While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s
father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed
to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of
Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow
of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra
and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.
To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own consid-
erable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker
unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into
Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As
Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share
dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communi-
cate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.
As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search
to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, 153
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notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs.
Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and
her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, re-
lated to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this tragedy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated tragedy. Everything is
tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing
abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes this was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.
The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones.
The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a pre-
dominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner and Ten-
nessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been
successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel, the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to
Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s
body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye, and her
spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.
By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open a television com-
mercial for American Express with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first
prompted to examine the “wide perceptions which light [children’s] interior lives” ( Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. In the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.
Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The
Green Mile was published as a serial in six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. While he is still thought of as having no style, King actually maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate readers emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.
King, perhaps more than any other author since William Faulkner and his fictional
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Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within his later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones, King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things, and Insomnia. For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.
Cell
After Bag of Bones, much of King’s work consisted of teleplays. However, in 2006, King produced Cell, a grim but subtly gleeful exercise in social criticism and homage to classic works of horror and science fiction. Upon its publication, King spoke openly about his having produced a work that would give his fans his spin on the American zombie film as initiated by director George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels. The plot of Cell neatly parallels the story lines of Romero’s zombie movies and their numerous imitations: The earth is suddenly stricken by a mysterious plague that
turns most of its inhabitants into mindless predatory monsters who prey on the few hapless humans who remain unaffected.
Just as Romero used the original Night of the Living Dead to examine Americans’fears in the 1960’s during the Cold War and the Vietnam War and Dawn of the Dead (1978) to decry the rampant consumerism of the 1970’s, so King develops Cell as a wry critique of early twenty-first century technomania and self-absorption. A glitch in the nation’s mobile-phone system (perhaps a terrorist plot) short-circuits the brains of everyone talking on cell phones at the time. Labeled “the Pulse,” this glitch removes people’s individuality, higher levels of intelligence, and impulse control, triggering wave after wave of mindless violence. Those unaffected by the Pulse try to reach distant rural areas where cell phones would have been scarce. This is the essential social comment that runs throughout Cell: Cell-phone addicts are barbarians who are literal threats to society and a menace to those who do not share their obsession with constant phone chat.
To underscore this satiric element, King has his hero, Clay, minutes before the Pulse
occurs, strolling down the streets of Boston reflecting to himself that he is witnessing people with cell phones performing inconsiderate, ungracious acts that would have been un-
imaginable only a few years earlier. Thus, even before disaster strikes, King depicts modern Americans as divided into “phone-crazies” and others;
the Pulse only intensifies and highlights this division. In another allusion, this one to classic science fiction, King has the Pulse occur on October 1, thereby referencing English scientist Fred Hoyle’s much-admired science-fiction novel October the First Is Too Late (1966), in which an anomaly in the space-time continuum separates humankind into opposing groups living in disparate
eras of time and levels of civilization.
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The Dark Tower
King’s major accomplishment of the early twenty-first century was the completion of
his novel cycle The Dark Tower. Inspired by Robert Browning’s long poem “Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) and envisioned as an epic intermingling of the
Western genre and fantasy, this septet began with The Gunslinger in 1982, with a new volume following approximately every five years until 2003, when King focused on the se-
ries’completion, revising Gunslinger that year and publishing the fifth installment. The final two volumes appeared the following year.
As with many such expansive series, there is much that is good in the Dark Tower cycle, but it is nevertheless a flawed work. Recounting the long journey of gunslinger/
knight-errant Roland Deschain toward the Dark Tower, a pivot where thousands of paral-
lel universes meet, the series draws on manifold sources: Western films, science fiction, classic fairy tales, L. Frank Baum, Greek mythology, Celtic and Eastern mysticism, Jungian psychology, Arthurian romance, and King’s own hefty canon. When these strands
mesh, the effect is dazzling, most especially in the fifth volume, Wolves of the Calla, a revisioning of the classic Japanese film The Seven Samurai (1954) and its American Western remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The plot is tight and engaging, taking as its motivation a primary theme of King’s fiction: the vulnerability of children in a predatory cosmos. Furthermore, in “the Calla”—farmlands of a parallel United States—King engages in first-rate world making on the order of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert, as he portrays in detail the dialects, religions, and folkways of the Calla’s residents.
In the sixth and seventh novels, however, the series’ central conceit—that our Earth is
one of thousands of parallel worlds—begins to overwhelm even careful readers, as
Roland and his companions pop in and out of numerous Earths so rapidly and frequently
that narrative coherence is compromised. Furthermore, in these two novels, King’s in-
creasing references to his own canon begin to cloy when he interjects himself into the text, literally saving the day at one point through a deus ex machina—and cheekily using that
term in addressing one of his protagonists. Many fans as well as critics also found King’s long-awaited conclusion to Roland’s quest unsatisfying. In truth, the implication at the end of The Dark Tower that Roland’s quest has happened before and will happen again is in keeping with much of the Jungian and mystic underpinnings of the septet, implying as it does that archetypes such as the hero and the quest are eternal and recurrent.
A far more serious flaw in the ending of the series is not the fate of Roland but that of Susannah, the only other surviving member of his “ka-tet,” or band of fellow fighters. As they near the Dark Tower, Roland and Susannah stumble upon and rescue a child artist
who has the ability to make real whatever he draws. He sketches a portal to another world for Susannah to slip through to a parallel New York City, in which she is united with ana-logues of her slain friends. The suddenness of this magic boy’s appearance and of
Susannah’s subsequent exit seems jarring and false: Why should she abandon Roland just
as they approach the Dark Tower? Does King really think that her joining a posse of paral-156
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lel-world clones of her dead comrades constitutes a “happy ending,” as King’s disclaimer in the text at this point indicates?
King clearly learned from whatever mistakes he made in the long narration of Roland’s
journey, as his subsequent work of horror/fantasy fiction, Lisey’s Story, a masterwork that drew raves from reviewers, deals with the same themes—the binding power of love and
the damage wrought by child abuse—employing the same tropes: the quest motif, the
concept of parallel realities, and metafictional conceits. Lisey’s Story, however, although a long work, addresses King’s recurring themes within the framework of a taut plot and with always believable character motivation.
Linda C. Badley; Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Updated by Thomas Du Bose
Other major works
short fiction: Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002.
screenplays: Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of his book; with George Romero); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992.
teleplays: The Stand, 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002.
nonfiction: Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan).
children’s literature: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004
(text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman).
edited text: The Best American Short Stories 2007, 2007.
miscellaneous: Nightmares in the Sky, 1988.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Stephen King: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. One of the best single collections of essays about King’s fiction, many reprinted
from other sources. Offers high-quality critical examination of King’s works through
Needful Things, covering a range of topics and themes. Supplemented with chronology, bibliography, and index.
Collings, Michael R. Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Cul-
ture. 2d rev. ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1997. Examines King’s influence 157
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on the rise of horror fiction in the United States and the effects of such fiction on society. Includes bibliography and index.
_______. The Work of Stephen King: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide. San
Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Provides both a good chronology and useful
descriptions of some of King’s hard-to-find works as well as a copious annotated list of secondary sources.
Hohne, Karen A. “The Power of the Spoken Word in the Works of Stephen King.” Journal of Popular Culture 28 (Fall, 1994): 93-103. Discusses the tension in King’s work between slang speech, which codifies a knowledge rejected by those in power, and
monologic orality, which embodies that power. Argues that King’s fiction illustrates
the tension between official and unofficial languages and ideologies that exists not
only in literature but also throughout society.
Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade, “Danse Macabre” to “The Dark
Half.” New York: Twayne, 1992. Discusses King’s work in the 1980’s, including his nonfictional analysis of the horror genre in Danse Macabre, his Richard Bachman
books, Misery, and the novellas of the Dark Tower saga. Features a 1989 interview in which King discusses fairy-tale references in his work as well as his treatment of se
xuality, masculinity, and race.
_______, ed. The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Collection of scholarly interpretive essays covers subjects such as homophobia, treatment of female characters, and dialogic narratives in
King’s novels and short fiction. Includes bibliography and index.
Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Book-by-book analysis, from Carrie to Pet Sematary, attempts to show King’s literary merits, stressing subtle characterization and nuances of symbolism and allusion. Supplemented by
chronology and primary and secondary bibliographies.
Russell, Sharon A. Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Provides biographical information and a discussion of the
horror genre before analyzing King’s novels from 1996 through 2001. Includes
bibliography and index.
Spignesi, Stephen J. The Essential Stephen King: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels, Short Stories, Movies, and Other Creations of the World’s Most Popular Writer. Franklin Lakes, N.J.: New Page Books, 2001. Detailed volume by a King enthusiast combines
serious critical examination of the author’s works with the readable commentary of an
unabashed fan. Includes discussion of many of King’s novels.
Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Complete Stephen King Uni-
verse: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Comprehensive reference volume explores every aspect of King’s work, including the common themes, places, and characters that run through his fiction. Features
biographical chronology, bibliography, informative appendixes, and index.
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Winter, Douglas E. The Art of Darkness: The Life and Fiction of the Master of the Macabre, Stephen King. Rev. ed. New York: New American Library, 1989. Provides a perceptive critical overview of King’s work, with long articles on each novel up to The Talisman. Includes a short biography of King and extensive bibliographies of King’s work and of books and articles written about him.
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