English instructor at a preparatory school in Hampden, Maine. He wrote at night in the
trailer he shared with his wife and two children. In the early 1970’s, he sold stories to men’s magazines. Then, in 1974, he published Carrie, which was followed by several best sellers and sales of motion-picture rights.
King settled in Maine with his wife Tabitha King, a novelist and the writer of Small World (1981), Caretakers (1983), and others. They had three children, Naomi, Joe, and Owen. In addition to writing daily (except Christmas and his birthday), King became active in opposing censorship, composing essays and lecturing on the topic and supporting
controversial publications. He also indulged his love of rock and roll, having purchased a local radio station (renamed WZON) and occasionally performing, with writers Dave
Barry, Amy Tan, and others, in a group named the Rock-Bottom Remainders.
In 1999, King was struck by an automobile while walking along a road near his home.
His injuries were quite severe, yet the famous author remained upbeat and philosophical
during his lengthy recovery. He incorporated this painful accident into much of his subsequent long fiction, including Song of Susanna, the Dark Tower series, Lisey’s Story, and Duma Key.
Analysis
Stephen King may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,”
describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that
may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning,
his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “When the technologies fail, when . . . religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”
King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television
generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville,
Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store.
The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in
clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move
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cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies
naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.
King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor
draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre, King’s study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made mon-
ster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines the roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of the culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters took on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal
horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the
traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.
Carrie
Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her
mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The
the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react
with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting, “Plug it up!”
Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan
Snell persuades her popular boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball.
Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is
paralleled by a new plot by the girls against Carrie, led by the rich and spoiled Chris
Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted King and Queen of the Ball,
only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism
telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only
survivor.
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As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and
monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is
“Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple
on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”
Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976, the novel was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears in the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist, is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, un-checked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of its evil.
King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows
freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnesses and commentaries: newspaper
accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especial
ly Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot, King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.
‘Salem’s Lot
By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized
into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminished the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvested the archetype with meaning
by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. King’s major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms
and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes
the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s
grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issue of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with
contemporary meaning.
The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot is the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Wa-144
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tergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at
night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the
responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human
population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot, a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.
King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,”
Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between
cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to
exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must
partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culturewide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The
paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.
It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Mark Petrie) and a novelist (Ben Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton,
Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining, The Dead Zone, and Firestarter, the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil.
Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday school for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the
town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical
mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop”
remnants of American culture.
As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for
their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales. The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout King’s fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.
The Shining
In The Shining, King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when 145
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it is closed because of heavy snows. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much-beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The
environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly
expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.
Christine
In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured Cinderella story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Christine, “one of the long ones with the big fins.”
An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success,
power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-and-run revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale—driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium
for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into
“some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.
As automotive monster Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk
tradition of the “death car” and a venerable technohorror premise, as seen in King’s
“Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive. King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and
national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in
1958 a midpriced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and
engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future
imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recov-
ers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.
Christine’s odometer runs backward, and she regenerates parts. The immortality she
offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested develop-
ment in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the
“golden oldies” station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage
Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s bur-
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time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christi
ne reenacts “the death,”
in the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”
The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burned-out
monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Garage,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have
drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective,
Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine‘s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.
The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming-of-age, from the oppo-
site end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by King as he ap-
proached his forties, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children.
The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on play-
ing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grown-ups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”
Pet Sematary
In Pet Sematary, King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear”