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all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King
himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own
dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the
neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,”
whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American
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burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat Church is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box
broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor
Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—
and resurrections follows.
The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and which leads to
the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency
and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The
larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and rage, then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized,
like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”
The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental
trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s
“resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child”
and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot, Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Dis-
ney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy.
Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.
In this modernization of Frankenstein, King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify the 1980’s. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—
what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “wasteland” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem
about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “spiritus
mundi.” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.
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It
In It, a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented in It, the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victims’ isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of the each individual victim’s worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Little Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)
In a scary passage in Pet Sematary, Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890’s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around
him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of the protagonists in It, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo
and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner, the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future.
Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its siege, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill
Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.
It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take
stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850, serial; 1850, book) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Inti-
mations of Immortality” (1807), from which King takes his primary theme and narrative
device, the look back that enables one to go forward. In the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a
generation and a culture.
Other 1980’s novels
As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage.
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mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, ac-
cording to Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the
“intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers, King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation wit
h technology and televangelism. In the Dark Tower cycle, he combined the gothic with the Western genre and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand. Then, with much fanfare, in 1990 King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.
King and Bachman
The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in
1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five
novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew
into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and, if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the Bachman novels (with one excep-
tion) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting
question of what “Stephen King” really was.
Misery
Misery, which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psy-
chotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of Sheldon’s hero-
ine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader”
becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Schehera-zade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours
each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.
Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “You set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns—not his “seri-150
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ous” novel Fast Cars—was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.
The Dark Half
It was not a complete surprise, then, when in 1989 King examined the issue from the
other side, in The Dark Half, an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a
twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beau-
mont is a creative-writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George
Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-
selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Like King, Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with graveside service and
papier-mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style)
soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. The writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends,
community.
Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex (c. 429 b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary—King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale”
as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.
In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desire and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard
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Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the
gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of self-parody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it) gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.
Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne
Some have criticized King’s negative depictions of women, which King himself ad-
mitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this
weakness in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne. Both present strong but besieged female protagonists, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.
Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for sexual bondage play in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—
Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and
strength.
Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient as-
pect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. King, however, had examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong females in Insomnia, Rose Madder, and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman
must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness giv
es way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)
The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to the sprawling It or the encyclopedic The Stand, these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery‘s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the
genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as the novella The Body and the story “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).
Character and voice, however, have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie
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Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells.
In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.
Bag of Bones
Bag of Bones, which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike
Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy of a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment.
Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.