‘It’ before It: Stephen King and the abhuman from Carrie to The Shining

Although Stephen King’s most famous use of the pronoun ‘It’ comes from his 1986 novel It, he nevertheless uses ‘It’ in highly distinctive ways well before then. These uses of ‘It’ before It need to be discussed because they signify a complex transformation of human characters into monstrous creatures. Focusing on texts ranging from Carrie to The Shining, this article explores how King developed these distinctive ‘Its’ from a somewhat vague sense of unease or twisted desires into complex signifiers of the ways human characteristics can transform into monstrous actions. But King’s focus is never solely on the spectacle or the general horror of this transformation from human to monster. Instead, he explores the unsettling problem of the ways even the most positive human desires and actions can turn characters into ‘It’ creatures. Thus, the real tragedy of becoming an ‘It’, this article argues, comes from recognizing that these ‘It’ creatures are never just simple variations on a monstrous theme; instead, they represent the ways ordinary people can become monstrous as they lose themselves to their own alluring, but ultimately empty, actions.

The (un)death of the author: Authorship as horror trope in Stephen King’s fiction

Both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, Stephen King has reflected in more depth on authorship than most of his peers. Critically negotiating Roland Barthes’s declaration of the death of the Author (1967), King ‘resurrects’ the author persona in his fiction and turns it into an ‘undead’ horror trope. This article explores how this narrative mechanism operates in four King novels: Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story. King’s development of authorship into a fictional horror trope, the analysis demonstrates, metaphorically negotiates King’s anxiety regarding his own authorship and its literary status.

‘Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch’: Justifications for patriarchal violence and the mischaracterization of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance

Stephen King has criticized Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining for its characterization of Jack Torrance as an unsympathetic monster rather than a well-intentioned man tragically destroyed by his addiction and anger. However, a re-examination of the novel and its sequel shows that King’s Jack Torrance is, no matter what King says, a dangerous patriarchal figure long before he enters the Overlook. The Shining and Doctor Sleep detail Jack’s wife and son’s co-dependent attachment to him, their wariness and fear of him, his long history of toxic behaviour and his deep capacity for self-deception that all help to expose a justifying narrative for patriarchal violence. However, King’s extratextual defences of Jack and the critical narrative that reaffirms his assessment of Jack’s moral character must be part of our analysis of The Shining’s critique of patriarchal ideology, as the contrast between those statements and the textual evidence reveal a desire to see Jack as sympathetic that makes King and the audience complicit in the same narrative of justification that the novel exposes.

‘We lie best when we lie to ourselves’: Stephen King’s It and the horrors of nostalgia

Stephen King’s 1986 novel It follows a traditional horror story arc of restoration of order through defeat of a monster, but the interlude sections of the novel complicate this narrative structure with an alternate story arc in which the people of Derry are also a source of horror within the novel, who enable the monster with their desire to sanitize the past of the town. This arc, in which the townspeople are perpetrators and enablers of horrors, reflects a cultural tendency towards nostalgic views of the past that would have been noticeable in political and cultural movements of the 1980s. As nostalgic currents have returned to prominence in political movements surrounding the election of Donald Trump and other populist movements, re-examining the interlude sections of It reveals commentary about the horrors of nostalgia that, like the cyclical reawakening of the novel’s monster, are relevant once again.

Roll on two: Ambiguous energies in Stephen King’s The Shining, The Green Mile and Revival

This article positions King as both heir to the literary romantics and arbiter of contemporary issues as located specifically within his representation of energy, and electricity in particular. Writing both within and beyond horror, King both characterizes and creates energic structures that reflect both romantic aesthetic conceptualizations of electricity and modern concerns regarding its generation and fuel consumption more generally. By examining how The Shining (1977), The Green Mile (1996) and Revival (2014) present energy and also formally generate it, I will explore a little attended to element of King’s work and identify how energy functions ambiguously within these texts, materializing both horror and hope, bringing about both the conclusion and continuation of human life. I will also explore how the particular spaces this power is located within both channel and amplify it, King’s work here a surprising textual conduit for our fascination with, reliance on and fear of energy and the ongoing problems and potentialities alive within it.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

From capes to Tuffskin jeans: Stephen King’s vampires and 1980s angst

The central premise of this article is that Stephen King’s use of the vampire as a figure of horror transforms across three texts: ‘Salem’s Lot, ‘The night flier’ and ‘Popsy’. Drawing upon Reagan-era anxieties, King brings us to the conclusion in ‘Popsy’ that the prototypical vampire is not necessarily the one people need to fear since it is the human monster who preys on the vulnerable.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

‘Art-horror’ and ‘hardcore art-horror’ at the margins: Experimentation and extremity in contemporary independent horror

The changing forms of contemporary horror have been the subject of much discussion, both in popular journalism and scholarship. Amid an on-going discussion on the arrival and characteristics of what has been contentiously termed ‘post-horror’, this article seeks to situate recent independent American horror within the context of the recent art film, in keeping with the work of Geoff King, as well as the traditions of ‘art-horror’ as it has been referred to by Joan Hawkins. Using a series of examples taken from recent independent horror – including A Ghost Story (David Lowery 2017) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers 2019), as well as the micro-budget independent films of Phil Stevens – Falvey makes use of King’s work to explore the textual characteristics of recent ‘art-horror’. Falvey argues that films iterative of this mode employ experimentation and extremity (in various forms) to discursively position the films away from more generically recognizable studio horror films in a bid for critical distinction.