Bruno Bettelheim, King views horror stories as “nothing more than fairy tales for grown ups. And one way to get a grown up is to open up that conduit to the child he was.” Because they tap memories that return with uncanny power, fairy tales are “the scariest stories that we have,” King told Tony Magistrale in 1989 (Second 4).

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James Twitchell argues that King’s appeal, like that of action film and video games, is almost exclusively to adolescent males.6 But King holds the record for the most Book of the Month Club (BOMC) Main Selections (fourteen), provoking BOMC to create The Stephen King Library, which offers the 27 King novels in “treasurable” hard cover editions (“The Complete Stephen King”), and suggesting that Twitchell is way off the mark. Like Robert Bly or Clarissa Pinkola Estes, King’s cultural work involves evoking the “inner child” in his multi-generational audience. Fairy tales were never really “for” children anyway. The folktales they have come down from were told by elders as the guardians of tradition to a community audience. In the nineteenth century, when Dickens’s novels were circulated around the Victorian household of family and servants, and often read aloud, or when the author himself performed public readings from his Christmas Books, the traditions of the oral community as extended family continued. Stephen King novels are similarly a family affair, passed from parent to child (or vice versa). As Bettelheim explains, many fairy tales begin with the death of a parent or ancestor, or an aging parent’s decision to let the heir take over after proving him- or herself worthy (8). The protagonist, an initiate, must meet with loss or change, and encounters fundamental existential dilemmas that, as Jung pointed out, occur several times over a life. As a modern novelist in a self-conscious culture, King sums up national and cultural experience as well. King’s early books resemble Dickens’s or the Brontës’ in their domestication and modern “fracturing” of fairy tale and Gothic formulas and in fulfilling Bettelheim’s theory of the cathartic and educative function of fairy tales. Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), a ball, and a theme in which a persecuted victim recovers her female power. Christine is a fairy tale for postliterate males—Carrie for boys as the revenge of the nerds. The novel memorializes the youth and car culture of the 1950s in this version of “Cinderella” in which the high school nerd changes into a hood, acquires a beautiful girlfriend (the princess), and destroys the bullies who formerly humiliated him—all through the agency of a magical car, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, “One of the long ones with the big fins.” Arnie’s transformation is a body makeover, like the car’s. Pet Sematary is based on W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” and the formula of the fatal wish come true. ’Salem’s Lot is Dracula come to Our Town. Often King’s characters and places have mythical or typifying names: Carrie White, John Smith, Louis Creed (whose cat is named Church), Libertyville (Pennsylvania), Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot (corrupted, into ’Salem’s Lot).

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Fairy tales state existential dilemmas “briefly and pointedly” in stereotypes and formulas in which “evil is as omnipresent as virtue” (Bettelheim 8), but the figures in many of the tales are unequivocal, “not ambivalent as we all are in reality.” Polarization (projection of internal conflict on “positive” and “negative” objects) allows the child to learn to deal with emotional and moral distinctions. Amoral tales with ambiguous characters (like “Puss ’n’ Boots”) reassure the child that success can be achieved (Bettelheim 9–10). Thus, the boy in ’Salem’s Lot is “a biggerthan-life archetypal eleven-year-old boy. And a lot of the kid characters in the books are strong and good” (qtd. in Kilgore 104). Barlow, the King vampire in ’Salem’s Lot, is Dracula raised to the nth power. In The Dark Half, the storyteller himself is polarized into the Good author (the clumsy and moderately successful literary novelist Thad Beaumont) and the Bad author (George Stark, his pseudonym and inspired pulp writer). The campy Creepshow includes types such as the henpecked professor-husband and the insufferable bitch wife, or the Gothic, all-consuming patriarch who terrorizes his daughters with the line, repeated as a ghastly-farcical refrain, “I want my cake!” Ambiguous characters such as Carrie are protagonist-victim-monsters with whom we identify as the story metes out justice from her perspective. (King’s early novels usually provided a semblance of the fairy tale consolation. Thus the exceptions, the familycentered Cujo and Pet Sematary, were especially shocking for ending with the death of a child.) “Round” characters were the product of literacy and memory, of consciousness that could turn in upon itself. King’s characters are not introspective in the usual sense. They are postliterate schizophrenics whose inner space is laid graphically before us, in the blood-filled elevators of the Overlook Hotel or in cinematographically realized flashbacks or in flames. King gets us inside the skins of his protagonists by giving them his own preternaturally sharp third eye. Whether we really empathize with Arnie Cunningham or not, we cannot doubt the intensity of his physical sensations. Similarly the clairvoyant Danny Torrence shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward, hearing his heels clack on the white hexagonal tiles, and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him. The woman was sitting up. .... Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There

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was the minute sound of breaking ice shards. She was not breathing. (The Shining 218) King’s characters may be “flat,” but the worlds they move in are “hyperrealized” in primary colors. Roland, the “gunslinger” and knight errant of the postapocalyptic The Dark Tower is “like something out of a fairy tale or myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book” (King, Dark Tower: Gunslinger 42). According to Douglas Winter, he is “a simulacrum of the classic elements of heroic mythology”: a quester wandering through a wasteland of broken-down machines, gasoline pumps, highways, and railroads (66). King’s epic fantasy The Stand, often compared to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is perhaps the most beloved King book. It is also a postapocalyptic Western: small groups of survivors of a superflu struggle across the American continent, attempting to rebuild civilization. The adversary is the “Walkin’ Dude” named Randall Flagg who draws loners and outlaws to Las Vegas; he is opposed by tribal Mother Abagail Freemantle, who is also the childlike seer. As in the Greek epics or the Hebrew Bible, The Stand’s stereotypes are absolute figures around which to organize information. The Stand (like the oral epic) is copious, redundant, organized by aggregates (associated clusters that provide structures for storing information), amplification, and set formulas—epithets, proverbs, songs, speeches, messages, rituals, and omens—rather than tight plotting. Fran Goldsmith’s diary (like Mike Hanlon’s diary in It) stands for what is left of literacy and history. As in the oral epic, history is contextualized, embedded within the human life world of polarized action and struggle. Needful Things (1991) has “a huge cast,” King says, calling it a “throwback” to ’Salem’s Lot and The Stand, “where I threw in 50 or 60 characters and then said, ‘Shit!’ and threw in about 30 more” (qtd. in Ashton-Haiste 30). A disaster or crisis is often the focal point for assembling a vast number of characters. Carrie, King’s first novel, and ’Salem’s Lot, his second, destroyed whole towns and in the process took an inventory of culture. King is known for setting up a “complete, mundane, comfortable world with name-brand products and familiar language” (Thomases and Tebbel 207), a world like our own whose repletion of surfaces is a disavowal of its real ephemerality. That King’s “worlds are echo chambers of popular culture” (Twitchell Preposterous 104) is consistent with his role as “oral” historian and compares with Homer’s use of copia—the catalogues of men and artifacts. In a 1981 interview, King describes the reader as “a guy in space” who, lacking historical context, needs to be brought down to a

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semblance of earth, anchored to a hyperreal or created “environment that the reader can identify with totally” (qtd. in Thomases and Tebbel 207). As in preliterate culture, the information flow is the only “real thing.” Some things are “certain,” King explains, in that they “run through society. Anywhere ... somewhere there’s going to be a Coke sign. People identify with Coke” (qtd. in Thomases and Tebbel 207) to the extent that for many it is not merely a soft drink but, as Stuart Ewen suggests, a badge of identity. In our eternally remade culture, Coke (or its like) replaces the cross, the flag, or the ancestor. Adapting the methods of the American Naturalists to contemporary popular culture, King makes his characters and settings “dense” with demographic signs. Like Disney World or Norman Rockwell’s paintings, his texts combine naturalistic detail with the comforting two-dimensionality of TV sitcoms and kitsch. In a culture of advertising, brand images can attain a semblance of permanence through their omnipresence and become our archetypes. Coke is the “real” thing. H O M E O S TA S I S

AND

N O S TA L G I A

Oral literature “invested a great deal of energy in saying over and over what has been learned arduously over the ages.” Oral culture is by nature conservative (Ong 41–42). But Ong, Havelock, Millman Parry, and Claude Lévi-Strauss have stressed that (in contrast to literate societies) preliterate societies were homeostatic, living “very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium,” explains Ong, by “sloughing off memories” that have lost relevance (46). There was no sense of linear chronology as we know it. The oral narrator began an epic in medias res, meaning not (as commonly thought) at a particular midpoint in a chronological narrative, but at whatever scene or formula was called for. Performances were not repeated verbatim. The bard’s memory consisted of “a float of themes and formulas” out of which stories were constructed (Ong 6). Oral traditions reflected present cultural values (Ong 48). Oral history was inconceivable. Postmodern history is similarly nonexistent. In 1971 William Irwin Thompson wrote that Americans’ idea of history is “a shattered landscape in which the individual moves through a world of discontinuities” (12), and where a person no longer has a “history” as a single, linear identity developing from birth to death and “is free to change lives and wives as often as he has the energy” (18). In the 1980s and 1990s, this serial view of the self became commonplace. Replacing linear history was a cyclical pattern of retrogression, nostalgia, and renewal. Postmodern psychology shifts the emphasis from the ego to a more fluid idea

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of the self in time and place. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” we were told in the 1980s. Self-help books such as Passages proclaimed that we go through (indeed are) a series of different stages or crises—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, mid-life, old age—whose constant is the passage itself, or the process of psychic death and rebirth. Popular culture is obsessed with rites of passage, which objectify flux and commemorate change. Each “passage” makes us adolescents in that we confront primary terrors, regress, take stock, discard, and begin again. King’s novels concern, and provide rites for, these passages. In the postmodern scene, history is homeostatic, relative rather than objective and linear. This perspective became obvious in the 1980s in movies that celebrated or examined nostalgia in generational cycles. Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Blue Velvet conflated time, blurring the boundaries of the generation “gap”; parents became adolescents again and vice versa, or the audience was invited to be a part of both generations at the same time (Blue Velvet). The conflation was uncannily pleasurable and sinister. Since the 1950s, American culture has looked back roughly two decades or a single generational span—with the 1950s retroactivated in the 1970s, the 1960s beginning in the 1980s, and the 1970s in the 1990s. The early and middle novels of Stephen King are informed with this pattern. King is Rousseauistic, depicting good children, corrupt parents, and evil institutions (Magistrale, Landscape 95–97), and a world in which cyclical renewal is necessary. A pattern, as Joseph Reino also notes (2–3), is the lost father who is replaced by a writer-figure and a stopgap culture created out of the “pop” remnants of American culture (’Salem’s Lot’s Ben Mears, the Losers’ Club, whose group therapy and regression serve the same purpose). Like postfuturist science fiction films of the 1980s, King’s landscapes are haunted with the debris of the accumulated, corrupt past, and the future is ever in doubt. In The Stand, most of the world’s people have been destroyed by plague, but not their corpses, abandoned cars, or the world’s weapons. “Everything is lying around waiting to be picked up again,” remarks one character. Trashcan Man, pyromaniac and walking arsenal, is also a technological wizard. The Walkin’ Dude is the sociopath haunted by and haunting with political memories waiting to come around again; he recalls attending school with Charles Starkweather, meeting Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962, riding with the Ku Klux Klan, cop-killing with black men in New York City, and whispering plans to Donald DeFreeze about Patty Hearst (Winter, Stephen King 59–60). Flagg (the Walkin’ Dude) draws his fellows across the desert to Las Vegas. King’s chosen few are American Adams whose solution is to begin again, creating small alternative communities. Hence Fran

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Goldsmith and Stu Redmond leave the world’s last community in Colorado and return to Maine—to start over. King’s world is one of permanent “historical amnesia,” as Fredric Jameson calls it. Conservative nostalgia substitutes for a temporal perspective and effects a sense of continuity and permanence through spatialized time, as Stuart Ewen points out, or history as style (111–34). Vivian Sobchack notes a similar trend in “postfuturist” science fiction from Blade Runner (1982) to Back to the Future (1985): “excess scenography” inflated the value of space, of mise-en-scène, while temporal distinctions were “conflated” and “homogenized” (274). As in the Gothic, the setting very nearly was the film. Or, rather, science fiction dissolved into Gothic. “Retro” culture, its product, maintains cycles of continuity against the threat of constant dislocation. King retrofitted the horror monsters of 1950s reruns of the already nostalgic 1930s film classics. In a culture that maintained itself through nostalgia, the hoarier the cliché, the better. In King’s novels, according to Paul Gray, life becomes “stock footage” and “ancient history the Flintstones.” What Gray doesn’t say is that for many it is the Flintstones or nothing at all. But King is also “postmodern,” says Robert Kiely, in depicting a nation “exposed over and over to itself, as an enormous mirror, part trite situation comedy, part science fiction, part cop show.” As national rites of passage, King’s books focus on our era of diminished expectations. They especially fit the 1980s, when America saw itself less in the image of Lincoln than as Ronald Reagan, a “dazed behemoth with padded shoulders” (Kiely). This sensibility is obvious in Christine (1983), which, like Back to the Future, was a compendium of the 1970s as 1950s retro culture. The novel was a scaffold to which King attached copia from folklore, pop culture, and from the mobile youth culture that had come down from the 1950s by way of advertising, rock songs, television film, and national pastimes. Christine is flooded with the fragments and rhythms of fifty-some rock songs from the 1950s through the 1970s—with the 1970s songs (by Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, and Elvis Costello) standing as jaded versions of their prototypes. The spiritual source of this mythos is Christine’s haunted radio, her “soul,” which is stuck on a Golden Oldies station, thus determining the plot, with “Teen Angel,” “In My Room,” and “Dead Man’s Curve” proving most fatal. Vintage rock also structures the novel into three sections (with rock lyrics heading each of the 51 chapters) and arranged in Leslie Fiedler’s terms, in Love and Death in the American Novel, as “Teenage Car Songs,” “Teenage Love Songs,” and “Teenage Death Songs,” the first two categories collapsing into the last. Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical in which deja vu substitutes for history.

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The Gothic is by nature nostalgic and a critique of nostalgia: its essentials are regression, haunted space designed to recapture (primal) psychic energy, and in the recovery of feeling, a sense of rebirth or transcendence. Christine is nostalgia about the horrors of nostalgia, a “dark parable about the death of the American romance with the automobile,” enacting its “last gasp” (Winter, Stephen King 125) or final backfire. Thus the 1958 Plymouth Fury is a time machine, a spatial metaphor for trips taken in and out of time. Christine is also a fine example of how reading Stephen King conserves through ritual. King recalls the moment that inspired him to write The Stand, of hearing a preacher “dilating upon the text ‘Once in every generation the plague will fall among them.’” He liked the phrase (it “sound[ed] like a Biblical quotation but (was] not”) so much that he typed it out and tacked it over his typewriter (Danse Macabre 371). In 1990, with much fanfare, the “original” version of The Stand appeared, enlarged by some 350 pages and several new characters. The ritual of rereading thus becomes the Second Experience. The Second Experience, moreover, hits baby boomers at midlife and becomes part of its ritual of wiping out, taking stock, and starting over. Both generations seem to find the second or third time around richer, more Biblical in its plenitude. In May 1994 The Stand was back on the paperback best-seller list. The occasion was the ABC television miniseries, updated for the age of AIDS it seemed to predict, and premiering on Mother’s Day. King’s tales of terror are rituals of the most fundamental sort, of redemption, regression, abjection, and return. For at least two generations they have been a collective act in which cultural memory was reinstated, a culture’s looking back to get its bearings. As King’s recitations, these tales of monsters, machines, brand images, and old TV icons, viewed nostalgically or elegaically, go on offering provisional structures for a dissolving and reforming culture. T H E “G R A I N

OF THE

V O I C E ”: K I N G ’ S O R A L /A U R A L N A R R AT I V E

The 1986 magazine Time cover story provided a list of King’s patented “tics and tropes.” Below are six (out of nine): The Disgusting Colloquialism: “She drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked up a remarkably large looey onto the top of his head.” The Brand-Name Maneuver: “Here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass.” The Comic-Strip Effect: “Whack-WHACK-Whack-WHACK—And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and

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pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth. (NONONONONONONO).” The Burlesque Locution: “‘Goodafternyoon, deah leady,’ Richie said in his best Baron Butthole voice. ‘I amn ain diah hneed of three ticky tickies to youah deah old American flicktoons.’” The Fancy Juxtaposition: epigraphs from Virgil and Mean Streets. (Kanfer 74) What these examples have in common, and an aspect of the comic book style, is an acoustical dimension: printed words must be sounded out and heard by a bodily ear, their oral–aural dimension retrieved. King is not the “first to turn his fiction over to the echo chamber of mass culture,” Gray remarks, mentioning postmodernists Barthelme, Pynchon, and John Barth. King’s novels are the other side of what John Barth called a “literature of exhaustion” that confronted the crisis of literacy with Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968). The “author” of Barth’s “Life-Story,” confined to print, blurts out in direct address to “The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction,” and asks “How is it that you don’t go to a movie.... play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances?” (127). However particularized and challenged “you” feel after reading this passage, Barth’s author concludes that his reader is himself. King prefers an even more direct assault on his readers’ senses. Rather than turn the barrier of print itself into self-conscious art (as Barth does), and drawing on the comic-book, he gives his fiction a sound track. He bludgeons typography until it performs. In “The Body” (1982), the narrator is crossing a railroad bridge when a train materializes: The freight’s electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comic book or one of your own daydreams fly apart, letting you know what both the heroes and cowards really heard when death flew at them: W H H H H H H H O N N N N N N N N K ? WHHHHHHHHONNNNNNNNK (Different 358). King sees to it that his books “not only read well, but listen well” (Kilgore 116). “It’s the total experience of a book to read it aloud,” opines King. “It’s a much more intimate experience to listen to a novel.... The page has a shape ... a form of its own.... But when you listen ... you can fall totally into [the story]” (qtd. in Beahm 128). It is hardly surprising that King is a fan of talking books (the King children earned their allowances by taping books

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for him to listen to while driving) and has recorded many of his own. While many authors are poor readers (and don’t know it), King is the exception. “Usually if someone gets through one paragraph I’m dancing in the aisles,” says Jim Barrigan, director of Penguin-Highbridge Audio. King “opens up his Jolt cola, takes a swig, and off he goes.... He’s an editor’s dream because he can go through three or four pages of the book without one mistake” (Green 43). King shifts typography into iconography, representing sound as sound. In “The Raft,” for example: “‘Help,’ Rachel screamed. ‘Help it hurts please help it hurts IT HURTS IT HURRRRTS———’” (288). What more can you say? King reclaims the discounted or discredited language of the body, especially the body in pain. The first lines of Misery (1987), therefore, can be comprehended only when read phonetically: they must be pronounced and heard: umber whunnn yerrrnnn umber whunn fayunn These sounds: even in the haze. (3) Author Paul Sheldon is awakening from an automobile accident and a long drugged sleep. The passage communicates Sheldon’s swim back into consciousness, his registration of the sounds of the words, “Your number one fan,” spoken by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse obsessed with Sheldon’s romance novels. The phonetic spellings force us to read the text aloud or “as if” aloud. We are plunged into Sheldon’s existential situation, his failure to comprehend words as words, his embodiment. We enter active oral–aural consciousness. For audiences already “there,” such typography replenishes the one-dimensional, enclosed medium of the printed page. During the crisis of orality in Greek culture, in the fifth century B.C., when writing was new and lacked the authority of speech, many written texts similarly called attention to themselves, “speaking” of their limitations and also of strange new powers. Havelock translates a scene from Euripides’ Hippolytus (428 B.C.) in which a murder victim’s husband discovers on her corpse a note naming her killer. “The tablet shouts, it cries aloud,” he exclaims, overcome less with grief than with surprise at the novelty of text: “Look, look at what I have seen in written letters (en graphais)—a song speaking aloud!” (lines 877–80, qtd. in Havelock 22). In the eighteenth century Lawrence Sterne showed a comparable selfconsciousness about the printed text. King forces his text into a postliterate aural–acoustic dimension, allowing the reader to get the sense of “being

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there.” And although Sterne and King play with the text as if it were a toy, both seek to evoke a sense of the evocative power of the spoken word in oral culture. All sound is dynamic, but especially oral utterance, which originates inside living organisms and thus has magical power. The spoken word is always an event, a moment in time, lacking the “thinglike repose” of the printed text (Ong 32). To represent the oral African-American community, Toni Morrison seeks a “visceral or emotional response as well as an intellectual response ... with the audience” and opens the text to the participation of the reader and a chorus (Morrison, “Rootedness” 330). Morrison may be the best example of the oral novelist that we have. King’s “pop,” white, mass-produced version of “soul” (and however much it pretends to a homogeneity of American culture that does not exist) affects similar qualities, in particular the visceral sense of a voice—or, rather, voices. King’s short stories are often first-person narratives. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” narrated by crusty Homer Buckland, is one of several in dialect. The novel Dolores Claiborne (1993) is narrated by a garrulous sixty-fiveyear-old woman as a single taped confession. One of King’s most widely recognized “tics” is the use of italics to enhance typography, lending the text acoustical power (however paradoxically through a kind of iconographic signification). Italics shift the typography, enabling readers to hear the more-than-literal word, returning them to the uncanny voice of the unconscious. Italics most commonly stylize proverbial expressions and messages, flashbacks, fantasies, clairvoyant utterances, intuitions, and/or auditory hallucinations. With the help of italics, the Creed family cat Church, recently returned from the dead in Pet Sematary, “speaks” to his master: “I’m here to tell you that you come out the other side with your purr-box broken and a taste for the hunt.... I’m part of what your heart will grow now... Tend your garden well” (192). Earlier in the novel a hit and run victim speaks from the collective voice of the Micmac burial ground: The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak. Louis heard syllables—phonetics, at least—but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.... “Caaa,” the young man said. “Gaaaaaaa—”.... Then Louis thought he might have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious ... cross-patched the sounds into my own experience.... A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to ... move up and down his arms and along his belly in waves....

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“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis,” the dying man said. “A man grows what he can ... and tends it.” (74) Later, picked up by Jud Crandall, “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier” recurs as a refrain throughout the novel—its fatal, faintly Biblical sound reverberating beyond the page. Italics signify an opening in the text, a gap in fabric of reality through which the collective unconscious speaks. In “The Reach,” italics similarly represent a community voice, whether represented by an individual—for instance, Stella Flanders, who has never left Goat Island—or the spirits who come to meet her when, ninety-five years old and dying of cancer, she decides to cross to the mainland: She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke: Take my hand, Stella— (do you) Take my hand, Bill— (oh do you do you) Annabelle ... Freddy ... Russell ... John ... Ettie ... Frank ... take my hand, take my hand ... my hand ... (do you love). (“The Reach,” 565) The typography indicates a transcendence of ordinary textuality in contrapuntalism. “Do the Dead Sing?” asks the voice. The answer is another question, “Do you love?” It is answered in what she perceives to be a ghostly chorus, a self-transcending affirmative. Italics often lead into internal rhyme and elaborate, ballad-like patterns of incremental repetition—a question, a phrase, a quotation, a proverb—as in Stella’s “I stay here because the mainland is too far to reach” (553), and “The Reach was wider in those days” (Skeleton 560). The reach is water, time, memory, community, and finally life. The question “Do you love?” thematically and tonally links contrasting stories in Skeleton Crew: in “The Reach,” in “Nona” (where it is a terrifying self-indictment), and in “The Raft,” where it is a fragment of a song. In the beginning of the story the question is associated with summer love and, by the end, with loss and failure and death. The skillfully balanced contrasts in the stories go on indefinitely and give a sense of King’s considerable aural range. King recalls the first record he ever owned, a 48 with “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” Finding rock was like finding something “very, very powerful, like a drug, like a rush. It made you bigger than you were.... Then

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watching American Bandstand and seeing ... really ugly [people].... They look[ed] like me! But the music made them big, too” (Schaffer 115). Rock music is a big part of the King mystique. “Every day at 9 A.M., ... [he] climbs into a T-shirt and jeans, swallows a vitamin pill, drinks a glass of Maine tap water and turns on some hard rock on WZON” and writes until 5 P.M. (Kanfer 83). In many oral cultures, narratives were (and still are) chanted to music, especially drums and stringed instruments, which stabilizes or varies the text. In Christine, King’s patterning, incremental repetition, and (as the horror mounts) a pulsing, driving rhythm provide a “musical” accompaniment to the action. This has an obvious appeal to people who channel surf or listen to music or watch television while reading. Like writing, reading is no longer a single-minded, solitary activity. King’s novels make sense within the intermediary contexts that the present generation of readers encounter. As they prepare children and adolescents for adulthood, they also initiate them into the global village. Many characters discover their identities as writers first through telling stories to friends (Gordie Lachance in “The Body” and Bill Denbrough in It). The writer’s role is a response to a community, and King’s speaking narrators often act as the community storyteller performing on demand. In “The Body,” the narrator Gordie transcends embodiment and finds his calling by telling stories to his friends, and the oral situation represents a special pre-adolescent space in which “real” community or presence existed. In It, Bill Denbrough, introspective stutterer-cum-successful professional writer, must perform as the Losers’ spokesman. Wisdom may derive from the “inner child” but it can reveal itself only in the power of utterance. Denbrough is “called” to lead the group in the Ritual of Chud, which is a kind of shouting match. We are reminded to read phonetically: Dropping his voice a full register, making it not his own (making it, in fact, his father’s voice, although Bill would go to his grave not knowing this ...), drawing in a great breath, he cried: “HE THRUSTS HIS FISTS AGAINST THE POSTS AND STILL INSISTS HE SEES THE GHOSTS NOW LET ME GO!”

(It 1056)

In this demonstration, the dialogic voice of the community (the father and the symbol of the ancestor as foundation, the Turtle) wins out against the monophonic voice of It (Magistrale, Second 115–19). Conversely, writers who lack an audience, who are blocked or secretive, go berserk (Jack Torrence, Thad Beaumont as Richard Stark). Vision separates, abstracts: sound is a unifying sense. We listen with the whole body, surrounded by sound, becoming the sound. Creating an

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acoustical dimension in which the book seems to speak, King’s enhancements “read” somatically, opening up typographic space to a sense of context. My students explain that when they read King’s fiction they forget themselves. They forget where they are. They forget they are “in a room.” They forget they are reading. O R A L A G O N I S T I C A N D E M PAT H I C M O D E S : T H E D E AT H O F T H E A U T H O R Readers lose themselves in King’s novels because Kingstyle seems to be no style. King takes a hack’s pride in having no affectations or aesthetic purposes (outside of liking to scare people) and his own inner compulsion. He writes because he can’t not write. His comment on the style of the American Naturalists as “horrible or nonexistent” is telling: it is the lack of style that he chooses as trademark. Peter Straub was immediately taken with King’s “unprecendentedly direct” style: “It was not at all a literary style, but rather the reverse. It made a virtue of colloquialism and transparency.... [I]t moved like the mind itself ... like a lightning rod to the inner lives of his characters” (“Meeting Stevie” 10). “Vox pop” Richard Corliss more recently termed it (38). The absence of a style gives King a voice, and thus an illusion of presence, of a body. In an essay from Image/Music/Text, Roland Barthes uses the phrase “the grain of the voice” to describe what one hears “deep down in the cavities” of the body of a singer (181). Beyond the song, the singer, and the style, and lacking identity or personality, the “grain” is the “body in the voice as it sings” (188) that testifies to authenticity. Through his disavowal of “literary” style, King acquires (at least the impression of) such a “grain” or “body.” His books have “rhythm” and “weight,” says Michael McDowell, and thus “work for most readers in a way that they perceive as visceral” (95). King reaches down to what Sartre valorized in Camus (and Roland Barthes considered impossible): “writing degree zero.” Or, as Charles L. Grant describes the King phenomenon: “It’s a voice there in the work, King sitting on the back porch with a beer in his hand.... ‘So let me tell you a story that’ll scare the shit out of you’—even if it’s five hundred pages long, you listen” (30). The author as guy next door. As Ong tells us, the verbomotor lifestyle of primary orality tends to unite people in groups: it “fosters personality structures that are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than ... among literates” (Ong 69). King’s noises presume the immediate presence of a “listener,” project an instant audience, and lend him a credibility that goes with the territory. Says Nina Auerbach, “we believe him” whether he is quoting Moby Dick or saying “‘EEEEEOOOOOOARRRHMMMMM!’ or ‘Hurts! It

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hurrrrr—.’” (“Not With a Bang”). The aural–acoustical dimension of King’s rhetoric extends far beyond the text in an ongoing dialogue with readers and critics (and himself ), creating an arena (or, rather, multimedia center) for the writer’s public personality. King multiplies himself in prefaces, forewords, introductions, afterwords, and notes that are dog-eared, revered, and intoned by fans. He writes and speaks with the authority or (what is even better) the untutored “common sense” and anti-intellectual humor of the “average man” on nearly everything. His approach to writing the text of a volume on gargoyles, a coffee table book and collaboration with the photographer fstop Fitzgerald, is a case in point. In it King swears he knew nothing about the subject, researched nothing, and wrote as he promised to, from his “nerve endings” (“It wasn’t laziness; ... the more empiric knowledge I gleaned on the subject of gargoyles, the worse I would write about them” [Nightmares 7–8]). Frequently King turns anti-intellectualism into oral “literature,” in the sense that writing takes on the properties of oral agonistic. In the foreword to Underwood and Miller’s Fear Itself, he counters the “brand name” accusation with the self-appellation, the “Green Giant of ... the ‘modern horror story’” (“On Becoming” 15). Thus raising the insult to a hyperbolic flattery, he finishes the round with a literary allusion: “Perhaps the first brand-name writer was Charles Dickens” (“On Becoming” 42). His strategy descends from the oral form called “flyting” or reciprocal name calling, with King inverting the vilification on himself. (He gained early expertise when he wrote a college newspaper column called “King’s Garbage Truck.”) King’s stylistic trademark, if he has a single one, is “excess,” says Michael Morrison. He “revels in crude behavior on the page.” A “literary bull in the china shop,” he “not only breaks glassware to get your attention, he defecates on the floor” (Morrison 263). King’s scatological expressionism compares with the oral storyteller’s liberal use of the agonistic, the language of gore, grimaces, grunts, and groans. Hence King confesses in the “Notes” to Skeleton Crew, “I got to thinking about cannibalism one day ... and my muse once more evacuated its magic bowels on my head. I know how gross that sounds, but it’s the best metaphor I know of, inelegant or not, and believe me when I tell you I’d give the little Fornit Ex-Lax if he wanted it. Anyway, I started to wonder if a person could eat himself ” (571). This note explains the inspiration for “Survivor Type,” the tale of a doctor marooned on an island who subsists on parts of his own body. King’s metaphors, even when describing his own style, are somatic: they seek to “reinvest” literary clichés with body language. Much of King’s content, as in nineteenth-century belles lettres, dramatizes and acts out the implied author’s relations with his readers.

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Proverbs and riddles are used in oral culture “not simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat,” and one riddle sets the stage for another appositional or contrasting one (Ong 44). In his “Afterword” to Different Seasons King answers the objection that he lacks “literary elegance” by claiming to give instead “good weight,” which he translates thusly: “if you can’t run like a thoroughbred you can pull your brains out. A voice rises from the balcony: ‘What brains, King. Ha! Ha, very funny, fella, you can leave now!’ ” (504). Joseph Reino expresses consternation with this sort of behavior, which he calls “image-mutilation” and regards as compulsive (Preface [ix]). Regardless of taste or compulsion, it is one of King’s tropes. Paradoxically it validates readers’ experience of the texts, enhancing their sense of the voice and the person. Ultimately it recontextualizes the writer and the reader in a site that recalls the oral community. Oral literature was agonistic not only in its manner of presentation but in its content, its celebration of physical excess and its ardent descriptions of violence. Blood flows freely in the oral tradition. Citing psychologist J. C. Carothers, Ong points out that as literates tend to interiorize schizophrenia, people in oral cultures more often act it out: rather than psychic withdrawal, they show “external confusion, leading ... to violent action, including self mutilation and violence to others.” Special terms designate this behavior: “the old-time Scandinavian warrior going ‘berserk’” or the Southeast Asian “running ‘amok’” (Ong 69). The detailed depiction and ritualization of violence was a logical extension of this perspective. Ong notes how Books VIII and X of The Iliad “rival” the most sensational of today’s television shows and movies (Ong 44). The grisliness of the oral versions of the “classical” fairy tales is by now well known. Carrie’s reversal of Cinderella’s happy ending, for instance, recovers the gruesome revenge elements of the tale’s folk originals (the stepsisters’ heels are sliced off and a dove pecks out their eyes). Carrie is Cinderella in the body language of menstrual blood and raging hormones. King’s adolescent joy in grimaces and groans, the Mad magazine humor, and the staple of “grue” hardly need mentioning. Writing exorcises demons that would otherwise erupt, as the blocked Jack Torrence of The Shining (1977) demonstrates. King’s writer-protagonists are invariably prone to grotesque oral or scatological performances or extreme violence, suggesting Kristevan relationships between writing and horror, the body and the text. Misery (1987) portrays writing and reading as a grotesque physical battle of the sexes (with needles, axes, and typewriters)—to the death. Or King’s writers produce literalized metaphors in which their characters come to violent physical life (The Dark Half, “Secret Window, Secret Garden”). Red, the narrator of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”

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(1982) reveals to the reader that he has concealed the one-hundred-page manuscript about the quasi-legendary prison career of Andy Dufresne in his rectum (enlarged by gang-banging encounters with the prison “sisters”). In “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” (in “The Body,” Different Seasons) a fat boy gets even with his tormentors by vomiting all over his fellow contestants at a blueberry pie-eating contest and starts a gut-wrenching chain reaction in the audience. In Danse Macabre, King explains his appeals to the gag instinct as a last resort: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion, and so 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” (37). The engagement with an audience undermines King’s corporate image, authorial stance, and textual closure and so enhances the King phenomenon. The dialogic text means that King is “in love with his readers, as someone in his income bracket might well be,” writes Susan Bolotin. This cozy relationship spills over into the now countless books of Stephen King commentary, Stephen King calendars, Stephen King quiz books (Spignesi 1990 and 1992) and games, Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter (Jan. 1985–Dec. 1989), The Stephen King Companion (Beahm), In the Darkest Night: A Student’s Guide to Stephen King, Teacher’s Manual: The Novels of Stephen King (Zagorski), and The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia (Spignesi). This phenomenon in turn spills over into the news magazines that follow him under the headings of Business or Show Business as often as the book section.7 “Do you know me?” he asked rhetorically, looking at you through your TV screen. This American Express commercial assumed that King’s face is a familiar image, a fact that makes him unique among authors. As King has asked, “What does it mean when somebody who is a novelist is invited to appear on ‘Hollywood Squares’?” King is the author not as Logos but as image. Whereas this makes a movie star unreachable, it makes an author approachable. When we read “him” we hear his voice and see his face. He is so much a part of the popular culture that flows through his books that he has become just like you and me. It is not merely that his books “echo” popular culture and advertising; it is that Stephen King is ubiquitous. Although he now writes occasionally for The New York Times Book Review or Life, we are more likely to see him on television or (in paperback) at the local discount or grocery store. His relatively newfound critical acceptance has done anything but set him at a distance; now that he is an American institution, you are “invited” to “Enter into a special relationship with Stephen King”—so says the cover letter for The Stephen King Library (Weinberg). The advertising brochure intones: “Once in a generation, a special writer attains both best-selling popularity

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and great critical acclaim.... The Stephen King Library is being launched in recognition of the achievement of this ‘20th century Edgar Allan Poe.’” King’s celebrity status doesn’t taint the Northeastern homespun, familyman-and-Bangor-citizen. King’s public role is so fragmented, apparently, as to resemble the “average” American’s life. It doesn’t hurt that for one hundred dollars, a fan could join him in 1986 around a Maine campfire and listen to him tell stories (Stephen King’s World of Horror). King sometimes seems to prefer performing his fictions—whether in the form of Stephen King’s World of Horror, a television dramaseries (The Golden Years), directing movies (disastrously, in Maximum Overdrive, 1986), screen writing (successfully in Sleepwalkers, 1992, and The Stand, 1994)— more than writing them, and recalls Charles Dickens’s near defection to the theatre. As Ong points out, in eliminating the narrator’s voice, print “mechanically as well as psychologically locked words into space” and created a firm sense of closure and distance. The Victorian novel, especially in Dickens, was an exception and displayed signs of “lingering feeling for the old oral narrator’s world” (Ong 149). The address to the “Dear Reader” indicated the author’s sense of audience and context, and monthly installments encouraged unprecedented reader engagement with the characters and the author.8 Dickens’s addiction to dramatic readings from his novels is even more revealing. His favorite scene—Sykes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist—was also his most theatrical in the Grand Guignol style. Eisenstein quotes Stefan Zweig’s description of the “three-quarters of a mile” long lines of people who waited for tickets to a Dickens reading in New York (207). Contemporaries report that Dickens’s genius as a performer was as great as his writing talent. His fiction “partook of the theatrical,” says Philip Collins, and in giving readings from that fiction he was demonstrating “his long-standing debt, as a writer, to [this calling]” (xviii). Likewise King, a mass-media guru for the global village, uses whatever means to make the page an arena of spectacle and struggle. As King’s performances are novels, his novels are theatrical performances. Sometimes it seems as if he would rather demonstrate or teach the—books than simply write them. The brand-name dropping, thought to be a sign of King’s anti-intellectualism, is part of a heuristic gloss that runs throughout and beyond the fiction. Don Herron is correct in describing it as “much like what you’d expect from a professor,” providing “themes, recurring motifs, cross-references” (133). In this respect, it contrasts with academic postmodernists who delight in burying their themes in arcane codes and allusions that are in the end self-referential. King does the opposite: he writes a horror fan’s version of Dracula (’Salem’s Lot). He explains literary allusions in terms of the mass media, producing a cross

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between Classic Comics and Cliff ’s Notes, or between T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land and the CD-ROM multimedia edition of Grollier’s Encyclopedia. As part of King’s analysis of the American way of death, Louis Creed of Pet Sematary finds himself thinking “‘A fine and private place ... but none, I think, do there embrace.’ Who? Andrew Marvell. And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk anyway?” (Pet 285). The answer is on page 286 of the novel, where Jung’s collective unconscious is explained. By the end of the novel, after burying his son’s corpse in an Indian burial ground that resurrects its contents with naturalistic simplicity, Louis feels “less than human now, one of George Romero’s stupid, lurching movie zombies” or an escapee from “T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little god Swamp.... Headpiece full of straw.... That’s me” (Pet 372). King is serious in referring to his fiction’s “good weight.” As speech acts, having the force of utterance from within the body, words do have substance, context, power, impact, frisson. Truly moral fiction must make you feel (King, Introd., Arbor House Treasury 11). And a good tale, Poe has asserted, is one that produces an emotional or visceral effect. King’s appeal is “visceral” also in the specific sense that he is perceived as speaking-listeningfeeling presence. Here is Book of the Month Club editor-in-chief Brigitte Weeks advertising Needful Things, the Fall 1991 Main Selection: the reason we care about [King’s] novels is that we care about his people.... We feel the pain in Polly’s twisted hands.... Most of all ... we sense that Stephen King cares about us, his readers. Once again, he says it best: “I love the people who read my stuff.... I love them because they listen.” (10) Weeks’s “Stephen King” is a smarmy, all-American empath. He creates contexts within which his feelings—especially his feeling for pain—are extended to readers, who are not readers so much as listeners, and who in listening are “healed.” This King, moreover, needs us. His image as a man who goes through a “Freudian exorcism” every time he writes is appropriate to our time, for our priest must be “one of us.” A plurality of voice, body, boy next door, public figure, teacher, entertainer, and family man, King has become everything but that alienating figure, The Author. Decentering and deconstructing the authorial role, he is the community storyteller. “[W]riters, actors, and actresses are the only recognized mediums of our society,” King, quoting Thad Beaumont (from The Dark Half) told Tony Magistrale (Second Decade 11). Hence Stephen King: empath, medium, shaman, healer. As his zombies and vampires became

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our dying and reviving gods, representing and absolving us of our own cannibalism, King had become our high priest by the end of the 1980s. In a 1983 Playboy interview, he suggested that his role derived from that of the old Welsh sin eater, the wandering bard who would be called to the house when somebody was on his deathbed. The family would feed him their best food and drink, because while he was eating, he was also consuming all the sins of the dying person, so at the moment of death, his soul would fly to heaven untarnished, washed clean. (King, qtd. in Norden 54) In “absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities,” the Sin Eaters are “taking them upon ourselves”: We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spinning our spider webs of words, ... sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it into the night. (King, qtd. in Norden 54–55) The “spider webs of words” are the medicine man’s poultices, an absorbing, healing medium for the cultural body. But that body is, after all, fantastic. And because he “sells” lies, consolations, and absolutions, and will die with a full stomach—as he readily admits—King is “headed straight for hell” (Norden 54–55). Indeed, horror as King had defined it by the end of the first decade of his career, was like most such rites of passage and absolution, was antiintellectual, conservative, and self-recuperating—“as Republican as a banker in a three-piece suit.” It was an oral tradition in several senses. Or as King said in 1983, it had an “effect of reconfirming values, or reconfirming selfimage and our good feelings about ourselves” (King, qtd. in “An Evening” 9). In King’s second decade, things would become less simple.

NOTES Some of the material in this chapter was published under the titles “Love and Death in the American Car: Stephen King’s Auto-erotic Horror,” in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmare, eds. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray Brown (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1987), pp. 84–94; and “Stephen King,” volume 4 of Critical Survey of Long Fiction, revised edition, ed. Frank N. Magill. Copyright, 1991, by Salem Press, Inc., pp. 1883–1897. 1. Erik Hedegard, “Mentors,” Rolling Stone College Papers, April 15, 1982: 52; qtd. in Winter, Stephen King 22.

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2. Tony Magistrale (Landscape) and David G. Hartwell (Introd., Dark Descent 690) have also noted the similarity between King and Dickens. 3. I have grouped Ong’s eighteen or so devices into more general categories for purposes of this analogy. 4. The relations of Stephen King’s fiction with the electronic media are many and complex. All of his full-length novels through 1993 (with the exception of Thinner, The Talisman, Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder) have been made into or sold as films, most have been profitable, several exceptionally so (Carrie, Stand By Me, Pet Sematary, The Running Man), and several have been critically acclaimed (Carrie, The Shining, Misery, The Dead Zone, Christine, The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne). He has written numerous screenplays and directed the film Maximum Overdrive (1986). His collaborations with filmmakers are well known. His co-writing with George Romero on Creepshow (1982), a film anthology inspired by E.C. Comics’ blend of camp and gore and television series such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery, in turn inspired dozens of horror and fantasy anthologies and series such as HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, which turned the cinematic version of the tale of terror into a showplace for the work of first-time and wellknown directors alike. As a video image King is familiar from American Express commercials, talk shows, and parodies. He has hosted and chatted with fans in a series of television specials called The Horror World of Stephen King. The ABC-TV miniseries adaptation of It (1990) signaled recognition of King’s commercial appeal by network television. Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock company produced Stand By Me (1986) based on “The Body” (1982), Misery (1990), and Needful Things (1993), all directed by Reiner. King wrote the original screenplays for the ABC series Stephen King’s Golden Years (1990) and the film Sleepwalkers (1992). Richard Corliss in Time magazine most recently reports twenty-one Stephen King films. Since then, Pet Sematary 2 (1991), the television miniseries The Tommyknockers (1993), George Romero’s The Dark Half (1993), Rob Reiner’s Needful Things (1993), Mick Garris’s ABC miniseries Stephen King’s The Stand (May 1994), Frank Darabant’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Taylor Hackford’s Dolores Claiborne (1995), and the ABC miniseries Stephen King’s The Langoliers (May 1995) have appeared. See the Filmography, Jeff Conner’s Stephen King Goes to Hollywood and Ann Lloyd’s The Films of Stephen King for a more complete listing. The “Master Storyteller” is also widely available on audio cassette, notably as narrator of his own Dark Tower cycle. 5. For three weeks, November 17–31, 1985, and January 12–18, 1986, King had five simultaneous entries on the bestseller lists (Twitchell, Preposterous 106). 6. Twitchell’s general point about the appeal of violence to adolescents, however, is supported by the boom in the adolescent niche market for horror and thrillers. Stephen King may have had something to do with this trend. See Paul Gray, “Carnage: An Open Book,” Time 2 August 1993: 54. 7. “When the weekly newsmagazines account for King’s success, they betray their bourgeois bias and his talent. Time considers him under the rubric Show Business, while ... Newsweek settles for Business,” reports James Twitchell. In Forbes’s special issue on “entertainment’s biggest earners” for 1986, King ranked with actors, singers, and producers and was the only author on the list (Twitchell, Preposterous 106). In a June 1993 feature. “What People Earn,” Parade Magazine ranks “Stephen King, 46, Author, Bangor, Maine,” at $15 million a year (VerMueulen 4). 8. King’s most recent effort is The Green Mile, published in six Dickens-style installments.

SHARON A. RUSSELL

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eedful Things is King’s last novel to deal with the fictional town of Castle Rock. The town, whose name comes from a Frank Sinatra song of the fifties, is familiar from several earlier works. While King considers The Dark Half, “The Sun Dog,” and Needful Things the Castle Rock trilogy, the town is the setting of novels such as Cujo, The Dead Zone, and the short story, “The Body.” King explains that he is leaving Castle Rock because it is too familiar. He would rather be less comfortable in his writing. Working with a town whose map he can draw discourages him from taking risks (Beahm, Stephen King Story 151). Castle Rock is located near Durham, Maine, where his family moved when he was eleven (Beahm, Stephen King Story 19). The Durham of King’s youth is the model for Castle Rock (Beahm, Stephen King Story 27). The two major divisions of the novel are illustrated with woodcut images, and each chapter begins with a small woodcut. Bill Russell did the illustrations for this text and carries on with this style in Dolores Claiborne. Needful Things also brings back an important character from an earlier novel, Sheriff Alan Pangborn of The Dark Half. Needful Things features a large number of characters who interact as the story progresses. While he experiments with the horror genre in many of his recent works, King returns to his traditional view of horror in Needful Things. Supernatural events dominate the plot. While people act realistically, they are motivated by an

From Stephen King: A Critical Companion, pp. 111–126. © 1996 by Sharon A. Russell.

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evil power. King treats the horror genre seriously in Needful Things, but he also portrays the interactions of the citizens of Castle Rock humorously. PLOT DEVELOPMENT AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE King opens Needful Things with a short chapter called “You’ve Been Here Before.” Here he talks to his readers as though they have just returned to Castle Rock. With a folksy tone he sets the time of year—October. As we sit with him on the steps of the bandstand, he introduces the people who pass and tells a little bit about their relationships, focusing on the aggravations between people. This casual information sets up the personal conflicts which will result in the destruction of Castle Rock. We see the signs Wanda Hemphill, a Baptist, has put up protesting the Casino Nite the Catholics are planning at the Knights of Columbus Hall. The religious leaders of the two congregations, Father Brigham and Reverend William “Willie” Rose, have done nothing to stop the friction between the two groups. We learn about some of the women in town. Myrtle Keeton is worried because her husband Dan, the head selectman, is disturbed about something. Leonore Potter, who takes great pride in her flowers, is considered snooty by the rest of the town. The narrator then brings us up to date on some of the past history of the town, events covered in previous King fiction. He tells us about Frank Dodd of The Dead Zone, Joe Camber and Sheriff Bannerman of Cujo, and Pop Merrill of “The Sun Dog.” He summarizes other conflicts between Henry Beaufort and Hugh Priest, and Wilma Jerzyck and Nettle Cobb. He informs us that Sheriff Alan Pangborn has lost his wife and younger child and that Polly Chalmers is suffering from arthritis. He ends by telling us that all these events will mean nothing compared to the opening of a new store down the street from where Pop Merrill’s junk shop, the Emporium Galorium, used to be. The store’s name is Needful Things, and it is about to get its first customer. After this beginning the novel is divided into three parts: Grand Opening Celebration, The Sale of the Century, and Everything Must Go. It ends with another version of “You’ve Been Here Before.” The action covers eight days, from Tuesday, October 8, to Tuesday, October 15. Each day is clearly marked to help us follow the passage of time. The folksy speaker disappears, and the main body of the novel is told in the voice of a third person narrator who can either remain outside of the characters or move from mind to mind sharing their thoughts with the reader. King picks up the story where the folksy narrator left off. The first sentence not only establishes the focus for this section of the novel but also tells a lot about life in Castle Rock. “In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news” (13).

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King then introduces the first victim of this new store, eleven-year-old Brian Rusk. A sign announces that Needful Things is a new kind of store where you won’t believe your eyes (13). King shows how various people in town react to the store mostly through Brian’s eyes. When Brian notices that the store is open, he goes in even though his mother has shown more interest in it. If we are aware of the horror tradition, we know that Brian should be careful. The owner welcomes him with echoes of Count Dracula’s famous words, “Come in my friend. Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring” (22). Dracula says almost exactly the same words to Harker except for the substitution: “Come freely. Go safely ...” (Stoker 20). The owner, Leland Gaunt, claims to be from Akron, Ohio. Brian thinks the jacket he is wearing may actually be a smoking jacket like Sherlock Holmes wears. This first meeting with Gaunt establishes the strange nature of his store and its contents. Brian holds a splinter from Noah’s Ark and has an image of actually being on it. We get a better idea of how Gaunt operates when he gets Brian to tell him what he wants most in the world—a ’56 Sandy Koufax card. When Gaunt locates the card it is not only the perfect card, it is signed for Brian. Even though Gaunt claims this is just a coincidence, we know these kinds of coincidences don’t just happen, especially in horror fiction. We are concerned when Gaunt negotiates with Brian for the card. The price is just below the amount of money Brian has in his pocket. But there is an additional price. We do not learn exactly what it is, but it involves Wilma Jerzyck, Brian’s neighbor. With this transaction King establishes the pattern Gaunt will use to involve the whole town in a network of “deeds” leading to the destruction of Castle Rock. After Brian’s purchase King describes the attitude of a small New England town to a new shop. He explores the relationship between curiosity and a conservative code where certain things are just not done. He lists the rules which should be followed: you should not be the first to come or the last to go; you should not show too much interest in the contents of the shop or the background of the owner; and you should not bring a welcome-to-town present such as homemade baked goods. But one resident of the town does not follow its rules. Polly Chalmers has a history which fascinates the other residents of the town. Her eccentricity is confirmed when people see her bringing a Tupperware container containing a cake to the new store right after it officially opens. When she meets the owner she has the sense she already knows him even though she is sure she doesn’t. She immediately feels the charm of this stranger. But we sense that King wants us to watch Gaunt very carefully. We may even wonder if there is a little irony in the fact that Polly has brought him a devil’s food cake. We observe the shop through Polly’s

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eyes. She sees it as a curio shop and notices that there are no price tags on any of the items. We also learn about the terrible arthritis in her hands, which is even more of a problem because she runs a sewing shop. As they discuss the people in the town we find out that Nettle Cobb, who works for Polly, made the cake. Leland explains that he doesn’t price anything because he enjoys bargaining or “defining worth by need” (48). Even though Polly really likes him, we are worried. After she leaves the shop his smile, showing “his uneven teeth, ... became unpleasantly predatory” (48). We are even more concerned when he states that Polly will do. King continues to detail all of the customers who enter Gaunt’s shop, the negotiations, and the purchases. He develops the personality traits of each character and their reactions. Gradually people leave with their “needful thing” and some unstated agreement to play a little trick on someone, to do a little deed. Some customers make a good bargain, and Gaunt waits to trap them into another kind of action. He promises another object to match the one they have. Once they have discovered how much they want the original piece they will agree to anything to get its mate. Near the end of this section Polly finally agrees to try a charm which will cure her arthritis. The first section of the novel also puts in motion the events Gaunt has established with his sales. It covers the longest period of time, from Tuesday through Sunday. While Gaunt will start a few new feuds between people, he concentrates on controlling people who already have enemies. He has most of the people in town in his power by the end of this section. We also begin to understand the kinds of pranks he asks people to perform and the pattern of destruction he creates. We also become aware that he is some kind of monster. The other person to recognize that he is not human is Brian Rusk, who commits suicide because he cannot deal with this knowledge. Nettle and Wilma meet and kill each other in the first section. Their horrible fight to the death is the signal of what is to come. Gaunt is pleased with what he has accomplished so far. He sees himself as an electrician, cross wiring connections between people. When the wiring is finished he will turn up the voltage all the way. Gaunt does this not just out of malice; he is collecting souls like trophies. But he is also amused by what happens. As he views the town, he also decides to hire an assistant. The second section of the novel covers a shorter period of time, from Sunday to part of Monday. The last section covers from quarter to six on Monday night through the destruction of the town later that night. Gaunt hires Ace Merrill, who has just returned to town to avoid people he owes $80,000 for a drug deal gone bad. On Monday, which is also Columbus Day, the people of Castle Rock discover unpleasant things about each other. The

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various lies Gaunt has caused others to plant being to surface. We watch the reactions as each prank is revealed and begin to anticipate what will happen. Some of the events on this Monday don’t appear to be that bad. Less likable people seem to bring on their own trouble because they believe what they find and don’t actually talk to the other person involved. We can understand that Wilma and Nettle, who were already enemies, might believe the other had done something terrible. But at first we are less sympathetic with people who find forged love letters and believe them. Gaunt also attacks Alan and Polly in this section. They are lovers and care deeply about each other. Gaunt avoids meeting Alan until the end of the novel. He uses the pasts of these two people to set them against each other. Polly has hidden the cause of her son’s death from Alan. Alan still cannot deal with the death of his wife and one son. Alan works to undo the evil Gaunt creates even though he is not aware of the source. He concentrates on the cause of the final confrontation between Nettle and Wilma. The sequence of the events does not work for him, and he begins to suspect that others are involved. The second section ends with most of the action under way. Gaunt teams up Ace Merrill and Buster Keeton. Buster and Ace set bombs connected to timers all over town. Buster wants to die, and Gaunt convinces him to take his enemies with him. By this point we can see the direction the story is taking. Our main concern is for the positive characters, especially Polly and Alan. King interrupts our observation of Buster and Alan with the more humorous battle between the Catholics and the Baptists over the casino night fund-raiser. The fight is now fueled by Gaunt’s intervention. Both sides are attacked by similar bombs at their meetings. King alternates the movements of these two groups with individual acts of destruction. A state trooper who is investigating the murders in town tries to stop the battle between the two religious groups. Even additional troopers can’t halt the fighting. King once again introduces other actions in the middle of this event. Alan returns to town after getting information from Brian’s brother. Some people finally realize how Gaunt has manipulated them. Polly rids herself of Gaunt’s charm. Meanwhile Ace and Buster are making and setting their bombs. As all of the groups come together, Alan is sidetracked when he believes that a videotape of his wife’s death Gaunt has left for him is authentic. King moves everyone into the final confrontations that will end in the destruction of Castle Rock. As the bombs go off, Polly manages to show Alan how he has been fooled by Gaunt. Alan finally confronts this monster. He uses a magic trick to bring the forces of good to his side. He wants to distract Gaunt by making flowers appear from his watch. The ghosts of previous events in the town

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appear to Alan during this final showdown. He sees the sparrows from The Dark Half and the dogs from Cujo and “The Sun Dog.” The Sheriff cannot kill Gaunt, but he manages to grab a bag that contains the souls Gaunt has taken from his customers. When Alan pulls the string to release the flowers, he releases a “bouquet of light” (679) which forces Gaunt to retreat. Polly joins Alan in defending the bag of souls. Gaunt finally changes shape and flies away. The violent storm which has been raging suddenly stops. The few survivors take each other to the hospital. Alan and Polly leave behind a town which no longer exists. The accumulation of events which has plagued Castle Rock for so many years is over. King has one last message for the reader. The final section of Needful Things mirrors the opening. The folksy narrator has returned, but he is in another town, Junction City. A new store is about to open. This time it’s called Answered Prayers. King is telling us that he, too, will go on in another location. Castle Rock is gone, but he will find new towns for his horror. CHARACTERS Many characters interact in Needful Things, but only a few are fully developed. Most of the people in Castle Rock are defined by their needful things and what they are willing to do to get them. Even though we may learn a little about people like Ace Merrill and Buster Keeton, we deal only with the surfaces of these personalities. King deliberately keeps us in the dark about Gaunt, a character who represents absolute evil. Like Barlow in ’Salem’s Lot, he is a supernatural creation who looks human but does not share many human traits. We share his view of the town at certain key moments, but he never really exists as a person. The few characters we get to know in detail change as the novel progresses. Brian Rusk, Alan Pangborn, Polly Chalmers, and, to a lesser extent, Norris Ridgewick have both good and bad characteristics and more fully developed personalities. S H E R I F F A L A N PA N G B O R N King introduces the Sheriff as he returns from Portland, where he has been testifying in several court cases. We first see him defined by his job. Throughout the novel changes in his personality are connected to his investigations. But King also includes details which begin to give us another view of this man. We see him driving a station wagon which he calls the ultimate unmarked car, a family vehicle. He is also depressed. We soon learn the major reason for his depression, the loss of his wife, Annie, and his son, Todd. The car holds memories of family events. For Alan it still contains their ghosts. He finds a trick can in the glove compartment. It looks like a

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can of nuts, but when he opens it a fake snake pops out. His son and wife have been dead for nineteen months, but he still has this can, the last thing his son bought from his favorite store, the Auburn Novelty Shop. He knows he should throw it out, but he can’t bring himself to do it yet. Alan is an amateur magician, and Todd shared his father’s love of tricks. His skill with magic is also evidence of his grace and agility. King also introduces Alan’s relationship with Polly. Alan decides to call her, just the sound of her voice will make him feel better. He recalls another event from his past, his connection to Thad Beaumont. We find out what happened to Thad after the events in The Dark Half. He has a drinking problem and is divorced. The failure of Thad’s relationship leads Alan to blame himself for what happened to his own wife. He was too busy with others to see what was happening to her. The autopsy showed that Annie suffered from a brain tumor. Thad Beaumont’s brain tumor was also the cause of his problems. When the Sheriff enters the police department we see him interact with First Deputy Norris Ridgewick. Alan operates according to what he sees as right. He can’t know that telling Norris to give Danforth Keeton III a ticket for parking in the handicapped space will help create the chaos at the end of the novel. Buster’s reaction sets off his personal disintegration and the destruction of the town. We last see Alan on the first day of the novel amusing himself by making shadow puppets on the wall. The tricks and magic Alan plays with suggest that he has not lost his connection with childhood, an essential trait in a King hero. Alan may be haunted by the death of his wife and son, but he will briefly play the role of foster father for Brian Rusk’s brother and uncover important clues about the first murderers in Castle Rock. Alan’s role as a detective does not give him personal satisfaction because he cannot solve the mystery of his wife’s death. He cannot understand why she was not wearing her seat belt, something she always did. His son was wearing his. He can’t figure out if she was planning to commit suicide and wonders why she took their son with her. He blames himself for not seeing that something was wrong, and he also wonders if he could have done something to prevent it. He originally turned to Polly, his wife’s friend, to see if she had any information to help him with this problem. Alan is forced to deal with his ghosts as he attempts to prevent the destruction of the town. He tries to see a pattern in the inquiries he makes about what is happening. King reveals more about his character as we watch him try to solve the town’s mysteries. He finally understands when he questions Brian’s brother Sean after Brian’s suicide. Sean reveals that Brian bought a baseball card he thought was a Sandy Koufax. When Sean saw it was just a dirty old card, Brian discovered the real truth about Gaunt. Sean tells Alan that Brian knew Gaunt wasn’t really a man. Alan thinks he knows everything. On the way back to town he worries about why he didn’t want

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his son to buy the trick can with the snake. He finally understands that the can would also appeal to Gaunt. It is a trick based on misdirection. Alan understands that misdirection is the key to the tricks Gaunt has others perform. He understands that magic can entertain, but it can also be used to make people angry with each other. Alan only thinks he understands Gaunt. When he confronts him, Gaunt has left him a videotape of his wife’s accident. Alan cannot stop himself from watching it. Polly forces him to see he has been tricked. Gaunt’s version is flawed because in it Annie is wearing her seat belt. When Alan realizes this error he finally can confront Gaunt. He uses the snake in the can and the flower bouquet to win over Gaunt, who believes in magic. For a moment he thinks the snake is real, and it bites him. Gaunt drops his valise, and Alan is able to grab it. When they confront each other Alan creates shadow puppets of the town’s past, the town’s ghosts, to chase Gaunt. Sparrows from The Dark Half, a Saint Bernard from Cujo, and the sun dog from the story of that name all appear. Alan understands the importance of magic: it connects him to his dead son, to belief in illusion. He knows his magic is not misdirection, and he defeats Gaunt. As the survivors leave town Alan knows he will never really learn how his wife and child died, but he can finally accept this fact. P O L LY C H A L M E R S Polly Chalmers, too, must come to certain understandings before she can work with Alan to defeat Gaunt. Polly is a different kind of female character for King. His few positive female characters are usually identified with motherly activities; for example, Fran is pregnant for most of The Stand. Polly’s secret relates to her motherhood. She was a single parent and left Castle Rock to have the child. After her father rejected her she was too proud to accept any help from her parents and eventually moved to San Francisco. She is still too proud to tell Alan what happened to her son. His baby-sitter caused a fire in Polly’s apartment which killed them both. Gaunt uses this secret, forging a letter suggesting that Alan is looking into her past by making inquiries of the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare. Polly may feel guilty about her past, but King does not seem to judge her. She runs her own business, is compassionate in hiring Nettie, who was in a mental institution for killing her abusive husband, and has a settled, independent life. Like Alan she works well with others, especially her employees. Aside from the one secret, she has a mature, adult relationship with Alan. Her one great problem is her arthritis. Her motive for allowing Gaunt to control her is much more justified than that of the other characters. She

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is one of the last to deal with Gaunt and only does so because nothing helps the terrible pain in her hands. King also suggests that she is not thinking as clearly as she might because of the pain and the medicine she is taking to deal with it. Gaunt gives her a charm which takes away the pain. But in payment she plants information which turns Ace Merrill against Alan and almost causes her death. She may initially accept Gaunt’s forged evidence, but she is finally able to see through it. Through a mental conversation with her Aunt Evvie, another independent woman, she discovers the forgery. When she was alive Aunt Evvie gave her advice and approved of her attempts to free herself from her parents and the town. Polly realizes that in the forged letter she is called Patricia. In San Francisco she used the name Polly. When she frees herself of Gaunt’s influence she also finally liberates herself from her past, from her pride and her hurt. Her freedom leads her to understand Gaunt. She is able to make Alan see as well. She knows she has to accept the pain of living, the pain in her arthritic hands. King also suggests that those who form lasting relationships based on trust will survive. BRIAN RUSK Brian is another of the young boys who have important roles in King novels. While Brian shares some of their characteristics, he differs in important ways. He is still at the point where he maintains the beliefs of childhood. In many King novels this ability to retain a sense of wonder is what saves a child from destruction. Unfortunately for Brian, his belief in fantasy makes him a perfect subject for Gaunt, who uses Brian’s imagination immediately. Brian senses Noah’s Ark in a splinter of wood. He sees the baseball card he is supposed to see rather than the one Gaunt really gives him. Even when he finally forces himself to do the pranks Gaunt demands, he begins to enjoy them the way a child would. But Brian also quickly discovers that part of the joy in having a special card is showing it to others. He senses that this would get him in trouble because he could not explain how he got the card. He moves from enjoying to the more private pleasure of gloating. This reaction alters his personality as he closes up to others. Brian realizes that Gaunt has trapped him, but he cannot find a way out. He sees no choice but to follow Gaunt’s orders. He can’t deal with the result of his actions, the deaths of Wilma and Nettie. He has no one who can help him. He is certain that someone saw him, and the Sheriff will be after him. Alan does try to talk to him, but Brian is losing his childhood. He does not react to Alan’s flower trick. Brian can’t confess, but he doesn’t lie either. He tells Alan that a monster caused the destruction at Wilma’s house. Alan cannot reach him. Brian’s dreams have turned from his crush on his

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teacher to nightmares about the monster. He knows more than he wants too. “It’s like knowing how the magician does his tricks” (463). The knowledge of what is behind the magic belongs to the adult world, and Brian cannot cope with it. Alan does not understand how seriously Brian has been hurt by this knowledge. Sean tries to prevent his brother’s suicide, but Brian finally shoots himself. He has moved into the pain of the adult world too quickly. NORRIS RIDGEWICK While Norris is not one of the most important characters in Needful Things, he is one of the few survivors. He has been a deputy for a while and worked with Alan investigating Homer Gamache’s death in The Dark Half. Our first meeting with him in this book is not very impressive. He does not want to give Buster a parking ticket. We can tell he does not want to confront this man. While Alan likes him, he also makes the shadow hand puppet version of him “skinny and a little self-important” (67). Norris drives Alan crazy because he insists on changing into his uniform in the men’s room. But he does stand up to Buster even though it ruins his day. At the end of that day he is trapped by Gaunt when he sees in the shop window a fishing rod like the one he used to have as a boy. He wants it because it represents the good times he had with his father. Norris becomes involved in the violence in two ways. Like Polly, he cannot avoid performing his little prank. He even is at the point of suicide like Brian. But as he stands with the noose around his neck an inner voice forces him to face the truth. His fishing rod is just junk. He still almost dies. He is certain Gaunt has pushed him. But he manages to free himself in all senses of the word. He destroys the rod and goes after Gaunt. While Norris tries to arrest Ace and Buster, Ace shoots him. Norris survives and redeems himself, managing to shoot Ace before Ace can shoot Polly. Alan tells his First Deputy he can change his clothes in the men’s room anytime. Norris still feels that all of the destruction is his fault. But Polly shows him how they are all to blame. The town no longer exists, but the survivors have learned to accept reality. THEME In Needful Things King explores three familiar themes, managing to develop them in new ways: the relationship between the individual and the community, the importance of childhood, and the destructive impact of an evil presence. While some might only see the novel as an exposé of the greed of a community, not everyone in Castle Rock acts from the same motives or

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has the same desires. People may promise anything to acquire their needful things, but many of their purchases are not intrinsically valuable. Gaunt exploits people’s desires, but these desires are often connected to simple dreams such as owning a certain baseball card or a beautiful piece of glass. The chosen items represent the hidden dreams of the owners and often suggest unfulfilled desires in their lives—a fishing rod like the one a father owned, or sunglasses owned by Elvis. But King is concerned about how far people will go to fulfill their desires. He is concerned that our quest for personal gratification can destroy society. King is interested in both individual actions and the organization of the community. By taking apart Castle Rock he investigates what held it together. In The Stand King looks at what happens after a civilization is destroyed. In Needful Things he details the process of destruction. King uses Gaunt and his store to test the rules of society. He details the laws covering the behavior of the town toward a new store. But these codes are not strong enough to save the community. Kings shows how these codes break down. We quickly believe the worst of each other and act rather than talk. In part, we are trapped by our own needful things. We want to believe we can get what we want without paying the full price. Civilization is just a thin coating over our more violent impulses. Only a few of Gaunt’s customers can see how they have been manipulated. King is not very hopeful about our ability to live together. When the social structures of Castle Rock begin to fall apart, King shows how ineffective the traditional supports of a community can be. All the organizations we trust to maintain society become involved in the destruction. The Sheriff ’s office becomes a source of contamination when Norris falls under Gaunt’s spell. Buster’s actions compromise the city government, and the churches generate much of the hostility in town. When individuals begin to attack each other there is no higher organization to prevent the violence from escalating. King does not see much hope for society. In the end the town is destroyed and only a few individuals remain. Society’s failure to control evil means that Gaunt survives to continue his work elsewhere. Alan can save the souls of his town, but we don’t know if individuals in the next town will be able to save themselves. Alan can trick Gaunt because he has special powers of is own. He understands the power of magic and misdirection. Polly is able to get Alan away from the false video because of the force of their relationship. But King leaves us wondering what might have happened if these two people had not been successful. And they cannot save everyone. Many of Gaunt’s victims are good people who just wanted to fulfill one of their dreams. The failure of the community in Needful Things allows Gaunt to partially succeed. He does not get their souls, but he does destroy Castle

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Rock. In King’s world the punishment does not always fit the crime, and bad things can happen to good people. But society’s rules do not protect good people who make bad decisions. In Needful Things King changes his view of childhood. Even children are taken in by Gaunt. Their innocence is no protection. Brian sees the reality of his actions too late. He has lost the protection of being a child. In other King novels children survive because they believe in the monsters adults deny. Brian’s childhood dream of owning a special baseball card betrays him. King may be suggesting that collecting baseball cards has become tainted by adult greed and materialism. Baseball cards have become big business. Brian is too young for the adult world. He has confused childhood desires with adult dreams of getting something for nothing. He cannot confide in Alan. He commits suicide, an act associated with adults, because he does not see any other solution. Society’s failure in Needful Things extends to the parent/child relationship. Alan does not really get a chance to form a new father/son relationship with Brian and save him. Gaunt’s actions either play on failed father/son relationships or destroy potential relationships. Characters are drawn to Gaunt’s shop by the promise of either improving or regaining a connection with a father figure. Brian’s father started his collection. Brian has worked hard to get many of his cards, but the Sandy Koufax card is beyond his reach. A purchase from Gaunt’s shop does not improve his relationship with his father because the terms of purchase make it impossible for Brian to share it with anyone. Items from Gaunt’s shop isolate people because they cannot admit what they have done to purchase their treasures. Norris and Brian finally realize that things cannot substitute for true parent/child relationships. They feel so guilty about their actions that they no longer want to live. The destruction of family connections is just one kind of evil that Gaunt brings to Castle Rock. Gaunt embodies a kind of evil which exists outside of normal human interactions. He is a monster, but he uses human needs and emotions as the tools of his destruction. In Needful Things King is saying good-bye to more than Castle Rock. He examines the nature of the relationship between good and evil in a small New England town. The opening description of the town explains its social structure and examines members of Castle Rock and the motives for their actions. King assigns different values to the choices people make in Gaunt’s shop. The objects they select reflect their lives. Some people operate out of greed and pettiness. They choose things which support their fantasies. King finds these adults ridiculous and even dangerous. While Cora Rusk indulges in her fantasy relationship with Elvis, Brian, her son, commits suicide. Some shoppers

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are pathetic. Gaunt tempts Nettie with a piece of carnival glass. She once had gone crazy and killed her abusive husband when he broke pieces of her collection. King suggests that our attachment to things as a substitute for real relationships is sad, leading us to overvalue things and become paranoid about losing them. Gaunt’s evil is successful because he knows how to take small human defects and connect them to create mass destruction. No one really enjoys their purchase from Gaunt. His bargains are too costly. People can’t show their objects to others. In most cases, if they shared the joy in their purchase, they would find out how they had been cheated. Gaunt controls the way they see their objects. They can’t see the reality behind their bargains. Many of their treasures are really junk. False things cannot replace real relationships, as many people discover. They also realize that they have made bad bargains they can’t revoke. Only a few people successfully break away from Gaunt’s control. Alan escapes from the power of the videotape, and Polly returns her charm. Alan is able to defeat Gaunt because he is not impressed with the man or his power. Alan’s character unites many of the themes in the novel. He has lost his son and cannot save Brian. He is a representative of law and order who cannot prevent the destruction of the town. But Alan survives and triumphs because he learns how to accept his losses. His dead son’s trick works on Gaunt. His successful relationship with Polly overcomes the power of Gaunt’s tape. Their combined goodness turns Alan’s magic tricks into real snakes and shafts of light which overcome Gaunt’s evil. Gaunt is not destroyed, but he leaves town without the souls he came for. The survivors know they will have to live with the consequences of their actions. There will be no more Castle Rock. But they value what they have learned. They see the effect of the evil Gaunt represents, and they understand their own complicity in the destruction. This knowledge is their punishment for agreeing to Gaunt’s terms, but it also gives them the power to avoid such choices in the future. ALTERNATIVE READING: GENRE Needful Things is another example of how King explores the limits of the horror genre in his recent fiction. In Misery he uses realism to create a different kind of horror—one without supernatural origins. In this novel we must witness the horror of human evil. Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne are also realistic novels. In Needful Things King examines our relationship to the supernatural. He looks at the horror genre and its relationship to the evil which comes from within us and that which has a source outside of us. Many

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of King’s horror novels deal with evil which originates outside of the individual: the aliens in Tommyknockers, the clown in It, the ghosts in The Shining. Often the horror comes from inside a character. In Needful Things the evil begins outside of the individual, but humans carry out the destruction. Gaunt uses human malice and greed to accomplish his destruction. In the horror genre, we expect a conflict which will involve some aspect of the supernatural. We also assume that there will be a certain amount of violence connected to this conflict and that the conflict will include a confrontation between good and evil. Like other King novels, Needful Things has all these elements of the genre. Gaunt is like many supernatural horror figures in his fiction. He controls people through a kind of hypnosis, appearing to them when they think they are alone. He knows things about people that no one else knows. He operates out of a sense of pure evil. Humans amuse him, and he plays with them. At the end of the novel he reveals his true nature. As he leaves town in defeat he goes through a series of changes. We don’t always see Gaunt, but his car turns into a buckboard driven by a dwarf and then a medicine-show wagon with the sign “Caveat Emptor,” buyer beware. As he leaves, the souls he has captured escape from the valise, and the town and its people are no longer poisoned. The fighting and the storm stop. King expands the genre by including more than just the horror which comes from outside. He is also interested in the way we contribute to the horror we experience. Gaunt exploits the needs of the citizens of Castle Rock. He may have an unfair advantage because of his supernatural powers, but he cannot be effective without their help. The destruction he helps them create may have started because of his supernatural powers. But Castle Rock is destroyed by human violence. King uses Alan’s interest in magic to help explain what is happening. Magic works because the audience is tricked into believing. The magician misdirects us. When Alan understands this concept he understands how Gaunt operates. But magic is so powerful that we may fall under its spell even if we know there’s a trick. Alan falls under Gaunt’s spell until Polly helps him see Gaunt’s mistake. Alan’s magic is human in origin, but it becomes transformed when he meets Gaunt. Contact with Gaunt releases the supernatural in others. Gaunt believes in the power of magic, and his belief turns human magic into the supernatural. In Needful Things King explores the relationship between the supernatural and natural worlds. He is concerned not just with the horror we usually find in the genre. He is worried about the natural horror which results from the way humans treat each other. He looks back on the past of Castle Rock. Some of the town’s problems have a supernatural origin, as in

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the monster dog released by the photographs in “The Sun Dog.” Other conflicts in Castle Rock may combine natural and supernatural forces. In The Dead Zone special powers lead to the discovery of a serial killer. In this novel individuals are responsible for the human horror. Cujo is just a poor rabid dog who attacks the humans and causes the death of a child. The supernatural is not really important in Cujo. Thad Beaumont does not wish his evil half to come alive in The Dark Half, and Thad needs help from supernatural forces to overcome him. In Needful Things a single evil being sets the townspeople against each other. Gaunt accomplishes some of his goal by using the evil in us all. King still employs supernatural elements to explore the horror genre in this novel. But he also suggests that human horror is more destructive than any which comes from outside of us. Castle Rock has been the scene of both natural and supernatural horror. King has used this town as a setting to examine the many kinds of evil possible in the horror novel. He finally destroys the town by combining the power of a supernatural evil with the destructive power of the average human being. WORKS CITED Beahm, George. The Stephen King Story. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992. King, Stephen. Needful Things. New York: Viking, 1991; New York: New American Library, 1992.

K AT H L E E N M A R G A R E T L A N T

The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery

Is the pen a metaphorical penis? Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 3 “Here’s your book, Annie,” he panted, and his hand closed on more paper. This bunch was out, dripping wet, smelling sourly of spilt wine. She bucked and writhed under him. The salt-dome of his left knee whammed the floor and there was excruciating pain, but he stayed on top of her. I’m gonna rape you, all right Annie. I’m gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do. So suck my book. Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking CHOKE. He crumpled the wet paper with a convulsive closing jerk of his fist and slammed it into her mouth, driving the half charred first bunch farther down. Stephen King, Misery, 292 Is the pen a metaphorical pistol? Are words weapons with which the sexes have fought over territory and authority? Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land, 3 Writing a book is a little like firing an ICBM ... only it travels over time instead of space. Stephen King, Misery, 257

From Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Spring 1997), pp. 89–114. Republished in Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Reprensentation of Women. © 1998 by Greenwood Publishing Group.

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I

n the past few years, Stephen King’s relationship with his audience has taken several horrifying turns. King is arguably the best selling,1 certainly the most lucratively rewarded,2 author in American history, and his rise to this position may have had some rough moments at the beginning, when—as he puts it—“I began to have long talks with myself at night about whether or not I was chasing a fool’s dream” (“On Becoming a Brand Name” 19). But oddly enough, King seems to be facing the most taxing and draining moments of his career at the zenith of his success. As King himself asserts, “I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force” (Beahm 17), and the popularity of the stories which have made him such an economic force has cost him dearly. George Beahm, compiler of the exhaustive Stephen King Companion, asserts that “King is a publishing phenomenon and ... a celebrity in his own right” (16) but adds that this very success has not been good for King: He is a victim of his own celebrity status. King is a household name, a contemporary figure of popular culture. His face is recognizable, in part because of the many book-jacket photos and the media interviews, but mostly because of the campy American Express ad in which he played himself. When you’re famous, popular, and rich, he has found out, everyone wants a piece of you. Understandably, that is what King detests the most; he called it in his Time profile “the cult of the celebrity.” (Beahm 17) King can no longer attend conventions or book fairs; he is so heavily in demand that he finds himself threatened physically by the affection of his fans. He cannot comply with his publishers’ desires to participate in book signings since, as Beahm explains, “Experience has shown him that the lines may be longer than he can accommodate in a single session” (17). Richard Panek reports that fans often camp outside his Bangor, Maine, home (32), and King’s safety and the safety of his family are now less than secure, a situation which seems to trouble King greatly. In fact, in 1985, he said of his career, “Sometimes I feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. I knew enough to get the brooms started, but once they start to march, things are never the same” (Panek 29). In fact, King and his family have been forced to learn the dangers of King’s popularity. In April of 1991, King’s wife, Tabitha, was surprised in their home by an intruder carrying a fake bomb. Apparently the would-be terrorist, Eric Keene, a native of San Antonio, Texas, was convinced that

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King had stolen the plot of his novel Misery from a woman Keene claimed to be his aunt, Anne Hiltner. To make matters more complex, it seems that Hiltner herself has written to King for about ten years, accusing him of burglarizing her Princeton, New Jersey, home 150 times (“Man Threatens to Blow Up Stephen King’s Home”). Another obsessive fan, Steven Lightfoot, a 28-year-old native of San Francisco, has recently made himself conspicuous in Bangor, Maine, King’s hometown, sporting a bumpersticker on his van which reads, “Photos prove it’s Stephen King, not Mark David Chapman, getting John Lennon’s autograph. No joke, folks” (“Personals”). Lightfoot’s point is, of course, that it was King and not Chapman who murdered Beatle John Lennon. And—the odd connections seem to multiply—King himself relates an incident in which the deeply disturbed Chapman approached King—before Chapman murdered Lennon—asking King for an autograph and a picture; King obliged him, later realizing that the person who “described himself as my number-one fan was in fact the man who killed John Lennon” (Beahm 248). And King’s secretary, Shirley Sonderegger, reports that King’s fans “look to Steve for everything,” including advice and money (Spignesi 28–29). Some of their intrusions are, as she puts it, “just crazy stuff”; in fact, she says that King once received a box with “the bones and hair of several dead kittens” (29). King’s fans have made a heavy impact upon King’s work as well as upon his life. In fact, he feels his own creativity threatened at times by their demands and their devotion. King has complained bitterly for years about the strange requests fans impose upon him—requests for information, for resurrection of favorite characters, for books on cherished subjects, for King’s fulfillment of the fantasies he has stimulated in his fans. According to Richard Panek, it became clear early in King’s career that he would not be able to keep up with his audience’s insatiable and vociferous lust for his works: “Always a workaholic who churned out five to 10 pages every day except Christmas, the Fourth of July and his birthday, King now couldn’t produce fast enough to meet popular demand. By 1982, he’d published ten books in eight years not including the [pseudonymous] Bachmans (30), and by 1990, he had written thirty book-length works (Spignesi 150). The pressure to produce is accompanied by the pressure to create repeatedly on command the works which most please the clamorous throngs who buy those novels. King relates his vulnerability as a writer to the kinds of work he produces: There is no particular danger in writing what I will call, for want of a better term, “serious fiction.” In writing popular, commercial fiction, there is nothing but danger. The commercial writer is easy to bribe, easy to subvert, and he knows it. I have felt this

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much more strongly in the last two or three years than ever before. (“On Becoming a Brand Name” 16) King seems to have made every effort both to protect himself physically from his eager audience and to preserve his creative autonomy. In addition to increasing security in his home in Bangor (“Break-In Rattles Writer Stephen King”), King has made a serious effort to extend his creative experiments into areas other than those approved by his fans. In 1982, he offered his readers Different Seasons, which he concluded with a somewhat defensive “Afterword”: “I got typed [as a horror writer] and I don’t much mind—after all, I write true to type ... at least, most of the time. But is horror all I write? If you’ve read the foregoing stories, you know it’s not” (501). And, although she focuses upon King as a horror writer, Elizabeth Young points to the fact that Misery and The Dark Half “have been highly self-referential, dealing with the collapse of the boundaries between life and fiction faced by professional authors” (34). Early in King’s career (1978), John D. MacDonald emphasized King’s creative autonomy when he asserted, “He does not write to please you. He writes to please himself” (ix). And during that same period, King himself insisted, in the foreword to his collection Night Shift, that he wrote for himself: I didn’t write any of the stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines before they appeared here and I never once returned a check uncashed.... I didn’t write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. (xiii) Despite King’s efforts to shield himself personally and artistically, his fans have cost him dearly and frightened him badly. Playboy interviewer Eric Norden asked King, “Are you ever worried about a mentally unstable reader’s emulating your fictional violence in real life?” and King replied, “Sure I am; it bothers me a lot” (Beahm 42). And concerning his status as a celebrity, he remarked, “The occupational hazard of the successful writer in America is that once you begin to he successful, then you have to avoid being gobbled up. America has developed this sort of cannibalistic cult of celebrity, where first you set the guy up, and then you eat him” (Beahm 247). In a telling harmony of metaphors, Kim Newman echoes King’s fears of his audience and his concerns for his own creative autonomy in her review of his novel Misery (1987); Newman writes, “There are obvious parallels [in the novel] with King’s own well-publicised feelings that his chosen genre has been eating him alive” (30).

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* * * Although Stephen King has, indeed, expressed his fears, frustrations, and angers over his audience for a very long time and although he has touched in many of his works—both fiction and non-fiction—on the issue of creativity, Misery (1987) is probably King’s most thorough and complex exploration of the powers of his own mind, of the powers of the artist, of the pressures of the audience, and of the workings of creativity. King had clearly reached a crisis in his relationship with his audience during the period when he published this novel, and the fact that he published a vituperative and belittling piece on his devoted audience—“‘ Ever Et Raw Meat?’ and Other Weird Questions”—during the same year that Misery appeared makes clear his concern with this constellation of issues.3 In this novel, King expresses his most intense feelings of anger at the demands his readers make by creating Annie Wilkes, a demented fan who, after a series of fortuitous events, manages to make romance writer Paul Sheldon her captive and torture and terrorize him into writing the novel she wants him to write. She is the embodiment of King’s worst fantasies about fans out of control or readers run amok. She is the fan, his “number one fan,” who will corrupt his work, pervert his style, and even endanger his life. As Newman puts it, Misery is a “writer’s nightmare” (30), the nightmare of loss of creative power. What is most horrifying about King’s fantasy on the theme of creativity is not his depiction of Annie Wilkes’s insane victimization of Paul Sheldon, not his graphic descriptions of how Annie torments Paul mentally, humiliates him, and finally cuts him—quite literally—to pieces. The horror in the novel resides in King’s own view of the creative process and, primarily, in the sexual roles he imposes upon that process. In Misery, creativity is solely a masculine prerogative, for the artist is male, and both the reader and the character/antagonist—made one in Paul Sheldon’s vicious and dangerous fan Annie Wilkes—are female. The artist’s power, moreover, is conveyed in terms of his sexuality; as a sexually potent male, Paul Sheldon is creative. When Annie Wilkes—as the subject of Stephen King’s art and as the consumer of Paul Sheldon’s art—inhibits or usurps the creative process, she threatens the artist’s autonomy and his masculinity. She immobilizes him, she even begins to cut off parts of his body, hinting that ultimately she will excise that most essentially masculine part—she will castrate him. With her power as audience, she threatens to render Paul Sheldon—physically, emotionally, and artistically—impotent. She effects a metaphorical and a real cannibalization, to use King’s frightened term, of Paul Sheldon, the stand-in for Stephen King.

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The reception Misery garnered from reviewers when it was released in 1987 offers another testament to the absolute devotion of the very fans King insults and ridicules in this novel. Despite the hostile attitude he harbors toward his audience, many reviews were quite ecstatic over the work, completely unaware—apparently—of the implications of King’s novel. Carolyn Banks, for instance, calls Misery King’s “most heavily autobiographical and funniest work” (1), and John Katzenbach praises King’s work, saying Misery “creates strengths out of its realities” (20). Another New York Times reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt—apparently striving to give King all the credit he can—asserts that the novel concerns “the torture of being a writer” (C17). Both Katzenbach and Lehmann-Haupt apparently neglect to acknowledge the very position they occupy as readers while they praise King’s vituperative and violent assessment of readers and reviewers. Oddly, the original jacket of the hardcover edition of Misery announced that Misery is “a love letter to King’s fans” (Hoppenstand and Browne 14), but several have termed the novel “hate mail” (Hoppenstand and Browne 14, and Beahm 249). Other reviewers, too, have been severely critical—not so much of the novel as a novel but rather of the angry and twisted attitudes which shape it. Darlene James calls Misery “both a profound comment on the potential price of commercial success and a hefty chunk of self-pitying narcissism from a successful writer groaning all the way to the bank” (51). And David Brooks charges that “Mr. King is taking a not-too-subtle slam at his audience, which only wants lightweight output,” going on to assert that since Misery “is selling like mad.... It just goes to show you that some people don’t know when they’ve been insulted” (28). King was perhaps more sensitive to the anger in his work than his readers were since he originally intended to publish Misery under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. According to Kim Newman, the only reason he allowed the novel to appear under his name was that his Bachman identity had recently been revealed (30). And very shortly after the novel’s appearance, Tabitha King, who as King’s wife might share some insight into his view of his fans, went quickly to King’s defense, asserting—despite the evidence in the novel to the contrary—that “Paul Sheldon is not Stephen King, just as Annie Wilkes is not the personification of the average Stephen King fan” (Spignesi 114). The speediness and the vehemence of Tabitha King’s retort cause one to wonder if she perceives the depth of King’s insult to his audience even as she denies it. * * * If—in Misery—Stephen King maliciously turns the creative effort into a vicious battle between artist and audience and if he uses this novel as an

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opportunity to effect some revenge upon that audience he has come to hate so vehemently, we might expect to find hints in his other works of the shape his fury is beginning to take. We might examine his comments on creativity to see how and why his metaphors become so stridently aggressive by the time he writes Misery. If, as Karen Stabiner, observes, King presents in this novel “Everyreader” as a “binge-eating, depressive woman” (8), if the novel is, as an anonymous reviewer in Booklist asserts, a “misogynist fantasy” (“Upfront: Advance Review” 1153), and if the novel offers the darkest implications of our culture’s view of creativity, surely evidence exits elsewhere in King’s monumental and effusive output which reveals this tendency developing. Probably the first issue of note with respect to King’s view of the creative process and his part in it is that he feels somewhat insecure about his own efforts. His protagonist Paul Sheldon is, like King himself, a popular writer; while King is known for his horror fiction, Paul is famous for his genre romance tales about a figure (Misery Chastain) whom even he finds objectionable and insufferable; in fact, when Sheldon finally kills off Misery and moves on to more serious writing, he says “Free at last! Free at Last! Great God Almighty, I’m free at last! The silly bitch finally bought the farm!” (13). As a popular novelist, King, like Paul Sheldon, writes what he calls “plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s” (Different Seasons 504), and it is clear that he is what Richard Panek quite accurately terms “the Joe Sixpack of literature” (30). In fact, King even defines himself as a “brand name author ... one who is known for a certain genre of the popular novel” (“On Becoming a Brand Name” 15). But King’s secure position in popular fiction has not kept him from larger dreams; he admits, I’d like to win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize. I’d like to have someone write a New York Times Book Review piece that says “Hey, wait a minute guys, we made a mistake—this guy is one of the great writers of the 20th century.” But it’s not going to happen. (Goldstein 8) And even as he is hurt by and yet hardened to the critical establishment’s unwillingness to take him seriously, he is also victimized by his own susceptibility to criticism of his work in his chosen genre: “I obsess over the possibility of bad reviews and brood over them when they come” (Four Past Midnight xiii). King’s double insecurity about his work—is he good enough to be taken seriously and is he even good enough to write that which is not taken

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seriously—is reflected in Paul Sheldon’s goals in Misery. First, Paul decides to stop writing genre fiction and to move to a more critically acceptable effort; he gives up the saccharine and predictable stories about Misery for a novel called Fast Cars (a novel about a young streetwise male as opposed to the Misery series which concerns a glamorized, long-suffering female), which convinces him—as he completes it—that he is finally a writer of merit: “You may have just won next year’s American Book Award, my friend,” he tells himself (14). Second, however, it becomes clear that Paul is not easily going to escape the demands of his fans. He is the prisoner of Annie Wilkes (he has been injured in an automobile accident from which Annie has rescued him, and she has imprisoned him and nursed him in her deserted Colorado mountain farm), and he comes to realize that Annie is a “dangerously crazy” (8) woman who wants him to bring back the character Misery he created in his successful romance novels. In order to stay alive and to placate the controlling and demanding reader which Annie has proven herself to be, Paul must renounce his more ambitious efforts by burning his only copy of Fast Cars, and he must again prove himself as a genre writer; he must resurrect Misery, continue the Misery series, and do so in such a way as to appease this voracious audience. He must succeed in writing romance novels that Annie will love, he must continue to satisfy his popular audience. Moreover, he must write in such a way that he never stoops to cheap tricks or flashy effects to achieve Misery’s resurrection, for his reader Annie is exacting and rigorous. When Sheldon offers Annie his first compulsory effort at a new Misery novel, Annie rejects it, saying “It’s not right.... I said it wasn’t right. It’s a cheat. You’ll have to change it” (97–98). Annie’s attitude prompts Sheldon to consider his own feelings about Annie as audience and fan: “Had he once thought of her as the perfect audience? Oh Boy. Have to give you credit, Paul—when you make a mistake, you go whole hog. Constant Reader had just become Merciless Editor” (98). Obviously, the significant question King raises about creativity here is this: who guides the creative effort, in whose control is this creative process. As Darlene James puts it, “The plot [of Misery] provokes questions about the relationship between a book’s producer and its consumer, a fiction writer and a fictional character. Who, ultimately, is in control? Misery implies that its millionaire author feels terrorized by his massive audience” (51). King himself has noted his ambivalence in dealing with his audience: “I am concerned with my readership. But it’s kind of a combination love letter/poison-pen relationship, a sweet-and-sour thing.... I feel I ought to write something because people want to read something. But I think, ‘Don’t give them what they want, give them what you want’” (Goldstein 6).

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In understanding the dynamics of this power straggle between creator and those who consume or enjoy the fruits of that creativity (and who in turn reward and further inspire the creator), it is necessary to uncover the gender marking King imposes upon his metaphors for that process. What is perhaps most appalling about King’s view of the creative enterprise is that the powerful agent in that act is male and that the passive recipient of the act is female. Paul Sheldon is the artist who is put upon by his “number one fan” Annie Wilkes, a woman who perverts and destroys his creative efforts. And it is clear that King’s criticism of Annie Wilkes for overstepping the bounds of appropriate female behavior reflects more extensive hostilities toward women. King seems to harbor a certain anger toward those females who thwart him intellectually; he describes how, earlier in his life, he discovered the writer Loren Singer: “I happened to borrow a novel titled The Parallax View from the Bangor Public Library. I didn’t take it out because it looked particularly good; I took it out because the old ladies with the blue rinses had, as usual, gotten to the library earlier in the day and taken everything that was good” (Underwood and Miller, Fear Itself 17). And even King’s enthusiastic readers seem to concur with him that the market for popular fiction is controlled by women, and they conclude that King has achieved his great success in part by learning successfully to respond to the needs of this powerful force. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray Browne assert that King’s spectacular entry into the mass market arena [with Carrie in 1974] was even more spectacular when considering the paperback audience of the time: well-educated middle-class women, and the predominant taste of that audience: sex/money/power thrillers and romances. (1) Hoppenstand and Browne go on to observe that King has finely cultivated an understanding of his audience’s needs and that, even chafing at the restraints of that audience, King continues to please: he possesses an intimate understanding of what his audience desires of his work. He plays The Author myth for his cult following for even though he protests at times about this type of devoted reader, he does nothing to change the status quo.... It’s as if he fears severing the line of communication with The Following since The Following tells him what they want from him, what it takes to produce a bestseller. (5)

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In meeting what Hoppenstand and Browne call the “emotional needs of his audience,” King has, they point out, directed his work “at the foundation of the paperback mass market: women and adolescents” (5). And while Misery offers a very negative view of the connection King has forged with his audience, he clearly has exploited his audience’s input; in fact, elsewhere he is often appreciative of his audience. In his introduction to Four Past Midnight, King applauds his readers for liking Different Seasons, which was not his usual effort: “God bless and keep Constant Reader; the mouth can speak, but there is no tale unless there is a sympathetic ear to listen” (xiv). In his introduction to his collection of short stories Skeleton Crew, King is again quite friendly toward the audience that supports him: “I hope you’ll like this book, Constant Reader” (16). Oddly enough, he uses this very phrase, “Constant Reader,” to refer to Annie Wilkes in Misery. But, despite the fact that King acknowledges his debt to “Constant Reader,” he seems to rage when this figure exceeds its authority. And in coming to terms with the power of his reader, King conceives of his audience—in its most negative sense—as female, as demandingly and voraciously and belittlingly female. And since for King his own creativity seems connected ineluctably to his masculinity, King describes the connection between writer and reader in sexual terms. Again, he is the seducer, the aggressor, the masculine force, and his audience is the female— that being who must be taken. King asserts, in Skeleton Crew, that “Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair,” and—of course—he as the writer and we as the readers are the somewhat reluctant and detouring participants in that affair. He goes on to say that a short story somewhat attenuates the intensity of this affair: “A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction” (17). King carries this sexual metaphor into his remarks to his audience in several of his works. He frequently presents himself as a seducer and renders his audience as the reluctant yet interested object in need only of a bit of encouragement to succumb with a sigh of pleasure. He admits that he likes to coax his audience into a position of vulnerability: “I’m not really interested in killing somebody in the first paragraph of a novel. I want to be your friend. I want to come up to you and put my arm around you and say, ‘Hey, you want to see something? It’s great! Wait till you see it! You’ll really like this thing’” (Underwood and Miller, Bare Bones 4). In discussing himself as a reader, King’s word choice reveals the same sexual positioning; he admits that he read Tolkien with enthusiasm because “Tolkien and his hobbits simply

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ravished me”—not “pleased,” or “entranced,” or “fascinated,” but “ravished” (“What Stephen King Does for Love” 240). And King begins his introductory note to Four Past Midnight with a rather innocent invitation: “Well, look at this—we’re all here. We made it back again. I hope you’re half as happy to be here as I am. Just saying that reminds me of a story, and since telling stories is what I do for a living (and to keep myself sane), I’ll pass this one along” (xii). He sets up the same sort of intimacy in his foreword to Night Shift, when he says “Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear.... Where I am, it’s still dark and raining. We’ve got a fine night for it. There’s something I want to show you, something I want you to touch. It’s in a room not far from here—in fact, it’s almost as close as the next page” (xi and xxii). In his introduction to Skeleton Crew, the sexual implications of King’s invitations become more overt: “Wait—just a few minutes. I want to talk to you ... and then I am going to kiss you. Wait ...” (13), and he ends his introduction with the promise of more intimacies: “Okay— commercial’s over. Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it’s no big deal; it’s only because you are my love” (17–18). The preceding passage reveals most clearly King’s construction of the perfect relationship between reader and writer. The writer is in charge, he is masculinely assertive, and he will impose himself upon his reader as he desires. The appropriate reader goes quietly along for the ride and accedes to the writer’s demands for obedience and intimacy. In his nonfiction work on horror in movies and novels, Danse Macabre, King makes more clear his view of writing as a blatantly sexual seduction with appropriate roles for writer and reader; if we view dancing as a figure for romantic or sexual intimacy, King’s use of that metaphor is especially telling: “the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level” (17–18). What is most perplexing about King’s use of this metaphor is the danger and violence with which he infuses it; it is as though his dance, his shared intimacy between reader and writer, is an exercise of power and imposition very much like a rape: “The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of” (18). For King, then, horror is “combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart” (25), warfare in the realms of trust and intimacy, but warfare for which the victim/reader is partly responsible, for the horror writer finds our secret joy, our hidden passions. The writer is, however, in control, and even as he frightens us, we accede to his power. As

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King invites us to enter this engagement with him, he insists upon making us aware of the threat involved. Our fears notwithstanding, though, we will enter this relationship, for he is the leader in this pas de deux. He writes, “It’s a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom. But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark. May I have the pleasure?” (28). By the end of Danse Macabre, King makes more overt the sexual content of his relationship with his reader, but he renders it innocent and playful: “My, look at this.... I do believe the sun is coming up. We have danced the night away, like lovers in some old MGM musical.... I cannot tell you how much I’ve enjoyed the evening” (375). When viewed in terms of this sexual metaphor for the relationship between writer and reader, King’s increasing hostility toward his demanding audience makes perfect sense In King’s paradigm, the ideal audience is constructed as the ideal woman—uncomplaining, undemanding, receptive, appreciative, compliant, and grateful. But like those voracious “blue beaded ladies” of the Bangor library, his audience makes trouble. His readers make demands, lodge complaints, ask pointed and stupid questions, grumble bitterly, and—like recalcitrant and intractable women—these readers must be brought into line with a show of force. Of course the most potent show of force available to men in dealing with defiant and assertive women is rape. As Susan Brownmiller put it in her pioneering study Against Our Will, Rape [is] ... not only a male prerogative, but man’s basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, [is] ... the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood. (14) And Carol Vance, observing that “the threat of sexual attack [serves] as a powerful reminder of male privilege, constraining women’s movement and behavior” (3), may be said to take Brownmiller’s observations one step further in asserting that rape and physical violence directed against women serve to punish women who prove troublesome or rebellious: “gross and public departures from ‘good’ woman status... still invite—and are thought to justify—violation” (4). As we shall see, this is just King’s strategy in dealing with the allegorical conflict between writer Paul Sheldon and reader Annie Wilkes. Annie’s body becomes the receptacle for Paul’s words and his work, but when she begins to take control of Paul’s efforts, when she directs and leads instead of appreciating and following, she must be reminded of her

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place—she is woman/reader. Upon her body, Paul Sheldon will reassert and reaffirm his creative potential. * * * That Misery offers King’s most definitive work on creativity and the problems of the writer as brand name is clear from the first few chapters of the book. In fact, King sets up the conflicts Paul Sheldon will face and establishes the means by which he will work out the problem of being a famous and very popular writer early in the novel. Stephen King, working through his alternate, Paul Sheldon, begins his novel with the quintessential creative act of western culture, bringing order out of chaos; not only are King’s initial images effective in conveying the power that creativity holds for King, but they are almost arrogant in their positioning of the creative artist. Chapter 1 offers the reader meaningless letters on the page as an introduction into the world of Paul Sheldon: umber whunnn yerrnnn umber whunnnn fayunnnn These sounds: even in the haze. (3) As the narrative begins, Paul Sheldon brings order by making sense of these words (“your number one fan”), and King appropriates biblical language for Paul’s painful awakening: “Let there be light (even of the hazy variety), and the light was good, and so on and so on” (3). But our “god” in this novel finds himself helpless; he lies in bed after an automobile accident, he is in pain, he drifts in and out of consciousness, and he seems to be held captive by the woman who claims to be an admiring fan. Paul’s identity is clearly bound up with his writing, for as the haze clears sufficiently for him to remember who he is, he identities himself first and most aggressively as a writer. In his delirium, his childhood name flickers in and out of his mind—“that’s my name Paulie I’m Paulie” (4). His captor refers to him as “Paul,” and he recognizes his name is Paul Sheldon (6), but it is not until he reaches full consciousness that he claims his complete name along with his most essential orientation: “He was Paul Sheldon, who wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and bestsellers” (6). The conflict between Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes begins with the ambiguity of her position as his nurse; she saves him after his accident but the fact that she saves him makes him completely dependent upon her, for not only are his legs shattered, “pulverized” as King puts it (36), but he has

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also become dependent upon the drag Novril, which Paul discovers is a “pain-killer with a heavy codeine base” (8). From the outset, Annie Wilkes invades Paul Sheldon’s consciousness; she is as powerful and as mysterious as the African goddess of the H. Rider Haggard stories with whom Paul associates her (7), and she forces herself upon him. The first words he hears and the first lines we read are her claim that she is his “number one fan.” And in more and more pernicious ways she begins to invade Paul. In an apparently innocent act, designed only to save Paul’s life, she has fed him intravenously. But Paul comes to perceive that she has invaded his body in order to make him well, for ultimately she uses this invasion of his body to claim him as her own: “‘ I fed you intravenously,’ she said. ‘Through tubes. That’s what those marks on your arms are.’ She looked at him with eyes that were suddenly flat and considering. ‘You owe me your life, Paul. I hope you’ll remember that. I hope you’ll keep that in mind’” (16). Paul’s victimization at Annie’s hands evolves at two levels. In the first place, he is completely dependent upon her for the drugs he craves and the care he needs, and in the second place she begins to struggle with him over whether he will even live. Only a few pages into the novel, Paul refers to Annie’s treatment of him as rape: not only has she invaded his body with drugs and tubes, but she has, he asserts, caused him to be “raped back into life” (6). As Paul has lain sleeping, he apparently stopped breathing, and Annie performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation upon him. Paul, even this close to death, is appalled at the stench of Annie’s breath because it represents almost a sexual violation of him: “she had forced [her breath] into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman” (4), and that part of Annie, a “mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge,” revolts him so deeply that it makes him live: “Breathe, goddam you!” the unseen voice shrieked, and he thought I will, anything, please just don’t do that anymore, don’t infect me anymore, and he tried, but before he could really get started her lips were clamped over his again, lips as dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again. (5) Paul breathes in order to “flush the smell and taste of her out of him” (5). In viewing Annie as Paul’s number one fan here, it is significant to note that what she has done literally—and the story plays cruelly with the literal levels of language—is to inspire Paul, to fill him with air and spirit, the will to live and then the will to create. She has done what a good fan should do; she has

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given her author a reason to live and write, but there is something fundamentally unwholesome about this relationship. Paul is not, however, violated simply by Annie’s presence and her power; he is also violated by her forcing him to accede to her version of reality. She chooses that he will live, and he lives; she chooses that he will eat, and he eats; she chooses that he will write, and he writes. As he does so, the role reversal which forms the basis for the conflict between Paul and Annie intensifies. Not only has Annie usurped a male prerogative, to use Brownmiller’s term, in “raping” Paul, but now she begins to impose her story on his experience. He is, after all—both as a character and as a stand-in for King himself the writer, the creator; she is—at least at the level at which King operates—only a character and—at the level at which Paul operates—only a fan. Sheldon’s greatest distress seems to arise as Annie demotes him from creator to created. Curiously, it is not Annie’s emotional or aesthetic power which allows her to assume the position Paul has occupied; rather it is the power of the material, the real, which affords her the ability to command Paul Sheldon’s attention and obedience. She holds Paul Sheldon’s bread and butter, quite literally, in her hands—as his captor/nurse and as his number one fan who buys his books. Paul lives or dies—as a man and as a writer—if Annie his reader desires it. Now Annie has the power of the storyteller; now she dictates how the narrative will unfold: It was while he ate the soup that she told him what had happened, and he remembered it all as she told him, and he supposed it was good to know how you happened to end up with your legs shattered, but the manner by which he was coming to this knowledge was disquieting—it was as if he was a character in a story or a play, a character whose history is not recounted like history but created like fiction. (10) And in a complex and interesting contrapuntal dialogue—his portion expressed only within his own mind—Annie continues to create Paul’s history while he seeks to assert himself by remembering his most recent literary effort. The dialogue continues for over a page, Paul silently—and sadly, since he is the wordsmith here—asserting himself against Annie: The new novel was called Fast Cars, and he hadn’t laughed when it was done. He just sat there in front of the typewriter for a moment, thinking You may have just won next year’s American Book Award, my friend. And then he had picked up—

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“a little bruise on your right temple, but that didn’t look like anything. It was your legs.... I could see right away, even with the light starting to fade, that your legs weren’t—” the telephone and called room service for a bottle of Dom Perignon. (13–14) Obviously, despite her consistent show of force against Paul, Annie Wilkes does not consciously imagine herself to be a match for Paul Sheldon; she is quite content to be his fan and allow him to be the creative force behind the novels she loves; she tells him “that she had read each of his eight novels at least once, and had read her very favorites, the Misery novels, four, five, maybe six times. She only wished he would write them faster” (9). What then has gone wrong with this relationship between creator and consumer? What threat does Annie Wilkes pose to Paul Sheldon; why—when power falls so completely into the audience’s hands—does the audience become so dangerous to the writer? * * * King’s marking of his typical audience as female reveals a good deal about what he values in an audience and how he perceives that the relationship between reader and writer should function. To understand his metaphorical use of Annie as a stand-in for his audience, we must take into consideration the symbolic function of the female body in western culture. As Susan Rubin Suleiman puts it, “The cultural significance of the female body is not only... that of a flesh and blood entity, but that of a symbolic construct” (“Introduction” 2). And in her brilliant discussion of the role of the female in film, Laura Mulvey characterizes woman’s relationship to “patriarchal society” in this way: “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (7). In this role, the female body cannot function as a representative for the assertive female self; the female body is, rather, read or experienced as an emblem of another’s, a male’s, pleasure, not as a proclamation of self identity; her function is to provide a counterbalance to the roles assigned to the more powerful male: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly” (11).

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In this way, King relegates Annie to two important functions in Misery. In the first place, she is the symbolic construct, as Suleiman calls it, by means of which King himself projects his fantasies concerning audience and audience demands upon the body of Annie Wilkes. In terms of the view of creativity which King constructs in Misery, Paul Sheldon’s audience is female and ignorantly so: while she might be crazy, was she so different in her evaluation of his work from the hundreds of thousands of other people across the country—ninety percent of them women—who could barely wait for each new five-hundred page episode in the turbulent life of the foundling who had risen to marry a peer of the realm? (25) Oddly, it is Annie’s very ignorance and her transient passivity which make her a good audience for Paul’s romance novels: Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader. (57) And secondly, Annie is for Paul the incarnation of all those fans who threaten him and thwart his creative potential. In both cases, the best Annie is the most passive Annie, the quietest Annie, the least demanding Annie; she most fully embodies “That spirit of ... of fan-love” (28) as King terms it. Like a good character and like a good reader, Annie exists to be contemplated or manipulated by the active artist/writer—Paul or King. For King—who is the “maker of meaning”—she is the symbol which realizes his fears about audience; she is “the bearer of meaning.” As a character, she is for Paul—also the “maker of meaning” within the novel—that force through which his work is most fully realized. She is—or should be—the appreciative, accepting audience. In neither case is Annie the “maker of meaning” herself. And this is, of course, the very problem with Misery. Annie has transcended her function as “bearer of meaning” and thereby has imperiled the creative dynamic by which both King and Sheldon operate. King’s conflation of creativity and sexuality, his unrelenting use of sexuality as a metaphor for creativity, becomes clear when we contemplate Annie’s madness, and Paul Sheldon declares several times that she is, indeed, mad: I am in trouble here. This woman is not right” (13). In the first place, Annie is not acceptably feminine: she is, in fact, repulsively unattractive. She is fat, she is slovenly, she smells, and she is insane. In short, she is not a desirable

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partner for this reader/writer pas de deux. Paul’s descriptions of Annie are curious, though, for they reveal that it is more than her unattractiveness which bothers him; what he seems to hate most about her is her impregnability. Annie cannot—it seems—entered: she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom.... It seemed to him that if he made the first two fingers of his hand into a V and attempted to poke them up her nostrils, they might go less than an eighth of an inch before encountering a solid (if slightly yielding) obstruction; that even her gray cardigan and frumpy house skirts and faded outside-work jeans were part of that solid fibrous unchannelled body. (7) And here we find a clue to the dangers of the audience. As Paul has revealed, ninety percent of his readers are female, but Annie renounces her essential femaleness, at least as it is constructed in western culture. She spurns receptivity and passivity, the pregnability which Paul has told us she lacks, and arrogates powers to herself which are rightfully the powers of the artist. She begins to tell Paul what to write. She makes demands. She—with his injury—finds herself in the position of being able to “rape” Paul with pills and with humiliation. When she discovers that he has killed off the deplorable character—at least from his perspective—Misery, Annie demands that he write a novel in which he resurrect this character. She will remain resistant to Paul; she will demand her own way. And, of course, Annie’s way is not the way of the real artist who knows his good work. To Paul and to King himself, Annie is ignorant and presumptuous, like a woman who doesn’t know what is good for her. And as a reader she lacks refinement and intelligence. She prefers the romantic Misery series to a tough new work about a car thief: “She doesn’t like the new book because she’s too stupid to understand what it’s up to.... Too stupid? No. Too set. Not just unwilling to change, but antagonistic to the very idea of change” (25). At Paul’s initial refusal to comply with Annie’s requests for more fiction about Misery, Annie begins a series of violations which uncover the absolute terror which lies behind King’s anger at his fans’ demands. First, Annie forces Paul to burn his prized Fast Cars manuscript, then she cuts off his foot because she knows he is trying to escape her, and finally she cuts off his thumb. Each stage in her humiliating and vengeful assault upon Paul seems to incarnate King’s feeling that his fans are slowly but surely consuming him—bit by bit, inch by inch. And each assault is underscored by Paul’s real

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fear that Annie will castrate him and King’s real fear that his audience is depriving him of his creativity—very closely associated for him with his masculine sexuality, with his power to assert, enter, dominate, and control. As Annie begins to assert herself on Paul, as she begins to make insistent demands concerning his work, Paul feels the assaults in his groin: “The pain throbbed in his legs and made a deep steel circlet around his crotch. He had touched himself down there, and he thought his pelvis was intact, but it felt twisted and weird” (17), and “His thighs, crotch, even his penis, were all still mottled with fading bruises” (35–36). Not only did the crash which brought him under Annie’s power break his “writing bone” (104) as Paul puts it, but he realizes as Annie continues to threaten him, as she literally “hobbles” him (205), that he has lost his manhood. His writing, his power, his masculinity are conflated, and Annie has control of all in this novel of horror. When Annie gives Paul a defective typewriter, he bewails his lost manhood at the same time that he mourns his lost power to create: Once there had been a man who would at least have asked.... He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet ... and two thumbs. (211–12). The problem for Paul is that he needs Annie, and he knows it—despite his fears that she will, as he puts it “castrate him” (202) literally and creatively and despite her threats to do so: “You’re lucky I didn’t cut off your mangland. I thought of it, you know” (251). Paul asserts, “A person might as well not write a book at all, if there’s no one around to read it” (161). And Annie, as the powerful audience, knows this, too; she tells Paul somewhat threateningly, “You owe me your life, Paul. I hope you’ll remember that” (16). But the irony of Paul’s relationship with his audience is that his creative power is firmly identified with his power as a male, and yet the demands of his audience, Annie’s demands, threaten to unman him. As Paul Sheldon describes the hold a writer has on his audience, he talks about the “gotta,” as in “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out” (224), the force that makes a reader need the writer, crave the writer’s words, cling to the writer as a sexually dependent slave: 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 bad and 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 just like the Jacksons said on the record—don’t stop til you get enough. (224–25)

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Thinking about his creative process and his audience’s role in that process, Paul foregrounds the sexuality of it: But hadn’t there also been some sort of fuck, even if of the driest variety? Because once he started again ... well, she wouldn’t interrupt him while he was working, but she would take each day’s output as soon as he was done ... he knew this by now, just as sexually acute men know which dates will put out at the end of the evening and which ones will not—to get her fix. To get her gotta. (226) * * * The relationship between audience and writer is, thus, sexual, aggressively and specifically heterosexual, in that the writer “fucks” the audience—as King puts it; he provides the audience with pleasures, the “gotta,” that the audience cannot provide itself. The ideal audience is passive and accepting, totally within the thrall of the writer’s sexual/creative power just as the ideal woman is submissive and silent in the traditional paradigm for heterosexuality. In their discussion of the manner in which heterosexuality has been constructed in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs foreground these qualities of heterosexuality by observing that the traditional sexual arrangement in western culture may be seen as “a condensed drama of female passivity and surrender” (5). They go on to assert that even in the twentieth century, “Heterosexual sex has had many uses, but it has had, over and over, one social meaning, and that is male domination over women” (203). But Annie Wilkes—because she is an overbearing and demanding fan/woman—has perverted and deformed the essentially heterosexual relationship between writer and reader. Not only does she refuse her role as passive object, but she also continues to usurp Paul’s power to create. With respect to Annie’s creativity, King sets up an odd—but probably inadvertent—parallel with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s conceptualization of the angry, creative female spirit, “the madwoman in the attic.” Annie is a crazed artist in her own fight, but her “art” has consisted of a series of grisly murders and the book she creates from these murders. Thus, Annie further rejects her role as “hearer of meaning” rather than “maker of meaning” by her hidden and bizarre creative efforts. Annie has hidden herself away on her mountain farm because she has been accused of—and actually committed—a series of murders, and her narrative of the murders has proven powerful since she has managed to convince the authorities and

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the courts that she is innocent. Like Gilbert and Gubar’s madwoman, she has been selfish and fiendishly forceful: “committed only to their own private ends, these women are accidents of nature, deformities meant to repel, but in their very freakishness they possess unhealthy energies, powerful and dangerous arts” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 29). What Paul Sheldon discovers is that Annie has actually written her own book. She is not simply a fan of his; she is a creator as well, for she has kept detailed scrapbooks chronicling all her killings. Annie is a serial killer who has put some pride and much energy into her work; as he examines the record Annie has kept of her victims, Paul says, “This book, dear God, this book was so big” (176). It comes as no surprise, given Paul Sheldon’s equation of sexuality with creativity, his projection of his creative powers onto his penis, that the first thing he notices about Annie Wilkes’ book is its size. And oddly, Annie proves a worthy competitor in this creative competition, as effective at the craft of writing as Paul Sheldon, for she has laid hold of him with the “gotta.” Despite his horror at what Annie has done, Paul continues to read her book: “he bent over the book again. In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it” (179). Ultimately, the struggle between Paul and Annie comes down to a struggle of texts; will Paul’s story be told or will Annie’s? Who will have the power to create? For as he reads further in her scrapbook, Paul discovers that he will be the next to die: “He turned the page and looked at the last clipping—at least so far—and suddenly his breath was gone. It was as if, after wading grimly through the almost unbearable necrology in the foregoing pages, he had come face to face with his own obituary” (185). Either Paul will author this story, and Annie will die, or Annie will strip Paul of his creative power, his masculinity, his right to “fuck her,” and he will die. In fact, Annie has so completely disempowered Paul as a writer and as a man that Paul must construct a new metaphor for creativity, one which expresses his dependence upon Annie Wilkes and her mastery over him—he has become Scheherazade to her Shahriar. Just as Scheherazade had to provide the powerful emperor with tales to prolong her life, Paul must entertain Annie in the way she demands. As long as Paul can keep Annie interested in the story he weaves, the Misery novel she forces him to write, she will—she must—let him live. He says to himself, “you owe her [his character Misery] your life, such as that may be... because you turned out to be Scheherazade after all, didn’t you?” (220–21). To he sure, Paul’s willing acceptance of this transformed state fills him with self-loathing, and—as his metaphors reveal—makes clear how he feels about the abject obedience, both creative and sexual, to which Annie has reduced him. When Annie requests that Paul reveal the end of the Misery

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story before he writes it, he understands that his hold on his audience is still a sexual hold—although by now he has been reduced, in his terms, to the female position: “‘I can’t do that,’ he said ... Because you wouldn’t respect me in the morning” (228). And he asserts that it was his earlier novel, his novel about men and crime and the real world—Fast Cars—which could have saved him from the prostitution to which the popular Misery novels consigned him: I’m no whore. Fast Cars was about not being a whore. That’s what killing that goddamned bitch Misery was about, now that I think about it. I was driving to the West Coast to celebrate my liberation from a state of whoredom. What you did was to pull me out of the wreck when I crashed my car and stick me back in the crib again. Two dollar straight up, four dollar I take you around the world. (66) The question for Paul Sheldon as for Stephen King is how to right this creative relationship gone awry. How is Paul to reclaim his masculinity and his creativity? The answer is obvious—he must assert himself sexually against the woman who has refused to afford him access to her body, who—in Paul’s words—feels like “clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices” (7); he must re-establish his sexual and creative dominance, repositioning Annie in her appropriate role as bearer of meaning rather than maker of meaning. In a study of rape and representation, Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver assert that “rape and rapability are central to the very construction of gender identity,” that “the social positioning of women and men” is set and perpetuated by the literary and artistic representations which demonstrate acceptable power relationships between men and women (3). In order to reassert the gender identity necessary for creativity in Stephen King’s metaphorical universe, Annie must be raped, for as Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs point out, “sex is the ratification of male power” (203). Thus Annie’s orifices must be filled—specially her demanding mouth—her power overthrown, and her sexual creative passivity re-imposed. In a scene more horrible than any King has written, Paul Sheldon rapes Annie Wilkes with his book. He takes his power—pen, penis, book, now a single emblematic unity—into his hands and violates Annie with this power. He forces that book down her throat, screaming I’m gonna rape you, all right Annie. I’m gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do. So suck my book. Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking CHOKE. (292)

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To secure his retaken position, Paul must kill Annie, and after a prolonged and horrifying struggle he does, but she lives in his head; the memory, the force of the demented fan haunts him: “I think she’s dead. But be careful. If she’s still alive... dangerous... like a rattlesnake” (300). Ironically, for all of Paul’s hatred of Annie as audience, she guarantees his publishing success, for after he heals from the nightmare of his captivity, he releases the book which she forced him to write—Misery’s Return. As Paul’s agent, Charlie, tells him, “This book is going to outsell everything in the world” (304). King is not quite finished playing with us by this point; in fact, almost obsessively he seems forced to call to our attention the fact that there is some connection between our demands for his work and Annie’s demands for Paul Sheldon’s novels. As Paul discusses his new novel with Charlie, his agent tells him: “We all ought to be down on our knees thanking God that the story in the book is almost as good as the story behind the book.” What his agent refers to, of course, is the torment to which Annie has subjected Paul. By implication, the novel we hold in our hands—Misery—has grown out of the torment to which we—the demanding and voracious, the unappealingly female audience—have subjected King himself. With this in mind, we remember the dedication of the book—“This is for Stephanie and Jim Leonard, who know why. Boy, do they”—and the fact that Mrs. Leonard was King’s secretary for many years (Spignesi 100), the woman who protected King from his fans—number one and otherwise. By the end of Misery, Stephen King answers very clearly the questions posed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their works, The Madwoman in the Attic and No Man’s Land. In considering the metaphors for women’s creativity in nineteenth-century literature, they wondered whether the pen was not a metaphorical penis; in examining the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century, they asked whether the pen had become a metaphorical pistol. To both of these questions Stephen King seems to answer resoundingly, “Yes!” For his penis is linked very strongly to his creativity, and his creativity is most clearly a weapon by means of which, when as an audience we behave properly, he pleases, but by means of which, when we transcend the bounds of appropriate behavior, he punishes. His greatest moments of creative joy seem to come when he can reduce us to the submissive position of female audience to his masculine creator. As he puts it in a discussion of “Apt Pupil,” I thought to myself, “Gee, I’ve done it again. I’ve written something that has really gotten under someone’s skin.” And I do like that. I like the feeling that I reached between somebody’s legs like that. (Beahm 250)

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NOTES 1. If comparisons to other popular figures are significant, an anonymous commentator in the Economist deems King as much a star as Eddie Murphy or Michael Jackson, likening him as well to Stephen Spielberg (“Author as Star” 97); in a review of Misery in New Statesman, Kim Newman concurs that King is as impressive in his popularity and impact as Spielberg, as does Karen Stabiner, in a review of Misery, which appeared in the L.A. Times. In Variety, Charles Kipps termed King “a one-man entertainment complex: going on to report that “Twenty-one of his books and short stories have been made into movies, and another five are in development. King has written several screenplays, produced some of the films and even directed one of them” (3). George Beahm opines that “As a writer, King has arrived in grand style, like few other writers in our time. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He has had almost as many books written about him as those written by him. He has won numerous awards in the fantasy and science-fiction fields. A university is collecting his work seriously—the Special Collections at the University of Maine at Orono. He commands the enviable position of usually being able to pick and choose his projects. Publishers love him because he’s their money machine and keep him happy at all costs. He is, in short, a power unto himself in the comparatively small world of book publishing (17). And an entire newsletter, Castle Rock, provided fans with information on King and his projects from 1985 until 1989 (Spignesi 102–26). And although King has been, as one reader puts it, “scorned by the cognoscenti” (“Author as Star” 97) and given “critical short shrift” according to Michelle Slung, he seems to motivate enthusiasts and scholars alike to write about him. According to George Beahm, as of 1990, a total of twenty-nine books had been written on King or were in the works with publishers eagerly awaiting their completion (326–30); Stephen Spignesi sets the number at a more modest twenty-seven (673). Even those who approach him with a critical or scholarly spirit find themselves gushing with the enthusiasm of a devoted fan. Douglas E. Winter dedicates his Stephen King: The Art of Darkness “to Steve and Tabby, for caring” (xiv), and Peter Straub admits that he “became evangelical about Stephen King” (9). 2. Elizabeth J. Young declares that King is “the world’s best-selling author” (34), and Darrell Schweitzer calls King “arguably the most successful fiction writer of any kind active today in the English language” (5). Richard Panek reports that King’s “cottage industry has grown at a rate that scares even King himself. In the last two years [since 1989] he made a reported $22 million, and he’s currently in the middle of a four-book contract worth a record $32 million to $40 million” (29). Panek goes on to assert that King’s price is “the highest in the history of publishing” (30). In 1989, Forbes compiled a list of the 40 highest-paid entertainers, and King ranked 23d, earning $25 million in two years, making him the highest-earning novelist on the list (“Author as Star” 97). According to Charles Kipps, the “King empire” brings in over $100 million a year from various entertainment ventures” (3). 3. “ ‘ Ever Et Raw Meat?’ and Other Weird Questions” offers King’s most uncharitable view of his audience. He ridicules questions such as “How do you start a novel” and “Who is your favorite writer” as well as belittling readers for even expressing interest in his work and his work habits. Curiously, he concludes his tirade with the assurance that “no one—at least no one with a modicum of simple human kindness— resents questions from people who honestly want answers” (7), yet his whole piece, as its

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title reveals, springs from the premise that readers are somehow presumptuous and ridiculous for their interest in the writers they most revere.

WORKS CITED “Author As Star.” Economist 18 Mar. 1989: 97. Banks, Carolyn. Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. Book World [Washington Post] 14 June 1987: 1 and 14. Beahm, George. The Stephen King Companion. Kansas City and New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1989. “Break-In Rattles Writer Stephen King—Will Lock Gate.” San Francisco Chronicle 29 Apr. 1991, three star ed.: D2. Brooks, David. “Bookshorts: Numbing, Chilling, Thrilling.” Rev. of Misery by Stephen King. Wall Street Journal. 23 June 1987: 28. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs. Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979. ———. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol 1: “The War of the Words.” New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988. Goldstein, Bill. “King of Horror.” Publishers Weekly 24 Jan. 1991: 6–9. Higgins, Lynn A. and Brenda R. Silver, eds. “Introduction: Rereading Rape.” Rape and Representation. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 1–11. Hoppenstand, Gary and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic Worm of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. James, Darlene. Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. Maclean’s 20 July 1987:51. Katzenbach, John. “Sheldon Gets the Ax.” Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. New York Times Book Review. 31 May 1987: 20. King, Stephen. Different Seasons. New York: New American Library, 1982. ———. “‘ Ever Et Raw Meat?’ and Other Weird Questions.” New York Times Book Review 6 Dec. 1987: 7. ———. Four Past Midnight. New York: Signet, 1990. ———. Misery. New York: Viking, 1987. ———. Night Shift. New York: Signet, 1978. ———.” On Becoming a Brand Name.” Foreword to Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King. Eds. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. San Francisco: UnderwoodMiller, 1982. 15–42. ———. Skeleton Crew. New York: Putnam’s, 1985. ———. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. 1979. New York: Berkley, 1982. Kipps, Charles. “King’s Tale of Mystery & Intrigue—And That’s Just His Contract.” Variety 29 Nov. 1989: 3. Lehmann-Haupt. Christopher. “Books of the Times.” Rev. of Misery by Stephen King. New York Times 8 June 1987: C17. MacDonald, John D. Introduction. Night Shift: Excursions into Horror. By Stephen King. New York: Signet, 1978. vii–x.

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“Man Threatens to Blow Up Stephen King’s Home.” San Francisco Chronicle 23 Apr. 1991, three star ed.: A3. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18. Newman, Kim. “Horror: Body Snatcher.” Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. New Statesman 18 Sept. 1987: 30–1. Panek, Richard. “King’s Ransom.” M. Inc 8.5 (1991): 29–32. “Personals.” San Francisco Chronicle 29 June 1992, three star ed.: D3. Schweitzer, Darrel, ed. Discovering Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1985. Slung, Michelle. “In the Matter of Stephen King.” Armchair Detective 14 (1981): 147–49. Spignesi, Steven. The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Works of America’s Master of Horror. Chicago: Contemporary, 1991. Stabiner, Karen. “The Misery of Stephen King.” Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. Los Angeles Times Book Review 10 May 1987: 8. Straub, Peter. “Meeting Stevie.” Introduction to Fear Itself. Eds. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982. 7–13. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Introduction. The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 1–4. Underwood, Tim and Chuck Miller, eds. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. ———. Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982. “Upfront: Advance Review.” Rev. of Misery, by Stephen King. Booklist 1 Apr. 1987: 1153. Vance, Carol S. “Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed. Carol S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 1–27. “What Stephen King Does for Love.” Seventeen Apr. 1990: 240–1. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: NAL, 1984. Young, Elizabeth J. “Best of Horror: Printers’ Devils.” New Statesman and Society 3.130 (1990): 34–5.

J E S S E W. N A S H

Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

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lthough sympathetic critics have given it an impressive literary lineage, Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary has resisted easy categorization. Mary Ferguson Pharr detects the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but she notes that King’s work is the least self-conscious of many such variations (120). Tony Magistrale, in “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited” and in his book Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic, finds a strong affinity in theme and purpose with Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other New England and/or transcendentalist writers. Slavoj Zizek relates Pet Sematary to the tragedies of Sophocles (25–26). One need not, however, give King such a distinguished pedigree to appreciate Pet Sematary’s complexity or recognize its importance in contemporary popular culture. To do so, one might suggest, runs counter to the very spirit of King’s works. As he himself informs us in Douglas Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, King’s primary sources for his novel are his own life experiences and fantasies, popular culture, and his reading of archaic burial lore (145–146, 150). In other words, the key to understanding Pet Sematary does not lie in the “classical” literary tradition so much as in popular culture itself and how popular culture appropriates, reworks, and represents more classical literary artifacts. Pet Sematary’s connection to Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular must be seen within the dynamics of a contemporary popular culture matrix. In

From Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Spring 1997), pp. 151–160. © 1997 by Blackwell Publishing.

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Danse Macabre, King refers to Frankenstein as “caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber” (65). People are often less familiar with Shelley’s actual text than they are re-presentations of the figure of Frankenstein in popular culture. It is helpful to think of the echoes Frankenstein sets in motion in terms of Clifford Geertz’ notion of “webs of significance” (5). The webs in which King is enmeshed are not entirely those of Shelley; even when he shares webs of significance with Shelley, such as the problematic nature and popular fear of science and technology, his attitude in regard to those webs is entirely different. For example, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley credits the ultimate origin of her novel to her husband’s and Lord Byron’s rather tabloid, sensationalistic discussions of “Dr. Darwin,” but she distances herself from those discussions, confessing that she does not know if they are accurate depictions of what Darwin had actually written or done (xxiv). In Pet Sematary, on the other hand, King revels in the tabloid and the sensational, using at one point in the novel the supposed authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as an argument against scientific rationalism and its debunking of the possibility of miracles (200). Along with “penis envy” and the “oedipal conflict,” the Shroud is one of those strange truths that Arnie Cunningham in Christine recognizes and to which he subscribes (24). Similarly, to emphasize his preference of the sensational over the purely realistic, King tells his readers in the introduction to Skeleton Crew that in The Thorn Birds his “favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours” (21). In Frankenstein, Shelley’s focus is not on what is scientifically or realistically possible but rather the moral dilemmas of modern human beings. Pet Sematary, however, does want us to reconsider what is possible precisely because King is a child of the tabloid, the medical oddity, and archaic lore. Therefore, if King is rewriting Frankenstein, he is rewriting it from a vastly different personal, cultural, and historical perspective, and so much so, I would like to suggest, that Frankenstein and Pet Sematary no longer share the same genre. King’s novel is an example of what we might fruitfully think of as “postmodern Gothic,” which is a transformation or historical mutation of the traditional Gothic tale. Such a designation takes seriously King’s ties to the traditional Gothic genre but also recognizes the influence of the prevailing postmodernism of much of late twentieth century popular culture (see Collins). Such a designation has the added benefit of allowing us to determine what is gained and what is lost in King’s transformation of traditional literary forms. It will be suggested in this essay that King’s postmodern Gothic is more amenable to popular or mass sentiment than the

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traditional Gothic work, and thus King is more willing to tackle explicitly cultural issues as opposed to the traditional Gothic preoccupation with personality and character. In the process, King is able to launch a full frontal attack on the modern American experience, developing a powerful and consistent cultural critique, using the voices of those he understands to be typically marginalized in contemporary American society, the child, the adolescent, the ordinary Joe and Josephine of lower, middle, and rural America, the wise non-academic, and at least in the case of Carrie, Verena Lovett forcefully argues, the tabooed, menstruating woman (175) What is lost in King’s mutation of the Gothic genre is more difficult to grasp, especially since his Gothic fiction is often more successful in portraying middle America than so-called “realistic” mainstream fiction (Nash 38), but the problematic nature of his postmodern mutation cannot be avoided. What is often lost in the gale of fright, supernatural menace, and cynical social commentary is a certain sense of textual logic, integrity, and purpose. Pet Sematary is a good instance of the dilemmas King’s postmodern Gothic poses. In that novel, King gives us a cast of characters whose actions and eventual fate are truly horrifying, but they are placed in a logically inconsistent fictional universe, a universe so supernaturally oppressive that they have no choice in the matter. Horror is achieved at the expense of logic, but with the loss of logic, the novel’s ability to address real problems in a real America is compromised. What we must eventually fear in King’s fiction is not the real world of oppressive parents and governments but the imaginary, but if this is the case, King’s work loses its critical edge, its power to engage American society. Thus, King’s greatest problem is a side effect of his greatest asset, his postmodernism, his privileging of folk, archaic, and popular traditions over that of scientific rationalism. This postmodern privileging of the popular and the archaic converges nicely in Pet Sematary. If Rabelais is the master preserver of popular culture’s history of unrestrained and subversive laughter, as Bakhtin argues (3–58), then Stephen King is the master of popular culture’s history of unrestrained, subversive, and thus unsettling fear. In the case of Pet Sematary, the fear in question is the primordial fear of the dead and the archaic forces associated with death and dying. Zizek is at least partly correct when he notes that the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is that “of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living” (22). Zizek’s description is lacking in two regards. First, the fantasy, as it is rooted in the popular imagination and the archaic religious mind, is based on a fear of the dead, and that fantasy is not that someone will “want” to come back from the dead but that someone or something will bring that person

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back. In Pet Sematary, it is not little Gage who wants to come back; it is his father who will not let him go. A second and perhaps even more significant aspect of this common fantasy is that it expresses a pre-scientific or superstitious fear that death is not final, that death can somehow be overturned, that one can be both dead and alive at the same time. The importance of this fear is that it flies in the face of what we know from our own experience and from what we know medically and scientifically. But it is precisely this superstitious fear that King privileges in his critique of the American family and society in Pet Sematary. The fear he evokes is not escapist; it is evoked in earnest. It is obvious from King’s comments in Winter’s work and his own Danse Macabre that he takes his novel, its social commentary, and its supernatural ambience seriously. Winter refers to King’s use of the supernatural as “rational supernaturalism,” in which the order and facade of everyday life is overturned (5–9). That is, King and his admirers tend to take his supernatural creations seriously, as more than literary creations, as in nineteenth century ghost stories. These supernatural beings represent a popular and archaic distrust of the scientific and the rational. In King’s hands, the supernatural and the fear it generates do not offer an escape from the rigors of culture, as in more traditional Gothic novels, but they offer an avenue by which a direct confrontation with the problematic nature of the modern American experience can be launched. More often than not, the object of the supernatural attack in King’s fiction, especially in Pet Sematary, is the modern family and its hapless members. King’s postmodernism is nowhere more in evidence than in his insistent deconstruction of the “magic circle” that is the modern American family. An essential element of this deconstruction is King’s privileging of adolescent discourse over that of adults and rationalism. Adolescents must battle the supernatural because adults cannot or will not, as in IT. Even when the supernatural is not introduced, as in Rage, the adolescent is given a privileged place from which to speak, and to speak unchallenged. The enemy of such adolescents, of course, is that symbol of American modernism, the middle-class family. It is the family that makes of adolescence such a gruesome age. According to King, it is the sorry state of relationships within the family that makes the adolescent vulnerable to the enticements of the supernatural, especially in Christine. It is the fragile, illusory nature of the nuclear family that gets Louis Creed in trouble in Pet Sematary. But one could easily point out that King’s own “rage” in this instance is misplaced. The American family is not designed to prepare its young for battles with the supernatural. Whether or not such families do a good job of preparing their members for the adult world is another question, but that is not the focus of Pet Sematary or his other postmodern Gothic novels. The irony is somewhat

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incredible. The American family is judged to be inadequate because it does not prepare its members to deal with the imaginary. In King’s works, it is as if troubled, hypocritical families attract the attention of the supernatural. There is a logical problem, however, with King’s presentation in these novels, one that also plagues and eventually undermines the textual integrity of Pet Sematary. The supernatural in King’s fiction is rather catholic in its choice of families. In IT, the children of both “healthy” families and obviously dysfunctional ones are targeted. In Christine, Arnie Cunningham is an easy mark for the supernatural because of his rebellion against an overbearing mother and a weak father, but so is his friend Dennis who comes from a more normal and loving family. In Pet Sematary, ancient supernatural forces toy with the Creeds, a young family riddled with problems, but also with an older more mature family, their neighbors, the Crandalls. Thus, whether or not one comes from a healthy or a dysfunctional family makes little difference in the battle with the supernatural. So we have to wonder if, logically, the attack of the supernatural has anything to do with the health or structure of the American family. If this is the case, we have to wonder what role a critique of the American family actually plays in the postmodern Gothic novel. The American family is not the source of the evil that threatens people, and it is not ultimately the family itself that attracts evil. More often than not, it is the child, the adolescent, and the “adolescing” adult, to use Erikson’s apt description (91), who attract evil because they are in rebellion against the adult world. King’s privileging of the discourse of adolescents and the discourse of fear traps him. The ultimate complaint of adolescents is that they are misunderstood by adults, but King’s monsters and supernatural beings seem to understand them well enough, that they are akin to monsters in their own right, giving awkward credence to what adults have feared all along, that their children are monsters, that they might want to eat their parents, as they do in both ’Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary. In short, what King says he is doing in his novels is not what his novels actually do. In fact, his novels work so well as artifacts of popular culture because that old subversive fear that popular culture has preserved since archaic times is rarely challenged. But if the supernatural, the object of archaic and popular fear, is so catholic in its choice of families and individuals, what difference does family structure make? One can only assume that because King’s work is popular and postmodern, it must include an attack on adulthood and the family even if that attack has no logical place in the tale. One can go even further. In the battle with the supernatural, as we learn in IT, coming from a dysfunctional family may be to one’s benefit.

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Such contradictions especially complicate the narrative logic of Pet Sematary and Louis Creed’s symbolic role in that narrative. A physician, Creed moves his wife, two children, and cat from Chicago and the tyranny of his wife’s Jewish natal family to Ludlow, Maine, which is not as bucolic as it seems. Creed finds a father-figure in his older neighbor, Jud Crandall, but it is this father-figure who introduces him to the old Indian burial ground that lies just beyond the pet cemetery and who first suggests that he might use the burial ground to resurrect the cat Church. When he resurrects Church, Creed only learns what the town and Crandall have known for a long time: the dead do come back, but “changed,” if not psychotic. But this does not stop Creed from eventually burying his son and then his wife in the burial ground, bringing them both back but with horrifying consequences. It is clear from King’s own comments that it would be a mistake to think of Creed as a hero (Winter 145–54). King is actually quite critical of his protagonist. According to King, Creed “never ceases to be the rational man” (Winter 151). It is not clear, though, how Creed is a rationalist, and on this point, the inherent weaknesses in King’s postmodern Gothic resurface. More specifically, Creed is made to represent something he is not, rational. One does not have to be a clinical psychologist to realize early on in the novel that Creed is acting and behaving irrationally. Inside his new house, Creed experiences a “premonition of horror” (35). One might accuse Creed of being rational for not taking seriously that premonition, but of far more importance is Creed’s seemingly irrational avoidance of an everyday problem, the potentially dangerous location of his home near a road frequented by speeding trucks, and yet he takes no precautions to protect his two young children, Ellie and Gage, by erecting a fence. When the family cat Church is presumably killed by one of those trucks, Creed responds irrationally. He does not build a fence at that point, heeding a real warning; no, he considers resurrecting Church. So central is the cat to the health of his family—and thus the significance of the cat’s name—that Creed takes the cat to the old Indian burial ground and resurrects him. When Gage is killed by still another of those trucks, he, too, is resurrected in spite of how badly Church turns out. Gage goes on a killing spree, committing the ultimate atrocity, killing and cannibalizing his own mother. Still, Creed does not learn from his mistake. He takes the corpse of his wife to the old Indian burial ground and resurrects her. No, Creed is not a rational man, but that is because King as author will not let him be rational. As Natalie Schroeder cautions us, the causes of Creed’s behavior are ultimately “ambiguous” (137). By the time we are near the end of the novel, it is not clear if Creed acts as he does to protect the “magic circle” of his family, or once he has been introduced to the magic circle of the Pet

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Sematary and what lies beyond it, the magic circle of Little God Swamp, if it is not the powers of that other, more primordial magic circle guiding and pulling him. By the end of the novel, we know that the powers at work in the Indian burial ground have the ability to put Jud to sleep and thus block his possible interference with Creed’s plans to exhume and rebury Gage; they warn the older man to stay out of things (321). At roughly the same time, as Creed is exhuming his son’s body, he feels the power of the “place” growing and calling out to him (323). Even earlier, Jud voices his fear that the “place” had arranged the death of little Gage (274–75), and he, too, can feel the power of the place growing (319). The driver of the truck which hits Gage cannot explain why he speeded up instead of slowing down. Something came over him, and he put the “pedal to the metal” (293). And Creed himself is put into a deep sleep while Gage returns to wreck havoc at the Crandall home (376). Because of the nature of the supernatural involvement in his world and its manifest power, Creed does not really have the freedom to be rational. What would it mean to be rational in the world of the Wendigo? Because we are in the midst of a postmodern Gothic universe in Pet Sematary, wherein the premonition is privileged over reason, where the dream should be taken seriously, and where ghosts have more authority than scientists, we might expect King’s portrayal of the ghost Victor Pascow to be less contradictory, but we would be wrong. Pascow dies in the infirmary while under Creed’s care. Before he dies, he issues a warning. “In the Pet Sematary,” he begins but falters and then eventually says, “It’s not the real cemetery” (73–74). Later that night, now as a ghost, Pascow visits Creed again. With dried blood on his ghostly face, Pascow seems to Creed to be an “Indian” (83). His appearance is noteworthy. We are tempted to think of him as the representative of a more archaic, more natural form of religion, but Pascow’s warnings only seem to plant the seed of temptation in Creed’s mind. Creed fails to heed Pascow’s warnings, but Creed’s daughter, Ellie, does heed those warnings and yet, because she does heed those warnings, she actually contributes to a deepening of the tragedy that is unfolding in Ludlow. While in Chicago visiting her grandparents, and presumably under the influence of Pascow, Ellie dreams the truth about Church, that he has been killed (172). Back in Ludlow, after Gage’s death, she dreams that Creed, too, will die (300). On the plane trip back to her grandparents after the funeral, she dreams of Gage coming back and retrieving a scalpel from his father’s medicine bag (312). Pascow personally visits her dreams to warn her that her father is in danger (316). But Pascow’s warnings have a tragic consequence. Because of Ellie’s dreams, Rachel decides to make a return trip to Ludlow to check on her husband. Basically, Ellie and Pascow send Rachel to a rather gruesome death.

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It is not clear if Pascow represents forces inimical to the Wendigo of the Indian burial ground or if he himself is an “Indian” spirit. In any case, the forces at work in Ludlow are so powerful that they can insure that Rachel and Ellie will be away when Creed exhumes and reburies Gage. And those forces can extend their power beyond the realm of Ludlow. There are sudden flight cancellations that make it possible for them to fly to Chicago with Rachel’s parents immediately after Gage’s funeral (295). When it becomes apparent that something is wrong in Ludlow, Rachel is able to get a ticket back to Ludlow, but it is in a roundabout, time-consuming fashion. She thanks “God” for saving her the last seats on the various legs of her flight back (326), but it is obvious that she is being kept out of the way until it is too late for either her or Creed. She, like her husband, has been carefully orchestrated from the very beginning and orchestrated in such a way that they cannot resist. In this postmodern Gothic novel, King weaves together archaic lore and myth and the postmodern rebellion against rationalism. In fact, the key to understanding Pet Sematary and appreciating its rich complexity lies in noting the tension in that text between the supernatural and the modern American experience. The ultimate symbol King uses to denote the Mystery of death in Pet Sematary is a circle or spiral (286), and the ultimate symbol of the modern American family, referred to cynically as a “magic circle” (121), is Church the family cat. The modern American family’s bonds are so fragile that it is held together by a pet, and when that pet is killed, those bonds are so threatened that a man of reason, Louis Creed, attempts the forbidden and what we normally think of as impossible. The problem with King’s postmodern Gothic universe is that in that universe Creed can resurrect his son. When King discusses Creed, he evaluates him as if he lived in our world and not in the Gothic world King has created for him. King’s momentary lapses in this regard indicate a greater problem with many postmodern Gothic artifacts of popular culture. It is a problem King shares with such diverse authors as Frank Miller, Dean Koontz, John Saul, and Anne Rice, to mention but a few. The very real problems these authors wish to address, such as the nature of the American family, child abuse, crime, and gender, are addressed in such mythologicallyexaggerated worlds that those worlds become the problem to be overcome, and not the issues that first inspired them. In Pet Sematary, King has transformed the Gothic tale in an exciting and truly horrifying fashion, but in doing so, he has made something so much more frightening that we forget to confront death. One of the things that holds the American family together, King tells us in Pet Sematary, is its fear and avoidance of death. Unfortunately, in the

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“flash” of the novel, the true horror of death, its mundane character and its very ordinariness, is lost, and that defeats King’s stated purpose in writing the novel. He tells Douglas Winter that he “had never had to deal with the consequences of death on a rational level” (147). The novel was to be such an exercise, but very quickly the novel ceased to he an investigation of death and funerals. As King tells Winter, when the ideas came for the novel, and they came very quickly, it was not the death of a cat or the possible death of his own son that triggered his emotional response. It was the possibility that they might come back from the dead (Winter 146). In this sense, King’s novel does not deal with death. It deals with a fear that replaces the fear of death, and that fear is the fear of the return of the dead. Such a replacement is a defense mechanism no doubt, and that is probably why King’s novel is so popular and why the ideas that form the basis for that novel are so persistent in folk and popular culture. Death may well be an issue the American family and society will not face, but then neither will Stephen King. WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswosky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Erikson, Erik H. Insight and Responsibility. New York: Norton, 1964. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: NAL, 1975. ———. Christine. New York: Viking, 1983. ———. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. ———. IT. New York: Viking, 1983. ———. Pet Sematary. New York: Doubleday, 1983. ———. Rage. The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. New York: NAL, 1986. ———. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: NAL, 1975. ———. Skeleton Crew. New York: NAL, 1985. Lovett, Verena. “Bodily Symbolism and the Fiction of Stephen King.” Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure: Popular Fiction and Social Relations. Ed. Derek Longhurst. London: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s Gothic American. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. ———. “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Nash, Jesse W. “Gerald’s Game: The Art of Stephen King.” The New Orleans Art Review 11 (1990). Pharr, Mary Ferguson. “A Dream of New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein.” The Gothic Worm of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary

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Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Schroeder, Natalie. “‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible’ and ‘The Other Side’: The Theme of Death in Pet Sematary and Jitterbug Perfume.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Bantam, 1981. Winter, Douglas. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: NAL, 1986. Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MIT P, 1991.

E D WA R D M A D D E N

Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Stephen King’s Christine

Cars are girls. Didn’t you know that? Stephen King Christine (194)

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n 1994, Jim Pierce, the “allegedly abusive” father and manager-coach of tennis star Mary Pierce, said of his well-publicized desire to reconcile with his daughter, “Mary is like a finely tuned sports car. She is sleek and powerful, and she is the best. Well, I built the Ferrari—and now I want the keys back” (“Perspectives,” 13). Pierce’s comparison of his status as father and coach to the building and tuning of a car suggests that a woman’s (sexual or athletic) performance and her body, compared to a sportscar, are subject to male power and ownership. Sliding from simile to metaphor, he renames his daughter “the Ferrari,” and claims the power of repossession. Pierce “built” her, and he wants the keys back: He wants to re-possess the car, his daughter, and the financial gain her “sleek and powerful” body represents. In American culture, cars are traditionally and iconographically imagined as women, and as Pierce’s perhaps frightening quotation indicates, women may symbolically become cars. Both cars and women, in this reversible metaphorization, have traditionally been considered male property. And if cars are women and women are cars, then the traffic in women may mark the sociosymbolic relations between men—the

From Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, ed. Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, pp. 143–158. © 1998 by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson.

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homosocial relations—that in many ways structure society. The exchange of commodities, of women and/as/or cars, facilitates and marks the transfer of both power and property among men. In this chapter I examine one particular textualization of the exchanges among men of women and cars: Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Christine. In the novel, the author uses (indeed, overuses) the familiar metaphor of cars as women to construct a myth of the female monster, in this case a demonic and feminized 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine. The text maps the tropes of a 1950s teenage romance, the adulterous plot (the romantic triangle), and a male coming-of-age narrative onto the archetypal twentieth-century horror narrative, the myth of the evil machine. Central to King’s text are lover’s triangles—the book begins, “This is the story of a lover’s triangle” (1)—and repeatedly those triangles are marked by the eroticized and conflated exchange of both cars and women.1 This circulation of goods, money, power, and women among men has been detailed in various ways by both anthropologists and feminists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Luce Irigaray, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In this analysis of Christine, I focus on two particular aspects of this paradigm: the status of women and the relations between men. Clearly, the metaphorization of women as cars denotes an objectification of women as commodities in a homosocial and patriarchal system—that women are objects of exchange, not acting, subjects. Additionally, as Sedgwick repeatedly points out in her examination of English literature, the bonds being formed and cemented through the traffic in women (through marriage, prostitution, and the exchange of images of women) are not the bonds of men with women, but those of men with men. Sedgwick’s very use of the term “homosocial desire” denotes a continuum that includes men desiring men and men promoting the interests of men, a continuum that, in contemporary Western culture, necessitates homophobia—a disavowal and fear of homosexuality necessary to maintain the proper boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual.2 Christine is a novel informed by a concern for the sexually and socially proper—for property, propriety, proper commerce, proper bodies and genders, proper sexualities, and proper social spaces. Although the traffic in cars and the traffic in women mark the homosocial systems of exchange in the novel, the repeated eruptions of ghosts, violence, and excrement into those systems of exchange (the author seems obsessed with anality) signal a return of what is repressed within those systems in the novel: female subjectivity, bodily anxiety, and homosexual panic. The novel’s narratives of male power, emblematized by the romance of the automobile and the nostalgic invocations of the 1950s, are marked by the violent repression and commodification of women’s sexuality, by an uneasiness about the body or

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bodily in general, and by the further repression and irrational fear about the homosocial/homosexual desires that structure the narrative world. If, as Lydia Simmons suggests, “The car is the myth and metaphor for America” (153), we must read this particular car text as emblematic, in some way, of American cultural anxieties. King’s novel represents a particular relation of gender and sexuality, that of an objectifying misogyny and its corollary homophobia endemic to American culture—that is, both the commodification of female sexuality circulated among men and the homosocial desires and homosexual panic that structure such an exchange.3 THE TRAFFIC

IN

WOMEN

Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Christine (as well as John Carpenter’s movie of the same name) is a curious amalgamation of so many stories we’ve heard before: the 1950s teen romance, the male coming-of-age narrative, the myth of the evil machine.4 It’s Pygmalion and Carrie and Frankenstein and American Graffiti all rolled into one narrative vehicle. Further, it’s a novel of nostalgia for a powerful American past and a novel marking the death of the American romance with the automobile, itself emblematic of American power and progress in 1950s postwar culture. The novel, in fact, seems a perverse echo of the nostalgic television series Happy Days. The names of the show’s lead character and of the soda shop proprietor, Richie Cunningham and Arnold respectively, are combined in the name of the novel’s main character, Arnold Richard Cunningham. The stories of romance, horror, and nostalgia contaminate one another in King’s text, and the nostalgia for past narratives foregrounds the violence and power inequities of both gender and sexuality inscribed therein. In the novel, Arnie Cunningham, a stereotypical nerd, must buy a car and obtain a girlfriend in order to construct himself as an autonomous male, wielding financial/sexual power and divorcing himself from overprotective parents and a protective best friend, Dennis Guilder, the high school jock who narrates most of the novel. But this narrative of a young man coming to power is complicated by his relations with other men, and also by the car, Christine, and the girlfriend, Leigh Cabot. Across the bodies of Christine and Leigh, the desires, anxieties, jealousies of other men are cathected or exchanged. Both car and woman become vehicles of homosocial exchange within the social spaces inscribed in the novel, primarily those of the father–son relationship, adolescent male friendship, and romantic triangle(s). Dennis Guilder, the narrator, begins the novel: “This is the story of a lover’s triangle, I suppose you’d say—Arnie Cunningham, Leigh Cabot, and, of course, Christine” (1). But that “of course” is a bit disingenuous, for the

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Arnie/Leigh/Christine triangle is only one triangle among many in the novel. In fact, the primary triangle might arguably be that of Arnie, Leigh, and Dennis, the most traditional triangle and the one Dennis admits late in the novel—the triangle in which “the Best Friend steps in” (224). The relationship between Arnie and Dennis is repeatedly triangulated—not only by Leigh (the girlfriend) and by Christine (the car), but also by Arnie’s overprotective parents, Michael and Regina Cunningham, professors who teach at Horlicks University (King’s less-than-subtle and sexist dig at academics); by the former owner of Christine, Roland LeBay, whose ghost comes back to haunt both the car and Arnie; and by Will Darnell, the owner of a garage who rents space to Arnie and who later involves him in illegal, interstate commerce. Dennis says of the time that Arnie spends working on Christine in Darnell’s garage, “And goddammit, was I jealous? Was that what it was?” (68). Sedgwick ties the romantic triangle to the homosocial transactions of patriarchal culture, in which heterosexuality is bound to traffic in women: “the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for cementing the bonds of men with men” (25–26). Dennis and Arnie’s relationship is part of a complex web of relationships, of male social space and homosocial commerce—of men circulating cars and women among themselves. LeBay sells Christine to Arnie, who rents space from Darnell in which to work on “her.” Dennis “steals” Arnie’s girlfriend. Arnie admits that the primary reason he asks Leigh out is his jealousy in imagining her with other men (163). In other words, he asks her out not for herself, not because he desires her, but because she is desired by other men. Ironically, he later says that Christine had been “waiting for the right buyer”: the one “who would love her for herself alone” (319). Although Arnie rejects his stereotypically wimpy father and castrating mother,5 he adopts two alternative fathers (or fathers-in-law): Darnell, the garage owner, and LeBay, who sells Christine to Arnie, an exchange of feminized property. Stephen Bayley calls the transaction, which occurs in a chapter entitled “Arnie Gets Married,” “a complex litter of meanings, combining sex and money and ownership in a trilogy of intense eroticism” (29). When Arnie and Dennis stop to look at the car, Dennis thinks of LeBay as “a very old pimp huckstering a very young boy” (34). As Arnie later imagines the transaction, it is a marriage in a used car lot, Darnell the best man, Christine the bride, and LeBay rising to give away the bride (317–18). Dennis remembers Arnie’s first view of the car as “love at first sight” (63), and he later portrays the relationship as a sexual addiction or obsession—“you’re hooked right through the fucking bag, aren’t you?” he asks Arnie. Arnie thinks of Christine in sexual/romantic terms as a “perfect” spouse, “waiting

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faithfully” on him: “She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and ... rest in her warmth. She would never deny.... She loved him” (319). Even Dennis’s even-tempered and rational father speaks of the purchase “as if ... Arnie had gotten married” (63). The purchase of a car is figured in the images of the traffic in women— both prostitution and marriage (in which a man “gives” his daughter to another man). LeBay further equates cars and women when he compares “the smell of a brand-new car,” which is “about the finest smell in the world,” with that of female genitalia (10), a remark that Arnie later echoes by equating driving and sex (413). LeBay himself had been in love with the car: An acquaintance says of him that he “treated it like it was a woman.... He loved that fucking car.... He didn’t give a shit for his wife” (396–97). Leigh calls Arnie’s relation with Christine “a disturbing parody of the act of love” (196). That cars are women is no new metaphor, though it becomes a bit tiresome in the novel. But the novel does foreground it as a learned, male metaphorization. Dennis—who has nightmares about Christine “bearing down on him in the high womanscream of burning rubber” (226)6—says, “it’s from your father that you get the magic, the talismans, the words of power. If the car won’t start, curse it ... and be sure you curse it female” (36). It is a repeated motif that by the middle of the novel has a horrific effect, combining discourses of eroticism; homosociality, manipulation, and violence, so that men working together on a car becomes a symbolic gangrape: Inside, the world was full of the echoey, evocative bang of tools and the sound of men working on cars and hollering profanity at the rolling iron they were working on. Always the profanity, and always female in gender: come offa there, you bitch, come loose, you cunt, come on over here, Rick, and help me get this twat off. (120) Like LeBay, these men not only compare cars to women, but specifically to female genitalia, and the pun in the last phrase portrays men working on a car together as men having sex with a woman.7 In this textual world of banging tools and sexualized cars, only Leigh questions the association of gender and cars, even as she reinforces it. Dennis briefly resists calling the car “Christine”—“I didn’t like it,” he says, though he immediately compares Arnie’s purchase to a man “who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning” (63). It is Leigh who tells Arnie that cars are girls.

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When Leigh asks Arnie “which you love more,” he says, “I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars.” She answers, “Cars are girls. Didn’t you know that?” (194). King adds: Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn’t been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn’t always true; she didn’t think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford. (195) But Christine is a girl (even if King does, for the moment, undercut Leigh’s moment of insight). Leigh tells Arnie that she cannot make out with him in the car, because—as she later tells herself—“it was like making love inside the body of her rival,” it was a “perversion.” To ride in Christine, adds Leigh, is to be “swallowed” in her (196). Christine—mouth or womb—is female, and to Leigh, making love to Arnie in the car would be to make love inside the body of another woman. Christine and Leigh are in many ways interchangeable goods in the novel’s systems of exchange. Leigh does not ask Arnie whom he loves more, but which he loves more, grammatically portraying both as things. Not only does Leigh recognize that cars are girls and that their rivalry is a sexual rivalry, but Christine may emblematize for Leigh her own disenfranchisement, especially because her dreams about gender and power inevitably turn to cars and driving, to being forced as a child to ask for dolls for Christmas rather than the red racing car she really wanted because it was a “boy toy” (204–5). Worse, the metaphor of cars as women is reversible in the novel, for in this text, women are cars. Dennis, madly in love with Leigh, compares her to a new car: “Like that long-ago Plymouth that had rolled out of Detroit on a carrier in 1957, she was, in a sense, still under warranty” (427). He notes elsewhere that “Leigh Cabot didn’t have any rust on her rocker panels” (141). Cars and women—as goods, bodies, and commodified sexuality—are items of exchange; they mark off the proper versions and property of male society. However, this metaphor not only underlines the novel’s homosociality, it also indicts and contaminates its users as well. If women are cars, then all bodies are machines, indicating an anxiety about bodies and bodily identity. Drugs, alcohol, and sex are, for Dennis, compulsive “engines” (62), people are “in gear” (221), minds in “overdrive” (337), and most dramatically, the car’s body and men’s bodies replicate one another. LeBay dies when Christine is vandalized (182)—an equation Dennis makes specific when he imagines their having similar injuries (to eyes and headlights). And Arnie’s complexion gets better in tandem with Christine’s

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repairs (120). Finally, when Christine hunts one victim while panting like an animal (289), the text immediately reverses the metaphorization, and the last breath of Buddy Repperton, the victim, slips out “like auto exhaust” (293). THE GOLD KEY

TO THE

CRAPPER

The anxiety about the body finds further expression in an anxiety about anality—the body’s wastes, the body’s orifices, its penetrable boundaries. Within the various frames of male social relations in the novel, male power and the gift of (female) goods are inextricably linked to violence and defilement. Every frame of exchange becomes in some way marked by refuse, by the remainders and reminders of parodic, illegitimate, or “unnatural” exchanges. The continued return to scatological language and the continued motif of shit, both literal and symbolic, mark an anxiety about the aggressive homoerotics of social space in the novel. If it is Dennis and LeBay who mark—with Arnie—the homosocial systems of the novel (the erotic triangle, the marriage exchange), it is Darnell who more clearly marks the defilement integral to these systems of exchange. His is the realm of illicit commerce. Not only does he traffic in alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine illegally (242, 412), but it is Darnell who emphatically collapses money, power, and privilege into the language of shit. As he had previously hired LeBay, Darnell hires Arnie as a runner, and he gives Arnie a garage door opener, to give him easy access to garage space and illegal goods. King adds, “It [the door opener] was, perhaps, Darnell’s version of a gold key to the crapper” (242)—the true sign of privilege, the locked executive restroom. The movie version of the novel repeats and amplifies the image of the gold key. When Arnie first arrives at the garage in the movie, Darnell warns him that he has no privileges yet: “Don’t think you’ve got the gold key to the crapper.” And he continues this language of scatology and anality, talking about “shitpiles” of money and “money falling out of my asshole.” In Darnell’s world, privilege and socioeconomic power become access—secret, powerful, privileged access—to shit. When Arnie works the circuits of illegal interstate commerce, he transports the contraband in the secret compartment of a car’s trunk, goods cleverly inaccessible in the rear of Darnell’s 1966 Chrysler Imperial. Similarly, in the short story “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” from King’s 1982 collection Different Seasons. Andy, who is raped by “killer queens” in prison (21) and examined anally by the guards, gets back at them by using money he has secreted in his anal cavity, and his friend (the narrator) smuggles his story out of prison the same way Andy smuggled money in.8

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Throughout Christine, anal language functions as a discourse of both power and aggression, further collapsing structures of violence and privilege. Arnie, becoming or echoing LeBay, keeps inveighing against the “shitters” of the world—it is LeBay’s signature word that Arnie adopts. But shit as both a marker of aggression and an item of exchange is literalized when the town hoodlums destroy Christine and, in a final and crucial act of defilement, defecate on her dashboard (213). This act is the pivot of the novel. After this moment, every relationship in the novel is markedly changed, and the killings begin. After Christine smashes the first of the boys, Moochie Welch, the invective is returned, and Moochie is metaphorized as shit to be scraped up with a shovel. (Implied, perhaps, is that Moochie is the one who actually defecated on Christine.) Arnie actually calls Moochie shit only in the movie version. In the book, it is the police investigator, Rudy Junkins, who says of Moochie. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a shovel?” (257). But he is mocking Arnie’s unbelievably flippant dismissal of the dashboard defecation. Arnie pretends to be unaffected by the vandalistic destruction of his car, and he keeps repeating, about the excrement. “Shit wipes off” (256). In between these utterances, a mechanic in the garage curses his car, female of course, chanting, “Oh shit on you, you whore”—a textual echo of Christine’s desecration (257). It is surely no accident that at the novel’s end, Dennis crushes Christine inside of Darnell’s garage, the space of shit, with a sewage truck named Petunia. Calling the truck a “kaka sucker” (263), he tells its owner, “I want to get rid of some shit” (265). And he proceeds to use it to restore order, to kill Christine, to clean up that defiled social space and homosocial order. But the social space is still tainted. The smell of shit remains and reminds. Petunia still smells of sewage and Christine of dead bodies, the excess and the (living) dead she leaves in her wake. It is surely no accident either that when Darnell is arrested for his illegal business, the police again use anal language for the restoration of social order: “Get this bag of shit out of here” (336). In her analysis of the movie To Live and Die in L.A., Sharon Willis ties anal language not only to illicit commerce (counterfeit money) and male aggression, but to the homoerotics of commerce and the corollary homophobia of the narrative as well—male aggression is figured repeatedly in images of male rape (16–19). Sedgwick writes of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. “[It] is the only English novel that everyone says is about excrement in order that they may forget that it is about anality” (Between Men, 164), and she connects the traditional and Freudian criticism of acquisition, of “filth and lucre,” to anal eroticism. Similarly, economic and social power and issues of control are tied to the bodily images of anality in King’s Christine. Moochie Welch, the novel’s “sack of ‘shit’” is also literally a sack of money—

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he had been begging for spare change outside a concert, and as he ran away from Christine, the pockets of his pants and parka jingled with over thirty dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes. But in the emphatically homosocial textual realm of Christine, both homophobia and aggression play an inevitable part in the textual trajectory of the anal theme. As Willis explains, “male homosocial bonding ... depends on keeping its distance, through repression and violence, from homosexuality; hence it depends, in its historical construction, upon homophobia” (18). When the ghost of LeBay actually takes over Arnie, Arnie/LeBay finds himself saying, and those shitters with their fancy goddam cars and the trunks full of golf-clubs those goddam officers I’d like to bend them over this here lathe I’d play some golf with them I could find the right hole to put those little white balls in you bet your ass. (317) Later, while drinking beer with Dennis, Arnie/LeBay throws his empty cans into a wastebasket, saying, “Watch me put it up the little tramp’s ass, Dennis” (408). Both the wastebasket and “the right hole to put those little white balls in” are aggressive images of anal rape. The “little tramp” is an image of waste (a wastebasket) and of power; the name refers not to a woman, but to Charlie Chaplin and indirectly to Hitler—one of LeBay’s obsessions (429). The other image suggests the multiple rape of powerful men (military officers); anal rape becomes an expression of power over them. The double-bind of the image of anal rape is its aggressive masculinity and its possible homoeroticism. In a textual world of relentless heterosexuality, such an image may symbolize the presumed “unnaturalness” of other exchanges in the novel (such as the illegal commodities hidden in the trunk), but it also continues the dynamics of homophobia and misogyny because the powerless—male or female—are always the “fucked.” LIKE

A

COUPLE

OF

QUEERS

Late in the novel, Dennis wonders if this has only been the story of two childhood friends growing apart and of his own consequent “fixation on Christine, the wedge that had come between [them]” (439). One might thus read the novel as a narrative of the movement from adolescent same-sex relationships to adult heterosexual relations.9 Even such a traditional psychological narrative may be marked by anxieties about homosexual desire and female sexuality, and to simply dismiss the narrative in such a way—as only a narrative of boyhood friends sexually and socially growing

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apart—is to dismiss the overwhelming homosociality the novel inscribes, indicts, and evades. As Dennis himself says of such an interpretation, “It ignored the hard facts, but it was comfortable” (439). For Dennis, such an interpretation ignores the unbelievable “hard facts” of a sentient car and a ghost; it allows Dennis and Leigh to live “ordinary lives.” For the contemporary reader, such a reading ignores the overwhelmingly gendered and sexualized social systems of the novel; it ignores the commodification of women that the sexualized car suggests, and it ignores the homosociality that the ghost represents—a father proffering a woman’s body to his son, a father taking over the son’s body.10 Such a reading is perhaps also comfortable, because it allows Dennis (and the reader) to ignore the sexual anxieties at work in the relationship between Dennis and Arnie. When Dennis asks himself, after Christine begins to take up Arnie’s time, “was I jealous?” (68), the answer is an emphatic, albeit evasive, yes. When Dennis’s new, buxom girlfriend wants him to take her to a local make-out spot, he admits, “I should maybe have been thinking about the promise of her breast, but instead I found myself thinking about Arnie” (83). In the narrative of the romantic triangle, the real bond being delineated is that between the male rivals, “the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle ... being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved” (Sedgwick, Between Men, 21). The real bond developed by the novel is that between Dennis and Arnie. Dennis notes, as he attempts to comfort Leigh, “I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us—and part of myself was, too. I had known him for a long time. A long good time” (381). It is as if the relationship with Arnie takes emotional and temporal precedence over that with Leigh. Leigh drops out of the romantic plot at the end, marrying an IBM customer service representative rather than Arnie or Dennis. Arnie dies—appropriately enough, in a car accident with his mother—and Dennis concludes the tale of Arnie, “Rest in peace, Arnie. I love you, man” (497). In the novel, the heterosexual love triangle is bound to a homosexual panic, the fear and loathing provoked when the affection between men begins to become eroticized.11 When the female body—car or woman—is erased from the exchange, or when the male body itself becomes feminized, the erotic potential of homosociality seems to necessitate homophobia and a panic about homosexuality. Arnie is repeatedly feminized in the novel, his body and his psyche marked as feminine and permeable. Not only do the school bullies call Arnie “Cuntface” (145), but Dennis himself feminizes Arnie in his narration. He calls Arnie’s laughter “hysterical” and feminine (49), he protects him at school, and he notes that Arnie’s first job, flagging

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for a road crew, is a “girl’s job”—in fact, Arnie fills in for the girl who quit because she became pregnant (12). At one point, when Arnie, who seems “hysterical” and “haglike,” starts crying, Dennis hugs him: I knew what to do. Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest. We sat that way for maybe five minutes, and then I drove him to his house and dropped him off. After that I went home myself. Neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that. No one came along the sidewalk and saw us parked at the curb. I suppose if someone had, we would have looked like a couple of queers. I sat there and held him and loved him the best I could and wondered how come it had to be that I was Arnie Cunningham’s only friend, because right then, believe me, I didn’t want to be his friend. (56, emphasis added) This scene between Dennis and Arnie is not marked by the aggressive anality of LeBay, though Arnie does late in the novel include Dennis among the “shitters” of the world—“You stole my girl ... you’re just a shitter, like all the rest of them” (454). But the scene is marked by King’s obsession with the anal because Dennis says he would rather be “standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhea and no dime” than holding his hysterical friend, thus equating homosexual panic with an excremental anxiety (indeed, the problem of control of the sphincter). This scene also prefigures Leigh’s refusal to embrace Arnie in Christine; these two embraces (or lack thereof) frame the sexual politics of Arnie’s purchase of and obsession with Christine, and both encounters (the actual and the feared) take place in a car, stereotypical realm of teenage sexuality. More importantly, for Dennis, this is a scene of both tenderness and disgust; a poignant aporia, it is unspeakable (“Neither of us talked about it later”). Douglas Keesey, in his analysis of homophobia in King’s fiction, footnotes this scene—among several—as indicative of “the fear that male bonding will be seen as gay attraction,” which is, “pervasive in King’s fiction,” and which he ties to Sedgwick’s descriptions of homosexual panic (Keesey, 199, n. 4).12 This is not to say that Dennis is homosexual, but to note the homoerotic and homophobic tension of the text. Male tenderness must be held at a homophobic arm’s length. To “[love] him the best I could” is to hate and disavow that love: to not talk about it, to wish to be somewhere else, someone else. He doesn’t want to be Arnie’s friend because of the fear

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that to others—and perhaps to Arnie or himself—it will seem that he really wants to be Arnie’s lover. Late twentieth-century American culture, as the text indicates, fosters an anxiety about and a disjuncture in the relations of men with men, rigorously policing the proper exchanges of homosocial bonds: cars and women, not embraces. In such a culture, as a character says in another King story, there is “no room for the hommasexshul” (Night Shift, 263). HARD BODIES, SOFT BODIES For Arnie, at one point in the novel, homosexual panic is all too real. Christine has been his symbolic phallus, his source of potency (200). But when he is arrested with Darnell’s goods in his trunk (hidden in the special compartment in the rear of Darnell’s Imperial), he sees his phallic power taken away, his body commodified, and his anal privileges redefined in a realm of violent, erotic, and oppressive homosocial power: “His panicstricken mind spun up a kaleidoscope of jumbled images.... Prison bars, blued steel. A judge bending down from a high bench.... Big bull queers in a prison yard looking for fresh meat. Christine riding the conveyor into the carcrusher in the junkyard” (338). The police penetrate his car’s trunk, three men gathered around the rear of the car, one policeman accusing Arnie of being “an asshole,” another policeman’s body phallically “almost entirely in the trunk; only his blue-gray-clad legs stuck out” (339). Arnie begins to think of Christine to reassure himself, as, throughout the novel, he has touched or caressed her hard body to gather confidence—“He groped back behind him, touched Christine—her hard, cool, reassuring surface—and things dropped back into place again” (329). (Arnie constantly caresses the car, “seeming to draw strength from it” [180]. Her “solidity” seems “to comfort him” [255].) Christine’s “hard” body, phallic and impermeable (and “behind” him), is Arnie’s support, a comfort to his fears of psychic and bodily permeability, which are figured in the image of “big bull queers” who surely echo the rapists of “Shawshank Redemption.”13 Although Arnie’s terror at arrest is of his body’s penetrability—vividly imagined in the image of anal rape—a more frightening terror might be his loss of both identity and body to a usurping male, not in sex, violence, or confinement, but in possession. Arnie’s other father figure, Roland LeBay, who sells him Christine, returns as a ghost to inhabit both the car and Arnie’s body. The ghost in the car becomes the ghost in the machine, and Arnie’s body gives birth to his own violent father, the ghost of LeBay “coalescing” inside him (351). At one point an “apparition” appears in the car beside Arnie. At first he sees that it is the ghost of LeBay, then it seems to be an aged

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version of himself. Arnie thinks to himself, “This version of himself and Roland D. LeBay could have been son and father: the resemblance was that great” (322). The ghost embodies the perverse patriarchal lineage of the father usurping the body of the son. But that apparition—like many of the apparitional bodies in Christine—dissolves, both literally and figuratively. The body shrivels and decays in front of Arnie, “rotting before his very eyes” (322). The bodies associated with Christine are never solid.14 Dennis repeatedly characterizes his perception of LeBay within Arnie in images of a drowned man (337). Arnie’s identity seems liquid, LeBay’s face ever protruding, taking over, or pushing through Arnie’s body. When LeBay begins to take over, Arnie’s face “roils” (456), his body shudders and convulses “as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes” (457). His language and his body, even a characteristic back injury, gradually replicate LeBay. The signature of Arnie also becomes that of Roland LeBay—which Dennis and Leigh find out with a bit of detective work (386–90)—not only representing the fact that LeBay’s ghost is taking over Arnie’s body (as it had the car), but also indicating the importance of the patronymic, the father’s name. If Christine is Arnie’s symbolic phallus, his sense of power, it is only because it is bestowed by LeBay, who represents the perverse law of the patriarchy that structures the narrative. This return of the ghost is an intrusion of the past, a return of history and his story. Arnie talks, says his father, “as if this were the fifties instead of the seventies” (468). Christine, narrative and car, facilitates a nostalgia for past narratives. (The movie visually quotes James Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause.) The car’s odometer runs only backwards, and the radio plays only oldies. Set in 1978 and published in 1983, this novel is an elegy to the American romance with the automobile. King notes the degeneration of neighborhoods, the transformation of “desirable neighborhoods” into “exurban sprawl” (44). He notes in particular the renaming of a street: Barnswallow Drive, the center of a residential neighborhood, becomes JFK Drive, a strip of gas stations and fast-food restaurants on the way to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The loss of a mythic American past is doubly marked in the street name (after the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and the transformation of neighborhoods into aesthetically displeasing roadside culture. But the novel is perhaps also an indictment of our romantic desires for past narratives and our blindness to the repression that haunts them. In this novel, the return to nostalgic history involves the return of a repressed history, a kind of return of the living dead figured in the misogyny and homophobia that linger with us. The nostalgia for past narratives releases the

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violence inscribed therein and foregrounds a history marked by male power and male privilege: a horrific story, in which women and/as cars delineate a homosocial culture, and in which ghosts and shit mark the violence, repression, and the homosexual panic integral to that culture. If the automobile may be said to both shape and haunt American imagination (Dettelbach, 120), King’s Christine foregrounds both the gender dynamics that shape American (car) culture and the sexual anxieties that haunt it. Dennis asks himself midway through the novel: Buy an old car and it will what? Change your head, your way of thinking ...? If we follow this line of reasoning to the bitter end, ladies and gentlemen, where does it take us? Where indeed? (138) Where indeed. To a social and textual realm in which women and cars are interchangeable goods, and where homosexuality is a frightening category of experience. To a world in which “cars are girls,” one in which a man may claim to have “built the Ferrari” of his daughter’s body and now “want the keys back,” rather than let her assert her own subjectivity. To a culture in which misogyny and homophobia are intimately connected. In fact, to a culture not so very different from our own. NOTES 1. See Stephen Bayley’s Sex, Drink, and Fast Cars for an extended analysis of the female symbolism of automobiles. See also Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car, by Peter Marsh and Peter Collett, which refers briefly to King’s Christine in relation to the themes of the car as a weapon and as a love object (170, 198). On the broader significance of the automobile in American culture, see The Automobile Age and The Car Culture, by James Flink; The Automobile in American Culture, edited by David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein; Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, edited by Jan Jennings; and In the Driver’s Seat, The Automobile in American Literature and Popular Culture, by Cynthia Golomb Dettelbach. Dettelbach’s book appeared before the publication of King’s Christine, but her chapter on “Dreams of Possession, Nightmares of Being Possessed” (90–120) provides a useful analysis of many of the themes that surface in Christine. Finally as a contrast to King’s Christine, see J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, a disturbingly erotic novel that finds in the imagery of automobile accidents an equation of sex, technology, and violence. Unlike the determinedly heterosexual and homophobic narrative of Stephen King’s Christine, Crash is bisexual, even polymorphously perverse. 2. On the exchange of women as property, see, for example, Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 The Elementary Structures of Kinship; Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One; Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”; and Sedgwick’s Between Men, especially the chapter on “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles.” (See also Emma Goldman’s “The Traffic in Women,” an earlier economic analysis of prostitution and the “white slave trade.”) Both Irigaray and Rubin reread Lévi-Strauss’s analysis through the

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lens of feminist theory. Sedgwick builds upon their analyses, but where Irigaray fails to distinguish between the social construction of male–male bonds and the actual demonization of male–male sex (see, for example, Irigaray 192), Sedgwick points out the simultaneous homosocial and homosexual dynamics at work in the traffic in women and the disavowal of the homosexual at work in the hegemony of the homosocial. I am especially indebted to Sedgwick’s work. On the necessity of the homophobic impulse in Western homosocial cultures see Sedgwick’s Between Men (3, 18–20, 25–27). 3. Verena Lovett, who examines in detail the menstrual imagery of King’s 1974 novel Carrie, dismisses Christine as simply comparable to “misogynistic pulp fiction,” a novel about “the tensions of masculinity” rather than the “female energy” she finds significant in other King texts (174). She fails to take into account the fact that, although women in the novel are minor characters, the car Christine, emphatically a female entity, is a primary character. There is female energy in this text, but, as I demonstrate, it is tied to misogynistic fear and homophobia, both of which structure the novel’s “tensions of masculinity.” 4. The myth of the evil or sentient machine is a common theme in King’s fiction. See “Uncle Otto’s Truck” in Skeleton Crew and “Trucks” in Night Shift. 5. King depicts both parents as “caricatures” (to use King’s own word for Arnie’s father). Both are academics. Michael, Arnie’s father, is a mournful, vegetarian history professor who mopes around in cutoffs playing a recorder. Regina, his mother, is a cold, domineering English professor who wants to crush any sense of teenage rebellion. (See 17–18, 23.) 6. This screaming is a characteristic feature of Christine. For example, “the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman” (240), and “he heard the car’s engine scream. The sound was like the shriek of a woman who scents treachery” (368). 7. It is perhaps worth noting here that one character in the novel (who is sitting in a gas station, masturbating) reads a pornographic novel entitled “Swap-Around Pammie,” which features a woman who “had gotten it from just about everyone” (360–61). In the novel’s male and automotive (sexist and misogynistic) world, women are repeatedly shared by men. 8. The implication, then, for the reader is that text he or she is holding is the transcript of that secreted (or excreted) text. The movie version also seems to foreground the anality of the story. Andy escapes from prison through the sewage system, and he slides out of a sewage pipe in a scene that can only be described as excremental. 9. Earlier in the novel, Dennis says he feels like someone whose best friend has married a “high-riding dyed-in-the-wool bitch.” “You don’t like the bitch,” he says, and she doesn’t like you, so “you just close the door on that room of your friendship,” or, more likely, “you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch’s enthusiastic approval” (70). Such imagery furthers the interpretation of the narrative as a movement from adolescent male bonding to adult heterosexuality. 10. Both LeBay and Christine are the catalysts of the perverse proliferations of triangulating desire. When LeBay takes over the body of Arnie, Dennis says Arnie and Leigh’s relationship becomes “a perversion on perversion—LeBay, Leigh, and Christine in some hideous ménage à trois” (446). And Dennis says of his budding relationship with Leigh, “Arnie was between them, and almost surely always would be. Arnie and his lady” (224), referring, of course, to Christine. 11. In Between Men, Sedgwick uses the term “homosexual panic” to denote the perceived social threat of “blackmailability,” “the interiorized and psychologized homophobia inherent in Western homosocial bonding, which enforces the disjuncture

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between homosexual desire and homosocial relations” (89–90). Later, in the Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick enlarges the definition to take into account the legal use of the term, “homosexual panic” being a defense used in court to prevent or lighten the sentencing of those who commit antigay bias crimes (gay-bashing, assault, murder), a defense based on the “assumption that hatred of homosexuals is so private and so atypical a phenomenon in this culture as to be classifiable as an accountability-reducing illness.” Sedgwick notes that the defense is so widely accepted that it in fact proves just the opposite, that hatred of homosexuals is “even more public, more typical, hence harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged groups” (Epistemology of the Closet, 19–21). This defense, in fact, was used as recently as 1993 in the state of Texas, in relation to the murder of Tommy Music in Midland in April 1993. His murderers got a lighter sentence because they claimed they became “momentarily irrational with fear” when Music allegedly made sexual advances. (For a discussion of this case and its implications, see Garry Boulard’s article, “The Anti-Twinkie Defense” in The Advocate, June 14, 1994.) 12. Much of Keesey’s analysis is an attempt to recuperate King’s fiction from the charge of homophobia. His reading of It is a sophisticated and perhaps convincing attempt to prove that, at least in that novel, “Only by facing up to one’s fear of effeminacy, only by acknowledging the monstrousness of homophobia, can one learn to live with others and with the Otherness in oneself” (198). However, despite Keesey’s compelling reading of It, I find Christine to be much less nuanced: It is a text in which the repeated denigration or objectification of the female and the aggressive anality between men reinforces misogyny and homophobia in ways that are both unsubtle and unredeemable through any kind of creative reading. 13. Frank Darabont, the director and screenwriter of the 1994 movie version, distanced himself from the homophobia possibly represented in the “bull queers,” insisting that they are not gay but rapists who substitute men when women are not available. (See “The Buzz” in The Advocate, 4 April 1995.) The rapists. however, are still labeled “queens” or queers: they are still marked as homosexual. 14. Christine carries the ghosts of her victims. A car full of rotting corpses appears at a gas station for one of the final murders (362–63), and the rotting dead—in various states of dismemberment or decay—appear as wedding guests in Arnie’s dream of marriage to Christine (318).

WORKS CITED Ballard, I. G. Crash. New York: Farrar, 1973. Bayley, Stephen. Sex, Drink, and Fast Cars. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Boulard, Garry. “The Anti-Twinkie Defense.” The Advocate, 14 June 1994, 33–38. “The Buzz.” Rev. of The Shawshank Redemption. The Advocate. 4 April 1995, 70–71. Carpenter, John. Dir. Christine. Columbia Pictures, 1983. Darabont, Frank. Dir. The Shawshank Redemption. Columbia Pictures. 1994. Dettelbach, Cynthia Golomb. In the Driver’s Seat: The Automobile in American Literature and Popular Culture. Westport: Greenwood. 1976. Flink, James J. The Automobile Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1988. ———. The Car Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1975. Goldman, Emma. “The Traffic in Women.” Anarchism and Other Essays. 1917. New York: Dover, 1969. 177–94.

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Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jennings, Jan, ed. Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990. Keesey, Douglas. “‘ The Face of Mr. Flip’ Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King.” The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Edited by Tony Magistrale. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992. 187–201 King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Viking. 1983. ———. Different Seasons. New York: Viking, 1982. ———. Night Shift. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1978. ———. Skeleton Crew. New York: Putnam’s, 1985. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elemental Structures of Kinship. 1949. 1967. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer. and Rodney Needham. Edited by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Lewis, David L., and Laurence Goldstein, eds. The Automobile and American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1980, 1983. Lovett, Verena. “Bodily Symbolism and the Fiction of Stephen King. Gender, Genre, and Narrative Pleasure. Edited by Derek Longhurst. London: Unwin Hyman. 1989, 157–76. Marsh, Peter, and Peter Collett. Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986. “Perspectives.” Newsweek, 27 June 1994, 13. Rubin, Gayle: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York and London: Monthly Review, 1975, 157–210. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. ———. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Simmons, Lydia. “Not from the Back Seat.” The Automobile and American Culture. Edited by David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980, 1983, 153–58. Willis, Sharon. “Disputed Territories: Masculinity and Social Space.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 19 (January 1989): 4–23.

S H E R RY R . T R U F F I N

“Screaming While School Was in Session”: The Construction of Monstrosity in Stephen King’s Schoolhouse Gothic

THE TEACHER

AS

MONSTROUS OTHER

M

alevolent teachers who “would hurt the children in any way they could” are immortalized in Pink Floyd’s The Wall and in numerous texts that exemplify the trend that I call the “Schoolhouse Gothic.” Extraterrestrials attempt to colonize earth by inhabiting the bodies of high school teachers and terrorizing students in The Faculty. A demon disguised as a substitute teacher is sent to punish a lapsed satanic cult, that is also a parent–teacher association, by sacrificing cult members and their children/students in The X-Files. The “objective” nineteenth-century scientist and the white supremacist are fused in the sinister, slaveholding schoolteacher in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These texts suggest that in the popular imagination, schools serve the same social function as prisons and mental institutions—to define, classify, control, and regulate people—as Michel Foucault articulates in Discipline and Punish. In response, no area of contemporary culture— music, film, television, fiction, or scholarship—can escape the compulsion to return again and again to schools and teachers to dramatize a central fixation that locates these texts in the Gothic tradition: a fixation on mystified power. The work of that most prolific contemporary Gothic writer, Stephen King, is no exception.

From The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard, pp. 236–248. © 2004 by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard.

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David Punter, who notes that the Gothic survives to this day because it continues to offer an “image-language in which to examine social ... fears,”1 observes that contemporary academic discourse shares with the Gothic a clear set of obsessions: power, alienation, dislocation, otherness (181–214). The Gothic, like the contemporary academy, has its origins in the Age of Reason yet offers what Fred Botting calls “counternarratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values.”2 Such counternarratives resonate with those of Foucault, whose work is preoccupied with, if not actually haunted by, the legacy of the Enlightenment. According to Anne Williams, Foucault’s work reveals the way in which “Enlightenment thought [is] characteristically ordered and organized by creating institutions to enforce distinctions between society and its other, whether it resides in madness, illness, criminality, or sexuality.”3 In specifically Gothic terms, the relationship between the thinking, rational subject and its Other(s) works the same way: “the haunted Gothic castle ... creates the haunted, dark, mysterious space even as it attempts to organize and control it” (Williams 248). Thus both the Gothic tradition and poststructuralist discourse interrogate the strategies of classifying and standardizing that is associated with the Enlightenment and question the institutions that reproduce these strategies, including the state, the family, the church, the laboratory, and, yes, the school. The modern academy is one of the institutions entrusted with the construction of the contemporary subject. It functions as home, prison, and laboratory all at once and is, according to Foucault, a key site where Power and Knowledge intersect and reinforce one another. We do not, however, need Foucault’s guidance to see that the modern school has assumed many of the socializing and penalizing functions traditionally associated with the court, the family, and the church. As a result, the teacher becomes a figure of immense power, dictating what children learn, when they work, when they play, and even when they take trips to the lavatory. More importantly, teachers determine which children are prodigies and which ones are problems. And so they wield an inexhaustible and inscrutable authority. Schools and schoolteachers make frequent appearances in the fiction of Stephen King, whose Schoolhouse Gothic presents teachers as monstrous Others whose teaching breeds monstrous students who, in turn, strike out at the educational system that created them. This fiction equates teaching with crimes that have long prevailed in Gothic texts, even as it reflects shifting configurations and conceptions of power. King’s The Shining and Rage displace the fears and rivalries that Freud ascribed to parent–child relationships (a pattern evident in earlier Gothic texts) onto educational institutions, portraying the teacher as an abusive surrogate parent and

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highlighting the power of the teacher to identify and isolate “bad” children and to administer punishment. Rage also likens modern education to another Gothic anxiety—rape—locating the male in the position of power over the docile, usually female figure. Images of teachers as abusers and rapists emphasize the way in which the teacher labels and victimizes the student. Other images, however, implicate the teacher and the school in larger systemic processes that construct the student as the monstrous Other. Both “Suffer the Little Children” and Rage develop the Gothic tradition by exploring the role of the school and schoolteacher in enforcing what Foucault calls the “Power of the Norm”4—established and legitimated through strategies of surveillance and consolidated in discourse. The Shining sets the stage for the constant slippage between the roles of cruel teacher and abusive parent that recurs in King’s fiction. Jack Torrence, an alcoholic writer and former English teacher, agrees to be the winter caretaker of what turns out to be a malevolently haunted resort hotel in Colorado, ultimately succumbing to the sinister influences of the hotel and attempting to bludgeon his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny, to death. Jack takes the job to work on a play about a school headmaster who accuses a “saintly”5 student of cheating on a final exam, eventually beating him to death; Jack has recently lost his teaching position after assaulting a rich, good-looking student named George Hatfield who slashed Jack’s tires after being cut from the debate team because he stuttered. During his time at the Overlook, Jack is increasingly unable to write his play as he comes to see the student-hero of The Little School as “a monster masquerading as a boy” (273) and to identify with the schoolmaster who beats him to death. As Jack becomes increasingly paranoid and violent, he repeatedly confuses his son, Danny—whose imaginative, clairvoyant power to “Shine” draws the envy of his artistically frustrated father—with George Hatfield, whose money, popularity, and good looks Jack had resented. In a trance, Danny imagines his father shaking him and screaming “Don’t Stutter!” and is bewildered, since he has never stuttered (139). Later, Jack has a vision in which he bludgeons George Hatfield to death with a cane (much like the one his own abusive father had wielded), at which point Hatfield—to Jack’s horror—transforms into a crying, pleading Danny (287). Jack then encounters the ghost of Grady, a former caretaker who has murdered his wife and two daughters before killing himself; Grady tells Jack that Danny plans to escape and therefore “needs to be corrected” (366). Ultimately, Jack roams the labyrinthine hotel,6 brandishing a mallet, which he uses to break several of his wife’s ribs and to threaten his son/student while screaming, “You cheated! You copied that final exam!” (444). In Jack, King fuses the cruel father with the sadistic teacher, who is instructed that “education always pays”

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(368). King thus shows us two monstrous educators who define instruction as violence. LEARNING

FROM

MONSTROUS TEACHERS

King’s “Suffer the Little Children” begins to suggest the ways in which monstrous teaching might create monstrous students. Echoing Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a genealogy of Western penal practices, King, in “Suffer the Little Children,” indicates parallels between the school and the prison or mental institution, explores the ways in which these institutions define deviance, and inscribes surveillance and forced confession at the heart of the teaching profession. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the “disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” (7) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an index of the transformation of social power in Western culture. In pre-modern society, power, located in visible authorities, worked to punish physical bodies for specific crimes; in a modern disciplinary society the hidden machinations of power define and regulate deviance through normalizing practices and strategies of surveillance. The aim of this power, in Foucault’s formulation, is its own reproduction, which requires the construction of particular forms of subjectivity—the making, in short, of persons. The chief characteristic of these persons is, for Foucault, their homogeneity. Foucault describes the human soul as no more and no less than “the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body,” a thing “not born in sin and subject to punishment, but ... born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint” (29). Foucault’s rather astonishing claim here is that neither God nor nature nor parents nor mad scientists create people: rather, people are produced by Power, an impersonal force (or, rather, a complex network of related forces) that— despite all ideologies to the contrary—constitutes, legitimates, animates, and reproduces the institutions that, in turn, constitute and help to replicate modern culture. Thus, Foucault argues, power makes people. Schools—like prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories, and other social institutions—play an important role in constructing these modern subjects and in ensuring that most will be docile and “normal” while others will be unruly and “deviant.” For Foucault, the modern disciplinary society is a “punishable, punishing universality” (178) whose institutions individuate, distribute, and rank the human multiplicities whose lives they are charged with improving, rehabilitating, curing, and ordering through “procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge” (192). What unites these different “procedures” is “a

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relation of surveillance,” which Foucault insists is “inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency” (176). Surveillance is the most important mechanism, according to Foucault, by which Power is obtained, deployed, and transferred in modern Western culture. Surveillance “automatizes and disindividualizes” (202) Power, dispersing and mystifying it. It reproduces the specific form of Power that Foucault calls the Norm, which, he argues, “since the eighteenth century, ... has joined other powers—the Law, the Word (Parole) and the Text” (184). These powers are, in fact, intertwined: the power of the Norm is both translated into and enforced by discourse, by texts. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that academic and medical discourses of the Victorian age “transform[ed] sex into discourse”7 and implies that modern subjectivity can be understood in the same terms: our culture believes that the “truth” about a person is found not in intimate interaction but rather in a confession or, better still, a file. Foucault’s Power of the Norm—established and legitimated through strategies of surveillance and consolidated in discourse—turns out to be a major concern of King’s Schoolhouse Gothic. The protagonist of “Suffer the Little Children” is Miss Sidley, a rather severe elementary school teacher who, “like God, ... seemed to know everything at once.”8 One way that she inspires this fear is by watching her students in her eyeglasses while writing on the chalkboard: “the whole class was reflected in [her] thick lenses and she has always been amused by their guilty, frightened faces when she caught them at their nasty little games” (82). In fact, she regards control over the students as her crowning professional triumph: “the success of her long teaching career could be summed and checked and proven by this one everyday action: she could turn her back on her pupils with confidence” (81). Miss Sidley becomes convinced that a student named Robert is a monster after she sees his distorted face in her glasses, and then sees him momentarily “chang[e]” (83) when they are face to face. Assuring herself that “she was not going to be one of those oldmaid schoolmarms dragged kicking and screaming from their classes at the age of retirement,” women who “reminded her of gamblers unable to leave the tables while they are losing,” she insists that “she was not losing. She had always been a winner” (83). Teaching, for Miss Sidley, is not occasionally punctuated by power struggles: it is a power struggle in which nothing less than the prerogative of definition is at stake. However, Miss Sidley begins to suspect that the power structure has somehow been inverted; she can “feel the weight of their eyes on her like blind crawling ants” (84) when she writes on the board and despairs as her cold, alert, watchful eyes turn into “frightened, watching” (85) eyes. One day,

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she finds herself watching Robert transform into an ugly monster, and she is terrified. She pulls herself together and concludes that if her students are fiends “hiding behind masks” (85), and if Robert is “a monster, not a little boy,” then “she must make him admit it” (87). She longs to grab the children and “shake them until their teeth rattled and their giggles turned to wails ... thump their heads against the tile walls and ... make them admit what they knew” (85). Significantly, it never occurs to her to contrive ways of placing the children in the care of colleagues in the hope that they will see what she sees: instead, she plots to make the children confess. For Foucault, confession is a key component of the exercise of Power. It signals that a subject has internalized the definitions imposed upon him or her. In The History of Sexuality, he describes the confession as: a ritual ... that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence [or virtual presence] of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile ... [61]. Thus, if Miss Sidley can get the children to confess, then her status as an authority will be unassailable, as will her judgment of the deviance of her students. Miss Sidley marches the class into the mimeograph room one by one for a “Test” (“Suffer” 90)—itself a ritual of definition and classification— and shoots them. Here, as in The Shining, King defines education as violence. Miss Sidley executes the children one by one until she is discovered by another teacher, and then she is sent to a mental institution, where the psychiatrist and the orderlies “watc[h] her for the first sign of an aggressive move” (92) just as she once watched her pupils. Eventually, she is allowed to interact with children under carefully controlled circumstances but “see[s] something which disturb[s] her” (92) and eventually commits suicide. Her psychiatrist, in turn, becomes absorbed in contemplation of the children— “hardly able to take his eyes off them” (92)—at which point the story ends. It is not clear from the text whether or not the children actually transform into the creatures seen by Miss Sidley (and, presumably, the psychiatrist) or whether these metamorphoses are delusions, brought on, perhaps, by the very power disparities in and through which the teacher has learned to function. That is, to justify and to maintain her power, Miss Sidley needs to regard the children as monsters (at least potential ones), and her visions are depicted as a self-fulfilling prophecy of a most horrific order. In this story, however, power does not go uncontested: Foucault claims that “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather

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consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (HS 95). In “Suffer the Little Children,” students who have been subject to the power of “a dominating, overseeing gaze”9 find a way (at least in Miss Sidley’s mind) to resist, to turn that gaze around and thus to reverse the mechanism of surveillance and gain a measure of control—however fleeting and costly—over their tormentor. In this story, the classroom is depicted not as a value-free place in which benevolent teachers facilitate learning but rather as a site of institutional surveillance and control—not unlike the prisons, mental institutions, and hospitals described in Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and The Birth of the Clinic—institutions designed, according to Foucault, to objectify, classify, and discipline bodies and to construct persons (and, perhaps, monsters). MONSTROUS PRODUCTS

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Rage, one of King’s early novellas, goes much farther than “Suffer the Little Children” in exploring the ways in which the monstrosity of the teacher is reproduced in the student and revisited on the school. In Rage, the maladjusted Charlie Decker uses a pipe wrench to mangle a chemistry teacher who has forced him to solve a problem on the board and then mocked him for getting it wrong. When he is expelled, Charlie sets his locker on fire to create a diversion, shoots two teachers, and holds his algebra class hostage. After the initial shock subsides, his classmates join him in a strange form of group therapy that concludes with the ritual humiliation and abuse of the single straight-laced non-participant. As Charlie puts it, school was cancelled for the day, but “in Room 16, education went on.”10 Rage employs many images to explore the monstrosity of teachers. Like The Shining, Rage reveals a Freudian subtext that parallels parents with teachers and presents both as monstrous. Charlie’s relationship with his father is horrific—rife with unresolved, and irresolvable, Oedipal conflict. He reports that “my dad has hated me for as long as I can remember” (53). After Charlie encounters the primal scene, he begins to regard his father as a monster: he remembers hearing noises and imagining that “something terrible was coming. Coming for me through the darkness ... creaking and creaking and creaking” (50). He realizes that “the Creaking Thing was in Mom and Dad’s room,” and, shortly thereafter, that “the Creaking Thing was my Father” (51). He “dare[s] to hate him back” (58) at age four, after his father hurls him to the ground in anger and then denies the act. The boy shrieks; his mother temporarily exiles his father, and Charlie admires the “practiced and dreadful ease” with which his mother sends his dad “stomping away like a surly boy” (58). In Rage, the Freudian subtext is far from subtle.

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Charlie is unable to separate his family trauma from his troubles at school, and so he thinks of his schooling in familial terms, as being “caught for another day in the splendid sticky web of Mother Education” (11). More often, however, he conceives of school as decidedly masculine, as a sophisticated version of his father. As he leads his peers in a group intervention, Charlie is repeatedly distracted and disturbed by Mrs. Underwood’s body, admitting to himself that “I wish it was [my father] I’d killed, if I had to kill anyone. This thing on the floor between my feet is a classic case of misplaced aggression” (155). Principal Denver’s lecture comes to Charlie as “shark words at deep fathoms, jaws words come to gobble [him]. Words with teeth and eyes” (20). For Charlie, father and teacher are always one, and both are sinister, castrating forces against which he must fight for self-preservation. Rage also likens modern education to rape, positioning the teacher as the powerful (usually male) subject in contrast to the docile (usually female) other. Anne Williams argues that much male Gothic fiction is about “horror of the female,” a horror that is “figure[d]” and “control[led]” in Gothic texts by displays of masculine power, displays ranging from the penetrating male gaze to actual rape and murder.11 Charlie Decker refuses to be feminized and victimized in this way, to play the docile victim that Williams describes as “an object ... [that] may never be anything else but an object, and a focus of unconscious resentments against the feminine” (109). Charlie taunts the principal about his true role, which Charlie believes to be both sexual and sadistic. Charlie accuses Mr. Denver of get[ting] “a kick out of peddling my flesh” (Rage 21) but sarcastically excuses him by conceding that “everybody has to get it on, everybody has to have someone to jack off on” (21). Before leaving the office, Charlie untucks his shirt, unzips his pants, and tells the secretary that Mr. Denver “jumped over his desk and tried to rape me” (22). When the school guidance counselor, Mr. Grace, is asked to take over for the principal, Charlie refuses to answer his questions, believing that the counselor is “a man with a headful of sharp, prying instruments. A mindfucker” (67), always trying to “sli[p] it to you” (66). Charlie manipulates and reverses the power dynamic by insisting on being the one who gets answers: he tells Mr. Grace that he will shoot a student if Grace asks him any questions, then tricks him into asking a question, at which point, Charlie shoots into the floor, shocking his peers out of their mesmerized states and terrifying the school officials. Charlie hears Mr. Grace crying over the intercom and congratulates himself on having “made [Grace] fuck himself with his own big tool” (75). Later, as his peers bond, Sandra—one of Charlie’s smartest classmates—compares her education to an anonymous, somewhat violent sexual encounter that she has had, musing that teachers

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“want to stuff things into your head until it’s all filled up. It’s a different hole, that’s all. That’s all” (116). Thus Rage offers a conception of the school—of its disciplinarians, its counselors, and its teachers—as a power struggle of the sadomasochistic variety, and suggests that students, aware of themselves as sexual as well as pedagogical victims, are able to appropriate power and invert the power structure. The paranoid vision of high school offered in Rage suggests, however, that the power by which the academy operates is more subtle, diffuse, and mysterious than that of either the abusive parent or the serial rapist. Charlie Decker, like Miss Sidley, fears the kind of surveillance that Foucault associates with modern Western culture and its chief normalizing institutions. Charlie suspects that he is even being watched in the restroom: “someone’s always got to peek. People like Mr. Denver and Mr. Grace even get paid for it” (11). He remembers bringing his weapon to school “ever since [he] decided that people might ... be following [him] around and checking up” (23). He recalls the day that he assaulted his chemistry teacher and how “everybody was looking at [him]. All of them staring” (150). He thinks of the aftermath of the attack, “the way people looked at [him] in the halls. The way [he] knew they were talking about [him] in the teachers’ rooms” (155). Although Charlie has, in fact, done something to attract the attention of the school officials, the novella suggests that the school, like a prison, is designed not for isolated observation but rather for general, corporate surveillance and control. It is a place that assumes and, in a sense, creates deviance. The physical plant, the daily routine, and the power structure of the school all help to reproduce the Foucauldian Power of the Norm by maximizing conformity. The lockers stand “in silent sentinel rows” (25) like prison guards. The ticking of the clock carves the day into intervals (85, 96, 143, 157), and “the clock buzze[s] away with a vague kind of determination” (52). According to Foucault, segmented time is central to the modern disciplines: “there is not a single moment of life from which one cannot extract forces” (DP 165). The school is especially sensitive about time: Foucault reports that “from the seventeenth century to the ... beginning of the nineteenth, ... the complex clockwork was built up cog by cog” so that “in the end, all the time of all the pupils was occupied ... [and] [t]he school became a machine for learning” (165). This machine, Foucault goes on to explain, “requires a precise system of command” and a “technique of training” (166). This training involves “few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted by signals—bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher.... The pupil will have to have learnt the code of the signals and respond automatically to them” (166). It is not surprising to note,

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then, that when Charlie shoots the teacher and shuts the classroom door, only one student screams, and even she “stop[s], as if ashamed at screaming while school was in session, no matter how great the provocation” (Rage 33). Charlie and his peers tense up each time the schoolbell rings as they resist the automatic response of gathering their things and heading to the next class (85). In Rage, the diffuse power relations produced and reproduced in the school expand beyond the single figure of a teacher or a principal; they are, as anticipated by Foucault, ultimately internalized within the psyches of the students. Constant surveillance—along with its discursive product, the permanent record—ensures that the student will become what Foucault calls “an effect and object of power, ... effect and object of knowledge” (DP 192). Foucault claims that modern culture not only makes individuals out of bodies, but also “case[s]” (191) out of individuals. The case is “the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality ... and the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc” (191). Foucault argues that: for along time ordinary humanity—the everyday individuality of everybody—remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of man ... formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination [191]. The caseness of the student—or the prisoner or mental patient—is contained in and maintained by his file. During Charlie’s visit to the principal’s office, Mr. Denver looks at a paper “so he wouldn’t have to look at” the boy, and the boy surmises that it is “something from my file, no doubt. The almighty file. The Great American file” (Rage 20). Later, when Mr. Denver is on the intercom, Charlie snarls at him, “I’m out of your filing cabinet now, Tom. Have you got it? I’m not just a record you can lock up at three in the afternoon” ... “before the day’s over, we are going to understand the difference between people and pieces of paper in a file” (43). Charlie, in short, recognizes that he has been constructed as a Foucauldian “case” by his teachers and counselors over the years and that in “case” form, he resides in his permanent record. He resists this construction, perhaps because he believes that it is false and perhaps because he fears that it will become true, that its official bureaucratic sanction will make it so. Foucault insists that:

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[w]e must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains and objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production [DP 194]. Charlie’s deepest anxieties come from an awareness that he is, in some sense, the object of such procedures, that he has been carefully observed, monitored, assessed, and classified—and from his suspicion not only that he cannot escape these judgments and classifications but also that they have had some mysterious role in making him the monster that he is. Significantly, Charlie’s drama ends as he leads his classmates in an attempt to force a confession of deviance from all-American boy Ted Jones. Now that he is in a position of power, Charles takes upon himself the prerogatives of Foucauldian power. When Ted refuses, he is accused of a variety of perversions and hypocrisies, then spat upon, punched, kicked, and tortured with the implements of the classroom: ink and notebook paper. He is left in a catatonic state, looking rather monstrous, with “blue black teardrops” all over his face, a bloody nose, and “one eye glar[ing] disjointedly toward no place” (Rage 162). King shows that the deviant becomes the Norm, that Power shifts, reproduces itself, endures. Today, the headline “Horror in the Halls” is likely to announce neither the publication of a Gothic novel nor the release of a teen slasher flick, but rather a real-life school shooting. In light of the Columbine tragedy of 1999, as well as the seemingly ubiquitous school shootings around the U.S., Stephen King’s 1971 Rage—if not his full inventory of Schoolhouse Gothic tales—appears decidedly prophetic. Ultimately, Charlie Decker may share with the student-gunmen of our time a common nightmare—that they’re “another brick in the wall.”12 The same fear appears to plague scholars and teachers, judging from the way in which the contemporary academy has embraced the claustrophobic vision of modern Western culture and its institutions that Foucault offers in Discipline and Punish, deploying this vision as a basis for probing its own crimes and complicities. It remains to be seen whether academics will attempt to remake their institutions in such a way as to meaningfully address the sense of dis-ease that gives rise to such disturbing images of schools and teachers—to the horrifying alienation that constructs both teachers and students as the Other—or whether they will simply become bored with those images and develop new, less unsettling self-portraits. Either way, manifestations of the Schoolhouse Gothic will continue to circulate and to enthrall as long the paradigms resonate with the

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anxieties of the larger culture, as long as they give those anxieties structure and significance. NOTES 1. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, vol. 2: The Modern Gothic. 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1996), 117. 2. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 2. 3. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 248. 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 184. 5. Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Signet, 1978), 271. 6. Evoking the typically labyrinthine Gothic structure. 7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 20. 8. Stephen King, “Suffer the Little Children,” in Nightmares & Dreamscapes (New York: Signet, 1993), 81. 9. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings: 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 152. 10. Stephen King, Rage, in The Bachman Books (New York: Signet, 1986), 44. 11. Williams, 114. 12. Roger Waters, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II.” On The Wall (New York: Columbia Records, 1979).

WORKS CITED Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. ———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. King, Stephen. Rage. In The Bachman Books. New York: Signet, 1977. ———. The Shining. New York: Signet, 1978. ———. “Suffer the Little Children.” In Nightmares & Dreamscapes. New York: Signet, 1993. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1996. Waters, Roger. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Il.” The Wall. 1979. Performed by Pink Floyd. Compact Disk C2K 68519. New York: Columbia Records, 1997. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

HAROLD BLOOM

Afterthought

B

y all accounts, Stephen King is public-spirited, generous, humane, and an exemplary social citizen. As a novelist and story-writer, he impresses me as being no more or less aesthetically and cognitively valuable than Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, John Grisham, and our other popular novelists with enormous audiences. That is to say, King—like these others—does not seem to me a borderline literary phenomenon, whose works will have the status of period pieces. Rather, King’s books—like Clancy’s and Grisham’s—are not literary at all, in my critical judgment. I am aware that there is much opinion opposing me upon this matter. Recently, the editor of a mass-circulation magazine asked me to write an aesthetic defense of King, who in the editor’s judgment is the Charles Dickens of our time. Schoolchildren, encouraged to read over the summer, make their way through one or two volumes of King. Reading Harry Potter is not reading, and neither is perusing Stephen King. He, more than the sci-fi authors, is the writer who is consonant with our age of virtual reality. The screen, the World Wide Web, and Stephen King are different aspects of the one eclipse of reading. King, whatever his qualities, emerges from an American tradition one could regard as sub-literary: Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft revered Poe, though he also followed the British fantasist Arthur Machen. In King’s instance, the direct precursor would seem to be Jack London, later to be

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replaced by Lovecraft and Poe and then by an entire range of popular horror fiction. Alexander Pope warned against breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, so I will avoid King’s obvious inadequacies: cliché-writing, flat characters who are names upon the page, and in general a remarkable absence of invention for someone edging over into the occult, the preternatural, the imaginary. Nothing is justifiable about Poe’s prose (or his verse), but Poe dreamed or constructed universal and permanent nightmares. Lovecraft, whom I find very hard to get through, nevertheless receives a cogent defense in a great book of exegesis, Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets (2001). For Nelson, Lovecraft takes us back to the major ancient and Renaissance heresies: Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism. Part of Lovecraft’s peculiar power may be this deep link to ancient heresies, but I hardly believe that King would be improved as a writer by an immersion in Neoplatonism. An esoteric cosmogony would be of little use to King, who is a horror-writer rather than a creator of romance fantasies. His fans find exactly what they want in King, and these are fans he shares with Anne Rice (a sickly imagination) and with Dean Koontz and Peter Straub, who are less homespun than King. I persist in my impression that King’s books are not written, as such. They are visually oriented scenarios, and they tend to improve when filmed. And there is the largest clue I can discover for his enormous circulation: he is the crucial horror-writer called forth by the Age of Information. He persuades his legions of fans because his monstrosities are presented as information.

Chronology

1947 1949

1965 1966–1970

1971 1972 1973

1974 1975

Stephen Edwin King is born September 21 in Portland, Maine. Donald Edwin King, Stephen’s father, leaves the family and never returns. King, his mother, and his older brother Donald spend the next few years moving from place to place before finally settling in Durham, Maine. Writes first novel-length manuscript. Publishes first short story, “I Was a Teenage Graverobber,” in Comics Review. Attends the University of Maine, Orono, where he studies American literature and writes a column for the weekly paper. As an undergraduate, King teaches a seminar entitled “Popular Literature and Culture.” Marries Tabitha Spruce. Writes at night and by day teaches at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. Finishes writing Carrie after wife Tabitha retrieves his first discarded attempt from the trash bin. Sells Carrie to Doubleday for an advance of $2,500. Paperback rights are later sold for $400,000. King is able to quit his job and write full time. Mother Nellie dies of cancer. Carrie is published. ’Salem’s Lot is published.

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1976 1977 1978

1979

1980 1981 1982

1983

1984

1985

1986 1987

Chronology

Brian De Palma’s film adaptation of Carrie opens; paperback edition of the novel becomes a bestseller. Publishes Rage under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and The Shining as Stephen King. While teaching at the University of Maine, Orono, King develops the critical material on horror and the Gothic that he will later incorporate into Danse Macabre. A novel, The Stand, and a collection of stories, Night Shift, are published. The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman) is published. The Dead Zone is published and rises to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Firestarter is published. Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining is released. The novel Cujo, the Bachman novel Roadwork, and the nonfiction study Danse Macabre are published. In addition to Creepshow, King’s collection of graphic stories inspired by comic books of the 1950s, three new books are published this year: Different Seasons, a collection of novellas, the Bachman novel The Running Man, and The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. The film adaptation of Creepshow, King’s first screenplay, is released. The novels Christine, Cycle of the Werewolf, and Pet Sematary are published. Film versions of The Dead Zone, Cujo, and Christine are released. The fifth Bachman novel, Thinner, and The Talisman, a novel King coauthored with Peter Straub, are published. Firestarter and Children of the Corn, two films based on King’s fiction, are released. King admits that Richard Bachman has been his pseudonym; New American Library publishes a collection of the first four Bachman novels. King writes and directs the film Maximum Overdrive, based on his short story “Trucks.” Skeleton Crew, a collection of short stories, is published. Silver Bullet, a film based on Cycle of the Werewolf with a screenplay written by Stephen King, is released. IT is published. The film Stand By Me, based on the novella “The Body,” is released. Misery, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Tommyknockers, and The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three are published. The films Creepshow 2 and The Running Man are released.

Chronology

1989

1990

1991

1992 1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998 1999

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The Dark Half is published. Pet Sematary, produced from another King screenplay, is released. King coaches his son’s little league team to a state championship. King recounts his experiences as a little league coach in “Head Down,” an essay written for The New Yorker magazine and later anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing. Four Past Midnight, a collection of novellas, is published. The films Misery and Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift, are released. Stephen King’s IT, airs as an ABC television miniseries. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and Needful Things are published. The Dark Half is released as a feature film. Golden Years, a series written by King, appears on CBS as does Sometimes They Come Back, a made-for-TV film based on a King short story. Gerald’s Game is published. Sleepwalkers, from an original screenplay by King, is released. The novel Dolores Claiborne and a collection of stories, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, are published. Needful Things is released as a movie and Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers appears as an ABC miniseries. Insomnia is published. An ABC miniseries written by King, Stephen King’s The Stand, airs. The film The Shawshank Redemption, based on an earlier novella, is released. Rose Madder is published. The films Dolores Claiborne and The Mangler, based on a King short story, are released. The miniseries Stephen King’s The Langoliers appears on ABC. The novel Desperation and the serial novel The Green Mile are published. The Regulators is published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The film version of Thinner is released. The short story “The Man in the Black Suit” wins an O. Henry Award for best American short story. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass and Six Stories are published. Stephen King’s The Shining, written by King, appears as a miniseries on ABC. Bag of Bones is published. Apt Pupil, a film adaptation of King’s novella, is released. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Hearts in Atlantis are published. Storm of the Century, written by King, airs on ABC as a miniseries and is published in book form. The

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2000 2001 2002 2003

2004

2005 2006

Chronology

film of The Green Mile is released. In June, King is seriously injured when hit by a van near his home in Maine. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is published. The novel Dreamcatcher and Black House, a sequel to The Talisman cowritten with Peter Straub, are published. Everything’s Eventual and From a Buick 8 are published. Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla is published. King receives The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower VII: Dark Tower are published. King collaborates with Stewart O’Nan on Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. The Colorado Kid is published. Faithful wins a 2005 Quill Award. Cell is published.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. BEN P. INDICK attended Rutgers University. After being stationed in Europe during World War II, he returned to the United States to become a pharmacist. His essays on horror and science fiction have been widely published.

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DON HERRON has been leading the critically acclaimed Dashiell Hammett Tour of San Francisco since 1977. He is the author of The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs as well as a biography of the crime writer Charles Willeford. He edited The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph, two critical anthologies on the pulp writer Robert E. Howard. CLARE HANSON is a professor in the English and drama department at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England. She has written studies of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, but her current research involves the intersection between medicine and culture. Her Cultural History of Pregnancy was published in 2004. TONY MAGISTRALE is professor of English at the University of Vermont. A leading scholar of Gothicism and horror film and fiction, Professor Magistrale has written and edited numerous studies on Stephen King. His most recent books include Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film and a student companion to Edgar Allan Poe. DOUGLAS KEESEY is professor of film and literature at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He has written a survey of Don DeLillo’s fiction and has edited, with Paul Duncan, the books Erotic Cinema and Paul Verhoeven. MICHAEL N. STANTON is professor emeritus of English at the University of Vermont. He has written on Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Robert Southey. An expert on fantasy literature, Professor Stanton recently published the book Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards: Exploring the Wonders and Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” He is a contributor to glbtq, the online encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. LINDA BADLEY is the author of Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic and Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. She teaches literature, gender studies, and film at Middle Tennessee State University and serves as the general editor, with R. Barton Palmer, of the Traditions in World Cinema series at Edinburgh University Press. SHARON A. RUSSELL is the author of Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion and a Guide to African Cinema.

Contributors

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KATHLEEN MARGARET LANT currently teaches at California State University at Hayward, where she also directs the Online Programs division of Extended and Continuing Education. She is the editor, along with Theresa Thompson, of Imagining the Worst: Stephen King’s Representation of Women. JESSE W. NASH is a family therapist and educational consultant. He is the author, with Elizabeth Trinh Nguyen, of Romance, Gender, and Religion in a Vietnamese-American Community: Tales of God and Beautiful Women. EDWARD MADDEN teaches courses on modernism, twentieth-century poetry, and queer theory as an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written on many subjects, including AIDS literature, and his own poetry has appeared in literary reviews across the country. SHERRY R. TRUFFIN is assistant professor of English and communication arts at Tiffin University in Ohio, where she teaches courses on writing, literature, and criticism. In addition to the essay on Stephen King in this volume, Professor Truffin has written on James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Flannery O’Connor.

Bibliography

Alexander, Alex E. “Stephen King’s Carrie: A Universal Fairytale.” Journal of Popular Culture, 13 (Fall 1979): 282–288. Badley, Linda. Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Beahm, George. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman. Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1998. Blue, Tyson. The Unseen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1989. Bruhm, Steven. “On Stephen King’s Phallus, or The Postmodern Gothic.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, 75–96. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Burns, Gail E., and Melinda Kanner. “Women, Danger, and Death: The Perversion of The Female Principle in Stephen King’s Fiction.” Sexual Politics and Popular Culture, edited by Diane Raymond, 158–172. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Collings, Michael R. The Annotated Guide to Stephen King: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography of the Works of America’s Premier Horror Writer. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1986. ———. The Many Facets of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985.

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———. The Stephen King Phenomenon. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1987. Connor, Jeff. Stephen King Goes to Hollywood. New York: New American Library, 1987. Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Egan, James. “Antidetection: Gothic and Detective Conventions in the Fiction of Stephen King.” Clues 5, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1984): 131–146. ———. “Sacral Parody in the Fiction of Stephen King.” Journal of Popular Culture 23, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 125–141. Findley, Mary. “Stephen King’s Vintage Ghost-Cars.” In Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 207–220. Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2004. Gallagher, Bernard J. “Breaking Up Isn’t Hard to Do: Stephen King, Christopher Lasch, and Psychic Fragmentation.” Journal of American Culture 10 (Winter 1987): 59–67. Gray, Paul. “Master of Postliterate Prose,” Time (August 30, 1982): 87. Hanson, Clare. “Stephen King: Powers of Horror.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, 135–154. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Heller, Terry. The Delights of Horror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Herron, Don, ed. Reign of Fear: Fiction and Film of Stephen King. Columbia, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1988. ———. “Stephen King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic.” In Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 129–157. New York: New American Library, 1986. Hohne, Karen A. “The Power of the Spoken Word in the Works of Stephen King.” Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 93–103. Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Indick, Ben P. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.” In Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 171–185. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982. Kanfer, Stefan. “King of Horror.” Cover story. Time (October 6, 1986): 74–78, 80, 83.

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Keesey, Douglas. “‘The Face of Mr. Flip’: Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King.” In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, 187–201. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. King, Stephen. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 89–114. Lant, Kathleen Margaret and Theresa Thompson, eds. Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Madden, Edward. “Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Christine.” In Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, 143–158. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. ———, ed. The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992. ———, ed.“The Shining” Reader. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1991. ———. Stephen King: The Second Decade, “Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half.” New York: Twayne, 1992. Magistrale, Tony and Michael A. Morrison, eds. A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Nash, Jesse W. “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 151–160. Norden, Eric. “Playboy Interview: Stephen King.” Playboy (July 1983). Oakes, David A. Science and Destabilization in the American Gothic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Porteau, Chris. “The Individual and Society: Narrative Structure and Thematic Unity in Stephen King’s Rage.” Journal of Popular Culture 21, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 171–178. Punter, David. “Laws of Recollection and Reconstruction: Stephen King.” In Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law. London: Macmillan, 1998.

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Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, “Carrie” to “Pet Sematary.” Boston: Twayne, 1988. Russell, Sharon A., ed. Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Schroeder, Natalie. “Stephen King’s Misery: Freudian Sexual Symbolism and the Battle of the Sexes.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 137–148. Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985. Spignesi, Stephen. The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Works of America’s Master of Horror. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991. Smith, Greg. “The Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries?: Academics, Moralists, and the Stephen King Phenomenon.” Midwest Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 329–345. Stanton, Michael N. “Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone.” In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, pp. 61–72. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Truffin, Sherry R. “ ‘ Screaming While School Was in Session’: The Construction of Monstrosity in Stephen King’s Schoolhouse Gothic.” In The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard, 236–248. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982. ———. Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. New York: New American Library, 1986. ———. Bare Bones: Conversations with Stephen King. Columbia, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1988. Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror. Los Angeles: Renaissance, 2001. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: New American Library, 1984.

Acknowledgments

“King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural” by Ben P. Indick. From Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, pp. 171–185. © 1982 by Underwood-Miller Publishers. Reprinted by permission. “Stephen King: The Good, the Bad and the Academic” by Don Herron. From Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, pp. 129–157. © 1982 by Underwood-Miller Publishers. Reprinted by permission. “Stephen King: Powers of Horror” by Clare Hanson. From American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, ed. Brian Docherty, pp. 135–154. © 1990 by The Macmillan Press. Reprinted by permission. “Tracing the Gothic Inheritance: Danse Macabre” by Tony Magistrale. From Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half, pp. 20–26. © 1992 by Twayne Publishers. Reprinted with permission of the Gale Group. “‘The Face of Mr. Flip’: Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King” by Douglas Keesey. From The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, ed. Tony Magistrale, pp. 187–201. © 1992 by Anthony S. Magistrale. Reprinted by permission.

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“Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone” by Michael N. Stanton. From The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, ed. Tony Magistrale, pp. 61–72. © 1992 by Anthony S. Magistrale. Reprinted by permission. “The Sin Eater: Orality, Postliteracy, and the Early Stephen King” by Linda Badley. From Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice, pp. 15–43. © 1996 by Linda Badley. Reprinted by permission. “Needful Things (1991)” by Sharon A. Russell. From Stephen King: A Critical Companion, pp. 111–126. © 1996 by Greenwood Publishing Group. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. From Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women by Kathleen Margaret Lant. © 1998 by Greenwood Publishing Group. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary” by Jesse W. Nash. From Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Spring 1997), pp. 151–160. © 1997 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted by permission. “Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Christine” by Edward Madden. From Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, ed. Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, pp. 143–158. © 1998 by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. “ ‘ Screaming While School Was in Session’: The Construction of Monstrosity in Stephen King’s Schoolhouse Gothic” by Sherry R. Truffin. From The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard, pp. 236–248. © 2004 by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas Howard by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com. Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume.

Index Abjection, 44–46, 47–51 Academic analyses, overview of, 20–24 American Express, 119 Anality, 118–119, 183–185, 185–188 Apollonian impulse, 64 “Apt Pupil”, 39 Archetypes, 102–103 Authors, 9–11, 116–122. See also Writing

extra-sensory abilities in, 11, 13–14 fairy tales and, 104, 118 internal conflict and, 100–101 subtext in, 21 Carroll, Noel, 67–68 Cars, as metaphors, 177–178, 181 Castle Rock, 125, 126–131, 135–137 Castles, 7 Chalmers, Polly, 127–128, 131, 132–133 Chapman, Mark David, 143 Chastain, Misery, 54–56 Childhood. See also Teachers Alan Pangborn and, 131 Brian Rusk and, 133–134 modern horror genre and, 62 Children of the Corn, 38 Christianity, ’Salem’s Lot and, 12 Christine criticisms of, 30 gold key and, 183–185 monstrosity and, 101 propriety and, 178–179 retro culture and, 109–110 summary of, 179–180 cars as women, 180–183 Cinderella, Carrie and, 104, 118 Circle jerkers, 73–75

Bachman, Richard, 22 “The Body”, 111, 119 “The Boogeyman”, 38 Borderline case, Carrie and, 48 Bradbury, Ray, 10 Bradenton, Kit, 78 Brand-names, 95–97, 110, 120–121 Bravery, modern horror genre and, 61 “The Breathing Method”, 38, 102 Briggs, Joe Bob, 20, 22 Burke, Matt, 29–30 Cabot, Leigh, 179–183 Cannibalism, 37–38, 117 Carrie abjection and, 47–51 223

224

Civilization, Needful Things and, 135–137 Clichés, use of, 24–25 Collings, Michael R., 70, 74 Colloquialisms, 110–111 The Colour Out of Space (Lovecraft), 34 Comic-strip effect, 110–111 Crandall, Jude, 114 Creativity, Misery and, 145–146, 147–148 Creed, Louis, 170–175 Creepshow, 25–26, 105 Criticisms lack of originality as, 24–28, 31–32 of Misery, 146 of narrative style, 111–116 unbelievability as, 29–31 use of cliches as, 24–25 Cujo, 99, 101 Culture, retro, 109–110 Cunningham, Arnie, 179–183, 185–188, 188–190 Danse Macabre criticisms of, 33–34 gag instinct and, 119 Gothic style and, 59–65 parables in, 21 sexuality and, 151 The Dark Half, 105 The Dead Zone extra-sensory abilities in, 13–14 as great novel, 29 historical events and, 86–87 influence of Poe on, 10–11 personal history and, 87–89 politics and, 89–94 praise of, 36–37 as success, 83–84 symbolism in, 84–86

Index

Death as mystery, modern horror genre and, 61 Decker, Charlie, 201–206 Different Seasons, 118, 119, 144 Disch, Thomas, 32–33 Dodd, Frank, 10–11, 88 Dracula (Stoker), 8–9, 11–13, 25 Dreams, as postmodern gothic, 173–175 Education Rage and, 201–206 “Suffer the Little Children” and, 198–201 Electronics, as third eye, 98–101 Evil, Leland Gaunt as, 130 Excess, as trademark, 117 Extra-sensory abilities acceptance of, 13–14 The Dead Zone and, 83–86, 88–89, 93 psychic powers, 11, 83–86, 88–89, 93 telekinesis, 13, 46 telepathy, 14 The Eyes of the Dragon, 103 Fairbairn, Douglas, 26 Fairy tales, 104–105, 118 Families, Pet Sematary and, 169–170, 174–175 Fans obsessive, 142–144 relationship with, 145–146, 148, 156–160 Fathers, Carrie and, 48–49 Fear, gothic style and, 15–16 Fires Carrie and, 47 The Dead Zone and, 84–85 Firestarter and, 13–14

Index

use of, 101 Firestarter, 13–14 Flagg, Randall, 106, 109 Flanders, Stella, 114 Foucault, Michel, 195–196, 198–201 Four Past Midnight, 151 Frankenstein (Shelley), Pet Sematary and, 167–168 Freaks (Browning), 34 Freud, Sigmund, 41–43 Gag instinct, 118–119 Gaunt, Leland, 127–131, 135–137 Gender, genre and, 57–58. See also Sexuality Genre, gender and, 57–58 Ghosts Christine and, 188–189 in Pet Sematary, 173–174 The Shining and, 14–15, 196 use of, 6–9 Gold key, Christine and, 183–185 Gothic style Danse Macabre and, 59–65 fear and, 15–16 history of, 6–9 Misery as, 53–56 Pet Sematary and, 167–175 teachers and, 195–196, 202 “Graveyard Shift”, homophobia and, 77 Guilder, Dennis, 30, 179–183, 185–188 Harker, Jonathan, 11–13 Hiltner, Anne, 142–143 Historical events, The Dead Zone and, 86–89 History, homeostasis and, 108–110 Homosexuality Christine and, 183, 185–188

225

“Graveyard Shift” and, 77 “I am the Doorway” and, 77 It and, 69–75 King and, 68–69, 78–79 ’Salem’s Lot and, 75–77, 79 The Stand and, 78 Homosocial systems, Christine and, 183–185 The House Next Door (Siddons), 68–69 “I am the Doorway”, homophobia and, 77 Identity, language and, 43–44 Imagination, third eye and, 98–101 Indian burial grounds, 172–173 Internal conflict, Carrie and, 100–101 Invasion (wolfe), 33 It, 69–75, 101 Italics, use of, 113–114 “Jerusalem’s Lot”, 38 Juxtapositions, 111 Keene, Eric, 142–143 King, Tabitha, 142–144, 146 Koontz, Dean, 33 Kristeva, Julia, 44–46 Lacan, Jacques, 43–44 Language, identity and, 43–44 Leandro, John, 78–79 Lightfoot, Steven, 143 Lightning rods, 84–85 Little God Swamp, 172–173 Lord of the Rings, The Stand and, 27–28, 106 Lovecraft, H.P., 9, 13–14, 21, 34 Maine, authorship of Invasion and, 33

226

Masturbation, 73–75 McGee, Charlie, 11, 14 Mears, Ben, 29–30, 75–77 Memory, third eye and, 98–101 Menstruation, Carrie and, 46 Metaphors cars as, 177–178, 181 literalization of, 118–119 sexuality as, 150–152 Misery creative process and, 147–148 excess in, 118 as gothic horror, 53–56 Paul Sheldon and, 153–156 phonetics and, 112 sexuality and, 145, 149–153, 160–163 view of audience and, 145–146, 156–160 “The Mist”, 100 “The Monkey’s Paw”, 26, 104 Monstrosity, 67–68, 195–198, 198–201, 201–206 Mothers, Carrie and, 49–50 “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut”, 39 “The Necronomicon”, 13 Needful Things, 106–107 Alan Pangborn and, 125, 130–133 Castle Rock and, 125 characters of, 131–134 horror genre and, 137–139 plot development and narrative structure in, 126–131 themes of, 134–137 Night Shift, 12, 38 Nixon, Richard, 90–91, 94 Nomos, 95 Nonfiction, Danse Macabre as, 59–65

Index

Normality, modern horror genre and, 61 Nostalgia, Christine and, 109–110, 189–190 Oedipal moment Freud and, 41–42 Jacques Lacan and, 43–44 The Shining and, 50–53 “One for the Road”, 12 Oral-aurality, 111–116 Oral literature, 102–107 Oral narratives, 117–122 Originality, lack of, 24–29, 31–32 Overlook Hotel, ghosts in, 14–15 Pangborn, Alan, 125, 130–132 Parables, in Danse Macabre, 21 Pascow, Victor, 173–174 Performances, 120–121 Personal history, The Dead Zone and, 87–89 Pet Sematary, 104 contradictions in, 171–172 criticisms of, 26, 31–32 dreams in, 173–174 families and, 170–171, 174–175 Frankenstein and, 167–168 italics in, 113–114 as postmodern gothic, 168–169 Pierce, Jim, 177 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7–8, 10–11, 14–15 Politics, The Dead Zone and, 89–94 Popular culture, oral history and, 106–107 Popularity of horror genre, reasons for, 60–62 Postliteracy, appeal to, 95–97 Postmodern gothic, 168–169, 173–175 Precognition, in Dead Zone, 13–14

Index

Psychic powers, 11, 83–86, 88–89, 93 Pyrotechnics Carrie and, 47 The Dead Zone and, 84–85 Firestarter and, 13–14 use of, 101 “The Raft”, 99 Rage, 201–206 “The Reach”, 114 Readers. See fans Redundancy, 102–103 Retro culture, Christine and, 109–110 “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan”, 119 Ridgewick, Norris, 134 “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, 76, 118–119, 183 Rusk, Brian, 127–128, 133–134 ’Salem’s Lot criticisms of, 25, 29–30 fairy tales and, 104–105 homophobia and, 75–77 vampire genre and, 11–13 weakness and, 79 Satire, 68, 70–72 Schools Rage and, 201–206 “Suffer the Little Children” and, 198–201 Schweitzer, Darrell, 22 Second Experience, 110 Semiotic concept, Julia Kristeva and, 44 Sexuality. See also Homosexuality car metaphors and, 177–178 Christine and, 179–183 Frank Dodd and, 88 Misery and, 149–153, 160–163

227

Rage and, 202–203, 205 Shawshank Redemption, 76, 118–119, 183 Sheldon, Paul, 54–56, 112, 147–148, 153–156 The Shining criticisms of, 25 excess in, 118 extra-sensory abilities in, 14 ghosts in, 14–15 influence of Poe on, 11 King discussing, 30–31 monstrosity and, 196 Oedipal moment and, 50–53 praise of, 36 Siddons, Anne Rivers, 68–69 Sidley, Miss, 199–201 Singer, Loren, 149 Skeleton Crew excess in, 117 morals and, 35–36 reviews of, 22 Small Assassin, The (Bradbury), 39 Smith, Johnny extra-sensory abilities of, 13–14, 83–86, 88–89, 93 personal history and, 87–89 political changes and, 89–92 Social codes, homosexuality and, 68–69 Societal failure, 135–137 “Sometimes They Come Back”, 38 Sounds, 111–116 The Stand childhood memories and, 103–104 homophobia, 78 influence of Poe on, 10–11 The Lord of the Rings and, 27–28 stereotypes in, 106 Status quo, modern horror genre and, 61

228

Index

Stephen King Concordance (Collings), 21 Stephen King’s World of Horrors, 120 Stillson, Greg, 10, 86–88, 90, 92–93 Stoker, Bram, 8–9, 11–13, 25 Style, excess in, 117 Success, effects of, 142–144 “Suffer the Little Children”, 198–201 Supernatural, 138, 170–171 Surveillance, Rage and, 204 Survival, modern horror genre and, 62–63 “Survivor Type”, 37–38, 39, 117 Symbolism, 84–86, 118–119, 150–152, 177–178, 181 Targets (Bogdanovich), 39 Teachers monstrosity and, 195–198 Rage and, 201–206 “Suffer the Little Children” and, 198–201 Telekinesis, in Carrie, 13, 46 Telepathy, in The Shining, 14 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper), 33–34 Thinner characters of, 29–30 name-brands in, 22 praise of, 37 sub-text of, 34–35 Third Eye, 98–101 Thompson, Jim, 26 Tolkien, J.R.R., 27–28, 106

The Tommyknockers, 78–79 Torrance, Danny, 14–15, 50–53, 105–106 Torrance, Jack, 50–53, 78, 196 Trademarks, excess as, 116–122 “Trucks”, 101 Turning-away, 44–46, 47–51 Underwood, Larry, 11 Vampire genre criticisms of, 25 in Night Shift, 12 ’Salem’s Lot and, 11–13, 29–30 Wagenknecht, Edward, 23 Walpole, Horace, 6 Weizak, Sam, 84, 86 White, Carrie. See Carrie White, Margaret, 48–49 White soul, 95–96 Wilkes, Annie, 54–56, 112, 148, 156–160 Winter, Douglas, 23–24, 25, 30, 106 Wolfe, Aaron, 33 “The Woman in the Room”, 38 Women, 57–58. See also Sexuality Writing Ben Mears and, 75–76 characters and, 115 excess in, 118 Misery and, 53–56 role of author and, 102 The Shining and, 52–53