Teaching Stephen King Horror The Supernatural and New Approaches To Literature

TEACHING
STEPHEN
KING
Horror, the Supernatural, and
New Approaches to Literature
ALISSA BURGER
Teaching Stephen King
This page intentionally left blank
Horror, the Supernatural, and New

Approaches to Literature
Alissa Burger
Palgrave
macmillan
TEACHING STEPHEN KING
Copyright © Alissa Burger 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-48390-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this
publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited
copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10
Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One
New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN 978-1-349-69469-3
E-PDF ISBN: 978-1-137-48391-1
DOI: 10.1057/9781137483911
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burger, Alissa.
Title: Teaching Stephen King : horror, the supernatural, and new approaches
to literature / Alissa Burger.
Description: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015030906 |
Subjects: LCSH: King, Stephen, 1947—Study and teaching | BISAC:
EDUCATION / Curricula. | EDUCATION / Language Experience Approach. |
EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Arts & Humanities. |
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Media Studies.
Classification: LCC PS3561.I483 Z6225 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030906
For my students
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Why Teach King? 1
Section I: Variations on Classic Horror Tropes

2 The Vampire 11
3 The Werewolf 27
4 The “Thing Without a Name” 43
5 The Ghost 59
Section II: Real Life Horror

6 Rage 73
7 Sexual Violence 87
8 Coming of Age Stories 103
Section III: Playing with Publishing

9 Serial Publishing and The Green Mile 121
10 Ebooks 137
11 Graphic Novels 153
12 Conclusion 171
Notes 177
Works Cited 187
Index 205
Acknowledgments
While the author’s name is the only one that appears on the cover, no one
writes a book alone, and many people have contributed to the writing of
this one.
First, without the inestimable work of Stephen King, my class and this
book wouldn’t exist. Reading King and talking about it with students—and
having that be just another day at the office!—are a pleasure and a privilege
I’m grateful for every day. As long as he keeps writing, I’m happy to be
counted among his Constant Readers.
I am also lucky to have the support and encouragement of a number of
excellent colleagues and friends. Megan Welsh, Stephanie Mix, and Brandi
Grahlman looked at early drafts of some of these chapters and their ques-
tions, feedback, and suggestions were immensely helpful.
I worked with an excellent group of editors at Palgrave Macmillan and
Amnet. Thank you, Mara Berkoff, Sarah Nathan, Rachel Crawford, Milana
Vernikova, and Jennifer Crane.
My family, both near and far, continue to encourage and inspire me. A
book has a way of taking small—and not so small—nips of time out of days
spent with those we love. Thank you for your love, patience, and continued
support, and for not complaining when you get King books for Christmas
so I can pick your brain later. I love you.
When I get too far into a project or struggle with the inevitable frustrat-
ing bits, Jason Burger is there to pull me back out into the real world. I love
you and I couldn’t do it without you.
Finally, thank you to my students. At its best, teaching is a collaborative
effort, an interactive process of critical thinking, discussion, and debate.
Thank you for reading, for coming to class prepared, for your questions
and your insights. Every day, every semester, I feel lucky to have the chance
to spend that time with you, reading and talking, hearing your thoughts
and learning together. Thank you for being my comrades in literature and
my fellow Constant Readers. This book wouldn’t be possible without you.
1
Why Teach King?
A s of 2015, Stephen King has published more than fifty books and “every
single one [of his novels] has spent time on the best-seller list” (Cowles,
emphasis original). His books have sold over 350 million copies and
according to Forbes, King “earned $45 million in the 2007–2008 fiscal year
alone” (Keneally). He is a household name, synonymous with contemporary
horror, and his work has inspired over one hundred film and television
adaptations, ranging from excellent—such as the Frank Darabont-directed
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999)—to awful
and even downright inexplicable, like the profusion of Children of the Corn
sequels. King’s popularity and mass-marketability are undeniable. However,
popularity does not necessarily denote literary merit and bestseller status
does not ensure an author’s work entry to the academic discussion or the
high school or college classroom. So why teach King?
The Debate
In the last few years, King has begun to achieve the type of literary valida-
tion and accolades that had escaped him for the majority of his prolific
and otherwise successful career. As Jane Ciabattari writes in “Is Stephen
King a Great Writer?”, “the respect of the literary establishment has always
evaded King. For years, the question of whether he was a serious writer
was answered by a quick tabulation of book sales, film deals, income, and
sheer volume of output, which added up to a resounding ‘no.’ Commercial
triumph did not equal literary value. Being a bestseller was anathema.” The
perception of King’s literary merit began to shift when King was awarded
the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters in 2003 and named Grandmaster by the Mystery Writ-
ers of America in 2007, though as J. Madison Davis writes, “Neither award
came without controversy” (16). As David D. Kirkpatrick wrote of King
2 TEACHING STEPHEN KING
being recognized for his Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,

this “is the first time that the organization, the National Book Foundation,
has awarded its medal to an author best known for writing in popular genres
like horror stories, science fiction, or thrillers. Very little of Mr. King’s work
would qualify as literary fiction.” This elite definition of the literary left many
critics combative and dismissive of King’s award and within the ranks of the
genre fiction so easily dismissed by Kirkpatrick, there was also some resis-
tance to King’s being named a Grandmaster. As Madison explains, King’s
work arguably expands beyond the scope of the traditional boundaries of
the mystery genre and “King clearly writes stories of sensation and usu-
ally includes the supernatural, which is exactly why some mystery writers
and readers have grumbled in private about his being granted Grandmaster
status” (19). At the core of both of these discussions is one of definition,
an inclusion or exclusion based on what “counts,” either as literary fiction
in the former or as true mystery in the latter. While the often contentious
discussion of whether or not King should be accepted into these hallowed
halls rages on, he continues to transcend and trespass genre boundaries,
pushing out of the clearly demarcated “horror” box within which many
of his critics have penned him, as was recently demonstrated anew when
his 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar Award for crime writing. Most
recently, in September 2015, President Barack Obama presented King with
the National Medal of Arts, honoring King as “one of the most popular
and prolific writers of our time [who] combines his remarkable storytelling
with his sharp analysis of human nature” (“President Obama to Bestow”).
Despite critical objections to King being considered a “literary” writer, his
popularity and growing prestige are undeniable.
The debate over King’s literary merit has been going on for decades,
almost since the publication of his first novel Carrie in 1974, and its most
recent incarnation played out in the pages of The Los Angeles Review of
Books, between Dwight Allen and Sarah Langan, beginning with Allen’s “My
Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes.” King has often been dismissed out
of hand as “just” a genre writer and in this assessment his popularity has
frequently been marshaled against him on the argument that fiction that
appeals to the masses cannot be simultaneously literary. These familiar criti-
cisms are part of Allen’s rejection of King, as he questions why “some people
in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction
as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a ‘major’ contributor to American lit-
erary culture? . . . [D]o we believe that commercial success on the King scale
signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house
supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?” Allen
also defends the type of writing he sees as truly “literary”—which by defi-
nition, within Allen’s argument, King is empathically not—explaining that
WHY TEACH KING? 3
“Among the things I hope for when I open a book of fiction is that each sen-
tence I read will be right and true and beautiful . . . that I will be continually
surprised by what a particular writer reveals about particular human beings
and the world they inhabit. A great book of fiction will lead me toward some
fresh understanding of humanity, and toward joy” (Allen). In contrast to this
ideal, Allen argues, King’s characters are flat and predictable, moralistically
divided into camps of good and evil, his prose is “dull” and his approach to
narrative construction “workmanlike.” Allen concludes his critique of King
by admonishing readers that he does not recommend reading King “unless
you are maybe fifteen and have made it clear to your teachers and everybody
else that you aren’t going to touch that literary ‘David Copperfield kind of
crap’ with a ten-foot pole,”1 recommending instead authors whom he deems
more worthy of the reader’s time, including Roberto Balaño, Denis Johnson,
David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon.
A couple of weeks after Allen’s article was published, fellow Los Angeles
Review of Books writer Sarah Langan responded in defense of King with her
essay “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic.” Langan begins by
rejecting Allen’s argument that the popular cannot be simultaneously liter-
ary and challenging the dichotomy upon which Allen based his critique,
arguing that “Allen’s oppositions—workmanlike/artistic; literary/genre;
educated/blue collar, New Yorker reader from Louisville/dumb fuck from
Bangor—are contrived. They distract us from real issues by splitting groups
that aren’t actually different, or at least not opposites.” At the heart of the
debate waged between Allen and Langan are the meanings and importance
of literature itself, the impact that fiction can have upon its reader, and
the connection possible through the written word. While Allen described
his nearly transcendent requirements for the literary, Langan situates her
analysis of effective literature a bit differently. While she acknowledges that
not all of King’s works are masterpieces, she argues that
[A]ll of his novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. By this I mean, his
fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgment. Innocent
Carrie White wakes up with her period and telekinesis at the height of the
women’s movement. No wonder everybody craps on her, and no wonder
we’re delighted that she slaughters them all. In Cujo, the materialism of the
1980s American family tears itself apart from the inside, as represented by
a family dog gone mad . . . In some King novels, the stakes are the soul of
the individual—will Johnny assassinate the senator to save the world’s future
(The Dead Zone)? In others, it’s the family unit: Will Wendy take responsibil-
ity, punch Jack in the face with a cleaver, and save her son (The Shining)? In
others (The Stand, The Gunslinger Series, Running Man), he asks, Will we be
the heroes of our societies, and start steering this ship in the right direction? Do
we have the courage to save the world? (emphasis original)
These larger themes speak to a common, shared experience of humanity, the

existential questions with which we all collectively struggle, combining the
immediate and visceral appeal to readers’ emotions with the larger thematic
concerns of King’s novels and their connections to the world around them.
Another frequent criticism of King is the height of this emotion, which often
crosses the border into melodrama. As Langan continues, “No one except
King challenges us so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters. That’s
because he’s a believer,” possessing a sentimentality and faith in goodness
and humanity that are often transmitted to his readers. As Langan admits of
some of King’s stories of world-saving heroism and love triumphant, “even
as my intellect rebels, a part of me believes” (emphasis original). This imme-
diacy of emotion, in combination with the rich possibility for critical liter-
ary and thematic analysis, makes King especially well suited to reading and
discussion, both in and outside of the classroom.
At the heart of King’s novels are the characters themselves, individuals
who often haunt readers long after they have closed the book’s cover or put
down their Kindle. It is because of these characters that King’s appeals to
emotion—however melodramatic and schlocky they may at times be—are
effective, can capture the imaginations and hearts of readers as powerfully
as they do. As Langan argues, “We never forget his characters. They live,
they breathe.” King may be best known for his supernatural horrors, but it
is readers’ investment with and fear for individual characters that make the
terror of his novels truly effective. As King said in an interview with the BBC
prior to the release of 2013’s Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, “You
can’t be afraid for the characters if they are just cardboard cut-outs. What
I want the audience to do is fall in love with these people and really care
about them and that creates the suspense you need. Love creates horror”
(quoted in Stock). While the monsters King writes about are often fictional,
his characters have the ring of truth, an authenticity that resonates with the
reader. As King reflects in “I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie,” “I may have told
a few whoppers about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and the living dead, but I
like to think that I have told the truth, as best as I’ve been able to manage it,
about the human beings that the books are mostly about” (15).
In addition to the resonant themes and rich characterization of King’s
short stories and novels, King’s work is often dynamically in tune with the
culture that surrounds him, from the simple details of brand names and
omnipresent popular cultural references to the fears and anxieties that
keep readers awake at night. As Ciabattari argues, “At a time when we are
barraged with horrifying events—beheadings, Ebola, serial killers, plane
crashes, police shootings, mass murders, cyberbullying—his visceral sto-
ries provide a catharsis, sometimes even a sense of order. Some victims can
be avenged in fiction, if not in life.” King’s short stories and novels work on
WHY TEACH KING? 5
a variety of different levels to effectively appeal to and terrify readers: in the

common experiences at the heart of many of his horrors, the reader may
recognize a bit of themselves, feeling a thrill of emotion either at that reso-
nance or as a result of their investment with specific characters, all while
negotiating the larger, real world anxieties of King’s contemporary moment.
According to M. Jerry Weiss’s educational guide to teaching King’s short

stories, “Recent surveys of high school and college students indicate that
the fiction of Stephen King is highly read” (2). Weiss identifies some of
King’s main strengths—and supporting reasons for his inclusion in the
classroom, if not the literary canon—as good storytelling, varied horror
techniques, characters of a wide range of ages, and consideration of “the
dark side of humanity” and “the fragility of life” (ibid.), themes which often
catch the interest and imagination of readers and which similarly resonate
through much less controversial examples of classic and literary fiction.
There are a wide range of opportunities for incorporating King into the
classroom, from the focused inclusion of a specific short story or novel to
a dedicated unit or, at the college-level, even an entire single-author semi-
nar on King’s work. This book is organized into three key sections, with
each focused on a different approach to bringing King into the classroom,
including through connection with more classical Gothic or horror novels,
highlighting the wide range of realistically based horror featured in King,
and examining the many ways in which King has actively negotiated the
publishing process and formats.
The first section, Variations on Classic Horror Tropes, explores the
ways in which King has negotiated familiar figures in his own fiction. In
his critical consideration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), King
outlines the tradition’s key figures: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the
Thing Without a Name” (51). As he reflects, “these three are something
special . . . [A]t the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that
has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls ‘the myth-pool’—that
body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those
who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (ibid.). King excludes
the figure of the ghost from this core lineup because, as he says, “the Ghost
is an archetype . . . which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to
a single novel, no matter how great” (ibid.). However, it fits perfectly here
in a critical discussion of King’s larger literary connections to the Gothic
tradition and will be included in the final chapter of this section. These
chapters are designed to engage with the larger genre context of horror
and the Gothic, connecting King back to the established and accepted
canon, while also highlighting the ways in which he reinvents and reimag-
ines those familiar horror figures. This section takes these classic works of
literature and connects them with King’s negotiations of these archetypal
figures. Chapter Two focuses on the vampire, building upon Bram Stoker’s
Dracula to explore King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), “One For the Road” (1978),
“The Night Flier” (1993), and American Vampire, Volume 1 (2010, with
Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque). Chapter Three examines the dual-
istic figure of the werewolf, contrasting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde with King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1985), Christine (1983),
Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990) and The Dark Half (1989). Chapter
Four explores the “Thing Without a Name” of Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein to analyze the monstrous undead in King’s Pet Sematary (1983), Cell
(2006), and Revival (2014). Finally, Chapter Five draws upon a rich tradi-
tion of ghost stories to critically consider hauntings in King, including his
novels The Shining (1977) and Bag of Bones (1998).
While King is best known for his horror, including the supernatural
figures of the previous section, much of King’s horror is based in real life
situations and instances of violence. That real life horror often proves an
incredibly productive source of conversation in the classroom and over
the course of several semesters, many students have told me that these
are the stories and novels that stick with them, the ones that continue to
haunt them long after they’ve finished reading. After all, these are things
that could really happen, anywhere and to anyone. Finally, each of the
themes explored here—school shootings, sexual violence, and coming of
age—are ones that resonate especially powerfully with the young adults of
these high school and college classrooms. Chapter Six focuses on King’s
first-person school shooter novella, Rage (published under the pseud-
onym Richard Bachman in 1977), which he pulled from publication after
it was found in the locker of a school shooter, and explores the highly
contested connections between popular culture and violence, as well as
the disturbing trends of school shootings and rampage-style violence in
our contemporary culture. In the early 1990s, King wrote several novels
depicting strong female protagonists who face sexual violence and domes-
tic abuse, including Dolores Claiborne (1992), Gerald’s Game (1992), and
Rose Madder (1995), and these representations are explored in Chapter
Seven. Finally, the adolescent coming of age is rarely clear or uncompli-
cated, but instead often fraught with trauma and horror of its own, the
subject of Chapter Eight, which includes the novellas The Body and Apt
Pupil (both from the 1982 collection Different Seasons), as well as the
female bildungsroman of Carrie.
The final section, Playing with Publishing, examines the ways in which
King has engaged in experimental publishing over the course of his career,
WHY TEACH KING? 7
especially in recent years. As Ciabattari explains, King “keeps millions

of readers engaged at a crucial time in the world of books, as technol-
ogy continues to transform reading in unpredictable ways. King has been
one of the first to experiment with new technologies, coming up with
online serial novels and the first downloadable ebook, Riding the Bullet.”
King has been consistently prolific since his first publication of Carrie in
1974. However, in addition to publishing the usual novels, short story and
novella collections, and short stories in magazines and journals, King has
also been—and continues to be—dedicated to pushing the envelope when
it comes to publication possibilities, including his experimentation with
the nineteenth-century tradition of serial publishing with The Green Mile
(1996); his embrace of new twenty-first-century technology with ebooks,
including UR (2009) and Guns (2014), which are available exclusively in
that format; and the graphic novel adaption of his own works, from The
Stand to his Dark Tower series. A close consideration of these different
publication formats creates a unique opportunity to talk not exclusively
about the literature itself, but also about the way in which literature is
communicated from author to reader, bringing in issues of commerce,
accessibility, audience, and constantly evolving literacies. Chapter Nine
focuses on the rich history and recently reenergized tradition of serial
publishing, including King’s The Green Mile. With the exploding popular-
ity of e-readers and digital content, King has published multiple ebook
exclusives, which are the subject of Chapter Ten, including UR, Mile 81
(2011), A Face in the Crowd (2012, co-written with Stuart O’Nan), In the
Tall Grass (2012, co-written with Joe Hill), and his non-fiction essay Guns,
King’s reflection on gun violence in American culture in the wake of the
2013 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Chapter Eleven examines
graphic novel versions of King’s work, beginning with a quick overview of
visual literacy and graphic novel terminology before examining N. (2010),
The Little Green God of Agony (2012), and Road Rage (2012, co-written
with Joe Hill).
Finally, the book’s conclusion looks beyond the pages themselves to
consider King’s seemingly unflagging productivity, address the interdisci-
plinary consideration of film adaptations of King’s work, and reflect upon
future possibilities for incorporating King into the high school and college
classroom.
Section I
Variations on Classic
Horror Tropes
2
The Vampire
K ing’s fiction is dynamically invested in traditional figures of the Gothic,

including vampires, werewolves, monsters, and ghosts. As John Sears
explains in his Stephen King’s Gothic, “Gothic figures, obsessed with death
and endlessly dying, refuse to die, becoming posthumous versions of and
re-enactments of their own traditions” (68). These familiar Gothic tropes
continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, infinitely fluid as
they adapt and adjust to meet the needs, anxieties, and tensions of each
new age. This constant change reflects their adaptation to “new contexts,
in new disguises, [which] suggests versatility, a mobile pervasiveness
that insists against its own putative borders” (ibid.). The vampire is the
ultimate monster of the liminal space, challenging and permeating borders
previously considered inviolable, including boundaries between the Self
and the Other. As with the Gothic figures of the werewolf, monster, and
ghost, the vampire’s continued impact rests in its constant evolution. As
Nina Auerbach argues in Our Vampires, Ourselves, “what vampires are
in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have
become . . . [E]ach feeds on his age distinctively because he embodies that
age” (1). Our monsters are not just those fictional bogeys that go bump in
the night, but rather the symbolic manifestation of the cultural moment’s
deepest fears and anxieties.
One of the first written records of the vampire figure can be traced
back to 1725, when an Austrian medical officer chronicled how “the Ser-
bian hajduks (peasant-soldiers) under his supervision had exhumed a
corpse, transfixed it with a stake, and burned it to ashes. They did so, he
explained, because they believed that the dead man had returned from the
grave at night, climbed atop sleepers, throttled them, and thereby caused
them to die after twenty-four hours of illness” (Butler 27). They referred
to “persons of this sort” as “vampyri” (ibid.). One of the first appearances
of the vampire figure in fiction is Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poem,
“The Vampire” (1748), which foregrounds the sexual transgression of the

vampire figure as he seduces a young female victim: “as softly thou art
sleeping / To thee shall I come creeping / And thy life’s blood drain away.
/ And so shalt thou be trembling / For thus shall I be kissing / And death’s
threshold thou’ it be crossing / With fear, in my cold arms.” In 1816’s The
Vampyre, John Polidori creates Lord Ruthven, an aristocratic vampire,
one of whose most horrifying skills is his ability to pass unnoticed among
the upper classes and lead others—including the story’s hero, Aubrey—to
do his bidding. He is also capable of a more sexual seduction: he mar-
ries, then feeds on and kills Aubrey’s sister, while Aubrey dies driven
mad trying to prevent the marriage. In the mid-nineteenth century, vam-
pires began to make their way into reading for adolescents in the “penny
dreadfuls,” an early form of horror-based comic books, with the serialized
Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer, which introduced several
iconic characteristics of the vampire, including “having fangs leaving two
puncture wounds, coming through a window to attack a sleeping maiden,
hypnotic powers, and superhuman strength. Varney is also the first exam-
ple of a sympathetic vampire who loathes his own condition but is help-
less to stop it” (Laming). Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla adds further
erotic elements to the vampire mythology, introducing a couple of key
themes that continue to influence vampire fiction and popular culture,
including the sexy female vampire and the vampire as representative of
same-sex desire. However, the most well-known vampire novel of all time
is Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which more than a century later
is still considered the “quintessential vampire book” (Laming). As Scott
Laming explains, Stoker’s Dracula “mixed medieval myths and previous
vampire fiction with sex, blood, and death . . . [while] Stoker’s vampire
hunter, Abraham Van Helsing, helped create a trend for heroes willing to
fight the undead.”
These vampire figures challenge and obliterate borders, running rough-
shod over the boundaries that separate the Self from the Other and the living
from the dead, penetrating the body as well as the psyche, and leaving noth-
ing sacred and inviolate. Veronica Hollinger asserts that vampires are more
culturally resonant and powerful than other supernatural creatures such as
werewolves and Frankenstein’s Monster, arguing that “the deconstruction of
boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is the monster-of-choice these
days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure; it is the monster
that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the mon-
ster that looks like us” (qtd. in Duda 12, emphasis original). Attesting to the
perennial popularity and constant negotiation of the vampire figure, the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have experienced a resurgence of
vampire mania, from the action tropes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer television
THE VAMPIRE 13
and spin-off comic book series and Blade film franchise to the romantic
vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Charlene Harris’s Sookie
Stackhouse series, as well as the film and television adaptations each have
inspired.
Drawing on the traditional Gothic horrors by which he has been
inspired and responding to the contemporary discourse surrounding the
vampire, King has reimagined the vampire at various points throughout
his career and in a wide variety of mediums, ranging from the short story
to novel and even graphic novel, including ’Salem’s Lot, “One for the Road,”
“The Night Flier,” and American Vampire, Volume 1.
’Salem’s Lot and “One For the Road”
King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, reinvents the familiar vampire narra-
tive for a new generation, transporting the vampire from the shadowed
mountains of Transylvania to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine.
King views ’Salem’s Lot as an homage to Stoker’s Dracula. Reflecting on
’Salem’s Lot, King likens it to a “game of literary racquetball: ’Salem’s Lot
itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watch-
ing to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again” (Danse
Macabre 26). In addition to reinventing Stoker’s familiar count for a new
place and time, King also drew upon the over-the-top, gruesome monsters
of E. C. comics, “a new breed of vampire, both cruder than Dracula and
more physically monstrous” (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xvii–xviii). With
’Salem’s Lot, King creates a pastiche of the vampires of the classic Gothic
tradition and those of his childhood popular culture, exploring “how
Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches
of the E. C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and
part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xx). ’Salem’s Lot also reflects the
contemporary cultural anxieties Auerbach comments upon, as King writes
that “in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against
my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with
the society around me” (ibid.). In revisiting Stoker’s Dracula, King’s novel
echoes the tenor of cultural change while using the shift in setting to high-
light the evil lurking behind the façade of small town America,1 upset the
accepted vampire conventions, and challenge the collective strength of the
vampire hunters.
Stoker’s Dracula was set in a time of great cultural and scientific change,
and as Carol A. Senf explains in Dracula: Between Tradition and Modern-
ism, was a moment poised at “the intersection of myth and science, past
and present” (7). The post-Watergate era of ’Salem’s Lot was similarly a time
of dynamic change and uncertainty and King uses the vampire as not only
a literal monster, but also as a vehicle to embody “important metaphors of
the seductiveness of evil and the dehumanizing pall of modern society”
(Winter 37). As King said of the early 1970s cultural influence on his novel,
I wrote ’Salem’s Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting.
That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the
White House tapes, the shadowy, ominous connection between the CIA and
Gordon Liddy, the news of enemies’ lists, of tax audits on antiwar protestors
and other fearful intelligence . . . [T]he unspeakable obscenity in ’Salem’s Lot
has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future.
The secret room in ’Salem’s Lot is paranoia, the prevailing spirit of [those]
years. It’s a book about vampires; it’s also a book about all those silent houses,
all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem.
(qtd. in Winter 41)
In this climate of suspicion and mistrust, the threat is not only external—
the coming of the vampire to Jerusalem’s Lot—but internal as well, stem-
ming equally from “the corruption that emerges from within the town
itself ” (Magistrale, Hollywood’s Stephen King 180). Both historically and,
even more powerfully, in the national imagination fueled by literature and
popular culture, the idea of the small town is cloaked in idealized nostalgia.
As Miles Orvell argues in The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns
in American Memory, Space, and Community, “Americans dream of Main
Street . . . as an ideal place; they have also dreamed it into being, created
it and re-created it, as a physical place, the material embodiment of the
dream” (7). On the surface, Jerusalem’s Lot seems to be just such an idyllic
small town and as King writes early in the novel, “Nothing too nasty could
happen in such a nice little town. Not there” (’Salem’s Lot 42). However,
as Orvell argues, the “glow of nostalgia . . . obscures some of the harsher
realities of life on Main Street, realities of social division in the small town”
(129). Beyond these common distinctions of class and social status, Jerusa-
lem’s Lot hides its own horrors and even before the coming of the vampire,
there are everyday evils taking place just out of sight and dark secrets are
hidden behind drawn shades, including child abuse, rape, and murder.
This chronicling of change is also reflected stylistically in the epistolary
approach of both novels. Dracula is made up of a series of letters and diary
entries, including those written in shorthand by Jonathan Harker and Mina
Murray Harker, Dr. Seward’s phonograph journal, and a range of profes-
sional communications, as well as clippings from newspapers providing
accounts of inexplicable occurrences. As Leah Richards argues, “As a group
of manuscripts from various sources, collected, arranged, standardized,
reproduced, and distributed with the intent to inform a wider audience
THE VAMPIRE 15
of a significant state of affairs, Dracula is a representation of the periodi-

cal, and more specifically the newspaper, of the 1880s and 1890s” (440).
In fact, it is Mina’s collation and transcription of the varying accounts
that provides the vampire hunters with the information they need to find
and destroy Dracula. However, while the transmission of information is
more widespread and easily accessible in twentieth-century America, the
epistolary in ’Salem’s Lot offers nothing but unanswered questions and a
lack of awareness that results in further death. While the epistolary form
runs throughout the entirety of Stoker’s novel, the epistolary approach in
King’s novel serves to bookend the central narrative, which is told from a
third-person omniscient perspective. King’s prologue features a newspa-
per article titled “Ghost Town in Maine?”, which relates that “a little over a
year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalem’s Lot that was not usual.
People began to drop out of sight” (’Salem’s Lot 7), with “The list [of the
missing] . . . of a disquieting length” (’Salem’s Lot 9). Ben Mears is monitor-
ing the news out of Jerusalem’s Lot from afar, from his and Mark Petrie’s
latest refuge in Mexico, as two of the town’s few survivors who, having been
outnumbered by the vampires, fled Jerusalem’s Lot. The articles themselves
offer very little true understanding of what is going on; instead, Ben has to
read between the lines, to see what others can’t—or perhaps more accu-
rately, won’t—even with the evidence in black and white before them. It
is a series of articles relating strange occurrences in Jerusalem’s Lot, from
“funny noises” (’Salem’s Lot 622) in the night to suspicious deaths and dis-
appearances from nearby homes and communities, which prompt Ben and
Mark’s return to Jerusalem’s Lot. In both Dracula and ’Salem’s Lot, the epis-
tolary format reveals the vampires’ secret to the vampire hunters, though
with varying degrees of success: while Stoker’s vampire hunters succeed in
finding and destroying Dracula, the articles Ben finds instead underscore
their failure in eradicating the danger that haunts Jerusalem’s Lot.
Stoker’s Dracula builds upon well-established vampire tradition and the
characteristics Van Helsing enumerates have become standard: Dracula
is immortal, has no shadow and no reflection, possesses great strength
and is “so strong in person as twenty men,” cannot cross running water
under his own power, must be invited in, can hypnotize his victims, can
be destroyed by sunlight or a stake through the heart, is repelled by garlic
and holy symbols, and “can, within limitations, appear at will when, and
where, and in any of the forms that are to him: he can, within his range,
direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all
the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the
fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times van-
ish and become unknown” (Stoker 250). King’s Kurt Barlow bears several
similarities to his monstrous predecessor. Barlow is ancient, aristocratic,
and European. He and his fellow vampires must be invited in, but those
who look into his eyes are unable to resist his power; as Dud Rogers, one
of the Lot’s first inhabitants to meet Barlow reflects, Barlow’s “eyes seemed
to be expanding, growing, until they were like dark pits ringed with fire,
pits that you could fall into and drown in” (’Salem’s Lot 225). The epi-
demic that begins with Barlow spreads with terrifying and indiscriminate
rapidity, the monstrous quickly outnumbering those who are willing to
believe and strong enough to fight. However, while some of the protec-
tions against vampires hold firm—for example, Mark is able to drive off the
undead Danny Glick with a plastic cross from his monster model (’Salem’s
Lot 361)—many of the tried and true vampire defenses falter and fail. The
cross itself is powerless without the belief to support it, as Father Callahan
finds when he attempts to stand against Barlow, undone by his wavering
faith (’Salem’s Lot 525). A prisoner in Dracula’s castle, Harker laments that
“the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘moder-
nity’ cannot kill” (Stoker 37). While the concept and historical moment of
“modernity” has changed in ’Salem’s Lot, the overwhelming power of the
vampire remains; the isolation and skepticism of modern life in Jerusalem’s
Lot provides the vampire hunters with no new tools for fighting against
Barlow and, compounding the horror, many of the traditional means
prove ineffective. In ’Salem’s Lot, the struggle is unwinnable because, as
King reflects, “the garlic doesn’t work, the cross doesn’t work, the running
water doesn’t work, the stake doesn’t work, nothing works: and basically
you’re fucked. There’s nothing you can do” (qtd. in Auerbach 160, empha-
sis original). Even when Ben stakes Barlow, watching the head vampire’s
body disintegrate into nothingness, this fails to truly destroy his terrifying
power. With Barlow reduced to nothing but a handful of teeth, even these
meager remains retain Barlow’s power and hate as “they twisted in [Ben’s]
hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite” (’Salem’s
Lot 617). Finally, even after Barlow’s destruction, the vampires he has cre-
ated remain, stalking the night, feeding on the inhabitants of nearby areas,
even after the town itself has been largely deserted.
In Dracula, the vampire is defeated only through the collective power
of the vampire hunters, what Van Helsing calls “the power of combina-
tion” (Stoker 251). All of their insights and written accounts are neces-
sary to identify and locate the threat, illuminated by Mina’s transcription
and collation of the various letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. Each
of the vampire hunters brings a unique contribution to their shared effort:
Harker’s knowledge of the law and personal experience in Transylvania,
Mina’s quick mind and organizational skills, Dr. John Seward’s medical and
psychological expertise, Arthur Holmwood’s wealth and aristocratic posi-
tion, and Quincey Morris’s daring and bravery. They are led by Van Helsing,
THE VAMPIRE 17
with his intimate knowledge of the supernatural threat, and his own per-
sonal “power of combination,” as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and
one of the most advanced scientists of his day . . . [with] an absolutely open
mind” (Stoker 119). In fact, the greatest threat to their individual and col-
lective safety comes when they are separated, when Van Helsing excludes
Mina from their discussion and planning on account of her gender, leav-
ing her alone and vulnerable to the Count’s predations. ’Salem’s Lot also
brings together an eclectic crew of vampire hunters, each with their own
unique set of skills: author Ben Mears, English teacher Matt Burke, medi-
cal doctor Jimmy Cody, monster aficionado Mark Petrie, and Father Cal-
lahan. However, “’Salem’s Lot produces no Van Helsings” (Auerbach 159),
no one who truly knows the vampires beyond their own limited scope of
expertise, whether literary, medical, or pop cultural. While King’s vampire
hunters quickly become believers, none of them has the Renaissance-man
knowledge or wealth of experience Van Helsing possesses. They are finding
their way in the dark, through trial and error, and unlike Stoker’s vampire
hunters, those of Jerusalem’s Lot never come together as a cohesive group—
they are, in fact, never all together in the same place at the same time—with
Barlow picking them off one by one until only Ben and Mark remain, forced
to flee. In the end, Ben and Mark fail to defeat the vampire threat and as
Sears argues, “King’s version of the vampire in this novel expresses the nega-
tive, pessimistic fulfillment of this myth. ’Salem’s Lot is a novel of failure and
despair, the failure of belief and faith . . . the failure of Fathers to rule and
of heterosexual love to redeem and, in its representation of the undead and
their uncanny, persistent afterlives, a novel of the failure of endings” (Sears
18). Unlike Dracula’s death and Mina’s return to a state of grace at the end of
Stoker’s novel, the horrors of Jerusalem’s Lot prove indestructible.
King’s short story “One for the Road,” which was included in his first
short story collection, Night Shift, underscores this sense of dark hopeless-
ness and futility. “One for the Road” takes place two years after the purify-
ing fire that Ben and Mark set and which has obviously not achieved its
intended purpose. Booth, the first-person narrator of “One for the Road”
reflects that “two years ago, in the span of one dark October month, the Lot
went bad” (“One for the Road” 302). A few months later, “the town burned
flat . . . It burned out of control for three days. After that, for a time, things
were better. And then they started again” (ibid.). Jerusalem’s Lot is drawn
back to the forefront for Booth and his friend Tookey when a traveler
comes rushing into Tookey’s Bar in the midst of a blizzard after he and his
family went off the road in the storm. Venturing out into the storm with the
out-of-towner Gerard Lumley, Booth and Tookey steel themselves for the
worst, on high alert and armed with brandy and religious totems, including
Booth’s crucifix and Tookey’s family Bible. As Booth explains, “I was born
and raised Congregational, but most folks who live around the Lot wear
something—crucifix, St. Christopher’s medal, rosary, something” (ibid.).
As the men set out, they try to warm Lumley, telling him that if they don’t
find his wife and daughter in the car, they’ll go for the sheriff and if they see
anyone, “we’re not going to talk to them. Not even if they talk to us” (“One
for the Road” 306). Just as Booth and Tookey fear, when they find Janie and
Francie Lumley, it’s too late. Lumley’s wife Janie calls to him from across
the snow and when he goes to her, “she grinned [and] you could see how
long her teeth had become. She wasn’t human anymore. She was a dead
thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm” (“One for
the Road” 310). Janie falls upon her husband and when Booth and Tookey
turn to flee, they find Lumley’s daughter, Francie—or rather, the monster
that Francie, like her mother, has become. They make their escape, saved
by Tookey’s mother’s Bible, though it is a near thing; Tookey suffers a heart
attack in the process and years later, the nightmare still haunts Booth.
Echoing the direct address of “you” that punctuates “The Lot” chapters of
’Salem’s Lot, Booth ends by offering sage words to the reader: “my advice
to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don’t go up that
road to Jerusalem’s Lot . . . Especially not after dark” (“One for the Road”
312). Like Ben and Mark, Booth and Tookey fought and won a small vic-
tory: their own survival. However, neither duo has been able to truly defeat
the horror that lurks in Jerusalem’s Lot.
“The Night Flier”
While the distinction between human and monstrous is clearly demar-

cated in ’Salem’s Lot and “One for the Road,” in King’s story “The Night
Flier,” protagonist Richard Dees must face the ways in which he himself is
not so different from the monster he pursues, blurring the lines between
the human and the inhuman. Dees is a journalist for a salacious tabloid
called Inside View, which puts a premium on scandal and gore, with little
concern for journalistic accuracy or integrity. Like the vampire itself, Inside
View feeds upon the misery and carnage of the world around it, zooming
in on the bloody aftermath of tragedy for the prurient titillation of its read-
ers. Dees is on the trail of a monster dubbed “the Night Flier,” a presumed
serial killer who has left death in his wake at one airport after another. In
his quest for a photograph of the Night Flier, Dees is staying true to “the
things that had made Inside View a success in the first place: the buckets
of blood and guts by the handful” (“Night Flier” 117). The tabloids, their
mass-marketed horrors, and the readers who consume them are parasitic,
their clamoring demand sending Dees and others like him out in search of
human misery to meet their endless need.
THE VAMPIRE 19
While the vampire and human, the hunter and hunted, are often shown
as diametrically opposed, from early in “The Night Flier” Dees is implicitly
likened to the vampire himself through the use of blood imagery, depicted
as a predator hunting down the prey of the story he seeks. He begins to
track the story and, as a journalist “made for sniffing blood and guts”
(“Night Flier” 118, emphasis original), Dees feels the old, familiar charge
of a juicy lead and “the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong
and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow
it all the way to the end” (“Night Flier” 113). Driven by this hunger—in
this case for the both metaphorical and literal “blood” that Inside View’s
readers crave—Dees is a hunter, willing do anything and sacrifice anyone
to catch his quarry. As the story progresses, the similarities between Dees
and the Night Flier become even more pronounced and flying to one of
the Night Flier’s scenes of carnage, “In the combined light of dusk and the
instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a bit like a vampire himself ”
(“Night Flier” 117). Dees’s use of blood becomes more literal when he is
forcing a landing at the Wilmington airport, risking his life and the lives
of those in other airplanes in his desperate need to land before the Night
Flier can make his escape, taking a knife and cutting himself on his arm
and beneath his eye to feign injury (“Night Flier” 130). Drawing his own
blood, Dees makes himself a partial sacrifice, shedding his own blood—
and even consuming some of it when it runs down his face and into his
mouth before he spits it out—in the heat of the hunt. Finally, when Dees
stands face-to-face with the Night Flier’s carnage, rather than shrinking in
horror he feeds in his own way: snapping pictures as he consumes the suf-
fering, the violence, and the blood splattered before him. Running into the
terminal, “Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Dees saw a foot clad
in a black Converse sneaker; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it” (“Night Flier”
142). Even when he comes across a mutilated though still living victim, his
instinct is not to help or alleviate suffering, but once more to feed, shooting
another photo to splatter the pages of Inside View with the blood its readers
crave. In his pursuit of the story, Dees is nearly as inhuman as the monster
he chases.
Despite this callousness and his overwhelming thirst for the story, no
matter what the cost, Dees is not a literal vampire and as he follows in the
footsteps of the Night Flier, he doubts the true identity of the Night Flier
himself as well. Like many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem’s Lot who refuse
to believe, Dees feels safe in his belief that the Night Flier is not a real
vampire, though he does concede that “the guy thought he was a vampire”
(“Night Flier” 115, emphasis original). As with King’s other vampires, “The
Night Flier” negotiates familiar tropes. Eyewitness accounts of the Night
Flier and the paper trail documenting his movement point toward what
Dees sees as potential masquerade, playing on tropes and clichés: grave-

yard dirt below his plane’s cargo door, a black tuxedo and voluminous cape,
and the signing of his name on logs as Dwight Renfield, in homage to the
literary and cinematic incarnations of Dracula’s most loyal servant, a com-
bination of the name of Stoker’s madman and Dwight Frye, who played
Renfield in the 1931 classic film. However, the Night Flier differs from his
traditional counterparts in significant and grotesque ways, with large-scale
bite marks on opposite sides of the victims’ necks rather than discrete, side-
by-side puncture wounds (“The Night Flier” 127). Dees never doubts that
he is chasing a flesh and blood man; while the Night Flier may be capable
of monstrous acts, it doesn’t occur to Dees that he may actually be follow-
ing in the footsteps of a monster until he finds himself face-to-face with the
bloodbath of the Wilmington airport.
Dees’s pursuit hinges on the need to see, to have visual evidence. He
takes the photos that accompany all of his stories and it’s the concrete
images rather than the comparatively static stories that keep Dees hunting:
“He liked to touch them. To see how they froze people either with their real
faces hung out for the whole world to see or with their masks so clearly
apparent that they were beyond denial. He liked how, in the best of them,
people always looked surprised and horrified. How they looked caught”
(“The Night Flier” 135). The photographs are his evidence, his truth, his
real quarry. However, in the end, the monster he seeks evades him, even as
it stands directly at his shoulder, breathing on his neck, speaking into his
ear. Dees is pushed to his breaking point, forced to realize that the mon-
sters he has spent years exploiting sometimes turn out to be real. He can’t
see the Night Flier in the mirror over his shoulder, knows that the vampire
is un-photographable, and can’t even turn to see the Night Flier with his
own eyes: in this case, to see is to die. Dees catches only an incomplete
glimpse as the Night Flier destroys his photographs, pulling his film with
“a long white hand, streaked with blood . . . ragged nails silted with filth”
(“The Night Flier” 145). After years of selling the unbelievable to his Inside
View readers, Dees now has his own beyond-belief tale, one for which he
has no proof and which no one will believe, though the images seem likely
to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Though Dees has been irreparably changed by his encounter with the
Night Flier, the vampire escapes into the darkness while Dees himself once
more becomes the monster. As the only living person standing in the midst
of the airport abattoir and with no other suspect remaining, Dees is pegged
as the murderer as the cops descend. Dees’s blood is once more spilled,
this time against his will, as “the cop was slamming Dees up against the
wall hard enough to make his nose bleed and he didn’t care, he didn’t care
about anything” (“The Night Flier” 146). Dees has seen the horrors beyond
THE VAMPIRE 21
his reckoning that lurk in the shadows and with that knowledge, he has
reclaimed some small scrap of his humanity in this knowledge, at just the
moment when he becomes a monster in the eyes of the rest of the world.
American Vampire, Volume 1
The first decade of the twenty-first century was dominated by romantic

vampires, including the glittery vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
series and its film adaptations, as well as the romantic vampires of Char-
laine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, its adapted HBO series True Blood
(2008–2014), and the CW series The Vampire Diaries (2009–present).
However, with the 2010 comic series American Vampire,2 Scott Snyder,
Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King refused this sympathetic, dreamy
vampire by creating a new, violent, and brutal take on the familiar figure,
reclaiming it for the ranks of true horror. As King writes in “Suck on This,”
his introduction to the trade edition of American Vampire, Volume 1,
Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys
and only work at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls;
boys with big dewy eyes.
What should they be?
Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad
boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and
blue, accent on the red. (v)
American Vampire, Volume 1 introduces Skinner Sweet, a new kind of

vampire, with unique characteristics and several twists on the familiar
mythology. The individual issues switch back and forth between the 1880s
Western frontier and 1920s Hollywood, encompassing the transformations
of first Skinner Sweet and later, Pearl Jones. Snyder wrote to King asking
if King would be willing to provide a review blurb for the comic; however,
taken in by Snyder’s story, King ended up becoming a co-author, writing
Skinner Sweet’s backstory instead (King, “Suck On This” v–vi). The result
is a back and forth collaboration, with Snyder and King passing the story
from one to the other, Snyder writing Pearl’s story—the first half of each
issue—and King contributing Sweet’s, the second half of individual issues.
Snyder, Albuquerque, and King create a new breed of vampire with Skin-
ner Sweet. As Julia Round explains in Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels:
A Critical Approach, “American Vampire is a taxonomy that classifies vam-
pires by nationality; all with different natures, strengths, weaknesses, and
so on” (196). After being accidentally infected by a European vampire in

the larger tradition of Stoker’s Dracula, Sweet is “reborn as the next stage
in vampire evolution, a creature who is energized by the sun rather than
threatened by it” (Lipinski 135), weakest on nights with no moon, and sus-
ceptible to gold rather than wooden stakes. Sweet is the only one of his
kind, a completely new and unique type of vampire. As Sweet explains to
Pearl after he infects her, both saving her life and transforming her, they
are an improvement on the traditional European vampires: “Bloch and
his kind, they’re like . . . old, broken-down European clunkers, okay? But
you and me, Dolly? We’re like shiny new 1926 Fords. Top of the line, just
rolled out onto the showroom floor. See sometimes, when the blood hits
someone new, from somewhere new . . . It makes something new. With a
whole new bag of tricks” (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 45). Even infec-
tion and transmission themselves occur “in non-standard ways, i.e. not by
biting” (Round 197), with Skinner and Pearl both infected with a drop of
blood in the eye at the time of their deaths and Pearl’s roommate Hattie
infecting herself with a knife covered with American vampire blood. These
differences, the overwhelming drive for power, and Sweet’s antagonizing of
the European vampires set up a dynamic and bloody conflict between the
two factions, as each tries to claim supremacy over and destroy the other.
This recontextualization also provides the opportunity for Snyder, Albu-
querque, and King to negotiate the vampire mythology. As King argues in
his introduction, “There’s a subtext here that whispers powerful messages
about boundless American energy and that energy’s darker side: a grasping,
stop-at-nothing hunger for money and power” (“Suck on This” v). Snyder
echoes these themes in his afterword as well, writing that “while [Skinner
Sweet’s] is the story of the first American Vampire, it’s a story about us,
about Americans, about what makes us scary and admirable, monstrous
and heroic” (Snyder 170). Round argues that “Skinner (and Pearl) embody
the frontier spirit and the American Dream, with energy and recklessness
. . . However, beneath the surface there is a darker interpretation in which
the American Dream is claimed to be little more than ‘The Great National
Fantasy’” (196), an illusion of power colored with the shadows of passion
and violence. As the series continues, taking on a number of different semi-
nal moments in American history as seen through the lens of this new
monster, Snyder and his collaborators continue to negotiate and explore
these themes of nationalism, identity, and the American dream.
These new American vampires are different in appearance as well.
While the European vampires echo the tradition embraced by Stoker’s
Dracula—pale, slightly elongated fangs, largely resembling their human
counterparts—Snyder’s American vampires embrace the monstrous.
When Sweet and Pearl transform, their humanity is all but obliterated and
THE VAMPIRE 23
the graphic novel images are “used to emphasize key points, in particular
moments of violence and horror . . . [characterized by] color and excess”
(Round 196). Their fingers elongate into vicious, claw-tipped talons, their
jaws extend down and forward from their faces, and both their top and
bottom teeth become brutal, oversized fangs. As Round explains, “Pearl
and Skinner’s physical features are exaggerated forms of the vampire motifs
and emphasize the animalistic” (197). Albuquerque’s drawings of these
transformations are detailed, delightfully grotesque, and rendered in large
scale, often featured in single-focus, full-page panels. The first visual rep-
resentation of the American vampire is Pearl’s transformation in the sec-
ond issue, as she seeks revenge on Chase Hamilton, the famous actor who
handed her over as a victim to the European vampires; her monstrousness
dominates the page, in a panel that takes up more than three-quarters of
the page, the only other images being two significantly smaller panels that
show Hamilton’s horrified reaction and an explosion of blood and gore as
Pearl slashes his throat, while the violence itself remains—at least tempo-
rarily—unseen (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 48). This same issue also
features a full-panel of Skinner Sweet’s escape from his submerged coffin,
as he explodes into the water surrounding him, highlighting another power
that separates him from his more traditional European counterparts. Albu-
querque’s first drawing of the vampire Skinner Sweet highlights his face,
teeth, yellow eyes, and upper torso, including the prominent muscles and
tendons of his arms and his hands, which end in clawed talons, while his
lower body remains in deep shadow, a monster bursting from the darkness,
simultaneously seen and unseen, visible and yet ultimately unknowable in
his newness (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King and 165). While these full-
page panels establish the unique features of these new American vampires,
multi-panel pages highlight their action and their abilities, showing them
in attack mode against humans, the European vampires, and against one
another, as Pearl and the self-infected Hattie battle to the death.
In addition to the varying historical times of the two interconnected sto-
ries, American Vampire complicates the notion of time itself, tying together
past and present, the immediate and the recollected. As Round explains
the unique nature of the comics format, “the layout and architecture of the
comics page illustrates a view of time as a co-present and static structure
that we only experience sequentially” (57). Combining image and text, in
comics and graphic novels, “Echoes of past and future are used to empha-
size key moments or themes” (ibid.), blurring temporal lines. The opening
pages of the first issue of American Vampire negotiate temporal order with
what Scott McCloud calls a “parallel combination” of text and image, in
which “combinations of words and pictures seem to follow very different
courses—without intersecting” (Understanding Comics 154). The first two
pages are characterized by blue and black, deep shadows and the endless
desolation of the desert, as a shrouded figure disposes of mutilated dead
bodies, throwing them into a pit that already holds several more, obviously
an oft-used dumping ground, highlighting a single isolated moment in a
much larger, ongoing arc of violence and death. The final panels of the sec-
ond page feature a close-up of Pearl Jones, first focusing on the damage to
her body, then closer still, her eye and a single tear, alongside her whispered
imprecation that “I’m alive . . .” (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 2). How-
ever, textually these two pages are largely dominated by an extended series
of text box captions that tell a much different story, as Pearl recalls the first
film she ever saw, the magic that captured her imagination and brought her
to Hollywood and ultimately, her dark fate in the desert. As eight-year-old
Pearl peeked through the curtains at the back of a local general store, “on
that screen was the most amazing sight I’d ever seen. All these men and
women made of light—pictures, but alive” (ibid.). Her reminiscence of her
first glimpse of the 1902 short silent film A Trip to the Moon, directed by
Georges Méliès, provides the transition, as the moon of her recollection
gives way to the moon over the desert, which in turn gives way on the next
page to the painted moon on a film studio set three days before, where Pearl
and her roommate Hattie are working as extras (Snyder, Albuquerque, and
King 3). Skinner Sweet’s backstory also navigates multiple time periods, in
this case through the narration of Will Bunting, an author who witnessed
both Sweet’s death and the aftermath of his resurrection, encompassing
nearly fifty years between Skinner’s death in 1880 and a public reading of
Bunting’s novel Bad Blood in 1925. The final page of “Bad Blood,” the first-
issue installment of Sweet’s backstory, ends with three side-by-side images
of Bunting and his changing appearance over this time span, including
1880, 1909, and 1925, dates coinciding with Sweet’s death, resurrection,
and the comic’s present, in which the stories of Sweet and Pearl Jones inter-
sect (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 32). At the close of the final install-
ment of Sweet’s origin story, Bunting reflects on his motivation in telling
this story as his own death nears. As Bunting tells the rapt—and decreas-
ingly skeptical—audience, “I’m here tonight because I want it to be known,
by all of you . . . that there are monsters out there. Real monsters that walk
the roads and rails of this country” (166, emphasis original). The complex-
ity of multiple, overlapping time periods sets up the continuing series as
well, which is now in its eighth installment, and features such disparate
and far flung settings and time periods as 1935 Las Vegas (Volume 2), the
dual fronts of World War II (Volume 3), the 1950s (Volume 4), and the free-
loving 1960s (Volume 7).
With American Vampire, Volume 1 and the creation of Skinner Sweet,
Snyder, Albuquerque, and King create a new vampire by embracing the
THE VAMPIRE 25
monstrosity of the old, eschewing the soft-focus romantic vampires that

dominated early twenty-first century representations to reclaim the time-
less nature of the monstrous vampire, in all his bloody, gory glory. Like the
vampires of ’Salem’s Lot and “The Night Flier,” Sweet and his counterparts
build upon the Gothic tradition, embracing the legacy of horror which has
preceded them, while simultaneously negotiating the characteristics of this
familiar figure for a new generation.
3
The Werewolf
T he figure of the vampire—and King’s variations on it—is largely one of

externally defined monstrosity, including fangs and the potential for
violently penetrating the boundary between the Self and the Other. But
what happens when the boundary being crossed is internalized, between
the Self and the Other that resides within? This is the psychological duality
engaged by werewolves, people who hide a monster within themselves.
That intimate relationship with the Self, the inescapable familiarity, is what
makes the werewolf particularly terrifying. As King argues of the werewolf
in Danse Macabre, “Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its
weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but
only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently
one thing: his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see
in the bathroom mirror each morning” (75). Therein lies the particular
fascination of the werewolf figure: the vampire, the “Thing Without a
Name,” and even the ghost are clearly Other, not us; while they may have
once been human, they are no longer. We are alive, while they are dead; we
are human, while they are monsters. But the werewolf is the darker part
of the human psyche, the part kept hidden from the world but which, in
the form of the werewolf, breaks out to run amok, leaving violence and
destruction in its wake. The werewolf is human, but one with a monster
inside: often undetectable, uncontrollable, and for its host, inescapable,
except through death.
At the base of this discussion of duality and the werewolf are Sigmund
Freud and his structural theory of personality. Freud argued that the per-
sonality is made up of three distinct, though interacting, parts: the id, the
ego, and the superego. According to Freud, “The ego represents that which
may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which con-
tains the passions” (19). As Kendra Cherry explains, the id is the primitive
nature of the individual, unconscious and instinctive, with its foundation
in the pleasure principle, “which strives for immediate gratification of all

desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the
result is a state [of] anxiety or tension.” This makes sense for infants, who
have no other way of interacting with or understanding the world, but as
individuals grow and mature, their personalities develop further, as does
the complexity of their interactions with the rest of the world, which leads
to the development of the ego and superego. Cherry goes on to explain,
“The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing
with reality.” In contrast with the pleasure principle that drives the id, the
reality principle “strives to satisfy the id’s desires in realistic and socially
appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of
an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses.” Finally, the
superego can be seen as a process of socialization, through which indi-
viduals learn what is acceptable and morally right within the parameters
of their surrounding society, then govern their behaviors accordingly. As
Cherry explains, “The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of
our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both par-
ents and society—our sense of right and wrong.” Freud’s structural theory
of personality is one of moderation, negotiation, and repression of antiso-
cial, pleasure-hungry impulses.
With Gothic duality and the figure of the werewolf, we find individuals
for whom this development has been derailed. Rather than proceeding in
the usual fashion from the pleasure-craving id to its more moderated and
socially aware balance with ego and superego, the werewolf lives in the id,
maintaining it as a fundamental cornerstone of identity, though one which
is subsumed and kept largely separate from the day-to-day life of the other,
public Self.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the quintessen-
tial classic tale of duality. Dr. Jekyll is, by all accounts, a good man and
a well-respected doctor who is, in his own words, “inclined by nature to
industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen,
and thus, as might have been supposed, with an honourable and distin-
guished future” (Stevenson 78). Despite these many virtues, he also has
some undisclosed vices, which he refers to as “a certain impatient gaiety of
disposition” (ibid.), and his interest in the mystical and in transcendental
medicine at times put him in conflict with other medical professionals,
such as Dr. Hastie Lanyon. But regardless of these vices, Jekyll negotiates
with relative success between his id and his ego, presenting an acceptable
public face to the world. This is also reinforced and rewarded by his super-
ego, in his sense of position as a good doctor, a medical expert, and an
upper-class gentleman with all of the social benefits that accompany those
roles. But hiding his vices becomes a bit of a strain and in recognizing
THE WEREWOLF 29
these two elements of his identity, Jekyll begins to consider whether it

would be possible to separate them, thus giving himself freely to his evil
deeds without jeopardizing the moral high ground of his ego and the priv-
ilege of his superego. As he reflects upon this conundrum,
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be

relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered
from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just
could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good
things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace
and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. (Stevenson 80)
In his exploration of this question, we have the creation of Mr. Hyde,

Jekyll’s id, separated from the rest of his personality, externalized and inde-
pendent. As Shubh M. Singh and Subho Chakrabarti explain in their article
on literary psychiatry “A Study on Dualism: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde,” in separating the good and evil elements of Jekyll/Hyde,
“Evil now does not require the existence of good to justify itself but it exists
simply as itself, depicted as being the more powerful, the more enjoyable of
the two” (222), and Hyde is set loose on the world to wreak his havoc, while
Jekyll and his reputation are safeguarded, kept beyond reproach.
Hyde is the diametric opposite of Jekyll: as Jekyll reflects upon his alter
ego, Hyde “was pure evil” (Stevenson 84). Hyde has no regard for humanity,
which is demonstrated in his violence against others, including the tram-
pling of the girl that opens the novella and the murder of Sir Danvers Carew,
which sets the police looking for the fiend. Both of these attacks are brutal
and unfeeling, as reported by their respective witnesses. As Mr. Gabriel John
Utterson’s friend Mr. Enfield reports, Hyde “trampled calmly over the child’s
body and left her screaming on the ground” (Stevenson 4). With even greater
brutality, when Hyde’s path crosses that of Sir Danvers Carew: “Mr. Hyde
broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment,
with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down
a storm of blows, under which the bones audibly shattered and the body
jumped upon the roadway” (Stevenson 27). Hyde is pure id, pursuing what-
ever violent impulse catches his fancy, with no compunction or remorse,
loosed from the restrictive influence of responsibility imposed by engage-
ment with the ego and superego. As Singh and Chakrabarti explain, Hyde is
“easily recognizable as the id, seeking instant gratification, having an aggres-
sive instinct, and having no moral or social mores that need to be followed.
He takes pleasure in violence and similar to the death instinct ultimately
leads to his own destruction” (223). On the other side of this dualistic Self,
Dr. Jekyll embodies the ego, engaging with his larger social surroundings,
while “the superego is represented by the proclaimed and implicit morals

of Victorian society which prided itself on refinement and goodness, and is
shocked by the seeming nonchalance with which Edward Hyde indulges in
his debaucheries” (Singh and Chakrabarti 223).
Despite the clear separation of the Jekyll and Hyde elements of his iden-
tity, there is still conflict, struggle, and overlap. As Jekyll reflects upon the
baser parts of his own nature, “This, too, was myself ” (Stevenson 83). This
overlap becomes even more dramatic when Jekyll loses control over his
transformations, beginning to change spontaneously into Hyde and find-
ing greater difficulty in transforming himself back into what he sees as
his “true” Self. Despite the intersection of these different elements of his
identity, however, Jekyll cannot bring himself to take responsibility for the
crimes that Hyde has committed. In his confession, he denies these, saying
that “even now I can scarce grant that I committed it” (Stevenson 87) and
when speaking of these acts he refers to Hyde as someone else, calling him
“He, I say—I cannot say, I” (Stevenson 98).
The final distinguishing characteristic between Jekyll and Hyde is the
physical transformation: while Jekyll is tall, thin, aged, and distinguished,
Hyde is younger, shorter, “dwarfish” (Stevenson 18) and “troglodytic” (ibid.).
In fact, as Enfield tries to explain and Utterson’s own encounters with Hyde
echo, Hyde is a tough man to describe; as Enfield says, “There is something
wrong with his appearance . . . I never met a man I so disliked, and yet I
scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling
of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point” (Stevenson 9). Jekyll and
Hyde’s internal natures, then, are mirrored in their external appearances,
though the monster also lies hidden behind Jekyll’s own, public face, with
Hyde always present—or hiding—within Jekyll himself.
In addition to the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and the
giving way of good to evil, Stevenson’s novella also underscores the break-
down of boundaries that are a hallmark of the Gothic genre. As Cathrine
O. Frank explains, “Dr. Jekyll’s story is the story of a door, or several doors:
a door that exits on the alley, the door that fronts the respectable side of the
house . . . the door of the cabinet that Utterson breaks down, even the door
of Utterson’s own cabinet in which he locks away Jekyll’s disgraceful will”
(215). These doors are meant to separate the public from the private, con-
cealing one’s secrets safely from the rest of the world. Doors are intended
to serve as an impermeable barrier, “that point of access and egress, that
bar against public intrusion, the closed door behind which the king in his
castle rules” (Frank 215). These doors also serve as a productive meta-
phor for the other boundaries that are transgressed in Stevenson’s novella,
including the class disparities and the separation of the different elements
of Jekyll/Hyde’s identity. In shedding the burden of the ego and superego,
THE WEREWOLF 31
Hyde slides downward not only in terms of morality but also in his class
position, as “Dr. Jekyll loses his social standing as a result of his indulgence
of his desires and inhabits a working-class body to seek gratification of
unseemly appetites” (Danahy 23). The creation of Hyde tears asunder the
presumably inseparable elements of the Self, dividing them into good and
evil, gentleman and monster, ego and id.
The figure of the werewolf epitomized here by Hyde is a layered rep-
resentation of the darker side of human nature: evil without conscience,
uncontrollable, capable of great horrors, the darker side of the Self
unbound. King explores this theme of Gothic duality in his fiction, in both
its physical and psychological manifestations, with the literal werewolf of
Cycle of the Werewolf, the monstrous transformation of Arnie Cunning-
ham in Christine, and the more internal duality of dissociative characters
in the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, and the novel The Dark Half.
The Werewolf
As Basil Copper explains in The Werewolf in Legend, Fact, and Art, “The
legend of the werewolf is one of the oldest and most primal of man’s super-
stitions” (24), appearing in oral and written traditions as far back as ancient
Greece (Copper 26). Within the werewolf mythology of literature and
popular culture, the full moon is the werewolf ’s transformational trigger
and the only way to stop the beast is with a silver bullet. In addition to
tales of the literal transformation of man into beast, these werewolf stories
also provided a way to conceive of and respond to the evil and violence of
which humans are capable. Take, for example, the case of Jean Granier, a
“self-confessed werewolf ” in 1603 France, who “confessed to having eaten
a baby stolen from its cradle, parts of young children, and to having clawed
and bitten several young girls” (Otten 9). These violent crimes of mur-
der and cannibalism are considered clearly monstrous, well outside the
accepted boundaries of human behavior and interaction; in identifying
himself as a werewolf, Granier sets himself apart as no longer human and,
even though Granier’s crimes were treated a sign of mental illness,1 his self-
perceived monstrosity provided his fellow humans the cathartic release of
seeing him as something else, not like them, the Other.
Beyond the physical monstrosity, the werewolf figure also taps into
themes of psychological duality. In The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy,
Horror and the Beast Within, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray explains
that while “the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon or condi-
tion sometimes termed ‘lycanthropy’ have long been debated in Western
culture” (1), with the advent of modernity “the werewolf has also been
uniquely implicated in elaborating ways of thinking about selfhood” (3).
Echoing the structural theory of personality developed by Freud and

explored in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in addressing the werewolf
figure, “The juxtaposition of the conscious and unconscious . . . under-
lines how processes of being and knowing have intersected in modernity,
because the conscious-unconscious opposition has become central to con-
ceptualizations of self and reality” (du Coudray 5, emphasis original) and
as a result, “Representations of the werewolf have reproduced such atti-
tudes, showing the lupine instincts of the wolf or ‘beast within’ (an analogy
of the unconscious) to have a damaging and negative impact upon the
afflicted individual (an analogy of the conscious self)” (du Coudray 6).
King’s Cycle of the Werewolf draws upon many of the traditional char-
acteristics of the werewolf. Given King’s well-known engagement with the
larger scope of popular culture and the horror genre, it is unsurprising that
the novella “is structured like a B-monster movie, first depicting a series of
murders committed by an unknown creature which we ultimately realize is
a werewolf ” (Larson 103), who in his human form is the Reverend Lester
Lowe.2 The coming of the werewolf is sudden and unexpected, transform-
ing the sleepy small town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine into the site of inexpli-
cable horror. As King writes in the first chapter of Cycle of the Werewolf,
Something inhuman has come to Tarker’s Mills . . . It is the Werewolf, and

there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the
arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado.
Its time is now, its place is here, in this little Maine town where baked bean
church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring
apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizens’
Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next week there will be
news of a darker variety. (Cycle 14)
While King’s small towns are no strangers to horror—as the vampires of

Jerusalem’s Lot have already demonstrated—it takes Tarker’s Mills several
months to come to recognize the monster that walks among them and even
longer to rally against it. As Randall D. Larson explains in “Cycle of the
Werewolf and the Moral Tradition of Horror,” “for the first six chapters, the
story comprises a series of vignettes, as during six successive full moons
half a dozen townsfolk are shredded by the savage beast. It’s in the second
half of the book that the characters begin to come to life and the structure
of the piece heads toward an inevitable face-to-face confrontation between
hero and villain” (103). Just as it takes the townspeople several months to
accept the supernatural horror of the werewolf, Lowe himself struggles
with accepting his fate. In werewolf legend, there are a number of possible
causes that can turn man into werewolf, including eating wolf meat, sleep-
ing outside under the full moon, or being the victim of a malicious curse
THE WEREWOLF 33
(Radford), but in Cycle of the Werewolf, there is no clear cause for the were-
wolf ’s lycanthropy, with the random nature of his transformation tapping
into a different kind of psychological fear. As Lowe thinks, “This—whatever
it is—is nothing I asked for. I wasn’t bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It
just . . . happened. I picked some flowers . . . I never saw such flowers before
. . . and they were dead before I could get back to town. They turned black,
every one. Perhaps that was when it started to happen” (Cycle 111, emphasis
original). There is no specific cause for Lowe’s transformation and he him-
self remains unsure of his own monstrosity for the first few months, until
he wakes up from a wolf-dream to find the savaged corpse of church jani-
tor Clyde Corliss in the sanctuary (Cycle 48). With the words of his dream
sermon still echoing in his mind—“The Beast! The Beast is everywhere!”
(Cycle 46, emphasis original)—Lowe must face the undeniable truth that
he himself is the Beast.
Despite their monstrosity, many werewolves are often depicted as poten-
tially sympathetic. As Benjamin Radford explains, “Because lycanthropy
was seen as a curse, werewolves were often thought of as victims as much
as villains. The transformation from man to wolf was said to be tortuous
(recall such scenes in the film An American Werewolf in London), and
many sought cures for real and imagined symptoms” (Radford). Michael
Collings argues in The Many Facets of Stephen King that “Unlike other crea-
tures of horror, the werewolf is more sinned against than sinning . . . The
curse works in two ways. On the level of plot, it transforms an otherwise
sane, rational individual into a ravening monster. More disconcertingly,
however, on the level of theme and symbol, it divorces that individual
from reality, often arbitrarily isolating the afflicted person from society at
large and from personal standards of morality and behavior” (78). Most
werewolves are unable to control their transformations, whether those
changes are triggered by a full moon (as is traditionally the case, a legend
used in Cycle of the Werewolf) or otherwise, which raises the question of
that character’s agency, their degree of free will, power, and control over
themselves. However, Lowe remains relatively unsympathetic because,
much like Dr. Jekyll before him, he takes no responsibility for his actions
and embraces the opportunity to give himself over to this dark and violent
aspect of himself as he “makes excuses for his behavior without fighting
against it” (Strengell 76). Lowe is “determined to rationalize his own wick-
edness” (Larson 106), reassuring himself that “if I sometimes do evil, why,
men have done evil before me; evil also serves the will of God . . . if I have
been cursed from Outside, then God will bring me down in his time” (Cycle
111, emphasis original). Unlike other folkloric, literary, and popular cul-
ture werewolves, where the victim “often struggles valiantly against what
is happening” (Collings 78), Lowe absolves himself of any culpability and
gives himself over to the freedom and pleasure of his werewolf alter ego.
When Marty Coslaw destroys Lowe, it is with a strong sense of empathy
and as he aims the gun at the beast he laments “Poor old Reverend Lowe.
I’m gonna try to set you free” (Cycle 125). There is little regret or remorse in
this destruction, simply the dichotomous and clear triumph of good versus
evil, the monster defeated and the human saved.
In contrast, Arnie Cunningham in Christine is much more sympathetic,
unwillingly transformed and tortured over the violence this transformation
begets. When Arnie first lays eyes on Christine, the rusted and battered
hulk of a 1958 Plymouth Fury, he is in the summer before his senior year
of high school, unattractive and unpopular. As Arnie’s best friend Den-
nis explains in the novel’s opening lines, “He was a loser, you know. Every
high school has to have at least two; it’s like a national law. One male, one
female” (Christine 1). Pimply, awkward, and perennially date-less, Arnie is
Libertyville High’s “loser,” but all that changes with Christine. As Douglas
Winter explains, as he restores Christine, “Arnie also begins to change, first
for the better—his acne clearing, skinny body filling out, self-confidence
growing—but then he matures beyond his years, a teenaged Jekyll ren-
dered into a middle-aged Hyde” (124). Arnie’s transformation has a threat-
ening, ominous undercurrent as he begins to lose his sense of himself and
his own identity, becoming inextricably intertwined with the car itself and
beginning to take on characteristics and mannerisms of Christine’s previ-
ous owner, the foul-mouthed and misanthropic Roland D. LeBay.
From the moment he sees Christine, Arnie has to have her, an open-
ing salvo of single-minded obsession that characterizes their relationship
throughout the novel. LeBay’s wife and daughter both died in or near
Christine—his daughter choked to death and his wife reportedly com-
mitted suicide by running a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car3—but
despite these tragic losses, LeBay’s single-minded devotion to Christine
never wavers, and this is an obsession he hands off to Arnie along with
Christine’s keys. Christine drives a wedge into every significant relationship
in Arnie’s life, sowing enmity and resentment as she ultimately isolates him
from his parents, his best friend Dennis, and his girlfriend Leigh. Beyond
this obsession and isolation, Arnie also begins to take on some of LeBay’s
habits, wearing a back brace, using LeBay’s favorite epithet of “shitters,”
and most significantly, being consumed by LeBay’s volatile rage. Finally, in
addition to Arnie’s transformation into—or perhaps even possession by—
LeBay, his identity also melds with that of Christine herself, and he loses
large chunks of time when he’s with Christine that he cannot later remem-
ber beyond sitting behind the wheel or “just cruising” (Christine 200).
While Arnie does not literally become LeBay or Christine, as Reverend
Lowe becomes the werewolf, he does forge a powerful physical connection
THE WEREWOLF 35
with each. Arnie’s resemblance to LeBay gradually grows as Arnie devel-

ops the older man’s back problems, injuries he sustains pushing Christine,
pouring his blood, sweat, and tears into her with brute force, destroying his
own body as he brings hers back to glossy near-perfection. Arnie’s power,
his agency, and his identity are intertwined with both LeBay and Chris-
tine, as he increasingly loses control while one or the other of these two
take over. The power Arnie shares with Christine also taps into twentieth-
century nightmares of technology. As Winter explains, in “The machine
age . . . individual lives and emotions have become the fuel that services the
engines of technology” (122). In addition, as these technologies hold fur-
ther sway over human life, these individuals often must face the threat of
their own dehumanization. As James Egan argues in “Technohorror: The
Dystopian Vision of Stephen King,” “the horror [King] evokes often seems
inseparable from the dangers of imperious science and runaway machin-
ery of many sorts” (47), including “the debilitating effects technology has
on its users” (49). In giving himself over to his obsession, Arnie forges a
horrifying bond with Christine. When Christine rolls out on her own to
seek vengeance against the bullies who have tormented Arnie and vandal-
ized her, Arnie is not behind the wheel, though it is certainly his rage—so
like LeBay’s before him—which fuels her rampage. Just as the werewolf
form is, for many of its victims, an uncontrollable state, Arnie has no power
over and no memory of what happens when Christine goes driving on her
own; she is acting out his most violent fantasies, though he is not the one
putting the pedal to the metal to bear down on Buddy Repperton, Moochie
Welch, or any of the other young thugs who vandalized Christine. Winter
argues that with the technohorror of Christine, “the metaphor for dehu-
manization coexists with an older, more primeval fear—that of internal
evil: the upsurge of the id” (Winter 123).
As Christine’s power and Arnie’s all-consuming obsession with her
grow, LeBay also rises to the forefront, taking control increasingly often,
leaving Arnie helpless and terrified. What began as Arnie’s increased self-
confidence and assertiveness quickly rots, devolving into callousness,
lechery, and violence. As LeBay takes over, Arnie becomes even more
inextricably intertwined with Christine herself, and though he briefly
thinks that “if he got rid of it, he would be . . . happier” (Christine 253),
their interconnection makes this an impossibility, leaving Arnie power-
less to save himself, and while “the car frightened him sometimes . . .
He could no more junk it than he could commit suicide” (ibid.). While
Arnie’s agency and ultimate culpability may be debatable, his misery is
clear. Unlike Reverend Lowe, who happily gives himself over to the were-
wolf form, justifying his actions and sidestepping responsibility, Arnie
is desperately unhappy. In Dennis’s final conversation with Arnie, his
friend struggles to take control, as he pleads with Dennis, saying “I can’t

help it . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me,
Dennis. Help me” (Christine 456). Despite this brief surfacing, however,
Arnie cannot maintain his control, and LeBay quickly reasserts his power,
berating and abusing Dennis, the final corruption of the two young men’s
friendship. Finally, also unlike Reverend Lowe, Arnie is sympathetic
because he holds himself culpable and fights back. Arnie is too far gone
to ever triumphantly reclaim himself—he has given too much of himself
over to Christine, has had too much of himself drawn into LeBay’s end-
less rage—but he dies trying.
The Werewolf Within
King has also explored this issue of duality in some of his author characters,
particularly Mort Rainey in the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden (in
Four Past Midnight) and Thad Beaumont in the novel The Dark Half, two
works that he sees as being quite significantly connected. As King explains
in “Two Past Midnight,” the introduction that precedes his novella in the
Four Past Midnight collection, “Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act—as
secret as dreaming—and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous
craft I had never thought about much” (238). It is this psychological combi-
nation of the powerful hold of fiction over both reader and writer that King
explores in Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Dark Half.
In Secret Window, Secret Garden, the conflict between Mort Rainey and
John Shooter hinges on Shooter’s charge of plagiarism, kicked off with
the opening lines of the novella, when Shooter tells Rainey, “You stole my
story . . . You stole my story and something’s got to be done about it. Right
is right and fair is fair and something has to be done” (Secret Window 241).
The type of plagiarism that Shooter is accusing Rainey of is of the most
egregious sort: taking someone else’s work, putting his name on it, and
passing it off as his own. Though it is true that Rainey did not plagiarize
from Shooter, his hands are not completely clean, and the first story he
got published to start his career was not, in fact, his own, but written by
a former classmate called John Kintner. This is one of the most serious
offenses an author can commit and Mort thinks to himself that “The most
incredible thing was this: he had known better. He had known the possible
consequences of such an act for a young man who hoped to make a career
of writing. It was like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka. Yet still . . .
still” (Secret Window 355, emphasis original). Throughout the novella,
Mort refuses to directly address this plagiarism, instead thinking around
it before circling back to this initial moment of theft, telling the truth to
Shooter when he says he didn’t steal his story but all the while lying to
THE WEREWOLF 37
himself as he refuses to remember and take responsibility for the act of

plagiarism that began his own career.
Echoing this misrepresentation of himself through his work, there are
also numerous the issues of identity that are central to Mort’s own internal
conflict, the question of who he is, both as an author and as a man. This
dualism is multiplied in Secret Window, Secret Garden, with many differ-
ent compartmentalized sections of Mort’s identity: there’s everyday Mort,
writer Mort, the parts of Mort that he hides from himself, and the exter-
nalization of John Shooter, a series of schisms that arguably began cracking
into distinct personas with that initial plagiarism. Mort believes himself to
be an honest writer and a good man, though his first success came from
stealing someone else’s words; he believes himself to be a man incapable
of violence, though when he finds out about his wife’s infidelity, he storms
into the hotel room she shares with her lover, brandishing a gun. In both
of these instances, he clings fiercely to his image of himself, with the truth
emerging—both to the reader and to himself—in fragmentary snatches.
The distinct separation of the different elements of Mort’s identity
brings the issue of psychological duality to the forefront. As Mort’s ex-wife
Amy discusses what happened with investigator Fred Evans in the novella’s
epilogue, Evans tries to explain it, saying that “I know that Mr. Rainey had
what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two people,
and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the
same body” (Secret Window 377). However, rather than schizophrenia,4
Mort is more likely suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, previ-
ously and perhaps more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disor-
der. As defined by the National Alliance on Mental Illness,
Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously referred to as multiple

personality disorder, is a dissociative disorder involving a disturbance of
identity in which two or more separate and distinct personality states (or
identities) control an individual’s behavior at different times. When under
the control of one identity, a person is usually unable to remember some
of the events that occurred while other personalities were in control. The
different identities, referred to as alters, may exhibit differences in speech,
mannerisms, attitudes, thoughts and gender orientation. The alters may
even present physical differences, such as allergies, right-or-left handedness
or the need for eyeglass prescriptions. These differences between alters are
often quite striking. (“Dissociative Identity Disorder”)5
Mort does not physically transform into another being, as Reverend

Lowe does when he becomes the werewolf, though the man he sees as
John Shooter is, at least from Mort’s perspective, an individual completely
separate from himself.6 When he sleeps—which he does frequently and
deeply, well-recognized as a symptom of severe depression—he “becomes”

Shooter, though he has no memories of this transformation when he awak-
ens, furthering his belief in Shooter as a separate, psychotic antagonist
rather than his own repressed guilt and rage.
While the conflict of Secret Window, Secret Garden is one of plagiarism,
in The Dark Half, there is a different kind of contested authorship in play,
that of the author’s pseudonym, which has particular resonance with King’s
work, as he himself wrote several books under the pseudonym of Richard
Bachman. Writing as Bachman, King published four novellas that would
eventually be collected as The Bachman Books (1985), including Rage, The
Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man.7 He also published the novel
Thinner (1984) under his Bachman pseudonym and later, after his identity
was well-known, he used Bachman again to publish The Regulators (1996, a
parallel novel to Desperation, published at the same time under King’s own
name), and Blaze (2007).8
King wrote The Dark Half in 1989, just a few years after his own pseud-
onym was revealed. As Heidi Strengell points out of The Dark Half, in this
novel “the Gothic double resides within the Gothic double, that is, the real-
ity of the novel reflects reality. Undoubtedly, both pseudonyms function
as a dark alter ego for the artist, a chance to realize his most violent and
pessimistic visions” (Strengell 79). Writing literary novels under his own
name, Thad Beaumont is moderately successful and his first novel, Sudden
Dancers was a nominee—though not winner—of the National Book Award
(Dark Half 20, 25). However, Thad’s popularity skyrockets when he cre-
ates his pseudonym, George Stark, writing a gritty and hyper-violent series
of crime books centered on antihero Alexis Machine. As Thad reflects on
this choice in an interview following the outing of his alternate identity,
“Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking about
being invisible . . . The more I played with the idea, the more I felt that I
would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself ” (Dark Half 24). However, despite
this commercial success, Thad pulls back from Stark, wanting to reassert
his own literary identity, a decision that is further necessitated by an over-
zealous fan who discovers Stark’s identity and attempts to blackmail Thad.
Thad gives up his pseudonym, publicly and theatrically “killing” and bury-
ing Stark in a People magazine photo spread (Dark Half 21–22). As Sears
explains, Stark “is a fictional character . . . [who must be] symbolically
killed off so that the real writer may live (again)” (62). But Stark is also, as
his tombstone epigraph reads, “Not a Very Nice Guy” (Dark Half 22). In
creating his alter ego’s publicity biography, Thad gave Stark a dark, violent
history, including serving prison time for arson and assault (Dark Half 27).
After Stark’s “death,” Thad’s wife Liz remarks that “It’s good to have him
dead . . . I didn’t like him much” (Dark Half 32). Except that once created,
THE WEREWOLF 39
Stark refuses to stay dead. Stark’s malevolent life illustrates “the horror
implicit in the ambivalent power of the writer to create and destroy, the
writer’s uncanny ability of self-redefinition and self-naming, and of imag-
ining into existence non-existent beings, events, and places, the power of
words to evoke the unimaginable, and the symbolic authority of the writ-
ten text that overrides, in the moment of reading and writing, that of the
real world” (Sears 63). In wielding his creative power—and act echoed by
Mort’s creation of Shooter in Secret Window, Secret Garden—Thad’s abili-
ties have outstripped his control, have expanded beyond the point where
he can reel them back in.
Where Thad is a mild-mannered, clumsy family man, George Stark is a
graceful, violent loner, and while Thad wants to establish his success as a
writer under his own name, Stark isn’t quite ready to give up the popular-
ity achieved under his. The books Thad publishes under his own name are
subtle, literary, and not especially acclaimed, while the books he writes as
George Stark are violent, bloody, and twisted, all characteristics Stark him-
self emerges possessing. While Thad and Stark become, through this mys-
tical detachment, separate men, they also remain inextricably connected
to one another. For one thing, Stark’s fingerprints are Thad’s and their voice
patterns are identical, forensically tying Thad to the brutal, bloody murders
Stark commits as he makes his way to his creator; as Sears writes “Within
[the novel’s] detailed police procedural discourse, Thad and Stark are one:
legally, and in terms of the epistemology of evidence on which the novel
draws, there is no difference between them” (64). In addition, Thad and
Stark share an animating life force, one that is not powerful enough to sus-
tain them as two separate identities, and as Stark comes to confront Thad,
he is decomposing, disintegrating day by day. As two sides of the same
man, their mutual survival was effective, with each symbiotically feeding
off of and fueling the other; however, now that they are separated, only one
can survive. Another significant connection between the two men is that,
in some ways, Thad actually likes Stark. Much as Hyde did for Jekyll, Stark
is the darkest part of Thad’s own Self realized, without consequence or
repercussion—at least, until he refuses to die. Stark frees Thad to give in to
his worst impulses, to revel in the mayhem and violence of Alexis Machine
without guilt, an escape hatch from the normative strictures of his life as a
husband and father, and as monstrous as Stark is, Thad finds that freedom
difficult to give up.
Thad’s obvious duality is that between himself and his pseudonym,
George Stark. However, there is another layer to Thad’s duality and “Like
Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, whose transformation is occasioned by scientific
explanation, King attempts to establish credibility by means of medicine”
(Strengell 79). As an adult, Thad finds out that his childhood headaches
were caused by an absorbed twin that was then surgically removed from
his brain, as the doctor excises an eye, “part of a nostril, three fingernails,
and two teeth” (Dark Half 9) from Thad’s brain. So in addition to Thad’s
psychological duality as he splits himself between Thad Beaumont and
George Stark, there is also this internal dualism, the literal existence of
another (though incomplete) person within his childhood self.
This dualism also ripples out from Thad himself, further explored in
Thad and Liz’s twin babies, William and Wendy. As Thad and Liz remark
upon throughout the novel, William and Wendy have an intense, near-
telepathic bond. They communicate with one another without speaking
and play together easily, “rolling a large yellow ball slowly back and forth
in the playpen” (Dark Half 104) while Sheriff Alan Pangborn, Thad, and
Liz discuss the details of the case. The twins share emotional responses,
laughing and crying when the other does. They even seem to have their
own rudimentary toddler language: William “cooed, then babbled at her.
To Thad, their babbling always sounded a little eerie . . . For a moment it
was as if they were holding a conversation in their own private world—the
world of twins” (Dark Half 255). Finally, as Thad and Liz find out after
Wendy takes a fall, “they share their bruises too” (Dark Half 257), with
William developing an identical bruise in exactly the same spot as Wendy’s,
even though he had sustained no injury that would account for it.
Just as Stark’s means of creation were fantastical, so is his destruction, as
Stark is carried away by an enormous flock of sparrows, folkloric “psycho-
pomps,” which Thad’s absent-minded colleague Rawlie DeLesseps explains
are “those who conduct human souls back and forth between the land
of the living and the land of the dead” (Dark Half 314). DeLesseps goes
on to explain that sparrows, in particular, have a rather gruesome role as
“outriders of the deceased . . . [who] guide lost souls back into the land of
the living . . . the harbingers of the living dead” (ibid.). Mystically created,
Stark is mystically dispatched, and the darkness within Thad is seemingly
defeated. However, when the monster lurks within, it can never really be
completely bested or destroyed. Considering Thad, Pangborn thinks
You don’t understand what you are, and I doubt that you ever will . . . Standing
next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out
of. The monster is gone now, but you still don’t like to be too close to where it
came from. Because there might be another. Probably not; your mind knows
that, but your emotions—they play a different tune, don’t they? Oh boy. And
even if the cave is empty forever, there are the dreams. And the memories.
(Dark Half 464, emphasis original)
Even though Stark has been carried away, the darkness within Thad remains
and once unleashed, it can never be entirely contained or forgotten. The
THE WEREWOLF 41
Dark Half closes on a victory, but one that proves to be only temporary. As
Strengell writes, Thad “is mentioned in a less pleasant context later in King:
in Needful Things (1991) we learn that Thad Beaumont has broken up with
his wife and in Bag of Bones (1998) that he has committed suicide” (80).
Though momentarily victorious, with the werewolf, man and monster are
contained within the same body, animated by the same Self, and the horror
proves, in the end, to be inescapable.
This is an insurmountable challenge faced by all of these dualistic pro-
tagonists, from the literal werewolf of Reverend Lester Lowe in Cycle of the
Werewolf to the possession of Arnie Cunningham in Christine, as well as
the more internalized duality of the author and his creation in Secret Win-
dow, Secret Garden and The Dark Half. The monster within often proves the
most difficult to defeat, and this victory is rarely claimed without tragedy.
In all four of these works, the character must defeat the monster and free
himself, a feat that ultimately destroys the man entirely. Each of these men
struggles with the question of who he is, how much power he has, and who
he wants to be, though that Self remains unattainable except through his
own death.
4
The “Thing Without a Name”
I n addition to vampires and werewolves, King’s work features a host of

other monsters. In The Tommyknockers (1987), Dreamcatcher (2001),
and Under the Dome (2009), a monstrous alien presence threatens the
humans who encounter it. In Cujo (1981), the real-life horror of a rabid
Saint Bernard is compounded with the intertwining supernatural horrors
of the bogeyman in Tad Trenton’s closet and the dark legacy of Frank
Dodd, a serial rapist and murderer whose crimes terrified the community
years before, a story which is told, in part, in The Dead Zone (1983). King’s
IT (1986) is the monster story on an epic scale, with the horror that stalks
Derry taking on myriad faces and disguises, from Pennywise the clown to
a giant bird and popular culture staples like the werewolf and the Creature
From the Black Lagoon. However, the monster is perhaps most terrifying
of all when it has been brought to life by the hand of man, through human
machination rather than supernatural or cosmic means.
The Gothic monster was brought to life with Mary Wollstonecraft Shel-
ley’s classic novel Frankenstein (1818), the tale of Victor Frankenstein, his
unrelenting obsession, and the Creature he creates and gives life. In this
novel, Shelley establishes a theme that runs throughout representations of
monstrosity in literature and popular culture to this day: the interconnec-
tion of man and monster, whether in creation, similarity, or both. Victor
Frankenstein is a complex character and as Susan Tyler Hitchcock argues
in Frankenstein: A Cultural History, Shelley’s novel remains so powerful
because it combines two familiar myths: that of the intrepid hero who dares
go where no man has gone before and its diametrically opposed counterpart,
that of the man who is punished for doing so (4). As Hitchcock explains,
“These two archetypal myths are essentially human—and essentially con-
tradictory. One inspires a human being to cross over into unknown realms,
and congratulates anyone who does so. The other limits human pursuit and
experimentation, threatening punishment to anyone who dares” (5). Victor
begins his experiments in the full knowledge that he is endeavoring to reach

beyond the bounds of human knowledge, confessing that “It was the secrets
of heaven and earth that I desired to learn” (Shelley 33) and that “life and
death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through”
(Shelley 48). Victor succeeds in doing so, but is then horrified with the
result, fleeing from his creation in revulsion, abandoning the Monster and
leaving him ultimately free to wreak havoc as he will.
A central concern of Frankenstein and the living dead novels that fol-
low it, including King’s, are the intersections of knowledge, technology,
and humanity. Victor is so obsessed with whether or not he can attain the
knowledge to achieve his macabre purpose that he never pauses to con-
sider whether or not he should do so. He can, so he does. However, when
it comes to Victor’s learning and knowledge, Claudia Rozas Gómez points
out that this knowledge is of a very limited sort. In her article “Strangers
and Orphans: Knowledge and Mutuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,”
Gómez explains that while Victor’s quest for knowledge is internal and
secret, shutting him off from others and the community that surrounds
him, the Monster’s learning is interactive, a true quest for knowledge with-
out a fixed end goal, focused instead on continued growth and connection
(363–366). Gómez writes that “From early on in the novel it is clear that for
Victor knowledge is something that is private, ‘secret’ and waiting to be dis-
covered” (364). As a result, his creation of the Monster is “conducted in the
shadow of guilt and concealment” (Baldick 51). In his solitary and single-
minded pursuit of that knowledge, Victor absents himself from interaction
with others, and by extension from the responses and reactions that could
well suggest that this reanimation is not a very good idea. Once he has suc-
ceeded, Victor finds himself incapable of understanding his creation, his
power having escaped his control, with the impossibility of containment or
even clear definition that is at the heart of the monstrous. As Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen argues in his introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture, a
key characteristic of the monster is that “the monster polices the borders
of the possible . . . From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster
stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes” (12).
The monster occupies a liminal position between the knowable and the
unknowable, both portraying and policing those boundaries that should
not be transgressed.
Just as Victor’s quest for knowledge quickly outstrips his common sense
and self-restraint, technology creates opportunities for humans to delve into
mysteries they may not be fully prepared to consider, a threat that is renewed
with each new technological advancement. As Jonathan Crimmins writes,
“Frankenstein was written at a moment when matter could no longer be easily
dismissed as inert extension. Invisible and active across distances, the forces of
THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 45
gravity, magnetism, and electricity showed matter to be dynamic rather than

inert” (564). Shelley explains in her introduction to the novel that Franken-
stein was not wholly sprung from her imagination, but inspired by scientific
and technological discoveries, specifically those being made by Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, who “preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some
extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion” (Shelley 8).
As she turned to her own tale, she reflected that “Perhaps a corpse would be
reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the compo-
nent parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued
with vital warmth” (ibid.). As Roseanne Montillo explains in The Lady and
Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Cre-
ation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, experiments with galvanism pioneered
by Luigi Galvani and later, his nephew Giovanni Aldini, also challenged the
boundaries between life and death. As Montillo writes, galvanism “presented
an opportunity for restarting one of the body’s main vital organs: the heart.
If that were to happen, the dead could reawaken” (9). With these scientific
inquiries before her, Shelley argues, the creation of Victor’s Monster, while
imaginative and horrific, was “not of impossible occurrence” (11).1 This
anxiety about the potentially destructive and dehumanizing power of tech-
nology is not unique to Shelley’s time either; as Thomas Vargish argues in
“Technology and Impotence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” “It’s our chief
story, a myth comparable to that of the loss of paradise and the fall of man in
Genesis. It is in fact our version of that myth, expressed as the fall of humanity
from a projected technological paradise into an actual technological crisis”
(325). With technological advances coming fast and furious in the twenty-first
century, from increasingly complicated cell phones and gadgets to medical
advances and genetic experimentation, it is no wonder that the story of Victor
Frankenstein and his creation continue to resonate with contemporary read-
ers. As David S. Hogsette argues,
[T]his novel grips our imaginations today precisely because the ultimate
transgressive horrors of which it speaks pertain particularly to our scientifi-
cally advanced culture. Scientists now hold knowledge that may allow them
to do much of what Mary Shelley only dreamed of through Victor’s charac-
ter. In other words, Frankenstein may no longer be merely a vicarious thrill;
it has become, instead, a terrifying mirror reflecting a horrific reality we are
unprepared to accept. (533)
What was once primarily speculative horror is now all too close to the
reality being continually created by aggressive, boundary-pushing scien-
tific exploration, making Frankenstein still timely nearly two hundred years
after its first publication.
Given this powerful resonance, it is unsurprising that Shelley’s Fran-

kenstein has inspired countless film adaptations, reimaginings, and com-
mercial products, from Halloween masks to breakfast cereal, and almost
two centuries later, Frankenstein’s Monster is culturally ubiquitous. As
Hitchcock argues, “the monster’s story says something important. Other-
wise, we would not keep telling it” (10–11). Just as King has been inspired
by the classic horrors of Stoker and Stevenson, he has also negotiated and
reimagined the figure of the “Thing Without a Name,” in the tradition
of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Pet Sematary and Revival have distinct echoes of
Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Cell plays with the popular cultural icon of
the zombie, the living dead who arguably take their formative inspiration
from Frankenstein’s Monster, though they have spread their incarnations
far afield in the intervening centuries, from George A. Romero’s Night of
the Living Dead (1968) to the dystopic reality of AMC’s The Walking Dead
(2010–present), as well as more insidious explorations of the animated
body deprived of the Self, such as Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers and its film adaptations (1956; 1978).
Pet Sematary
Slavoj Žižek has referred to Pet Sematary as “perhaps the definitive nov-
elization of ‘the return of the living dead’” (25). In Pet Sematary, King
provides readers with a modern-day Victor Frankenstein in the figure of
Louis Creed, a doctor who objectively accepts death as “perfectly natural”
(Pet Sematary 55) while simultaneously, as a husband and father, he can-
not abide it when it strikes his own family. Pet Sematary begins with the
Creed family transplanted from Chicago to Ludlow, Maine and their first
encounters with their kindly neighbor Jud Crandall and the dangerous
road that lies between their homes. Harried but ultimately happy, Louis,
his wife Rachel, and their young children Ellie and Gage quickly get settled
in their new home, routines, and relationships, including a hike into the
woods behind their house where, led by Jud, they find the eponymous pet
“sematary,” a trip which introduces the theme of death in the novel and the
multiple and overlapping anxieties surrounding it, from Rachel’s refusal
to speak about death to Ellie’s fear that her cat, Church, will someday die.
Following an argument with Rachel after their walk to the pet sematary,
Louis reflects that “as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for
childbirth, the most natural thing in the world” (Pet Sematary 56), often
messy and traumatic, but part of the regular order of things. This is a belief
that he holds to steadfastly when Victor Pascow is brought into the univer-
sity infirmary after being hit by a car while jogging: despite the chaos of the
waiting room and the gore of Pascow’s injuries, Louis remains calm and
professional.2 Within moments of seeing Pascow’s broken body, he knew
“The young man was going to die” (Pet Sematary 71–72). Louis’s views on
the nature of death undergo dramatic revision, however, when death strikes
his own family, first with his daughter’s cat Church and later, young Gage.
As Mary Ferguson Pharr explains in “A Dream of New Life: Stephen King’s
Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein,” when it comes to death as natu-
ral, Louis “can accept this fact in theory; in reality, he finds it more difficult
to take” (122). As Louis thinks, “your family’s supposed to be different . . .
Church wasn’t supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic
circle of the family” (Pet Sematary 121, emphasis original), a direct echo
of Elizabeth Lavenza’s comforting words to Victor Frankenstein that “our
circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection” (Shelley 169).
When Church is killed in the road, Jud leads Louis into the woods beyond
the pet sematary, initiating him into the dark knowledge of the Micmac
burial ground. When Church returns from his grave, profoundly changed
but alive, Louis begins to realize that the boundaries between the living and
the dead are not as solid or impassable as he has previously believed, a dark
possibility that consumes him following the death of his son.
Following in Victor’s Frankenstein’s footsteps, Louis finds it impossible
to turn away from this forbidden knowledge. As Strengell argues, Victor
and Louis are quite similar in their near-identical “refusal to take responsi-
bility for one’s actions and hubris, that is, false pride and defiance” (53). Just
as Victor is horrified by his creation, Louis finds the reanimated Church
repellant, with his flat stare, smell of the grave, and vicious killing and
dismemberment of all manner of small animals, from mice and rats to a
large crow (Pet Sematary 173, 190). The truth of Church’s resurrection is
that he “wasn’t really a cat anymore at all . . . He looked like a cat, and
he acted like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation” (Pet Sema-
tary 254, emphasis original). This dark reality, however, is not enough to
deter Louis from taking Gage’s body to the Micmac burial ground, where
the power of the place draws him beyond even his most rational consider-
ations. Louis’s interactions with death throughout the novel are character-
ized as adversarial—with his repeated thoughts of “won one today, Louis”
(Pet Sematary 185) when he bests death—and conceding defeat and los-
ing Gage is more than Louis can bear. Pharr argues that Shelley’s Franken-
stein revolves around the truth that “uncontrolled science made man more
demonic than deific” (115) and Louis follows this same path, and though
the power of which he takes control is more supernatural than scientific,
once he discovers he can challenge death, he finds it impossible to resist.
Just as Victor Frankenstein’s quest for knowledge is carried out in
secret, isolating him from those he loves and his larger society, Louis’s
experiments with the burial ground are covert. As Winter explains, Pet
Sematary revolves around secrets (135) and the biggest secret of all is
death itself, a mystery unsolvable except by those who have themselves
died. King echoes this theme of secrecy in an epigraph to the novel, where
he writes that “Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret” (Pet Sematary 9,
emphasis original). Just as Victor Frankenstein keeps his monstrous cre-
ation from his family through enclosing himself in his rooms, lying both
openly and by omission, and fleeing into the wilderness to confront his
creation, after discovering the dark power of the burial ground, Louis’s life
is circumscribed by these secrets. He sends his wife and daughter away to
Chicago and reflects that if Gage’s resurrection is successful, they will have
to live new, covert lives on the run, separating themselves completely from
family and friends, and closing a door on their former lives which could
never be reopened (Pet Sematary 311). While the secrecy of his knowl-
edge isolates Victor from his friends and family, casting him outside of the
domestic sphere which he has held so dear, for Louis the secrecy threatens
to become his life, to reimagine and remake himself and his family, defined
by the secret of the living dead Gage.
Despite this secrecy, there is an irresistible urge to share the secret with
another. As he nears death, Victor Frankenstein feels a desperate need for
someone to know what he has done, to recognize his achievements even as
Victor himself declaims them, as he confides in Captain Walton. Similarly,
Jud Crandall is far from innocent in Louis’s spiral into madness and Sears
refers to Jud as “a demonic father-figure” (202). It is Jud who first leads
Louis into the woods beyond the pet sematary, not telling him where they
are going or why, taking him blindly into the darkness and the unknown,
over the deadfall, through the swamp, and up the stone stairway. How-
ever, just as Victor Frankenstein repeatedly refers to destiny as pushing
him ever onward, Jud’s decision to take Louis to the burial ground may not
be entirely his own. As he tells Louis while they walk through the woods
with Church’s body, “I hope to God I’m doing right. I think I am, but I can’t
be sure” (Pet Sematary 127). Even in the midst of this rationalization, Jud
knows the destructive nature into which he and Louis are about to tap and
considering the older man the next day, Louis thinks that “the medicine
available at the Micmac burying ground was not perhaps such good medi-
cine, and Louis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man
knew it” (Pet Sematary 161). The burial ground exerts its power over Jud
and works him to its will, just as it will soon come to exert that same power
over Louis. When Jud later tries to interfere and stop Louis from burying
Gage in the woods, it exerts a different kind of power over him, putting
him to sleep. Once Jud has passed on his secret and inducted another into
the dark mysteries of the burial ground, he becomes expendable, and the
power of the place uses Gage’s reanimated body to murder the old man.
It is a constantly regenerating cycle, passed from one man to another and
one generation to the next: Jud had learned the way from Stanny B. when
Jud’s dog Spot died and Jud teaches it to Louis with the death of Ellie’s cat.
In his turn, Louis attempts to do the same to Steve Masterson, who spies
Louis carrying Rachel’s dead body into the woods. Louis’s invitation and
warnings to Steve echo Jud’s to himself almost verbatim, as he tells Steve
that “You may hear sounds . . . Sounds like voices. But they are just the
loons, down south toward Prospect” (Pet Sematary 408–409). Steve teeters
on the edge of following Louis into the woods but turns away at the last
moment, fleeing in terror and essentially erasing their conversation from
his mind. However, just because Louis doesn’t succeed in finding an initiate
for the burial ground doesn’t mean that its influence has waned. After all,
the questions of life and death, of love and loss, are basic human concerns,
existential questions of a shared humanity. As Louis walks out the door to
face the monstrosities of his reanimated cat and son, King casts a specu-
lative eye toward the future, remaining for a moment within the empty
Creed house, which has seen so much love and horror. As King writes,
“the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on
that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive . . . as
it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date . . . And
perhaps they would have a dog” (Pet Sematary 396). While the power of the
burial ground may destroy those it bends to its will through the monstros-
ity of their own desires, its influence is indestructible.
Both Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed also fail to learn from their
mistakes. As Pharr writes of Victor and his Monster, “The dream made
flesh, then, is inevitably a nightmare, taking the dreamer not to divinity
but to infamy, even insanity. And the darkest part of this nightmare is
that Victor never really gives up on his original vision” (119). Even on his
deathbed, Victor reflects that while “I have myself been blasted in these
hopes, yet another may succeed” (Shelley 192), recounting a caution-
ary tale to Captain Walton while simultaneously unable to truly repent
of his actions. Louis demonstrates a similar hubris and performs all sorts
of mental gymnastics to justify returning to the Micmac burial ground.
Despite his awareness of Church’s changed return and that “If Gage came
back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity” (Pet Sematary
255), Louis takes Gage to the burial ground anyway, refusing the horrific
possibilities and justifying his actions anew at every step along the way.
Then, when Gage returns as a cannibalistic monster, killing both Jud and
Rachel, Louis refuses this dark knowledge once more, rationalizing his
choice to bury his wife there: “I waited too long with Gage . . . Something
got into him because I waited too long. But it will be different with Rachel”
(Pet Sematary 408). Both Victor and Louis have come face to face with their
creations and have paid for their mistakes with the lives of their loved ones,
but neither can stop themselves from plunging ever onward and claiming
power that they know, from their own tragic experience, to be destructive
and better left alone. As Tony Magistrale argues in “The Shape Evil Takes:
Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited,” “Creed’s compulsion to deliver the bodies
of his son and wife to the cemetery is not adequately explained as a con-
sequence of his guilt and grief. Rather, he is more interested in continu-
ing his misguided experiment under the irrational premise that eventually
he will discover a way to dominate death” (82). Both Victor’s and Louis’s
stories remain, in a sense, unfinished. As Pharr argues, they “can have no
conclusion. Dreams never do. Victor dreams of successful creation almost
to his last breath, and yet he dies. Louis dreams of joyous resurrection in
the very face of demonic possession, and still the carnage continues” (124).
Once caught within this web of power, it becomes impossible for either
man to turn from it and much like a drug addict, both Victor and Louis
keep grasping for reasons and justifying their actions as they continue to
lay siege to the liminal space that separates the living and the dead.
Revival
Much like Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed, Revival’s Charles Jacobs
has his faith tested by tragic loss and his desire to transcend the boundaries
between the living and dead quickly become an all-consuming obsession.
In Frankenstein and Pet Sematary, religion was largely an absent presence,
hovering around the edges of Victor and Louis’s meditations on death,
which are largely scientifically engaged; however, in Revival, Jacobs first
enters the novel as a man of God, the reverend of the Methodist church the
Morton family attends, introducing the question of faith into the familiar
theme of men coping with loss in these novels. When tested by the loss of
his beloved wife and son in a car accident, Jacobs’s faith fails him and rather
than finding comfort in a Christian conception of the afterlife, he mounts
the pulpit one last time to give what young Jamie Morton and other parish-
ioners refer to as the “Terrible Sermon” (Revival 66). As Jacobs tells his
horrified congregation, “There’s no proof of these after-life destinations;
no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with
our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense” (Revival 73, empha-
sis original). This revelation marks the end of Jacobs’s tenure at the First
Methodist Church of Harlow and though he later presides over a traveling
tent revival as a healer, his faith has been not just tested but broken. In the
place of the Almighty, Jacobs begins dedicating himself to the miracles of
electricity. As he concludes his Terrible Sermon, outlining an obsession

that will both guide and consume him, “Maybe there’s something there,
but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands him . . . If you want
truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning—a billion volts
in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and tempera-
tures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a higher power in that, I
grant you” (Revival 74, emphasis original). Like Victor and Louis, Charles
Jacobs seizes the opportunity to use science to interrogate the secrets of the
afterlife and attempt to wrest power from death itself.
Jamie Morton, who was a young boy when Jacobs and his family came to
Harlow, finds his life inextricably intertwined with that of Charles Jacobs,
as the two men continue to stumble upon each other over the next fifty
years in what the Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert calls “a relationship that
turns positively Faustian” (64). The first time Jamie rediscovers Charles
Jacobs, Jamie is a heroin-addicted rhythm guitarist and Jacobs is a carnival
huckster, taking “Portraits in Lightning” as Dan Jacobs, though his pow-
ers also extend far beyond this entertainment, as Jacobs proves when he
administers his electrical treatment to free Jamie from his addiction. Their
paths diverge again, though not before Jacobs sets Jamie on a new path with
a job at a Colorado recording studio. Though Jamie is cured of his addic-
tion, he has lingering aftereffects. As Brian Truitt explains in his review
of Revival, “Charlie’s healing methods aren’t without consequences . . .
and Jamie faces demons—both metaphorical and sometimes literal—
while learning he’s not the only one affected by Charlie’s strange ministry.”
Not long after Jacobs’s treatment, Jamie wakes up in his backyard, poking
his arm with a fork and repeating the same words that he found him-
self speaking immediately after the treatment: “Something happened”
(Revival 171). However, as Jamie discovers, he is not Jacobs’s only success
story, nor are his side effects the worst of the lot. The supplicants Jacobs
has healed at his tent revival—unknowing human guinea pigs for his elec-
trical experimentation—have had a host of troubling aftereffects, includ-
ing institutionalization, self-harm, compulsive behaviors such as walking
and eating dirt, and suicide (Revival 242). While Victor and Louis strove
to bring the dead back to life, Jacobs’s goals are even more ambitious: he
wants to see what waits beyond the border, to find out what happened to his
wife and son. The culmination of Jacobs’s research and experimentation—
and one he coerces Jamie to serve as assistant in performing—is the revival
of a dead person, in the hopes that she will be able to come back and tell
him what she has seen, what lies beyond the veil between life and death.
For this experiment, Jacobs chooses Mary Fay,3 a woman dying of mad
cow disease, one of the few diseases that are impervious to being cured by
Jacobs’s special electricity.
King’s dedication page at the beginning of Revival includes “a laundry

list of horror-genre influences” (Staskiewicz 74), including Bram Stoker,
Fritz Leiber, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, and Peter Straub, though the
strongest inspirations explored in Revival are Shelley’s Frankenstein, Arthur
Machen’s The Great God Pan, and the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft.
Like Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Jacobs is shaken by tragic loss, and the
refusal to accept this loss, grieve, and move on with his life pushes Jacobs
to dangerous obsession, including Frankenstein’s theme of the disastrous
consequences of “interfering with life and death” (Spanberg). Like Victor
and Louis’s rejection of the natural order of death when it strikes those they
love, Jacobs longs to strip death of its mystery and power. As he tells Jamie
as they prepare to revive Mary Fay, “Sometimes death is natural, a mercy
that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of
senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion. My wife and son,
taken in a stupid and pointless accident, are perfect examples. Your sister
is another. They are three of millions” (Revival 366). Jamie has nightmares
of his dead and reanimated loved ones, including his parents, his brother
Andy, and his sister Claire, murdered by her abusive ex-husband; his terror
at their decomposed and monstrous appearance draw a clear line between
living and dead for Jamie. He knows, as Jud Crandall cautioned Louis in
Pet Sematary, that “sometimes dead is better” (166). However, this is a
truth that Jacobs either refuses or simply cannot comprehend. Like Louis
Creed, while Jacobs has counseled countless grieving family members on
the everlasting peace awaiting their loved ones, when it comes to his own
dearly departed, this holds no comfort. Echoing the life-giving lightning of
countless Frankenstein film adaptations—an added element not present in
Shelley’s novel4—Jacobs works to harness the almost unfathomable power
of electricity to break those bonds. When the lightning strikes, Mary Fay is
indeed returned to a kind of horrifying undead animation.
Arthur Machen’s 1890 novella The Great God Pan also features a
scientist bent on experimentation, in this case on the human brain. As
Dr. Raymond explains to his friend Clarke, who has come to witness
his great test, “There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and
this vision . . . beyond them all as beyond a veil” (Machen 10, emphasis
original), one which he intends to lift with his experiments on a young
woman—again—named Mary. As he explains to Clarke, Raymond is but
one in a long line of men who have attempted to plumb these depths, as
“the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god
Pan” (Machen 11). Raymond anesthetizes Mary and cuts into her brain,
and following this procedure, Mary has indeed looked into the world
beyond their own and come back fundamentally changed. As Raymond
and Clarke look on, “her eyes opened . . . They shone with an awful light,
looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands
stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder
faded, and gave place to the most awful terror” (Machen 19). The rest of
Machen’s novella consists of a series of stories told between men who have
seen troubling and terrible things, including suspicious deaths and suicides
that revolve around a woman who goes by a series of pseudonyms, includ-
ing Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, and Mrs. Beaumont, a woman who “was
at once the most beautiful and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on”
(Machen 40). This diabolical and dangerous woman is found to be much
more: the daughter of Dr. Raymond’s test subject Mary, who he discovered
to be pregnant not long after her peek beyond the veil, a woman who is not
wholly human. As Lovecraft explains in his Supernatural Horror in Litera-
ture, Helen “is the daughter of hideous Pan himself ” (83). While she herself
is destroyed, there still remains “the horror which we can but hint at, which
we can only name under a figure” (Lovecraft 82). As Raymond reflects, “I
forgot that no human eyes could look on such a vision with impunity. And
I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open,
there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may
become the veil of a horror one dare not express” (86). Helen Vaughan is
destroyed, but the horrifying reality that lays so close to the real world is
impossible to contain or deny. This eerie tale of cosmic horror’s influence
has extended far into the intervening century’s culture of horror and weird
tales, impacting both Lovecraft and King. As Lovecraft argues of The Great
God Pan, “the charm of the tale is in the telling . . . And the sensitive reader
reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat
the words of one of the characters: ‘It is too incredible, too monstrous; such
things can never be in this quiet world . . . Why, man, if such a case were
possible, our earth would be a nightmare’” (83). King credits Machen’s
novella on the dedication page at the start of Revival, capping off his list of
horror influences with The Great God Pan, which King says “has haunted
me all my life.” The impact of The Great God Pan resonates throughout the
whole of Revival, with Jacobs echoing Dr. Raymond’s obsession with peer-
ing beyond the veil and his callous approach to the subjects on whom he
experiments, considering one life—or dozens, as it ultimately turns out to
be—well worth the cost of his single-minded pursuit of this dark and secret
knowledge.
While Mary Fay’s reanimation echoes Victor’s creation of his Monster in
Frankenstein and the impulse to cross these boundaries echoes The Great
God Pan, the truths Mary reveals are straight out of Lovecraft’s canon of
cosmic horror, a dark reality separated from our own by the thinnest of
boundaries, and which spells destruction and madness for mankind. As
Daniel Kraus writes, “Frankenstein is a touchstone here, but more so is
Lovecraft,5 as King edges ever closer to the madness of the unknowable

and eventually, to his courageous credit, stares directly at it” (36). As King
explained in an interview with Goodreads’ Catherine Elsworth, he “wanted
to use Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, but in a new fashion, if I could, strip-
ping away Lovecraft’s high-flown language.” Many of Lovecraft’s doomed
protagonists find themselves initiated into dark knowledge through read-
ing forbidden manuscripts or books, and Jacobs follows in their footsteps,
looking to a mystical tome called De Vermis Mysteriis as part of his research
and experimentation (Revival 336). Jacobs plunges into both conventional
and unconventional knowledge and tapping into this darkness, succeeds
in opening the door between the two worlds. As Jamie looks into Mary
Fay’s now monstrous, inhuman eyes, he sees not just the bedroom in
which he stands with Jacobs, but “The true world behind it” (Revival 379,
emphasis original). Struck with horror, Jamie looks upon “a barren land-
scape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of
naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. The
nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the
humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous
blood” (Revival 379). This conclusion makes Revival “one of King’s most
harrowing, most fatalistic works” (Kraus 36), with Jacobs and Jamie denied
any small comfort they took from hoping their loved ones had found peace
in the afterlife and for their own ultimate ends. As Jamie reflects of his
murdered sister, “Somewhere in it was Claire—who deserved heaven and
had gotten this instead . . . This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting
not just for the evil ones among us but for us all” (Revival 380–381, empha-
sis original). As a result of Jacobs’s experimentation, the line between this
world and our own has become perforated, with the side effects of those
he has experimented upon tying these worlds together, opening the door
between the two.
Cell
A popular contemporary development of the figure of the reanimated

corpse is that of the zombie. As Kyle William Bishop explains in American
Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular
Culture, the zombie film has been a horror staple for more than seventy
years and this subgenre has “become even more relevant to a contempo-
rary and post-9/11 audience” (19). Rather than the conscious, if misguided,
choices made by Victor Frankenstein, Louis Creed, and Charles Jacobs, the
reanimated dead of the zombie comes from without and en masse, an envi-
ronmental rather than individually created monster. King taps into this
rich cultural vein with Cell, where a cell phone transmission turns all users
into rampaging, violent monsters in a single chaotic moment, as “Every-

one who does own a mobile and answers it on the morning of 1 October
is transformed into a neck-chomping zombie or a self-harming psycho by
something called The Pulse, a mysterious noise or vibration that spreads,
virus-like, through the mobile networks” (O’Neill 54). King’s negotiation
of the zombie narrative works a bit differently than his other novels, which
draw on Gothic literary precedents, because unlike the figures of the vam-
pire, werewolf, ghost, and reanimated dead in the tradition of Shelley’s
Frankenstein, the zombie narrative was born in film rather than literature.
As Bishop argues, the figure of the zombie is unique in its lack of literary
foundation:
The zombie is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped an
initial literary manifestation . . . Almost every vampire movie owes some-
thing of its mythology to Bram Stoker, and the reanimated dead have clear
ties to Mary Shelley, especially when the creatures share more in common
with the living than they do with the dead. The zombie, however, has no ger-
minal Gothic novel from which it stems, no primal narrative that established
and codified its qualities and behaviors. (12–13)
The cinematic zombie has long been characterized by its walking dead
status—biologically dead, though mobile—along with inarticulate moan-
ing and an endless, cannibalistic quest for brains. However, the charac-
teristics of the zombie have been dynamically negotiated over the course
of its history, such as the fast moving zombies of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film
28 Days Later and an increasing emphasis on bioterrorism and narratives
of infection alongside similar reality-based fears and anxieties. Stephanie
Boluk and Wylie Lenz explain that “The latest mutation of the zombie in
popular culture has led to contestations over what, precisely, constitutes a
zombie. While lumbering, Romero-style zombies effectively tapped into
mid-twentieth-century contagion paranoia, the apocalyptic terror of the
living dead was replaced in films such as 28 Days Later and the Resident
Evil series with a more explicitly biological model of viral infection” (6).
While the modus operandi might change, however, the terror evoked by
the zombie itself remains consistent and “the viral zombie does not replace
the older style of zombie as much as find a way to reconfigure it in the
light of emerging scientific discourses that tap into deeply felt post-AIDS,
SARS, bird flu, and H1N1 anxieties. The zombie has been rationalized and
assigned a pathology” (ibid.). King’s cell phone zombies or “phone-crazies”
similarly negotiate the zombie figure. In the immediate aftermath of The
Pulse, the affected humans suddenly and violently turn upon one another,
as protagonist Clay Riddell witnesses a man biting off a dog’s ear (Cell 8)
and an adolescent girl ripping out a woman’s throat with her teeth (Cell 10).
The transformation is widespread and almost instantaneous; as Fantasy &

Science Fiction’s Charles de Lint explains, “since so many people carry cell
phones, when they see the carnage and chaos created by the first wave of
the afflicted, it’s only natural for them to use those cells to phone their loved
ones, or 911, and so become similarly afflicted” (34). While Cell explores
the biological infection pattern of transformation, King also taps into the
fear of unknown and nearly boundless technological advancement, with
bioterrorism spread through the ubiquitous cell phone signal. As Brendan
O’Neill argues, “If Romero’s zombie flicks captured cold-war America’s
fears of the red threat from without, King’s Cell captures the contemporary
dread of new technology, of what we might be doing to ourselves by push-
ing the boundaries of science and invention” (54). From the supernatu-
ral to biological and technological, the zombie continues to evolve with
changing times, the threat of contagion and infection, the disintegration of
the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the body and the
rest of the world.
The zombies themselves continue to develop and change over the course
of Cell, with the impacts of The Pulse resembling a mutating virus rather than
a more simplistic before-and-after difference. Shortly after the initial Pulse,
the phone-crazies begin to travel in organized packs, and as 15-year-old Alice
observes, “They’re getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they’re
thinking together” (Cell 158), with the survivors concluding that the phone-
crazies’ bird-like “flocking” is the result of “telepathic group-think” (Cell 159).
The phone-crazies move around during the day and group together in a
comatose sleep-state at night, telepathically connecting with one another and
a series of stereos and boom-boxes to transmit an easy-listening soundtrack
of lullabies. Their powers continue to grow, with the phone-crazies able to
infiltrate the dreams of the survivors, take over their bodies to speak and
control their actions, and organize to seek vengeance following the destruc-
tion of a sleeping flock, developing into a “hive mind born out of pure rage”
(Cell 385). Young computer whiz Jordan comes to the conclusion that The
Pulse is basically a software corruption, enacted on the biological circuits of
the brain, reducing humans to their most basic imperative. As Jordan argues
of the phone-crazies, “Those things’re rebooting, all right. They might as
well have SOFTWARE INSTALLATION, PLEASE STAND BY blinking on
their foreheads” (Cell 204). But as his headmaster Charles Ardai explains,
“At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness.
The prime directive is murder . . . [T]hat is what the Pulse exposed five days
ago” (Cell 206). Though this is a fatalistic, nihilistic view of humanity, King
also offers hope for the future. In the couple of weeks following The Pulse,
this programming begins to break down, as Clay witnesses two phone-
crazies beginning to reassert their desires and ability to speak, if not quite
their humanity itself (348–352). Even as Clay knows that the phone-crazies
must be destroyed, he can’t help but see their potential humanity: “maybe in
the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born
in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and
sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the
violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn’t actually made war on
the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war” (Cell
439, emphasis original). From this perspective, in the fight for survival, the
phone-crazies and the “normies” are more similar than different. Just as King
negotiates the characteristics of the zombie figure in Cell, this cause also cre-
ates the possibility for a way back, deviating from the usually irreversible
zombie state: if the human brain can be effectively rebooted, forced to revert
to its last workable, pre-Pulse configuration, humanity can potentially be
restored, a hope that Clay clings to after finding his transformed son, Johnny.
At the heart of the zombie narrative are powerful cultural anxieties
about infection, terrorism, and the apocalypse. As Boluk and Lenz explain,
“Plague, zombies, and apocalypse are deeply entangled with each other”
(7). While the vampire, werewolf, and ghost tend to be isolated occurrences
with a relatively limited scope of influence, the rise of the zombie signals the
end of the world as we know it, a direct challenge to humanity as a whole.
As Bishop explains, “Apocalyptic narratives . . . particularly those featuring
zombie invasions, offer a worst-case scenario for the collapse of all Ameri-
can social and governmental structures” (23). There is no one to turn to for
salvation, rescue is far from guaranteed, and each individual must fight for
themselves, either alone or communally, side-by-side with other survivors.
The way things have always been or “should” be is inconsequential, for with
the apocalypse and the arrival of zombies, there is a new world order to
which the survivors must adapt or die. While we have not yet reached the
point of a full-on apocalypse, the twenty-first century has seen a range of
horrific and world-changing events, both natural and unnatural. Cell taps
into myriad national and global anxieties, a supernatural exploration of
reality-based terror. Finally, Bishop notes that “the primary metaphor in
the post-9/11 zombie world is of course terrorism itself ” (29). In Cell, the
source of The Pulse remains undefined, loosely attributed to global terror-
ism, though given the impact and the constant fight for survival, the specif-
ics of this terrorism are presented as largely inconsequential, with the true
horror coming from the uncertain and dangerous times in which we live.
As the New York Times’ Janet Maslin argues, “Stephen King’s Cell invokes
the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the kind of disaster in which ‘clothes floated
out of the sky like big snow.’ It echoes the upheaval caused by [the 2004]
monstrous tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. It reflects the violent anarchy
to be found in Iraq. It shivers at the threat of bioterrorism and the menace
of computer technology.” In a world full of these very realistic threats and

fears, the supernatural representation of the zombie allows readers to face
these horrors one step removed rather than head on, claiming some vestige
of control and resolution in a time when they often achieve little of either
in the grand scheme of national and international turmoil.
The zombie—like the vampire, werewolf, and ghost—is a supernatural
figure, though one that, like its counterparts, effectively represents real-
life horrors, symbolically conveying the fears and anxieties of its cultural
moment. Each of these traditional horror figures has been continually
revised and reinvented for a new audience, and the figure of the zom-
bie resonates particularly powerfully in the early twenty-first century. As
Bishop argues of the timeliness and real-life correlation of the zombie film,
“Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely
resemble the scenarios depicted by zombie cinema, such images of death
and destruction have all the more power to shock and terrify a population
that has become otherwise jaded to more traditional horror films” (11–12).
With novels from ’Salem’s Lot and Christine to The Shining and Revival,
King returns to traditional horror figures, resituating them in our contem-
porary time and familiar places, highlighting the lasting terror to be found
there and exploring the ways in which through these monsters, we find
what it means to be human.
5
The Ghost
W hile King’s consideration of the previous three figures—the vampire,

the werewolf, and the “Thing Without a Name”—each have a single
classic novel from which they draw their rich literary traditions,1 this is
not possible with the ghost, which King argues cannot be traced back to
or typified by any one novel (Danse Macabre 51).The ghost story has a
long, rich history, one which serves both to terrify and negotiate human
anxiety about death and what lies after. As Otto Penzler explains, “Tales
of the supernatural have been a fixture of the storytelling tradition since
preliterate times, and the most popular form they have taken is the ghost
story” (xi). This spectral influence can be seen in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead and in Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. These ghostly intercessions were
also a preoccupation of the Roman Empire, where “notably Plutarch and
Pliny the Younger, wrote about haunted houses” (Penzler xi), including
the latter’s “An Ancient Ghost Story,” where clanking chains and other
ominous sounds lead the narrator to discover a buried body which, once
laid to proper rest, sets the house at ease. Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle
of Otranto similarly establishes the tradition of the ghost story and the
haunted house, with Manfred and his family cursed by his earlier misdeeds,
a series of spectral attacks that only ends when order is restored and the
castle is in the hands of the true heir. Ghosts appear in starring roles in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) and Macbeth (1611), and the ghost of Jacob
Marley serves as the transformative catalyst that instills Ebenezer Scrooge
with the Christmas spirit in Charles Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol
(1843). Transcending historical moments, individual cultural and religious
beliefs, and a wide range of literary formats, ghosts seem to hold universal
appeal for horror readers, which is no wonder, since the preoccupation
with death and what comes after is a universal concern of all humans. As
Michael Newton argues in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Ghost
Stories, “The ghost is a way of engaging with our mystification about death.
It survives with the belief that there is something left over when the human
body becomes a corpse, that there is a residue, or a remnant, that does not
cease in the moment of dying” (xxi). As a result, Dorothy Scarborough
argues in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, “The ghost is the most
enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible”
(81). As long as humans must face their own mortality, ghost stories will
continue to play a central role in sounding those questions and fears.
There are several common themes to the traditional ghost story, includ-
ing the manifestation of the haunting, which can take many forms, and
the interrogation of its causes. In ghost stories spirits take on many forms,
including full body apparitions (a ghostly version of the individual’s body),
the unexplainable movement of objects, phantom sounds, a breeze with-
out a clear source, and phantom smells, often of scents associated with the
deceased, such as cigar smoke or a signature perfume. As Penzler explains,
ghosts “may have widely divergent goals. Some return from the dead to
wreak vengeance; others want to help a loved one” (xii). If a ghost is a rem-
nant of humanity that has remained behind in the land of the living, dis-
corporated following the death of its body, the ghost story often argues that
there is some reason for the spirit staying behind, such as strong emotional
ties or unfinished business, and oftentimes if that reason can be discovered
and addressed, the spirit is free to move on.
Hand in hand with the ghost story is that of the haunted house tale.
Like the werewolf, the haunted house story comes to readers where they
live, infiltrating their innermost private spaces. As Newton argues, “Ghosts
are the intrusion—the link—between the private and the public. Their
haunting demonstrates that this secure place is not sealed off, but lies open
to others, to previous inhabitants, to strangers” (xxvi–xxvii). This is a ter-
rifying proposition, with the realization that we can never be truly safe,
even in our innermost sanctums, with the shades drawn and the doors
locked. As Dale Bailey lays out the key components of the haunted house
story in American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American
Popular Fiction, at its most basic level, “it must be old, it must be large,
[and] it must have a troubled history” (57). However, once past these initial
requirements, the haunting is often about far more than just ghosts or rest-
less spirits, instead reflecting the conflict within or between the characters
themselves, as well as larger cultural themes. As Bailey continues his analy-
sis, there is a wide-ranging “latitude of social and cultural tensions the for-
mula of the haunted house tale can engage. Again and again, such novels
touch upon class, gender, history, and economy. Time after time they enact
the Manichean clash of good and evil and the tensions between scientific
and supernatural world views. Inevitably, they present a view of evil as ever
re-emergent” (63). Barry Curtis builds on this complexity in Dark Places:
The Haunted House in Film, where he argues that “‘ghosts’ and the dark
THE GHOST 61
places where they dwell have served as powerful metaphors for persistent
themes of loss, memory, retribution, and confrontation with unacknowl-
edged and unresolved histories” (10). With this in mind, the haunted house
story bridges the gap between the past and the present, with the haunting
often signaling a simultaneous enactment of these time periods, as well as
revealing tensions and anxieties of its surrounding contemporary culture.
Ghosts and hauntings take center stage in King’s The Shining and Bag of
Bones, as well as King’s recent sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep (2013).
Both The Shining and Bag of Bones are haunted house stories that engage
with the multiple levels Curtis addresses: in addition to the haunting, both
novels address significant issues of gender, power, and violence; the perme-
ability of the barrier between the past and the present; the significance of
place in holding the echoes of the pain and suffering that have occurred
there; and the responsibility of descendants to atone for their predecessors’
actions and legacies, even when they as individuals are innocent, another
theme which signals the breakdown between the crimes of the past and its
clash with the individualistic present.
The Shining
King’s novel The Shining is a haunted house story on a grand scale, cen-
tered on the fractured Torrance family’s winter stay in Colorado’s Overlook
Hotel, where patriarch Jack Torrance has taken a job as the seasonal care-
taker, accompanied by his wife Wendy and young son Danny. However,
not long after the Torrances move in, they realize that they are not the
hotel’s only occupants, with the walls and rooms still holding the memories
of the tragedies and misdeeds that have taken place within them over the
years. Danny Torrance is especially aware of the ghosts because of his pow-
erful precognition, which Overlook chef Dick Hallorrann calls “the shin-
ing” (Shining 114). Before leaving the Torrances for the winter, Hallorann
warns Danny about the hotel, telling the boy that “I don’t know why, but it
seems that all the bad things that ever happened here, there’s little pieces of
those things still layin around” (Shining 125). Dick also attempts to reas-
sure Danny, telling him that “I don’t think those things can hurt anybody”
(ibid.), though Danny soon finds out that’s not the case.
The most terrifying and powerful of the ghosts that Danny encounters
is Mrs. Massey, the dead woman in the bathtub of Room 217. Entering the
room despite being expressly forbidden to do so by his father, Danny finds
a true horror, pulling the shower curtain back to find that “The woman
in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her
gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy
island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She
was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace” (Shining 319–320).
While Mrs. Massey is not the first ghost that Danny sees at the Overlook,
she is the first who is able to harm him, who doesn’t go away when he closes
his eyes and tells himself he is safe; instead she catches and chokes him, the
line between the present and past, the living and the dead, obliterated with
this very real, physical assault.
Mrs. Massey is only one small part of the Overlook Hotel’s dark and
sordid history, a legacy of underhandedness, manipulation, and pain that
pulls the Torrances further under its spell as the winter goes on. Discover-
ing a scrapbook in the Overlook’s basement,2 Jack finds out not just about
the glitz and glamour of the grand hotel, but the scandals as well, includ-
ing “Mafia murders, sexual violations, and corrupt financial transactions”
(Magistrale, “Truth Comes Out” 41). Jack “promised himself he would take
care of the place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had never
really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was
almost like having a responsibility to history” (Shining 233). The Overlook
occupies a liminal space, where the past is alive and capable of violently
impacting the present, and the more powerful the hotel’s hold over Jack
Torrance becomes, the thinner the boundaries become, between past and
present, between the Overlook and Jack, throwing the entire Torrance fam-
ily into an unremitting and constantly threatening liminal limbo. As Winter
argues, Jack “absorbs and is absorbed by the hotel, and the truths of the past,
repressed in the dark basement of the unconscious, begin to emerge” (49),
awakening ghosts that haunt both the hotel and Jack’s own past.
The Overlook’s ghosts are not the only unquiet pasts haunting the Tor-
rance family, who bring their own dark and troubled history with them up
into the mountains. Newton argues that beginning in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, “the troubled family” becomes a common tar-
get of haunting, as a result of their position “as abortive examples of domes-
ticity. Into their compromised worlds the ghost comes, an undead symbol
of their failures” (xxix). The Torrance family is certainly troubled as they
head up into the mountains, facing incredible stress, financial ruin, and the
disintegration of the martial relationship between Jack and Wendy, as well
as that of the family as a whole. Jack is a recovering alcoholic, with a long
trail of addiction and violence behind him, including breaking Danny’s arm
in a drunken rage and beating a student who vandalized Jack’s car, the latter
attack an incident of Jack losing his temper while stone-cold sober. Jack’s
position as winter caretaker of the Overlook is a last gasp effort to set his life
on track, further establish his sobriety, rediscover himself as a writer, and
save his rapidly deteriorating family. Just as the ghosts haunt the halls of the
Overlook, Jack’s alcoholism and violence haunt his memories and his family.
At first, the Overlook does seem to be a new beginning for the Torrances,
THE GHOST 63
bringing them closer together and strengthening their bonds with one
another. Early in the winter, Wendy thinks hopefully that “her husband
seemed to be slowly closing the door on a roomful of monsters” (Shining
174). If this door can be closed and locked, put behind them once and for all,
the future of the Torrance family is full of untold possibilities. However, the
Overlook’s ghosts zero in on Jack’s flaws, tapping into his weaknesses in his
imagined and increasingly potent conversations with Lloyd the bartender
(Shining 350–355), his negotiations with the cold and manipulative Horace
Derwent, and his conversation with Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s previous
caretaker, who murdered his wife and daughters (Shining 516–522). Playing
upon Jack’s addiction, his temper, his self-doubt and self-loathing, the Over-
look makes Jack one more tool in its arsenal of destruction.
The gender dynamics between Jack and Wendy are complex and often
contentious, compounded by Jack’s own sense of emasculation as a result of
his personal, familial, and professional failures. As the novel begins, Danny
and Wendy have been pulled along in Jack’s destructive—and self-destruc-
tive—wake for years. Winter describes this early Wendy as “attractive, frag-
ile, threatened—a modernized Gothic heroine” (48). She stays with Jack in
spite of his drinking and its destructive impact on their marriage, even after
he breaks their son’s arm. In Jack’s perception of himself and his life, Wendy
is often at the periphery, a shrill and nagging nuisance, constantly challeng-
ing him, judging him and finding him wanting. Women hold a similarly
tangential position in the Overlook’s history, which is dominated by men’s
passions, though at the Overlook, women rarely stray beyond their “proper
place,” instead confined within the misogynistic gender roles demarcated
by systems of power, money, and violence. As Magistrale argues in “‘Truth
Comes Out’: The Scrapbook Chapter,” “Men have owned and managed the
Overlook; men created its notorious reputation. Women are references
in the scrapbook (and elsewhere throughout the novel) only as glittering
ghosts—whores and decadent dolls wearing ‘gleaming high-heeled pumps,’
perfumed and naked beneath tight evening gowns and cat-masks, who are
present only to enflame the masculine libido” (43). As Jack falls further
under the Overlook’s influence, he pushes Wendy away, their fights becom-
ing increasingly volatile until he attempts to kill her, trying to beat her to
death with a roque mallet. Abused and afraid, it would be easy for Wendy
to be first overcome and then destroyed by her husband; however, she rises
above this violence, willing to sacrifice herself to save her son, and growing
stronger as a result of her suffering. As Sidney Poger writes in “Charac-
ter Transformation in The Shining,” Wendy’s metamorphosis is achieved
when she fights, a choice which leads her to “change from a dependent
wife and mother, content to see her son more in love with his father than
with her, to a primal mother. Wendy is transformed, and we have witnessed
the transformation in her battle with Jack. She has fought through broken
ribs, broken vertebrae, and broken back to become the woman she had the
potential for becoming” (52–53). Danny and Wendy are irrevocably trans-
formed by their experiences within the Overlook, claiming power that they
never knew they had, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and
in direct challenge to the Overlook’s violent, patriarchal, and misogynistic
history.
Jack’s ghosts are not his alone, but rather a legacy—or haunting—from
his own childhood, lived in fear of his father, a mercurial alcoholic who
could be both loving and violent, sometimes simultaneously. Despite
young Jack’s devotion, “Love began to curdle at nine, when his father put
his mother in the hospital with his cane” (Shining 329), randomly and
without provocation beating her into unconsciousness at the dinner table.
When the doctor arrives, Jack’s father tells him that she fell down the stairs,
a lie which is not believed but accepted, and the catalyst for their family’s
destruction when “in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their
father’s story while holding the hand of the parish priest” (Shining 332).
Jack’s father’s violence is further explored in the prequel “Before the Play,”
portions of which were published in TV Guide before the premiere of the
1997 miniseries adaptation of The Shining, which was written by King and
directed by Mick Garris.3 As King writes in “Before the Play,” “In that long,
hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance turned 6, his father came
home one night from the hospital [where he worked] and broke Jacky’s
arm. He was drunk” (52). In a well-established pattern of generational
abuse, after escaping from the shadow of his terrifying father, the legacy of
violence lives on within him, with his childhood terror haunting his adult-
hood, a horror that he passes on to his own son, echoing specific details
decades later, breaking Danny’s arm in a drunken haze and later, pushed
by the Overlook to murder his son.
In his final moments within the Overlook, Jack becomes a ghost of sorts
himself, possessed by the place’s evil, which taps into Jack’s capacity for vio-
lence to goad him into killing his wife and son. However, Poger argues that
“The hotel manipulates Jack with his cooperation, but it cannot remove his
essential characteristics of love and humanity” (50). Standing up to this
monstrous version of his father, Danny says “You’re not my daddy . . . And
if there’s a little bit of my daddy left inside you, he knows they lie here . . .
You’re it, not my daddy. You’re the hotel” (Shining 631, emphasis original).
To save his family from the Overlook, Jack has to fight back against both
the hotel’s ghosts and his own demons. Fighting off the Overlook’s mali-
cious control, Jack regains himself—his own best, un-haunted self—for
one fleeting moment, telling Danny to “Run away. Quick. And remember
how much I love you” (Shining 632). In the end, though Jack is incapable
THE GHOST 65
of shedding the ghosts which cling to him, from both the Overlook and
his own flawed past, he is able to rise above them, to hold them at bay
long enough for Wendy, Danny, and Hallorann to escape, scarred but not
destroyed.
The events of that childhood winter at the Overlook Hotel haunt Danny
Torrance as he grows up and these unshakeable horrors are at the center of
King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. Samantha Figliola argues
that “Danny is the most haunting (and haunted) of a host of children who
have populated King’s novels and stories” (54) and in Doctor Sleep, read-
ers get to see how those ghosts have shaped Danny’s life and transformed
him, influencing the man he has become. Just as with the ghosts of The
Shining, some of them are external manifestations—both Room 217’s Mrs.
Massey and Horace Derwent find Danny again—while others are internal
and inescapable, such as Jack Torrance’s familial legacy of alcoholism and
rage, both of which plague adult Dan. As Brian Truitt writes in his review
of the novel, with Doctor Sleep, “Decades have passed, and now Dan Tor-
rance is struggling with a variety of demons—the literal ones as well as the
ones that come at the bottom of a bottle or a baggie of white powder.” After
hitting rock bottom, Dan shakes off at least some of these ghosts, finds a
purpose and a family of which to be a part, and becomes a Hallorann-esque
mentor to young Abra Stone, a girl with a shining even more powerful than
Dan’s own. While Dan kicks the booze and drugs, he cannot escape himself
and the myriad ways in which he is like his father, as well as his memo-
ries of and complicated feelings about his father, and the experience of his
childhood weeks at the Overlook, which draws him back for a final con-
frontation. As Abra perceptively observes, “the past is gone, even though
it defines the present” (Doctor Sleep 485). However, in the end, the past is
neither entirely gone nor forgotten, but rather an integral part of who Dan
is, the challenges he faces, and the path his future will take.
Bag of Bones
In Bag of Bones, Mike Noonan is a successful suspense author whose wife

Jo dies unexpectedly, felled by an aneurysm in a hot drugstore parking
lot. In the aftermath of this loss, Mike struggles with the discovery that
Jo was pregnant, with his resultant doubts about her honesty and fidelity
compounding his grief. Mike retreats to Sara Laughs, their house on Dark
Score Lake, Maine, which he quickly discovers is already occupied by a
rabble of ghosts. The haunting also radiates out from Sara Laughs, inex-
tricably tied to the life of the community, the unincorporated TR-90. As
Mike soon discovers, the TR has been cursed by the vengeful spirit of Sara
Tidwell, a black singer who was gang-raped and murdered by several of the
town’s young men, who also murdered her child. Mike’s return, grief, and
preoccupation with the haunting of Sara Laughs are further complicated
by his attraction to a lovely young widow, Mattie Devore, and her daughter
Kyra, who are locked in an ugly custody dispute with the woman’s wealthy
father-in-law, Max Devore, who is incidentally the descendent of the ring-
leader in Sara Tidwell’s rape and murder.
At the novel’s publication, the book was well-reviewed and several critics
speculated that it was the start of a new direction for King’s writing, a more
sophisticated, subtler nod to the traditional Gothic style rather than the
gore-splattered horror which those passingly familiar with King often per-
ceive as his trademark. As GQ reviewer Terrence Rafferty commented of the
novel, “it practically brings the whole [ghost story] genre back to life” (170).
Entertainment Weekly’s Tom De Haven also marked this novel as a departure
from King’s signature style in his review, arguing that “for all of its potboiler
conventions (isolated house, mysterious rappings, damsel in distress), Bag of
Bones is, hands down, King’s most narratively subversive fiction. Whenever
you’re positive—just positive!—you know where this ghost story is heading,
that’s exactly when it gallops off in some jaw-dropping new direction” (“King
of the Weird” 95). Bag of Bones is a complex ghost story, moving well beyond
the simplistic trope of a single haunting spirit to explore the significance of
place, violence, and the continuing influence of the past on the present, as
well as complicating these familiar ghost story elements with issues of race
and sexuality.
The causal links of the haunting are initially unclear and the blurry lines
between past and present are complex and convoluted, while the presence
of several ghosts attempting to communicate with Mike often keep him,
as well as the reader, guessing about the spirits’ motivation and honesty.
The truth of Sara Tidwell’s violent end is only revealed in bits and pieces,
coming together slowly over a few hundred pages. As Mike works through
the mystery, the answers only become clear as one individual piece after
another falls into place: for example, first he finds out about the death of
two of Sara and the Red-Tops’ children: one child was caught in a mali-
ciously laid animal trap (Bag of Bones 370), while Sara’s child was drowned
by his mother’s attackers (Bag of Bones 398–399). Weeks later, he comes
to the realization that a disproportionate number of local residents and
their children have names beginning with “K” (Bag of Bones 565, 567), a
supernatural echo of Sara’s murdered son, Kito. Finally, upon discovering
the truth of Sara Tidwell’s rape, murder, and subsequent curse, Mike real-
izes via an out of body experience that takes him back in time to Sara’s
murder, that her influence affects the entire town, not just in this nam-
ing, but in compelling the descendants of her murderers to kill their own
children until their family lines are extinguished (Bag of Bones 669–689).
THE GHOST 67
This realization takes him weeks to achieve, punctuated with a number of

red herrings, loose ends, and unanswered questions along the way, leaving
Mike with the feeling that there is more going on in the TR than meets the
eye, something dark and dangerous just below the surface of the life of this
small community.
Mike Noonan is especially unique in terms of his characterization
because he is one of King’s relatively rare first-person narrators, allowing
readers direct and intimate knowledge of his thoughts and feelings, as well
as keeping them wondering about his narrative reliability. For example, is
his house truly haunted or is he simply going crazy, a possibility that he
himself contemplates several times over the course of the novel? This char-
acterization is especially significant when it comes to parsing out Mike’s
motivations and ultimate reliability as a narrator. Mike repeatedly finds
himself influenced by the curse of Sara Tidwell, trapped within what he
repeatedly thinks of as “the zone” of the TR, internalizing the haunting
and finding himself steered by it—specifically by Sara Tidwell’s desire for
vengeance—and at times unaware of the ways in which his actions are not
his own. This is especially powerful in the wake of Mattie’s murder, when
Mike finds himself pushed to kill Kyra. Under the thrall of “the zone,” he
even convinces himself that this murder is in Kyra’s best interest, a way of
setting her free from the pain and suffering she faces: “let it all end—the
sorrow, the hurt, the fear . . . Life was a sickness. I was going to give her
a nice warm bath and cure her of it” (Bag of Bones 633). This is a pivotal
moment in the novel where the unreliability of Mike’s first-person narra-
tive position is especially clear. As Rebecca Janicker explains of this section
of the novel in her article “‘It’s My House, Isn’t It?’: Memory, Haunting, and
Liminality in Stephen King’s Bag of Bones,” Mike’s “dipping in and out of
the zone compromises the reliability of his narration, as when he believes
taking Kyra to Sara Laughs will protect her. A typically gothic device, this
serves to show the extent to which Sara’s ghostly interventions have infil-
trated his mind and begun to directly influence his behaviour” (191). In
these moments, Mike is not quite himself, instead animated by the haunt-
ing, driven by Sara Tidwell’s desire for revenge, which has radiated through
the long years since her murder.
In addition to Sara Tidwell’s ghostly presence and malicious influence,
the spirit of Mike’s wife Jo also haunts their house on Dark Score Lake. In
spite of Mike’s struggles with the sexually charged aftermath of his wife’s
death, his discovery of her pregnancy, and his doubts about her fidelity,
Jo is a largely comforting presence there, reassuring Mike of her love and
faithfulness. Jo is the counteracting force to Sara’s rage, leading Mike to
discover the truth while Sara attempts to divert him and turn him to her
own murderous ends. Jo calls Mike back from brink of madness, as he
contemplates murdering Kyra, her voice crying together with Mattie’s to

bring him out of “the zone” and back to himself (Bag of Bones 632). Jo
communicates with Mike through his writing, sending him encoded mes-
sages to lead him to the plastic owls hidden under her studio, the treasure
trove of her own research into the history of the TR and Sara Laughs, and
the dark discoveries to which it led her. When Mike must face Sara Tidwell
and destroy her bones to end her curse, Jo comes back to him, if only for
a few moments, taking up arms against Sara and keeping her at bay while
Mike completes the final exorcism, pouring lye over the bones of Sara and
her son, Kito. As Sara’s screams fade away, Mike turns to his similarly dis-
solving wife: “It was Jo I wanted to see, Jo who had come God knew how far
and suffered God knew how much to help me” (Bag of Bones 691). Mike’s
life and house have been haunted by a variety of ghosts, working at cross-
purposes, waging a war for both his soul and his sanity, but in the end, the
power of love and strength of his connection with Jo temporarily transcend
the limitations of death, turning him toward salvation rather than destruc-
tion, an optimism that is later echoed by Mattie’s brief, ghostly return to
save Kyra (Bag of Bones 706–708).
Bag of Bones also effectively highlights the connection between the past
and the present, including issues of race, sexual violence, and murder. As
Janicker explains, Sara Laughs and the TR “act as a liminal space; caught
between past and present, the living and the dead, they provide a transi-
tional area in which traumatic memories are continually thrust back upon
the community responsible until they are finally relieved” (184). Inherent
in this memory function is the need for responsibility and expiation and, as
Janicker continues, “there is a clear sense of the collective: collective aggres-
sion, collective guilt and collective punishment not only shared by a whole
community but passed down to their descendants” (ibid.). Mike travels
between the past and the present, passing back and forth between the two
time periods, and in doing so realizes the immediacy connecting the two,
including the ways in which the sins of the past continue to haunt the pres-
ent. Until Sara Tidwell is properly laid to rest, the past is never truly passed
and it will keep repeating itself over and over again.
Another common uniting characteristic between the past and the pres-
ent of the TR are the gender politics that impact—and eventually destroy—
the lives of Sara Tidwell and Mattie Devore. The figure of the “damsel in
distress” is a common archetype of the Gothic and both Sara and Mattie
can be considered within this framework. As Réka Tóth explains in “The
Plight of the Gothic Heroine: Female Development and Relationships in
Eighteenth Century Female Gothic Fiction,” the genre often “necessitates
the presence of a female protagonist who stands in the midst of abuses
and dangers posed by . . . [cultural] institutions” such as “family, marriage,
THE GHOST 69
[and] church” (21). Despite Sara and Mattie’s individual strengths, they find
themselves circumscribed and persecuted by these systems: the patriarchal
status quo, as embodied by Devore and his friends, refutes Sara’s sense of
belonging in the TR through the violence of the racist and viciously patri-
archal men who attack her, while Mattie finds herself powerless before
Max Devore’s overwhelming financial influence, through which he buys
the favor of the courts and many citizens of the TR. Both women refuse to
surrender, despite the implacable institutional forces stacked against them,
though in the end, this resistance is ineffectual and both women end up
murdered as a result. As Tóth argues, within this Gothic tradition, “the
female has to be sexualised or murdered—in short eradicated, disposed of,
suppressed—so that men could define themselves in a patriarchal world
where identity is linked to possession” (32). With these women’s murders,
the patriarchal order is restored, both individually and culturally.
As with many traditional Gothic tales, the idea of property and owner-
ship is at the root of each woman’s consideration as aberrant and unwel-
come. Sara is black and Mattie is poor, both of which position them outside
the realm of acceptable citizenship and, seen as thus vulnerable, what little
they do have can be taken from them, by violent means and with little
fear of larger social repercussion. In their resistance they threaten the sta-
tus quo, which leads to the impulse for the traditionally Gothic villain to
“[assume] male ‘title’ over female property . . . the penetration of which
more often than not results in the growth of male desire to penetrate the
female body, as well” (Tóth 31–32). With Sara, this penetration is literal in
her gang rape by Jared Devore and his friends, while with Mattie it is more
metaphorical, with Max Devore obsessed with taking custody of Kyra,
perverting and devaluing her shared love with his now-dead son Lance,
subverting the natural patriarchal lineage and subsuming it under his own
desire for ultimate control.
Sara’s role as a Gothic heroine and the violence she suffers is further
complicated by race. She and the Red-Tops are black in an otherwise pre-
dominantly white community in the early twentieth century: they are tour-
ing entertainers, travelers passing through, and seen as an exotic diversion.
Browsing the historic clippings chronicling the band’s time in the TR, Mike
reflects that “The overall tone shook me . . . I’d describe it as unfailing genial
contempt. The Red-Tops were ‘our Southern blackbirds’ and ‘our rhythmic
darkies.’ They were ‘full of dusky good-nature.’ . . . They were, God keep
us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn’t mind being called full of
dusky good-nature” (Bag of Bones 651–652). Despite this paternalistic rac-
ism, as they stay on longer, Sara and her group begin forming relationships
with the people of the TR and it is this affront to the cultural traditions
and hierarchy of the community that spark the men’s violence against Sara.
As Mike passes backward in time to witness Sara’s rape and murder, Jared
Devore rages that on the community street “She thought she could walk
there like a white gal! She and her big teeth and her big tits and her snotty
looks. She thought she was something special, but we taught her different
. . . We taught her her place” (Bag of Bones 671).4 But Jared is one of the
only people who feels this way, an outsider within a world in which he
has always been privileged, held in a position of leadership and authority.
Mike counters Jared’s outrage, understanding that the other members of
the TR “did talk to her. She had a way about her—that laugh, maybe. Men
talked to her about crops and the women showed off their babies. In fact
they gave her their babies to hold and when she laughed down at them,
they laughed back up at her. The girls asked her advice about boys. They
boys . . . they just looked” (Bag of Bones 673, emphasis original). Sara has
been accepted into the community, seen as both a friend and a source of
erotic fascination. As Teresa Derrickson argues of sexuality and race in the
Gothic tradition, “racial blood . . . [colors] its characters in ways that paint
clear demarcations between those of moral rectitude and those of moral
depravity, those intrinsically civil and those hopelessly rapacious” (48).
From this perspective, despite Sara’s acceptance by the rest of the TR—and
in the case of the young men, their desire coupled with their appreciation
of Sara’s unattainability—to Jared and his gang, this makes her deviant, a
sexual object rather than an active agent, and as such, they feel they can
and even must reassert their superiority by dominating and denigrating
her, debasing her until she is firmly beaten back down in accordance with
what they see as her proper racial and sexual station. However, despite this
sexualization and perceived deviance, she is not theirs to contain or pos-
sess; in fact, when they try, she literally laughs in their faces, both at Jared’s
impotence and because, despite their sexual violence against her, they can
never own her, can never defeat her unbridled spirit. It is this final resis-
tance, especially to Jared’s inadequate masculinity, that is the final straw. In
raping her, Jared reclaims his physical masculinity and in murdering her,
his patriarchal position within the culture is reaffirmed, putting all back as
it should be, from Jared’s violently misogynistic perspective.
In both The Shining and Bag of Bones, the hauntings experienced by
these characters are both internal and external, a combination of their own
individual memories, questions, and failings coupled with the ghostly pres-
ence of the past asserting itself on the present. Whether these ghosts are
malicious, like the spirits of the Overlook and Sara Tidwell, or drawn back
by love, like Jo and Mattie, King’s work suggests that the line between the
present and the past, the living and the dead, is thin, permeable, and often
closer than we think.
Section II
Real Life Horror

6
Rage
K ing is best known for his tales of supernatural horror, such as the
vampires, werewolves, monsters, and ghosts of the previous section.
However, some of King’s most effective terror stems not from these
fictional manifestations of terror, but from much closer to home, based in
the context of real life horrors, including school shootings, sexual violence,
and the often difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.
While the vast majority of King’s published work is readily available, in
both trade paperback and ebook versions, in the late 1990s King made the
choice to pull one of his novellas from publication: Rage, written under the
pseudonym Richard Bachman. Driving King’s choice was the disturbing
fact that copies of the novella had been found in connection to a couple
of fatal school shootings, a presumed influence on shooters who identi-
fied with King’s anti-hero protagonist, Charlie Decker. King published his
novella Rage in 1977 as Bachman (a name he also used to publish other
works, including The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner,
The Regulators, and Blaze). Told from the first-person perspective of Char-
lie Decker, the novella tells Decker’s story as he becomes a school shooter
and takes his high school algebra class hostage. While Rage is no longer
being published, used copies of the original 1985 collection of The Bach-
man Books are often readily available from online sellers1 and many librar-
ies still carry this collection, which includes Rage.
In the opening pages of Rage, Charlie discloses himself as an unreliable
narrator, reflecting that “Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that
was about the time I started to lose my mind” (Rage 7). As he begins tell-
ing his story, Charlie has already been suspended for attacking his chem-
istry teacher, Mr. Carlson, with a pipe wrench. He is temporarily back in
school, though in the early chapters, he is called to the principal’s office
to be informed of his expulsion and transfer to Greenmantle Academy, a
boys’ reform school. After receiving this news, Charlie sets fire to his locker,
takes his father’s gun, and returns to his algebra classroom, where he shoots
his teacher, Mrs. Underwood. Charlie then takes his class hostage, shooting
another teacher who comes to the room to see what is going on. However,
once the initial shock of the situation wears off, Charlie’s fellow students
largely rally behind him and they proceed to, in Charlie’s words, “[get] it on”
(Rage 33), sharing their darkest secrets and deepest fears with one another
as they question and challenge the world outside.
As with many of King’s other works, particularly his coming of age sto-
ries, the adolescents in Rage find themselves abused by and resentful of
the adults around them and the arbitrary power their elders wield. Both
Mr. Carlson and Mrs. Underwood antagonize their students when they
provide wrong answers or falter in their attempts to articulate the right
ones. On the day Charlie attacked Mr. Carlson, the teacher had called him
up to the blackboard to complete a problem in front of the class and as
Charlie struggled to solve the problem, Mr. Carlson “started to make fun
of me. He was asking me if I remembered what two and two made, if I’d
ever heard of long division, a wonderful invention, he said, ha-ha, a regular
Henny Youngman” (Rage 149). Mrs. Underwood has a similarly antago-
nistic approach and on the morning of Charlie’s expulsion, when one of
his fellow students is attempting to frame his response to the algebraic
equation of “a = 16.” Billy Sawyer responds that “a” could be understood
as “Eight plus eight” (Rage 8) and when Underwood asks him to elaborate
further, he fumbles “See, if you add eight and eight, it means . . .” (ibid.).
Even when Charlie himself is not the center of attention in this educa-
tional haranguing, it makes him painfully uncomfortable: “‘Shall I lend
you my thesaurus?’ Mrs. Underwood asked, smiling alertly. My stomach
began to hurtle a little and my breakfast started to move around a little . . .
Mrs. Underwood’s smile reminded me of the shark in Jaws” (ibid.). Out-
side of the classroom, adults are not much more helpful or nurturing. As
Tony Magistrale explains of Charlie’s situation in Stephen King: The Second
Decade: Danse Macabre to The Dark Half,
Charlie knows about rules and authority, but he knows almost nothing of love
and affection; he has been taught the necessity of self-control and repression,
but not how to channel his tremendous energies into constructive release;
and while school and his parents labor to inculcate in him civilized virtues
through lectures and books, the alacrity with which they employ violence
undermines the sincerity of their efforts. (52)
Principal Denver struggles to understand Charlie but fails and though the
guidance counselor, Don Grace, has been meeting with Charlie on a daily
basis since Charlie’s attack of Mr. Carlson, Grace is no closer to under-
standing who Charlie is or why he does what he does. Captain Philbrick
RAGE 75
of the State Police is called in to talk to Charlie through the loudspeaker

as he holds his classmates hostage, and Philbrick is similarly powerless to
understand or effectively respond to him. Things are just as bad at home,
where Charlie’s mother coddles him and his relationship with his father is
characterized by violence and fear. As Charlie tells his classmates, “My dad
has hated me for as long as I can remember” (Rage 53).
Charlie shares traumatic stories from his past, including accounts of his
distant and abusive relationship with his father and his troubled interac-
tions with women. Let into Charlie’s own dark universe and finding them-
selves under a shared pressure from the adults and world outside, Charlie’s
hostages begin to share their own stories of pain, anger, and suffering, as
it quickly becomes apparent that in many ways, Charlie’s fellow students
are just like him. Within this unique situation, Jesse W. Nash argues, “the
adolescent is given a privileged place from which to speak, and to speak
unchallenged” (154). Inside the classroom, the students communally dis-
mantle the structure of the wider world, obliterating the lines that separate
one clique from another and shouting truths that are supposed to remain
unspoken. As Magistrale argues, “The students appear to recognize and
accept Charlie as one of their own; perhaps none of them would resort to
his extreme form of antisocial behavior, but they all understand the spirit
that has created the hostage situation” (The Second Decade 53). “Pig Pen”
Dano tells the class that the reason for his slovenly appearance is that his
mother spends all of their money entering contests, refusing to buy him
new clothes (Rage 90). Good Girl Sandra Cross talks about how she went
looking for anonymous sex with a dangerous stranger: “I didn’t know him
at all. I kept thinking that maybe he was one of those sex maniacs. That he
might have a knife. That he might make me take dope. Or that I might get
pregnant. I felt alive” (Rage 127, emphasis original). Listening to their sto-
ries, seeing the ways in which his fellow students respond to his violence, it
is their savagery that haunts Charlie, rather than his own, as he asks: “them.
How do we understand them?” (Rage 31, emphasis original). Charlie has
admitted and even, to some extent, come to terms with his own madness,
but when he sees it reflected in the vast majority of his fellow students, his
understanding of the world is unbearably altered.
The only holdout is Ted Jones, the classroom’s “golden boy,” who
staunchly defends the status quo throughout their ordeal; within the class-
room, “Ted is a trenchant reminder to all of them of the hypocrisy and cru-
elty that is at the center of the patriarchal system Charlie and King attack”
(Magistrale, The Second Decade 53). While the others give themselves
over to the experience, baring their souls and disclosing their secrets, Ted
refuses, instead sitting back in silence and in judgment, with a predatory
gaze fixed on Charlie, ready to take him down at the first sign of weakness.
In the all too familiar story of a high school shooting, Ted is the expected
hero, the guy who will fight the monster and save the day. Ted is “sym-
bolic of the adult world that all of these children have grown to hate, even
though they are in the process of joining it” (ibid.). Despite this seemingly
unassailable façade, Ted has plenty of his own secrets and his own shame,
though he refuses to share them with the class. In the end, his fellow stu-
dents turn against him, falling upon them as they hit, taunt, and spit on
him, rubbing ink in his hair as a final act of debasement, a visual marker
of Ted as an outsider, an Other, expelled from the safety of the communal
group. After they leave the room, Ted and Charlie are both sent to psy-
chiatric facilities, Ted rendered catatonic by his traumatic experience and
Charlie found psychologically unfit to stand trial.
In the novella’s final chapter, alone in his room, Charlie is still haunted
by his fellow students, unable to open the yearbook that his mother has sent
him, sure that he will be able to “Just as soon as I can make myself believe
that there won’t be any black streaks on their hands. That their hands will
be clean. With no ink. Maybe next week I’ll be completely sure of that”
(Rage 170). Charlie has come to a new understanding in his time as a school
shooter and hostage-taker, but it is one that has left him even more psycho-
logically unsettled and damaged than he was at the outset and the novella’s
conclusion, with its epistolary inclusion of court and medical records that
transcribe but shed no light, is anticlimactic, raising questions rather than
providing answers. Rage provides a wealth of opportunities for discussing
troubling contemporary issues, including school shootings in general as
well as more focused discussions of possible causes of and responses to this
violence, and finally, King’s choice to pull Rage from publication.
School Shootings and Rage
School shootings have become an all too common occurrence in contem-

porary American culture: Moses Lake, Washington in 1996. West Paducah,
Kentucky in 1997. Columbine High School in 1999. Virginia Tech in 2007.
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Marys-
ville, Washington in 2014. In each of these instances, one or more troubled
adolescents or young adults brought guns to a school and turned them on
the students there, with devastating results. According to an article by Niraj
Chokshi, there were 74 school shooting incidents in the two years follow-
ing the violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School.2 School shootings have
become a disturbingly common occurrence in American culture.
In 2002, the Secret Service, working with the Department of Educa-
tion, looked at 37 school shooting incidents involving 41 shooters between
RAGE 77
1974 and 2000 to see if there were any significant recognizable patterns
among shooters. After their research, they released a report called the
“Safe School Initiative.” What they found was that school shooting inci-
dents were “rarely impulsive acts” but instead were “typically thought
out and planned out in advance” (“Secret Service Safe School Initiative”).
Dave Cullen’s research for his book Columbine corroborates this trend, as
he reports that “a staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance”
(Cullen 322). In interviews following the shootings, The Secret Service Safe
School Initiative report also found that in most cases, at least one adult had
been worried about the shooter and that the shooter’s fellow students often
had suspicions or knew of the shooter’s intentions, though they didn’t tell
adults. The Secret Service Safe School Initiative and several other experts
in the psychology of violence concur that there is no distinct profile for
school shooters. These shooters do, however, tend to share some common
attributes, including “narcissism, depression, low self esteem and a fascina-
tion with violence” (“Expert: No Profile”). In addition, as Cullen points out
in his discussion of the Secret Service and FBI guides, “All the recent school
shooters shared exactly one trait: 100 percent male. (Since the study a few
have been female). Aside from personal experience, no other characteristic
hit 50 percent, not even close . . . Attackers come from all ethnic, economic,
and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had
no criminal record or history of violence” (322).
There are a wide range of catalysts that have been hypothesized as con-
tributing to school shootings, including American culture’s obsession with
and glamorization of violence, which is often reflected in popular culture;
for example, the music of Marilyn Manson and the computer game Doom
were debated as possible contributing factors to the Columbine shootings.
As with other types of popular culture featuring violence, King’s Rage was
brought into the school shooting conversation in some troubling ways,
including several connections between the novella and real-life shooters.
In 1988, Jeff Cox held his English class hostage in San Gabriel, California.
Cox said he got the idea, in part, from Rage (Guns, ch. 2). In 1989 in Jack-
son, Kentucky, Dustin Pierce held his World History class hostage; as hos-
tage negotiator Bob Stephens later said, Pierce was reading and may have
been inspired by Rage (Guns, ch. 2). In 1993, Scott Pennington shot his
English teacher, Deanna McDavid, and a school custodian, Marvin Hicks,
taking his class hostage, then letting them go a few at a time. Reflecting on
Pennington’s troubled relationship with his father and his peers, U.S. News
and World Report’s Jerry Buckley writes that “there were times when Pen-
nington must have felt as if he knew Decker. Maybe even a time . . . when
he felt he was just like Decker.” Barry Loukaitis, a shooter at Frontier Mid-
dle School in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996 asked his fellow classmates,
“this beats the hell out of algebra, doesn’t it?” as he held them hostage, a
line that echoes Charlie’s in Rage (Johnson). Following a school shooting
in West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997, a copy of King’s novella was found in
the locker of school shooter Michael Carneal (“Bogeyboys”). Though the
influence of Rage is clearly present in these instances, the nature of that
influence is significantly harder to articulate.
King addressed this issue in his keynote speech, “The Bogeyboys,”
which he delivered at the Vermont Library Conference in 1999.3 Con-
sidering the issue of school shootings, King opens his speech with the
reflection that in the case of school shootings or other rampage-type vio-
lence taking the lives of children and young adults, “When kids die on the
highway, it’s sad but not nationwide news. When the bogeyman strikes,
however . . . that’s different” (“Bogeyboys”). King goes on in his speech
to explore several contributing factors to adolescent violence and school
shootings, including “the amp-cult atmosphere of make-believe violence”
(ibid.). However, King argues that popular culture is a relatively small
part of these influences and it is these adolescents’ everyday lives, at home
and at school, that need to be most intensely scrutinized and explored,
saying that:
Bogeyboys do not win foot-races, get kissed by the Homecoming Queen, or

garner blue ribbons. They are profoundly inarticulate and don’t date much . . .
At home, they stay in their rooms. If pressed, the parents of bogeyboys will
often admit that they were afraid of these children long before they broke out
and committed their acts of violence. If they add that they can’t say exactly
why they were afraid, no one need be surprised; these parents, often bright,
nonabusive, and community-active, are rarely skilled at communication
within the family . . . Bogeyboys make few friends, and those they do make
are often as crazy and balefully confused as they are. (“Bogeyboys”)
As King’s multi-faceted exploration of this issue in his speech shows—an

argument he would develop further in his ebook Guns more than a decade
later in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings—there
is no one single answer, no silver bullet that will prevent all future school
shootings. Instead, there is a complex combination of causes, ranging from
individual to relational and further afield to social and cultural. In order
to understand and effectively respond to adolescent violence and school
shootings, it is necessary to take this wide range of factors, as well as their
dynamic and often volatile combinations, into account.
On his decision to pull Rage from publication, King said while there’s
no definitive proof “that Michael Carneal, the boy from Kentucky who shot
three of his classmates dead as they prayed before school, had read my
novel, Rage, but news stories following the incident reported that a copy of
RAGE 79
it had been found in his locker. It seems likely to me that he did” (“Bogey-
boys”). Even without a verified direct causal relationship, King continued,
“I asked my publishers to take the damned thing out of print. They con-
curred” (“Bogeyboys”). King also commented on Rage being pulled from
publication in the introduction to Blaze, the most recently published (and
likely final) Bachman book, saying that Rage is “now out of print, and a
good thing” (“Full Disclosure” 1). Finally, King addressed this issue in
2013 in his Kindle Single ebook, Guns, which looked at the epidemic of
gun violence, school shootings, and our cultural responses in the wake of
Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Here King says that “My book
did not break Cox, Pierce, Carneal, or Loukaitis, or turn them into killers;
they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were
already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I
pulled it from sale” (Guns, ch. 2). As he asks of these shooters, “Is it really
so surprising that they would find a soul brother in the fictional Charlie
Decker? But that doesn’t mean we excuse them, or give them blueprints to
express their hate and fear. Charlie had to go” (ibid.). King had every right,
protected by the freedom of speech ensured by the First Amendment, to
ignore these connections, to disavow any relationship between his book
and this violence, and to continue publishing Rage. However, troubled by
these correlations, King did what the law could not demand that he do and
chose to self-censor. King’s choice raises several thought-provoking ques-
tions for discussion, including the weighting of freedom of expression ver-
sus the greater good, the distinction between connection and culpability,
and whether readers agree with King’s proactive choice to pull Rage from
publication or if that choice is ultimately effective in keeping the book—
still available used, in libraries, and in bootleg PDF format online—from
finding its way into the hands of those it could destructively influence.
The relationship—if any—between popular culture and acts of violence
remains fiercely debated. Does watching violent movies or television shows
desensitize viewers to violence? Do song lyrics romanticizing gun violence
make the listener any more likely to go out and shoot someone than if they
hadn’t listened to that song? Or does reading King’s Rage mean that a student
may then become a shooter, seeing this type of violence as an acceptable
form of expression? While there are arguments made for a direct cause and
effect relationship—some of which King draws into conversation in “The
Bogeyboys”—in the case of school shootings, the choice is ultimately that of
the shooter. Presumably with free will and at least some level of control over
his own actions (insanity defense notwithstanding), these are acts the school
shooters premeditate, plan, and choose to carry out. While we cannot boil
down the debate to a simple axiom like “popular culture made me do it,”
King acknowledges that there are some gray areas. As he reflects, “a novel
such as Rage may act as an accelerant on a troubled mind” (“Bogeyboys”),

a potentially dangerous influence, if short of a direct causal link. When it
comes to the interrelationship between school shootings and popular cul-
ture, it is rarely a clear, black-and-white issue. What we have instead is a
large, ever-changing, and situationally shifting gray area.
Causes of School Shootings
Reading and critical discussion of Rage also creates the opportunity to dis-
cuss a wide range of possible contributing factors and responses to these
instances of violence, including gun control, security in schools, mental
health concerns, potential relationships between popular culture and vio-
lence, and contemporary crises of masculinity.
In his Kindle single Guns, King discusses three key issues of gun control,
ranking these from the most to least likely to be enacted: comprehensive
background checks including a mandatory waiting periods, a ban on clips
that hold more than ten rounds, and a ban on so-called “assault rifles such
as the Bushmaster and the AR-15” (Guns, ch. 6). However, while these gun
control measures could do some good in addressing violence, in other ways
this is a very limited measure since “the guns are already out there and the
great majority of them are being bought, sold, and carried illegally” (Guns,
ch. 3). Any gun control measure aimed at the regulation of the sale and
possession of firearms is, by definition, limited to those who acquire these
weapons through legal means. The Columbine shooters, Harris and Kle-
bold, were under 18, too young to legally buy guns themselves, though they
were able to convince a friend to go to a gun show with them and act as the
buyer (Cullen 90). The guns Adam Lanza took with him to Sandy Hook
Elementary School were from his home, legally purchased by his mother,
part of a larger contemporary trend in which “School shootings in the USA
during the two years since the Newtown, Conn., massacre often involved a
minor taking a gun from home and using it in a confrontation that started
out as an argument” (Copeland). King’s own Charlie Decker faced no legal
hurdles getting the gun he took to school, simply removing the unsecured
and forgotten pistol from his father’s desk drawer (Rage 27). As a result, any
increased gun control measure, no matter how effectively implemented
and enforced, will likely fall short of the aim of keeping weapons out of the
hands of potentially dangerous would-be school shooters.
Another possible response to violence in schools is having heightened
security, such as armed guards, or allowing teachers to carry guns. In a press
conference a few days after the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, Wayne
LaPierre of the National Rifle Association argued that “five years ago,
RAGE 81
after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security
in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza
started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday,
he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?” (qtd. in “NRA
Speech”). In the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, several states have
taken this possibility under consideration, with South Dakota passing a
law in 2013 that allows employees to carry guns on school property. South
Dakota Representative Scott Craig argued that especially for isolated, rural
schools, which may be far from police intervention, “the knowledge that an
armed volunteer is in a school could dissuade a would-be attacker” (Prall).
There was an armed guard on site at Colorado’s Arapahoe High School
during a school shooting situation late in 2013, which proved effective in
limiting the damage the shooter was able to inflict. Following the incident,
Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robison concluded that the guard’s
presence “was absolutely critical to the fact that we didn’t have more deaths
and injuries” (qtd. in Knickerbocker). As Brad Knickerbocker writes, “The
whole episode—from the time the shooter entered the school until he shot
himself—lasted just one minute and 20 seconds” (Knickerbocker), argu-
ably brought to such a swift conclusion by the presence and response of the
armed guard who confronted the shooter. Such security could potentially
provide a front line against individuals attempting to enter schools to com-
mit violence, though this presumes proper training, skill, and appropriate
response from any employees carrying firearms or, in the case of armed
guards, budgetary approval.
Mental illness is another key concern when it comes to gun violence in
schools. Alan Richarz of The Christian Science Monitor argues that “Any
real solution attempting to prevent future mass shootings must focus less
on the gun, and more on what factors drive people to pick up that gun
and engage in indiscriminate killing. In particular, preventing future mass
shootings requires a frank look at underlying, and often unaddressed,
mental illness and social isolation in America.” Many school shooters
have been identified—either previously diagnosed or in the aftermath of
the violence—as suffering from mental illness. For example, Dr. Dwayne
Fuselier posthumously diagnosed Columbine shooter Eric Harris with
psychopathy. As Cullen explains, “In popular usage, any crazy killer is
called a psychopath, but in psychiatry, the term denotes a specific men-
tal condition” (187), with common personality traits including being
“charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and
egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy” (239). A Yale Univer-
sity report on Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, concluded that Lanza
was “‘completely untreated in the years before the shooting’ for psychiatric
and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and
was also deprived of recommended services and drugs” (Cowan). If these

mental illnesses had been identified and properly responded to, perhaps
violence could have been averted in these two instances. However, focus-
ing on mental health could also potentially heighten the stigma already
too often associated with mental illness, which can keep individuals from
reaching out and seeking the help they need. This is a particularly signifi-
cant concern, given the lack of strong connection between mental illness
and violence against others. As Jessica Rosenberg explains in her article
“Mass Shootings and Mental Health Policy” in The Journal of Sociology and
Social Welfare, “a large body of research shows that violence by people with
serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is rare
and accounts for approximately only 4–5% of violent acts” (109). Positing a
cause and effect relationship between mental illness and school shootings
may help identify and address potential shooters; however, it could also
further target and marginalize an already stigmatized group while, given
the statistics on the low level of interconnection between mental illness
and violence, have little overall impact on preventing school shootings and
other types of large-scale violence.
Another concern that relates directly to King’s choice to pull Rage from
publication is the potential and oft-argued relationship between popular
culture and violence, a connection that has been debated as far back as
the 1920s (International Communication Association). In Stop Teaching
Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Vio-
lence, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano argue
that when it comes to school shootings and other rampage-style violence,
“the root cause is the steady diet of violent entertainment our kids see on
TV, in movies, and in the video games they play—as they sit in front of
their screens and digital devices for forty hours each week. This amount of
continuous exposure to gratuitous violent images sensationalizing murder,
rape, and torture is neither benign nor cathartic” (2–3). Instead, Gross-
man and DeGaetano argue, this constant exposure to violent imagery in
popular culture “primes children to see killing as acceptable” (3). Discuss-
ing connections between pop culture violence—specifically video games—
and real world violence, David Bauder explains that “Violence in video
games seems more and more realistic all the time, notes Brad Bushman, a
professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University . . .
Bushman conducted a study that he said showed that a person who played
violent video games three days in a row showed more aggressive and hos-
tile behavior than people who weren’t playing” (Bauder). However, much as
King identifies Rage as a possible “accelerant” rather than a cause in school
shootings, an interest in violent popular culture is likely more productively
addressed as a symptom than a direct cause of real-world violence. Writing
RAGE 83
about Adam Lanza, Slate’s Geeta Dayal argues that “Lanza’s interactions
with popular culture—the video games he played, the movies he watched,
the music he listened to—may have been symptoms of his alienation, but
they were not the root cause of his violent behavior.” This echoes King’s
reflections on the role of Rage in inspiring or influencing school shooters:
violent popular culture may hold an appeal for those who are already suf-
fering, who already consider violence as a possible reflection of their expe-
riences or answer to their problems, though rarely a singular, motivating
cause of violence itself.
Finally, since school shooters have almost exclusively been young men,
some researchers have been exploring contemporary crises of masculin-
ity and asking what makes young men more prone to solving problems
with violence than their female counterparts. Wendi Gilbert, director
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and MissRepresentation.org created the 2015
documentary film The Mask You Live In, which is discussed in the article
“The Newtown Shooting and Why We Must Redefine Masculinity.” As
Gilbert explains, the documentary “explore[s] what it means to be a man
in our society and the extremes of masculinity imposed on our boys and
men. It further uncovers how American culture reinforces a rigid code of
conduct on boys that inhibits their capacity for empathy, stifles their emo-
tional intelligence, limits their definition of success, and in some cases,
leads to extreme acts of violence.” As prominent masculinity scholar
Douglas Kellner explains, in our contemporary culture, there is “a domi-
nant societal connection between masculinity and being a tough guy . . .
a mask or façade of violent assertiveness, covering over vulnerabilities”
(qtd. in “A Conversation”). However, this culturally prescribed and con-
tinually reinforced performance of masculinity is untenable and can have
destructive repercussions, as Kellner continues, when “The crisis erupts
in outbreaks of violence and societal murder, as men act out rage, which
takes extremely violent forms such as political assassinations, serial and
mass murders, and school and workplace shootings” (ibid.). When boys
and young men are conditioned to believe that their masculinity hinges
on their ability to suppress and hide their emotions rather than their will-
ingness to openly address these issues, this repression can lead to destruc-
tive behavior, both internally- and externally-directed, pointing toward a
clear need to reconsider and reinvent what it means to “be a man” in our
contemporary culture.
Turning from potential causes to responses to this violence, it’s also
necessary to consider the cultural conversation surrounding school
shootings. A little more than a month after the shootings at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, King published Guns as a Kindle Single ebook. As
the publisher summarizes Guns, “In a pulls-no-punches essay intended to
provoke rational discussion, Stephen King sets down his thoughts about
gun violence in America” (“Guns”). Guns is a thoughtful and complex
reflection on gun violence that addresses a variety of factors ranging from
gun control and mental health to representations of violence in popu-
lar culture, and given the unique potential created by electronic release,
King was able to publish Guns quickly, allowing it to become part of the
conversation in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings,
which is a key strength of e-publication.4 In Guns, King lays out the dis-
turbing familiarity of the media coverage and discussion surrounding
school shootings, highlighting the ways in which we have the sense that
we already “know” this story, how it will play out, the things that will be
said—including the expert interviews and heated debates between gun
control advocates and the National Rifle Association, for example—and
the things that will be done, which ultimately amounts to not much, as
“any bills to change existing gun laws . . . quietly disappear into the legisla-
tive swamp” (Guns, ch. 1), all but forgotten until the next tragedy. While
the potential causes and responses continue to be fiercely debated, the
inarguable truth is that these acts of violence continue to occur with dis-
turbing regularity, often with innocent lives caught in the crossfire.
King’s Choice
Rage has now been out of print for more than fifteen years. Reflecting on
the connections between school shootings and Rage, King says that “Once I
knew what had happened, I pulled the ejection-seat lever on that particular
piece of work. I withdrew Rage, and I did it with relief rather than regret”
(“Bogeyboys”). While the complexity of these issues are far too great to
draw a direct cause and effect relationship between Rage and school shoot-
ings, King made what he still holds to be the right choice, fulfilling what
he sees as a moral obligation. As King writes in Guns, “I didn’t pull Rage
from publication because the law demanded it; I was protected under the
First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it. I pulled it because in
my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible
thing to do” (Guns, ch. 6, emphasis original). While he doesn’t regret his
decision to pull Rage from publication, he also makes it clear that contrary
to media accounts, he doesn’t regret writing it in the first place. While King
still believes that pulling Rage from publication was the right choice and he
remains happy with his decision to do so, he also says that “Nevertheless, I
pulled it with real regret . . . The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone
who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an
asshole with no conscience” (Guns, ch. 2).
RAGE 85
High school shooters may have been inspired by Charlie Decker, but
there’s one particularly significant distinguishing feature between fiction
and reality in these instances: while the students in Rage forge deep rela-
tionships with Charlie, transformed by their time in the classroom with
him, this camaraderie and coveted anti-hero status is not reflected in any
of these emulative examples. As Buckley writes of Scott Pennington’s 1993
shooting and hostage situation, “In the story, Decker, a high school senior,
kills two teachers and then holds classmates hostage while trying to con-
vince them he is a hero. In the book, Decker wins approval. In Room 108,
Scott Pennington would not. Not ever.”
7
Sexual Violence
K ing came under fire—especially early in his career—for the nature

of his female characters. There is an entire book of literary criticism
dedicated to negative representations of women in King’s work, Imagining
the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women,1 a collection of
essays edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Teresa Thompson; as Lant and
Thompson argue in their introduction, “Although King must be praised
for [his] accurate and potent rendition of Everyman in the late twentieth
century, his representations of Everywoman often provoke hostility as well
as admiration” (4). As Magistrale sums up the criticisms of King’s female
characters in his chapter on “Challenging Gender Stereotypes: King’s
Evolving Women” in Stephen King: America’s Storyteller, “During the first
two decades of his career, several feminist scholars observed that the roles
King traditionally allotted women in his fiction and specifically female
sexuality itself were patronizingly restrictive and frequently negative”
(131), drawing on the critique of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who argued
that “it’s disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength
of vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the
ages of seventeen and sixty” (qtd. in Magistrale, “Challenging” 131). King
acknowledged this weakness, saying in a 1983 interview that this criticism
is “the most justifiable of all those leveled at me” (qtd. in Magistrale,
“Challenging” 132). As Magistrale argues, in light of this admission, “King
has labored over the years to create more human and less stereotypical
female characters. The nineties reflected King’s efforts to redress the first
half of a career filled with females who were either ‘barely distinguishable
Barbie dolls’ or seductive embodiments of evil” (Magistrale, “Challenging”
132). Many of King’s 1990s novels, such as Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne,
and Rose Madder, reflect his concern with and desire to address this issue.
Women’s experiences and violence against women continue to be a central
concern of some of King’s contemporary work as well, including his story
“The Gingerbread Girl,” which was published in the 2008 collection Just
After Sunset and the novellas Big Driver and A Good Marriage, both of
which were included in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars.
Sexual abuse and domestic violence have been and remain central con-
cerns of feminism and throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, though while “Feminists [have] worked to end this violence . . .
their success was mitigated by the recoil against feminism,” or what
Susan Faludi defined as “backlash” (Canfield 392). As Canfield contex-
tualizes Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder, these novels in their frank
and unflinching representation of domestic violence added to the hushed
awareness that this problem was not going away. King also demonstrated
that, contrary to what anti-feminists said, feminism was not to blame, but
rather that a society—which ignored such violence—was” (393). However,
regardless of these debates over the causes of domestic abuse, while the
arguments rage on, so does domestic violence, and in the backlash cli-
mate of the 1990s, it was those women who suffered, with significant cuts
to programs that supported victims and survivors of domestic abuse. It
was within this context that King’s Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and
Rose Madder came out and claimed spots on the New York Times Bestseller
List, bringing significant and high-profile pop culture attention to these
issues. As Canfield explains, these novels’ “publication dates coincide with
increased levels of reported domestic abuse as well as the nation’s growing
counterattack against feminism. Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are
unique literary contributions during the backlash era because they por-
trayed domestic violence as a real horror in American life” (393), and their
female protagonists as not solely victims, but survivors and heroines in
their own right.
Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game are separate stand-alone novels, tak-
ing place hundreds of miles apart, though they also share a distinct nar-
rative overlap, with the lives of Dolores Claiborne and ten-year-old Jessie
Mahout fleetingly connecting, as each gets a glimpse of the other in the
aftermath of their respective ordeals during the solar eclipse on July 20,
1963. In this momentary flash, these two women who have never met or
even heard of one another are brought together in the shared horror of
sexual assault, in the aftermath of Dolores’s murder of her husband Joe St.
George on Little Tall Island and Jessie’s own experience of sexual abuse at
the hands of her father on the shores of Dark Score Lake. In the path of the
eclipse, both women find themselves in darkness, each isolated in her own
way, but not alone.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 89
The format of Dolores Claiborne is distinctive in that it doesn’t have

any chapter breaks, a characteristic shared by a few of King’s other novels,
such as Cujo. Instead, it is presented as one continuous, unbroken narra-
tive. As Magistrale explains, “Dolores tells her story via a free association
monologue, starting in the middle of what she has to say and working
back and forth from past to present . . . [an approach that is designed] to
help the reader see that events that occurred in the past are still impacting
the present” (“Challenging” 134). Dolores Claiborne is also unique in the
larger narrative context of the story. Dolores is not just telling the reader
her story, she is in a police interview room, talking to Police Chief Andy
Bissette and Officer Frank Proulx of the Little Tall Island, Maine Police
force. As the novel opens, Dolores is suspected of the murder of her can-
tankerous employer Vera Donovan and while she denies murdering Vera,
she confesses to the murder of her husband Joe St. George. There’s also a
stenographer there, Nancy Bannister, recording Dolores’s story, another
female presence that, while narratively tangential, is often sympathetic
and even at times commiserating with Dolores’s experiences and trials
and as a woman. Dolores’s tone is informal and conversational, punctu-
ated by her direct addresses to the others in the room. However, Dolores’s
remains the sole voice in the novel, with the others an absent presence
within the room: the reader knows that they are there because Dolores
is speaking to them and they are clearly asking questions to which she
is regularly responding. This absent presence is established immediately
in the opening line of Dolores Claiborne, when Dolores says “What did
you ask, Andy Bissette?” (Dolores Claiborne 19). Even though we never
hear Andy’s, Frank’s, or Nancy’s voices, their interactions with Dolores
are central to the story and the outcome of those interactions that will
decide Dolores’s fate. Dolores’s unique voice, including her conversational
Downeast Maine dialect, also powerfully underscores that it is her story
readers are hearing, from her point of view, and in her own words. King
rarely uses the first-person narrative perspective, though in his use of it
here, that narrative perspective also works to develop Dolores’s character-
ization. As Magistrale argues, “If we view this novel in gendered terms, the
novel implies that the strong female voice guiding us through this narra-
tive has earned its right to the language and personality being revealed on
the page. In other words, the events of the past have made Dolores Clai-
borne into the independent, self-determined character we find narrating
this text in present tense” (“Challenging” 134).
In contrast to Dolores’s externally focused narrative, Gerald’s Game is
almost exclusively internally directed, as Jessie Mahout (now Burlingame)
finds herself in a life-threatening predicament, hand-cuffed to the posts
of her and her husband Gerald’s bed in their isolated summer house, with
Gerald dead of a heart attack on the floor nearby and no one to come to
her rescue. Jessie’s first priority is to figure out a way to free herself and save
her own life, though as she discovers in those long, desperate hours, part
of freeing herself also requires her to remember what she has forgotten, to
face the long-repressed childhood afternoon on which her father sexually
abused her. Jessie has never really escaped that terrifying moment and as
she considers that traumatic catalyst, “The total solar eclipse lasted just over
a minute that day, Jessie . . . except in your mind. In there, it’s still going on,
isn’t it?” (Gerald’s Game 138, emphasis original). As Jessie faces that long-
ago nightmare, she discovers her own inner strength through the recogni-
tion of all that she has made herself forget, including the shared guilt her
father forced upon her and the confusing mixture of love and revulsion
that characterized her feelings for him afterward. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie’s
most pressing confinement is that of the cuffs that hold her to the bed,
where she faces a potential range of horrific deaths from dehydration to
blood loss. However, her physical bondage is also a symbol of the ways in
which she has psychologically and emotionally restricted herself over the
decades since the assault, turning away friends who tried to help her and
stopping therapy when her counselor nudged a little too close to the truth.
As Theresa Thompson explains in “Rituals of Male Violence: Unlocking the
(Fe)Male Self in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne,” “Jessie is chained in
more ways than one: physically and socially . . . Her chains are not just very
real Kreig police handcuffs, they are substantial metonyms for the [femi-
nine] mystique itself, critical representatives of the legal and psychological
systems that support myths of masculine dominance” (51). Jessie must free
herself from the handcuffs, but she must also free herself from the invisible
shackles that bind her as well, including social and cultural perceptions of
acceptable female gender roles and femininity, by finding the courage to
uncover her own memories and the voice to tell her own story.
Dolores and Jessie are the only ones who can tell us about their experi-
ences and actions, what they have endured and what they have survived.
As Carol A. Senf argues in “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen
King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice,” “the nar-
rative structure becomes King’s version of femaleness, and the novels give
increasing power and articulation to those women’s voices” (93). Dolores
alone can tell readers about the deaths of her husband, Joe St. George and
her employer Vera Donovan—the first of whom she admits to having mur-
dered and the latter whom she is suspecting of having murdered—because
in both instances, she is the only other person who was there, the only one
who knows the truth. Alone with her father on the day of the eclipse, only
Jessie knows of her sexual molestation, an assault that she has long kept
secret, even from herself. Both women are making a confession, though the
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 91
natures and circumstances of those confessions differ dramatically. Dolo-

res’s confession is made to legal authorities and at least in part criminal
in nature, while Jessie’s is internal, self-revelatory, and therapeutic. Dolores
makes hers voluntarily, while Jessie can only force herself to look into the
shadow of the eclipse when there is no remaining alternative, other than
death, left available to her. Despite these differences, both women’s confes-
sions are potentially destructive, with Dolores facing prosecution and Jes-
sie unsure of how she will be able to cope with her trauma, though both
are simultaneously cathartic, secrets that they may well need to tell to save
themselves in myriad ways. Through their suffering, these women have
earned the right to have their stories told, to break their silences, and reveal
their own secrets, on their own terms.
As Dolores herself acknowledges, an island is a hard place to keep a
secret. Little Tall Island is a small and close-knit community, insular and
isolated, a place where people know one another’s secrets. As Canfield
discusses the significance of this setting, it echoes the isolation faced by
many victims of domestic violence as well, a theme which is prominent in
Dolores Claiborne in Joe St. George’s abuse of Dolores and their children.
Canfield explains that “King uses Little Tall as compelling microcosm of
the larger society, using the island’s isolation as a metaphor for the isola-
tion found in an abusive home . . . The islanders knew of Joe’s abuses, but
they looked the other way, pointing to a recurring theme in domestic vio-
lence. Seeing no other alternative and getting no help from her neighbors,
Dolores committed murder” (398). According to the National Coalition
Against Domestic Violence’s (NCADV) most recent fact sheet, while men
are also victims of domestic violence, this is a type of abuse that predomi-
nantly affects women, who make up 85 percent of domestic violence vic-
tims. According to the NCADV, “One in every four women will experience
domestic violence in her lifetime,” with the violence most often committed
by someone the woman knows (emphasis original). In addition, domestic
violence encompasses much more than physical abuse, including a range
of behaviors and actions that attempt to control and exert power over the
other individual, as outlined in the NCADV wheel-shaped diagram of
power and control, including coercion, threats, intimidation, emotional
abuse, isolation, victim-blaming, economic dependence, and an environ-
ment of patriarchal power structures based on male privilege.
In addition to the abuse suffered by the woman herself, domestic vio-
lence also has a profound impact upon children in the house, which is evi-
denced in Joe St. George’s sexual abuse of Selena, bullying of Joe Jr., and
troubling influence over little Pete. The influence of this abuse—or exposure
to abuse—in childhood can have lifelong effects on children who grow up
in households where domestic violence take place, including abuse of the
children as well, and there is a higher chance of the children—especially male

children—becoming abusers themselves, given that “Witnessing violence
between one’s parents or caretakers is the strongest risk factor of transmit-
ting violent behavior from one generation to the next” (National Coali-
tion Against Domestic Violence). Readers get a glimpse of the generational
nature of domestic abuse from Dolores’s perspective, where she initially took
Joe’s abuse of her as a matter of course after having seen her mother abused
by her father. As she tells her interviewers, “My own Dad used his hands on
my Mum from time to time, and I suppose that was where I got the idear
that it was all right—just somethin to be put up with” (Dolores Claiborne
87). This exposure to domestic abuse as a child proved a hurdle to Dolores
standing up for herself against Joe; as she says, “Before I could do it, I had
to once n for all rise above the memory of my Dad pushin my Mum down”
(Dolores Claiborne 101), which is difficult but, as she finds when left with no
other choice, possible. There are many different types of domestic violence
portrayed in Dolores Claiborne, as they affect both Dolores and her children.
While Dolores makes a stand early in the novel that Joe will never physically
abuse her again, the abuse continues in different ways, including many of
those outlined by the NCADV Wheel of Power and Control: intimidation,
emotional abuse, economic control of the family’s finances, blaming Dolores
for his abuse of her and later of Selena, and his belief in male privilege in the
way he treats Dolores as a servant, there to cook, clean, and cater to his needs.
Joe also abuses their children in a variety of ways, including his sexual abuse
of his daughter Selena and his bullying of Joe Jr. On the surface, Joe has a
good relationship with their youngest son, Pete, though Dolores is terrified
by all of the different ways she sees little Pete turning into his father as he
grows up, which is chilling in light of the statistics of how many children of
abusers grow up to become abusers themselves. Regardless of the significant
differences between all of these different types of domestic violence Joe com-
mits against Dolores and the children, they all come back to the same central
issue of power and control. In many ways, Joe arguably has little control over
his own life: he is lower class, can’t hold down a steady job, and struggles with
alcoholism. However, as the man of his own house, he is powerful, if only
temporarily, a power he achieves by abusing his wife and children.
In Gerald’s Game, Jessie suffers a single instance of sexual abuse at the
hands of her father, who molests her when they are alone during the eclipse.
Just as Joe convinced Selena that she had led him on and encouraged him,
Jessie fears that the abuse is her own fault, suffering paroxysms of guilt
and self-doubt that her body “had already started to change, and it had
done something to her father that it had no business doing” (Gerald’s Game
223), and Selena and Jessie are both manipulated into seeing themselves
as co-conspirators, forced to see themselves as similarly guilty alongside
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 93
their abusers rather than as the victims they truly are. Dolores tells her
interviewers that Joe told Selena “over n over again that I’d drive her out
of the house if I ever found out what they was doin . . . What they was
doin! Gorry!” (Dolores Claiborne 137, emphasis original), with Joe framing
Selena as an active and willing participant rather than a victimized child.
Jessie’s father manipulates her feelings of guilt and conspiracy deftly, first
telling her that they have to confess to her mother about what happened,
and only gradually capitulating to her panicked, desperate pleas that they
instead keep it a secret, terrified that her mother will think it was her fault,
until Jessie “had broken down utterly . . . weeping hysterically, begging him
not to tell, promising him she would be a good girl forever and ever if he
just wouldn’t tell” (Gerald’s Game 249). Sexually abused by their fathers,
Selena and Jessie are further, more insidiously victimized by this manipula-
tion after the fact, when each young woman holds herself responsible for
the abuse she has suffered, emotional and psychological damage that will
continue to impact each one’s life in small and large ways into their adult-
hood and shape the women they will grow to be.
While abuse by men is the central conflict of these novels, at the hearts
of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game are the relationships between
women, particularly Dolores’s relationship with her long-time employer
Vera Donovan and Dolores’s complicated relationship with her daughter
Selena in the former, and Jessie’s recollections of her college friend Ruth
Neary in the latter. These women’s strength is central to each of those rela-
tionships. For example, Dolores acknowledges throughout the novel that
Vera is a hard woman to work for and is often unlikable, such as when
she is shouting about the proper number of clothespins or making her
messes as Dolores vacuums. However, despite these challenges and despite
the fact that their relationship is, on one level, that of an employer and her
employee, they are also the most important people in one another’s lives as
Vera ages and Dolores’s children leave the island. Similarly, while Dolores
and Selena are close before the sexual abuse begins, their relationship is
strained from that point on, marked by Selena’s guilt at telling and her
suspicion of her mother following Joe’s death. They love one another and
Dolores stops at nothing to protect her daughter, though the price they
both pay, especially in the change in their relationship with one another, is
almost too high to bear.
Much like Dolores’s interviewers, Selena is an absent presence
throughout the novel: while Dolores speaks of her frequently and Selena’s
abuse was the catalyst for Dolores murdering Joe, Selena is gone from
the island and has been for more than twenty years. Despite everything
Dolores has done—and is still doing—to protect Selena, she comes to the
sad conclusion that:
I think she did pay—that’s the worst part . . . She’s forty-four years old, she’s
never married, she’s too thin (I can see that in the pitchers she sometimes
sends), and I think she drinks—I’ve heard it in her voice more’n once when
she calls. I got an idear that might be one of the reasons she don’t come home
anymore; she doesn’t want me to see her drinkin like her father drank. Or
maybe because she’s afraid of what she might say if she had one too many
while I was right handy. What she might ask. (Dolores Claiborne 309–310)
Dolores’s description of Selena bears a striking resemblance to the psycho-

logical profile of childhood sexual abuse survivors, which is unsurprising
given the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. As an article on the
“Impact of Child Abuse” from the Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA)
group explains, “The impact of child abuse does not end when the abuse
stops.” There are several common aftereffects that continue to impact the
lives of adult survivors, who often experience negative impacts on their
physical and medical health including general happiness levels, with abuse
survivors “four times more likely to be unhappy even in much later life,”
experience isolation and difficulty forming and sustaining relationships,
and have increased instances of “suicidal behaviour, increased likelihood
of smoking, substance abuse, and physical inactivity” (“Impact of Child
Abuse”). Based on Dolores’s description of her now-adult daughter, Selena
exhibits several of these traits. As far as her relationship with her mother
goes, Selena also seems to be torn between suspecting her mother and
blaming herself. As Dolores says of one of Selena’s visits, “I saw the same
questions in her eyes then as had been there twelve years before, when she
came up to me in the garden, amongst the beans and the cukes: ‘Did you
do anything to him?’ and ‘Is it my fault?’ and ‘How long do I have to pay?’”
(Dolores Claiborne 335). These questions can never be answered as long
as Dolores is dedicated to protecting her daughter from the truth, which
turns Selena outwardly against her mother and internally against herself.
In Gerald’s Game, one of the many voices Jessie hears in her head as
she struggles to escape is that of her acerbic college friend Ruth Neary,
who Jessie hasn’t spoken to in years.2 A frank-talking and tough-loving
woman, Ruth took Jessie along to a women’s consciousness group, where
Jessie was moved to panic by another young woman’s shared story of vio-
lence and abuse at the hands of her brother and his friends, who raped her
and burned her with cigarettes (Gerald’s Game 107). Ruth followed Jessie
when she fled from the room and now, years later,
Jessie wondered what she had said to Ruth as they sat with their backs
against the locked kitchen door and their arms around each other. The only
thing she could remember for sure was something like “He never burned
me, he never burned me, he never hurt me at all.” But there must have been
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 95
more to it than that, because the questions Ruth had refused to stop asking
had all pointed clearly in just one direction: Dark Score Lake and the day
the sun had gone out . . . She had finally left Ruth rather than tell. (Gerald’s
Game 110)
Unable to face the truth of what she has endured, Jessie cuts off all poten-
tially supportive relationships she shares with other women. However, once
she has worked her way through these repressed memories, remembered
what she has forgotten, and rejected the guilt with which her father for
so long succeeded in binding her, she reaches out to Ruth, and the novel
“concludes with Jessie’s telling her own story in her own voice and with her
own words” (Senf, “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne” 94) in a long,
confessional letter to Ruth, and the tentatively hopeful possibility of female
friendship restored.
Though Dolores and Jessie are separated by hundreds of miles and find
themselves at dramatically different times in their lives—after all, Jessie is
much closer to Selena in age and circumstance than she is to Dolores—
they are united by the horror of sexual violence and abuse and what one
has to do, to others and within oneself, to survive.
Rose Madder
Rose Madder begins in medias res, as the reader is dropped into a typi-
cal suburban living room in the immediate aftermath of one of Norman’s
frequent assaults on Rose, as she cowers in agony, struggling to breathe.
Entering into the story in the midst of Rose’s pain, readers share in that
agony, her suffering, her hopelessness. This abuse profoundly shapes Rose’s
characterization, her past, and the choices she makes for her future.
Like Joe St. George in Dolores Claiborne and Tom Mahout in Gerald’s
Game, Norman Daniels in Rose Madder is an abusive man, though these
men’s means of abuse are quite distinct. They all exploit the powerlessness
of their victims, though Joe and Tom’s abuses are more covert, shrouded in
silence and secrecy even within the family, while Norman’s is more overt,
violent rather than manipulative, and fueled by rage rather than a lack of
power, which he has plenty of, socially speaking, as a police officer. In the
Psychology Today article “Behind the Veil: Inside the Mind of Men That
Abuse,” John G. Taylor identifies several key characteristics of abusers,
including jealousy, controlling behavior, isolation of the abused, forcing
the abused to have sex against their will, and belief in and demand for the
adherence to traditional gender roles (Taylor). As Taylor continues, abus-
ers are often “very clever, smart, and extremely charming,” with the abil-
ity to easily “deceive and manipulate” others. As a result, these secretive
abusers are often not recognized by those outside of the home, and Taylor
draws a comparison between these men and Stevenson’s classic figure of
duality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, due to “the stark contrast in their public
and private selves” (Taylor). These three men in Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s
Game, and Rose Madder represent a continuum of the public faces of abus-
ers: while almost everyone on Little Tall Island knows what kind of man Joe
St. George is and they assume he abuses his wife and children, Tom Mahout
seems to remain above suspicion, and Norman is adept at presenting a more
acceptable public face when he chooses to (which is usually when it suits
his purposes), even though his “temper” is well known among his fellow
policemen.
In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare asks the question “what’s in
a name?” (III. ii. 43). Names, the power of naming, identity, and choice
are very important in Rose Madder, particularly with Rosie herself. Like
Dolores in Dolores Claiborne, Rosie begins by reclaiming her maiden name
after she flees from her husband, becoming Rosie McClendon instead of
Rose Daniels. She also adamantly sees herself as Rosie, or as is repeated
throughout the novel, “Really Rosie,” rather than Rose.3 In fact, this name
is one of the first things that opens her up to a potential romantic relation-
ship with Bill Steiner: in calling her Rosie, he sees her as she sees herself,
rather than who he wants her to be (Rose Madder 159). Rosie also further
distinguishes different parts of her identity and experiences in her separa-
tion of herself from Miss Practical-Sensible, who makes her first appear-
ance as Rosie contemplates leaving and then makes the first step toward
this escape (Rose Madder 30). Miss Practical-Sensible echoes another one
of Jessie Burlingame’s voices in Gerald’s Game, that of Goodwife Burlin-
game, who admonishes Jessie to be good, quiet, and not make a fuss when
she tells Gerald she has changed her mind about sex and he sets out to rape
her anyway. As Lant and Thompson argue, “many key aspects of King’s rep-
resentations of women appear firmly entrenched in a patriarchal economy
of domesticity. An overwhelming sense of socially condoned masculinist
violence and trespass haunts his women and men and their relations within
these domestic spaces” (6), a status quo of which Miss Practical-Sensible
and Goodwife Burlingame serve as enthusiastic mouthpieces. Both Miss
Practical-Sensible and Goodwife Burlingame are the voices of “proper,”
submissive, traditional femininity, personified conservative gender expec-
tations that threaten to keep Rosie and Jessie in destructive relationships
and patterns if they cannot somehow find the strength to silence these
voices and rise above them. There is one final Rose integral to the novel,
the titular Rose Madder of the painting Rosie falls in love with at the pawn
shop. The painting has no title or artist name and bears only the simple
inscription of “Rose Madder” on the painting’s paper backing. Featuring
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 97
a woman looking down upon the ruins of a temple, the painting takes on
fantastic significance in Rosie’s life, with the woman featured there becom-
ing an inspiration and a symbol of strength and bravery as Rosie begins her
new life, as Rose Madder is the externalization of Rosie’s darker self and
the rage she has long suppressed. The painting also allows Rosie to claim a
power and agency that she was denied in her marriage to Norman, because
in the other world she finds there, “abusive men did not get off scot-free
and powerful women were the leaders. Rose proved her strength in this
other world” (Canfield 393), a moment of personal growth and reclaimed
self-worth that carries over into the “real” world on the other side of the
frame as well.
After making her escape and finding some possibility for a new life hun-
dreds of miles from Norman, Rosie finds safe haven with Daughters & Sis-
ters, a residential women’s shelter than offers women security and a chance
to begin new lives. In the focus on this mutually supportive community,
King moves beyond the personal experiences of individual women to
more expansively consider the social and cultural issues surrounding and
potential interventions in response to domestic violence within a larger
scope. Shelters and safe houses are, historically speaking, a relatively new
development. As the Advocates for Human Rights group explains, “The
shelter and safehouse movement in the United States began in the early
1970s . . . [When] one of the most critical issues facing victims was the
absence of alternative housing” (Advocates). Daughters & Sisters has sev-
eral features that are characteristic of such shelters and safehouses, includ-
ing the resources and transitional housing described as Rosie gets back on
her feet and their focus on residents’ safety. As the Advocates for Human
Rights group explains, “Some shelters work to ensure resident security by
keeping the shelter’s location a secret . . . Many women are stalked and
killed by their former partners after they leave. Being able to keep their
location a secret not only protects women from these batterers but can
also enhance their feeling of being safe” (Advocates). This is evident in
Rosie’s journey to Daughters & Sisters, to which she is referred through a
nearly invisible network of supporters, beginning with Peter Slowik at the
bus station. Further security measures are put in place as well, with the
intercom and camera system that Rosie encounters when she finally finds
her way to the house. As Canfield writes, it is at Daughters & Sisters that
Rose “discovers that she was not alone, that other women had experienced
domestic abuse as well. It is also here that she learned self-defense, a way
to fight back . . . [highlighting the] importance of these types of homes as
not only physical shelters for women, but emotional refuges” (398), a rep-
resentation that was especially significant in a political climate that dra-
matically cut funding to many of these shelters (Canfield 398).
King combines the real life context of domestic violence survivors and
safe houses with the supernatural and fantastic, and Rose Madder draws
on a wide variety of genre influences, including fairy tales, mythology, and
magic realism, creating a rich and multi-layered text. While fairy tales have
been a staple of children’s literature for generations, the original versions
of these fairy tales were often more dark than Disney. As Jesse Greenspan
writes in “The Dark Side of the Grimm Fairy Tales,” there are several dis-
turbing themes in these common tales, including premarital sex, graphic
violence, child abuse, anti-Semitism, incest, and wicked mothers (Greens-
pan). Consider these familiar tales: Cinderella is essentially an indentured
servant to her family, abused by her stepmother and stepsisters; in the
Grimm fairy tale version, the stepsisters try to trick the prince by cutting
off bits of their feet to fit into the slipper and when Cinderella prevails, she
invites them to the wedding, where birds peck out their eyes on the way to
and from the ceremony (Grimm 85–86). Or there’s Snow White, who eats
a poisoned apple from her wicked stepmother and falls into a death-like
sleep, to be awakened by the kiss of the handsome prince; in the Grimm
version, when Snow White marries the prince, her stepmother is ordered
to come to the wedding and dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies
(Grimm 336). Intended for children, the Disney versions of these familiar
stories are significantly sanitized and much more closely aligned with the
romantic tradition. However, another notable feature of these fairy tales—
whether Grimm or Disney—is the way in which they outline traditional
female gender roles as diametrically opposed, with good girls rewarded and
bad women destroyed. Rose Madder has several clear fairy tale allusions, of
both the classic and Disney varieties. When Rosie discovers the cricket in
her apartment, she sets him free, telling him to “Go on, Jiminy” (Rose Mad-
der 190). In her growing relationship with Bill, she felt “as if she had been
asleep, not just now . . . but for years and years, like Snow White after the
apple” (Rose Madder 213, emphasis original). Later, in the painting’s maze,
with a handful of seeds, Rosie finds that “All at once she knew what the
seeds were for: she was Gretel underground, with no brother to share her
fear” (Rose Madder 259).
In addition to these fairy tale references, Rose Madder is also rich with
mythological allusions as well. The blonde woman in the painting is simul-
taneously powerful and terrifying. As the woman’s handmaiden tells Rosie,
“Girl, don’t you look straight at her . . . That’s not for the likes of you” (Rose
Madder 236). This description echoes that of Greek mythology’s Medusa,
the monstrous Gorgon, a glimpse of whom would turn the gazer to stone.
However, Medusa wasn’t always monstrous. As Beth J. Seelig explains in
“The Rape of Medusa in the Temple of Athena: Aspects of Triangulation
in The Girl,” “Medusa was originally a very beautiful young girl, especially
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 99
renowned for the beauty of her hair. Her tragedy began with her rape in
the temple of Athena. Accounts of who raped her vary, some saying it was
Zeus, others Poseidon” (898). Following this rape, Athena cursed Medusa,
turning her into the fearsome creature she has become, with a head full of
terrifying snakes. In her appearance and her power, “Medusa’s head is both
a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the
Devil’s mark on the individual, as well as being the image of death for those
who look at it” (Bogan). Medusa—and the woman in Rosie’s painting—are
strong and destructive, an inspiration and a horror.
When Rosie is sent on her quest to rescue the baby within the painting’s
maze, she delves further into the world of mythology and more specifi-
cally, into the underworld. Within the mythic world, the River Styx sepa-
rates the worlds of the living and the dead. Rosie crosses a river as she
descends further into the world of the painting, though this is more akin
to mythology’s River Lethe, “the river of forgetfulness” (Dawson), which
is a great temptation for Rosie. Though the handmaiden warns her not
to drink from the river, Rosie thinks of her life with Norman and all of
the abuse she has suffered, reflecting that some things may be better off
forgotten, nightmares of which she can finally let go (Rose Madder 250).
However, she’s able to draw on her strength and resolve, to cross the river
without drinking. In another mythological allusion, Rose treads near the
footsteps of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythol-
ogy, a beautiful young woman who was kidnapped and “became queen of
the underworld as the abducted wife of Hades” (Cotterell and Storm 74).
While Zeus intervenes and Persephone is only required to spend one-third
of the year in the underworld, “Persephone could never return entirely to
the living world because she had eaten in Hades’ realm: a very old idea that
strictly divided the food of the dead from that of the living” (Cotterell and
Storm 75). In most accounts of Persephone’s story, this food was either
a pomegranate or pomegranate seeds, and this is the fruit that comes
to Rosie’s mind, though she knows that the fruit she finds within the world
of the painting is not quite a pomegranate, that this is a fruit with its own
unique, dark power, as “The tips of her fingers went numb right away . . .
At the same time, the most wonderful aroma filled her nose” (Rose Mad-
der 255) as she collects the seeds she’ll need. As with crossing the river of
forgetfulness, Rosie is tempted to eat of the fruit, a temptation that also
echoes Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, and the fall of man in the
Garden of Eden. She resists, though she comes very close to absentmind-
edly putting her fingers in her mouth. Reflecting on this combination of
myth and creation story, Rosie thinks to herself “It’s not the Tree of Good
and Evil . . . It’s not the Tree of Life either. I think this is the Tree of Death”
(Rose Madder 255, emphasis original).
The world within Rose Madder’s painting and the maze at its center
also have mythological origins. The most famous maze of Greek mythol-
ogy was that designed by Daedalus for King Minos and was home to the
monstrous Minotaur, a half bull/half man creature, who was sustained with
annual human sacrifices, when youth were sent into the maze as tributes,
where they were killed and devoured, until Theseus fought and defeated
the Minotaur (Cotterell and Storm 84). In Rose Madder, Norman first takes
on the image of the bull when he steals a child’s rubber mask of Ferdinand
the Bull (355). Munro Leaf ’s children’s book The Story of Ferdinand is about
a bull who is very gentle and refuses to fight, preferring instead to lay under
his favorite tree and smell the flowers. Obviously, this kind nature couldn’t
be more opposite of Norman Daniels’s cruelty and beastliness. Ferdinand
is a fascinating parallel to the bull of the maze, Erinyes, with Rose Madder
referring to both as one. As Rose Madder asks Rosie, “Have you forgotten
that Erinyes is blind?” (Rose Madder 433). Rosie is concerned and “thought
to say, You’re confused, ma’am, this is my husband we’re talking about, not
the bull in the maze. Then she remembered the mask Norman was wearing
and said nothing” (ibid., emphasis original). Rose Madder combines this
wide range of representations of the bull to create a complex set of refer-
ences and negotiations about women, power, violence, and the intersection
of man and beast. In his essay on “Mythic Quality and Popular Reading in
Stephen King’s Rose Madder,” Roberto de Sousa Causo argues that “King
distorts the myth in order to fit his own needs of confusing Norman with
the monster: The creature in the maze isn’t exactly the Minotaur, since
it’s a bull, and it’s called Erinyes, a name which means fury, and is one of
Demeter’s epithets. Later the bull becomes Norman, or Norman becomes
the bull: the monster is a metaphor for the less than human male” (363).
When Norman breaks into Daughters & Sisters, he is uncomfortable and
jumpy, overwhelmed by the feminine atmosphere of the house, to which
Ferd responds that “This is where Circe turns men into pigs, after all . . . Yas,
dis be de place” (Rose Madder 376, emphasis original). As with many of the
references and allusions from the second half of the novel, Circe is a figure
from Greek mythology, best known for her role in Homer’s Odyssey, where
she turned Odysseus’s men into animals, a further negotiation of the com-
plex fluidity between man and beast in Rose Madder.
In the final section of Rose Madder, both Rosie and Norman undergo
dramatic transformations. Internally, Norman continues to slip even fur-
ther into insanity, starting to experience blanks in time and hearing voices,
including Ferdinand the Bull’s and his abusive dead father’s. Externally,
Norman begins to literally become the bull whose mask he wears. First,
he discovers that he cannot take the mask off and soon the mask becomes
one with him as he transforms—or at least his head does—into that of the
SEXUAL VIOLENCE 101
blind, one-eyed bull Erinyes: “the mask wouldn’t come off no matter how
hard he yanked at it, and he knew with sickening surety that if he raked his
nails into it, he would feel pain. He would bleed, and yes, there was just the
one eyehole, and that one seemed to have moved right into the center of his
face” (Rose Madder 436, emphasis original). After masquerading as the bull
to disguise and protect himself, Norman has literally, physically become
the bull, or at least a half-bull combination of Erinyes and the Minotaur of
Greek mythology.
Rosie undergoes a significant transformation in the final section of
novel as well, discovering a well of icy rage within herself. As she directs
Bill through the world of the painting, “she heard coldness and calculation
in her voice. She hated that sound . . . but she liked it too” (Rose Madder
418). After finding that she had the hardness and anger within herself to
hear Norman being killed with no remorse, she discovers that this rage
follows her back into her everyday life, threatening her existence and her
relationships with those she loves. Physically, Rosie’s transformation is less
dramatic than Norman’s, as she briefly turns into Rose Madder, the angry
woman from her painting. As Bill says, looking at Rosie in the world of
the painting, “You look like someone else . . . Someone dangerous” (Rose
Madder 418). Though Rosie returns, both to her real world and her original
appearance, she has “penetrated a parallel world of fantasy (imagination),
and in that world she found the strength to face the struggle to reconstruct
herself and to fight her enemy. But now she has to live in the real world
and the pressure of daily life quickly dilutes the powers of that experience.
She needs to incorporate something of that transcendental feeling of the
fantasy world into her routine” (de Sousa Causo 364) in order to survive
and reconcile the two worlds, the fantasy and the reality. Once she and
Bill are out of the painting, this internal transformation proves difficult for
Rosie to shake and impossible to eradicate completely, for better or worse,
the impact of the abuse she has suffered and the strength she has claimed.
8
Coming of Age Stories
S ome of King’s most powerful tales feature the coming of age stories of
children crossing the threshold into young adulthood. This is a moment
at which many high school and college students find themselves as well,
complete with their own developing identities and uncertainties about the
future, and King’s coming of age stories can strike a particularly powerful
chord with young adult readers. One of King’s best known coming of age
stories is The Body (included in the 1982 collection Different Seasons),
which is often better known by the name of its film adaptation, Stand By
Me (Rob Reiner, 1986). Despite the dead body of the title of which the boys
go in search, there are no supernatural or ghostly horrors, as King focuses
instead on the bond between four young men and the different paths
their lives are about to set them upon as they move toward adulthood. A
darker coming of age tale, also in Different Seasons, is Apt Pupil, in which
Todd Bowden, a boy who is struggling with some of these same questions,
befriends an elderly Nazi war criminal in hiding, who takes Todd under
his wing and turns him into a monster. Finally, while The Body and Apt
Pupil consider the coming of age quests of young men, King’s first novel,
Carrie highlights the horrors faced—and inflicted—by a high school girl
as she struggles to define herself, with the real-life coming of age turmoil
here veering into the supernatural with Carrie’s telekinetic power, though
the cliques and bullying described are all too familiar in the real lives of
contemporary young adult readers.1
The coming of age stories featured in King’s work span a wide range
of adolescence and young adulthood, from the 12-year-old children of
The Body to 16-year-old Carrie White, and these coming of age stories are
resolved with varying degrees of success. As Ann Casano defines the com-
ing of age genre tradition of the bildungsroman, “the main character has to
experience some form of moral development. In essence, they have to grow
up. The focus of the character’s growth is the main thrust of the narrative.”
Within the context of the bildungsroman, the protagonist struggles with
who he or she is, who they will become as an adult, what path their life will
take, and how they will position themselves within and relate to the wider
world and its social structure. Casano goes on to outline several key char-
acteristics of the bildungsroman, most of which focus on the development
of an individual character and his or her significant change over the course
of the narrative. As Casano explains, “There is a search for meaning by the
protagonist, who is usually foolish and inexperienced at the beginning of
the narrative.” This search is often prompted by some key loss or trauma,
motivating the protagonist to undertake a significant personal journey, the
path of which is strewn with challenges, tests, and failure (Casano). At a
pivotal moment within this journey, “There is usually an epiphany, or a
flashing moment where the hero finally ‘gets it.’ This lucidity changes them
as a person. They learn what it takes to be a grown up in the real world”
(Casano). This bildungsroman also echoes the journey of Joseph Campbell’s
mythic hero,2 as this realization transcends the personal and emphasizes
societal responsibility and in the successfully achieved bildungsroman,
“The hero will eventually find his place in society by accepting its values
and rules . . . [The hero] has grown as a person from page one and at the
very least he is equipped with the maturity and knowledge to have a chance
in life” (Casano). As Jonathan P. Davis explains in Stephen King’s America,
King’s child protagonists “are forced at some point to exit the gates of purity
and enter the arena of adulthood, which occurs through some initial earth-
shattering discovery that causes them to recognize the imperfections of
their world” (48). Once they have seen the world through these adult eyes,
they cannot reclaim their childlike innocence and are set upon the journey
which will begin transforming them into the adults they are to become.
Some of King’s coming of age stories, such as that of Gordie Lachance
in The Body, proceed to a successful resolution, while others are ulti-
mately ineffective, ending in death and destruction, though all highlight
the challenges of identity and belonging faced by young men and women,
a maturation process that remains vibrant and volatile, whether in the
nostalgic 1950s setting of The Body or the more contemporary setting
tapped into with Kimberly Peirce’s recent film adaptation of Carrie (2013).
The Body
In The Body, a quartet of boys set off an adventure, prompted by one ques-
tion: “Do you guys want to go see a dead body?” (Body 299). However, as
Gordon “Gordie” Lachance, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern
Tessio make their way through the woods to find the body of Ray Brower,
their journey becomes not a lark, but a serious quest, one which will trans-
form them individually and as a group. The narrator, Gordie Lachance, is
COMING OF AGE STORIES 105
recounting this story of his childhood from the long-range vantage point
of a grown man, as he struggles to put his adolescent truth into words that
can carry the weight of what he wants to express. Korinna Csetényi ana-
lyzes the unique nature of this narrative position, as Gordie “frequently
jumps forward and backward in time. In the manner of Charles Dickens’s
character, Pip, there is the older, mature Gordon, recounting his singular
summer adventure.” King begins the novella from the perspective of adult
Gordie and his reflection that “The most important things are the hardest to
say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—
words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no
more than living size when they’re brought out” (Body 293, emphasis origi-
nal). Despite the difficulty of the telling and the very real possibility that his
words cannot live up to the truth he is striving to communicate, it is a story
that Gordie must tell, one that made him into the man he has become, and
it is through this dual perspective of an adult recalling his childhood self
that Gordie recounts his story. Interspersed with the story of the boys’ trek
to see Ray Brower’s corpse, The Body also includes a couple of Gordie’s short
stories published when he was a young man, as well as his adult reflections,
touched with nostalgia and a bent toward the philosophical. This narrative
complexity provides readers with a variety of perspectives from which to
consider Gordie’s personal bildungsroman and the revelation of Gordie as
not just a boy, but also as a young man and later, as an adult, highlighting
not only the transformative journey itself, but the echoes of its significance
and its repercussions across decades of Gordie’s life to come.
While the boys’ decision to go see the body of Ray Brower—a boy
reported missing and presumed dead, but not yet found, except by Vern’s
thuggish older brother Billy and his pal Charlie Hogan—is a grand adven-
ture out into the great unknown. It is equally significant, if not more so,
as an escape. In Castle Rock, Gordie and his friends find themselves in
constant conflict with their elders, a group which includes “a variety of
personal oppressors . . . [including their] parents, the storekeeper, the
dumpkeeper and his dog, [and] the older boys” (Biddle 86). In discover-
ing who they are, the boys must first pull away from where they’ve come
from, a separation that is especially significant given the contentious fam-
ily dynamics of each. As Jeffrey Weinstock writes in “Maybe It Shouldn’t
Be a Party: Kids, Keds, and Death in Stephen King’s Stand By Me and Pet
Sematary,” “each one of these boys . . . is already missing something or is,
on some level, scarred” (42). Gordie’s older brother Dennis was his parents’
favored son and with Dennis’s recent death, Gordie has become an “invis-
ible man” (Body 310) in his own home, superseded by his parents’ grief
and largely ignored. When Dennis is alive, he is the target of their par-
ents’ love and attention and after Dennis dies, Gordie lives in the shadow
of his brother’s memory, once again tangential and largely unnoticed.

While Gordie is neglected and ignored, Chris and Teddy are faced with
much more overt abuse: Chris’s drunken father beats him, while Teddy’s
father presses his son’s ears to a hot woodstove burner plate before being
taken away to a VA hospital psychiatric ward (Body 296). Both Chris and
Teddy must also continuously contend with their father’s legacies. Adults
write Chris off as a no-good thief and “Everyone expects him to live up
to the poor reputation, well-established by his delinquent brothers and
his abusive, alcoholic father, who regularly beats him. He desperately tries
to avoid being typecast, but the entire community seems to work against
his desire” (Csetényi). In contrast, Teddy constantly defends his father,
whom he loves with a single-minded and worshipful devotion, in spite of
his abuse, and “Teddy’s disfigured ears and hearing impairment stand a
constant reminder that sometimes the person entrusted with a child’s well-
being might also present the greatest threat to it” (Csetényi). Finally, like
Gordie, Vern lives in the shadow of his older brother Billy, though instead
of being a golden boy, Billy is a juvenile delinquent who beats his younger
brother, usually under the radar of their ineffectual parents.
Expanding out beyond these immediate family relationships, the boys
find little in the adult world upon which they can trust or depend. Due to
his family’s reputation, when milk money goes missing at school, Chris
is immediately the number one suspect; he did steal the milk money
but, caught by his conscience, turned it in to his teacher, who kept it
for herself, letting Chris take the fall and a three-day suspension (Body
382–383). When Gordie stops at a small shop to get them provisions
for their trip, the shopkeeper George Dusset attempts to cheat Gordie,
with one thumb on the scale as he weighs the boys’ hamburger, tries to
overcharge Gordie, and becomes hostile when Gordie calls him on both:
“What are you, kid? . . . Are you some kind of smartass?” (Body 344),
before throwing Gordie out of the store. The boys as a group fare no
better with Milo Pressman, who runs the town dump and bullies Teddy,
calling him a “looney” and making fun of Teddy’s father (Body 348),
before threatening to call all of the boys’ parents. From their parents to
their teachers and even adults they encounter in their casual day-to-day
existence, such as Dusset and Pressman, the boys’ relationships with
adults are conflicted, contentious, and often abusive, presenting “a rather
dark view of society, full of mean, hypocritical and weak adult figures”
(Csetényi). As Arthur W. Biddle explains in “The Mythic Journey in ‘The
Body,’” Gordie and his friends have “been scarred by the adult world and
denied its love” (87), a harsh reality which makes their coming of age
even more essential. They cannot rely on the adult world to care for them
or be there to provide them with guidance and support when they need
it, so they must construct a world of their own, finding their own identi-
ties and places within it.
As they move forward with their lives, crossing the threshold from
childhood to early adulthood, they do so through their bond with one
another and their search for a dead boy, a kid their own age named Ray
Brower who disappeared while picking blueberries and was hit by a train.
The initial draw for Gordie and his friends is to find Brower’s body and be
seen as heroes, perhaps gaining some of the adult attention and approval
which endlessly eludes them, though the journey becomes an end in
and of itself. As Gordie says, “There’s a high ritual to all fundamental
events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change hap-
pens” (Body 402), and the “magic corridor” he and his friends walk down
takes them along a set of train tracks and through the Maine woods.
They walk and along the way, find themselves and one another, as well
as the body of Ray Brower at the journey’s end. In seeing Ray Brower’s
body, the boys come to terms with their own mortality, both individually
and as a collective group; for Gordie in particular, “Ray’s body helps him
digest the experience of death and dying, something he was unable to do
when his brother died” (Csetényi). In addition to this new understand-
ing and the attendant maturation that comes from the boys’ experience,
their defense of Ray Brower’s body against the older boys also provides
them an opportunity to assert their masculinity. In turning back their
older brothers, even under the threat of beatings sure to come, they have
proven themselves to be no longer boys, but men. As Davis argues, The
Body is King’s “tour de force of coming of age stories . . . [which] por-
trays young people as having the inner strength to make the transition
from innocence to experience” (55). Transformed by the stories they tell,
the fears they share, and the horrors they overcome—a screaming cry in
the dark woods, leeches, the threats of the older boys—Gordie and his
friends return home different than when they set out, boys taking their
first steps into young manhood, with a burgeoning understanding of the
harsh realities of the world that await them, including Chris’s cataclysmic
revelation to Gordie that “Your friends drag you down . . . You can’t save
them. You can only drown with them” (Body 384). In the midst of their
strongest camaraderie and their all-encompassing friendship, Gordie
must return home knowing that life will change, that the deep love and
loyalty he feels for his friends is insupportable. As Magistrale argues in
Hollywood’s Stephen King, this trip into the woods signals “The death of
their friendly foursome, the death of their summer, and most important,
the death of their own childhoods” (38). Gordie must make sacrifices as
he grows up and becomes a man, and he has gotten his first glimpse of
those losses on this journey with his friends.
This coming of age is successful for Gordie, though the same is not true
for his friends. Gordie writes his story from the perspective of a grown
man; he is a husband and father, as well as a successful author, with his
childhood dreams realized. The Body combines this complex narrative
perspective by foregrounding Gordie’s childhood experiences, colored
through the nostalgia of his adult point of view and further supplemented
with the inclusion of a couple of Gordie’s early stories, as “Stud City” and
“The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” fill in some of the blanks of the inter-
vening years.3 But he is also the only one of his original group of friends
still living. Teddy and Vern’s deaths are almost expected, following the
pattern of their family histories and others’ low expectations of them, with
Teddy dying in a car accident while driving drunk after being rejected by
the Air Force and Vern killed in an apartment fire (432). Chris’s life—and
death—is more unexpected, as he refuses others’ perceptions of him and
works his way through the college-track courses side by side with Gordie,
going on to college and then studying law before being stabbed trying to
break up a fight at a fast food restaurant. The strength and solidarity that
Chris demonstrated with his childhood friends, his defining character-
istic, was also what would get him killed; as Gordie says, when the two
men began fighting, “Chris, who had always been the best of us at making
peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat” (Body 435).
Chris, Teddy, and Vern had the deck stacked against them ever getting
out of Castle Rock or stepping out from under the shadows cast by their
fathers and brothers, and although Chris beat those odds, his life is cut
short by brutal and senseless violence.
Apt Pupil
While Chris, Vern, and Teddy’s coming of age journeys are cut short by
circumstance or tragedy, the same cannot be said of 13-year-old Todd
Bowden, the young male protagonist of King’s novella Apt Pupil, which
Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner consider as “among
the grimmest pieces King has ever written” (304). Todd Bowden is—or at
least seems to be—a “total all-American kid” (Apt Pupil 111) when he first
shows up on the doorstep of Arthur Denker. However, Denker is really
Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal and despite his seeming nor-
malcy, Todd is far from a regular kid. Rather than approaching Dussander
out of fear or simple curiosity, he comes to blackmail Dussander, to trade
his silence regarding the old man’s identity for first-hand details of the war,
especially the concentration camps Dussander ran at Bergen-Belsen and
Auschwitz (Apt Pupil 114), and his later reputation as “The Blood Fiend of
Patin” (Apt Pupil 115). While Todd is an intelligent boy and does well in
school, his true passion and curiosity lie in these horrifying crimes against
humanity, a curiosity which quickly grows into an erotically charged and
all-consuming obsession as Todd “becomes increasingly corrupted by the
stories of murder he hears in exchange for not revealing his discovery to
the authorities” (Mahoney 25). Todd tells Dussander “I really groove on all
that concentration camp stuff ” (Apt Pupil 119). As a younger boy, looking
through a stack of his friend’s dad’s war magazines, Todd noticed that
All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories
were continued in the back of the book, and when you turned to those
pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads
sold German knives and belts and helmets . . . These ads sold German flags
emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer
Attack . . . They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not
mind. (121)
Considering this discrepancy, Todd thought to himself “I want to know

about everything that happened in those places . . . And I want to know
which is more true—the words, or the ads they put beside the words” (Apt
Pupil 121, emphasis original). Drawn in by what Dennis F. Mahoney calls
“the commercialization and fetishization of the Holocaust” (27), Todd
is consumed by this fascination and his dark fixation. It is this question,
and the growing obsession that accompanies it, which brings Todd to
Dussander’s door.
Todd returns to Dussander’s house regularly, telling his parents that he
is reading to the old man, as he demands to be told everything Dussander
has done, every detail the old man can remember. As Todd tells Dussander,
he wants to hear about “The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens . . .
The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff ” (Apt
Pupil 129). Despite initial resistance, Dussander opens his memory to Todd,
sharing the atrocities of his past as the boy listens eagerly, demanding more
stories and ever more explicit details. From an outside perspective, Todd
is a regular kid, just as on the surface, his relationship with Dussander is a
reciprocal one, with a young boy soaking up the wisdom of an elder, while
he helps the older man by reading to him. However, “Just as he has sub-
verted so many long-accepted conventions of Americana over the years,
here King takes a small-town conceit and relationship worthy of Norman
Rockwell and inverts it, turning the innocence of that Saturday Evening
Post image into a perversely insightful study of evil” (Wiater, Golden, and
Wagner 304–305). As Magistrale argues of this relationship in Hollywood’s
Stephen King, “King’s portrayal of evil most often appears to require an
active, illicit bond between a male (often in the role of a father or father
surrogate) and a younger, formerly innocent individual (often in the role
of biological or surrogate progeny) who is initiated into sin” (85). The rela-
tionship and balance of power between Todd and Dussander is complex
and mutually destructive: Todd is the child, though he holds Dussander’s
fate in his hands. However, this newfound power and Todd’s sense of him-
self as in control of the situation slips away as their relationship grows and
deepens, since if Dussander’s identity comes to light now, Todd himself will
be implicated as well, for having known about the man’s true identity and
kept it to himself, not to mention his prurient and self-serving motivations
for doing so. The balance of power is constantly shifting and negotiated
throughout the novella and “the question of who is the exploiter and who is
the victim . . . bears careful watching” (Magistrale, Hollywood’s 111). Todd
initially defined his relationship with Dussander based on his power over
the old man and the benefits that power could afford him—namely, forbid-
den knowledge—but as Dussander’s control of the situation increases and
even threatens to eclipse Todd’s own, Todd has only his all-consuming,
addictive obsession and the fear that it will be found out.
Both Todd and Dussander fall into long and destructive downward spi-
rals. Todd’s grades begin to plummet. He has nightmares, in some of which
he is a camp prisoner and in others, he wears an SS uniform (Apt Pupil
146); in still others, he occupies an ultimate position of power and control
as he tortures and rapes a bound female camp prisoner (Apt Pupil 189–
190). His grip on reality begins to slip as he finds himself increasingly pre-
occupied with violent fantasies. Dussander has his own nightmares as well,
though in telling his stories to Todd, he finds himself filled with renewed
vitality: “When he talked to the boy, he could call back the old days. His
memories of those days was perversely clear . . . Were a few bad dreams
too high a price to pay?” (Apt Pupil 149). The stories Dussander tells have a
powerful hold over Todd and forge their relationship, as the “language . . .
serves as the vehicle for [Todd’s] corruption, as he increasingly becomes a
vampiric extension of the evil that Dussander implants within him and that
will become ‘undead’ through him” (Mahoney 28). In the end, these stories
transform them both, connecting the past and the present, the living and
the dead: “The illicit nature of their behavior acts like a drug—demanding
more details, greater levels of barbarism, until narrative crosses into action,
past merges with present, and history becomes ‘their story’” (Mahoney 35).
Drawn increasingly further into their own dark obsessions and into their
mutually destructive relationship with one another, Todd and Dussander
push each other to—and eventually beyond—their limits. As Todd’s vio-
lence and madness continue to consume him, he externally continues to
put on the face of a regular, normal young man. Todd appears to be an
ideal, bright, college-bound student: he is on the varsity football and base-

ball teams, wins an essay contest on “An American’s Responsibility,” wins
his school’s “Athlete of the Year” award, gets high grades, and has a good
relationship with his parents (Apt Pupil 212). Underneath this idyllic, sub-
urban façade, however, all is not well with Todd. After a year of nightmares
and indulging in violent fantasies, Todd brings this violence to life when
he kills a wino with a hammer (Apt Pupil 210). As Magistrale writes in
“Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children,” Todd’s new passion
lies in “stalking and butchering helpless drunks and street people” (72).
Todd’s relationships become corrupted as well, as “his emerging sexuality
is stimulated only by perverse fantasies of women in bondage forced to
suffer sadistic violations . . . and his relationship with his parents, formerly
characterized by a playful intimacy, is now clouded by Todd’s need to sus-
tain elaborate barriers between the vicious self he is becoming and their
images of the innocent child he had been” (ibid.). Todd has pursued, and
in some respects, arguably fulfilled his obsessive quest, though he finds that
no amount of power or blood will ever satisfy him and, trapped within his
own atrocities, he can never again be innocent or safe.
In some ways, Todd’s coming of age is successful, if darkly perverted.
After all, he has crossed the threshold from childhood into young adult-
hood, through “the dissolution of the all-conference, all-American child,
to the emergence of the corrupt adult who has lost sight of all moral
principles” (Magistrale, “Inherited Haunts” 72). Todd begins to realize
this change within himself early on, reflecting that “He had many adult
thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great” (199). When he and
Dussander share a drink to celebrate Todd’s improved grades, Magistrale
argues that “The bourbon Todd consumes is symbolic of the corruption
inherent in King’s adult world, a realm in which Dussander serves as high
priest. The jelly-glass Todd uses to drink the whiskey, of course, represents
the childhood from which he has forever broken” (“Inherited Haunts” 73).
Todd even sees the murder of the winos and his own pragmatic approach
to these acts of violence as an integral part of his maturation and self-
actualization and he thinks that “Really, he was no different than anybody.
You had to make your own way in the world; if you were going to get
along, you had to do it by yourself ” (Apt Pupil 212). Todd feels the need
to kill to keep himself sane, to keep his nightmares from consuming him,
and the winos are the perfect target as he depersonalizes them and makes
them nearly interchangeable in his mind, while at the same time reassur-
ing himself that “their time of usefulness as human creatures was over.
Except their usefulness to Todd, of course” (ibid.).
In the end, neither Dussander nor Todd can maintain their respec-
tive disguises: Dussander is recognized by a former camp prisoner and
commits suicide to avoid being tried as a war criminal, and when Todd’s
machinations are discovered, he shoots his former school guidance coun-
selor and then takes aim at a nearby freeway, firing on passing motorists
until the police kill him (Apt Pupil 290).
Carrie
The bildungsroman has traditionally focused on the maturation and trans-

formation of young men. However, an extension of this narrative tradition
is the female bildungsroman. As Laura Pressman explains in “The Frauro-
man: A Female Perspective in Coming of Age Stories,” “Female bildung-
sromane in contemporary literature and film are able to explore issues that
those of the past were unable to mention. Sexuality, higher education, and
other aspects of society that were once off-limits to female writers (par-
ticularly when writing about women) are now described and explored
extensively because of the shift in cultural norms.” A common feature of
the female bildungsroman that distinguishes it from its male counterpart is
the frequent “inclusion of a love story as part of a girl’s growing up. While
works of previous centuries centered on marriage as the conclusion, many
contemporary works still incorporate romantic relationships as a key com-
ponent of the protagonist’s development” (Pressman), a concern not usu-
ally featured in boy’s coming of age stories. While The Body and Apt Pupil
feature the self-exploration and camaraderie of young men, King’s first
novel Carrie features the transformation of a young woman, the epony-
mous and unforgettable Carrie White.
King writes early in Christine that “losers” are an integral part of the
high school social scene, generally with one of each gender (1). Arnie
Cunningham is the male loser of Libertyville High in Christine and in
Carrie, Carrie White is his female equivalent, the female loser of Ewen
Consolidated High School. Carrie’s coming of age struggles are doubled,
in that she must strive to define herself and claim her identity on dual
fronts: first at home, where she fights to free herself from her mother’s
domineering control, and again in the high school halls, where she tries to
fit in and find a place in the high school pecking order where she can be, if
not accepted, at least relatively safe from targeted bullying and abuse. This
is a powerful and volatile combination, where Carrie faces pain, exclusion,
and suffering from all sides; as Sears writes, Carrie “explores the world of
American youth, analyzing religious extremism, bullying and suffering,
humiliation and revenge, and conflicts between the individual, the social
group, and the family” (28). Finally, her coming of age is physical as well
as social, with Carrie’s powers emerging with the onset of her first period,4
the biological and often cultural point of demarcation between girlhood
and womanhood. Faced with this coming of age, King’s Carrie—and the
subsequent film adaptations by Brian DePalma and Kimberly Peirce—
“[trace] the development of femininity to its nearly successful conclusion”
(Lindsey 280). This makes Carrie one of the most complex and contested
of King’s coming of age stories: Carrie successfully claims her power
and the identity that it affords her, but this self-actualization ultimately
destroys her.5
Carrie’s power rises to the forefront with the coming of her first period,
with Carrie’s—albeit delayed—puberty reawakening a long latent talent.
Just as Carrie’s telekinetic abilities are initially strange to her, her develop-
ing woman’s body is a mystery as well. Margaret White’s influence tempers
not only who Carrie, her daughter, could be, but the girl she understands
herself to be, physically and biologically, as well. When Carrie gets her first
period in the high school locker room in the novel’s opening scene, Carrie
has no idea what is happening to her and panics, thinking she is bleeding
to death. When Carrie asks her mother why she hadn’t told Carrie about
menstruation, instead leaving her to be terrified, ridiculed, and alone,
Margaret blames Carrie’s own sin. Turning to prayer as she simultaneously
berates Carrie and attempts to force the girl into her prayer closet, Marga-
ret White calls upon God to “help this sinning woman beside me here see
the sin of her days and her ways. Show her that if she had remained sinless
the Curse of Blood would never have come on her” (Carrie 65). Margaret
has a similar explanation for breasts, telling her daughter that only bad,
sinful girls develop them (Carrie 35). As a result, the physical aspect of
Carrie’s coming of age—as her body transforms from that of a girl into that
of a woman—is overshadowed by guilt and terror.
In her quest for her own identity, Carrie’s first challenge—and one that
she overcomes only temporarily and incompletely—is to separate herself
from her mother and resist her mother’s fundamentalist religious mania.
This volatile mother-daughter relationship circumscribes Carrie’s under-
standing of the world around her, which Margaret White dismisses almost
unequivocally as full of sin. Carrie’s life and identity seem to her one of
untapped possibility bound only by the prison of her mother’s maniacal
love, and she considers that
She could, she knew she could be
(what)
in another place. She was thick through the waist only because sometimes
she felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gaping, whis-
tling hole was to eat and eat and eat—but she was not that thick through the
middle . . . She could fix her hair. Buy pantyhose and blue and green tights.
Make little skirts and dresses from Butterick and Simplicity patterns. The
price of a bus ticket, a train ticket. She could be, could be, could be—
Alive. (Carrie 48, emphasis original)
However, none of these potential realities are possible within her mother’s
house. The temptation of the wider world and the potential for beauty and
freedom that could come with it are sin, false promises that must be turned
from and denied, in favor of Margaret’s fanatical brand of Christianity, with
its emphasis on punishment, repentance, abjection, and pain.
Outside of her home, Carrie’s quest for belonging among her peers is
familiar, one that remains just as relevant for contemporary adolescents
and teenagers as when King wrote his novel more than forty years ago.
Magistrale argues in his essay “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible
Children” that “One of King’s greatest fortes remains his ability to render
the most perverse and grotesque aspects of the American high school expe-
rience with unflinching accuracy” (61). The harsh reality of high school
cliques and both overt and covert bullying are central to Carrie and Car-
rie’s fraught—and ultimately unsuccessful—negotiation of her place among
her peers. Carrie has been the outsider, the perennially bullied Other, from
earliest childhood. Carrie struggles to fit in, to be more like her classmates
and earn their acceptance; however, “While trying to discover her iden-
tity, Carrie’s view of herself is continuously distorted by the ways in which
her immediate associates react to her” (Davis 144). Carrie can transform
herself in any number of ways, attempting to masquerade as a “normal”
teenage girl, but the high school hierarchy has her defined, a role and iden-
tity that she is locked into, however little she wants it and however dili-
gently she works to jettison it. Carrie’s classmates are “intent on dictating
to Carrie exactly how she view herself ” (ibid.) and from this perspective,
Carrie will never belong or be accepted; she will always be excluded, the
“freak,” the “loser.” This long line of ostracism and cruelty reaches a climax
in the locker room, as the other girls pelt Carrie with tampons and sanitary
pads. The culmination of more than a decade of bullying, in this moment
“critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long
searched for, was found. Frisson” (Carrie 10). While some of the girls in the
locker room “would later claim surprise” (ibid.) at what happened, at the
groupthink way in which they turned upon Carrie, it is really no surprise
at all, for either them or for Carrie herself. This is simply the next step,
the accumulation of thousands of smaller abuses that have punctuated and
established their treatment of Carrie since childhood, a spark set to the
kindling of a lifetime of bullying, and one which will eventually rage com-
pletely out of control.6
Despite Carrie’s well-established outsider status, Tommy Ross’s prom

invitation gives Carrie the chance to be someone new, to forget all of the
taunts and insults and be seen differently, finally a peer among her class-
mates rather than the butt of all their jokes. The female bildungsroman
is often distinguished from its more traditional male counterpart by the
central feature of a romantic love relationship and while Tommy and
Carrie have no romantic history together, their date to the prom opens
up a world of possibilities for Carrie and awakens her to the chance for
love and passion. Tommy asks Carrie to the prom out of his devotion to
his girlfriend Sue, though this triangle is complicated as Tommy begins
to admire Carrie, enjoying their time together rather than seeing it as
a chore to be completed and then quickly forgotten. Her position as
Tommy’s date and the inclusion it affords her, as well as Carrie’s own
rapidly developing sense of herself, make their evening together a cata-
lyst for Carrie’s self-discovery and transformation from an outcast girl
into a beautiful, powerful young woman. Tommy’s popularity—and by
extension, Sue’s social position, sacrificed as penance for her part in
the locker room abuse—have the potential to achieve something Car-
rie never could on her own and elevate her from the depths of social
exclusion.
As part of Carrie’s bildungsroman, this social rite of passage has the
potential to transform her. Carrie very carefully orchestrates this new stage
in her life. After overcoming her initial fear and suspicion, Carrie is cau-
tiously hopeful that things could finally change for her, and spends a good
deal of time and energy crafting the person she would like to become. Carrie
sews herself a beautiful red dress, one that highlights her new womanliness,
emphasizing her breasts and her slim waist: “She had bought a special bras-
siere to go with it, which gave her breasts the proper uplift (not that they
actually needed it) but left their top halves uncovered. Wearing it gave her
a weird, dreamy feeling that was half shame and half defiant excitement”
(Carrie 141). In the midst of this self-actualization and sexual awakening,
Carrie stands in her gown, waiting for Tommy and perched on the brink
of a world of possibilities and when she opens the door to him, she also
opens the world to herself; as Tommy silently looks at her, Carrie “felt—
actually, physically—her whole miserable life narrow to a point that might
be an end or the beginning of a widening beam” (Carrie 150). Having got-
ten a glimpse of this potential new life, Carrie’s behavior changes as well;
while she is still fearful and on the lookout for some cruel prank, she is also
happier, more outgoing, and ready to fight to hold onto this new self. As
she tells her mother, “I just want you to understand that things are going to
change around here, Momma . . . They better understand it too” (Carrie 115,
emphasis original).
Several critics, including Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, have compared Carrie

to a modern day Cinderella, who instead of getting her “happily ever after”
is pushed past the limits of endurance, to the point of fiery vengeance. Mir-
cea Eliade, in “Myths and Fairy Tales” argues that while on the surface, the
fairy tale “presents the structure of an infinitely serious and responsible
adventure . . . in the last analysis it is reducible to an initiatory scenario”
(201). From this perspective, fairy tales are more than just an entertaining
diversion; rather, they are a sort of dress rehearsal for the adolescent com-
ing of age, stories told to children that teach them how to be adults within
their cultures and communities through the codification of that culture’s
mores and values. From this critical perspective, Cinderella communicates
ideal gender roles, specifically that the meek and long-suffering girl will
eventually be rewarded for her patience, perseverance, and significantly,
her silence. Cinderella endures the abuse of her stepmother and stepsisters
without complaint and is blessed with a magical escape from her life of
drudgery and mistreatment. As Yarbro explains in her essay “Cinderella’s
Revenge: Twists on Fairy Tale and Mythic Themes in the Work of Stephen
King,” much of Carrie’s story follows the same narrative trajectory as Cin-
derella’s: overlooked and abused, a plain girl has the chance to show her
true self, beautiful and desired as she dances with her Prince Charming
at the ball. Yarbro equates Margaret White with Cinderella’s stepmother
and as Carrie’s classmates “mock her for her manner and appearance, their
derision [is] not unlike the Step-sisters” (6), as they collectively fill that nar-
rative position. With the idealized “happily ever afters” of countless Dis-
ney versions, it can be easy to lose sight of the brutality of traditional fairy
tales, though Yarbro reminds readers that “In one of the original versions
of Cinderella, when she is given the chance to be revenged upon her family,
she has their noses and hands cut off ” (ibid.). The culmination of Carrie’s
fairy tale, cut short by the bucket of blood Chris dumps on Carrie at the
evening’s crowning moment, echoes the violence of these early fairy tales
and Carrie rises above her tormentors to wreak her vengeance. As Yarbro
writes, Carrie “wrecks the entire town in a display of psychokinesis that
smacks of Jovian rage” (ibid.). While the traditional Cinderella’s reprieve
comes in the form of a magical fairy godmother, Carrie sets herself free,
through the paranormal power of her telekinesis, which, like Cinderella’s
magic, sets her apart from her peers. In the end, it is this combination of
multiple abuses coupled with Carrie’s telekinetic abilities that results in
Carrie’s climactic prom night massacre.
The path from childhood to adulthood is fraught with conflict and is
often overwhelming, terrifying, and even potentially traumatic. Winter
argues that this “journey, the coming of age, is an important underpinning
of all of King’s novels, and in Carrie, we see glimpses of the true danger that
King perceives along its path” (32). Carrie is pushed too far, by both her
mother and her peers, and responds to this pain through the only means
available to her, turning her suffering outward and focusing her wrath upon
her tormentors. Like Carrie, the boys of The Body and Todd in Apt Pupil also
encounter some of these “true dangers” along the path to adulthood. While
Gordie successfully navigates this passage, his friends are not so lucky, with
Vern, Teddy, and Chris’s possibilities cut short, to greater or lesser degrees,
by their family histories and the limited range of expectations with which
they are faced. Finally, Todd’s childhood innocence is left far behind in the
wake of his growing obsession and manipulation of Dussander, with his
dark fantasies subsuming all other aspects of his identity, corrupting him
beyond the point of salvation.
Section III
Playing with Publishing

9
Serial Publishing and

The Green Mile
K ing’s reputation as a prolific and best-selling author has been cemented

for several decades, with his dozens of novels and collections
establishing him as a clear publishing phenomenon. However, in recent
years King has moved beyond traditional publishing to experiment with
both old and new approaches, including serial publication, ebooks, and
graphic novels. This type of experimentation can be a risky move for
authors and publishers alike. As Neil Shoebridge argues in “New Chapter
for an Old Publishing Idea,” “Book publishers are not noted for their
marketing skills . . . Examples of innovative marketing strategies in the book
business are rare” (72). However, King has long embraced new approaches
to storytelling and publishing, with great success. One of the earliest—and
highest-profile—of these forays into experimental publishing was King’s
decision to publish The Green Mile serially in 1996. Set in a Depression-era
Southern prison’s death row, the first installment, titled The Two Dead Girls
was released in March of 1996, with one installment a month published
through the final installment, Coffey on the Mile, which was released in
August of the same year.
Serial publishing is a historical phenomenon and beginning in the Vic-
torian era, “From the moment that the industrialization of print produc-
tion offered a mass readership access to cheap, printed work, serialization
emerged as a prominent publication practice” (Allen and van den Berg 4).
Charles Dickens is often considered the best-known of the serial publish-
ers. As Joel J. Brattin, the honorary curator of the Fellman Dickens Col-
lection, explains “Every one of Charles Dickens’s novels was published
serially—that is, the novels appeared not all at once, but in parts or install-
ments, over a space of time” (Brattin). Dickens embraced serial publishing
for several reasons, both economic and authorial. In terms of affordability,
“Publishing his novels in serial form expanded Dickens’s readership, as

more people could afford to buy fiction on the installment plan,” while
Dickens also favored this serial publication approach because he “enjoyed
the intimacy with his audience that serialization provided” (Brattin), giv-
ing him the opportunity to consider reader responses to the stories in
progress as he moved forward into future sections. Several other now-
classics were also originally published in serial format, including Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), Gustav Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary (1856), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina (1877), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880),
Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Lee and Love).
In twentieth-century mass publication, serialization was a staple of the
weekly Saturday Evening Post, through which King himself experienced it
as a boy. As he recalls in the foreword to The Green Mile’s first installment,
The Two Dead Girls,
I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I first encountered

in The Saturday Evening Post, and I liked it because the end of each episode
made the reader an almost equal participant with the writer—you had a
whole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read
and experienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they
were rationed. You couldn’t gulp, even if you wanted to (and if the story was
good, you did). (ix, emphasis original)
Serial fiction has been much less common in contemporary publishing,

with some notable exceptions. For example, as Shoebridge writes, “the
1988 book The Bonfire of the Vanities by the American author Tom Wolfe
was serialised in Rolling Stone magazine, and the American writer Michael
McDowell released a book called Blackwater in installments” (73),1 the
latter of which focuses on a Southern family, some of whom are shape-
shifting were-alligators.
The main defining characteristic of the serial novel, inherent in the
name itself, is that it is published in several chronologically spaced out
individual installments rather than all at once. The time between install-
ments can vary, with an average time frame being somewhere between a
week and a month from one installment to the next. In terms of narrative
style, serial novels also must have an “overarching narrative, unresolved
until the end” (Lee and Love), including key themes that are developed
over multiple installments, as well as cliffhangers at the end of each install-
ment, with the exception of the concluding segment. Given these unique
demands, the narrative structure of the serial novel differs from that of the
SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 123
traditional novel, with the serial novel including multiple narrative cliff-
hangers, rather than just one central conflict, and often some revisiting of
earlier material at the beginning of installments to remind readers of where
the story last left off or to draw in new readers who have not read the previ-
ous installments.
While Victorian audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of
their favorite serial—with works such as Dickens’s Great Expectations and
David Copperfield parceled out over several years rather than a matter of
weeks or months—when King decided to publish The Green Mile serially, it
remained to be seen whether contemporary readers, accustomed to instant
gratification, would deem the installments worth the wait. Gabrielle Coyne,
the Australian marketing manager for Penguin, which published The Green
Mile, explained, “Serialising a book is a fantastic idea, but as King says, it
is something of a high-wire act. People must be persuaded to wait a month
for the next chapter. There is a risk that some consumers will not come
back for more” (qtd. in Shoebridge 73). Thom Geier echoes this sentiment,
writing that “In adopting a Dickensian serial form to tell a Depression-era
tale of death row, Stephen King took a risk” (31). However, it was a risk that
paid off handsomely for both King and his publishers. As the series drew
to a close with the sixth and final installment, all six installments simulta-
neously held a place on that week’s New York Times paperback bestseller
list (Geier 31). Advertising Age’s Nancy Webster summed up the financial
results of The Green Mile’s serial publication: “When the fast-paced cam-
paign was over, 23 million copies had been sold at $2.99 each—including
250,000 $18 boxed sets of the six part thriller” (s14), making The Green
Mile an overwhelming financial success.
The Green Mile was also critically successful, with reviewer Tom De
Haven calling the first installment, The Two Dead Girls, King’s “best fic-
tion in years” (“A Killer Serial” 63). Much of this positive response from
fans and critics was not in spite of the unique publication approach but
rather a direct result of it. As De Haven wrote after the first installment,
“Is Coffey innocent? I don’t know . . . Is this going to turn into a gore story
or a ghost story? Or both? I don’t know that either. In fact, all I do know
for sure at this point is that I’m hooked, and hooked good” (ibid.). Kris-
tine Kathryn Rusch of Fantasy & Science Fiction reflected on her reading
experience after the conclusion of The Green Mile. She picked up the first
installment and after finishing it “I found that I couldn’t shake the story
during that month . . . and I felt a deep frustration at my inability to finish
the book on my schedule” (4). At the publication of the second install-
ment, The Mouse on the Mile, Rusch says “I read that section within two
hours, and was alternately frustrated and pleased that I was enjoying the
series so much” (ibid.). Serial fiction and the enforced suspense between
installments was relatively unfamiliar to contemporary readers, though

The Green Mile’s unique publication format presented them with a new
and exhilarating reading experience, one that many readers enjoyed. As
Rusch looks beyond her own personal experience and reader response, she
writes “I’ve spoken with other readers who’ve had the same experience,
and we all agree that part of the joy of the series was the loss of control, the
forced savoring of the novel, the willingness to read at someone else’s pace.
Had The Green Mile been bad or even mediocre, the experiment would
have failed. Because it was good, it worked beyond all expectations” (ibid.).
The unique narrative structure of The Green Mile was a significant
contributing factor in getting readers to return for each new installment.
Given the episodic nature of serial publication, each segment must leave
the reader wanting more and motivate them enough to go buy the next
month’s installment, providing readers with a cliffhanger at each install-
ment’s conclusion. At the other end of this process, with the start of each
new installment, it is often necessary to provide readers with a recap of
the ongoing narrative and the previous installment’s conclusion, which can
serve to refresh the minds of readers and pull them back into the story or
even to give new readers the background information they need to begin
reading mid-series. Both of these stylistic approaches are characteristic of
The Green Mile’s serial publication. The first installment, The Two Dead
Girls, ended on an ominous, rather than action-based, cliffhanger, high-
lighting themes that would be central to the rest of the novel as a whole,
including the morality of capital punishment and the transformation of
narrator Paul Edgecombe through his relationship with inmate John Cof-
fey. As the first segment draws to a close, Paul gives readers a bit of a flash
forward, to the Green Mile following Coffey’s execution. As he considers,
“Never had I been in a place that felt so nakedly haunted, and it was right
then . . . that my head began to know what my heart had understood ever
since John Coffey had walked the Green Mile: I couldn’t do this job much
longer. Depression or no Depression, I couldn’t watch many more men
walk through my office to their deaths. Even one more might be too many”
(Two Dead Girls 90–91). While this is one of the serial novel’s more phil-
osophical cliffhangers, it serves several purposes as the reader begins to
immerse themselves in the story: we know from the very first installment
that Coffey will not receive a last minute reprieve, that Paul is a differ-
ent man after knowing Coffey than he was before, and that after presiding
over the executions of several men—78, to be exact, as he tells us in the
opening pages of the novel (Two Dead Girls 17)—it is a job he cannot do
any longer, a fundamental change for which his relationship with Coffey
is also responsible. With this cryptic conclusion to the initial installment,
King roughly sketches some of the parameters of the larger story to come,
creating suspense surrounding characterization rather than narrative

action. Later installments feature more traditional, action-based cliffhang-
ers: new prisoner “Wild Bill” Wharton takes a guard hostage at the end of
the second segment, The Mouse on the Mile; sadistic guard Percy Whet-
more kills the mouse Mr. Jingles at the end of the third installment, Coffey’s
Hands; and Paul and his men perch of the cusp of a potentially career-
ending risk at the end of the fourth installment, The Bad Death of Eduard
Delacroix. Each of these life and death moments left readers in suspense for
the month until the next installment’s release, when they would be pulled
back into the story at that exact same narrative moment. The cliffhangers
and the imposed delayed gratification shaped the experiences of readers as
well: they couldn’t keep reading and they couldn’t peek ahead to the end
to see what was going to happen, no matter how much they might want to.
Finally, these cliffhangers foregrounded King’s unique writing approach, as
King was still writing the later installments as readers devoured the early
segments. As King wrote in the foreword included in The Two Dead Girls,
“Until the final episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how
The Green Mile turns out . . . and that may include me” (xi). While the
second installment was on sale, the fourth segment was partially written;
as King told an interviewer, “The rest is somewhere in my brain . . . Some
of the other books I’ve written, I haven’t really known where I was going,
either, but it’s dangerous. It’s like taking off in an airplane and not knowing
if the landing gear works” (qtd. in Kennedy 60).2
Reengaging readers with the ongoing narrative is another unique sty-
listic hallmark of serial fiction and one that King accomplished in a couple
of different ways. First, King often includes direct repetition between the
end of one segment and the beginning of the next, with the reprinting of a
few paragraphs from the previous installment’s conclusion, reestablishing
the earlier segment’s final moments before moving forward. In addition,
our narrator Paul is telling the story of the Green Mile decades after it
happened, as an elderly man, remembering and writing about the past.
Given this perspective, Paul himself ushers readers back into the story
once more, reflecting on what he has written and what he still has to tell
as he sits down to continue his writing, serving as a guide between the
present and the past, bridging the gap between the preceding installment
and this new one. Paul’s perspective as an old man writing the story of his
younger self also affords King the opportunity to feature several thematic
doublings, dynamically connecting the past and the present for both Paul
and the reader. For example, Paul’s life, both then and now, takes place
within a prescriptive organizational structure, first at Cold Mountain
Penitentiary and later at Georgia Pines nursing home. In both instances,
his days are controlled and well-ordered, characterized by routine rather
than spontaneity; however, while in his days on the Green Mile he was the
man who established the structure, at Georgia Pines he finds it imposed
upon him by others, including the kitchen staff who cook his meals and
the orderlies who oversee his care. Another of these doublings between
past and present is that of abused power and arbitrary cruelty, with Percy
Whetmore’s blustering mistreatment of the Green Mile’s prisoners echoed
in Georgia Pines orderly Brad Dolan, who intimidates Paul both physically
and psychologically, constantly reminding Paul of his relatively powerless
position. Paul reflects of capital punishment that while the electric chair
can kill a man with relative ease, it can never destroy the evil which lies
within him and in much the same way, the evil that lies within such power-
hungry tyrants as Whetmore and Dolan is a universal constant, inescap-
able and cruel, one that continues to inflict pain and suffering on those
who cannot protect themselves. These themes resonate across the years of
Paul’s life, connecting the past and the present, as well as acting as a con-
duit for Paul’s memories and for readers as they navigate from one serial
installment to the next, bringing them back into Paul’s perspective and,
through that perspective, once more into the past and the story at the heart
of The Green Mile.
The Green Mile was later published as a single volume, satisfying the
desires of readers who wanted to read it at their own—likely accelerated—
pace, though as Rusch argues, “I feel sad for those of you who waited to
read the book all at once. You’ve missed something” (4).
Themes in The Green Mile
While the serial structure of the The Green Mile is narratively unique, the
novel as a whole has several larger themes that are developed over the
course of all six installments. The Green Mile combines the prison setting
and reality-based horror of King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shaw-
shank Redemption (in the collection Different Seasons) with supernatural
thrills and overarching, interconnected themes of capital punishment,
race, and tropes of Christianity.
Capital punishment is a perennially controversial topic: is state-
sanctioned execution morally right? If so, what crimes are punishable by
death? In what manner should that execution be carried out? Are our crimi-
nal justice and judicial systems reliable enough that executions can be per-
formed without the lingering questions or possibilities that innocent people
may be sent to their deaths? These questions have been central to the death
penalty debate since its inception and continue to be key concerns in the
ongoing discussion. The Green Mile is set in 1932, a historical moment when
capital punishment was an especially resonant issue. As Sean O’Sullivan
explains, “executions in the US reached an all-time high in the 1930s with

199 executions carried out in 1935” (486), a reality which situates The Green
Mile and its condemned men squarely within that historical moment.
In The Green Mile, the eponymous lime linoleum-tiled stretch of hallway
runs straight through Cold Mountain Penitentiary’s death row, dictating the
final steps of prisoners sentenced to die in the electric chair, with capital
punishment an omnipresent reality for both prisoners and guards alike. In
the first installment of The Green Mile, Paul refers to both the number of
men that he executed while at Cold Mountain—78—and the way in which
those executions weigh upon him: “that’s one figure I’ve never been con-
fused about; I’ll remember it on my deathbed” (Two Dead Girls 17). While
Paul has few moral qualms about his work—with the exception of John Cof-
fey, of course—it is not a burden he carries lightly. Following the execution
of Arlen Bitterbuck, the first depicted in The Green Mile, there is a decidedly
anticlimactic moment, when Paul says, “It was over. We had once again suc-
ceeded in destroying what we could not create” (Mouse on the Mile 44). In
addition to this individual death, Paul also questions the efficacy of execu-
tion. Considering another prisoner condemned to die, Eduard Delacroix,
the heinous nature of Delacroix’s crimes is undeniable: after raping and
murdering a young woman, he set fire to the body, which caught a nearby
apartment and killed six people, including two children (Two Dead Girls
29–30). Delacroix has been sentenced to death and Paul will do his duty.
But while Delacroix
would sit down with Old Sparky in a little while, and Old Sparky would
make an end to him . . . whatever it was that had done that awful thing was
already gone . . . In a way, that was the worst; Old Sparky never burned what
was inside them, and the drugs they inject them with today don’t put it to
sleep. It vacates, jumps to someone else, and leaves us to kill husks that aren’t
really alive anyway. (Two Dead Girls 30)
Paul occupies an unique position: it is his responsibility—along with his

fellow guards—to execute the prisoners in his care, after having come to
know many of them as both men and monsters, and while he believes in
the moral rightness of this duty, he is also troubled by the affront against
humanity and the ultimate uselessness of these executions.
Just as the 1930s were a statistically high point for executions, capital
punishment was a common topic of debate at the time of King’s writing in
the mid-1990s. As O’Sullivan explains, The Green Mile, its film adaptation,
and the larger “1990s cycle of death penalty movies, and the debate that
accompanied them, emerged at a time when support for the continued use
of capital punishment in America was running at an all-time high. Public
belief in the appropriateness of capital punishment in cases of murder

stood at 80% in 1994” (486) and “The number of executions carried out
reached a post-1976 high with 98 executions carried out in 1999” (487).3
Given the larger sociocultural context, The Green Mile positions readers—
and with the critically acclaimed film adaptation, viewers—in the thick
of this debate, considering the morality and efficacy of execution right
alongside narrator Paul Edgecombe, with all of the personal and ethical
implications his negotiation carries, as well as the complicity this implies,
echoed through those who come to witness executions at Cold Mountain,
Paul’s own considerations, and the readers’ position in bearing witness to
humanity and destruction on the Green Mile.
The most explicit consideration of the horrors of execution comes in the
aptly named fourth segment, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, where
the cruel and incompetent Percy Whetmore fails to wet the head sponge,
which results in a prolonged, torturous, and exceedingly inhumane death
for Delacroix. Without the sponge to efficiently conduct the electrical cur-
rent, Delacroix is basically cooked alive, with his body bursting into flames
before he dies: “it was at least two minutes before it was over, the longest
two minutes of my whole life, and through most of it I think Delacroix was
conscious” (Bad Death 54). King’s description of Delacroix’s execution is
detailed and unrelenting, refusing to turn away from the horror of Dela-
croix’s death, the torture Whetmore exacts, and the horrifying destruc-
tion of Delacroix’s body as he catches on fire and his flesh sloughs off (Bad
Death 57). Whetmore intended to make Delacroix suffer and in this, he
succeeds beyond his wildest expectations, though he is not the only one
who bears witness and Paul and his fellow guards must shoulder the bur-
den of complicity.
In addition to the guards who must oversee and deal with the after-
math of Delacroix’s execution, there are also those who have shown up to
witness it, believing in the moral rightness of his death, though they liter-
ally turn away in horror at its reality, “heading for the door like cattle in a
stampede” (Bad Death 54). In the moments following Delacroix’s long and
violent death, Paul hears one of the witnesses at his back scream “‘Oh my
God! . . . Is it always this way? Why didn’t somebody tell me? I never would
have come!’ . . . Too late now, friend, I thought” (Bad Death 57, emphasis
original). The witnesses have come to see justice done but instead been
horrified at its reality. Delacroix’s death is admittedly far more gruesome
than most, though Paul witnesses this same doubt and rejection at other
executions as well. Following the comparatively unremarkable execution
of Bitterbuck, Paul says of the audience members that “most sat with their
heads down, looking at the floor, as if stunned. Or ashamed” (Mouse on the
Mile 44). Finally, when Coffey begs Paul not to put a hood on him prior to
his execution, Paul grants Coffey’s final wish, much to the chagrin of some
of the witnesses who have turned up to watch Coffey die. However, “The
mask was tradition, not law. It was, in fact, to spare the witnesses. And sud-
denly I decided that they did not need to be spared, not this once” (Coffey
on the Mile 106). They have come to see and with Coffey in the chair, Paul
decides that they will; the witnesses must face the reality of the sentence,
however it may affect them. Though each of these executions differ, both
the guards and the witnesses are held culpable, complicit in the presence
of death. With Coffey’s execution, Paul does his duty, though for the first
time he does so in the full knowledge that it is wrong, that he is killing an
innocent man. While he has faced uncertainly and even downright horror
in the previous 77 executions over which he has presided, none have been
as clearly wrong as when he has to kill Coffey and it is this final affront—
against Paul’s relatively steadfast belief in the power of good over evil, as
well as his very humanity—that is the final straw for him. As he tells read-
ers at the end of The Green Mile’s opening segment, of himself and fellow
guard Brutus Howell, “Neither of us ever took part in another execution.
John Coffey was the last” (Two Dead Girls 92). Part foreshadowing and
part character-driven cliffhanger, readers know Paul will be transformed
by what he sees and experiences, as the representations of capital punish-
ment to come may well transform their own perspectives as well, situated
in the midst of the 1990s capital punishment conversation.
Another key theme—and one that cannot be entirely separated from
that of crime and punishment—is race, including criticism of Coffey
within the trope of the “Magical Negro.”4 As Brian Kent explains in “Chris-
tian Martyr or Grateful Slave? The Magical Negro as Uncle Tom in Frank
Darabont’s The Green Mile,” the “Uncle Tom” figure is “ubiquitous through-
out the history of cinema—that of the saintly, self-sacrificing black man
whose primary concern in his life is the well-being of his white masters,
even when that concern translates into suffering for Tom himself, for his
family, or for African Americans in general” (115). Kent goes on to explain
that the “Magical Negro” often helps these white masters through super-
natural means, though “the saintly black with supernatural powers . . . uses
these powers exclusively for the benefit of white people, often white people
who are complete strangers,” and despite these prodigious powers, these
black characters are often depicted as narratively peripheral, “operat[ing]
as a secondary character in films that foreground the concerns and behav-
ior of their primary white characters” (116). Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu out-
lines five key characteristics of the “Magical Negro”:
1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American,

in a story about predominantly white characters.
2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than to help the white

protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after
or while helping the white protagonist.
4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in
life, or all of the above.
5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch . . . He or she often
literally has magical powers.
While the “Magical Negro” is almost an invariably “good” and heroic char-
acter, possessing powers that his or her white counterparts lack, this power
is used exclusively for the benefit of the white protagonist, denying the
“Magical Negro” agency and self-determination.
The Green Mile’s John Coffey fulfills each of Okorafor-Mbachu’s defin-
ing characteristics for “The Magical Negro.” While Paul remarks early in
the novel that the Green Mile houses condemned prisoners of all races and
genders—“at Cold Mountain there was no segregation among the walk-
ing dead” (Two Dead Girls 18)—John Coffey is the only black man there
during the time about which Paul is writing. The only other non-white
character is Arlen Bitterbuck, a Native American death row inmate, who
is executed in the serial novel’s second installment. The warden, guards,
and Coffey’s fellow prisoners are all white; so are the law enforcement
officials who arrested Coffey, the journalist who covered the trial, and of
course, the two little girls Coffey is accused of raping and murdering. As
Cerise L. Glenn and Landra J. Cunningham argue in “The Power of Black
Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film,” Coffey’s “actions
are directed primarily toward the interests of Paul Edgecombe, the lead
White character. After Coffey cures Edgecombe from an ailment, he uses
his gifts again under Edgecombe’s direction” (142), to help his fellow pris-
oners and to cure the warden’s wife, Melinda Moores, of a brain tumor
which would otherwise kill her. Coffey drops unexpected into Paul’s life
and when Coffey is executed, he leaves Paul a changed man, transformed
by their relationship. Coffey is uneducated, only capable of reading and
writing his own name, which, he colloquially explains, is “like the drink,
only not spelled the same way” (Two Dead Girls 31). Finally, Coffey has the
spiritual strength of a martyr and the magical powers of a healer, allowing
him to take the pain and hurt of others into himself, alleviating their suf-
fering through his own.
In his relationships with white characters, the “Magical Negro” is almost
always sacrificial, often demonstrating a lack of “any personal life or defin-
ing characteristics” (Mendez). He drops into the white protagonist’s life
with little known history or backstory and usually drops out of it again, with
little fanfare and disappearing without a trace. Next to nothing is known

about John Coffey before he is found holding the bodies of the two dead
Detterick girls. There is almost no information about where Coffey was
before, where his home is, or where he came from (Coffey’s Hands 43–44)
and though he bears many scars, he tells Melinda Moores, “I don’t hardly
remember where they all come from, ma’am” (Night Journey 75). Coffey
can’t even recall where he got the lunch that was found in his pocket the
day he was discovered with the Detterick girls’ bodies (Two Dead Girls 57).
He “has no ties other than to the White people he helps . . . no history or
relatives” (Glenn and Cunningham 145). He shows up on the Green Mile
and in Paul’s life almost history-less, with the exception of the girls’ murder
and the ensuing trial. Coffey exits Paul’s life just as quickly, with his execu-
tion, though in the tradition of the “Magical Negro,” readers’ concerns lie
not necessarily with Coffey’s death itself but rather with its impact on Paul.
In fact, as Coffey prepares to go to the electric chair, he comforts Paul: “I
want to go, boss . . . I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss . . .
I’m tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my
head. I’m tired of all the times I’ve wanted to help and couldn’t. I’m tired of
bein in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I
would. But I cain’t” (Coffey on the Mile 81–82). In this exchange, Matthew
W. Hughey argues that “Coffey is transformed into the classic ‘white Man’s
Burden’ in which Edgecomb[e]’s benevolent paternalism is able to free
(murder) Coffey and then release (condemn) Coffey to the death penalty”
(564). While Coffey’s death is tragic, he goes to it willingly and even a bit
gratefully, shifting the narrative focus back to Paul, his transformation, and
how he has been changed by his relationship with John Coffey.
The theme of race and the “Magic Negro” are inextricable from the ear-
lier theme of capital punishment, and Coffey’s self-sacrifice at the novel’s
conclusion is a point of frequent contention. As Hughey argues, Coffey’s
execution “neither frames the death scene as a spectacle of an innocent
man being executed, nor does it suggest problems with the U.S. legal sys-
tem that regularly executes innocent people (with a historically much
higher rate for African Americans than whites)” (563–564). However, this
troubling connection between race and execution is one of the reasons
King gives for writing John Coffey as a black man. Responding to Spike
Lee’s charges of Coffey as a “super Negro” (qtd. in Magistrale, Hollywood’s
13), King says “It’s complete bullshit. Coffey was black for one reason only:
it was the one sure thing about his character that was going to make cer-
tain that he was going to burn. That was the situation I was trying to set
up. It was completely plot driven and had nothing to do with black and
white” (ibid.). While Coffey embodies many of the characteristics of the
traditional “Magical Negro,” The Green Mile also raises questions about the
racial prejudices of the criminal justice system, including the fact that Cof-
fey’s lawyer never comes to see him after he is imprisoned and there is
no possibility presented for an appeal. Coffey has been judged not only
by a court of law but also in the court of public opinion where, largely
because of his race and his size, he is deemed monstrous, guilty beyond
a shadow of a doubt. Coffey’s position as a “Magical Negro” within this
context is “particularly unnerving . . . [because] the concerns and condi-
tion of African American communities from which these magical Negroes
emerge are set aside in favor of exercising supernatural powers on behalf
of the white characters who represent the very social and political struc-
ture that oppresses them” (Kent 117). As Magistrale explains, “Coffey is
assumed to be guilty from the moment he is found holding the dead girls”
(Hollywood’s 140). Cradling the Detterick twins’ bodies, he is mourning his
inability to heal them, to bring them back to life, when he tells the arriving
posse that “I tried to take it back, but it was too late” (Two Dead Girls 35).
Seen through the lens of racism, prejudice, and hatred, Coffey’s words sign
his own death warrant, read as a confession by those rabid with grief and
vigilantism desperate for someone to blame.5
A final key theme—once again intertwined with the earlier ones of cap-
ital punishment and race—is John Coffey’s position as a sacrificial Christ
figure, with the two men even sharing the same initials. As Okorafor-
Mbachu argues, “When you have a character sacrificing himself or herself
for another character, this is not, in and of itself, bad. In religious texts,
sacrifice is most often treated as an act that makes one godly,” a trend seen
across religious and spiritual traditions from Jesus to the Buddha Gautama
and Krishna (Okorafor-Mbachu). These sacrificial characters come to help
others, to bring them enlightenment and salvation. Like Jesus, John Cof-
fey acts for the good of others, performs healing miracles, and ultimately,
gives his life. Paul F. M. Zahl argues that with The Green Mile, “King has
written an imaginative and dense parable of the triumph of sacrificial love
over wickedness and false accusation,” rich with Christian themes includ-
ing “subsitutionary atonement, the cross of Golgotha, and the unanswer-
able sovereignty of God” (82). Paul even finds himself in a crisis of faith
as Coffey’s execution nears, imagining himself akin to Jesus’ executioners;
as Brutus Howell asks him, “we’re fixing to kill a gift of God . . . What am
I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty
and he asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job?” (Coffey on the
Mile 78).6 However, combined with the interconnected themes of capital
punishment and race, Okorafor-Mbachu argues that the sacrifice made by
Coffey carries a different weight and significance, since “self-sacrificing
‘characters’ come in on a pedestal. Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna are usu-
ally the center of the plot. The fact of who they are makes their sacrifices
meaningful. The same cannot be said about the Magical Negro. The Magi-
cal Negro is expendable because he or she isn’t anyone special.” As Kim
D. Hester-Williams argues, this appeals to an underlying racial discord in
many viewers and expiates any guilt they may feel about Coffey’s unjust
execution, since “Elevating Coffey to the divine status of Savior allows the
spectator to dismiss his suffering, especially since he suffers for the ‘good’
of others; he saves those who can be saved. They are not, presumably, as he
is, economically or socially dispensable” (emphasis original). Considered
separately or in their interconnections—and particularly in light of recent
high-profile cases of violence against African American men—the themes
of capital punishment, race, and sacrifice provide for an insightful critical
consideration of The Green Mile, as well as its continued resonance in con-
temporary American culture.
Twenty-First Century Serialization
Serial publication is often viewed as a remnant of the publishing past, well

evidenced by the Dickensian allusions that informed many responses to
and reviews of The Green Mile at the time of its publication. However,
serialization has experienced resurgent popularity in the early twenty-
first century and this technique is alive and well in publishing and other
contemporary media, from film and television to graphic novels, video
games, and podcasts.7 As Plympton’s8 Jennifer 8 Lee and Yael Goldstein
Love explain in their “Short History of Serial Fiction,” “serials are compul-
sively appealing . . . So much so that every new medium for the past two
centuries has used them to establish its audience,” with the format expand-
ing beyond literature to encompass film, radio, and television as well. Indi-
vidual television episodes often end with an unresolved narrative to keep
viewers tuning in week after week, while the cliffhanger is a hallmark of
season finales for ongoing series in just about every genre of television.
On the big screen, the growing trend of book to film adaptations being
released as multiple movies has also capitalized upon this serial narrative
approach, using a cliffhanger to draw faithful fans back the following year
for the next installment. This is an approach that has worked especially well
with fantasy adaptations, including the final installments of popular Harry
Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games series, each of which were released as
two films, and the three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
prequel, The Hobbit, which was adapted by Peter Jackson and released as
three separate films from 2012 to 2014.
Serialization has also been making its mark in other media formats as
well. One recent example of this is the immensely popular podcast Serial.
A non-fiction podcast, the first series focused on a murder investigation,
with executive producer Sarah Koenig “investigating the 1999 mur-

der of high school senior Hae Min Lee, allegedly by Hae’s ex-boyfriend
Adnan Sayed” (Maerz 15), who was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for
the crime. In Serial, Koenig reviews the evidence and investigation in an
attempt to get at the truth of what happened to Lee and whether Sayed is,
in fact, her murderer. While many listeners enthusiastically embraced the
unique format of Serial, others found the lack of formulaic progression
frustrating. As Melissa Maerz explains in “Serial: The Podcast You Need
to Hear,” “Of course, real life isn’t tightly plotted like television. Some fans
have complained that certain episodes of Serial, like the one in which Koe-
nig consults the Innocence Project about the holes in the case, do nothing
to further our knowledge of who killed Hae. But maybe that’s the whole
point. There’s no showrunner writing this story” (16). Instead, Serial’s for-
mat and the ongoing exploration helmed by Koenig echo the uncertainties,
false starts, and constantly negotiated perceptions of real life. As Maerz
points out, in Serial, “Red herrings aren’t placed in our path for some nar-
rative reason—they’re just a fact of life” (ibid.). In its first season, Serial was
released on a weekly basis and, like King, Koenig and company had no idea
where the season would end up, though the podcast’s stakes are consider-
ably higher, including Sayed’s possible exoneration and closure for the Lee
family. The nature—and even potential existence—of a narrative conclu-
sion is never assured. As Maerz reflects, “Even if Koenig finds enough evi-
dence to exonerate Adnan by the season’s end, the law can’t free a wrongly
imprisoned man in time for the finale. And say Adnan is exonerated—that
doesn’t mean he’s not guilty” (ibid.). In addition to engaging the listener in
this dynamic and interactive way, considering the evidence alongside Koe-
nig, Serial also forces listeners to consider the nature of the criminal justice
system, their own biases and assumptions, and the ways in which real life is
often shoehorned into less complex and contradictory forms, for the sake
of familiarity and easier consumption.
Finally, serialization has become a distinguishing feature of a wide
variety of ebooks, reflecting not only shifts in literary trends but the way
people read as well. As the Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Alter argues,
serialization “is rebounding in the digital era . . . [because] The growing
use of tablets, smartphones, and e-ink devices has created a vibrant new
market for short fiction as readers flock to stories they can digest in one
sitting.” E-readers from the Kindle to the nook and even smartphones have
changed the way people read, allowing them to have a wealth of options
at their fingertips at any given moment.9 Given this dynamic new market,
both traditional and digital-exclusive publishers “are experimenting with
the same type of short, episodic fiction that weekly or monthly periodi-
cals published in the 19th century” (Alter), with serial publication focused
especially in popular genres such as romance/erotica and science fiction.

Sean Platt, co-author of several serialized digital novels, argues that “The
Charles Dickens model actually fits better now than ever because peo-
ple want bite-sized content” (qtd. in Alter). Some of these are published
as stand-alone installments, much like The Green Mile, though with the
accessibility of e-readers, for some works, readers can pay the purchase
price for the serial novel and their e-reader will automatically download
each new segment as it is released (Alter). As Keith Wagstaff points out
in “Must Read: Serial Novels Get Second Life with Smartphones, Tablets,”
digital serial publication makes good financial sense too: “From a sales
perspective, it’s probably a better idea than returning to traditional pub-
lishing. Sales of ebooks exploded from $68 million in 2008 to $3 billion in
2012, according to the Association of American Publishers. That represents
an increase from 1 percent of the market to 23 percent of the market—all
while hardcover and paperback book sales fell flat or declined.”
However, contemporary readers and viewers have become even more
accustomed to instant gratification than they were in the mid-1990s and
at the other end of the consumption continuum, original television series’
seasons are now often available all at once, ideal for binge viewing, such as
Netflix original programming like Orange Is the New Black (2013–present)
and the fourth season of the network-cancelled cult series Arrested Devel-
opment (2013), and Amazon original series, including Transparent (2014–
present). As a result, the serial approach—whether in film, television, or
literature—often tries the patience of consumers who feel entitled to the
next segment on their own terms and within their own time frame. For
example, Amazon reviews of Beth Kerry’s romance novel Because You Are
Mine, which was released in eight segments, express this frustration and
dissatisfaction: “‘I am really sick of sitting down to read this book and just
when you are enjoying it, it ends,’ one Amazon reviewer seethed. ‘Release
the whole book, I would enjoy it more,’ another wrote” (qtd. in Alter). This
echoes some readers’ sentiments toward The Green Mile as well, as they
impatiently awaited the next month’s installment, though many readers
learned to savor this anticipation as a defining facet of this unique publica-
tion approach.
10
Ebooks
T he premiere of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader in 2007 was a game-changer

for the book world, impacting both the business end of publishing
and the experience of many readers, though the pros and cons of this new
development are still being energetically debated almost a full decade later.
With often significantly lower per book prices, the instant gratification
of acquiring new books with a single click, and the possibility of having
access to a full library in the palm of one’s hand, e-readers are a boon for
avid readers, though for many the virtual version falls short of the full
experience of a print book, with its heft, presence, and aesthetic appeal,
including that familiar and oft-celebrated “old book smell.”
Both mediums have their own unique appeal and very few readers do
so exclusively within the digital domain, with e-readers instead creating
“more ways for consumers to access their books and music” (LaFemina)
rather than replacing print books. As Gerry LaFemina explains in “How
the Publishing World Acclimated to the Digital Revolution (Part 1),”
according to a Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project
study, “about 20 percent of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past
year,” a rate that jumps with younger readers to 47% (LaFemina). The near-
effortless accessibility of e-content may also be impacting readers’ habits
as well, in both content and quantity. As LaFemina summarizes the Pew
study findings, “Ebook users tend to read more books than those who read
only print material. A typical ebook user read 24 books in the past year,
compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-ebook users. A third
of those people who read e-content say they read more than they did before
ebooks” (LaFemina). In addition, the lower production cost of ebooks also
creates more publishing opportunities for niche or specialty authors, both
self-published and under the umbrella of major publishers, and LaFemina
argues that ebooks are “changing not only how we read but what we read
and by whom.” While the majority of readers still savor the experience of
browsing through their favorite bookstore—whether a massive Barnes and

Noble or their independent neighborhood shop—Amazon’s Kindle store
and other ebook marketplaces have a vast collection, far more than any
physical bookstore could feasibly keep in stock, and all available with a
single click. Beyond accessibility issues, ebook exclusives also “let authors
experiment with style and form” (Lee), proving to be a format especially
well suited to works that are longer than a traditional short story but
shorter than a full-length novel.
King has embraced this new format, publishing electronically even
before the mainstream popularity of e-readers, such as the Kindle and
Barnes and Noble’s nook. In 2000, King’s novella Riding the Bullet was
published as the first ebook, priced at $2.50; it “sold over 400,000 copies
in the first 24 hours” (Habash) and “was downloaded over 2.5 times per
second during its peak days” (Charski). Riding the Bullet tells the story
of Alan Parker, a college student who hitchhikes back home when his
mother is hospitalized following a stroke and catches a ride with a dead
man. With the familiar eeriness of a traditional ghost story or campfire
tale, King taps into the rich vein of urban—and rural—legend to create the
story of a young man faced with a terrible decision: to choose between his
own life and that of his mother. However, as Alan thinks to himself mid-
ride, “the worst stories are the ones you’ve heard your whole life. Those
are the real nightmares” (Riding 539). Riding the Bullet is a substantial
story, running just over fifty pages in the mass market paperback edition
of Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002), the collection in which it
was eventually published in print; it is both narratively familiar and atmo-
spherically disturbing. Reflecting on his decision to market Riding the Bul-
let as an individual ebook, King says that in working with new mediums,
part of this drive for experimentation and evolution is simply “Curiosity.
I just wanted to see what would happen” (qtd. in Lehmann-Haupt 93).
In addition, from a writing standpoint, as he explains in the introduction
to Everything’s Eventual, “it’s about trying to see the act, art, and craft of
writing in different ways, thereby refreshing the process and keeping the
resulting artifacts—the stories, in other words—as bright as possible” (xi).
As the overwhelming number and speed of downloads of Riding the Bullet
demonstrate, King’s experiment in publishing was inarguably successful
from a marketing standpoint and, in fact, made him an overnight sen-
sation among business and marketing audiences in a way unlike any he
had experienced earlier in his career, despite his popular success and long-
standing best-seller status. However, as King was disappointed to find, in
the midst of all these questions about and enthusiasm surrounding the
groundbreaking technological and commercial success of Riding the Bul-
let, “it was always the business aspect of it, the bucks, that was driving the
EBOOKS 139
interest” (qtd. in Lehmann-Haupt 93). As King mourns, “nobody cared

about the story. Hell, nobody even asked about the story, and do you know
what? It’s a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the
job done” (“Introduction: Practicing” xix, emphasis original). As is per-
haps inevitable for the first of its kind, the novelty of the process eclipsed
the quality of the product itself, at least in the technological and marketing
sectors of the public audience. Riding the Bullet was the opening salvo in
the e-publishing revolution that waited just a few years down the road, and
brought some small bit of attention to the question of how we read what we
read, above and beyond the text itself.
In 2000, King also self-published a serial ebook project, The Plant, which
was posted in installments on his website. The Plant is written in the epis-
tolary style, made up a series of letters and interoffice memos that are the
pulse of the publishing offices of Zenith House, including details about the
voracious plant that takes over their offices and lives. Unencrypted, King
asked readers to pay on the honor system, with a recommended amount
of one dollar per installment. Beyond the story itself, King also “described
[The Plant] as a metaphor for the way the publishing industry views the
net” (qtd. In Flood). As King explained:
The Plant happens to be about a voracious supernatural vine that begins to

grow wild in a paperback publishing house. It offers success, riches and the
always desirable Bigger Market Share. All it wants from you in return is a
little flesh . . . a little blood . . . and maybe a piece of your soul . . . What made
The Plant such a hilarious internet natural (at least to my admittedly twisted
mind) was that publishers and media people seem to see exactly this sort of
monster whenever they contemplate the net in general and e-lit in particu-
lar: a troublesome strangler fig that just might have a bit o’ the old profit in
it. If, that is, it’s handled with gloves. (qtd. In Flood)
When King began The Plant, he made a deal with readers: he would keep
writing and releasing installments “only if at least 75 percent of its readers
complied with his honor-system payment plan” (“Stephen King Buries The
Plant”). While the honor system worked well for early chapters, it dwindled
as additional segments were released, plunging from 78 percent paying for
the first installment to only 46 percent paying for the fourth (ibid.). King
left the novel unfinished after the sixth chapter, which he released online
free of charge, though according to King, the money was not the sole moti-
vating factor. In the end, King says, the story just ran out of steam and
“there was always the sense of pushing the story along” (qtd. in Lehmann-
Haupt 93). While The Plant remains unfinished, King hasn’t written off
the possibility of returning to it, either in terms of the story itself or non-
traditional delivery methods.
While Riding the Bullet and The Plant opened the door on new
e-publication possibilities, they were far from the start of a revolution: to
maintain ideal and readable format, these early ebooks often had to be
printed (Stross), falling short of the accessibility that would come to charac-
terize ebooks with the advent of dedicated e-readers, such as the Kindle and
the nook several years later. With the increasing popularity of e-readers,
King has ventured further into mainstream e-publication with several
unique projects, including Kindle exclusives like UR, Kindle Singles, col-
laborative projects with other authors including Stuart O’Nan and Joe Hill,
and Guns, a non-fiction essay published in the immediate aftermath of the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in late 2012.
UR
When Amazon planned the release of the second version of its popular Kin-
dle, a partnership with King and his willingness to embrace new technology
was a natural fit. As King explained in an Entertainment Weekly column,
“Inspector of Gadgets,” in 2008 his agent, Ralph Vicinanza, told King that
Amazon was “going to introduce a new version of the Kindle . . . and asked
if I might like to write an original story to be published exclusively in that
format” (20). With this in mind, King wrote UR, a novella about a magical
Kindle, which gives English professor Wesley Smith access to worlds of lit-
erature beyond his own, millions of alternate universes—or urs—including
thousands of books unwritten in Wesley’s own. As King continued, “Gad-
gets fascinate me, particularly if I can think of a way they might get weird”
(ibid.), and Wesley’s Kindle is definitely weird, showing up the next day,
with no instruction booklet, and pale pink rather than the then standard-
issue white. Wesley quickly becomes obsessed with the Kindle, nearly hyp-
notized by the potential presented by “So many authors, so many Urs, so
little time” (UR, ch. 3). Wesley’s voracious reading takes a darker turn when
he discovers that in addition to literature, his Kindle can also be used to
access back issues of the New York Times in these alternate worlds, as well
as local newspaper stories from the future in his own universe, through
which he discovers a looming tragedy and with this knowledge, the chance
to avert it.1
Unlike King’s earlier experiments with e-publication, UR became part of
an ongoing conversation, an established trend with increasing popularity, if
short of widespread adoption. At the center of debates about e-readers ver-
sus print books is often not so much what people read but how they read,
they ways in which they access, interact with, and consume the text itself.
Wesley orders his Kindle in a pique, following a fight with his girlfriend
EBOOKS 141
Ellen that, at least on the surface, is about books and reading. Ellen is the
women’s basketball coach at the same college where Wesley teaches and
their argument carries an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, with Ellen
lashing out not only at Wesley but at the book he holds—and which holds
his attention—as well. With Wesley distracted by the book in his hand,
Ellen tears it from him and throws it across the room, demanding, “Why
can’t you read off the computer, like the rest of us?” (UR, ch. 1). This ques-
tion punctuates the end of their relationship, though in the later days, Wes-
ley orders the Kindle and “in a way he still didn’t completely understand,
he had done it to get back at her. Or make fun of her. Or something” (ibid.).
Wesley thinks of himself as above this populist entertainment and relishes
the idea of telling his colleagues and Ellen herself that he is “experimenting
with new technology” (ibid.). This negotiation of different ways of reading
plays out in Wesley’s literature classroom as well, where he and his students
have a spirited, tug-of-war debate over the merits of e-readers versus print
books.
E-readers have, for better or worse, changed the way readers interact
with the text before them. Well beyond the personal preferences of individ-
ual readers, these two different types of reading engage distinct parts of the
brain. According to a Public Radio International interview with Manoush
Zomorodi, “Neuroscience . . . has revealed that humans use different parts
of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the
more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’
reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having
your eyes dart around a web page” (“Your paper brain”). This non-linear
reading is in contrast to what Zomorodi calls “deep reading,” which is more
linear and engaged, the type of reading that most do with a printed text.
The majority of readers alternate between the types of reading in which
they engage—reading both in print and online, whether Internet text on
a computer screen or e-readers—which results in a balance of these mul-
tiple literacies and reading practices. However, as Zomorodi explains, “The
problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well.
And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep
reading part of your brain” (qtd. in “Your paper brain”). M. O. Thiruna-
rayanan similarly considers the distinctions between reading a printed
book and reading online, explaining that a traditional “printed book is
much more conducive to promoting thinking than the sophisticated Web”
because of the different ways a reader engages with and consumes the text.
As Thirunarayanan explains, with traditional reading “The time spent in
thought will in many instances enable a person to generate an answer to
the question that aroused his or her curiosity in the first place. On the Web,
it is an entirely different story, one where clicking dominates thinking.”
Without the deep thinking that accompanies traditional reading, it also

stands to reason that retention of material read electronically could be an
issue: once the answer is found, it doesn’t necessarily need to be remem-
bered or critically engaged with. After all, if the question comes up again,
with a quick Google search, the answer is just seconds away. This has a
wealth of potential repercussions for the digital generation, many of whom
are growing up with unprecedented screen time, from tablets and laptops
to smartphones and e-readers. As Wesley’s student Robbie Henderson
argues—an argument in which he is unanimously supported by his fellow
students—the Kindle has many advantages. As Robbie explains, “It’s pretty
neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type
as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there’s no paper or
binding” (UR, ch. 1). With these unique features, readers have significant
levels of choice, with the instant gratification of reading what they want
when they want, as well as altering the appearance of the text itself, includ-
ing font size and visual layout.2 Wesley is placated by these advantages,
though they fall short of his ideal reading experience and he responds to
these possibilities with the imprecation to his students that “Books are real
objects. Books are friends” (ibid., emphasis original). While Wesley extols
the merits of “old school” (ibid.) books and his students take up the charge
of e-readers, they come to the common ground that books “are ideas and
emotions” (ibid.), regardless of the medium in which they are read.
The debate of pros and cons between print and ebooks continues to
shape the landscape of contemporary reading. Alongside this ongoing dis-
cussion, markets continue to shift to appeal to consumer demands and as
Daisy Maryles explains in Publisher’s Weekly, “the publishing model has
indeed changed and . . . what is available in ebook format is ubiquitous”
(33). As the statistics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American
Life Project demonstrate, younger readers are much more likely than the
previous generation to access texts electronically, whether via e-readers,
laptops, tablets, or smartphones, and the experience of reading is undeni-
ably changing for many. So given his prolific publishing history and his
embrace of new technologies with UR and other works, where does King
come down on the print versus ebook debate? As he concluded his tech-
nological reflections in the “Inspector of Gadgets” column, despite the
many benefits and apps of e-readers, “my e-reader will never completely
replace my books . . . The real problem with e-readers, and what may save
the embattled publishing industry, is simply consumer resistance. There
are lots of advantages to the electronic devices—portability, instant buyer
gratification, nice big type for aging eyes like mine—but there’s a troubling
lightness to the content as well. A not-thereness” (20). At the end of the
day, books have a heft and presence that their electronic counterparts lack,
EBOOKS 143
despite the identical ideas that lie within. However, any new medium of
presentation will continue to provide King—and other authors—with a
new venue to transmit those ideas to their readers.
Mile 81
King has published several collections of novellas and stories over the
course of his career, where the issue of a specific piece’s length is incon-
sequential, but finding publishing venues for longer stories as individual
works is a challenge.3 Kindle Singles are an ideal fit for works that are
too long to be considered a short story yet too short to be published as a
standalone novel. Typically ranging from 5,000–30,000 words, the Kindle
Single format allows authors to present works “at their natural length,”
as Amazon’s press release termed it (qtd. in Gough). As The Guardian’s
Julian Gough explained, “Writers can seldom express ideas ‘at their nat-
ural length,’ because in the world of traditional print only a few lengths
are commercially viable” (Gough). There’s a set range for print works con-
sidered marketable and woe betide the author who strays outside those
parameters: “Write too long, and you’ll be told to cut it (as Stephen King
was when The Stand came in too long to be bound in paperback). Worse,
write too short, and you won’t get published at all. Your perfect story is
50 pages long—or 70, or 100? Good luck getting that printed anywhere”
(Gough). Kindle Singles fill this void very effectively, presenting shorter
works by both bestselling and lesser known authors for a lower price, with
most Kindle Singles costing under five dollars. Kindle Singles create a mar-
ket for works that would be unlikely to get standalone publication else-
where and, for an author such as King, with his legions of devoted fans,
can provide readers with new work to enjoy while they wait for the next
full-length novel or collection of stories.
In 2011, King published the ebook exclusive Mile 81. Less meta-textually
linked to its technology of transmission than UR—and therefore, perhaps
a bit less “gimmicky”—Mile 81 is classic King, picking up several themes
familiar from his larger body of work, including children in extraordinary
circumstances, cars with supernatural powers,4 and terrors from beyond
the stars. In Mile 81, King picks up these larger themes, but addresses them
in microcosm, with the action limited to an abandoned rest area over a few
summer afternoon hours. A quick pop of horror and unsettling eeriness,
Mile 81 has the feel of a vintage Twilight Zone episode: backstories remain
largely undeveloped aside from a few broad stroke character details, the
conclusion shies away from tidy narrative closure, and the horror itself
remains largely unexplained, temporarily averted but far from defeated.
The day begins with ten-year-old Pete Simmons, left behind by his
older brother and friends, setting out to explore the abandoned rest area
at Mile 81, where he finds all kinds of adolescent bacchanalia left behind
by older kids, from a half full bottle of vodka to a gallery of Hustler center-
folds. But as young Pete dozes off his found booze, a battered, mud-splat-
tered, and nondescript station wagon pulls to a stop on the exit ramp just
outside: empty, evil, and hungry, “an unearthly predator, luring unsuspect-
ing passersby to a hideous fate” (“Mile 81”). Over the course of the story’s
approximately eighty pages, concerned and well-meaning motorists pull
off the turnpike to offer their help, including a convention-bound insur-
ance man, a hefty woman hauling a horse trailer, and the Lussier family. As
Doug Clayton, the first person to stumble across the seemingly abandoned
car reaches out to touch it, his hand slides effortlessly through its surface
and almost instantaneously, “His fingers were barely there. He could see
only the stubs of them, just below the last knuckles where the back of his
hand started . . . He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus,
something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand”
(Mile 81, ch. 2). Clayton is quickly consumed by the car, only his cell phone
and wedding ring remaining on the pavement nearby, an ominous warning
to the next passerby. However, as in much of King’s fiction, an inability to
believe the impossible proves fatal and while the next people to encounter
the car rationalize what they see and attempt to reason away their deep
sense of unease, the car continues to feed, consuming Julianne Vernon,
Johnny and Carla Lussier, and Trooper Jimmy Golding. The Lussier chil-
dren, Rachel and Blake, witness the car devouring their parents and warn
Trooper Golding—as Rachel tells him, “you shouldn’t go near that car,
Trooper Jimmy. It bites and it eats and it’s sticky” (Mile 81, ch. 5, emphasis
original)—but in the tradition of hard-headed and logical folks who come
to bad ends in King’s fiction, Trooper Golding can’t resist a closer look, sure
that there must be a logical explanation, right up until the moment the car
consumes him as well.
In the end, it is the children who must save themselves. King’s canon is
full of both extraordinary children and ordinary children put in extraor-
dinary circumstances, from Danny Torrance of The Shining and Charlie
McGee of Firestarter (1980) to ’Salem’s Lot’s Mark Petrie and Desperation’s
David Carver. As Tony Magistrale argues in “Inherited Haunts: Stephen
King’s Terrible Children,” “Most of his fictional adolescents find them-
selves enmeshed in the dark complexities of an adult world; they are not
responsible . . . but they are nonetheless forced into coping with the conse-
quences of such events” (59). After Pete witnesses Trooper Golding disap-
pear into the car, he and the Lussier children take matters into their own
hands, as they must. As Pete thinks to himself, when the police show up
EBOOKS 145
“they wouldn’t believe. They would eventually, they’d have to, but maybe
not before the monster car ate a bunch more of them” (Mile 81, ch. 6).
With childlike simplicity, Pete takes his life in his hands and takes on the
car with nothing but a magnifying glass, though this is enough to succeed
where adult rationalization and curiosity have failed. The car’s flank begins
to blacken and then smoke and “it shot up into the blue spring sky. For a
moment longer it was there, glowing like a cinder, and then it was gone.
Pete found himself thinking of the cold darkness above the envelope of the
earth’s atmosphere—those endless leagues where anything might live and
lurk” (ibid.). The story ends with this incomplete and temporary reprieve,
with the future of the now-orphaned Lussier kids uncertain, the monster
chased away but far from bested.
A Face in the Crowd, with Stuart O’Nan
King’s passion for baseball in general and the Boston Red Sox in particular
is well known, an interest that has been reflected in some of his fiction as
well, including The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)—published as a
novel and later, in 2004, as a pop-up children’s book—and the specialty
press mini-book Blockade Billy (2010). In what would go on to become the
Red Sox World Series-winning season in 2004, King and fellow novelist
Stuart O’Nan5 began talking and writing about baseball, a conversation that
culminated in their co-authored book Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red
Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. As a Publisher’s Weekly review
summarizes their collaboration, “O’Nan acts as a play-by-play announcer,
calling the details of every game . . . while King provides colorful com-
mentary, making the games come alive by proffering his intense emotional
reactions to them” (“Faithful” 32). In 2012, King and O’Nan collaborated
once more, bringing their dual loves of baseball and fiction together with
the Kindle Single A Face in the Crowd.
While UR’s tension tapped into a Kindle with otherworldly powers, in
A Face in the Crowd, Dean Evers’s television and cell phone prove to be an
unexpected link to the afterlife, as well as to his own past sins and regrets.
A widower living in Florida, baseball—specifically Tampa Bay Devil Rays
baseball, his adopted snowbird team—is one of Dean’s great pleasures,
often on the television as he sits down to his solitary dinners. The games
are a harmless entertainment, good for filling his lonely hours, until one
night he sees a face from his past: his childhood dentist Dr. Young, “sitting
alone in his white sanitary smock with his thin, pomaded hair slicked back,
solid and stoic as a tiki god” (King and O’Nan). As the nights and games
pass, Dean continues to see familiar faces in the crowd, including Lester
Embree, a dead boy from his childhood; his domineering former business
partner Leonard Wheeler; and his departed wife, Ellie. “The shadows from
Dean’s past get closer with each game” (Rogers 35) and as Dean looks upon
these specters he must also confront his own old sins: Dean and his child-
hood friends bullied Lester and shortly thereafter the boy disappeared and
was discovered drowned in a local pond. Dean blackmailed Wheeler in
order to buy him out of their shared business and he was unfaithful to his
wife, having an affair with his secretary. Later, he sees a girl he raped as a
young man, though he glosses over the true nature of this sexual assault,
recalling her as “the one who’d been sort of semiconscious—or maybe
unconscious would be closer to the truth—when he’d had her” (King and
O’Nan, emphasis original). The ghosts are not content to simply appear
to Dean, but instead reach out to him, implicating him, drawing him
toward them. When he sees Lester, “the quiet boy Evers and his friends
had witnessed being pulled wrinkled and fingerless from Marsden’s Pond
rose and pointed one fish-nibbled stub not at the play developing right
in front of him, but, as if he could see into the air-conditioned, dimly lit
condo, directly at Evers” (ibid.). After Dean’s dead wife appears on the tele-
vision screen, right behind home plate, then calls him on his cell phone
and takes him to task for his many shortcomings—his infidelity, being a
largely absent father in their son’s life—Dean swears off watching baseball.
That is, until the night that his old friend Chuckie Kazmierski calls to tell
him that he can see Dean on television, right behind home plate for the
Rays—Red Sox game. Racing down to Tropicana Field in an attempt to
come face-to-face with this ghostly version of himself, Dean becomes the
ghost, learning of his own recently discovered death as in the ballpark seats
around him, Dean is surrounded by “all the people he’d ever wronged in his
life” (King and O’Nan), forced to face the sins he has committed against
others as his former solace transforms into purgatory.
In the Tall Grass, with Joe Hill6
King has become a repeat collaborator with his son and fellow horror
writer, Joe Hill, including their work on the short story “Throttle” and its
graphic novel adaptation, Road Rage, both of which are discussed in the
next chapter. In 2012, King and Hill collaborated on a long story, In the Tall
Grass, which was originally published over two separate summer issues of
Esquire magazine and then released as a Kindle Single in October of that
same year, through which it would reach a significantly larger audience.
Reminiscent of King’s classic short story “Children of the Corn,” In the
Tall Grass begins mid-road trip, in the rural expanses of the Great Plains,
when Cal and Becky DeMuth—a brother and sister duo rather than the
EBOOKS 147
troubled husband and wife of “Children of the Corn”—hear cries for help
from a field of tall grass. Like the good Samaritans who meet their grisly
end at the abandoned Mile 81 rest stop, the DeMuths stop to help and
find themselves drawn ever further into the field and ever deeper into a
nightmare. In the Tall Grass is also similar to Mile 81 in that it addresses
horror tropes familiar from King and Hill’s longer works in microcosm,
including loss, isolation, and the sacrifices that must be made for sur-
vival. In Danse Macabre, King argues that good horror does its work on
two levels: the first is what he calls the “gross-out” (3), the visceral abjec-
tion of blood, guts, and gore. The second is more psychological, more
nuanced and here “on another, more potent level, the work of horror
really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search . . . [which is] looking for is
the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive
level” (Danse Macabre 4). Much of contemporary horror relies heavily on
the first of these techniques, but King argues, “it is on that second level of
horror that we often experience that low sense of anxiety which we call
‘the creeps’” (Danse Macabre 6). In the Tall Grass achieves both of these
types of horror, with a bit of Lovecraftian cosmic terror thrown in for
good measure.
After Cal and Becky’s instinctual humanitarian response to save the
woman and child lost in the tall grass, the situation quickly takes on an
ominous tone, a creepy and not quite right sense of dread. Once they enter
the field of grass, they are almost immediately separated and no matter
how they call, follow one another’s voices, and search for each other, they
remain apart. Disorientation sets in and “reality was starting to feel much
like the ground underfoot: liquid and treacherous. [Cal] could not man-
age the simple trick of walking toward his sister’s voice, which came from
the right when he was walking left, and from the left when he was walking
right. Sometimes from ahead and sometimes from behind. And no matter
which direction he walked in, he seemed to move farther from the road”
(King and Hill, In the Tall Grass). Once lost, it is impossible to find their
way again and the field is constantly shifting them and shifting around
them. There is plenty of “gross-out” horror to be found among the tall
grass, including dead animals, maggoty decomposition, and cannibalistic
feasts, but the true terror of In the Tall Grass is in the dehumanization of
those who are lost within it, as screams turn into laughter and men turn
into monsters.
Deep in the heart of the tall grass is an artifact of cosmic horror, a
black rock that, once touched, enlightens those who are lost, shows them
the way, and makes them one with the grass that surrounds them. As
Lovecraft explains cosmic terror in his classic essay Supernatural Horror
in Literature,
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,
or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere
of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and porten-
tousness becoming its subject of that most terrible conception of the human
brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of
Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the
daemons of unplumbed space. (28)
At the center of the field, presumably the cause of its ever-shifting direc-
tions and the madness of those trapped within, is the black rock. As the lost
boy, Tobin, tells Cal, “When you touch the rock—hug it, like—you can see.
You just know a lot more. It makes you hungrier, though” (King and Hill,
In the Tall Grass). Lovecraft’s stories are full of men and women who read
what they shouldn’t or look upon what they should turn away from, and
whose sanity is lost as a result, from “The Call of Cthulhu” to “The Rats in
the Walls,” and the irresistible knowledge Cal, Becky, and the others gain
through the black rock in the tall grass seals their fate and dooms them
to a never-ending nightmare. Cosmic horror and real life horror intersect
once again when Cal comes to the realization that the people who live near
the field cannot be oblivious to its effect: “They probably love this old field.
And fear it. And worship it . . . And sacrifice to it” (King and Hill, In the Tall
Grass, emphasis original). Having been sacrificed, they have no choice but
to call to others to do the same. Touching the rock and becoming one with
the field of grass, Cal and Becky’s are among the desperate voices that cry
out for help to the next passersby.
Guns
Another unique feature of ebooks is the potential for expedited publication,

since without the labor intensive process of print publication—including
layout, print, binding, and shipping—ebooks can make it from author to
reader significantly faster. An excellent example of this is King’s essay Guns,
his reflection on gun violence in America, written in the immediate after-
math of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Con-
necticut,7 where, on December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook
Elementary School and he killed twenty children and six adults. The horror
of this violence radiated outward from Newtown and set fire to the long-
standing debate over gun control in America.
In Guns, King provides an overview of the media culture surround-
ing school shootings and other acts of rampage violence in his opening
chapter, “The Shake.” With 22 distinct stages, King chronicles the media
EBOOKS 149
response to this type of violence from the shooting itself, to initial specula-
tive coverage, video and eyewitness reports, expert interviews, and heated
tugs of war between politicians, the gun control lobby, and the National
Rifle Association, all of which eventually becomes shunted to the margins
by a new, newsworthy disaster and forgotten, at least until the next school
shooting, when it is all repeated step-by-step once again (Guns, ch. 1). He
goes on to discuss his novella Rage, which he pulled from publication after
it was linked to several school shootings, as well as the current climate of
the gun control debate in America. King wraps up Guns with a series of
three suggestions: comprehensive background checks, a ban on magazines
that hold more than ten rounds, and a ban on guns classified as “assault
weapons” (Guns, ch. 6).
King positions himself to take a moderate stance, lamenting that “Political
discourse as it once existed in America has given way to useless screaming”
(Guns, ch. 3). Rather than staking out and defending one corner of an overly
simplistic pro or con debate, King instead “repeatedly emphasizes the need
for all sides to work together” (Charles). As both a liberal “blue-state Ameri-
can” and unapologetic gun owner, King appeals to readers from a wide range
of perspectives and, as David Haglund argues, “This already puts him more
in the middle on this issue than many gun control advocates, and probably
gives him at least a little bit of credibility with some gun owners.” As The
Guardian’s Rory Carroll writes of Guns, “In folksy, salty prose which blends
policy prescription with dark humour, King alternately cajoles, praises and
insults gun advocates in what appears to be a genuine pitch to change their
minds.” King’s goal was to interject this argument into the conversation tak-
ing place in the immediate aftermath of the tragic violence at Sandy Hook,
and the Kindle Single format allowed him to do exactly that: the shootings
took place on December 14, 2012, and Guns was released little more than a
month later, on January 25, 2013. As King explained, “I think the issue of an
America awash in guns is one every citizen has to think about. If this helps
provoke constructive debate, I’ve done my job. Once I finished writing ‘Guns,’
I wanted it published quickly” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). As a result of the
immediacy available for e-publications, King finished Guns and submitted
it to Amazon, which had it in the hands of readers only a week after he had
completed the essay. In this respect, the Kindle Single format has the poten-
tial to have a profound impact on the discourse surrounding current events
and issues. As Ron Charles of the Washington Post points out, “Amazon’s
Kindle Single platform is part of a dramatic shift in the publishing industry
that allows authors to respond to current events quickly and in longer form
that most magazines and newspaper op-ed sections can accommodate,” a
further extension of the Kindle Single’s niche for works that are longer than a
traditional essay or short story but shorter than a standalone book.
With Guns, King’s argument reached a wide audience, though whether

it was the most productive possible audience or had the dialogue-sparking
impact he was aiming for is open to debate, and in this case, the Kindle
Single format’s greatest strength may also be one of its greatest weak-
nesses. After the publication of Guns, many readers posted their personal
reviews of and responses to King’s essay on its’ Amazon page. As the New
York Times’s Benjamin Samuel writes in “Why Stephen King Was Wrong
to Publish ‘Guns’ as a Kindle Single,” “Although Amazon reviews are far
from the ideal forum for thoughtful discourse, the numbers have a lot to
say. Of the 100 most helpful 5-star reviews, 75% are marked ‘Amazon Ver-
ified Purchase’ (meaning the customer at least bought the eBook). Of the
98 total 1-star reviews, that percentage drops to 22.” What these numbers
indicate, Samuel explains, is that “we can assume that 78% of the 1-star
reviewers, the people who claim to disagree with King’s views, likely
haven’t even read the book. They are simply responding to the notion of
an anti-gun book, rather than the contents of this book” specifically. This
type of review sabotage frequently occurs in response to strongly par-
tisan and emotionally loaded topics. For example, Jody Raphael’s book
Rape Is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a
Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis elicited a plethora of one-star reviews,
the majority of which focus on her critical analysis of the Jerry Sandusky
case and its repercussions for Penn State football, with little context indi-
cating reviewers had read the book or considered the issues impacting
rape and sexual assault as a whole. Another example is Alexandra Rob-
bins’s Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, of which many self-identified
Greek life participants posted scathing one-star reviews, again without
much context or consideration of the book in its entirety; one anony-
mous poster even begins her review on this book’s Amazon page with
the confession that “A [sorority] sister of mine I hadn’t spoken with in a
while asked me to write a negative review for this book” (“Pledged”). As
Forbes’ Suw Charman-Anderson writes of these “fake reviews,” “Carpet-
bombers do not leave negative reviews in order to help readers avoid a
bad book, they do it to undermine the reader’s confidence in positive
reviews, damage the book’s ranking in Amazon and thus that author’s
sales.”8 There are almost no feasible responses to effectively address this
issue and as Charman-Anderson continues, “At the core of the problem
is the fact that there are huge benefits to behaving unethically but very
little cost for those caught doing so.” As these examples show, readers and
consumers with strong affiliations—whether to the NRA, their college
sports team, or their Greek organization—will defend those affiliations
and allegiances staunchly, loudly, and with or without critically consider-
ing the opposing perspective being offered.
EBOOKS 151
By publishing Guns as a Kindle Single, as a work that must be bought

and paid for—even at the low price of 99 cents—King may have distanced
himself from the very audience he most wanted to reach. As Samuel
writes, when it comes to paying for the pleasure, most readers aren’t “will-
ing to pay to have anyone, even Stephen King, tell them that their beliefs,
values, and behaviors are wrong.” Perhaps if no buy-in—either literal or
figurative—had been required, King’s argument may have gotten a more
wide-reaching and diverse range of readers, including those who disagree
with his position and arguments. However, given the length and complex-
ity of King’s essay, as well as his drive to get it to readers as soon as pos-
sible, it is hard to imagine a publishing medium more ideally suited to this
work than the unique Kindle Single format. No publication medium will
ever be without its flaws, perfect for every reader and capable of achiev-
ing every reading, writing, and marketing aim, but the Kindle Single has
created a unique space to reimagine what writing can be and what it can
achieve.
11
Graphic Novels
A nother non-traditional publishing format in which King has become

active in the last decade is that of graphic novels, both adaptations and
original narratives, including his previously discussed contribution to Scott
Snyder’s American Vampire: Volume 1. In 2007 the first installment of The
Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born was released by Marvel, inspired by King’s
epic seven-novel Dark Tower series and its gunslinger protagonist Roland
Deschain. King said in an interview prior to the first issue’s release, “The
first few issues . . . are almost entirely drawn from the books. Readers will
recognize them and hopefully be as thrilled as I am” (qtd. in Colton 01d).
However, after these early issues, Marvel’s Dark Tower series moved beyond
the narrative of King’s own books, delving into times and aspects of Roland’s
life that were not featured in the original series, going on to publish nearly
a dozen collections featuring the Gunslinger’s exploits, including The Dark
Tower: The Long Road Home (2008), The Dark Tower: The Journey Begins
(2011), and The Dark Tower: Last Shots (2013). In 2008, Marvel also began
publishing a graphic novel adaptation of King’s expansive novel The Stand
with Captain Trips (2010), American Nightmares (2010), and The Night Has
Come (2013). There have also been standalone graphic novels developed
from King’s work, including N. (2010), based on a novella featured in his
2008 collection Just After Sunset, and Little Green God of Agony, a 2012 web
comic adapted from a short story of King’s featured in the 2011 anthology A
Book of Horrors. King has also collaborated with his son and fellow horror
writer Joe Hill1 with Road Rage, which includes graphic novel adaptations
of King and Hill’s “Throttle” and the iconic Richard Matheson story “Duel,”
from which “Throttle” took inspiration. While the last several years have
provided King fans with a wealth of graphic novel adaptations, The Dark
Tower and The Stand can be challenging to incorporate into classroom
discussion because of the extensive nature of the King novels upon which
they are based, with the Dark Tower series spanning seven novels and
thousands of pages and the uncut edition of The Stand topping out at over
at well over a thousand pages. However, N., Little Green God of Agony, and
Road Rage are easily incorporated into class reading and discussion, with
each also providing the opportunity to address the intersection of unique
publication contexts.
Teaching Graphic Novels
In recent years, graphic novels have been making their way into a wide
variety of classrooms, from elementary schools to college courses and
libraries of all kinds, to teach not just classic and contemporary literature,
but also memoir, history, science, and rhetoric and writing. As Robert G.
Weiner and Carrye Kay Syma argue in Graphic Novels and Comics in the
Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art,
In the past 10 to 15 years, the use of sequential art in education has exploded.
Teachers in secondary and elementary schools, professors in universities,
and instructors of all kinds are using comics and graphic novels to illustrate
points about gender, history, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, and even
medicine. It is no longer a question of whether sequential art should be used
in educational settings, but rather how to use it and for what purpose. (1)
There are numerous benefits to teaching graphic novels, including engag-

ing reluctant readers, encouraging students to view familiar material from
a new perspective, and critically engaging students’ multiple literacies.
In particular, reading comics and graphic novels help students develop
visual literacy skills. As Lynell Burmark argues, “the primary literacy of the
twenty-first century is visual . . . Our students must learn to process both
words and pictures. To be visually literate, they must learn to ‘read’ (con-
sume/interpret) and ‘write’ (produce/use) visually rich communications.
They must be able to move gracefully and fluently between text and images,
between literal and figurative worlds” (5). Graphic novels are an excellent
tool for developing these skills and preparing students to critically engage
with and respond to a world that requires simultaneous and interactive
multiple literacies. Our contemporary culture is one of dynamic multi-
modal texts, a trend that extends well beyond the classroom. For instance,
the vast majority of websites include text and image, as well as advertise-
ments, links to related stories or materials, and even embedded video or
audio materials. In addition to strengthening students’ multimodal and
visual literacy skills, another characteristic which makes graphic novels an
ideal fit for classroom reading and discussion is that, as Weiner and Syma
argue, in reading these works “students are using a format that provides an
opportunity for active engagement. Their minds are lively when reading
GRAPHIC NOVELS 155
comics. The readers involve their minds with both the visual and narra-
tive content, hopefully resulting in great comprehension and interest” (5).
Finally, incorporating King’s graphic novels alongside his other literature,
whether short stories, novellas, or novels, highlights the constant negotia-
tion and adaptation of his work, his approach to writing, and its connec-
tion to the larger world.
Just as with more traditional literature—or any other discipline—
graphic novels have terminology and conventions that need to be mastered
and incorporated into discussion for students to have a truly engaged criti-
cal reading experience. While comics and graphic novels are often associ-
ated with children and young adults, that doesn’t necessarily mean that
the majority of students will be regular comic readers or, in some cases,
have ever read a comic or graphic novel. Even those who have may lack
the necessary terminology to critically analyze and respond to what they
read and see on the page, so a presentation of vocabulary and graphic novel
reading strategies is essential when incorporating graphic novels into the
classroom, regardless of discipline. Some key terms include:
Panel: Individual boxes within which a specific scene or action is con-

tained, panels can be a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from a small
portion of the page to a full-page image. As legendary comic book artist
Will Eisner explains in his 1985 book Comics and Sequential Art, panels
“secure control of the reader’s attention and dictate the sequence in which
the reader will follow the narrative” (Eisner 40).
Gutter: Visual spaces between the panels that separate one scene or action
from the next, gutters are one of the most dynamic ways in which the
graphic novel engages its readers through their “reading” of the gutters,
which require the audience to make a cognitive leap in terms of both the
time and space of the narrative being presented.
Captions or text boxes: Text that is often visually set apart from the image,
captions or text boxes provide the reader with background information,
often setting the scene or serving as a narrator guiding the reader through
the graphic novel’s story.
Dialog balloons: Another textual element, dialog balloons present the
reader with the characters’ spoken words or thoughts within the narrative.
Thought balloons: Another textual element, thought balloons communi-
cate a character’s unspoken thoughts to the reader, similar to literary internal
narration.
Sound effects: Textual expression of non-dialogue sounds, examples
include the “bam” of a punch, the “slam” of a door, or the “roar” of an
angry bear.
As analysis becomes more critically sophisticated, additional termi-

nology can be introduced, though this basic vocabulary sets students up
with the terms and critical reading tools essential to critically engage with
graphic novels, whether they are experienced readers or new to the for-
mat.2 In addition, many students benefit from a quick tutorial on reading
strategies specific to graphic novels, which build upon established reading
experiences—left to right, top to bottom—to incorporate the images and
the interaction between text and image.
Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art pro-
vides an excellent overview of the format, its history, and its near-limitless
possibilities. McCloud’s analysis emphasizes two key components to criti-
cally reading graphic novels: first, analyzing the image and text within indi-
vidual panels and second, completing narrative engagement in reading and
bridging the gap of the gutters. Every graphic novel has a unique visual style,
created by the artists; this can include a combination of factors, such as the
use of color versus black and white images, the distance or intimacy with
which characters are portrayed (long shot versus close-up, to draw on film
terminology), and the type and tenor of the lines themselves the artist uses
to create his or her images, whether thick or thin, solid or fragmented. This
combination of visual elements sets the tone for the graphic novel and ide-
ally, as with all literature, elicits an emotional response from the reader. The
textual elements of captions, dialog balloons, and thought balloons fill in
the narrative details, telling the story and giving voice to the graphic novel’s
characters. It is the combination of the visual and the textual—what we see
and what we read—which makes graphic novels such a unique, challenging,
and ultimately rewarding reading experience. As for the gutters between the
panels, McCloud explains that “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagina-
tion takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea . . .
Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something
must be there” (66–67). Julia Round further explains in Gothic in Comics
and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach, that “The reader’s activity takes
place in the gutter . . . for although the reader creates and realizes the bridg-
ing events of the story these will never be viewed: their existence is known,
but unseen, locked away in the gap between the explicit elements of the
story” (58). Given this challenge, the reader then becomes an active partici-
pant with the text, “filling in” the action occurring between the two panels.
“N.”
King’s “N.” first appeared as a short story in his 2008 collection Just After
Sunset. Through a series of documents, including letters, patient notes, and
GRAPHIC NOVELS 157
newspaper stories, “N.” tells the story of a psychiatric patient who comes
to see Dr. John Bonsaint, presenting with characteristic symptoms of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, including ritualistic counting and placing,
though his deeper concern is about the thinning of reality he has experi-
enced at Ackerman’s Field, outside the town of Motton, Maine. What N.
describes is a true Lovecraftian horror, dark and hungry, separated from
our world by thinnest of barriers, and with his realization of its existence, N.
is tasked with keeping it in place, in part by counting and touching the
stones in the field, of which there are sometimes seven and other times,
eight. N. commits suicide, passing his obsession on to Bonsaint, who in
turn leaves a manuscript that transmits this same compulsion to Bonsaint’s
sister Sheila, and through him, their childhood friend, Charlie, who is now
a well-known media figure and medical reporter. Through this ripple effect,
the knowledge of and obsession with the field, and the responsibilities that
accompany it, whether real or born of delusion, are passed from one to the
other, and as the story ends, N., Dr. Bonsaint, and Sheila are all dead by
suicide, and Charlie is on the way to Ackerman’s Field to see for himself.
“N.” follows in the tradition of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, in which
humanity is overshadowed by powers much greater than itself. As Pete
Rawlik outlines the characteristics of cosmic horror in his essay “Defining
Lovecraftian Horror,”
The hallmarks of Cosmic Horror include: (1) The majority of humanity

does not recognize its own insignificance, the indifference of the universe,
or its true nature; (2) Individuals, often detached from society, can gain per-
spectives that allow them to glimpse reality, but this often leads to insanity;
and, (3) Regardless of the knowledge or abilities gained, the protagonist has
little hope of affecting the course of events, or of revealing all that has been
hidden.
This type of horror was central in much of Lovecraft’s work, including his
entire Cthulhu mythos, and “N.” follows this tradition. N., Bonsaint, and
Sheila all see through the permeable barriers of their existence into the
darkness of the cosmos beyond and in doing so are forced to recognize their
own powerlessness and insignificance. Their new insight burdens them with
the responsibility to try to protect the world and all of humanity; however,
as Rawlik notes is often the case, these attempts are ultimately ineffectual. In
addition, much as in “The Call of Cthulhu,” where George Gammell Angell
leaves instructions for his notes to be destroyed, remarking that some things
are better—and safer—left unknown, the narrator reads on anyway, in “N.”
Sheila reads and passes on her brother’s notes, even though they are clearly
marked with his command to “BURN THIS” (King, “N.” 186). The curiosity
is too much of a temptation for each character—in the tradition of Pandora,

to whom Sheila refers (ibid.)—and ultimately leads to their destruction.
“N.” has been graphically adapted in two separate mediums, first as an
online series of short animated segments leading up to the publication of
Just After Sunset and later, in 2010, as a traditional graphic novel, with both
adaptations done by the same writer and artist team, Marc Guggenheim
and Alex Maleev. In the introduction to the graphic novel, Guggenheim
refers to the animated shorts as “mobisodes—short one to one-and-a-half
minute segments that could be downloaded easily on, say a mobile phone”
(iv). This graphic adaptation of N. ran in a series of 25 individual episodes,
no more than a couple of minutes each, with the run time of the entire
series totaling a bit under thirty minutes. The aesthetic of the images—
which would be echoed in the graphic novel that followed—are realistic
and often darkly shadowed, though lighter, warmer hues are also used to
contrast and emphasize the stones of Ackerman’s Field, backlighting them
as monolithic and looming. Many of the images that appear in the mobi-
sodes are the same as those that are later featured in the graphic novel,
though the video format provides some different possibilities for visual
storytelling, including movement and the combination of sound and
image. The majority of the images featured in the web series remain fixed
and static, much as they would be presented in traditional graphic novel
format; however, the combination with video allows the artists to negotiate
the images for emphasis, including zooming in on particularly significant
elements of the image or panning from one side to another to simulate
movement or underscore interaction between characters. There are also
some more traditionally moving images, such as the theme of shifting
clouds behind characters in several episodes and most significantly, the
growing darkness within the stones of Ackerman’s Field in Episode #22,
bringing to life the emerging threat of the monster within. Another unique
feature of the video web comic format is the combination of sound and
image, as the artists cut rapidly between individual images in tempo with
the narration, with the visual editing becoming more fast-paced in rhythm
with N.’s increasingly panicked and frenetic story. This technique is also
especially effective as N.’s obsession passes on to Bonsaint, who begins to
sound increasingly like his now-dead patient, and his obsession with the
field of stones, realization of the truth within, and quickly fragmenting
terror are reflected in Episode #20, with rapid cutting between isolated
images emphasizing this desperation, as well as directly echoing N.’s own
descent in earlier episodes.
In 2010, Guggenheim and Maleev built upon the material of the web
series’ mobisodes to create a graphic novel, which was published by Marvel.3
In addition to the characters created in the web series, the basic narrative
GRAPHIC NOVELS 159
structure, and many of the featured panels, in the graphic novel adapta-
tion, Guggenheim and Maleev also added to King’s original story, devel-
oping additional material, including the history of Ackerman’s Field and
what happens when Charlie arrives. In this way, King’s short story serves
as both the source for the central story and as inspiration for this narrative
expansion. The graphic novel adaptation of N. remains deeply invested in
documentation, with full-page panels of newspaper stories and letters. The
first page of N. begins just this way, with a close-up of a yellowed newspa-
per story titled “Tragedy in Motton,” recounting Andrew Ackerman’s 1911
murder of his wife and daughter, the burning of their home, and Acker-
man’s suicide, as well as the report that “There were no eyewitnesses to the
incident and Mr. Ackerman’s motivations remain unknown at this point”
(Guggenheim and Maleev 1). In the graphic novel’s final pages, Charlie
fills in some of the gaps in between, with two full-page panels depicting
his article “A River Runs Near It” (Guggenheim and Maleev 81–82), as he
recounts how the property was passed on to Ackerman’s niece, Norma,
who has inspired “‘ghost stories’ about an elderly woman who lived in a
ramshackle cabin on the outskirts of town in the woods that surround
Ackerman’s Field” (Guggenheim and Maleev 82). Norma is one of Gug-
genheim and Maleev’s key additions to the graphic novel and it is she
who passes the responsibility on to N., though he remains unaware of her
presence, even when she screams his name (Guggenheim and Maleev 31).
Despite his lack of awareness, their suffering becomes inextricably inter-
twined and their respective suicides are depicted in alternating panels,
united in the text boxes featuring Norma’s suicide note (Guggenheim and
Maleev 42–44), including her relief that “This man, this simple man, this
poor, terrible man, is coming to take my place” (Guggenheim and Maleev 44).
The other significant addition Guggenheim and Maleev make is in Char-
lie’s pilgrimage to Ackerman’s Field. In both King’s original story and the
web series, the tale ends on an ominous note, with Charlie’s own burgeon-
ing obsession as he heads out to see the field and the stones for himself,
his motivation masquerading as professional curiosity. Guggenheim
and Maleev take Charlie’s story a bit further and though the tenor of the
graphic novel’s conclusion echoes that of the previous two versions, the
ominously unfinished sense of the graphic novel’s final page implicates
the reader as well. In Guggenheim and Maleev’s N., Charlie returns to the
circle of stones to find groupies gathered there, several people who read
Charlie’s story and found themselves drawn to Ackerman’s Field and the
dark power it contains. As Charlie reflects in his own suicide note, “It’s
not like I knew they’d be there. But I should have guessed. I should have
expected it. American Report’s got a circ upwards of a million. You had
to figure someone would come out, try to visit the field. Truth be told, I
should be grateful there weren’t more, right?” (Guggenheim and Maleev

86, emphasis original). Having disclosed the secret and brought the mon-
ster near escape and the world to the brink of destruction, Charlie does
the only thing he can do: he shoots the gathered groupies, then turns the
gun on himself. However, even with this final obsession carried through to
its fatal climax, the influence of the stones in Ackerman’s Field is still not
silenced, as the last two pages of the graphic novel feature a full-page close
up of MapQuest directions (Guggenheim and Maleev 92–93), inviting the
reader to vicariously participate in the nightmare: to go, to see, to know.
All three versions of N.—King’s short story, the web series, and the
graphic novel—balance cosmic horror with more realistically grounded
fears, including fear of mental illness, bringing ancient terror into conver-
sation with very contemporary concerns. As Andy Bentley writes in his
review of the first issue of Guggenheim and Maleev’s graphic novel, as the
story progresses, “details such as Ambien, OCD (obsessi[ve] compulsive
disorder), and digital cameras emerge that root the story in modern times,”
though these contemporary details are simultaneously situated against the
backdrop of the 1911 murder and even further back, the ancient horror of
the creature within the circle of stones. As Bentley continues, considering
the representation of mental illness and diagnosis within N., “King deftly
interweaves past and modern fears by posing the question ‘what if the fear
felt by OCD victims was truly a guard to protect the world from harm?’ . . .
The implication that N’s disease could be transmitted like an infection is
quite disturbing.” All three of these versions of N. provide multiple layers
of horror in a complex combination of text and image for the reader—
or viewer—to sift through and critically consider, including the reality of
mental illness, the violence people do to one another, and the supernatural
horror of monsters beyond our understanding bent on destruction.
The Little Green God of Agony
King’s story “The Little Green God of Agony” was published in the 2011
anthology A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones. “The Little Green
God of Agony” tells the story of Kat McDonald, a nurse specializing in
pain patients, and her current charge, Andrew Newsome, a billionaire who
is looking for an easy path toward healing rather than doing the necessary
hard work of physical therapy that Kat prescribes for him. This desperate
search for an end to his pain leads him to Reverend Rideout, a faith healer
who promises to “expel” Newsome’s pain (King, “Little” 10), by locating
and exorcising the “demon god” (ibid.). Kat’s approach is significantly
more pragmatic: only proper physical rehabilitation and the necessary pain
GRAPHIC NOVELS 161
that accompanies it will heal Newsome. These two figures stand on oppo-
site sides of Newsome and on diametrically opposed ends of the question
of Newsome’s pain, the medical and the spiritual, though in their nego-
tiation of this truth, Kat must also come to some unflattering realizations
about herself. Rideout pinpoints Kat’s long experience with pain patients,
asking “don’t you think, first in the back of your mind, then more and
more towards the front, that they are lollygagging? Refusing to do the hard
work? Perhaps even fishing for sympathy? When you enter the room and
their faces go pale, don’t you think ‘Oh, now I have to deal with this lazy
thing again?’” (King, “Little” 20). Kat has become desensitized to the suf-
fering of her patients and as Rideout continues his analysis of her coldness,
her objections become increasingly uncertain, her voice growing softer
and less confident. Kat, who much like Newsome, had cast herself as the
hero of her own story, must come to terms with herself as compromised,
forced to question her every belief about Newsome and the patients who
have come before him. Rideout still views her with sympathy, however,
refusing to accuse her of outright cruelty: “I don’t believe you’re a coward,
merely calloused. Case-hardened” (King, “Little” 21). In bearing witness
to Rideout’s—ultimately successful—exorcism, Kat must not only see the
reality of Newsome’s pain and his miraculous healing, but she must also
face her own lack of empathy and challenge her own perception of herself
as a nurturer and healer. While she has an academic understanding of pain,
by the exorcism’s conclusion the feel of the green god creeping over the
back of her hand promises a more experiential possibility as well, harsh
retribution for her doubt and denial.
In October 2012 “The Little Green God of Agony” was adapted by
comic artist Dennis Calero as “The first horror web comic exclusive to
StephenKing.com” (“Little Green God”). The web comic was published
over a three-week period, with new “episodes” released on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays for a total of 24 installments. As McCloud wrote
in Reinventing Comics, his 2000 follow-up to Understanding Comics, web
publication has a great deal of potential uses for comics, with the message
transmitted through a new medium (177). McCloud embraces these new
possibilities, arguing that “For nearly any narrative challenge, digital com-
ics can offer potential solutions unlike anything ever attempted in print”
(226), including interactivity and using the overall format to echo the digi-
tal context. While the delivery of The Little Green God of Agony web comic
negotiates the possibilities of digital publication, released a single page at
a time over a period of three weeks, the layout of those individual pages
or episodes echoes that of a traditional comic book. The color scheme of
Calero’s The Little Green God of Agony echoes the ominous tone of King’s
story, visually characterized by stark black lines and deep shadows, with
the infusion of other colors as the story progresses: blue in early episodes
as Newsome tells his story and the suspense surrounding Rideout builds,
interspersed with warm oranges and yellows highlighting flashbacks of
the plane crash, which give way to black coupled with eerie green. As
Christopher Schulz argues of this color scheme, Calero’s “use of shadow,
light and color recalls the chiaroscuro cinematography of Universal’s clas-
sic monster films,” heightening the suspense and offering a connection to
the larger horror tradition. In Episode #12, Rideout instructs Newsome to
close his eyes and locate his pain, and in this specific moment, the defin-
ing colors of the web comic rise to prominence, with Rideout’s face high-
lighted in tones of pale green. As Kat voices her challenge to Newsome,
the colors revert once more to the blue that characterized earlier episodes,
though the green returns, at first pale and then gradually intensifying
as the exorcism gets underway in Episode #20, with the light and color
emerging from Newsome to infect and infuse the panels which follow,
dominating the final four episodes.
Another visual hallmark of The Little Green God of Agony web comic is
the shifting focus on and more significantly, the occlusion of specific char-
acters. While Newsome is a billionaire and sees himself as always in com-
plete control of those around him—if not necessarily able to control his
own body—Calero’s images negotiate between and visually underscore the
power and inscrutability of Kat and Rideout. As Dominic Umile explains,
“Calero inks the first six pages of this comic adaptation in such dramatic
plum, black, and blue that the facial features of bespectacled bystander
‘Rideout,’ a man of whom nurse Katherine MacDonald is suspicious, are
rarely very distinct.” In individual panels throughout the web comic, these
two characters appear isolated from the action, beyond Newsome’s influ-
ence and control, a separation that is visually echoed by their frequent
appearance as black figures, shown only in silhouette. In the final panel of
Episode #3, Rideout stands behind Kat, an ominous and looming figure
with only the lenses of his glasses illuminated, mysterious and enigmatic,
while in the left foreground of the panel, Kat looks from the corner of her
eye, attempting to see into the shadows and know the unknowable, “inter-
ested to see how the farmer-looking fellow would go about separating
Andy Newsome from a large chunk of his cash.” In the final panel of Epi-
sode #4, Rideout still stands apart, in this image a black silhouette loom-
ing over Newsome, again with only his glasses’ lenses highlighted as he
listens to Newsome’s story, a silent and somber judge, waiting to make his
pronouncement. Rideout’s face begins to take on additional detail toward
the end of Episode #8, with his facial features, moustache, and shirt collar
broadly sketched as he speaks his first, pivotal words: “I don’t heal.” In the
next panel, Rideout is shown more closely, though with less definition in a
GRAPHIC NOVELS 163
near-woodcut gray and black style as he completes his sentence: “I expel”

(King and Calero, Little, Episode #8). Rideout remains largely visible from
this point forward in the web comic, with realistic close-ups of Rideout’s
face, including an extreme close-up of Rideout’s eyes as he begins the exor-
cism, praying for strength (King and Calero, Little, Episode #19). However,
when Rideout and Kat engage in a test of wills after Kat’s outburst, Kat
and Rideout are shown alternately in silhouette, emphasizing the shifting
negotiation of power between them, as Kat questions first Rideout’s moti-
vations, then her own abilities and compassion (King and Calero, Little,
Episode #15). Kat’s “tough love” is underscored and questioned by this
presentation in silhouette again, making her a cipher, unknowable even to
herself once she has been forced to face her lack of empathy. Kat is shown
from behind in silhouette as she applies the transcutaneous electrical nerve
stimulation (TENS) to Newsome’s legs in Episode #3 and shown similarly
in silhouette in Episode #7, when Newsome is recounting—and objecting
to—one of the doctors’ prognosis that he was “manufacturing [his] own
pain,” as well as in the next episode as she encourages Newsome to endure
“a little more” (King and Calero, Little, Episode #8). On the final page, Kat
is once again shown in silhouette, transformed by her knowledge into a
new woman as she tells Melissa that she thinks she can finally imagine the
depths of true agony (King and Calero, Little, Episode #24).
The combination of image and text in the web comic also allows Calero
to navigate easily between and present an inter-textual representation of
King’s multiple modes of address in the short story, including omniscient
narration, Kat’s thoughts, and the spoken dialogue between characters. All
three of these types of address—and their interaction—are featured early
in the web comic, in the second panel of the first episode. In this panel,
the caption takes on the position of the omniscient narrator, immediately
setting up the context of Kat’s thwarted attempts to deliver Newsome’s
physical therapy: “Katherine MacDonald, Newsome’s private nurse, could
have pointed out, as she did at the start, that the TENS lost their efficacy
if they weren’t tight to the outraged nerves they were supposed to soothe,
but she was a fast learner. She loosened the strap a little, thinking . . .”
(King and Calero, Little, Episode #1). The ellipses which ends the omni-
scient narration of the caption is immediately picked up as it transitions to
Kat’s thought bubble, reflecting her internal dialogue as she anticipates the
next line of Newsome’s familiar story, that “The pilot told you there were
thunderstorms in the Omaha area” (ibid.), a line of thought that is similarly
picked up and vocalized by Newsome’s dialog balloon, in which he repeats
Kat’s thoughts almost word-for-word. In this single panel—and one that
sets the tone for the complexity and interaction that characterize the web
comic as a whole—Calero incorporates these multiple textual approaches
and, most significantly, the flow and interaction between them, to create
dynamic engagement and dialogue between the internal and external, the
silent and the spoken, and echoing both of these, the power relationship
and tenor of the interactions between Kat and her wealthy employer.
Finally, the web comic visually depicts the indescribable green blob,
which is described in vague terms in King’s short story as “something,”
“shapeless,” vaguely “bladderlike” (26), and repeatedly as “the green thing”
(26–27) and even more simply, “the thing” (27–28). However, just as the
“little green god” eludes written description, even in its visualized form
in the web comic it remains amorphous, vaguely defined, a relatively
unformed ball of bright green light, the intensification of the pale green that
characterized Rideout’s proposal earlier in the web comic. The green blob is
first seen in the final panel of Episode #22, foregrounded as a bright green
shape outlined with black, growing from intense green in the center to a
diluted and foggier green toward the borders, with the suggestion of spikes
or nodes along its outer edge. In the final two panels, the blob becomes
even more undefined, characterized instead by its movement, with thin
green lines charting its trajectory across the room, away from Newsome,
up Melissa’s arm and onto her face. The green blob takes precedence in the
horizontally extended final page, one of the central panels in a range of sev-
eral overlapping panels. However, even when the viewer is invited to look
directly at the “little green god,” here shown in isolation, divorced from any
action, it still remains unknowable, impossible to define or articulate. In
the web comic’s final panel, the green god becomes the ultimate unknown,
feared but unseen in an almost entirely black panel, broken up by only a
smattering of diffuse points of light, as it finds Kat.
Road Rage
Richard Matheson is an icon of contemporary horror, with works includ-

ing I Am Legend (1954), A Stir of Echoes (1958), Hell House (1971), What
Dreams May Come (1978), and a proliferation of short stories and Twilight
Zone episodes, including the iconic 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000
Feet,” where a young William Shatner is tormented by a gremlin on the
wing of the airplane in which he is flying. Matheson’s short story “Duel,”
originally published in Playboy in 1971, is widely considered a masterpiece
of reality-based horror, in which the protagonist, Mann, is terrorized on
the highway by a deranged truck driver. In 2009, Tor, a publisher special-
izing in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, brought together a collection of
homages to and stories inspired by Matheson’s prolific body of work in He
Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson. The opening story
GRAPHIC NOVELS 165
of this anthology is “Throttle,” a collaboration by King and Hill. Finally, in

2012 both “Duel” and “Throttle” were adapted to comic book format, with
each originally published as two-issue runs, and all four collected together
in the hardcover trade edition of Road Rage.
King and Hill’s “Throttle” is a new, contemporary take on Matheson’s
classic “Duel” and, as is to be expected, the two stories have several simi-
larities, including the isolation of the open road, a murderous truck driver,
and a “kill or be killed” conflict. However, King and Hill also provide a dark
twist on the familiar story. While Matheson’s “Duel” features a relatively
flat Everyman pursued on a murderous, fixated whim by a faceless truck
driver, King and Hill invest both pursued and pursuer with more devel-
oped characterization and motivation. Vince and his motorcycle gang The
Tribe, including his son Race, are on the road driving away from the scene
of massacre, having murdered Dean Clarke and his nameless girlfriend in
the aftermath of a meth lab fire, and as Vince discovers in the final moments
of The Tribe’s confrontation with the truck, the truck driver is the father of
the girl they killed. Rather than blind and faceless rage, a random horror
that could potentially strike anyone on any day if they’re unlucky enough
to cross the path of the wrong trucker, in “Throttle” the trucker is exacting
immediate and bloody justice, driven by filial love and grief.
The graphic novel adaptations of both stories in Road Rage were writ-
ten by Chris Ryall, but featured different artists, providing each with a
unique visual hallmark, with “Duel” drawn by Rafa Garres and “Throt-
tle” by Nelson Daniel. The opening pages of “Duel” are well ordered, with
four balanced horizontal panels on each of the first two pages. The panels
are bordered by thick black lines with thick white gutters between each,
providing clear distinction between each of the self-contained and sin-
gle-focus panels: Mann’s car, Mann behind the wheel, Mann passing the
truck (Road Rage 61–62). However, this logical, precise order—and Mann’s
understanding of the world around him—are soon disrupted. As the truck
goes roaring past Mann, the gutter separating the third and fourth panels is
nearly obliterated by the sound effect of the truck’s deafening engine, repre-
sented as a red and jagged series of lower- and upper-case “R”s (Road Rage
63). These sound effects are a central component throughout the comic
adaptation of “Duel,” with the increased frequency of the onomatopoetic
honking horns, screeching metal, and “shrrrrkkk” of flying gravel (Road
Rage 77) echoing the inexorably increasing madness of the situation. As
the battle between Mann and the trucker escalates in the first issue, the
panels become increasingly disordered, including overlapping panels of
varying sizes. For example, when the trucker waves Mann by and Mann
finds himself looking at a head-on collision with oncoming traffic, the page
includes seven different panels, almost all of which are of dramatically
varying size and focus, from extreme close-ups of the trucker’s hand and
Mann’s face to more abstract silhouetted images, and overlapping pan-
els that feature Mann’s face immediately juxtaposed with what he sees: a
pickup truck heading directly for him (Road Rage 69). As Mann gets off
the road and pulls into a diner’s parking lot, the panel organization shifts
back toward a more structured layout, with fewer panels, most of which are
conventionally rectangular, with wide white gutters. Order is temporarily
restored, though as Mann emerges from the diner’s restroom he realizes
that his nightmare is not yet over, with the hulking truck outside featured
in a single full-page panel and Mann silhouetted before the window (Road
Rage 82). The layout of the second issue echoes that of the first, moving
from well-ordered to overlapping and visually chaotic, with splintering jag-
ged panels (Road Rage 102–105), individual panels outlined with bright
red gutters (Road Rage 94), and embedded circular panels that move the
reader between the objective narrative action of the chase and the subjec-
tive perspective of Mann’s own point of view (Road Rage 96). While the
first issue and the early second issue feature several dialog and thought
balloons highlighting Mann’s thoughts and rationalizations, as the comic
progresses, the text shifts almost exclusively to text box captions and sound
effects. The final page of the comic adaptation of “Duel” features many of
these characteristics, including five panels, all characterized by the bright
orange of the truck’s explosion and the black contrast of the shadows it
casts, a final “K-BOOM!” sound effect of the explosion itself, close-ups of
Mann’s anguished face, and an irregularly shaped, un-bordered panel, with
Mann standing victorious in silhouette above the wreckage of the flaming
truck. The resolution here is featured through three separate, scattered text
box captions, echoing the final lines of Matheson’s short story: “Unexpect-
edly emotion came. Not dread, at first, and not regret; not the nausea that
followed soon. It was a primeval tumult in his mind . . . The cry of some
ancestral beast above the body of its vanquished foe” (Road Rage 106).
Echoing the increased fragmentation and visual chaos of the page lay-
outs, Garres’s art progresses from realistic to exaggerated and abstract.
Early in the comic, Mann’s facial features are clearly distinguishable, if
starkly drawn. However, as the chase continues, Mann becomes further
dehumanized, both in the desperation of his actions and in the style with
which his features are represented. Just as the page layout briefly returns to
a methodical organization toward the end of the first issue, Mann’s features
come briefly back into focus as he examines himself in the diner bathroom’s
mirror (Road Rage 81) and as, early in the second issue, he looks around
the diner, attempting to identify his tormentor. As the chase intensifies,
underscored by the fragmentation of the panels through the latter half
of the second issue, Mann’s features begin to become more exaggerated,
GRAPHIC NOVELS 167
transforming into a caricature of tortured humanity as his face becomes

increasingly indistinct and at times, even bordering on the unrecognizable
and monstrous as he fights for his life. In the final pages of “Duel,” Mann’s
face is drawn abstractly and fluidly, with curving and cartoonish lines
rather than the more realistic, starkly drawn lines of the comic’s beginning
(Road Rage 102, 103) and as he cheers his victory, Mann’s face is dominated
by the irregular oval of his screaming mouth, almost all other detail lost in
the abstract lines of the rest of his face, dehumanized in his scream of rage
and triumph.
In contrast to the increasingly abstract visual style of “Duel,” “Throttle”
has a realistic style, characterized by Daniel’s straight lines, which give the
truck, bikes, and even the faces of The Tribe a gritty and life-like feel. As
Ryan K. Lindsay writes in his review of the first installment, Daniel’s art-
work features “astoundingly pretty line work with gritty colors. The artist
is not afraid to push readers out of their comfort zone, delivering action
and horror on an incredible scale.” While “Duel” has a color-scheme char-
acterized by warm yellows, oranges, and dark black shadows, the color
palette of “Throttle” starts out in cool blues and grays. “Duel” is a nearly
mythical struggle of the hunter and the hunted, drawn in broad strokes and
steeped in symbolism, from the Everyman naming of Mann to the physical
equating of the trucker with his machine. In contrast, “Throttle” is strongly
grounded in reality and rather than the black and white of clearly defined
good and evil in “Duel,” the characters of “Throttle” occupy a more highly
charged and violently contested range of grays. The Tribe are not heroes:
the majority of them have criminal records, they had set up and were poised
to profit from a meth lab, and when the meth lab exploded, Race and Roy
brutally murdered Clarke and his girlfriend. However, The Tribe are family,
a group of men willing to die or kill for one another and early descriptions
in King and Hill’s story highlight their humanity, their camaraderie, and
their fierce loyalty to one another; as Vince reflects, “It had been different
on the way down to see Clarke. Better. The Tribe had stopped just after
sunup at a diner much like this, and while the mood had not been festive,
there had been plenty of bullshit, and a certain amount of predictable yuks
to go with the coffee and the donuts” (King and Hill, “Throttle” 26). King
and Hill look beyond the stereotype of the big, bad biker gang and while
The Tribe is far from redeemed, they become humanized and as a result,
the reader is able to understand and empathize with Vince’s loss. As Lind-
say argues, this characterization works to “sell the efficiency of Hill and
King’s homage, making readers really care about the characters and their
final moments. Like any great horror tale, half the issue works on invest-
ing the reader in characters and set up, while the other half slowly dis-
mantles this investment.” After all, a reader can’t care about what happens
to a character unless they are emotionally invested in that character in the

first place, which is essential in fully realizing Vince’s grief and vengeance.
As King and Hill write, “Vince had never lost so much so fast, six of The
Tribe dead on a stretch of road less than half a mile long. You didn’t do that
to a man’s family, he thought, and drive away” (“Throttle” 47). Similarly,
Keller, the rage-fueled truck driver who picks The Tribe off one by one, is
more than a faceless monster. As Vince pulls up alongside the truck, he sees
the honor roll sticker on the semi’s dust-coated bumper and realizes the
truth: “It was madness, but not incomprehensible madness” (King and Hill,
“Throttle” 48, emphasis original). The common ground of the two sides is
highlighted in the graphic novel in a long, narrow panel dominated by the
indistinct blacks and dark grays of the truck’s back end, with the honor
roll sticker the only light-colored element and the focal point of the panel,
which features a text box with a single word: “. . . family” (Road Rage 44).
Concluding Vince’s thought from the previous panel—of The Tribe as his
family—the ellipses here serves as both a connecting thread between Vince
and the trucker and as a textually represented moment of realization. This
violent interrogation of good guys and bad guys, “us” versus “them,” rip-
ples outward among the surviving members of The Tribe as well, forever
changing the already contentious relationship between Vince and Race, as
Vince realizes his son knew the girl’s identity and the reason for the truck-
er’s rage all along, keeping his silence as their friends were killed around
them. Standing above the flaming truck of their vanquished foe, instead of
Mann’s primal scream of triumph, Vince is beaten and despondent with
the realization that he “knew nothing about [the trucker], but felt suddenly
that he liked him better than his own son. Such a thing should not have
been possible, but there it was” (King and Hill, “Throttle” 53). The final
showdown comes between Vince and Race, the graphic novel alternating
between panels focusing on both of them together and those featuring each
man individually as their conflict comes to a head (Road Rage 52–55) and
as Race rides off down the road without looking back.
One of the characteristic visual styles of “Throttle” that echoes this con-
stant negotiation of the conflict is the widespread use of bleeds, which is
“when a panel runs off the edge of the page” (McCloud, Understanding
Comics 103). As McCloud explains, with bleeds, “Time is no longer con-
tained by the familiar icon of the closed panel, but instead hemorrhages and
escapes into timeless space” (ibid.). These bleeds are present from the very
first page of the comic, as The Tribe pulls into the parking lot of a diner, and
continue on nearly every page throughout the entirety of “Throttle,” under-
scoring the scope of the story, the interconnection between the past and
present, and the unresolved conflicts that hang over The Tribe and its mem-
bers, especially within Vince and Race’s volatile relationship. While “Duel”
GRAPHIC NOVELS 169
revolves around a clearly defined conflict—Mann versus the trucker—with

a distinct beginning, middle, and end, much of the tension in “Throttle”
comes from the larger, gradually established context and unfinished busi-
ness, themes that are emphasized by the extensive use of these bleeds. As
the trucker begins to run down The Tribe, nearly every page of the conflict
features a bleed, whether of a full panel image or a smaller panel, with the
images extending to the edges of the page, defying narrative containment
just as The Tribe and the trucker refuse flat, categorical characterization.
The bleeds are used to signify different narrative purposes at various points
throughout the graphic novel: in the early pages, when The Tribe is pull-
ing into the parking lot of a diner, the bleed signifies unfinished business,
a conflict bubbling just under the surface as Vince and Race argue about
what their next move should be (Road Rage 7). On the final page of the first
issue, a full-page panel features Race with the truck’s bloody grille loom-
ing behind him, blotting out the sky, with the bleed highlighting Race’s
separation from the rest of The Tribe’s surviving members and his eminent
danger. As the conflict barrels toward its conclusion, the panels are occa-
sionally more confined, such as a three-panel page focusing on the truck’s
destruction as the tanker explodes and the cab skids off the road (Road
Rage 49). Even with this conclusion reached, however, the connections and
relationships cannot be so easily contained and in the graphic novel’s final
pages, Race’s last look at his father bleeds off of the page (Road Rage 55), as
does that featuring Vince and Lemmy waiting for the police and whatever
comes next (Road Rage 56).
In Road Rage, as in N. and The Little Green God of Agony, text and image
work together to realize the literary elements of these stories by Matheson,
King, and Hill, both showing and telling the reader about the characters,
their relationships, and the horrors they face, both in others and within
themselves. The graphic novel format is beginning to transcend mediums
as well, as these three examples have shown, creating unique opportunities
for storytelling through web series, web comics, and traditional graphic
novels to provide readers a multi-textual way to engage with King’s ever-
growing body of work.
12
Conclusion
I n the more than four decades since King published his first novel,
Carrie, King has remained incredibly prolific, publishing more than
fifty novels and short story collections, while also stretching beyond the
boundaries of traditional publishing into serial publishing, ebooks, and
graphic novels, as well as non-fiction, including his critical consideration
of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(2000), and the ebook exclusive Guns in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook
Elementary School shootings. He has even expanded into the musical
realm, co-writing Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors)
Tells All (2013) along with his Rock Bottom Remainders bandmates, and
working with John Mellencamp and T Bone Burnett as the playwright for
the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012). In recent years,
King has also been active publishing in smaller venues, from literary
publications such as Tin House, which published the short story “Afterlife”
in 2013, to more mass market magazines like Esquire, which first published
King and Hill’s “In the Tall Grass,” as well as King’s stories “Morality” in
2009 and “That Bus Is Another World” in 2014. While these stories—and
other previously small-market published work—were eventually included
in King’s 2015 collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, in a time when many
print publications struggle to remain relevant in an increasingly online,
e-format world, King’s work breathes a bit of life into the publication of
literary magazines, reeling in the die-hard King fans hungry for his latest
story. King continues to push the boundaries of publication, bringing his
work to his Constant Readers in myriad ways, from traditional print and
magazines to ebook and audiobook exclusives.
King shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Between 2006 and
2014, “King’s output consist[ed] of 10 novels plus two story collections . . .
[as well as] movie and TV adaptations, occasional columns for Entertain-
ment Weekly and a tag-team story with novelist Joe Hill” (Spanberg), as
well as the graphic novel adaptation of King and Hill’s “Throttle” in Road
Rage. In 2015 alone, King published Finders Keepers (the sequel to the pre-
vious year’s Mr. Mercedes), the audiobook exclusive Drunken Fireworks,
and the collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
With King’s prolific—and ever expanding—body of work, there are
countless ways of incorporating King into the high school or college class-
room, from a single short story to a single-author seminar. As the first
section demonstrates, many of King’s works couple very effectively with
classic works of horror literature, in his ongoing negotiation of traditional
figures such as the vampire, werewolf, undead monster, and ghost. King’s
short fiction also pairs well with Gothic staples to connect King’s con-
temporary work with the larger scope of the genre and its influence. For
example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and King’s O.
Henry Award-winning short story “The Man in the Black Suit” (originally
published in The New Yorker in 1994 and later included in King’s collection
Everything’s Eventual) both have strong themes of a young man’s journey
into the woods, the horrors he discovers there, and the uncertainty of night-
mare versus reality, though the truth each man discovers transcends this
distinction. As the Real Life Horror section shows, King’s horror extends
beyond the supernatural to reality-based horror, from school shootings
and sexual violence to the turmoil of the adolescent coming of age. Rage
can be read in tandem with King’s ebook Guns to spark conversation on
school shootings, the relationship between popular culture and violence,
censorship, and self-censorship. King has continued to write about sexual
violence beyond Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and Rose Madder, with
his recent short stories and novellas “The Gingerbread Girl,” Big Driver,
and A Good Marriage, which address these serious and troubling issues
within the context of our contemporary culture. While the coming of age
stories featured here end in varying degrees of disaster, the framework of
the bildungsroman could be effectively expanded to explore the representa-
tion of children in many of King’s other works, from Firestarter to The Girl
Who Loved Tom Gordon. Finally, King continues to experiment with vari-
ous publication mediums, from age-old serial publishing to cutting edge
ebook exclusives. For better or for worse, e-publication is changing and
shaping the way we read, including what we read and how we engage with
the text itself, and King’s work can be used to interrogate these issues, as
well as the business of publication, the larger literary conversation, and stu-
dents’ experiences as readers. The graphic novels inspired by King’s work,
such as N., Little Green God of Agony, Road Rage, and even excerpts from
larger graphic novel series like the Dark Tower series and The Stand pro-
vide an opportunity to discuss authorship, inspiration, and adaption, as
each builds upon or brings a new twist to King’s original work.
CONCLUSION 173
In addition to his published works, King has had a significant impact

on popular culture, a further level of critical consideration that can be
effectively incorporated into the classroom. Almost all of King’s prodi-
gious body of work has been adapted for viewing, with many notable and
award-winning big screen adaptations, like Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic
The Shining (1980), Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) with Kathy Bates’s Oscar-
winning performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes, and director Frank
Darabont’s several adaptations of King works, including The Shawshank
Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist (2007). King’s works have also
been frequently adapted into television formats, including made-for-TV
movies, miniseries, and limited run series, including miniseries versions
of IT (1990), The Stand (1994), The Shining, and Bag of Bones (2011) and
new, original for television works such as Storm of the Century (1999), Rose
Red (2002), and Kingdom Hospital (2004). Just as King has explored uncon-
ventional publication formats, his adaptations have also negotiated their
respective mediums, such as the limited run series Nightmares & Dream-
scapes (2006), which featured ten individual stand-alone episodes based
on some of King’s shorter works. On both the big and small screens, King
adaptations have ranged from excellent to truly terrible. However, despite
the varying quality of these films, there are several King adaptations, on
both the big and small screens, that warrant serious critical consider-
ation.1 Linda Constanzo Cahir’s Literature into Film: Theory and Practical
Approaches lays out a very useful set of terminology for addressing and
analyzing adaptation, including the understanding of adaptation as “trans-
lation,” which can run to the gamut from literal to traditional, and even
radical reimaginings of the source material (16–17). By requiring students
to look beyond a simple comparison and contrast that chronicles differ-
ences between the two versions, it becomes possible to look more deeply at
adaptation choices and their impact on the work as a whole. For example,
The Shining’s Wendy Torrance is characterized very differently in King’s
novel, Kubrick’s film, and Garris’s miniseries, a shift which impacts not
only the character herself, but the choices she makes and how she interacts
with her husband and son, as well as how she responds to the supernatural
horrors of the Overlook Hotel. In exploring these different representations,
students can move beyond the simplistic (“that’s not how I pictured her
when I read the book”) to Wendy’s varying levels of agency, representations
of feminism, and anxiety surrounding images of powerful women.
King’s work has also entered the wider popular culture lexicon, so
instantly recognizable to the contemporary audience that complex sto-
ries can be communicated in shorthand, including “The Shinning” seg-
ment of The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror V” (1994) episode and the
“Three Kings” episode of Family Guy (2009), which parodies Misery, The
Shawshank Redemption, and The Body/Stand By Me, both of which expand

the discussion of King’s work to include adaptation, humor, and parody.
Both The Simpsons and Family Guy are dynamically intertextual series,
making regular references and homages to a wide variety of cultural prede-
cessors, including literature, music, Hollywood musicals, and classic film,
and while the series can certainly be enjoyable without the viewer being
in on all of these jokes, this engaged understanding of the references being
made only enhances the viewing experience. As Mallory Carra wrote of
seeing Kubrick’s The Shining as a first-year film student and seasoned Simp-
sons fan, “what I never realized about it is that The Simpsons parody of The
Shining is so spot on. When I finally did watch The Shining . . . I couldn’t
believe how many moments I recognized and how much my viewing actu-
ally enhanced the humor of The Simpsons sendup.” While many students are
familiar with The Simpsons and Family Guy, watching these episodes anew
with King’s work fresh in their minds creates a critically engaged return to
the material, with an awareness of the combination of literature, film adap-
tation, television, and these influences and interconnections.
King’s work has shaped both landscapes of American literature and
popular culture and, in recent years, has begun to make its way into high
school and college literature classrooms. While selections need to be care-
fully made to fit the reading and maturity level of the students—for exam-
ple, many of King’s novels feature violence and sexual content that may be
unsuited for younger readers—there are multiple advantages to teaching
the works of Stephen King. His characters are often complex and three-
dimensional, his settings tap into the familiar scenery of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, and he tackles weighty themes of life and
death, family, faith, community, loss, violence, and addiction. Finally, and
perhaps most significantly, King’s novels are but a single cog in the larger
machinery of literary history and contemporary popular culture, drawing
on the works that have preceded them in their themes and epigraphs, as
well as inspiring a gamut of popular responses, from adaptation to parody.
By reading and critically discussing King, students can be introduced to
literature as an active, responsive body of work, dynamically engaged with
what has come before and what will follow after, as well as King’s explicit
engagement with the world around him, from brand name references to
the incorporation of popular literature, film, and television. In seeing the
ways in which King’s fiction is part of a larger system, students are encour-
aged to engage not just with King’s work but with the literary tradition
as a whole, as well as the ways in which that literature impacts their daily
lives and the world around them. King’s work continues to have a finger
on the pulse of its surrounding culture, from its greatest joys to its deepest
anxieties, without ever losing sight of the larger underlying questions of
CONCLUSION 175
what it means to love, to fear, and to be human. By bringing King into the
classroom, we can encourage our students to carefully read and respond to
this literature on multiple levels, from the initial personal and emotional
response of effective fiction, to the critical analysis of literary elements, and
at the highest level of critical engagement, the grand unifying themes of the
human experience.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Allen’s choice of Dickens as the “literary” in contrast to King’s populist is

interesting, as there have been comparisons between King and Dickens drawn
throughout much of King’s career, including Dickens’s long-time dismissal
by his contemporary critics as a populist writer pandering to his audience.
As fellow writer Peter Straub comments in Jane Ciabattari’s “Is Stephen King
a Great Writer?”, King’s “readership is even larger and more inclusive and
the similarities between King and Dickens, always visible to those who cared
for King’s work, have become all but unavoidable. Both are novelists of vast
popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are beloved writers with a pro-
nounced taste for the morbid and grotesque, both display a deep interest in
the underclass” (qtd. in Ciabattari).
Chapter 2
1. The theme of small town secrets is a familiar one for King, a central factor
in several of his books. In addition to Jerusalem’s Lot, some of King’s other
notable small towns include Castle Rock, Derry, and Haven, all of which are
fictional towns in King’s Maine and the settings of several of his novels.
2. Chapter 11 focuses exclusively on King and graphic novels, including an
overview of graphic novel conventions and terminology.
Chapter 3
1. As Charlotte F. Otten outlines the outcome of Grenier’s case, “The court, rec-
ognizing his mental aberration and limited intelligence, sentenced him to life
in a monastery for moral and religious instruction. He died there at age twenty,
scarcely human” (9). Other accused werewolves weren’t so lucky and often “the
rudimentary proceedings and the mass executions bore something of the same
hysteria as such manifestations of the Salem witch trials” (Copper 27).
2. Cycle of the Werewolf’s structure is also unique in that King originally imagined it
as text to accompany a calendar, as a series of 12 monthly vignettes, echoing the
lunar pattern of the werewolf ’s transformation at the coming of the full moon.
178 NOTES
3. LeBay’s brother has his doubts about the nature of these deaths, however.
When Dennis pushes George LeBay for the rest of the story, George tells him
that after his daughter’s death, “Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that
Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end,
he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said, but in her
letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car” (Christine
433), a choice Dennis interprets as an act of “human sacrifice” (ibid.). George
also has his doubts about his sister-in-law’s suicide, telling Dennis “I’ve often
wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I’ve wondered how a
woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to
get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it through the window. I
try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night” (Christine
434). Beyond the many literal ghosts that populate Christine, George LeBay is
haunted by these unanswered questions, just as Dennis will be haunted by the
myriad ways in which he was unable to save Arnie.
4. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, with schizophrenia,
“People with the disorder may hear voices other people don’t hear. They may
believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or
plotting to harm them. This can terrify people with the illness and make
them withdrawn or extremely agitated” (“What Is Schizophrenia?”). While
the effects of schizophrenia can include hallucinations and delusions, in truth
schizophrenics don’t usually experience the multiple personalities exhibited by
Mort Rainey.
5. The second book of King’s Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three (1987),
features another complex dissociative character in Odetta Holmes/Detta
Walker, whose “two personalities—the sophisticated and wealthy Odetta and
the uneducated and vulgar Detta—lead separate lives, completely unaware of
each other” (Strengell 72).
6. King keeps the supernatural possibility alive as well, as at least a partial expla-
nation. A witness tells Amy about seeing Mort talking to Shooter: “according
to what Sonny says, Tom looked in his rear-view mirror and saw another man
with Mort, and an old station wagon, though neither the man nor the car had
been there ten seconds before . . . [B]ut you could see right through him, and the
car, too” (Secret Window 380, emphasis original).
7. Rage is discussed at length in Chapter Six.
8. Many readers and critics wondered why King had chosen to publish under a
pseudonym, when his own name and work had begun to be so well known
and popular and this is a question he addressed in his introduction to the col-
lected Bachman Books, in an essay titled “Why I Was Bachman.” One of the
main reasons he discusses is, in fact, to directly counter the fame he had already
achieved early in his career. As King says, “I think I did it to turn the heat
down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King. I think
that all novelists are inveterate role-players and it was fun to be someone else
for a while—in this case, Richard Bachman” (“Why I Was Bachman” viii). He
addressed this question from another angle and in further detail on the “Fre-
quently Asked Questions” section of his official website, where he says that “I
NOTES 179
did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the
publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept [from
an author] but I think that a number of writers have disproved that by now . . .
[Writing as Bachman] made it possible for me to do two books in one year. I
just did them under different names and eventually the public got wise to this
because you can change your name but you can’t really disguise your style.”
Chapter 4
1. This argument appears in the novel’s preface, which bore Shelley’s name but
was in actuality written by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
2. When the dying Pascow begins speaking of the pet sematary, however, Louis
finds it much more difficult to maintain his professional distance, nearly
fainting (Pet Sematary 75). Throughout the novel, Pascow continues to
refuse the easy categorization of living/dead that Louis imposes upon him,
appearing to Louis in a dream of the pet sematary and the woods beyond
(Pet Sematary 83–87) and later to warn Ellie (Pet Sematary 314).
3. In a nod to Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mary’s mother’s maiden name is Shelley
(Revival 358) and Mary has a son named Victor, who Jacobs says will be
well taken care of after her death, as payment for her willing participation
(Revival 361).
4. As Nell Greenfieldboyce explains, though many people think immediately of
“the scenes from the classic horror films, which show Victor Frankenstein in a
storm, using lightning bolts to jumpstart his creation as he cries ‘It’s alive! It’s
alive!’ … You won’t find that dramatic scene in Mary Shelley’s book.” While
Shelley refers to the rain outside and Victor’s decision to “infuse a spark of
being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (51), there is no dramatic light-
ning strike at this moment of creation, though storms and lightning feature
predominantly elsewhere in Shelley’s novel.
5. Several of King’s other works take inspiration from Lovecraft as well, including
his novella The Mist (included in Skeleton Crew, 1985) and the stories “Jerusa-
lem’s Lot” (in Night Shift) and “Crouch End” (in Nightmares and Dreamscapes,
1993). Lovecraft’s inspiration can also be seen in King and Hill’s In the Tall
Grass, which is discussed in Chapter 10 on ebooks.
Chapter 5
1. The zombie permutation of the undead monster is an exception to this tradi-

tion, as discussed in the previous chapter.
2. In “‘Truth Comes Out’: The Scrapbook Chapter,” Tony Magistrale argues that
King positions readers uniquely alongside Jack as he pages through the scrap-
book, implicating the readers themselves in the fascination with and hauntings
perpetrated by the hotel. As Magistrale writes, the “third-person narrative per-
spective . . . helps to create a sensation in the reader of peering over Torrance’s
shoulder as he reads along, even pausing with him to consider the implications
180 NOTES
of what is revealed. We become co-conspirators with Jack, involved in a subtle

collusion that is so compelling because it delves into a yet undisclosed record
of evil” (41).
3. Garris has directed several King adaptations for television movie and minise-
ries format, including The Stand (1994), Desperation (2006), and Bag of Bones
(2011). Garris also directed the film adaptation of Riding the Bullet (2004),
which had limited theatrical release.
4. Nearly a century has passed since Sara’s rape and murder when Mike begins
asking his questions. Much has changed in the TR-90, though this pervasive
racism remains, ugly and persistent, acting as an excuse for those who know the
TR’s troubling history. Before Mike starts digging into this dark past, he consid-
ers his caretaker Bill Dean one of his closest friends, a man who will always tell
him the truth and speak straight with him. However, when Bill confronts Mike
about his late wife’s research, he tells Mike that Sara and the Red-Tops “were
just . . . just wanderers . . . from away” (387). Mike hears what Bill says, as well
as what he doesn’t say: as Mike knows instinctively, in one more side effect of
“the zone,” Bill “hesitated in the middle of his thought, substituting wanderers
for the word which had come naturally to mind. Niggers was the word he hadn’t
said. Sara and those others were just niggers from away” (King 388, emphasis
original). The racism that motivated Jared and his men’s murder of Sara still
influences the life of the TR, if more covertly than in its earlier incarnation.
Chapter 6
1. First editions of Rage as a stand-alone novel are much harder to come by. As
Business Insider’s Cory Adwar explains, “In BookFinder.com’s list of the 100
most sought-after out-of-print books of 2013, Rage is ranked higher than any
other novel, at number two overall. Used copies of the first printing paper-
back are currently on sale online for anywhere between $700 and upwards of
$2,000” (Adwar). King is well represented further down this list as well, with
his “My Pretty Pony” (1989), which was part of a Whitney Museum of Ameri-
can Art series limited edition, at Number 3 and his standalone novella The
Body (which is also included in the 1982 collection Different Seasons) at Num-
ber 16 (“11th Annual BookFinder.com Report”). In the 2014 BookFinder.com
list, Rage dropped to Number 5 and “My Pretty Pony” fell to Number 22; The
Body rose to Number 4 and King’s The Colorado Kid was added to the list at
Number 6, securing King three of the top ten spots in the 2014 list (Carswell).
2. Chokshi’s article points out the significant debate over what counts as a school
shooting, which the research cited in Chokshi’s story defined as “any instance of a
firearm discharging on school property . . . thus casting a broad net that includes
homicides, suicides, accidental discharges and, in a handful of cases, shootings
that had no relation to the schools themselves and occurred with no students
apparently present” (Chokshi). This question of definition, methodology, and
quantification highlights just “how difficult quantifying gun violence can be”
(Chokshi), though doing so is a first—and foundational—step in addressing and
NOTES 181
responding to this violence. As Chokshi summarized the research data of these

74 incidents, 20 of these resulted in at least one victim being fatally injured,
while 53 resulted in victim injuries, with overall totals of 36 students injured and
10 killed (ibid.). In terms of location, “35 shootings took place at a college or
university; 39 shootings took place at a school that teaches grades K-12” (ibid.).
While there are still many instances of “traditional,” Columbine-style school
shootings, this seems to show that schools have frequently been the site of other
types of violent incidents in recent years.
3. This speech is available in its entirety online, both in video and transcript
formats.
4. See Chapter Ten for a more extensive discussion of King’s ebook publication of
both fiction and non-fiction works, including Guns.
Chapter 7
1. However, it should be noted that some of the essays included in this collec-
tion argue on behalf of the increasing strength and complexity of King’s female
characters, including Carol A. Senf ’s “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne:
Stephen King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice.”
2. Characters who hear voices in their heads are frequent in King’s fiction, espe-
cially when those characters have suffered significant trauma. In Gerald’s Game,
Jessie hears the voice of Ruth and the status quo-reinforcing imprecations of a
persona she refers to as Goodwife Burlingame, though she knows these are
all variations of her own voice and her own thoughts, rather than external or
potentially schizophrenic intrusions. As Senf argues, “Jessie’s decision to listen
to her own inner voice rather than to the voices that she hears around her and
her decision to take charge of her life, come at the end of the novel and indicate
Jessie’s growing realization of her own strength. Listening to others is a form of
victimization. Having allowed herself to be victimized by both her parents and
her husband, she decides that she will not continue to be a victim” (“Gerald’s
Game and Dolores Claiborne” 98). This is a theme that carries through other of
King’s works that feature sexual violence as well. For example, in King’s rape-
revenge novella Big Driver, published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars, Tess
hears voices as she recovers from her rape and decides to get revenge on her
rapist, including investing her GPS and her cat Fritz with voices of their own. In
A Good Marriage, another novella included in Full Dark, No Stars, Darcy dis-
covers that her husband is a sadistic serial killer, who rapes, tortures, and mur-
ders women; as she struggles to cope with this horrifying discovery, she divides
herself into different elements of her identity, separately referring to them as
“Smart Darcy,” “Stupid Darcy,” and “The Darker Girl.” Finally, in King’s story
“The Gingerbread Girl,” when Emily faces the threat of rape and murder, she
hears her father’s voice in her head, instructing her as she works to escape. In
each of these cases, as well as in Gerald’s Game, the female characters acknowl-
edge that these voices are variations of their own, designed to help them cope
with, endure, and survive the trauma at hand.
182 NOTES
3. This reference echoes the song “Really Rosie,” featured in a short animated film
of the same name, with music and lyrics by Maurice Sendak, who is best known
for the 1963 children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are.
Chapter 8
1. King’s epic novel IT is a coming of age story on a grand scale, centered on a

group of seven 11-year-old children who battle the monstrous horror feeding
upon Derry, then are called back once again as adults twenty-seven years later. IT
can be a challenge to incorporate into the classroom, given its prodigious length
of more than one thousand pages, though it could be productively included
through excerpts or within a structure in which students individually self-select
which King works they would like to read.
2. As Campbell explains in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The standard path
of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula
represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return” (Campbell
30, emphasis original). Within this formula, “A hero ventures forth from the
world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are
there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this
mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellowman” (30).
3. The Body and Carrie can be effectively put into conversation with one another
in their common theme of adolescent vengeance; as Linda Badley argues in
“Stephen King Viewing the Body,” “‘The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan’ is Carrie
in drag” (165). Bodily fluids and abjection are another uniting theme between
these two teens who’ve been pushed too far, with vomit in “The Revenge of
Lard Ass Hogan” echoing the significance of blood in Carrie.
4. Blood is a powerful theme throughout the novel as a whole, signaling both
maturation and abjection, with the coming of Carrie’s period, the pigs’ blood
Sue and Billy dump on Carrie at the prom, the bloodshed of Carrie’s rampage,
and with Sue Snell in the novel’s final pages, the coming of blood that can argu-
ably be interpreted as either a late-arriving period or a miscarriage.
5. This conclusion has led many critics to criticize Carrie White among King’s
representations of monstrous and one-dimensional female characters. For
example, as Shelley Stamp Lindsey writes of DePalma’s film version of Car-
rie, “Not only is Carrie a female monster, but sexual difference is integral
to the horror she generates; monstrosity is explicitly associated with men-
struation and female sexuality” (284). This critical response also positions
Carrie effectively in the conversation surrounding King’s other representa-
tions of female characters and violence against women, discussed in the
previous chapter.
6. Adolescent and high school bullying is still a serious issue and this theme
is likely one of the reasons that Carrie continues to be so powerful, partic-
ularly among young adult readers. The face of bullying has changed signifi-
cantly from 1974 to now, including the influence of social media, though the
emotional trauma remains largely unchanged. In her 2013 film adaptation of
NOTES 183
Carrie, director Kimberly Peirce—who also directed Boys Don’t Cry (1999),
which focused on the harassment and murder of transgender teen Brandon
Teena—highlighted the significance and potentially deadly impacts of bully-
ing. As Jamie Frevele writes in the article “Kimberly Peirce’s Remake of Carrie
Will Have an Anti-Bullying Message” for the website The Mary Sue, Carrie is
“a typical revenge story, but for many teenagers who are bullied for lesser rea-
sons than being (let’s admit this to ourselves) a total freak, it might hit close to
home. Especially now that a very bright spotlight has been put on standing up
to bullying and supporting bullied kids so they don’t do something harmful to
themselves or others” (Frevele). In addition to touching a chord with bullied
teens, Peirce’s film also modernized the context of Carrie’s bullying, with Chris
using her phone to record a video of the locker room attack, then posting it to
the Internet and projecting it on a large screen at the prom, using technological
as well as face-to-face tactics to torment Carrie.
Chapter 9
1. King briefly mentions both of these examples in his foreword to The Two Dead
Girls (vii).
2. There was, of course, always the potential for failure. Some of King’s stories
have a habit of getting away from him, as his longer books like The Stand and
Under the Dome illustrate, which could have left King with a story too big for
the format he had chosen. In addition, while The Green Mile was very success-
ful, his attempts at serialization have not always been. A few years later in 2000,
King put individual installments of a novel in progress, The Plant—which he
had actually begun writing in the 1980s—up on his website, with readers pay-
ing one dollar per segment on the honor system (“The Plant: Zenith Rising”).
However, after six installments, King stopped writing. The fact that few read-
ers were paying on the honor system may have contributed to this decision;
as Gwendolyn Mariano writes, “by the fourth installment, paid readers had
dipped to 46 percent of all downloads, according to King’s assistant, Marsha
DeFilippo. She added, however, that King had decided to put ‘The Plant’ aside
before he had the final figures for his fourth installment.” As his website says,
“The novel has not yet been completed. If the inspiration does return, at some
time in the future this project will be completed but the format for its publica-
tion may be different” (“The Plant: Zenith Rising”).
3. O’Sullivan contextualizes Darabont’s 1999 film adaptation of The Green Mile
within this larger context of films about capital punishment and the death
penalty, including Dead Man Walking (1995), Last Dance (1996), and The
Chamber (1996). O’Sullivan draws particularly strong parallels between The
Green Mile and Dead Man Walking, which could form the foundation of an
interesting comparison and contrast analysis: “Frank Darabont name checks
Dead Man Walking in several ways. Tim Robbins who directed Dead Man
Walking is perhaps best known for his starring role in Darabont’s Shawshank
Redemption . . . [and] Early on in the film death-row inmate John Coffey is
184 NOTES
brought onto the mile accompanied by the hail of ‘dead man walking, dead
man walking’” (O’Sullivan 492–493). King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption is also a fascinating possibility for critical comparison
and contrast, with the shared themes of incarceration, wrongfully imprisoned
men, justice, and the uplifting notions of transcendence and hope.
4. While this literary and cinematic trope has a long history, including the “Uncle
Tom” figure discussed by Kent, its contemporary meaning can be identified
beginning with 1950s discussions of the film The Defiant Ones (1958), star-
ring Tony Curtis as John “Joker” Jackson and Sidney Poitier as Noah Cullen,
who are escaped convicts, chained together and at odds with one another, not
least of all because of their difference in race; however, “in the end, after many
trials and tribulations, they become friends . . . [Later] Cullen sacrifices his
own freedom to help Joker. And so the first famous Magical Negro was born”
(Okorafor-Mbachu). The conversation surrounding the “Magical Negro” got
new life in 2001 when director Spike Lee addressed it, re-coining film charac-
ters such as Michael Clarke Duncan’s John Coffey in The Green Mile and Will
Smith’s Bagger Vance in The Legend of Bagger Vance as “Super-Duper Magi-
cal Negro[es]” (Okorafor-Mbachu), addressing the “absurdity of the magical
Negro characters” (Glenn and Cunningham 138).
5. In Hollywood’s Stephen King, Magistrale points out that “The fact that he was
not immediately lynched by the mob in the very woods where he is discovered
is more surprising than his perceived association with the rape and murder
of the two white girls” (140). This possibility is also in keeping with the racial
tenor of the Depression era where “Racial violence again became more com-
mon, especially in the South. Lynchings, which had declined to eight in 1932
surged to 28 in 1933” (“Great Depression and World War II”).
6. In the film adaptation, Paul asks Coffey this question, who then goes on to
absolve Paul, forgiving him for what he must do.
7. The 2014 collection Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and
Thijs van den Berg, contextualizes serialization historically and also includes
several excellent critical articles on contemporary serialized media, with sec-
tions on “Serialization on Screen,” “Serialization in Comic Books and Graphic
Novels,” and “Digital Serialization.”
8. Plympton is a “curated mobile reading service” dedicated to providing readers
with serial fiction and reading options on the go. As the homepage of their web-
site explains, Plympton’s “mission is to push the edge in what the next generation
of great storytelling should be in the digital age” (“Plympton. A Literary Studio”).
9. King’s wide range of e-reader exclusive publications is discussed at length in
the following chapter.
Chapter 10
1. Wesley, as most humans would, finds the opportunity to interfere and change
the course of the future irresistible, breaking established “Paradox Laws,”
which sets him on a collision course with King’s “low men in yellow coats”
NOTES 185
and the meta-universe of King’s fiction that revolves around The Dark Tower.
As they tell Wesley, “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses”
(UR, ch. 7).
2. While there is a pronounced preference for e-readers and electronic rather than
standard print versions of texts among many students, popularity does not
necessarily translate into effective learning. As Ziming Liu explains in Paper
to Digital: Documents in the Information Age, according to recent research,
“nearly 80% of students prefer to read a digital piece of text in print in order to
understand the text with clarity. Nearly 68% of the respondents report that they
understand and retain more information when they read print media” (54).
Readers also engage with electronic texts differently than print texts, includ-
ing in annotation and note-taking habits. As Liu reports, according to another
study, “nearly 54% of the participants ‘always’ or ‘frequently’ annotate printed
documents, compared to approximately 11% [who] ‘always’ or ‘frequently’
annotate electronic documents” (61).
3. King’s recent collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015) includes several of
these works that were previously ebook exclusive publications, including Mile
81 and UR.
4. Both Christine and From a Buick 8 (2002) feature cars with supernatural pow-
ers, though of a very different sort. King includes a wink to these earlier works
in Mile 81, when he says that “Jimmy Golding hadn’t believed in monster cars
since he saw that movie Christine as a kid, but he believed that sometimes mon-
sters could lurk in cars” (Mile 81, ch. 5, emphasis original).
5. O’Nan’s recent novels include Wish You Were Here (2007), Last Night at the
Lobster (2008), Emily, Alone (2011), The Odds: A Love Story (2012), and West of
Sunset (2015).
6. Hill has published several best-selling horror novels, including Heart-Shaped
Box (2007), Horns (2010), and N0S482 (2012), as well as a Bram Stoker Award-
winning short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts (2005), and the Locke and
Key graphic novel series. Like King, Hill has also embraced the unique oppor-
tunities of e-publication with several Kindle Singles, including Thumbprint
(2012), Twittering from the Circus of the Dead (2013), By the Silver Water of
Lake Champlain (2014), and Wolverton Station (2014).
7. Guns is also discussed at length in Chapter Six, which focuses in part on King’s
novella Rage and its connection to school shootings.
8. The opposite is also a significant problem, with unscrupulous authors creating
fake accounts to post positive reviews of their own books in the hope of driving
future sales (Charman-Anderson).
Chapter 11
1. Hill has extensive independent graphic novel experience as well, with his stan-
dalone graphic novel The Cape (2012), the Locke & Key series, and graphic
novel adaptations of his 2013 novel N0S482, including The Wraith: Welcome to
Christmasland (2014).
186 NOTES
2. GetGraphic.org, a website developed by the Buffalo and Erie County Public

Library, has a concise PDF of “Some Graphic Novel Basics” that covers basic
terminology and reading strategies for graphic novels, with examples. It can be
found under their resources for teachers, with the link “How to Read a Graphic
Novel.”
3. King is credited as creative director and executive director of the graphic novel.
Chapter 12
1. Several excellent books have been written on King’s Hollywood adaptations,

including Magistrale’s Hollywood’s Stephen King. There are a handful of other
critical works on film adaptations of King, including The Films of Stephen King:
From Carrie to Secret Window (edited by Magistrale), as well as more fan-based
books, like Stephen Jones’s Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie
Guide.
Works Cited
“11th Annual BookFinder.com Report: Out-of-print and in demand.” BookFinder.

com. BookFinder.com, 1997–2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher
Eccleston. Twentieth Century Fox, 2002.
The Advocates for Human Rights. “Shelters and Safehouses.” StopVAW.org. The
Advocates for Human Rights, 2010. Web. 22 June 2015.
Adwar, Corey. “This Stephen King Novel Will Never Be Printed Again After It Was
Tied To School Shootings.” Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 1 Apr. 2014.
Web. 22 June 2015.
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, Mike Perkins, and Laura Martin. The Stand: American
Nightmares. New York: Marvel, 2010. Print.
———. The Stand: Captain Trips. New York: Marvel, 2010. Print.
———. The Stand: The Night Has Come. New York: Marvel, 2013. Print.
Allen, Dwight. “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes.” Los Angeles Review of
Books. Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 July 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Allen, Rob, and Thijs van den Berg. “Introduction.” Serialization in Popular Culture.
(Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies). Eds. Rob Allen and Thijs
vanden Berg. New York: Routledge, 2014: 1–7. Print.
Alter, Alexandra. “The Return of the Serial Novel.” Wall Street Journal. The Wall
Street Journal, 11 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press,
1995. Print.
Badley, Linda. “Stephen King Viewing the Body.” Stephen King. (Modern Critical
Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1998: 163–190.
Print.
Bag of Bones. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Melissa George, Annabeth
Gish, Caitlin Carmichael, Anika Noni Rose. A&E, 2011.
Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American
Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1999. Print.
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-
Century Writing. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987. Print.
Bauder, David. “Violent Movies, TV Shows & Games Questioned after Sandy Hook
Shooting.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 21 Dec. 2012.
Web. 22 June 2015.
188 WORKS CITED
Bentley, Andy. “Stephen King’s N #1 Review.” IGN. Ziff Davis, LLC, 3 Mar. 2010.
Web. 23 June 2015.
Biddle, Arthur W. “The Mythic Journey in The Body.” The Dark Descent: Essays
Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. (Contributions to the Study of Science
Fiction and Fantasy, Number 48). Ed. Tony Magistrale. Series ed. Marshall B.
Tymn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992: 83–97. Print.
Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the
Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Print.
Bogan, Louise. “Medusa in Myth and Literary History.” Modern American Poetry.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, n.d. Web. 22 June 2015.
Boluk, Stephanie and Wylie Lenz. “Introduction: Generation Z, the Age of Apoca-
lypse.” Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Eds.
Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011: 1–17. Print.
Brattin, Joel J. “Dickens & Serial Fiction.” Project Boz. Worcester Polytechnic Insti-
tute, n.d. Web. 22 June 2015.
Buckley, Jerry. “The Tragedy in Room 108.” U.S. News & World Report 115.8 (1993):
41. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Burmark, Lynell. “Visual Literacy: What You Get Is What You See.” Teaching
Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More
to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills. Eds. Nancy Frey and Douglas
Fisher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008: 5–25. Print.
Butler, Erik. Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Trans-
formations in Europe, 1732–1933. Suffolk, England: Camden House, 2010. Print.
Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2006. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (Princeton/Bollingen Series in
World Mythology XVII). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972 (1949). Print.
Canfield, Amy. “Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder: A Literary
Backlash against Domestic Violence.” The Journal of American Culture 30.4
(2007): 391–400. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Carra, Mallory. “Comparing ‘The Shining’ With Its ‘The Simpsons’ Parody, Because
It Is So Perfect & Hilarious.” Bustle. Bustle.com, 2015. Web. 16 July 2015.
Carswell, Beth. “Top 100 Most Searched-For Books of 2014.” AbeBooks. AbeBooks,
1996–2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Casano, Ann. “Bildungsroman: Definition, Characteristics & Examples.” Study.
com. Study.com, 2003–2015. Web. 22 June 2015.
Carroll, Rory. “Stephen King risks wrath of NRA by releasing pro-gun control
essay.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 25 Jan. 2013. Web.
22 June 2015.
Causo, Robert de Sousa. “Mythic Quality and Popular Reading in Stephen King’s
Rose Madder.” Extrapolation 44.3 (2003): 356–365. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 22 June 2015.
Charles, Ron. “Stephen King releases gun control essay.” Washington Post. The
Washington Post Company, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Charman-Anderson, Suw. “Fake Reviews: Amazon’s Rotten Core.” Forbes. Forbes.
com LLC, 28 Aug. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
WORKS CITED 189
Charski, Mindy. “E-Books Open To A New Digital Chapter.” Inter@ctive Week 7.21
(2000): 18. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Cherry, Kendra. “The Id, Ego and Superego: The Structural Model of Personality.”
About.com. About.com, 2015. Web. 17 June 2015.
Chokshi, Niraj. “Fight over school shooting list underscores difficulty in quantify-
ing gun violence.” Washington Post. The Washington Post Company, 16 June
2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Ciabattari, Jane. “Is Stephen King a Great Writer?” BBC. BBC, 31 Oct. 2014. Web.
23 June 2015.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 3–25. Print.
Collings, Michael. The Many Facets of Stephen King. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo
Press, 1985. Print.
Colton, David. “Dark Tower looms in graphic form.” USA Today 19 Dec. 2006: 01d.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 June 2015.
“A conversation between Jackson Katz and Douglas Kellner on Guns, Masculinities,
and School Shootings.” Fast Capitalism 4.1 (2008). Web. 22 June 2015.
Copeland, Larry. “Report: School shootings often involve guns from home.” USA
Today. USA Today, 10 Dec. 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Copper, Basil. The Werewolf in Legend, Fact, and Art. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1977. Print.
Cotterell, Arthur, and Rachel Storm. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythol-
ogy. New York: Metro Books, 2012. Print.
Cowan, Alison Leigh. “Adam Lanza’s Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated’
Before Newtown Shootings, Report Says.” New York Times. The New York Times
Company, 21 Nov. 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Cowles, Gregory. “Inside the List.” New York Times. The New York Times Company,
18 Nov. 2011. Web. 24 July 2015.
Crimmins, Jonathan. “Mediation’s Sleight Of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 52.4 (2013): 561–583.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 July 2015.
Csetényi, Korinna. “Fall From Innocence: Stephen King’s The Body.” Americana:
E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 5.2 (2009). Academic Search Com-
plete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine. New York: Twelve, 2009. Print.
Curtis, Barry. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion, 2008.
Print.
Danahy, Martin. “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35.1
David, Peter, Robin Furth, and Richard Isanove. The Dark Tower: Last Shots. New
York: Marvel, 2013. Print.
David, Peter, Robin Furth, Jae Lee, and Richard Isanove. The Dark Tower: The Gun-
slinger Born. New York: Marvel, 2007. Print.
———. The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home. New York: Marvel, 2008. Print.
David, Peter, Robin Furth, and Sean Phillips. The Dark Tower: The Journey Begins.
New York: Marvel, 2011. Print.
190 WORKS CITED
Davidson, Casey. “King’s Row.” Entertainment Weekly 219 (1994): 10. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 3 July 2015.
Davis, J. Madison. “Thoughts on a New Grandmaster.” World Literature Today 81.3
Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1994. Print.
Dawson, Michael. “Styx (River).” Pantheon.org. Encyclopedia Mythica, 27 Dec.
1998. Web. 22 June 2015.
Dayal, Geeta. “Blaming Pop Culture for Gun Violence Is Just a Distraction.” Slate.
The Slate Group LLC, 21 Dec. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
The Defiant Ones. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Perf. Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier. United
Artists, 1958.
De Haven, Tom. “A Killer Serial.” Entertainment Weekly 319 (1996): 63. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
———. “King of the Weird.” Entertainment Weekly 451 (1998): 95. Academic Search
Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
de Lint, Charles. “Cell.” Fantasy & Science Fiction 111.1 (2006): 31–32. Academic
Derrickson, Teresa. “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse
of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar.’” ATQ: A Journal of American 19th
Century Literature and Culture 15.1 (2001): 43–58. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 22 June 2015.
Desperation. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Tom Skerritt, Steven Weber, Annabeth Gish,
Ron Perlman. ABC, 2006.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York: Pocket Books, 1963 (1843). Print.
“Dissociative Identity Disorder.” National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI,
1996–2015. Web. 18 June 2015.
du Coudray, Chantal Bourgault. The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the
Beast Within. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Print.
Duda, Heather L. The Monster Hunter in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2008. Print.
Egan, James. “Technohorror: The Dystopian Vision of Stephen King.” Stephen King.
(Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House,
1998: 47–58. Print.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press, 1990. Print.
Eliade, Mircea. “Myths and Fairy Tales.” Myth and Reality. Long Grove, IL: Wave-
land Press, 1963: 195–202. Print.
Elsworth, Catherine. “Interview with Stephen King.” Goodreads. Goodreads, Inc., 6
Nov. 2014. Web. 1 July 2015.
“Expert: No Profile for School Shooter.” United Press International (UPI.com).
United Press International, Inc., 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
“Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
(Book).” Publishers Weekly 251.48 (2004): 32. Academic Search Complete. Web.
23 June 2015.
Figliola, Samantha. “The Thousand Faces of Danny Torrance.” Discover-
ing Stephen King’s The Shining: Essays on the Bestselling Novel by America’s
WORKS CITED 191
Premier Horror Writer. Ed. Tony Magistrale. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press,
1998: 54–61. Print.
The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window. Ed. Tony Magistrale. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
Finney, Jack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New York: Scribner, 1998 (1955). Print.
Flood, Alison. “Stephen King writes ebook horror story for new Kindle.” The
Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 10 Feb. 2009. Web. 22 June 2015.
Frank, Cathrine O. “Privacy, Character, and the Jurisdiction of the Self: A ‘Story of
the Door’ in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” English Language Notes
48.2 (2010): 215–224. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 June 2015.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. Joan Riviere. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960 (1923). Print.
Frevele, Jamie. “Kimberly Peirce’s Remake of Carrie Will Have an Anti-Bullying
Message.” The Mary Sue. The Mary Sue, 16 Apr. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Geier, Thom. “The Obsession of Stephen King.” U.S. News & World Report 121.21
(1996): 31. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Gilbert, Wendi, and MissRepresentation.org. “The Newtown Shooting and Why
We Must Redefine Masculinity.” The Representation Project. The Representation
Project, 15 Dec. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Glenn, Cerise L., and Landra J. Cunningham. “The Power of Black Magic: The
Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film.” Journal of Black Studies 40.2
(2009): 135–152. Academic Search Complete. 22 June 2015.
Gómez, Claudia Rozas. “Strangers and Orphans: Knowledge and Mutuality in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 45.4 (2013):
360–370. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 July 2015.
Gough, Julian. “The big short—why Amazon’s Kindle Singles are the future.” The
Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 5 Sept. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
“Great Depression and World War II, 1929–1945: Race Relations in the 1930s and
1940s.” Library of Congress. Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 22 June 2015.
Greenfieldboyce, Nell. “Did Climate Inspire the Birth of a Monster?” NPR. NPR, 13
Aug. 2007. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
The Green Mile. Dir. Frank Darabont. Perf. Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan,
Patricia Clarkson. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1999.
Greenspan, Jesse. “The Dark Side of the Grimm Fairy Tales.” History.com. A&E
Television Networks, LLC, 17 Sept. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Cinderella.” Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales.
New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993: 80–86. Print.
———. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. New
York: Barnes and Noble, 1993: 328–336. Print.
Grossman, Dave, and Gloria DeGaetano. Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to
Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence, 2nd ed. New York: Harmony,
2014. Print.
Guggenheim, Marc. “Marc Guggenheim on Adapting N.” Eds. Marc Guggenheim
and Alex Maleev. Stephen King’s N. New York: Marvel, 2010: iv–v. Print.
Guggenheim, Marc, and Alex Maleev. Stephen King’s N. New York: Marvel, 2010.
Print.
192 WORKS CITED
“Guns (Kindle Single).” Amazon. Amazon, 1996–2013. Web. 22 June 2015.

Habash, Gabe. “Stephen King’s Strange E-Book History.” Publishers Weekly: Blogs.
PWxyz, 18 Sept. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Haglund, David. “Stephen King’s Heartfelt Essay About Guns Could Have Used an
Editor.” Slate. The Slate Group LLC, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Dir. David Yates. Perf. Daniel Rad-
cliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes. Warner Bros, 2010.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Dir. David Yates. Perf. Daniel Rad-
cliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes. Warner Bros, 2011.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” American Gothic Tales. Ed. Joyce
Carol Oates. New York: Plume, 1996: 52–64. Print.
Hester-Williams, Kim D. “NeoSlaves: Slavery, Freedom and African American
Apotheosis in Candyman, The Matrix, and The Green Mile.” Genders 40 (2004).
Web. 22 June 2015.
Hill, Joe. 20th Century Ghosts. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow, 2005. Print.
———. By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow,
2014. Ebook.
———. Heart-Shaped Box. Dunmore, PA: Harper Collins, 2007. Print.
———. Horns. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow, 2010. Print.
———. N0S482. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow, 2013. Print.
———. Thumbprint. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow, 2010. Ebook.
———. Twittering from the Circus of the Dead. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow,
2013. Ebook.
———. Wolverton Station. Dunmore, PA: William Morrow Impulse, 2014. Ebook.
Hill, Joe, and Charles Paul Wilson III. The Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland. San
Diego: IDW, 2014. Print.
Hill, Joe, Jason Ciaramella, and Zach Howard. The Cape. San Diego, CA: IDW,
2012. Print.
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2007. Print.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Martin Freeman,
Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage. New Line Cinema, 2014.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Martin Freeman, Ian
McKellen, Richard Armitage. New Line Cinema, 2013.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Martin Freeman, Ian
McKellen, Richard Armitage. New Line Cinema, 2012.
Hoffert, Barbara. “Revival.” Library Journal 139.11: 64. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 1 July 2015.
Hogsette, David S. “Metaphysical Intersections in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s
Theistic Investigation of Scientific Materialism and Transgressive Autonomy.”
Christianity and Literature 60.4 (2011): 531–559. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 1 July 2015.
Hughey, Matthew W. “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereo-
types in ‘Magical Negro’ Films.” Social Problems 56.3 (2009): 543–577. Academic
WORKS CITED 193
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1. Dir. Francis Lawrence. Perf. Jennifer Law-
rence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth. Lionsgate, 2014.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2. Dir. Francis Lawrence. Perf. Jennifer Law-
rence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth. Lionsgate, 2015.
“Impact of Child Abuse.” Adults Surviving Child Abuse. ASCA-Adults Surviving
Child Abuse, 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
International Communication Association. “No link between movie, video game
violence and societal violence? More violent video game consumption, less
youth violence: Study.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 November 2014. Web. 8
July 2015.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Perf. Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wyn-
ter, Allied Artists Pictures, 1956.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Philip Kaufman. Perf. Donald Sutherland,
Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum. United Artists, 1978.
IT. Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace. Perf. John Ritter, Harry Anderson, Dennis Christo-
pher, Annette O’Toole, Tim Reid, Tim Curry. ABC, 1990.
Janicker, Rebecca. “‘It’s My House, Isn’t It?’: Memory, Haunting And Liminality
In Stephen King’s Bag Of Bones.” European Journal of American Culture 29.3
Johnson, Bryan. “Top 10 Chilling Quotes During School Shootings.” Listverse.com.
Listverse.com, 9 May 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Jones, Stephen. Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide. New York:
Billboard Books, 2002. Print.
Keneally, Meghan. “Stephen King demands to pay more taxes because ‘rich people
would rather light themselves on fire’ than do it.” The Daily Mail. Associated
Newspapers Ltd, 30 Apr. 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Kennedy, Dana. “Going for Cheap Thrillers.” Entertainment Weekly 315/316 (1996):
Kent, Brian. “Christian Martyr or Grateful Slave? The Magical Negro as Uncle Tom
in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile.” The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie
to Secret Window. Ed. Tony Magistrale. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008:
115–127. Print.
King, Stephen. “Afterlife.” Tin House 14.4 (2013): 12–23. Humanities Source. Web.
3 July 2015.
———. Apt Pupil. Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1983 (1982): 109–290. Print.
———. Bag of Bones. New York: Pocket Books, 1999 (1998). Print.
———. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2015. Print.
———. “Before the Play.” TV Guide 45.17 (1997): 22–25; 49–57. Print.
———. Big Driver. Full Dark, No Stars. New York: Pocket Books, 2011 (2010): 193–
355. Print.
———. Blockade Billy. New York: Scribner, 2010. Print.
———. The Body. Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1983 (1982): 291–436. Print.
———. “The Bogeyboys.” HorrorKing.com. Stephen King, 1999. Web. 22 June 2015.
———. Carrie. New York: Anchor Books, 2011 (1974). Print.
———. Cell. New York: Pocket Star Books, 2006. Print.
194 WORKS CITED
———. Christine. New York: New American Library, 1983. Print.

———. “Crouch End.” Nightmares & Dreamscapes. New York: Penguin, 1993: 559–
591. Print.
———. Cujo. New York: New American Library, 1981. Print.
———. Cycle of the Werewolf. New York: New American Library, 1985 (1983). Print.
———. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery, 2010 (1981). Print.
———. The Dark Half. New York: Signet, 1990 (1989). Print.
———. The Dead Zone. New York: Signet, 1980 (1979). Print.
———. Desperation. New York: Signet, 1997 (1996). Print.
———. Doctor Sleep. New York: Scribner, 2013. Print.
———. Dolores Claiborne. New York: Signet, 1993 (1992). Print.
———. The Drawing of the Three. New York: Signet, 2003 (1987). Print.
———. Dreamcatcher. New York: Scribner, 2001. Print.
———. Drunken Fireworks. New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2015. Audiobook.
———. “FAQs.” StephenKing.com. Stephen King, 2000–2015. Web. 23 June 2015.
———. Finders Keepers. New York: Scribner, 2015. Print.
———. Firestarter. New York: Signet, 1981 (1980). Print.
———. “Foreword: A Letter.” The Green Mile. New York: Signet, 1996: vii–xiii. Print.
———. From A Buick 8. New York: Scribner, 2002. Print.
———. “Full Disclosure.” Blaze. New York: Pocket Books, 2007: 1–7. Print.
———. Gerald’s Game. New York: Signet, 1993 (1992). Print.
———. “The Gingerbread Girl.” Just After Sunset. New York: Scribner, 2008: 29–84.
Print.
———. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Scribner, 1999. Print.
———. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book. New York: Little Simon,
2004. Print.
———. A Good Marriage. Full Dark, No Stars. New York: Pocket Books, 2011
(2010): 405–526. Print.
———. The Green Mile: The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix. New York: Signet, 1996.
Print.
———. The Green Mile: Coffey on the Mile. New York: Signet, 1996. Print.
———. The Green Mile: Coffey’s Hands. New York: Signet, 1996. Print.
———. The Green Mile: The Mouse on the Mile. New York: Signet, 1996. Print.
———. The Green Mile: The Night Journey. New York: Signet. 1996. Print.
———. The Green Mile: The Two Dead Girls. New York: Signet, 1996. Print.
———. Guns. Bangor, ME: Philtrum Press, 2013. Ebook.
———. “Inspector of Gadgets.” Entertainment Weekly 1096 (2010): 20. Academic
———. “Introduction.” ‘Salem’s Lot. New York: Pocket, 1999 (1975): xv–xxii. Print.
———. “Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art.” Everything’s Eventual: 14
Dark Tales. New York: Pocket Books, 2003 (2002): xi–xxii. Print.
———. IT. New York: Signet, 1987 (1986). Print.
———. “I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie.” Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship,
Student Choice, and Popular Literature. Eds. Brenda Miller Power, Jeffrey D.
Wilhelm, and Kelly Chandler. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of Eng-
lish, 1997: 13–21. Print.
WORKS CITED 195
———. “Jerusalem’s Lot.” Night Shift. New York: Signet, 1979: 1–34. Print.
———. “The Little Green God of Agony.” A Book of Horrors. Ed. Stephen Jones.
New York: St. Martin’s, 2011: 1–29. Print.
———. “The Man in the Black Suit.” Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. New York:
Pocket Books, 2003 (2002): 35–68. Print.
———. Mile 81. New York: Scribner, 2011. Ebook.
———. The Mist. Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet, 1986 (1985): 24–154. Print.
———. “Morality” Esquire 152.1 (2009): 57–111. Academic Search Complete. Web.
3 July 2015.
———. “N.” Just After Sunset. New York: Scribner, 2008: 185–238. Print.
———. Needful Things. New York: Signet, 1992 (1991). Print.
———. “The Night Flier.” Nightmares & Dreamscapes. New York: Penguin, 1993:
109–146. Print.
———. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.
———. “One for the Road.” Night Shift. New York: Signet, 1979: 297–312. Print.
———. Pet Sematary. New York: Signet, 1984 (1983). Print.
———. The Plant. Bangor, ME: Philtrum Press, 2000. Ebook.
———. “The Plant: Zenith Rising.” StephenKing.com. Stephen King, 2000–2015.
Web. 23 June 2015.
———. Rage. The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. New York:
New American Library, 1986: 1–170. Print.
———. Revival. New York: Scribner, 2014. Print.
———. Riding the Bullet. New York: Signet, 2000. Ebook.
———. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. Different Seasons. New York:
Signet, 1983 (1982): 13–107. Print.
———. Rose Madder. New York: Signet, 1996 (1995). Print.
———. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: Pocket, 1999 (1975). Print.
———. Secret Window, Secret Garden. Four Past Midnight. New York: Signet, 2004
(1990): 241–381. Print.
———. The Shining. New York: Anchor Books, 2012 (1977). Print.
———. The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Print.
———. “The Bogeyboys.” HorrorKing.com. Stephen King, 1999. Web. 22 June 2015.
———. “Suck on This.” Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King. Amer-
ican Vampire, Volume 1. New York: DC Comics, 2010: v–vi. Print.
———. “That Bus Is Another World.” Esquire 162.1 (2014): 60–63. Academic Search
Complete. Web. 3 July 2015.
———. The Tommyknockers. New York: Signet, 1988 (1987). Print.
———. “Two Past Midnight.” Four Past Midnight. New York: Signet, 2004 (1990):
237–239. Print.
———. Under the Dome. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.
———. UR. Seattle, WA: Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 2009. Ebook.
———. “Why I Was Bachman.” The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen
King. New York: New American Library, 1986: v–xiii. Print.
King, Stephen, Mitch Albom, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, et al. Hard Listening: The
Greatest Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All. New York: Coliloquy, 2014. Ebook.
196 WORKS CITED
King, Stephen, and Dennis Calero. Little Green God of Agony. StephenKing.com.
Stephen King, 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
King, Stephen, and Joe Hill. In the Tall Grass. New York: Scribner, 2012. Ebook.
———. “Throttle.” He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson. Ed.
Christopher Conlon. New York: Tor, 2009: 17–55. Print.
King, Stephen, Joe Hill, Richard Matheson, Chris Ryall, Nelson Daniel, and Rafa
Garres. Road Rage. San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2012. Print.
King, Stephen, John Mellencamp, and T-Bone Burnett. Ghost Brothers of Darkland
County. Concord Music Group, 2012.
King, Stephen, and Stuart O’Nan. A Face in the Crowd. New York: Scribner, 2012.
Ebook.
———. Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Sea-
son. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.
Kingdom Hospital. Created by Stephen King. Dir. Craig R. Baxley. Perf. Jack Cole-
man, Diane Ladd, Andrew McCarthy. ABC, 2004.
Kirkpatrick, David D. “A Literary Award for Stephen King.” New York Times. The
New York Times Company, 15 Sept. 2003. Web. 23 June 2015.
Knickerbocker, Brad. “Colorado school shooting: Armed guards the answer?” The
Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Dec. 2014. Web.
22 June 2015.
Kraus, Daniel. “Revival.” Booklist 111.2 (2014): 36. Academic Search Complete. Web.
1 July 2015.
LaFemina, Gerry. “How the Publishing World Acclimated to the Digital Revolu-
tion (Part 1).” Highbrow Magazine. Highbrow Magazine, 19 Dec. 2012. Web. 22
June 2015.
Laming, Scott. “A Brief History of Vampires in Literature.” AbeBooks. AbeBooks,
1996–2012. Web. 17 June 2015.
Langan, Sarah. “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic.” Los Angeles
Review of Books. Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 July 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Lant, Kathleen Margaret, and Theresa Thompson. “Imagining the Worst: Stephen
King and the Representation of Women.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and
the Representation of Women. (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture,
Number 67). Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998: 3–8. Print.
Larson, Randall D. “Cycle of the Werewolf and the Moral Tradition of Horror.”
Discovering Stephen King. (Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism No. 8). Ed.
Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985: 102–108. Print.
Leaf, Munro. The Story of Ferdinand. Illustrated by Robert Lawson. New York: Puf-
fin, 1977 (1936). Print.
Lee, Jennifer 8, and Yael Goldstein Love. “A Short History of Serial Fiction.” Plymp-
ton. Plympton, 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Lee, Stefan. “Let’s Get Digital.” Entertainment Weekly 1304 (2014): 66–67. Print.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla: A Critical Edition. (Irish Studies). Ed. Kathleen
Costello-Sullivan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013 (1872). Print.
The Legend of Bagger Vance. Dir. Robert Redford. Perf. Matt Damon, Will Smith,
Charlize Theron. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000.
WORKS CITED 197
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “The Once and Future King.” Yahoo! Internet Life
7.12 (2001): 92. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Lindsay, Ryan K. “Review: Road Rage #1.” Comic Book Resources. Comic Book
Resources, 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Lindsey, Shelley Stamp. “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty.” The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996: 279–295. Print.
Lipinski, Andrea. “American Vampire.” School Library Journal 57.1 (2011): 135.
Liu, Ziming. Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age. Westport, CT:
Libraries Unlimited, 2008. Print.
Lovecraft, H. P. The Annotated Supernatural in Literature. Notes by S. T. Joshi. New
York: Hippocampus, 2012. Print.
Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan. (Short Story Index Reprint Series). Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1926 (1894). Print.
Maerz, Melissa. “Serial: The Podcast You Need to Hear.” Entertainment Weekly 1339
(2014): 14–16. Print.
Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Print.
———. “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children.” Stephen King. (Mod-
ern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1998:
59–75.Print.
———. “Challenging Gender Stereotypes: King’s Evolving Women.” Stephen King:
America’s Storyteller. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2010: 123–147.
Print.
———. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New
York: Twayne, 1992. Print.
———. “The Shape Evil Takes: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited.” Stephen King. (Mod-
ern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1998:
77–85. Print.
———. “‘Truth Comes Out’: The Scrapbook Chapter.” Discovering Stephen King’s
The Shining: Essays on the Bestselling Novel by America’s Premier Horror Writer.
Ed. Tony Magistrale. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1998: 39–46. Print.
Mahoney, Dennis F. “Apt Pupil: The Making of a ‘Bogeyboy.’” The Films of Stephen
King: From Carrie to Secret Window. Ed. Tony Magistrale. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008: 25–38. Print.
Maryles, Daisy. “E-books Rock.” Publishers Weekly 258.12 (2011): 33–36. Academic
The Mask You Live In. Dir. Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The Representation Project,
2015.
Maslin, Janet. “Invasion of the Ring Tone Snatchers.” New York Times 23 Jan. 2006:
n.p. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 July 2015.
Matheson, Richard. “Duel.” Duel: Terror Stories. New York: Tim Doherty, 2003:
11–39. Print.
———. Hell House. New York: Tor, 1999 (1971). Print.
198 WORKS CITED
———. I Am Legend. New York: Tor, 2007 (1954). Print.

———. Stir of Echoes. New York: Tor, 2004 (1958). Print.
———. What Dreams May Come. New York: Tor, 2004 (1978). Print.
McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: DC Comics, 2000. Print.
———. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Print.
Mendez, Dawn. “The ‘Magic Negro.’” Forbes. Forbes.com LLC, 23 Jan. 2009. Web.
22 June 2015.
“Mile 81.” Publishers Weekly 259.13 (2012): 77. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22
June 2015.
Minzesheimer, Bob. “Gun owner Stephen King adds his voice to gun-control
debate.” USA Today. USA Today, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Misery. Dir. Rob Reiner. Perf. James Caan, Kathy Bates. Castle Rock Entertainment,
1990.
The Mist. Dir. Frank Darabont. Perf. Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie
Holden, Andre Braugher. Dimension, 2007.
Montillo, Roseanne. The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr.
Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. New York: Wil-
liam Morrow, 2013. Print.
Nash, Jesse W. “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.” Journal of Popu-
lar Culture 30.4 (1997): 151–160. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “Domestic Violence Facts.”
NCADV.org. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 2005–2011. Web.
22 June 2015.
Newton, Michael. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth
Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce. New York: Penguin Classics, 2010: xv–xxxv. Print.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. Created by Stephen
King. Perf. William H. Macy, Steven Weber, Tom Berenger, Kim Delaney, Claire
Forlani. TNT, 2006.
Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George Romero. Perf. Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea.
Image Ten, 1968.
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” The Twilight Zone: The Complete Fifth Season. Writ.
Richard Matheson. Dir. Richard Donner. Image Entertainment, 2013. DVD.
“NRA Speech on the Newtown Shootings: Wayne LaPierre’s Most Controversial
Quotes.” TheStar.com. Toronto Star, 21 December 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
O’Nan, Stuart. Emily, Alone. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
———. Last Night at the Lobster. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
———. The Odds: A Love Story. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.
———. West of Sunset. New York: Viking, 2015. Print.
———. Wish You Were Here. New York: Grove Press, 2002. Print.
O’Neill, Brendan. “Wrong number.” New Statesman 135. 4785 (2006): 54. Academic
O’Sullivan, Sean. “Representing ‘The Killing State’: The Death Penalty in Nine-
ties Hollywood Cinema.” The Howard Journal 42.5 (2003): 485–503. Academic
WORKS CITED 199
Okorafor-Mbachu, Nnedi. “Stephen King’s Super-Duper Magical Negroes.” Strange

Horizons. Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, 25 Oct. 2004. Web. 22 June 2015.
Orvell, Miles. The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory,
Space, and Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Print.
Ossenfelder, Heinrich August. “Der Vampir.” Les Vampires. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 June
2015.
Otten, Charlotte F. “Introduction.” A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western
Culture. Ed. Charlotte F. Otten. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986:
1–17. Print.
Penzler, Otto. “Introduction.” The Big Book of Ghost Stories. New York: Random
House, 2012: xi–xii. Print.
Pharr, Mary Ferguson. “A Dream of New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a
Variant of Frankenstein.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Night-
mares. Eds. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green, OH: Bowl-
ing Green State University Popular Press, 1987: 115–125. Print.
Pliny the Younger. “An Ancient Roman Ghost Story (ca. AD 61–115).” The Ancient
Standard. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2015.
“Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities.” Amazon. Amazon, 1996–2013. Web. 22
June 2015.
“Plymton. A Literary Studio.” Plympton. Plymton, 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Poger, Sidney. “Character Transformations in The Shining.” Discovering Stephen
King’s The Shining: Essays on the Bestselling Novel by America’s Premier Horror
Writer. Ed. Tony Magistrale. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1998: 47–53. Print.
Polidori, John. The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold, Or, The Modern Oedipus:
Collected Fiction of John William Polidori. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press, 1994. Print.
Prall, Derek. “South Dakota OKs armed teachers, but school districts prove slow to
sign on.” American City and County. Penton, 10 July 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
“President Obama to Award 2014 Medals of Arts.” National Endowment for the
Arts. National Endowment for the Arts, 3 Sept. 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Pressman, Laura. “The Frauroman: A Female Perspective in Coming of Age Sto-
ries.” The Bildungsroman Project. The Bildungsroman Project, 2013–2014. Web.
22 June 2015.
Radford, Benjamin. “Werewolves: Lore, Legend, and Lycanthropy.” Live Science.
Purch, 30 Oct. 2012. Web. 18 June 2015.
Rafferty, Terrence. “Stephen King’s Big Chill.” GQ. September 1998: 159+. Print.
Raphael, Jody. Rape Is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are
Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review
Press, 2013. Print.
Rawlik, Pete. “Defining Lovecraftian Horror.” The Lovecraft eZine. N.p., 15 Apr.
2013. Web. 23 June 2015.
Richards, Leah. “Mass Production and the Spread of Information in Dracula:
‘Proofs of So Wild a Story.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52.4
200 WORKS CITED
Richarz, Allan. “Sandy Hook: Mental Health, Not Gun Control, Is the Answer to
Mass Shootings.” The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor,
20 December 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Riding the Bullet. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Jonathan Jackson, David Arquette, Barbara
Hershey. Innovation Film Group, 2004.
Robbins, Alexandra. Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities. New York: Hyperion,
2004. Print.
Rogers, Mike. “Mile 81.” Library Journal 137.5 (2012): 82. Academic Search Com-
plete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Rosenberg, Jessica. “Mass Shootings and Mental Health Policy.” Journal of Sociol-
ogy & Social Welfare 41.1 (2014): 107–121. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22
June 2015.
Rose Red. Dir. Craig R. Baxley. Perf. Nancy Travis, Steve Keeslar, Kimberly J. Brown,
Julia Campbell. ABC, 2002.
Round, Julia. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.
Rusch, Kristine Kathry. “Editorial.” Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan. 1997: 4. Academic
Rymer, James Malcolm. Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Blood. New York: Arno
Press, 1970 (1845–1847). Print.
Samuel, Benjamin. “Why Stephen King was wrong to publish Guns as a Kindle Sin-
gle.” New York Daily News. NYDailyNews.com, 14 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1917. Print.
Schultz, Christopher. “Stephen King Collaborates with Artist Dennis Calero on
Web Comic.” Lit Reactor. Lit Reactor, 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Sears, John. Stephen King’s Gothic. (Gothic Literary Studies Series). Cardiff: Univer-
sity of Wales Press, 2011. Print.
“Secret Service Safe School Initiative.” United States Secret Service: National Threat
Assessment Center. United States Secret Service, 2012. Web. 22 June 2015.
Seelig, Beth J. “The Rape of Medusa in the Temple of Athena: Aspects of Trian-
gulation in the Girl.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83.4 (2002):
895–911. MEDLINE with Full Text. Web. 22 June 2015.
Sendak, Maurice. “Really Rosie.” Perf. Carole King. Lyrics Depot. LyricsDepot.com,
2015. Web. 22 June 2015.
———. Where The Wild Things Are. Dunmore, PA: Harper Collins, 1963. Print.
Senf, Carol A. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. (Twayne Masterwork
Studies No. 168). Series Ed. Robert Lecker. New York: Twayne, 1998. Print.
———. “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen King and the Evolution of
an Authentic Female Narrative Voice.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and
Serial. Host Sarah Koenig. SerialPodcast.org. Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass,
2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Signet Classics, 1998 (1603). Print.
WORKS CITED 201
———. Macbeth. New York: Signet Classics, 1998 (1611). Print.

———. Romeo and Juliet. New York: Signet Classics, 1998 (1597). Print.
The Shawshank Redemption. Dir. Frank Darabont. Perf. Tim Robbins, Morgan
Freeman, Bob Gunton. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Introduction by Karen Karbiener. New York: Barnes &
Noble Classics, 2003 (1818). Print.
The Shining. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay, Courtland
Mead. ABC, 1997.
The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny
Lloyd. Warner Bros., 1980.
Shoebridge, Neil. “New chapter for an old publishing idea.” Business Review Weekly
18.17 (1996): 72. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2015.
Singh, Shubh M., and Subho Chakrabarti. “A Study in Dualism: The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 50.3 (2008): 221–223.
Snyder, Scott. “Afterword.” Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King.
American Vampire, Volume 1. New York: DC Comics, 2010: 169–170. Print.
Snyder, Scott, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King. American Vampire, Volume 1.
New York: DC Comics, 2010. Print.
“Some Graphic Novel Basics.” GetGraphic.org. GetGraphic.org, the Buffalo and Erie
County Public Library and Partnering Organizations, 2007. Web. 23 June 2015.
Spanberg, Erik. “Revival tells the dark and stormy tale of a New England minister
who loses his faith.” Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor,
11 Nov. 2014. Web. 1 July 2015.
The Stand. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Jamey Sheridan.
ABC, 1994.
Stand By Me. Dir. Rob Reiner. Perf. Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman,
River Phoenix. Columbia Pictures, 1986.
Staskiewicz, Keith. “Revival.” Entertainment Weekly 1340 (2014): 74. Academic
Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism.
Madison: U Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.
“Stephen King Buries The Plant.” CBS News. CBS Interactive Inc., 29 Nov. 2000.
Web. 22 June 2015.
Stephen King’s N. YouTube. Scribner, Marvel, and CBS Mobile, 2008. Web. 23 June
2015.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Bantam, 1981 (1886).
Print.
Stock, Jon. “Stephen King: ‘It’s still possible to scare people.’” The Telegraph. Tele-
graph Media Group Limited, 19 Sept. 2013. Web. 23 June 2015.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Introduction by George Stade. New York: Bantam, 1981
(1897). Print.
Storm of the Century. Dir. Craig R. Baxley. Perf. Colm Feore, Tim Daly. ABC, 1999.
Stross, Randall E. “Downloadable Horror.” U.S. News & World Report 129.5 (2000):
202 WORKS CITED
Taylor, John G. “Behind the Veil: Inside the Mind of Men That Abuse.” Psychology
Today. Sussex Directories, Inc., 15 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
Thirunarayanan, M.O. “From thinkers to clickers: The World Wide Web and
the transformation of the essence of being human.” Ubiquity. Association for
Computing Machinery, 1 May 2003. Web. 23 June 2015.
Thompson, Teresa. “Rituals of Male Violence: Unlocking the (Fe)Male Self in
Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne.” Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and
“Three Kings.” Family Guy, Volume 7. Writ. Alec Sulkin. Dir. Dominic Bianchi. 20th
Century Fox, 2009. DVD.
Tóth, Réka. “The Plight of the Gothic Heroine: Female Development and Relation-
ships in Eighteenth Century Female Gothic Fiction.” Eger Journal of English
Studies X (2010): 21–37. Print.
“Treehouse of Horror V.” The Simpsons: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Greg
Daniels, Dan McGrath, David S. Cohen, Bob Kushell. Dir. Jim Reardon. 20th
Century Fox, 2012. DVD.
Truitt, Brian. “King offers a haunting tale of redemption.” USA Today. USA Today,
11 Nov. 2014. Web. 1 July 2015.
———. “Stephen King shines in sequel Doctor Sleep.” USA Today. USA Today, 23
Sept. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1. Dir. Bill Condon. Perf. Robert Pattin-
son, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner. Summit Entertainment, 2012.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2. Dir. Bill Condon. Perf. Robert Pattin-
son, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner. Summit Entertainment, 2013.
Umile, Dominic. “Stephen King’s Debt to Horror Comics.” PopMatters. PopMatters
Media, Inc., 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 23 June 2015.
Vargish, Thomas. “Technology and Impotence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”
War, Literature, & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 21.1/2
(2009): 322–337. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 July 2015.
Wagstaff, Keith. “Must Read: Serial Novels Get Second Life with Smartphones,
Tablets.” NBC News. NBCNews.com, 19 Feb. 2014. Web. 22 June 2015.
Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Stephen King Universe:
A Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books,
2001. Print.
The Walking Dead. Created by Frank Darabont. Perf. Andrew Lincoln, Steven Yeun,
Norman Reedus, Chandler Riggs, Melissa McBride. AMC, 2010—present.
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. (Oxford World’s Classics).
Ed. W.S. Lewis. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998 (1764). Print.
Webster, Nancy. “The Green Mile.” Advertising Age 68.26 (1997): s14. Academic
Weiner, Robert G., and Carrye Kay Syma. “Introduction.” Graphic Novels and Com-
ics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2013: 1–10. Print.
WORKS CITED 203
Weinstock, Jeffrey A. “Maybe It Shouldn’t Be a Party: Kids, Keds, and Death in

Stephen King’s Stand By Me and Pet Sematary.” The Films of Stephen King: From
Carrie to Secret Window. Ed. Tony Magistrale. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008: 39–49. Print.
Weiss, M. Jerry. “A Teacher’s Guide to the Signet Editions of Selected Short Horror
Stories of Stephen King.” Penguin.com. Series eds. W. Geiger Ellis and Arthea J.
S. Reed. Penguin/Random House, 2014. Web. 24 July 2014.
“What Is Schizophrenia?” National Institute of Mental Health. National Institute of
Mental Health (NIMH), n.d. Web. 18 June 2015.
Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: New American
Library, 1984. Print.
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. “Cinderella’s Revenge: Twists on Fairy Tale and Mythic
Themes in the Work of Stephen King.” Stephen King. (Modern Critical Views).
Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1998: 5–13. Print.
“Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren’t the same thing.” Ed. T.J. Raphael.
Public Radio International. Public Radio International, 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 22
June 2015.
Zahl, Paul F.M. “Stephen King’s Redemption.” Christianity Today 44.3 (2000): 82.
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Cul-
ture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Print.
Index
A Blade, 13
addiction, 50, 51, 62–63, 64, 65, Blaze, 38, 73, 79. See also Bachman,
106, 174 Richard
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bloch, Robert, 52
122. See also Twain, Mark Blockade Billy, 145
“Afterlife,” 171 The Body, 6, 103, 104–108, 112, 117,
Albuquerque, Rafael, 6, 21, 22, 23, 24 174, 180n1, 182n3
aliens, 43 “The Bogeyboys,” 78–80, 84
American Vampire (series), 21, 24 The Bonfire of the Vanities, 122. See also
American Vampire, Volume 1, 6, Wolfe, Tom
21–25, 153. See also Snyder, Scott; The Book of the Dead, 59
Albuquerque, Rafael Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 12–13
“An Ancient Ghost Story,” 59. See also Burnett, T Bone, 171. See also
Pliny the Younger Ghost Brothers of Darkland
Anna Karenina, 122. See also Tolstoy, Leo County
Apt Pupil, 6, 103, 108–112, 117
Arrested Development, 135 C
audiobooks, 171, 172 Calero, Denis, 161–162, 163–164. See
author characters, 36 also Little Green God of Agony
Gordie Lachance, 104–108, 117 (webcomic)
Jack Torrance, 60–65, 179n2 “The Call of Cthulhu,” 54, 148, 157.
Mike Noonan, 65–70, 180n2 See also Cthulhu mythos;
Mort Rainy, 36–38, 178n4, 178n6 Lovecraft, H. P.
Thad Beaumont, 38–41 Campbell, Joseph, 104, 182n2. See also
mythic hero
B capital punishment, 124, 126–129, 131,
Bachman, Richard, 6, 38, 73, 79, 178n8 132, 133, 183n3
Bag of Bones (miniseries), 173, 180n3 Carmilla (novel), 12. See also le Fanu,
Bag of Bones (novel), 6, 41, 61, 65–70 Sheridan
Bates, Kathy, 173 Carrie (film, 1976), 182n6
Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 171, 172, 185n3 Carrie (film, 2013), 104, 182–183n6
Big Driver, 88, 172, 181n2 Carrie (novel), 2, 3, 6, 7, 103, 112–117,
bildungsroman, 6, 103, 104, 205, 112, 171, 182nn3–5
115, 172 The Castle of Otranto, 59. See also
Blackwater, 122. See also McDowell, Walpole, Horace
Michael Castle Rock, 105, 108, 177n1
206 INDEX
Cell, 6, 46, 54–58 The Defiant Ones, 184n4

The Chamber, 183n3 Desperation (novel), 38, 144. See also
child abuse, 14, 62, 64, 88, 90, 91–94, Bachman, Richard; The Regulators
98, 106–107, 143 Desperation (TV movie), 180n3
children, 15, 17, 18, 34, 40, 43, 46–49, Derry, 43, 177n1, 182n1
50, 57, 60–65, 66, 67, 68, 103, Dickens, Charles, 3, 105, 121–122, 123,
104–108, 111, 116, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 177n1. See also
144–145, 145–146, 147–148, A Christmas Carol
182n1 Different Seasons (collection), 6, 103,
“Children of the Corn” (film 126, 180n1
franchise), 1 direct address narration, 18, 89
“Children of the Corn” (short story), Disney, 98, 116
146–147 dissociative identity disorder, 37–38,
Christianity, 17–18, 50–51, 99, 113, 178n5
114, 126, 129, 132–133 Doctor Sleep, 4, 61, 65
Christine (film), 185n4 Dolores Claiborne, 6, 87, 88–95, 96,
Christine (novel), 6, 31, 34–36, 41, 58, 172, 181n1, 181n2
112, 178n3, 185n4 domestic violence, 2, 6, 52, 63, 64, 88,
A Christmas Carol (book), 59. See also 91–92, 95–96, 97, 99
Dickens, Charles Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 28–31, 34, 39,
“Cinderella,” 98, 116 96. See also Stevenson, Robert
Columbine, 76, 77, 80, 81, 180–81n2 Louis
coming of age, 6, 103–117, 172, 182n1. Dracula, 6, 12, 13–17, 20, 22. See also
See also bildungsroman Stoker, Bram; Van Helsing
cosmic horror, 52–54, 147–148, The Drawing of the Three, 178n5.
157, 160 See also Dark Tower (book series)
“Crouch End,” 179n5 Dreamcatcher, 43
Cthulhu mythos, 54, 148, 157 “Drunken Fireworks,” 172
Cujo, 3, 43, 89 duality, 27–41, 96
Cycle of the Werewolf, 6, 31, 32–34, “Duel” (comic), 153, 165–167,
41, 177n2 168–169. See also “Duel” (short
story); Hill, Joe; Matheson,
D Richard; Road Rage; “Throttle”
Daniel, Nelson, 165. See also Road “Duel” (short story), 153, 164–166,
Rage 168–169. See also Hill, Joe;
Danse Macabre, 5, 13, 27, 59, 147, 171 Matheson, Richard; Road Rage;
Darabont, Frank, 1, 129, 173, “Throttle”
183–184n3
The Dark Half, 6, 31, 36, 38–41 E
Dark Tower (book series), 3, 153–154, ebooks, 7, 121, 134–135, 137–151, 171,
178n5, 184–185n1 181n4, 185n2, 185n3, 185n6
Dark Tower (graphic novel series), E.C. comics, 13
153–154, 172 Edgar Award, 2
Dead Man Walking, 183n3 Eliot, George, 122. See also
The Dead Zone, 3, 43 Middlemarch
INDEX 207
epistolary style, 14–15, 76, 139, A Good Marriage, 88, 172, 181n2
156–157, 159 Gothic tradition, 5–6, 11, 13, 25, 28,
Erinyes, 100–101 30, 31, 38, 43, 55, 63, 66, 67,
Everything’s Eventual, 138, 172 68–69, 70, 172
Grandmaster status, 1–2
F graphic novels, 7, 13, 21–25, 121,
A Face in the Crowd, 7, 145–146. 133, 146, 153–169, 171, 172,
See also O’Nan, Stuart 177n2, 185n1, 186n2, 186n3.
fairy tales, 98, 116. See also See also American Vampire,
“Cinderella”; “Hansel and Gretel”; Volume 1; The Dark Tower;
“Snow White” Little Green God of Agony; “N.”;
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Road Rage; The Stand
Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 The Great God Pan (novel), 52–53.
Season, 145. See also O’Nan, See also Machen, Arthur
Stewart Greek mythology, 98–101, 158
Family Guy, 173–174 The Green Mile (film), 1, 127–128,
Finders Keepers, 172 129, 173, 183n1, 183n3,
Finney, Jack, 46. See also Invasion of 184nn4–5
the Body Snatchers (novel) The Green Mile (novel), 7, 121–135,
Firestarter, 144, 172 183n3, 184n5
Flaubert, Gustave, 122. See also Guggenheim, Marc, 158–160. See also
Madame Bovary Stephen King’s N.
Four Past Midnight, 36 gun control, 80, 84, 149
Frankenstein, 6, 12, 43–46, 50, 52, Guns, 7, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83–84, 140,
53–54, 55, 179n3. See also 148–151, 171, 172, 181n4, 185n7
Shelley, Mary
frauroman, 112 H
Freud, Sigmund, 27–28, 32. See also Hamlet, 59. See also Shakespeare,
structural theory of personality William
From a Buick 8, 185n4 “Hansel and Gretel,” 98
Full Dark, No Stars, 88, 181 Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band
Ever (of Authors) Tells All, 171.
G See also Rock Bottom Remainders
Garres, Rafa, 165. See also Road Rage Harris, Charlane, 13, 21. See also
Garris, Mick, 64, 173, 180n3 Sookie Stackhouse series;
Gerald’s Game, 6, 87, 88–95, 96, 172, True Blood
181n1, 181n2 Harry Potter, 133
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, 171 haunted houses, 59, 60–70
ghosts, 4, 11, 59–70, 73, 146, 178n6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 172. See also
“The Gingerbread Girl,” 87–88, 172, “Young Goodman Brown”
181n2 Hill, Joe, 7, 140, 146–148, 153,
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 164–169, 171–172, 179n5, 185n1.
(pop–up book), 145 See also In the Tall Grass;
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Road Rage; “Throttle”
(novel), 145, 172 The Hobbit, 133. See also Tolkien, J.R.R.
208 INDEX
Homer, 59, 100. See also Illiad; Odyssey The Long Walk, 38, 73. See also
The Hunger Games, 133 Bachman, Richard
Lovecraft, H.P., 52, 53–54, 147–148,
I 157, 179n5. See also “The Call of
Illiad, 59. See also Homer Cthulhu”; “The Rats in the Walls”
In the Tall Grass, 7, 146–148, 171,
179n5. See also Hill, Joe M
Invasion of the Body Snatchers Macbeth, 59. See also Shakespeare,
(film, 1956), 46 William
Invasion of the Body Snatchers Machen, Arthur, 52–53. See also The
(film, 1978), 46 Great God Pan
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (novel), Madame Bovary, 122. See also Flaubert,
46. See also Finney, Jack Gustave
IT (miniseries), 173 Magical Negro trope, 129–133, 184n4
IT (novel), 43, 182n1 magic realism, 98
Maleev, Alex, 158–160. See also
J Stephen King’s N.
Jackson, Shirley, 52 “The Man in the Black Suit” (short
James, Henry, 122. See also Portrait of story), 172
a Lady Marvel Comics, 153, 158
“Jerusalem’s Lot,” 179n5 Matheson, Richard, 153, 164, 165, 166,
Just After Sunset, 153, 156, 158 169. See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe;
Road Rage; “Throttle”
K McDowell, Michael, 122. See also
Kindle, 4, 134, 137, 138, 140–143. Blackwater
See also ebooks Medusa, 98–99
Kindle Singles, 79, 80, 83–84, 143, 145, Mellencamp, John, 171. See also Ghost
146, 149, 150, 151, 185n6. Brothers of Darkland County
See also ebooks; A Face in the melodrama, 4
Crowd; Guns; In the Tall Grass; Meyers, Stephenie, 13, 21. See also
Mile 81; UR Twilight Saga
Kingdom Hospital, 173 Middlemarch (novel), 122. See also
Kubrick, Stanley, 173, 174. See also The Eliot, George
Shining (film) Mile 81 (ebook), 7, 143–145, 147,
185n4
L Minotaur, 100–101
le Fanu, Sheridan, 12. See also Carmilla Misery (film), 173
Last Dance, 183n3 The Mist (film), 173
Leaf, Munro, 100. See also The Story of The Mist (novella), 179n5
Ferdinand Mr. Mercedes (novel), 2, 172
Lee, Spike, 131, 184n4 monsters, 3, 4, 11, 13, 20–21, 24, 27, 43,
The Legend of Bagger Vance, 184n4 45, 55, 58, 63, 73, 127, 147, 160,
Leiber, Fritz, 52 185n4. See also The “Thing Without
“Little Green God of Agony” (short a Name”; vampires; werewolves
story), 153, 160–161, 164 “Morality,” 171
Little Green God of Agony (web comic), mythic hero, 104, 182n2. See also
7, 153, 154, 161–164, 169 Campbell, Joseph
INDEX 209
N Plutarch, 59
“N.” (mobisodes), 158, 160. See also Polidori, John, 12. See also The Vampyre
Stephen King’s N. (graphic novel) Portrait of a Lady, 122. See also
“N.” (short story), 153, 156–158, 159, James, Henry
160. See also Stephen King’s N. pseudonym, 6, 38, 39, 53, 73, 178–179n8.
(graphic novel) See also Bachman, Richard
National Book Foundation
Distinguished Contribution to R
American Letters, 1–2 Rage, 6, 38, 73–85, 149, 172, 178n7,
National Medal of Arts, 2 180n1, 185n7. See also Bachman,
National Rifle Association (NRA), Richard; school shootings
80–81, 84, 149, 150 “The Rats in the Walls,” 148. See also
Needful Things, 41 Lovecraft, H.P.
“The Night Flier,” 6, 13, 18–21 The Regulators, 38, 73. See also
Nightmares & Dreamscapes Bachman, Richard; Desperation
(collection), 179n5 Reiner, Rob, 103, 173
Nightmares & Dreamscapes Resident Evil, 55
(television series), 173 Revival, 6, 46, 50–54, 58, 179n3
Night of the Living Dead, 13, 46 Riding the Bullet (ebook), 7,
Night Shift, 17, 179n5 138–139, 140
Riding the Bullet (film), 180n3
O Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Obama, Barack, 2 Redemption (novella),
Odyssey, 59, 100. See also Homer 126, 183n3
O’Nan, Stuart, 7, 140, 145–146, Road Rage (graphic novel), 7, 146,
185n5. See also A Face in the 153, 154, 164–169, 172. See also
Crowd; Faithful: Two Diehard “Duel”; Hill, Joe; Matheson,
Boston Red Sox Fans Richard; “Throttle”
Chronicle the Historic Roadwork, 38, 73. See also Bachman,
2004 Season Richard
“One for the Road,” 6, 13, 17–18 The Rock Bottom Remainders, 171
online publication, 7, 79, 139, 141 Rockwell, Norman, 109
On Writing: A Memoir of the Romero, George A., 13, 46, 55, 56.
Craft, 171 See also Night of the Living Dead
Orange Is the New Black, 135 Rose Madder, 6, 87, 88, 95–101, 172
Ossenfelder, Heinrich August, 11–12. Rose Red, 173
See also “The Vampire” The Running Man, 3, 38, 73
Ryall, Chris, 165. See also Road Rage
P Rymer, James Malcolm, 12. See also
penny dreadfuls, 12. See also Rymer, Varney the Vampire; or The Feast
James Malcolm; Varney the of Blood
Vampire; or The Feast of Blood
Persephone, 99 S
Pet Sematary, 6, 46–50, 52, 105, ’Salem’s Lot, 6, 13–17, 18, 25, 32, 58, 144
179n2 Sandy Hook Elementary School, 7, 76,
The Plant, 139–140, 183n2 78, 79, 80, 81, 83–84, 140, 148,
Pliny the Younger, 59 149, 171
210 INDEX
The Saturday Evening Post, 109, 122 Stephen King’s N. (graphic novel),
schizophrenia, 37, 82, 178n4 7, 153, 154, 158–160, 169, 172,
school shootings, 6, 7, 73–85, 172, 186n3
180–181n2. See also Columbine; Stoker, Bram, 6, 12, 13–17, 20, 22, 46,
Sandy Hook Elementary School; 52, 55. See also Dracula
Virginia Tech Storm of the Century, 173
Secret Window, Secret Garden, 6, 31, The Story of Ferdinand, 100. See also
36–38, 39, 41, 178n6 Leaf, Munro
Serial, 133–134 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 122. See also
serial publication, 7, 12, 121–135, 171, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
172, 183n2, 184n7. See also Straub, Peter, 52, 177n1
The Green Mile; The Plant structural theory of personality,
sexual violence, 6, 14, 62, 65–66, 68, 27–31, 32, 35. See also Freud,
69–70, 73, 87–101, 110, 127, Sigmund
130, 150, 172, 180n4, 181n2,
184n5 T
Shakespeare, William, 59, 96. See also technohorror, 35
Hamlet; Macbeth terrorism, 4, 55, 56, 57–58
The Shawshank Redemption (film), “That Bus Is Another World,” 171
1, 173–174, 183–184n3 Theseus, 100
Shelley, Mary, 6, 43–46, 47, 49, 52, 55, The “Thing Without a Name,” 5, 43–58.
179n1, 179n3, 179n4. See also See also monsters
Frankenstein Thinner, 38, 73. See also Bachman,
The Shining (film), 173, 174. See also Richard
Kubrick, Stanley “Throttle” (comic), 165, 167–169.
The Shining (miniseries), 64, 173 See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe;
The Shining (novel), 3, 4, 6, 58, 61–65, Matheson, Richard; Road Rage;
70, 144, 173 “Throttle” (short story)
The Simpsons, 173–174 “Throttle” (short story), 146, 153,
Skeleton Crew, 179n5 164–165, 167–169, 172. See also
small towns, 13, 14, 32, 177n1. See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe; Matheson,
Castle Rock; Derry Richard; Road Rage
“Snow White,” 98 Tolkien, J.R.R., 133. See also
Snyder, Scott, 6, 21–25, 153. The Hobbit
See also American Vampire, Tolstoy, Leo, 122. See also
Volume 1 Anna Karenina
Sookie Stackhouse series, 13, 21. The Tommyknockers, 43
See also Harris, Charlane; True Transparent, 135
Blood True Blood (TV series), 21.
The Stand (graphic novel series), 7, See also Harris, Charlane; Sookie
153, 172 Stackhouse series
The Stand (miniseries), 173, 180n3 Twain, Mark, 122. See also
The Stand (novel), 3, 7, 143, 153–154, The Adventures of Huckleberry
172, 183n2 Finn
Stand By Me (film), 103, 105, 173–174 28 Days Later, 55
INDEX 211
Twilight Saga, 13, 21, 133. See also Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of
Meyers, Stephenie Blood, 12. See also Rymer, James
The Twilight Zone, 143, 164 Malcom
Virginia Tech, 76, 80–81
U visual literacy, 7, 154–155
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 122, 129. See also
Stowe, Harriet Beecher W
undead, 6, 12, 16, 17, 52, 62, 110, The Walking Dead, 46
172, 179n1 Walpole, Horace, 59. See also
Under the Dome, 43, 183n2 The Castle of Otranto
UR, 7, 140–143, 145, 184–185n3 werewolves, 5, 6, 11, 27–41, 43, 55, 57,
58, 59, 60, 172, 177n2
V Wolfe, Tom, 122. See also Bonfire of the
“The Vampire,” 11–12. See also Vanities
Ossenfelder, Heinrich August
The Vampire Diaries, 21 Y
vampires, 4, 5, 6, 11–25, 27, 32, 43, 55, “Young Goodman Brown,” 172.
57, 58, 59, 73, 153, 172 See also Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Vampyre, 12. See also Polidori,
John Z
Van Helsing, 12, 15, 16–17. See also Žižek, Slavoj, 46
Dracula; Stoker, Bram zombies, 13, 46, 54–58, 179n1

Teaching Stephen King Horror The Supernatural and New Approaches To Literature

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Teaching Stephen King Horror The Supernatural and New Approaches To Literature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

TEACHING

Horror, the Supernatural, and New

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Section I: Variations on Classic Horror Tropes

Section II: Real Life Horror

Section III: Playing with Publishing

Why Teach King?

being recognized for his Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,

These larger themes speak to a common, shared experience of humanity, the

a variety of different levels to effectively appeal to and terrify readers: in the

Teaching Stephen King

According to M. Jerry Weiss’s educational guide to teaching King’s short

especially in recent years. As Ciabattari explains, King “keeps millions

K ing’s fiction is dynamically invested in traditional figures of the Gothic,

“The Vampire” (1748), which foregrounds the sexual transgression of the

’Salem’s Lot and “One For the Road”

of a significant state of affairs, Dracula is a representation of the periodi-

“The Night Flier”

While the distinction between human and monstrous is clearly demar-

Dees sees as potential masquerade, playing on tropes and clichés: grave-

American Vampire, Volume 1

The first decade of the twenty-first century was dominated by romantic

What should they be?

American Vampire, Volume 1 introduces Skinner Sweet, a new kind of

so on” (196). After being accidentally infected by a European vampire in

monstrosity of the old, eschewing the soft-focus romantic vampires that

T he figure of the vampire—and King’s variations on it—is largely one of

in the pleasure principle, “which strives for immediate gratification of all

these two elements of his identity, Jekyll begins to consider whether it

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be

In his exploration of this question, we have the creation of Mr. Hyde,

while “the superego is represented by the proclaimed and implicit morals

Echoing the structural theory of personality developed by Freud and

Something inhuman has come to Tarker’s Mills . . . It is the Werewolf, and

While King’s small towns are no strangers to horror—as the vampires of

with each. Arnie’s resemblance to LeBay gradually grows as Arnie devel-

friend struggles to take control, as he pleads with Dennis, saying “I can’t

The Werewolf Within

himself as he refuses to remember and take responsibility for the act of

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously referred to as multiple

Mort does not physically transform into another being, as Reverend

deeply, well-recognized as a symptom of severe depression—he “becomes”

The “Thing Without a Name”

I n addition to vampires and werewolves, King’s work features a host of

begins his experiments in the full knowledge that he is endeavoring to reach

gravity, magnetism, and electricity showed matter to be dynamic rather than

Given this powerful resonance, it is unsurprising that Shelley’s Fran-

electricity. As he concludes his Terrible Sermon, outlining an obsession

King’s dedication page at the beginning of Revival includes “a laundry

Lovecraft,5 as King edges ever closer to the madness of the unknowable

A popular contemporary development of the figure of the reanimated

into rampaging, violent monsters in a single chaotic moment, as “Every-

The transformation is widespread and almost instantaneous; as Fantasy &

of computer technology.” In a world full of these very realistic threats and

W hile King’s consideration of the previous three figures—the vampire,

In Bag of Bones, Mike Noonan is a successful suspense author whose wife

This realization takes him weeks to achieve, punctuated with a number of

contemplates murdering Kyra, her voice crying together with Mattie’s to

Real Life Horror

of the State Police is called in to talk to Charlie through the loudspeaker

School Shootings and Rage

School shootings have become an all too common occurrence in contem-

Bogeyboys do not win foot-races, get kissed by the Homecoming Queen, or