Stephen Edwin King’s success as a horror fiction writer is a fact beyond dispute. However, perhaps because of this immense popularity, scholars and literary critics seem to refuse to take his fiction seriously (Magistrale 1992, back cover blurb). The dominant popular perception is that King’s horror-fiction merely functions to shock a readership in the search of sensation. However, his fiction, if taken seriously, must be regarded as a “contemporary social satire,” which reveals “collective cultural fears and fantasies” (Wagner 6). King’s horror fiction is emblematic for the current difficulties of contemporary social conditions. His novels focus on American society and their moral struggles to define the meaning of good and evil. Most of King’s work analyses the ways in which the individual is infected by self-centredness, helplessness, governmental bureaucracy and increasing technological influences. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, “the nuclear madness, the Cold War, and the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defence Initiatives, [the] thrust of most traditional fiction is no longer capable of arousing or startling a modern audience which is used to seeing distortion and violence as natural” (Magistrale 2006, 4). In fact, “the world of the nightmare, of monsters and sadistic and grotesque occurrences, speaks to us directly from the pages of the daily newspapers and the videocameras of television newsrooms” (ibid.).
In these modern times of technological progress and intellectualism, King’s horror fiction has a degree of cultural relevance that has its closest historical parallel with the genre of Gothicism following the Enlightenment (ibid.). Like Horace Walpole, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Robert Louis Stevenson, King’s fiction suggests that for every advance in the disciplines of technology, there is a chance that this ‘progress’ will produce a possible reaction beyond human control (ibid.). In addition, governmental institutions fail to change the poor social conditions in contemporary society; as a result, the individual is forced to believe that “personal survival is the only realistic goal for the individual” (Wagner 7). I.e., as Tony Magistrale claims, “survivalism” and escapism has become “the dominant ideology of contemporary culture” (ibid.). With his fictional evils in his novels, King draws attention to the social and technological conditions of the contemporary world. In the tradition of ‘American Gothic’ authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, King evokes Gothic settings as vehicles for highlighting a ‘rotten’ economic apparatus. The characters in his fiction are all trapped between fear of the past’s deadly embrace and fear of the future’s progress. King’s fiction is written from the perspective of a fallen world, and his characters become profoundly aware of the existence of evil (Magistrale 1988, 20). Like Shelley, Stevenson, Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, King emphasises that evil is the outcome of the “individual’s lapse of moral judgment” (Magistrale 2006, 15). Magistrale argues that the weaknesses of the flawed characters in King’s fiction will eventually lead to a conscious act of performing evil over good (ibid.).
King’s novels are an escape from both life and death. As Douglas E. Winter says in his introduction of The Art of Darkness, “ […] horror fiction is a means of escape, sublimating the very real and often overpowering horrors of everyday life in favor of surreal, exotic, and visionary realms” (3). However, escapism does not necessarily have to be a “rewarding experience” (ibid.). Horror fiction concentrates on “subjective fantasies in which our worst fears and darkest desires are brought into tangible existence,” but, as Winter suggests, horror fiction provides an additional element – “a counterfeiting of reality whose inducement to imagination gives the reader access to truths beyond the scope of reason” (ibid.). As D.H. Lawrence commented on Poe’s fiction, “[i]t is lurid and melodramatic, but it is true” (85). This also could be applied to King’s fiction. In horror stories, people can violate society’s conventions; it allows them to “lose control,” experience emotions of “terror, revulsion, helplessness” that overwhelms them on a daily basis (Winter 1986a, 4). King’s fiction is not only a place people can visit to escape from reality, alongside its “cathartic value,” his fiction has a “cognitive value;” it helps people understand themselves and their position in society (ibid.). The horrors King describes are recognisable; his monsters are not found on intergalactic “planets” or in “exotic locations,” but live on the “ground floors of factories,” schools and churches (Magistrale 1988, 15). Because they are recognisable, King’s world is even more horrific because, people “comprehend its immediate relevance to their daily lives” (ibid. 16).
It is this “awareness of the pervasiveness of evil” that exists in both man itself and in man’s “social and political institutions,” that links King to the tradition of Gothic literature (ibid.). In Danse Macabre, King’s explanation of the relevance of the horror genre in literature is directly related to this sense of political and historical awareness. According to Magistrale, King suggests “that a parallel exists between economic or political stress and the emergence of literature and films which depict, whether or not symbolically, the cultural anxieties concerned with these tensions” (ibid. 24):
[…] the horror genre has often been able to find national pressure points, and those books and films which have been the most successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a spectrum of people. Such fears, which are often political, economical, and psychological rather than supernatural, give the best work of horror a pleasing allegorical feel. […] What scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won’t like – our own. (King 1981a, 316)
Relying on Gothic themes and elements as doubling, mood, and archetypes, King’s horror fiction seems to have its roots firmly embedded in the Gothic. In addition, in Magistrale’s Stephen King: The Second Decade, King acknowledges that his literary roots are undeniably in the Gothic genre:
A lot of the fiction I write follows the Gothic tradition wherein the past has unbreakable hold on the present. This obsession with the past throughout gothic literature, up to and including my own work, is an unpleasant thing. It is a twisted influence that restricts and even changes the present. (10)
As Heidi Strengell suggests, King “makes use of the technology of early Gothic fiction: the haunted castle, dark corridors, supernatural surprises, the mysterious villain, and ghosts” (2005a, 30). Richard Benton’s definition of ‘High Gothic’ shows that King’s work can be considered as a reconfiguration of the traditional Gothic:
The Gothic makes us think: how much do we know about reality, about life and death, about the universe and God, about human personality and motivation, and about the course of our destiny? How much do we know about good and evil, about what we should do and what we ought not to do? These are the kinds of questions that high Gothic proposes through the psychological archetypes dredged out of the darker depths of human experience, symbols of our ‘primitive’ thinking, the tigers we ride on within the unconscious depths of our inner selves. (7-8)
Magistrale suggests that King seems to have “inherited [these] moral perspectives” Benton associates with high Gothic literature (1988, 25). Furthermore, in defining the ‘sub-group’ “Didactic or philosophical [G]othic,” Frederick S. Frank argues that “the standard contraptions and supernatural phenomena” of the Gothic novel are used to depict different political or religious concepts (ibid.). In this context King’s work could be considered as moral novels, as King uses Gothic features to depict modern political and religious issues, his goal is to make the reader think.
King’s work clearly has Gothic elements, but is it justifiable to say that his novels are Gothic novels? The most obvious similarity between King and his Gothic predecessors is the reliance on Gothic settings and atmospheric techniques (ibid.). King often evokes gothic settings and techniques as vehicles for calling attention to the economic, social, and political apparatus with all its consequences.
The analysis in this thesis is limited to nine publications of King that appeared between 1976 and 1999. Conjoined with the history of traditional Gothic, chapter I explores American Gothic, its techniques of suspense, and its sense of the archaic directly derived from the original fiction (Punter 3). King’s work is often referred to as Gothic because his fiction frequently relies on its themes and styles. The Dark Half and Christine include such a traditional Gothic theme; the struggle within the individual to be good rather than evil. The existence of the Gothic double in King’s fiction shows that archaic Gothic figures like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have found their modern counterparts in contemporary literature. Chapter II explores this important Gothic motif. Chapter III investigates people’s fear of science. As early as the time of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, people feared that science would ultimately lead to the creation of horrifying monsters, the outbreak of diseases, and eventually to mass destruction and death. In this chapter, Pet Sematary and Christine are taken together to examine how these novels relate to the moral issues embedded in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Perhaps the most fundamental element in Gothic literature is ‘man’s man from innocence’ or ‘the pact with the devil’ (2005b, 221). These themes are apparent in several novels of King, where sometimes that pact is literally made. The Faustian pact has found its direct expression in Storm of the Century and Needful Things and is discussed in chapter IV (ibid.). Pet Sematary, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot, are taken together in chapter V because in these works, King, like most traditional Gothic writers, makes use of the techniques derived from early Gothic fiction: haunted castles, chained ghosts, and evil spirits. This chapter is designed to explore King’s fiction through the Gothic archetypes of the ghost and the castle. Chapter VI explores the moral choices people have to make in their struggle against the forces of evil. As mentioned before, most of King’s work analyses the ways in which the individual is corrupted by self-centredness, helplessness, governmental bureaucracy and increasing technological influences. This assault can be explained in terms of “social discontent” and a “narcissistic concern for the self” (Wagner 6). In Danse Macabre, King emphasises that a successful horror novel must be a balanced mixture of the real and the surreal and have a “pleasing allegorical feel” (1981a, 19). In addition to the sociological context embedded in King’s novels, this chapter will examine the symbolic subtext in King’s fiction.
In this thesis I will examine in which ways with his fictional evils King’s work draws attention to the social and technological conditions of the contemporary world. Like his Gothic predecessors, King produces characters that are forced to make ethical decisions in an immoral world. In my argument I will try to depict that his fiction, if taken seriously, must be regarded as a “contemporary social satire,” which discusses contemporary concerns and personal fears (Wagner 6). In addition, I will show that King’s horror fiction is emblematic for the current difficulties of the contemporary social conditions. Since King uses Gothic features to depict modern political, technological, and religious concepts, his work can be seen as a continuation and reconfiguration of the traditional Gothic novel. I will show that when the supernatural motif is removed his fiction would be no less terrifying. King departs from the conventions of the horror genre by focusing on (individual) characters. King’s fiction blends realism with fantasy. It is King’s characteristic blend of free will and determinism that combines the different facets of fantasy and reality and makes his fiction unique – at least in the horror genre. Ultimately, my concern is to illustrate that King’s horror fiction is more than trivial literature with the mere function to shock its readership in the search of sensation.
Chapter I
A Brief History of Gothic Literature
The term ‘Gothic’ has numerous meanings and, as David Punter explains, is used in several different fields (1). In the introduction of his book The Literature of Terror, Punter distinguishes a number of fields in which the term Gothic is used: as a literary term, as a historical term, as an artistic term, and as an architectural term (ibid. 1). In a historical context, the term could be applied to the Goths and their language. In an artistic context, the term relates to art forms in a style frequently used in Western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth century. In an architectural context, the term refers to a style common in Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries that is characterised by pointing arches, arched roofs, tall thin pillars, and rib vaulting.
The origins of the Gothic novel could be found in ancient folklore and seventeenth- and eighteenth century literary works. However, in a literary context, the term Gothic is generally applied to a group of novels written between the 1760’s and the 1820’s (Punter 1). Although Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) is considered as one of the first original Gothic novels, Gothic features could be found in earlier works like William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), Hamlet (1600-1601) Othello (1603) King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). Although these ‘Gothic’ elements already were presented prior to the ‘Gothic era,’ Gothic authors were the first to intertwine these elements with political, technological, and social issues in the eighteenth century. In fact, Gothic writers like – Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliff, and Matthew Lewis – were writing in reaction to the spirit of scientific enlightenment before authors like William Wordsworth did. As Magistrale suggests:
[…] Years before William Wordsworth was to praise the French Revolution as the event as the demise of the safe and orderly deistic universe, Gothic writers were preparing the way for the romantic urge to displace reason and authority by surrendering one’s rational will to the powers of the sublime dread. (1992, 28)
With their “tormented scepticism regarding the universality of reason and natural law,” the early generation of Gothic authors, laid the “foundations for the antivisions of Keats, Byron, and other dark romantics” (ibid.). Authors like Walpole, Shelley, and Stevenson frequently employ castles and ruins from the Dark Ages as settings for their stories. As Punter emphasises, there are essential differences between the better-known Gothic novels; nevertheless, “literary history has tended to group them together into a homogeneous body of fiction” (1). In this context, Gothic fiction is:
[…] set somewhere in the past, that exploits the possibilities of mystery and terror in sullen, craggy landscapes; decaying mansions with dark dungeons, secret passages, and stealthy ghosts; chilling supernatural phenomena; and often, sexual persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed and haggard villain. (NA II 19)
The castle of the Gothic novel, long considered as a “bastion of social order and moral safety,” symbolises the destruction of the settled and ordered society (ibid.). As Theodore Ziolkowski asserts:
Morally the gothic romance marked a shift from faith in a simple dualism to a fascination with more complex interrelatedness of good and evil. Politically it embodied the new sense of freedom that characterized the revolutionary age. Psychologically it signalled a turn from the portrayal of manners in an integrated society to the analyses of lonely guilty outsiders. (84)
Gothic writers composed their works largely as a critique of the political, social, and technological changes due to important mid- and late eighteenth-century events such as the French Revolution. The traditional Gothic reflects the “fear of an age of imperial decline;” it evokes religious and socio-political, and technological distress (Winter 1986a, 9). In addition, as Magistrale says, from “early eighteenth-century texts to works of contemporary of Gothic authors, the tradition has always maintained an allegorical level” (1992, 29). Moreover, there is an essential feature, although in a wide variety, “crops up in all the relevant fiction, and that is fear” (Punter 21). In Gothic literature, fear is not simply a theme; it also has “consequences in terms of form, style, and the social relations of the texts” (ibid.). As Punter concludes, examining Gothic literature is “exploring fear” and “seeing the various ways in which terror breaks trough the surfaces of literature” (ibid). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century’s Gothic authors like – Horace Walpole, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker – lay the foundations for contemporary horror fiction writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker. As Magistrale claims, “Gothic iconography went on to shape the work of twentieth century writers” (1992, 29).
American Gothic
As mentioned before, Gothic literature depicts the dark side of life, fear of technological progress, and the struggle between good and evil. Gothic literature is considered as “the art of haunting” that shows life is “possessed, that the present is a thrall to the past” (Edmunson 48). In England, the ‘classic Gothic novel’ took its first form as a reaction to the French Revolution. Gothic literature is a response to the years after the revolution in “which domestic unrest and fears of invasion from abroad shaped political and cultural life” (Punter 61). American Gothic is “a refraction of English: where English Gothic has a direct past to deal with, American has a level interposed between present and past” (ibid.189). This level is represented by a vague historical ‘Europe,’ an often already mythologized ‘Old World’ (ibid.):
[…] rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement – to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity – to loiter about the ruined castle – to mediate on the falling tower – to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past. (Irving 20-1)
This form of ‘sensibility’ could be recognised in all Gothic literature; however, in contrast to the Americans, English authors “did not have far to go to seek sites for their mediations” (Punter 189). The ‘New World’s’ “effort of imagining a distant past from the perspective of the early nineteenth-century” explains many of the characteristics of American Gothic literature (ibid.).
In the early-nineteenth-century, American culture was in a period that was characterised by the rise of industry, the progress of technology and political freedom. These massive changes resulted in an increasing fear of the future. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville depicted the dangers, although sometimes implicitly, of an uncontrollable and ever-changing ‘modern’ world. Like English Gothic authors, American writers explore the dark sides of society. Their literature is a reaction to the social issues of their time: slavery, technological progress, and the problems of European heritage. In their narratives of uncontrollable and suffering characters, who find their most essential views of the world turned upside-down, American Gothic authors confront their readership with their own values and attitudes through investigating the ever-evolving characteristics of the American identity. One of these characteristics is the American obsession for Europe. In the works of both Hawthorne and Poe, evil is connected with the Old World. Hawthorne’s characters are haunted by “guilt that is associated with the infection by European intolerance” (Punter 211-12). In addition, in his works Poe “creates an artificial version of a European environment” in which his fiction is situated (ibid.). Thus, as Punter suggests, Europe stands in both cases as “a weighty impediment in the path of [American] progress” (212). For Hawthorne, Europe is “continuing stain” on American culture and society; for Poe, Europe is “the evidence of and metaphor for the fundamental irony in human striving,” a terminology in “which to express the persistence of inadmissible desires” (ibid.). From early American Gothic writers like Hawthorne and Poe, the lineage of the movement continues through the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Although heavily criticised by scholars, Lovercraft can be seen as an inheritor of the Gothic tradition. His works deal with fear of the past, future, disorder, and with the “situation which would result if the walls of convention which surrounded both human perception and the cosmos were to be breached” (Punter 285). Although Lovecraft’s novels do not have the power of earlier Gothic works like Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, his vision is obvious: “beneath the solid surface of the world lurks the threat” of evil (ibid. 281). An apparent historical aspect in the usage is that contemporary writers of supernatural- or horror fiction, in fact, “derive their techniques of suspense and their sense of the archaic directly from the original Gothic fiction” (ibid. 3). These elements of original Gothic fiction went on to shape the novels of Stephen King which connects him to the Gothic tradition.
King & Gothic
The best known novels of early Gothic – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula – have in common that they all depict the fears of an “age of imperial decline” (Winter 9). More recently, the ‘technohorror’ films of the mid-twentieth-century depict an apocalyptic fear as a result of the creation of the atomic bomb (ibid.). In his fiction, King often makes use of this “subversive potential,” deliberately “creating sociopolitical subtexts that add […] depth and meaning to their horrifying premises” (ibid.). Like earlier Gothic literature, King’s novels depict contemporary cultural fears in “an era of continuous social and technological revolution” (ibid.). His intention is to draw attention to the consequences of the progress of technology:
So now we have nuclear bombs, we have stuff that can kill twenty million people in twelve seconds. CBW, nerve gas, the nukes, all this stuff, it’s just gadgets, that’s all it is. Our technology has outraced our morality. And I don’t think it’s possible to stick the devil back in the box. I think it will kill us all in the next twenty years. (qtd. in Winter 1985, 253)
Furthermore, King’s novels often connect “governmental bureaucracies” to “science in an unholy tryst,” for the reason they both interfere blindly, irresponsible, and “immorally with aspects of nature they neither respect nor comprehend” (Magistrale 1988, 51). King stresses the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions. Like Shelley, Hawthorne, and Melville, King “warns us against” the search of technological progress and “getting involved in areas beyond our comprehension,” since “we,” as Magistrale explains, “[a]s humans, are imperfect” (ibid.). King underscores the qualities of Gothic literature, “Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmer’s The King in Yellow […] are books and stories which seem to me to fulfil the primary duty of literature – to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed” (1981a, 282).
Evil is a recurring theme in King’s novels. Like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, King presents characters who are a “complex blend of good and evil,” often suggesting that “no individual is immune from the lure of evil” (Magistrale 1988, 20-1). According to King, this tension exists in all humans which leads to “that endlessly fascination question of who’s okay and who isn’t […] monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors – at any time” (1981a, 283). In King’s fiction, evil is not always as distinguishable as a ghost, devil, or a man-eating predator; as a result, his characters are often not able to identify the horrors surrounding them. King presents ordinary things or common people to inflict fear upon us. For King, the real horrors are not the ‘monsters’ themselves, but the misinterpretation of them. For instance, in his fiction, pet dogs appear to be vicious killers; dream cars have a taste for blood, and innocent children have the power to destroy entire cities.
King’s monsters are often a “symbolic representation of a larger cultural crisis (Magistrale 1988, 40). Therefore, King’s fiction, as Wagner argues, “must be viewed as a contemporary satire, revealing cultural fears and fantasies which go unspoken in everyday life” (6). This links King to Benton’s definition of ‘High Gothic’:
The Gothic makes us think: how much do we know about reality, about life and death, about the universe and God, about human personality and motivation, and about the course of our destiny? How much do we know about good and evil, about what we should do and what we ought not to do? These are the kinds of questions that high Gothic proposes through the psychological archetypes dredged out of the darker depths of human experience, symbols of our ‘primitive’ thinking, the tigers we ride on within the unconscious depths of our inner selves. (7-8)
It seems that King has “inherited [these] moral perspectives” that Benton associates with high Gothic literature (Magistrale 1988, 25). In defining the sub-group “didactic or philosophical gothic,” Frederick S. Frank argues that “the standard contraptions and supernatural phenomena” of the Gothic novel are “used to symbolize various political or religious concepts,” in this way King’s work could be considered as moral novels, as King uses Gothic features to depict modern political and religious issues, his goal is to make the reader think (ibid.). King’s novels depict that humans are not immune to technological mistakes; that “securities of our microcosms […] no longer represent effective sanctuaries against the chaos of an ever-changing […] world” (Wagner 2). Like traditional Gothic authors, King’s horror fiction “fulfil[s] the primary duty of literature – [it] tell[s] us the truth about ourselves;” in this way, King could be lined to the Gothic tradition (1981a, 282).
Chapter II
The Gothic Double
In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, King discusses three Gothic archetypes that represent fundamental issues with which the Gothic period was concerned. In this book King gives examples of these archetypes from several important novels of the Gothic era. To be more specific, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) deals with a person’s refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions; Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s versions of Faust portray the consequences of man’s search after divine knowledge; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) exploits the possibilities put forward by the discovery of the human psyche during the Gothic era. Important is the question of the double; the paradoxical existence of good and evil within a single human being. Taking the double as the subject of this chapter, I will show that this important issue of the Gothic era remains an essential theme in King’s horror-fiction. With examples from Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde I will show that the appearance of the Gothic double in King’s fiction tells us that King’s work, like Stevenson’s, examines the conflict between good and evil within humans. By means of modernised Gothic devices King discusses society’s cultural and psychological fears.
Synopsis The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson depicts the double life of the distinguished Victorian doctor Jekyll. This short narrative begins as Jekyll’s attorney Mr Utterson and Richard Enfield walk through the streets of London. When they come across a “blistered and distained” door, Enfield tells Utterson a “very odd story” of that particular door (Stevenson 3).
At three o’clock on a dark morning, Enfield says, a man like a “damned Juggernaut” collided with a little girl at the corner of the street (ibid. 4). The girl was knocked down to the ground; and then, as Enfield says, “came the horrible part of the thing;” for the man – Mr Hyde – “trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground” (ibid.). A crowd “as wild as harpies” gathered, and Enfield, as a respectable Victorian gentleman, feels obligated to protect Mr Hyde from the crowd (ibid. 5).When Enfield demands compensation in the name of the girl, Hyde withdraws through the door under discussion and returns a short time later with a signed check worth a hundred pounds. However, the check is signed with the name of Utterson’s friend, Dr Jekyll. After hearing this story, Mr Utterson returns to his home where he removes his friend and client Jekyll’s will, which he recently filed. The will states that “in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, MD, DCL, LLD, FRS, &c., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his ‘friend and benefactor Edward Hyde’” (ibid. 9). Convinced that there is something wrong with Jekyll’s will, Utterson goes to his friend’s house to inquire about it. However, Jekyll says to Utterson that the will is genuine, and to Utterson's displeasure, refuses to talk about his connection with Mr. Hyde.
Nearly a year later, Sir Danvers Carew, one of Utterson’s clients, is murdered. The witness, a maid-servant, describes the suspect as “a certain Mr. Hyde,” who had a “heavy cane” in his hand (ibid. 23). With an “ape-like fury,” as the maid describes, “he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the railway” (ibid.). With Utterson’s help, the police finds Hyde’s house; however, they cannot find Hyde. After the police leaves, Utterson goes to his friend’s house to confront him for harbouring a criminal. Dr Jekyll states that he has ended his relations with Hyde; he shows Utterson a letter written by Hyde to Jekyll saying that he was disappearing forever. However, when Utterson examines Hyde’s handwriting he discovers that it matches Jekyll’s.
After Hyde’s disappearance Jekyll gradually becomes more social, returning to his pre-Hyde days of social gatherings and dinner parties. One day, Utterson is invited to a dinner party at Jekyll's home and meets Dr. Lanyon there. Shortly after this party, Jekyll isolates himself again and Dr. Lanyon mysteriously dies from some kind of shock he received in connection with Jekyll. However, before dying Dr. Lanyon gives Utterson a letter with the instructions to read it after Jekyll’s death or disappearance. A few days later Utterson receives a visit from Jekyll’s butler Poole. He says that Jekyll has locked himself in his laboratory and asks for specific medication. Utterson agrees to help Poole. Later that night, when Utterson and Jekyll’s butler break into the doctor’s laboratory they find Hyde’s body dressed in Jekyll’s clothes – in Jekyll’s hide. Inside the clothes they find a letter with Jekyll’s confession.
In this letter Jekyll states that his intention was to develop a drug that would separate the good from the evil in human nature. After the death of Sir Danvers Carew Jekyll became fully aware of the consequences of potion he created. As the chapter “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case” explains, the potion and its effects proved to be unpredictable; as his abuse of the potion progressed, more and more often Jekyll turned into Hyde spontaneously. Jekyll was no longer in control of his evil ‘twin.’ In his letter Jekyll explains that he no longer can live under the reign of Hyde. The only way to escape from this evil is to end his own life.
Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde discusses the paradoxical existence of good and evil within a single human being. Stevenson’s novella was published three decades before Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the human psyche would begin to surface; nevertheless, Stevenson includes a metaphor for Freud’s visions of the conscious and subconscious human mind – or as Stephen King says, “the contrast between superego and id” (King 1981a, 90). Stevenson depicts a large block of buildings; Dr Jekyll’s house, an elegant doctor’s house, is situated at the front of one of the buildings: “[o]ne house […] second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort […]” (16). Located in the same building, but on the other side, Stevenson presents Mr. Hyde’s house as a dark, sinister, and filthy place: “[t]wo doors from the corner […] the door […] equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained” (3).
In the novella, the city of London also has an important role. The city has two sides; with on the one hand the new city which represents Victorian morality; on the other hand, the old city is portrayed as a place full of sin and crime. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also depict this duality within a single body. Whereas Dr Jekyll is moral, elegant, and a handsome doctor of medicine, his evil counterpart desperately tries to escape from the Victorian straightjacket. In fact, it could be suggested that it is Jekyll himself who opposes to Victorian rules of morality and prudence. Stevenson discusses the hypocrisy of the Victorian society; he suggests that all people are “commingled out of good and evil” (71). As King says, “it’s a moral tale” but also a “close study of hypocrisy – its causes, its dangers, its damages to the spirit” (1981a, 92). As Jekyll’s opposite, Utterson is “austere with himself;” he “drank gin when he was alone to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years” (Stevenson 1). Utterson embodies the hypocrisy of Victorian society, or as King says, “he’s a Victorian prig of the first water” (1981a, 92). Utterson sins only in thought, whilst Jekyll is the “hypocrite who falls into the pit of secret sin” (ibid.). As mentioned before, Stevenson is not only revealing the duality within a single person; his work is also a critique of Victorian hypocrisy. In this book, as Barbara Gates suggests, the “double life that the characters […] lead is not only false but suicidal” (1). Stevenson claims, “We should not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to common end” (qtd. in Osbourne vol. 24, 208).
Paradoxical existence of Good and Evil in Christine and The Dark Half
As Magistrale suggests, from early Gothic literature to the texts of contemporary Gothic writers, the tradition has maintained “an allegorical base” (1992, 29). King claims that there are four “essential archetypes from the Gothic past upon which subsequent myths of horror have been based” (ibid.): the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name, and the ghost (King 1981a, 283). These archetypes are all related to the traditional Gothic double as presented in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As mentioned earlier, the duality Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is largely based on a theory that underscores the conflict between the free will to do evil or to deny it. As King assesses in Danse Macabre, this conflict between “mortification and gratification” can be considered as the “cornerstone of Christianity” (94). King argues that, in mythic terms, the “twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality:” the split between the “Apollonian” (intellect and morality) and “Dionysian” (physical gratification) (ibid.). According to King, the narrative of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde describes the “conflict between man’s Apollonian potential and his Dionysian desires” (King 1981a, 95). This tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, what King also describes as the “Werewolf myth,” is an important and often recurring theme in King’s fiction (ibid. 283). The Werewolf myth suggests, like the Apollonian / Dionysian conflict, that evil and immorality are a part of human nature. The werewolf’s (psychopathic) desires are locked up behind the façade of normality; however, at some point evil (i.e. the werewolf) wants to escape from prudery and morality.
Like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King’s Christine concentrates on “humanity’s vulnerability to dehumanization” (Winter 1986a, 122). In Christine the allegory of dehumanisation “coexists with an older, more primeval fear – that of internal evil: the upsurge of the animal, the repressed unconscious, the monster from the id; or in this case the monster from the fifties” (ibid. 123). Arnie Cunningham, the story’s protagonist, is an unpopular and unattractive teenager who falls in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury, which he calls Christine. However, the car is possessed with the evil spirit of its former owner Roland D. Lebay. Arnie’s only friend – high-school football jock Dennis Guilder – narrates the story of Christine. The opening and closing sections of Christine are written in first-person as the story of Dennis, “looking backward” to his days in school (ibid. 120). However, the middle section, after Dennis is hospitalised, is written in third-person. The author’s “breaking of narrative,” as Winter suggests, “ensures the readership’s alienation from Arnie’s initially sympathetic character” (ibid.).
Like Arnie Cunningham, named after the main character in a television glorification of the naïve aspects of the fifties, King named the Plymouth Fury for a reason. He selected this car because it “summed up the fifties – it was a very bland, ordinary, mass-produced car” (King qtd. in Winter 1986a, 124). However, twenty years later the car is one of a kind. The car is as inapposite to the modern car as Arnie seems to be to modern life. Behind Christine’s steering wheel, the conflict between “the will to do evil and the will to deny evil is fought” (ibid. 124). The car symbolises man’s dualistic nature – a mechanic mixture of order and chaos. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Christine tells the story of the double life of Arnie Cunningham. The day that Arnie buys his ‘Fury’ it is in a condition that mirrors his own:
She was a bad joke, and what Arnie saw in her that day I’ll never know. The left side of her windscreen was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was bashed in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the boot-lid was ajar, and stuffing was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat covers, both front and back. It looked as if someone had worked on the upholstery with a knife. One tyre was flat. The others were bald enough to show the canvas cording. Worst of all, there was a dark puddle of oil under the engine block. (King 1983, 8)
The car’s allegory is “as telling as the two sides of Henry Jekyll’s townhouse, which border both a graceful Victorian street and a slumlike alley” (Winter 1986a, 124): “It was as if I had seen a snake that was almost ready to shed its old skin, that some of that old skin had already flaked away, revealing the glistening newness underneath […] a newness just biding its time, waiting to be born” (King 1983, 45). When Christine, as a result of Arnie’s mechanic skills, returns to street condition, Arnie changes as well, at first a positive change – his bad skin clears, he gains self confidence, and he finds his first love Leigh – but then Arnie matures beyond his years; he transforms from a “teenaged Jekyll” into a “middle-aged Hyde, caught up in a masquerade where innocence peels away like burned rubber and death rides shotgun” (Winter 1986a, 124). Arnie’s change results in an alienation from his parents, Dennis, and even his girlfriend Leigh. However, his love for Christine is mutual. Unfortunately, she is a “jealous lover,” killing every person who stands in their way (ibid. 124). Like Dr Jekyll, Arnie gradually changes into his darker counterpart Roland Lebay:
Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother. (King 1983, 427)
In the final chapter of the novel, Arnie dies in a crash with his parent’s car; not coincidently this happens at the exact moment when Christine is crushed and destroyed by a septic tank truck. They are miles away in space when Christine and Arnie die; however, they are allied in spirit (Winter 1986a, 123). In the last pages of Christine, Dennis describes two recurring nightmares that continue to haunt him for many years after the events described in the novel (ibid. 125). The first dream “flows logically from the narrative” and bears close resemblance to the scene where Mr. Hyde is found dead in Jekyll’s clothes (ibid.): “I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putrescent corpse in an Army uniform” (King 1983, 469). LeBay’s corpse becomes the representation of Arnie’s evil nature. This dream echoes an important scene in Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) where Dorian’s portrait not only reveals his physical appearance but also his soul. Dennis’ second dream suggests that evil has not been destroyed after all. In that dream “Christine suddenly lunges towards” Dennis; he sees a “vanity plate on the front – a grinning white skull on a dead black field […] imprinted over the skull are the words ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE” (King 1983, 470).
With Christine, King suggests that evil is rooted in human nature and always will be there. In addition, King’s novel laments the coming of age, as Dennis says, “[i]f being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die” (ibid. 42). Moreover, Christine serves as a parable about the death of the American romance with cars; Christine is a symbol of a lost American dream. By 1978, when the novel is set, the Chrysler Corporation (the Plymouth’s manufacturer) was near bankruptcy (Winter 1986a, 125). The car was no longer a symbol of success or freedom. Many were not even an American product. The car had lost its status and has become just a means of transportation. At the end of the novel, Guilder describes the man whom Leigh, Arnie’s ex-girlfriend, eventually marries with irony: “Nice fellow,” he says, “drove a Honda Civic. No problems there” (King 1983, 467). The matured Guilder, who tells the story of Christine, has come of age in the matter of the automobile, to its loss and its gain. Christine enacts the last gasp of that romance.
In The Dark Half, the Gothic double is presented through the characters of Thad Beaumont and his evil ‘twin’ George Stark. Possibly nowhere else in King’s fiction is the theme of duality within a single person being more explored than in this novel. In The Dark Half, Beaumont is a teacher and an author of extremely popular novels; however, his fiction is written under a pseudonym, George Stark. Blackmailed by a ‘fan,’ Thad decides to reveal his secret and publicly ‘buries’ his double. From that point, Stark conducts “search – and – destroy missions” against Thad’s publishers, friends, and family (Winter 1986a, 121). Like Hyde, Stark functions as the dark ‘alter ego’ for a seemingly respectable person. His pseudonym is a creature, the embodiment of his darkest desires, just as Hyde is the ‘desire-creature' of Jekyll’s desires.
Like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, whose split transformation is occasioned by ‘scientific’ explanation, as Strengell suggests, King “attempts to establish credibility by means of medicine” (Magistrale 1992, 65; 2005a, 79). As a child, as a result of chronic headaches, Beaumont is operated on; however, in stead of a supposed brain tumour, the doctors discover a foetal twin in his brain (Strengell 2005a, 79). In addition, Beaumont’s alter ego is “an extension of the writer’s psychological id” (Magistrale 1992, 64). Beaumont is fully aware of the fact that it is he who “built George Stark from the ground up” (King 1989, 143). Like Hyde, Stark indulges Beaumont’s deepest desires. The inclusion of Beaumont’s twin children in the novel, as Magistrale suggests, is “meant to suggest further the symbiotic relationship of Beaumont and Stark” (1992, 64). However, only as Stark threatens his immediate family, does he realise the consequences and extent of his split personality (Strengell 2005a, 80):
Stark might be calling from somewhere in New York City, but the two of them were tied together by the same invisible but undeniable bond that connected twins […] they were […] halves of the same whole, and Thad was terrified to find himself drifting out of his body […] meeting the monster […] the two of them meeting and merging again, as they had somehow met and merged every time he […] picked up one of those goddamned Berol Black Beauty pencils. (King 1989, 200)
Thus, like Jekyll’s potion, Beaumont’s Berol Black Beauty pencils ‘activate’ his dark side. He has created Stark to indulge his dark desires; but he now painfully realises that his evil side is out of control.
As Magistrale claims, “The Dark Half fails because of the unambiguous quality of its central relationship” (1992, 64). Despite King‘s ‘scientific’ explanations, their union is unclear and unpersuasive; therefore, it is impossible for King’s readership to accept the union as plausible. Magistrale argues that “the very emergence of Stark as a psychical being, born from a discarded fetus in Beaumont’s brain and then emerging from a false grave […] tends to weaken […] the character’s link to the rich tradition of literary doppelgangers” (1992, 64-65). Nevertheless, like its literary predecessors, King explores the traditional Gothic theme of the irresolvable struggle between good and evil. The Dark Half underscores the complex dualistic nature of man: “He [Beaumont] is two men — he has ALWAYS been two men […] at least two” (King 1989, 346). King’s visions are based on the notion that good and evil can both exist within a single body, and, “concomitantly,” as Strengell suggests, people are “ultimately unable to evolve, to purge [their] baser selves from [their] psyche[s]” (2005a, 86). As King says, “[w]erewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes […] The Monster never dies” (King 1982, 3-4).
Chapter III
Frankenstein’s Monster
As King suggests, all horror stories can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror is a result from an act of free and conscious will – a deliberate act of evil – and those in which the horror is predestined. A classic horror story of this latter type is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The vampires in English culture, in Stoker and elsewhere, are aristocrats who are not content with the constrictions placed on them by a settled and ordered society (Punter 118). Alongside the vampire in the romantic bestiary we could place the seeker after forbidden knowledge. Like the vampire, the seeker of forbidden knowledge has a desire which is social insatiable. However, as mentioned above, the vampire’s evil is predestined, whereas the seeker after forbidden knowledge makes a conscious decision to do evil. The figure of the seeker after forbidden knowledge turned into the most significant and popular of modern terror-symbols with the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Shelley’s work portrays the dangers and consequences of modern technology. In addition, the novel deals with a person’s refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions. The influence of Shelley’s novel has been enormous and King’s admiration for Shelley’s work is expressed in both Christine and Pet Sematary. Taking science and technological progress as subjects of this chapter, I will show that these important issues of the Gothic tradition remain essential themes in King’s fiction. Like Frankenstein, his novel relies upon and exploits public anxieties about scientific progress and about the direction of this process is undertaken in the absence of moral guidance.
Synopsis Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
Shelley’s Frankenstein tells the story of a young Swiss man who creates a nameless monster by assembling stolen body parts. Eventually, after being rejected by society, the monster turns against his creator. The story starts with the introduction narrated by an English explorer Robert Walton. Whilst on an expedition to the North Pole, an exhausted man is taken on board the ship of the explorer. In several letters addressed to his family, Walton gives a first-person account of the story Victor Frankenstein tells him.
Frankenstein grew up in Geneva in an aristocratic family. After the death of his mother, he left home to attend university in Ingolstadt. Here, his interest in galvanism, chemistry, mathematics, and natural philosophy grew to a dangerous obsession. After years of study, Frankenstein finally possesses the “capacity of bestowing animation upon […] lifeless matter” and he creates a ‘man’ put together with body parts stolen from charnel houses, dissecting rooms, and slaughterhouses (Shelley 932-3). He “worked hard for nearly two years;” however, now he finally has accomplished “the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body,” the “beauty” of his dream vanished and disgust filled his heart (ibid, 935). Frankenstein realises that instead of creating beauty he has created a monster:
I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. […] His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (ibid.)
Fearing for his life, Frankenstein took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house he inhabited.
The next day, when he returned to his apartment, the “demoniacal corpse” he created had fled (ibid.). As a result, Frankenstein turned “lifeless,” and did not recover “his senses for a long, long time” (ibid. 937). Several months later, when Frankenstein has recovered from his nervous fever, he receives a message that his cousin William was murdered. A good friend of the family, Justine, was accused and hanged for the murder; however, as Frankenstein later learns, it was the nameless monster that choked his cousin to death. Grief-stricken, Frankenstein wanders around in the forest, where he meets his creation. The monster, now able to speak, tells Frankenstein that after he had left the laboratory he found refuge in a hovel nearby a cottage belonging to an old blind man and his family. By observing them for months, he gradually learned to experience emotions and mastered the “godlike science of words” (ibid. 967).
At one day, the monster decides to introduce himself into the cottage of his protectors. He waits for the blind man’s children to leave before he enters the cottage to speak with the man. However, their conversation was interrupted by the returning children. The horrified children chased the monster out of the cottage striking him violently with a stick. Disappointed by society, the monster swears eternal revenge towards his creator. The monster demands a female companion as hideous as himself from Frankenstein (ibid. 987). If his creator consents, he promises that “neither [Frankenstein] nor any human being shall ever see [them] again” (ibid. 988). Frankenstein agrees; however, when he is almost finished with his second creation, he is seized by fear:
They might hate each other […] she might quit him […] even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (ibid. 999-1000)
Apprehensive that his creation will threaten “the very existence of the whole human race,” Frankenstein decides to break his promise and destroys the ‘bride’ of Frankenstein (ibid. 1000). Filled with anger, the monster promises Frankenstein “to be with [him] on [his] wedding night” (ibid. 1001). Several months later, on Frankenstein’s wedding night, his bride, Elizabeth, is strangled to death. Overwhelmed by grief, Frankenstein is determined to destroy his creation. He pursues his creation north, into the Artic, where he dies aboard the Pole bound ship of Walton. When Walton enters the room in which Frankenstein’s body lies, he sees the monster hanging over Frankenstein’s coffin. The monster says that he regrets all that he has done. In the last scene, the monster jumps overboard the ship on an ice-raft and vanishes in the darkness and distance.
Frankenstein’s Monster
Mary Shelley’s intentions are clear from the title page; the subtitle associates Frankenstein with the creator of mankind, Prometheus. Beneath the subtitle a “three-line epigraph” from John Milton’s Paradise Lost “equates Frankenstein with God and his Creature with the fallen Adam,” “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me, man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” (Shelley 907). The monster says to his maker, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (ibid. 960). These lines also suggest a “paradigm of bad family relationships,” where parents “fail to take responsibility” for the child they brought into the world (NA II 906). Frankenstein’s creation is rejected by all people he meets, even his creator turns away from him because of his physical appearance, “‘[a]ccursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?’” (Shelley 978). Like humans, Frankenstein’s monster needs love and affection; however, he is rejected by society because of his gruesome appearance. Consequently, his love changes into an inextinguishable hate. Shelley suggests that the creator is responsible for his creature’s behaviour. Thus, Shelley equates this relationship with a family relationship. Because Frankenstein has brought the monster to life he is responsible for, as he realises, endangering “the very existence of the whole human race” (Shelley 1000).
Frankenstein’s “experiments have a basis” in contemporary scientific issues: “evolution,” “the debate over the origins and nature of life,” and “the conflict between science and religion” (NA II 906). The novel is “an account of the monstrous potentiality of human creative power when severed from moral and social concerns” (ibid.). In addition it focuses on ‘otherness;’ Frankenstein’s creation becomes a monster because he is cruelly ensnared by one of the deepest tendencies of man’s biological inheritance – man’s aversion toward disfigured beings (Hoeveler 59). The novel’s focus is on the moral issues of humankind, not on the realistic possibilities of scientific research. Shelley’s Frankenstein illustrates man’s fear of science and technology. This theme recurs frequently in horror fiction, including Stephen King’s, and continuously “haunts the popular consciousness” (ibid.). In his fiction King blends the ‘Frankenstein myth’ with contemporary taboos and fears. By concentration on individual characters and contemporary social and political anxieties he departs from the traditional horror genre which focuses primarily on the supernatural.
Demonic Science in Christine and Pet Sematary
In King’s fiction, science and technology are often presented from a negative perspective. As Magistrale argues, machines in King’s work are “antagonistic to human welfare and values” (1988, 42). In science fiction in general, the emphasis often is on science itself, and it may benefit humankind rather than destroy it (Gresh and Weinberg 4). However, in King’s fiction, humans seldom benefit from scientific progress. In King’s world people are confronted with the uncontrollable products of science. Like Frankenstein’s monster, King’s monsters are a result of machinery invented by mankind that they no longer have under control. Consequently, when humans “abdicate responsibility for [their] actions and creations, a conduit is opened allowing supernatural demons to manifest dominion” (ibid. 47). In King’s Christine, George Lebay, the man whose brother sold Christine to Arnie Cunningham, illustrates this conception with a statement about scientific progress:
“Comes the Civil War and all at once it’s ‘ironclad time.’ Then it’s ‘machine-gun time.’ Next thing you know it’s ‘electricity time’ and ‘wireless time’ and finally it’s atom-bomb time.’ As if all those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that always keeps flowing … some wave of intelligence that is outside of humanity.” (King 1983, 98)
Like Frankenstein, Arnie’s sole purpose is to infuse “life into an inanimate body” (Shelley 935). He says, “‘I saw that car – and I felt such an attraction to it…I can’t explain it very well even to myself. But […] I saw I could make her better […] there something underneath […] I don’t think she’s any ordinary car. I don’t know why I think that…but I do’” (King 1983, 28). Arnie undergoes both physical and psychological changes as he grows more involved with his artificial creation (Magistrale 1988, 49). For Arnie, this is at first a positive change; as Winter notes, Arnie matures, his acne clears and he gains self confidence (1986a, 124). However, he gradually changes from a ‘teenaged Jekyll’ into a ’middle-aged Hyde.’ Arnie’s reliance on Christine becomes greater; through her mysterious connection with Roland D. Lebay, the car successfully converts Arnie into her slave (Magistrale 1988, 48). Arnie’s freedom is bought through technological implementation; however, it is actually a form of imprisonment. Arnie is drawn to the (American) promise of power and success, and with Christine his dream seems to come true.
However, like Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel, Arnie’s obsession with his ‘creation’ results in an alienation from his friends and family. As his obsession with his ‘creation’ deepens, Arnie looses control over his live. This even leads to his death. Like Frankenstein, Arnie has lost control over a creation that could threaten the “very existence of the whole human race” (Shelley 1000).
The moral lessons of Shelley and King tell their readership that “as man becomes more reliant on his technological creations, he comes to resemble them in his insensitivity and moral impotence” (Magistrale 1988, 50). In addition, King and Shelley both suggest, the more advanced our technological expertise, the greater the potential of people losing control over it (ibid.). In his novel King uses the metaphor of a machine to describe to process of growing up. Dennis Guilder, the story’s protagonist’s friend, comments on engines:
That’s something else about being a teenager […] There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don’t know what the fuck they are or what they’re supposed to do […] Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that’s really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you down the highway to hell […]. (King 1983, 58)
With this passage King also comments on ‘the machine age’ – whose first icon was the automobile. Humans have to adapt to the pace of machines; individual lives and emotions become the fuel that ‘feeds’ the engines of technology. The result of technological progress is, as King points out, that man is unable to fully comprehend the products that he has created.
Dr Louis Creed, Pet Sematary’s protagonist, has moved his family from Chicago to a small town in Maine, where he will supervise the university medical centre. The house in which they live is located next to a busy road. One day, when Jud Crandall, an elderly neighbour of the Creed family, takes them to a pet cemetery, Creed’s daughter Ellie is confronted with the mortality of her pet cat, Winston Churchill (Church). A few days later, fulfilling Ellie’s deepest fear, her cat is killed by a passing truck. Afraid of the pain that Church’s death will cause to Ellie, Jud leads Creed to an old Indian burial ground located behind the pet cemetery. From him Creed learns a secret about the burial ground known only to the locals. The secret of the Micmac burial ground is that everything that is buried there will come to life. The Indians believed that it was a magic place. Before the ground became sour the Micmacs buried their dead there. The Wendigo, an evil spirit-being of North Country Indian folklore , has polluted the burial ground, disturbing the sleep of the dead. Creed buries Ellie’s cat there. Her cat does indeed return alive the next day; however, the cat is “loathsome,” stinks of “sour earth,” and makes “disgusting sounds” (King 1984, 151). After Church’s resurrection Creed still can reason and reaches the right conclusions:
Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; [however,] there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor…but the medicine available at the Micmac burial ground was perhaps not such good medicine. (King 1984, 161)
Not long after the cat’s ‘rebirth’ another speeding truck kills Creed’s two-year-old son Gage. Confronted with this tragedy, Creed again chooses to interfere with the natural order. Creed does not care for the price he has to pay for his son’s return and buries him at the Indian burial ground, unleashing evil beyond his control.
In Pet Sematary, King explicitly discusses the consequences of people’s refusal to take responsibility for their actions. Like Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel, Creed infuses an inanimate body with life. King infers that Frankenstein’s behaviour could be explicated by his excessive arrogance:
The stories of horror which are psychological – those which explore the terrain of the human heart – almost always revolve around the free-will concept; inside evil, if you will the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father. This is Victor Frankenstein creating a living being out of spare parts to satisfy his own hubris, and then compounding his sin by refusing to take responsibility for what he has done. (King 1981a, 80)
As Strengell suggests, both Creed and Frankenstein, by “refusing to acknowledge” and “repent” their “wrongdoing,” succumb “to the mortal sin of pride – the same sin that resulted in Lucifer’s fall from heaven and Faust’s pact with the devil” (2005a, 54-5). The novel is “focused upon the question of moral responsibility for interference with the natural order” (Winter 1986a, 134). Creed is named with an intention; his creed – faith – is his flaw that pushes him along the path of destruction (ibid):
He [Creed] never ceases to be the rational man. Everything is plotted out – this is what could happen, this is what can’t happen. But nothing that he thinks can happen is eventually what does happen […] The Book is very Christian in that sense, because it is a book about what happens when you attempt miracles without informing them with any sense of real soul. When you attempt mechanistic miracles – abracadabra, pigeon and pie, the monkey’s paw – you destroy everything. (King qtd. in Winter 1986a, 134)
Like Frankenstein, Creed, as a doctor of medicine, has mastered the ‘the ultimate skill’ – infusing life on dead material – and is not afraid to use it (ibid). Originally, Creed and Frankenstein are driven by pure motives. Creed “has won one today” when he rescues a boy from a certain death (King 1984, 185). Frankenstein stresses that “[w]ealth was an inferior object: but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death” (Shelley 925). However, they both transform from rationalists into raving madmen. Frankenstein desires to become the creator of a new race (i.e., God): “[a] new species would welcome me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (ibid. 933). However, when the monster opens his eyes, Frankenstein realises that in stead of creating beauty he has created a monster. By resurrecting Church, Gage, and even his wife, Creed also becomes a creator of life. However, like Frankenstein, Creed “seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (ibid. 933). Like Shelley, King proposes that this role should be God’s: “[b]ringing back the dead back to life … that’s about as close as playing God as you can get, ain’t it?” (King 1984, 168, brackets in original).
As mentioned earlier, King discusses with his novel Pet Sematary the refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions. In addition King, like Shelley, asks questions as: Who is the real monster? and Who made whom? (ibid. 53). Like Frankenstein, Creed is responsible for the (re)birth of his ‘creations.’ The creators are the real monsters. King underscores the possible consequences when science interferes with the natural order. In addition, King stresses that people “lose their innocence” when they are confronted with tragic circumstances and that people are “faced with the struggle to redefine them morally” (Magistrale 2006, 133). By depicting the “negative results of this struggle,” King asserts that there are “certain mysteries people simply have to accept,” and that “certain barriers” people only “transcend at the expense” of their souls (ibid). King demonstrates that when people seek to control nature’s mysteries – “to imitate God” – people leave themselves “open to the forces of chaos” (ibid.). Other important flaws in Creed’s character are pride and defiance. Creed deliberately chooses evil and “didn’t feel guilty at all” (King 1984, 146). The love for his lost son appears not to be the only reason that attracts him to the burial ground: “In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that glamour. Yes that above all else – it had glamour” (ibid. 255).
In Danse Macabre King refers to Frankenstein as a work “caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber” (1981a, 67). Christine and Pet Sematary are such echoes. However, King id not copy Shelley’s work, but he has amplified the cultural echo Frankenstein set in motion. Here lies King’s strength; he redesigns Gothic archetypes; he interprets rather than originate. In contrast to Gothic characters, like those in Faust and Frankenstein, King’s characters are very accessible. People can identify with them. As King says, people do not have unease about King’s characters themselves; people have unease about the situations they (King’s characters) find themselves in. Because people can recognise themselves in his characters, King’s world is even more terrible because, people realise that the novel has immediate relevance to their lives (Magistrale 1988, 16). In addition, the contradiction between King’s monsters and his ordinary characters presents an important feature in his fiction, namely, realism versus the supernatural (Strengell 2005a, 259). This is the essence of Pet Sematary. In this novel the supernatural motif is the evil spirit; however, the real horror elements concentrate on the dissolution of the Creed family.
Chapter IV
Faustian Figures
As mentioned in the previous chapter, King’s fiction often includes central characters who are seeking after forbidden knowledge. In this chapter I will discuss another archetypal figure of the seeker after knowledge in relation to King’s fiction: Faust. Faust portrays the consequences of a person’s obsession for seeking after divine knowledge and valuing personal gain over a relationship with God. In contrast to Victor Frankenstein, who achieves his goal by the processes of actual science, Faust uses alchemy to achieve his end; he makes a deal with the devil. This ‘Faustian wager’ is considered an essential theme is Gothic literature and is also found in King’s fiction. In this chapter I will examine the Faustian wager in relation to King’s fiction.
Faust
The Faust story, an enormous successful anonymous German work of 1587, has been a foundation for many literary works from authors such as Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod, Gustav Mahler, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Jan Švankmajer. Although the story is assumed to be an authentic biographical account of a historical figure named Jörg Faustus, uncertainty about his real identity remains. For the sake of this thesis I shall I assume that George (in German Jörg) Faust (or Faustus) is the person on whom the Faustbücher are based. George Faust, also known as Doctor Faust, was born in Knittlingen in northern Württemberg, probably around 1480; and most likely died in 1540 (Watt 3). He called himself a “necromancer,” by which he meant that he was a “practitioner of black magic who foretold the future by communing with the spirits of the dead; an ‘astrologer’ (then as now) meant someone who interpreted the influence of the planets and stars on human affairs” (ibid. 4).
There are many versions of Faust, but as Watts asserts, “more than anyone else it was Marlowe who established the myth” (ibid. 27). This tragic version of Faust’s story “lived on in the literary and theatrical tradition” until Goethe “finally gave it much larger scope two centuries later” (ibid.). In Marlowe’s version of Faust, which is based on a German narrative, named in its English translation, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, the protagonist of the story, Dr John Faustus, “bids farewell to each of his studies – logic, medicine, law, and divinity – as something he has used up” (NA I 990). He turns to black magic; however, “the devil exacts a fearful price in exchange: the eternal damnation of Faustus’ soul” (ibid.). Faustus wants to be more than merely a man: “[a] sound magician is a mighty God” (Marlowe 1.63). He desires to have power and voluptuous pleasures that derive from forbidden knowledge; to get this power Faustus makes a deal with the devil which ultimately leads to the eternal damnation of his soul (NA I 990).
Marlowe’s play was written in the Renaissance; this period is known for scientific pursuits, as well as for social and political revolutions. With his play, Marlowe attempts to warn his Elizabethan audience for the consequences of seeking divine knowledge. Marlowe suggests that when people aspire after power – “power of rule, the power of money, and the power of knowledge” – they ultimately will fall from Grace; “the reward for sin is death,” he states (NA I 990; 1.40). Faustus’ fall is caused by arrogance and the ambition to be more than just a creature of his Maker.
Goethe’s Faust portrays Faust’s fate in his search for life’s meaning stepping beyond the natural limitations of humanity (Gillies 1). Only at the end of Goethe’s tragedy Faust is “brought to see the true value of his life” (ibid.). Faust is a man who is in search of life’s meaning; however, he steps beyond the natural limitations of mankind. Accordingly, his life is succession of crimes and illusions. Faust is more disappointed in human existence than he can tolerate and looks forward longingly to a future moment when he might be content; however, his death cuts him off (ibid.). Faust is dissatisfied until the end; however, as Gillies asserts, at the close of the story Faust has “rise[n] above the cult of merely negative dissatisfaction,” such as he “thought to be the only thing that life might offer” (ibid.). In this context, dissatisfaction now has an important meaning. It is a “spur to further effort,” a “dynamic force” which, if it works properly, “should urge us,” not to transcend the natural boundaries, but to “work fruitfully within them” (ibid.). Faust is an “eloquent statement” that the “road to life’s fulfilment” does not lie “through despair, violence and crime” (ibid.). Moreover, man should conquer these evils. Goethe’s Faust suggests that good eventually will prevail over evil; however, it also underscores that humans should not “relax for fear of contact with evil” (ibid. 2). Because of its “sublimely universal content,” its extensive “emotional and intellectual appeal” and its “unparalleled wealth and variety of poetic form,” Goethe’s tragedy could be “placed beside” Dante’s Divine Comedy (ibid.). However, this does not mean, as Gillies says, that the tragedy’s hero should be regarded as an example for mankind (ibid.). Like Marlowe’s, Goethe’s Faust warns people for the consequences for striving for (divine) knowledge and power (ibid.).
Link to the Gothic Tradition
Although the ‘Faust Books’ are not Gothic novels, they share many elements with them. However, they “lack almost totally the sadistic terror that was the visible hallmark of the gothic,” and “what motifs it shares with the gothic novel are also Shakespearean or general features” (Brown and Brown 68). Nevertheless, the books clearly have Gothic tendencies. In spite of their differences, as Brown and Brown suggest, “Faust’s devilish wager is readily assimilated to demonic pacts in works like Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer,” Balzac’s La Peaue de chagrin, and in horror fiction like King’s Storm of the Century and Needful Things (ibid.). In their essay, Brown and Brown point out how many elements the Faust Books share with Gothic literature dating from before, during, and after their composition (ibid. 69). Both include supernatural figures like “devils, angels, witches, hags,” and excessive natural figures like: “the innocent maiden, fatherless and ultimately orphaned, the warrior, the tormented natural scientist and philosopher” (ibid.). They have similar plot motifs: “dangerous and illicit sexuality, disguises and Doppelgänger figures […] religious rites and mysteries, political despotism and usurpation, a last minute deathbed struggle of good and evil” (ibid.). In addition, they have similar “elements of setting: prison-like enclosures, gothic chambers, churches, and fortresses, vast, moonlit natural expanses through which the characters voyage in space and time” (ibid.). Besides these features, a very important aspect of Gothic literature is the “ambivalence of tone and a self-conscious playfulness that the Gothic often reinforces with themes as playing and gambling” (ibid.). Not often recognised as such, the ‘Faustian wager’ (i.e. the pact with the devil) is considered as an inescapable feature in gothic literature and horror fiction. Whether sometimes overdone or underdone, Gothic novels “achieve their effects by testing, tantalizing, and teasing their characters” (ibid. 70). Like the Faust Books, they offer “sophisticated pleasures of crafty, knowing superiority” (ibid.). Their focus is not on the supernatural, but on the “human responses and resistance to the supernatural” (ibid.). The conclusion, as depicted in the Faust Books as well as in Gothic literature and horror fiction, is, whether the victims in the novels triumph or fail, that humans themselves are often responsible for the evils within or surrounding them.
A Pact with the Devil: Storm of the Century and Needful Things
As mentioned in the first chapter of this thesis, King can be considered as a Gothic author insofar as he employs Gothic elements and themes in his writing. In his fiction, King “posits the existence of two broad categories of evil” (Winter 1986, 70): internal evil – represented by figures as Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where a potion releases the evil within them – and external evil, portrayed by the Count in Stoker’s Dracula, Leland Gaunt in Needful Things, and Andre Linoge in Storm of the Century. Internal evil is psychological; it explores, as King says, “the terrain of the human heart” and “revolves around the free-will concept […] the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father” (1981a, 80). This concept could be found in Frankenstein where Victor creates a monster to satisfy his own hubris and refuses to take responsibility for the consequences. In Stevenson’s novel, it is Dr Jekyll, “who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisy” because he wants to be able “to party-down,” even with the “lowliest Whitechapel drab,” without “anyone knowing that he is anything but saintly Dr Jekyll whose feet are ‘ever treading the upward path’” (ibid.). The second form of evil may be called ‘chance’ or ‘predestination’ (Winter 1986a, 71). In contrast to internal evil, this evil cannot be avoided; it “awaits us at every turn of the spinning wheel of fortune, every toss of the dice,” without “apparent logic or motivation” (ibid.).
In Needful Things and Storm of the Century both evils are offered. ‘Inside’ evil or the free-will concept is symbolised, as I shall show below, by the hypocritical townspeople of Castle Rock (Needful Things) and Little Tall Island (Storm of the Century). Gaunt’s and Linoge’s evil, like the Count’s, seems to be predestined; they both come to a small town to collect human soul(s). As Wiater, Golden, and Wagner suggest, there is an interesting parallel that can be drawn between these novels (230). Both novels discuss the relationship between the individual and community; and in both, a devil-like creature visits their town with intimate knowledge of the townspeople’s darkest desires and secrets. The novels’ plot – an intruder comes to town creating disorder for evil purposes – is a theme frequently explored by King.
In King’s Needful Things, a store called Needful Things opens its doors on a warm October day; eight days later the town is completely destroyed. Introduced in the first chapter, the owner of store, Leland Gaunt from Akron, Ohio, makes his first deal of many he will make with the townspeople of Castle Rock – he sells an eleven-year-old boy a one hundred- dollar-worth baseball card for eighty-five cents and a ‘deed.’ In his case, Brian has to splatter his neighbour’s clean sheets with dirt. The seemingly harmless deeds function to unleash a little of the latent rage present beneath the town’s calm façade. In the following days, Gaunt ‘cuts deals’ with several other citizens ultimately resulting in the total destruction of the town. Like Faust, the people of Castle Rock sell their souls in exchange for a ‘forbidden’ or impossible desire. Gaunt is an “electrian of the human soul” and, as Wiater, Golden, and Wagner say, “delights in ‘cross-wiring’ potential victims to achieve maximum chaos” (King 1992, 339; 167). With Gaunt’s words King suggests that humans are easy to manipulate and deceive: “[a]ll it took was an understanding of human nature” (King 1992, 339).
Gaunt turns out to be an ancient devil-like creature that travels the world leaving chaos behind him, feeding himself with the misery of humans (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 167-8):
[Gaunt] had begun business many years ago-as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer's heart. He had sold his wares from the back of the wagon ... and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought [or sold]. (King 1983, 347)
Like the Faust Books, King’s Needful Things is a critique of materialism and self-satisfaction. In this novel, King also investigates the concept of free will. King’s characters are “defined by their needful things” (Strengell 2005b, 220). His characters in this novel all seem friendly; however, they are willing to anything in order to get their ‘needful thing.’ For example, in return for a coveted fox’ tail, Hugh Priest murders Nettie Cobb’s dog (King 1983, 239).
In addition, King discusses rural America detailing the social structure of a small town. Concerned with how far people will go in their pursuit for personal gratification and afraid that it can destroy society, King explores Castle Rock and uses Gaunt and his store to test the rules of the microcosm (Strengell 2005a, 222). Thus, Needful Things is both a satire and drama; an allegory of capitalism. The supernatural (Gaunt) is a symbolic representation of a cultural crisis. In addition, King suggests that it is the evil within humans, not external (supernatural) evil, which can destroy society. As King suggests, people must be willing to take responsibility for their actions and its consequences then they can break away from the devil’s control. King’s says that humans themselves are responsible for the evils within or surrounding them.
Like Needful Things, Storm of the Century depicts a small town community. Andre Linoge, a devilish sorcerer, comes to Little Tall Island in an attempt to force the citizens to provide him the heir he desires (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 233). He warns them that he was there once before; however, then, in 1587, the people of Little Tall refused to give him one of their children. As a result, he destroyed the village and its population. After numerous horrible events, the townspeople, convinced of Linoge’s supernatural powers, vote that they will give this creature what he wants in order to save themselves. Like in Needful Things, King’s Storm of the Century illustrates that people have terrible secrets and often pretend to be someone that they are not. Hypocrisy and moral corruption thrive in this typical American pastoral, which condemns everyone who is different (ibid. 219). This is emphasised by a feud between two spiritual leaders of the town that ultimately leads to the destruction of both churches:
Churches in small towns ... well, I guess I don't have to tell you how that is. They get along with each other-sort of-but they ain't never really happy with each other. Everything will go along peaceful for awhile, and then [...] they rave and rant and tell each other they're going to hell. (King 1991, 4)
King suggests, with Castle Rock as an example, that the traditional supports of a community are weak (Russel 122). This novel departs from the standards of the horror genre by emphasising on contemporary social concerns and by focusing on individual characters. He addresses social concerns directly, whereas the traditional Gothic addresses them indirectly. King shows that society does not succeed in providing security for its citizens; this failure extends to the organisations people normally trust: the police, the church, and even the state government (Strengell 2005a, 222). Even the sheriff’s office, as a ‘higher organisation,’ cannot prevent the violence in Castle Rock from escalating (ibid.).
In both novels, a stranger “comes to town with intimate knowledge of those guarded secrets” and uses it to tear the community apart (ibid. 231). Like the ‘victims’ in Needful Things, the citizens of Little Tall have to make a deal with an evil creature to get what they want. However, in Storm of the Century, Linoge is as dependant on humans as the people of the town are on him: “I’ve lived a long time – thousands of years – but I’m not a god, nor am I one of the immortals” (ibid. 233). Apprehensive that he ultimately will die, Linoge attempts to find a child to become his heir in order to prevent that his evil powers will die with him. By refusing his demand, the people of Little Tall can cast out evil from the world; however, the fear of a possible death at the hands of an evil being ‘forces’ them to sacrifice a child to save
their own lives.
The structures of Needful Things and Storm of the Century seem alike; however, the latter has a more disturbing nature. In Needful Things, the cultural crisis shatters the community, but when the hero of the narrative makes a decisive (moral) stand against the evil forces infecting his town, good, in the end, more or less, triumphs over evil. However, in Storm of the Century, as a result of the collective decision of the Little Tall community, evil triumphs over good. King suggests with this novel that people, in the end, in spite of the consequences, will choose for themselves.
In sum, as Strengell suggests, ‘social determinism’ plays an important role in both Needful Things and Storm of the Century (2005b, 222). However, the devil figures depicted in these novels symbolise external evil. Nevertheless, King suggests that evil is attracted to evil places: “Evil places call evil men” (King 1976, 113). Moreover, humans are attracted to evil as well. In both Needful Things and Storm of the Century humans cooperate with the evil forces surrounding them. In fact, the characters in the novels actually make deals with the ‘Devil’ in their pursuit for personal gratification (Strengell 2005b, 222). In King’s novels the appearances of evil creatures are an allegory of a cultural crisis (ibid). And, as Magistrale suggests, “grotesque and furious manifestations of evil forces” fill the emptiness created by the “absence of meaningful interpersonal relationships, responsible and responsive government, and supportive system of benevolent religious faith” (Magistrale 1988, 40).
Although King’s novels offer no clarifications as to why his supernatural creations turn against the world, his fiction achieves its effect “by testing, tantalizing, and teasing [its] characters” (Brown and Brown 70). Like the Faust Books, King’s novels “offer sophisticated pleasures of crafty, knowing superiority” (ibid). Their focus is not on the supernatural, but on the “human responses and resistance to the supernatural” (ibid.). King has transformed the Faustian figure into a contemporary relevant figure. In Needful Things and Storm of the Century King discusses rural America detailing the social structure of a small town. His characters represent real people; they have similar problems: financial problems, alcoholism, drug abuse, marriage problems, loneliness, etc. Because his characters are accessible and recognisable, the novel can have immediate relevance to people’s lives.
Chapter V
Gothic Archetypes: Ghosts and Castles
In his writing, King makes use of the “technology of early Gothic fiction:” haunted castles, tormented spirits, dark alleys, rattling chains, graveyards, and ghosts (Strengell 2005b, 223). In Danse Macabre, King argues that there are four essential archetypes in the Gothic tradition: the Vampire, the Werewolf, the Thing Without a Name, and the Ghost (King 1981a, 283). Of these archetypes, as Strengell claims, the “‘Ghost is the most potent,’ because it sums up all the rest and traces them to the original antagonist, the devil” (2005b, 223). King asserts that “the concept of the Ghost is to the good novel of the supernatural” is what the “concept of the Mississippi” is to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1981a, 291). In his fiction, the traditional concept of the Ghost is often represented. In Pet Sematary and The Shining, ghosts, portrayed as both ‘physical’ and metaphorical, are introduced as important characters. As I shall show below, the archetype of the haunted castle or house is depicted in Pet Sematary, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot. King calls this the archetype of the Bad Place because this term “encompasses much more than the fallen-down house at the end of the street […] with a moldering FOR SALE sign” (ibid. 295). It was Horace Walpole who first included a ghost (and its habitat: the haunted house) as “an actual character” in his fiction (Strengell 2005b, 224). The Castle of Otranto (1764) could be considered as the first ‘Gothic ghost novel.’ In this chapter, I will compare the themes, settings, and characters in King’s Pet Sematary, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot with those in Walpole’s work in order to show how King’s skill lies in his ability to redesign Gothic standards.
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
As mentioned earlier, Walpole’s text could be considered as the originator of Gothic fiction. In a letter to Rev. William Cole, Walpole’s account of the novel’s origin appears:
Your partiality to me and Strawberry have I hope inclined you to excuse the wildness of the story […] Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance. I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with the Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. (Lewis ix)
The hand mentioned in this letter grows into a huge statue and is the manifestation of evil in the narrative. The story, based upon his dream, is “compounded of unexpected elements, supernatural happenings, and voluble domestics” (Lewis xiii). His story is based upon the model of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Julius Caesar (Walpole 8). His “borrowings of scenes and passages,” as Lewis points out, are striking (xiv). For instance, when Frederic sees a creature from the other world he cries: “Angels of grace, protect me!” (Walpole 103). This echoes Hamlet’s response when he first sees the ghost of his father: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (1.4.39).
The Castle of Otranto is a compilation of Gothic ingredients: unexpected elements, supernatural happenings, and voluble domestics (Lewis xiii). In addition to the ghost in Walpole’s story, the castle also has a prominent role; however, the presence of the castle becomes less important than the “atmosphere of oppression and the powerlessness of the characters” in the novel, “manipulated by forces” they cannot understand (Strengell 2005b, 225). These forces are portrayed to underscore the possibility that “evil forces” can “shape man’s fate” (ibid). Furthermore, Walpole’s text is concerned with history. His text gives evidence of “the eighteenth-century view of feudalism and the aristocracy,” and in doing so originates what becomes the most established theme in Gothic literature: “the revisiting of the sins of the fathers upon their children” (Punter 52). When this is placed in a contemporary setting it is a “simple theme;” however, when the “very location of crime and disorder” is placed in the past it “becomes altogether more complex” (ibid. 52-3). Thus, the strength of The Castle of Otranto derives from the fact that in it “Walpole evolved a symbolic structure in which to represent uncertainties about the past” (ibid. 53). In his fiction, the supernatural and the past are connected; therefore, the supernatural could be considered as a symbol of the past revisiting its ‘victims.’ The nemesis in the novel, Manfred, represents, as Punter suggests, a “social anxiety which has a historical dimension: threat to convention was seen as coming partly from the past, out of the memory of previous social and psychological orders” (ibid.). In this context, The Castle of Otranto could be considered as an attack on the norms of the Enlightenment.
Pet Sematary
Interesting parallels could be drawn between the works of Walpole and King. Above all, they both use the supernatural to awaken and sustain interest (Punter 52). In addition, both authors combine fantasy with realism, use the supernatural in order to entertain, and both have a tendency to portray excess and exaggeration (Strengell 2005b, 224-5). As mentioned earlier, the archetype of the ghost plays an important role in both Walpole’s and King’s fiction; however, the archetype of the ghost portrayed in King’s Pet Sematary appears to be more ‘refined’ than in Walpole’s text (ibid. 26). Walpole’s use of the supernatural is not terrifying; his ghosts have no didactic purpose. Walpole’s ironic use of the supernatural is used to amuse and interest his readership. In contrast to Walpole’s ghosts, King’s ghosts have a distinct function. The ghosts in King’s fiction adopt the motivations and the souls of those that behold them; if the ghosts are good, they have adapted the good from their beholder; if they are evil, they have adopted the evil from their beholders (Strengell 2005a, 90). King says:
We fear the Ghost for much the same reason we fear the Werewolf: It is the deep part of us that need not be bound by piffling Apollonian restriction. It can walk through walls, disappear, speak in the voices of strangers. It is the Dionysian part of us…but it is still us. (1981a, 290)
Although King insists that “for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil,” his novels introduce ‘good ghosts’ as well (ibid. 292). King emphasises that “we know that ghosts aren’t inherently evil,” in fact, they could be “rather helpful” (ibid. 291).
Pet Sematary, based upon a dream by King, depicts this concept of good and helpful ghosts. Louis Creed, a physician in an infirmary, is confronted with the results of a horrible car accident on his first day at work. A young student, Victor Pascow, dies in Creed’s arms; however, not before he issues a warning: “It’s not the real cemetery” (King 1984, 74). Later that night, Pascow’s ghost visits Creed in his bedroom and takes him to the pet cemetery: “Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to,” “The barrier was not made to be broken,” “Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor,” “Doctor – remember,” he says (ibid. 87, italics in original). By showing and repeating the warnings by Pascow, King points out that Creed has willingly chosen to ignore them and is accordingly responsible for the consequences.
Through her psychic like nightmares Ellie, Creed’s daughter, unwillingly contributes to a deepening of the unfolding tragedy in the novel. Ellie has a dream, under the influence of Victor, where she learns the truth about the death of her cat, Church. After her brother’s death, she dreams of her brother coming back and killing her elderly neighbour with a scalpel retrieved from Creed’s medicine bag. In the same dream, Victor comes to warn her that Creed is in danger; however, this warning ultimately results in the tragic death of both her father and mother. Although Victor plays a minor role in the novel, his death, as Reino suggests, “sets up a death-and-resurrection pattern” (93). Victor Pascow, like Churchill (significantly nicknamed Church), is named with a purpose. The name Pascow is derived from the Latin Paschalis, meaning Easter. Together with the biblical paraphrase of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:11-44) at the beginning of the novel the surname of Victor suggests that he is, in fact, the “core around which the haunting of the resurrection-novel spiral” (Reino 93). The name Victor could refer to Victor Frankenstein who ‘comes back to earth’ to warn Creed, named for his faith (in science), for the consequences of “infusing life into an inanimate body” (Shelley 935). In the death of Ellie’s cat, Church, King “signals that at the heart of Pet Sematary is that of the rational being’s struggle with modern death – death without God, death without hope of salvation” (Winter 1986a, 133).
As mentioned before, Creed repeatedly ignores Victor’s warnings and thereby equally ignores the ‘rules’ of nature. Consequently, by repeating these warnings and underscoring their serious character, King stresses that Creed has willingly chosen to ignore them and is responsible for the consequences (Strengell 2005a, 61). King also deals with the question of faith and religion. Creed believes, as a doctor of medicine, that he is above the laws of nature (and its Maker), that he can outwit death because he is a man of science. In Pet Sematary King modifies traditional Gothic conventions to make a connection with his readership’s real-life concerns. He interprets the Gothic to suit his intentions by commenting on death, religion, and hubris in his work. This book, like many horror fiction novels, is a combination of fantasy and realism. The characters in The Castle of Otranto are neither lifelike nor reasonable in themselves; they are pretentious puppets (Punter 51). However, King enriches this novel with realistic and developed characters. In addition, King’s characters are people with whom his readership can easy identify. That is where the suspense comes from, not only from his use of the supernatural. In this novel the supernatural motif is the evil spirit; however, the real horror element of the story is the dissolution of the American family. In addition, focusing on the emotions of the human mind, King’s novel is concerned with chaos, death, and decay (Strengell 2005a, 68).
The Shining
Inspired by the haunted houses in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Edgar Allen Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death (1842), and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1954), the Overlook Hotel, situated in the mountains of Colorado, becomes the centrepiece of King’s third published novel, The Shining (Winter 1986a, 45). The Overlook, at first presented as a “great, isolated” building, and with its “dignified architecture and accumulation of history,” creates “the suggestion of a settled order” (ibid. 46). However, the five-year-old Danny Torrance recognises the hotel as an evil place that his imaginary friend, Tony, warned him against. The Overlook appears to be a “ruined castle of Gothic literature,” complete with “labyrinthine corridors, forbidden books and rooms, rattling chains (in the elevator shaft),” and a “company of ghosts” (ibid.). Moreover, the Overlook, like its “Gothic predecessors,” stands for “the pride and guilt of authentic tragedy” (ibid.).
King suggests that The Shining is set in “the apotheosis of the Bad Place:” it is not a haunted house but “a haunted hotel,” with “a different ‘real’ horror movie playing in almost every one of its guest rooms and suites” (1981a, 298). Thus, King offers a sequence of horrors to his readers, “working together in order to reinforce the concept of the house as a Bad Place” (ibid. 300). Built between 1907 and 1909 and plagued by numerous scandals ever since, the Overlook fulfils King’s ‘truest definition’ of the concept of the Bad Place: a “house with an unsavoury history” (Winter 1986a, 46; King 1981a, 300). The Overlook’s history repeats itself over and over again and has left a nasty ‘residue’ that, for certain guests, like Jack Torrance, the novel’s protagonist, “plays on like a supernatural newsreel” (Winter 1986a, 46):
[H]ere in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one. There was an endless night in August of 1945, with laughter and drinks and a chosen shining few going up and coming down in the elevator, drinking champagne and popping favors in each other’s faces. It was a not-yet-light morning in June some twenty years later and the organization hitters endlessly pumped shotgun shells into the torn and bleeding bodies of three men who went through their agony endlessly. In a room on the second floor, a woman lolled in her tub and waited for visitors. (King 1977, 284)
As mentioned before, in King’s fiction evil places call evil men. In The Shining, the Overlook has called Torrance as a caretaker, just as many evil men before him. Torrance’s childhood is marked by violence; his father physically abused both him and his mother under the influence of alcohol. Following in his father’s footsteps, he turns into an alcoholic and has an uncontrollable violent temper. Like the hotel, Torrance has an “unsavoury history” (King 1981a, 300). As King says, “the past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly” (ibid. 298). In this context, the Overlook hotel, as “a symbol of unexpiated sin,” is built by Jack (ibid). As Winter points out, in The Shining, the “ruined Gothic castle has become the haunted mind itself” (1986a, 49). Like in Gothic fiction, the Overlook hotel “functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of ‘confining narcissism” (King 1981a, 315).
An important recurring image in The Shining is a wasps’ nest – like Torrance and the hotel, a peaceful exterior whose insides are maddeningly burning (Winter 1986a, 50). When Torrance begins repair work on the hotel’s roof he finds a wasps’ nest. Torrance sees the nest as a symbol for his past and an omen for a better future:
He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into The Great Wasps’ Nest of Life. As an image it stank. As a cameo of reality, he felt it was serviceable. He had stuck his hand through some rotted flashing in high summer and that hand and his whole arm had been consumed in holy, righteous fire, destroying conscious thought, making the concept of civilized behavior obsolete. Could you be expected to behave as a thinking human being when your hand was being impaled on red-hot darning needles? Could you be expected to live in the love of your nearest and dearest when the brown, furious cloud rose out of the hole in the fabric of things (the fabric you thought was so innocent) and arrowed straight at you? Could you be held responsible for your own actions as you ran crazily about on the sloping roof seventy feet above the ground, not knowing where you were going, not remembering that your panicky, stumbling feet could lead you crashing and blundering right over the rain gutter and down to your death on the concrete seventy feet below? Jack didn't think you could. When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest, you hadn't made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the min and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds. (King 1978, 108)
When the wasps’ nest, as some trophy, is placed in Danny’s room, wasps emerge from the nest and sting him. Jack says: “They had come back. He had killed the wasps but they had come back” (King 1978, 130). This suggests that the wasps’ nest, like the past, is inescapable (Winter 1986, 51). The physical surroundings of the hotel mimic the inward-turning of Torrance himself (ibid). Because of Torrance’s obsession with the past the hotel becomes a “microcosm where universal forces collide” (King 1981a, 316). These colliding forces symbolise a familiar theme in King’s fiction: the duality of good and evil within a single human being.
The Shining shows that people cannot escape from the past. People have to move on, as Dick Hallorann, the surrogate father of Torrance’s son, says to Danny:
There’s some things no six-year-old-boy in the world should have to be told, but the way things should be and the things are hardly ever get together. The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us either. […] The world don’t love. […] But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter. Pull your act together and just go on. (King 1977, 415)
However, King’s main concern in The Shining is the impending destruction of the Torrance family. In this novel the Torrance family is depicted as being broken. The threat of divorce sways persistently over the Torrances, and in the matter of a modern melodrama, King discusses this issue from the angle of every family member. In this novel, King deals with child abuse (Jack breaks Danny’s arm), alcoholism, mental illness, and abusive marriages. Even when the supernatural element is removed this story would be no less horrific. The strength of this novel lies in that King creates characters his readership cares about and then he “turn[s] the monsters loose” (King qtd. in Winter 1986a, 67).
‘Salem’s Lot
Based upon the most celebrated tale of horror ever written, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, King’s second novel ‘Salem’s Lot tells, like most of his novels, the story of a small town community in southern Maine. Like the hotel in The Shining, the Marsten House in ‘Salem’s Lot is situated on a hill and looks over the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot:
The Marsten House has looked down on us all for almost fifty years, at all our little peccadilloes and sins and lies. Like an idol.’ 'Maybe it's seen the good, too,’ Ben said.
‘There's little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil — or worse, a conscious one. I believe Thomas Wolfe wrote about seven pounds of literature about that.’ (King 2006, 142)
The house was built by Hubert Marsten, who had been the president of a large New England trucking company in the 1920’s, a company which conducted its most profitable business after midnight, running Canadian whiskey into Massachusetts (Winter 1986a, 40). He was a wealthy man, but lost most of his wealth in the stock market crash of 1929. Ten years later Hubert killed his wife with a shotgun and hanged himself in the attic. The next forty years the house stays empty and becomes a piled, jumbled, bewildering rat’s nest (ibid. 41). The Marsten House becomes a symbol of evil, as Ben Mears, the novel’s protagonist, says, “‘I think that house might be Hubert Marsten's monument to evil, a kind of psychic sounding board. A supernatural beacon, if you like. Sitting there all these years, maybe holding the essence of Hubie's evil in its old, moldering bones,’” and now it has “called another evil man” (King 2006, 135-6). Evil places call evil men, King suggests, and Mr. Barlow, a modern counterpart of Stoker’s Count Dracula, has answered the call of this evil house.
Although the haunted Marsten House has a prominent place in the novel, the book is “about vampires, not hauntings” (King 1981a, 298). As King points out, the Marsten House’s function is to lend “atmosphere;” it is a “curlicue”, the “gothic equivalent of an appendix” (ibid.). The real focus of the novel is on the ‘undead’ in the physical appearance of vampires. That evil, in the form of Mr. Barlow, revisits Jerusalem’s Lot is not an accident (Winter 1986a, 40). Like Count Dracula, Mr. Barlow “instills” a blend of “terror and desire;” however, “the desire invoked is not one of sexual surrender but of submersion of identity” (ibid. 41). In addition, King’s use of the supernatural is a metaphor for the dehumanising pall of modern society. In an article about Dracula in Qui, King has stressed the time of its creation. At the end of the Victorian period, when a “sexual double standard thrived,” even “to the extent of Victorian gentlemen maintaining secret rooms” in their homes for sexual contacts, pornographic magazines, and other erotic belongings (ibid): “In a sense, Dracula was the secret room of Victorian literature. Besides being a ripping good monster story, it is a highly charged tale of abnormal sex, resounding mostly with dark notes of necrophilia” (King qtd. in Duncan 180). However, in ‘Salem’s Lot the contents of the ‘secret room’ are not sexual. The secret room in ‘Salem’ Lot is paranoia; it depicts the secret room of the seventies, when a “socio-political double standard thrived” (ibid.; Winter 1986a, 41):
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. […] it seemed that the Federal Government had been involved in so much subterfuge and so many covert operations that […] the horror would never end. […] 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 empty silent houses, all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem. (King qtd. in Duncan 180)
Like the Overlook hotel in The Shining, the Marsten House is a symbol of the past haunting the present. And Ben Mears, like Jack Torrance, is haunted by his past; however, unlike Torrance, Mears could lay his past to rest by driving a stake through his (undead) girlfriend’s heart.
What happens behinds the doors in the haunted houses in The Shining and ‘Salem’s Lot reflects on what happens behind closed doors of all houses in the world. King suggests that every house has its secret rooms. People think that when they “shoot the bolt on the door” they are locking evil out; however, King argues differently: “we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in…with them” (1981a, 299, italics in original). However, King’s novels The Shining and ‘Salem’s Lot suggest that people also lock themselves in with themselves. The vampires in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot suggest that “we are taking over ourselves, individuals succumbing to the whole” (Winter 1986a, 43). The process of isolation and fragmentation has seen the moral dissolution of the complete town. The citizens of the town are reduced to zombie-like creatures with the same “idiot indifference” as the Marsten House (King 2006, 21) With his book, King suggests that therein lies the root of paranoia – a fear and mistrust not only of those around us, but of our very own identities (Winter 1986a, 43). For if control and self-determination are lost to other people, or turn cannot be far away (ibid.). Although vampires, zombies, and ‘the undead’ are included in these novels to provide supernatural thrills and excitement, King also deals with American social reality. In this novel, he discusses sexual perversity, paranoia, the question of identity, and familial discord.
Chapter VI
Moral Issues
Literary critics often suggest that King’s horror fiction is merely trivial literature with the function to shock its readership in the search of sensation. However, if taken seriously, his work must be regarded as a “contemporary social satire,” which “reveals collective cultural fears and fantasies” (Wagner 6). King’s fictional evils draw attention to the social and technological conditions of the contemporary world. Like his Gothic predecessors, King produces characters that are forced to make ethical decisions in an immoral world. King’s horror fiction is emblematic for the current difficulties of contemporary social conditions. King uses Gothic features to depict modern political, technological, and religious concepts. Richard Benton’s definition of ‘High Gothic’ shows that King’s work can be considered as a reconfiguration of the traditional Gothic:
The Gothic makes us think: how much do we know about reality, about life and death, about the universe and God, about human personality and motivation, and about the course of our destiny? How much do we know about good and evil, about what we should do and what we ought not to do? These are the kinds of questions that high Gothic proposes through the psychological archetypes dredged out of the darker depths of human experience, symbols of our ‘primitive’ thinking, the tigers we ride on within the unconscious depths of our inner selves. (7-8)
As mentioned earlier, King seems to have “inherited [these] moral perspectives” Benton associates with high Gothic literature (1988, 25). In this context King’s work could be considered as moral novels, as he uses Gothic features to depict modern political and religious issues; his goal is to make the reader think.
This chapter explores the moral choices people have to make in their struggle against the forces of evil. As mentioned before in the introduction of this thesis, most of King’s work analyses the ways in which the individual is “assaulted and corrupted” by self-centredness, helplessness, governmental bureaucracy and increasing technological influences (Wagner 6). This assault can be explained in terms of social discontent and society’s “narcissistic concern for the self” (ibid.). In Danse Macabre, King emphasises that a successful horror novel must be a balanced mixture of the real and the surreal and have a “pleasing allegorical feel” (19). In addition to the sociological context embedded in King’s novels, this chapter will examine the symbolic subtext in King’s fiction.
Narcissism
People frequently ask King the question why he writes such gruesome literature; his answer is usually a counter question: “Why do you assume that I have a choice?” (King 1978 xii). After King explains “the why do you write that stuff question,” a new and more important question comes up: “Why do people read that stuff? What makes it sell?” (ibid.). King argues that this question “carries a hidden assumption with it, and the assumption is that the story about fear, the story about horror, is an unhealthy taste” (ibid). According to King, people read horror literature for the same reason people like to slow down and look at car accidents. This idea is also found in early literature of the supernatural, like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown (1835) and The Minister’s Black Veil (1836), and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). As King argues, all these novels show the “let’s slow down and look at the accident syndrome;” however, in these novels “the bodies have been removed, but the twisted wreckage” is still apparent (ibid.). When people pick up their morning newspaper and read about some terrible accident they are confronted with the fact that they are mortal after all. Thus, when people slow down and look at an accident, King suggests that those who are looking at the accident are, in fact, relieved that it is somebody else that has died. King infers that it lies in human nature to be fascinated by these horrors, but he also points out that people are disgusted by the same horrors. King argues that these feelings “mix uneasily, and the by-product of the mix seems to be guilt. . .a guilt which seems not much different from the guilt that used to accompany sexual awakening” (ibid.). As Kings asserts, an interesting parallel could be seen between fear and sexuality:
As we become capable of having sexual relationships, our interest in those relationships awakens; the interest, unless perverted some-how, tends naturally towards copulation and the continuance of the species. As we become aware of unavoidable termination, we become aware of the fear-emotion. And I think that, as copulation tends towards self-preservation, all fear tends towards a comprehension of the final ending. (King 1978 xvi)
This self-preservation or, as Wagner describes it, the “narcissistic concern for the self,” is encouraged by people’s disappointment in institutions (6). Theorists like Jürgen Habermas and Christopher Lasch claim that “contemporary breakdown in the authority of American institutions” contributes to a “general attitude of social cynicism and despair” (ibid). Disrespect for these institutions mirrors the established perception of the government as corrupt, of the family as an institute that is collapsing, and the schools as a place where students learn about drugs, violence, and sex (ibid.)
Wagner points out that “social discontent by itself is not an example of narcissism;” however, the widespread reaction to this discontent is (ibid. 7). Because people are convinced of society’s unchangeable nature, together with the feeling of discontent, they can only rely on themselves. As Wagner puts it: “social despair can atrophy into narcissism” (ibid). The “failure of institutions” to support “satisfying social experiences” results in the individual’s conviction that “personal survival is the only realistic goal” (ibid.). This theme is vividly portrayed by King in his novels, explicitly in Storm of Century and Needful Things. In both works King discusses the relationship between the individual and the community. In addition, they depict a critique of materialism and self-satisfaction. In both, a devil-like creature visits a small town with intimate knowledge of the townspeople’s darkest desires and secrets. The novels’ basic plot – an intruder comes to town creating disorder for evil purposes – is a theme frequently explored by King. In his book The Culture of Narcissism Lasch argues that “survivalism has become the dominant ideology of contemporary culture” (ibid.). King’s novels portray this ideology. People with “little hope for a better society” often have a difficult time to “make commitments necessary” to change the social circumstances of their lives (ibid.). Self-preservation can be seen as a product of the individual’s struggle to change personally, rather than as the results of changing society. In this context, as Wagner points out, to ‘change personally’ means, in effect, to “adapt to the social conditions of institutional decline by learning how to cope” (ibid.). As a result, individuals rely more on themselves than they do on society. In other words, self-satisfaction becomes more important than a better society. In a narcissistic culture, freedom is defined “in terms of one’s ability to survive the pitfalls of society by escaping from the evil assumed to be endemic to social life” (ibid.).
King’s fiction focuses on the evils in (American) contemporary society. Moreover, it portrays the ways in which this society “undermines the morality necessary for love, of self and others” (ibid.). As Wagner claims, King’s fiction “echoes a dominant concern of many contemporary social scientists: the lack of community and social connectedness in American society, and the culture’s general spirit of apathy” (ibid.). King’s focus is on people and their moral struggle to escape from the evil influences of society. Many of King’s characters rebel against these influences, especially those invoked by the government and technological progress. Magistrale calls this the “moral flight to freedom” (1988, 8). Because his characters flee from the established institutions in society, King’s fiction can be considered as “a dramatization of contemporary cultural narcissism” (Wagner 8). The only way to resist the “societal assault” on the individual is to withdraw from society, by retiring in “small interpersonal groups” (ibid. 8). Individual revolt (or in small groups) against society in King’s fiction seems the only way for moral endurance (ibid.). An interesting question is, then: if King’s characters are capable of leaving society, why are they not capable of changing it? The answer is, as Wagner says, that King does not “believe the individual can effectively confront the social forces he detests” (9). Moreover, King’s fiction shows that individuals will always be a part of a society, whether they like it or not.
Free Will vs. Determinism
King’s fiction frequently depicts the duality between good and evil and the individual’s struggle to morally define himself. As mentioned earlier, this duality is largely based on the Freudian theory of the struggle between id and the superego. As King makes clear in Danse Macabre, this conflict between “mortification and gratification” can be considered as the “cornerstone of Christianity” (94). King argues that, in mythic terms, the ‘twinning’ of the individual suggests an additional duality: the “split” between the “Apollonian” (intellect and morality) and “Dionysian” (physical gratification) (ibid.). According to King, the struggle between the individual’s good and evil self is a “conflict between man’s Apollonian potential and his Dionysian desires” (ibid. 95). Thus, the concept of evil is “rooted in both the individual himself” and the “social community that surrounds him” (Magistrale 2006, 14). King suggests that there are evils from the outside; however, the characters in his fiction who give in to the temptations of evil frequently do so of their own volition (ibid.).
The concept of free will is a very important feature in King’s novels. The characters in his fiction have the choice between good and evil. In this chapter I will define free will as a principle that is opposed to determinism. The former suggests that humans are completely unrestricted to choose good over evil (and vice versa) and the latter suggests that people are decisively influenced by outside forces. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary’s definition: “Determinism, [a] belief that people are not free to choose the sort of person one wants to be, or how one behaves, because all these things are decided by one’s background, surroundings, etc.” (328). However, in King’s fiction, as Magistrale asserts, the characters’ nature is more complex; King emphasises that humans are capable of “surrendering freely to evil,” but he also points out that outside pressures by “malevolent agencies” frequently “compels mortals to commit acts that lead to self-destruction” (2006, 14). Thus, King’s fiction is based on both deterministic and non-deterministic concepts. However, an important notion in King’s work is that when his characters act morally they can escape from their ‘fate’. As Strengell says, “free will can be demonstrated by taking moral responsibility for one’s actions and bearing responsibility for future actions, which , in turn, may change the future” (2005a, 191).
King’s account of the ‘moral allegory’ owes its formulation to the romance tradition in nineteenth-and twentieth-century (American) literature (Magistrale 1988, 57). King’s fiction is profoundly influenced by authors as Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, whose fiction revolves around characters who violate social standards for personal gratification and are responsible for their own fate (ibid.). In King’s fiction, like in the fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, when characters seek personal gratification, they inevitably destroy themselves. In King’s fiction, the only way to overcome evil is through a “conscious act of self-discipline” (ibid.). Thus, King’s characters have a choice. With a conscious act of selflessness comes “moral salvation” and with a conscious act of selfishness comes “damnation” (ibid.).
Those acts that lead to damnation are depicted in both Needful Things and Pet Sematary. The people of Castle Rock in Needful Things are defined by their ‘needful things’ and moreover, what they do in order to get them. Gaunt, the shop owner, points out that “it’s really a question of supply and demand” (King 1991, 319). More importantly, he says that his customers have the choice to buy or not buy his products: “You decide, Norris. The voice of Mr. Gaunt spoke up suddenly in his mind. It’s your fishing rod. And it’s your God-given right of free will, too. You have a choice. You always have a choice” (ibid. 428). In addition, it is an allegory of capitalism. King’s Needful Things is a critique of materialism and self-satisfaction and uses Gaunt and his store to investigate the rules of the microcosm of a small town in America. In Pet Sematary, Louis Creed, the novel’s protagonist, is also placed in the position where he must make a choice between good and evil. Creed shares many traits with the sinister characters in Hawthorne’s literature. Like Hawthorne’s characters, Creed violates social and moral values for personal gratification; therefore, he is responsible for his own destruction (Magistrale 2006, 58). Much as Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown relies on the woods of Puritan New England as a setting to portray the shortcomings and sins that are the inheritance of humanity, King’s Pet Sematary relies on the dark woods of Maine as “a deliberate backdrop for his own allegories, enabling him to utilize specific elements from that culture in his portrayal of the moral conflict” common to humans (ibid. 66). King’s work depicts the results of people’s struggle to redefine themselves morally when they are confronted with tragic situations. By portraying the negative results of this struggle, as Magistrale explains, King, like Hawthorne, suggests that “there are certain mysteries man must simply learn to accept, certain secrets he has no business attempting to discover and certain ethical barriers that he only transcends at the expense of his soul” (ibid.). “The barrier was not made to be broken,” says Victor Pascow to Creed (King 1984, 87).
As mentioned earlier, determinism shapes the lives of the characters in King’s fiction through community, home, and (governmental) institutions. In Needful Things King focuses on determinism through the microcosm of the small town of Castle Rock. King shows in this novel that the pressure that a community exerts on its citizens can have great consequences. King demonstrates that when people are “sociological so tightly determined” and their “free will is so limited” they consider “violence and self-destruction as their only stand and defy the prevailing circumstances” (Strengell 2005a, 218). In King’s novel The Stand, Glen Bateman, a sociologist, says about society:
Shall I tell what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man and a woman alone and I show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent that charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home. (King 1979, 253)
In The Shining Jack Torrance is determined by his past. The history of Overlook Hotel, the novel’s symbol of sin, mirrors Torrance’s unsavoury history (King 1981a, 298). As King says, “the past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly” (ibid.). In this novel, King deals with social anxieties such as alcoholism, mental illness, and abusive marriages. To be exact, The Shining, like Pet Sematary, discusses the destruction of the American family. In many of his works King depicts families as being broken or dysfunctional in some manner (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 300). Despite his use of supernatural elements King’s fiction remains credible – or at least sufficiently plausible to put forth an influence that may last beyond the act of reading. King’s fiction does not imitate the traditional conventions of Gothic; he has incorporated its Gothic elements such as monsters and atmosphere into his work and created a modern form of Gothic fiction. In combining realism with fantasy, King adds depth to his fiction and departs from the ‘traditional’ horror genre.
The Horror Story as a Mirror
Horror fiction is symbolical: “Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight…it offers us a chance to exercise […] emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand” (King 1981a, 47). Moreover, horror fiction “forces us to recognise the existence of evil in ourselves and in others” (Magistrale 2006, 5). Horror fiction concentrates on “subjective fantasies in which our worst fears and darkest desires are brought into tangible existence,” but, as Winter proposes, horror fiction provides an additional element – “a counterfeiting of reality whose inducement to imagination gives the reader access to truths beyond the scope of reason” (3). Thus, King’s fiction is a vivid portrayal of the limitations and imperfections of human beings. King’s novels mirror people’s darkest personal desires and repressive constraints imposed by society. The horrors King describes are recognisable; his monsters are not found on other planets, but live on the ground floors of factories, schools and churches (Magistrale 1988, 15). Because they are recognisable, King’s world is even more horrific because people “comprehend its immediate relevance to their daily lives” (ibid. 16).
Conclusion
As mentioned in my introduction of this thesis, the dominant popular perception is that Stephen King’s horror fiction merely functions to shock his readership in the search of sensation; however, in this study I have attempted to show that Stephen King’s fiction can be regarded as a contemporary social satire, which draws attention to the social and technological conditions of the contemporary world. King’s horror fiction is emblematic for the current difficulties of contemporary social conditions. His novels focus on American society and their moral struggles to define the meaning of good and evil. Most of King’s work analyses the ways in which the individual is infected by self-centredness, helplessness, governmental bureaucracy and increasing technological influences.
In the first chapter I showed the connection between traditional Gothic literature, American Gothic, and King’s horror fiction. The most obvious similarity between King and his Gothic predecessors is the reliance on Gothic settings and atmospheric techniques (Magistrale 1988, 16). King often evokes Gothic settings and techniques as vehicles for calling attention to the economic, social, and political apparatus with all its consequences.
In chapter II, I focused on a traditional (Gothic) horror theme: the struggle within the individual to be good rather than evil. The existence of the Gothic double in King’s fiction shows that archaic Gothic figures like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have found their modern counterparts in contemporary literature. The protagonists in Christine and The Dark Half are based, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, on the Freudian theory of the struggle between id and the superego. As King has pointed out in Danse Macabre, this conflict between “mortification and gratification” can be considered as the “cornerstone of Christianity” (94). In mythic terms, the “twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality:” the “split” between the “Apollonian” (intellect and morality) and “Dionysian” (physical gratification) (ibid.). This tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, what King also describes as the “Werewolf myth,” is an important and often recurring theme in King’s fiction (1981a, 283). Like Stevenson’s, King’s main focus is on humanity’s vulnerability to dehumanization (Winter 1986a, 122). King’s visions are based on the notion that good and evil can both exist within a single body, and, “concomitantly,” people are “ultimately unable to evolve, to purge [their] baser selves from [their] psyche[s]” (Strengell 2005a, 86).
Chapter III explored people’s fear of science. In these modern times of technological progress and intellectualism, King’s horror fiction has a degree of cultural relevance that has its closest historical parallel with the genre of Gothicism following the Enlightenment (ibid.). Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, King’s Pet Sematary and Christine suggest that for every advance in the disciplines of technology, there is a chance that this ‘progress’ will produce a possible reaction beyond human control (ibid.). These novels depict people’s fear that science would ultimately lead to the creation of horrifying monsters, the outbreak of diseases, and eventually to mass destruction and death. In addition, King’s novel deals with a person’s refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions. Moreover, King, like Shelley, asks questions as: Who is the real monster? and Who made whom? (Strengell 2005a, 53). Like Frankenstein’s monster, Creed’s ‘creations’ did not ask to be born. In this context, the creators are the real monsters. King underscores the possible consequences when science interferes with the natural order. King stresses in Pet Sematary that people “lose their innocence” when they are confronted with “tragic circumstances” and that people are “faced with the struggle to redefine them morally” (Magistrale 2006, 133). By depicting the “negative results of this struggle,” King asserts that there are “certain mysteries people simply have to accept,” and “certain barriers” that people only can “transcend at the expense” of their souls (ibid.). Moreover, this novel, like The Shining, concentrates on the dissolution of the American family.
In chapter IV, I discussed an essential theme in both Gothic literature and King’s fiction: ‘man’s fall from innocence’ or the ‘deal with the devil,’ i.e., the ‘Faustian pact’ (Strengell 2005, 221). The Faust Books portray Faust’s fate in his search for life’s meaning stepping beyond the natural limitations of humanity (Gillies 1). In King’s The Storm of the Century and Needful Things, like in the Faust Books, dissatisfaction has acquired a higher meaning (ibid.). It is a “spur to further effort,” a “dynamic force” which, if it works properly, “should urge us,” not to transcend the natural boundaries, but to “work fruitfully within them” (ibid.). Like the Faust Books, King’s fiction is an “eloquent statement” that the “road to life’s fulfilment” does not lie “through despair, violence and crime” (ibid.). In King’s fiction the appearances of evil creatures are an allegory of a cultural crisis. And “grotesque and furious manifestations of evil forces” fill the emptiness created by the “absence of meaningful interpersonal relationships, responsible and responsive government, and supportive system of benevolent religious faith” (Magistrale 1988, 40). Like the Faust Books, King’s novels “offer sophisticated pleasures of crafty, knowing superiority” (Brown and Brown 70). Their focus is not on the supernatural, but on the “human responses and resistance to the supernatural” (ibid.). The conclusion, as depicted in the Faust Books as well as in King’s horror fiction, is, whether the victims in the novels triumph or fail, that humans themselves are often responsible for the evils within or surrounding them.
Pet Sematary, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot, were taken together in chapter V because these works demonstrate techniques derived from early Gothic fiction: haunted castles, chained ghosts, and evil spirits. Chapter VI explored the moral choices people have to make in their struggle against the forces of evil. In his fiction, King makes use of supernatural phenomena to symbolise several religious, political, and social concepts. As shown in this chapter, King’s work analyses the ways in which the individual is assaulted and corrupted by self-centredness, helplessness, governmental bureaucracy and increasing technological influences (Wagner 6) This ‘assault’ is explained in terms of “social discontent” and a “narcissistic concern for the self” (ibid.). The concepts of ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’ are very important features in King’s novels. The former suggests that humans are completely unrestricted to choose good over evil (and vice versa) and the latter suggests that people are influenced by outside forces. However, King’s fiction is based on both deterministic and non-deterministic concepts. King’s account of the “moral allegory” owes its formulation to the romance tradition in nineteenth-and twentieth-century (American) literature (Magistrale 1988, 57). As King’s fiction is profoundly influenced by authors as Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, whose fiction revolves around characters who violate society’s values for personal gain and are responsible for their own fate. In King’s fiction, like in the fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, when characters seek personal gratification, they inevitably destroy themselves. The only way to overcome evil is through a “conscious act of self-discipline” (ibid.). King’s characters have a choice. With a conscious act of selflessness comes “moral salvation” and with a conscious act of selfishness comes “damnation” (ibid.).
With his fictional evils in his novels, King draws attention to the social and technological conditions of the contemporary world. In the tradition of ‘American Gothic’ authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, King evokes Gothic settings as vehicles for highlighting the (American) economic apparatus. The characters in his fiction are all trapped between fear of the past’s deadly embrace and fear of the future’s progress. King’s fiction is written from the perspective of a fallen world, and his characters become profoundly aware of the existence of evil (Magistrale 1988, 20). Like Mary Shelley, Stevenson, Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, King emphasises that evil is the outcome of the “individual’s lapse in moral judgment” (Magistrale 2006, 15). King’s horrors are recognisable; his monsters are not found on an ‘intergalactic world,’ but live on the ground floors of factories, schools and churches (Magistrale 1988, 15). In addition, King’s characters are easy accessible. King points out that his readership feels comfortable in his ‘world’ because they know and respond to his characters: “you don’t have unease about who they are,” but “you have unease about the circumstances that they find themselves in” (qtd. in Winter1985, 251). King’s real horrors are not supernatural. In his fiction, the horrors of child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, familial breakdown, and sexual perversity are translated into a bizarre Gothic atmosphere but remain visible. Because his horrors are recognisable, King’s world is even more horrific because, people realise that it has immediate relevance to their daily lives (Magistrale 1988, 16). King’s fiction’s relevance in literature is directly related to the sense of political and historical awareness. In Danse Macabre, King emphasises that a successful horror novel must be a balanced mixture of the real and the surreal (19). Like his Gothic predecessors, King produces characters that are forced to make ethical decisions in an immoral world. King uses Gothic features to depict modern political and religious issues; his goal is to make the reader think. In this way King’s fiction could be considered as moral novels and therefore can be regarded as ‘didactic’ Gothic.
In this thesis I have attempted to show that King’s fiction is more than trivial literature. With his (horror) fiction King does much more. King’s fictional characters in fictional situations are, in fact, representations of ‘real’ people in ‘real’ situations. King departs from the conventions of the horror genre by focusing on (individual) characters. King’s fiction blends the familiar with the bizarre. It is King’s characteristic blend of free will and determinism that combines the different facets of fantasy and reality and makes his fiction unique – at least in the horror genre. In contrast to other writers of the horror genre, who concentrate solely on the supernatural, King comments on social taboos and fears. In this context, King could be considered as an agent of the norm. Moreover, people can recognise themselves in King’s characters. That is were the suspense comes from. Certainly, King fiction often deals with the themes and conventions of the Gothic genre; however, his genius lies in his ability to redesign it; he does not imitate, he amplifies ‘the cultural echo of Gothic myths.’ Thus, his fiction departs from the conventions of the horror genre by focusing on contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties. This illustrates that King’s horror fiction is more than trivial literature with the mere function to shock its readership in the search of sensation.
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by Chiel van Rijn
Source: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/35556/Stephen%20King.doc?sequence=1
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Stephen King: „One for the Road“
1. Biographical, cultural and literary profile
1.1 Biography
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. After his parents separated,
he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. He started writing at a very young age. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level.
He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. In the spring of 1973 he started writing as a full-time job.
Stephen King is a novelist, horror-, fantasy- and science fiction writer, a short story writer, scriptwriter and film director.
1.2 Literal Profile
Influences
- horror stories from his father (H.P. Lovecraft) as well as radio horror shows and movies
- impressions from his youth, experiences as a blue collar worker
Style
- his ability to reconfigure old horror clichés into gripping, readable narratives; he uses strong, memorable images
- he combines elements of psychological thrillers, science fiction, the paranormal and detective themes into his stories
- he uses experiences and observations from his life, the stories are set in common everyday places, he draws upon common fears
Themes
- the clash of reality and fantasy
- the question why there are horrible things – if there is a God
- the tremendous attraction that violence has on normally good natured people
2. The Gothic genre and typical elements in “One For The Road”
The Gothic genre was launched in England in the 18th century. The first significant Gothic novel was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Gothic fiction contains supernatural and terrifying elements to make the reader feel fascinated and scared. Popular Gothic novels are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A lot of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe used Gothic elements. Today, Gothic forms can often be found in literature, movies and video games under the labels “Horror” and “Science Fiction”.
Examples of Gothic elements in “One For The Road”:
1) Darkness: The story plays at night; dark is equated with beauty
2) Vampires: A vampire can be considered as a sexual image between life and death, human and animal that turns from sweetness to cruelty
3) Horror: Horror is evoked by the snowstorm, the dark setting and the vampires
4) Madness: Lumley thinks the two old men are “loonies”
5) Nightmares: At the time Booth tells the story, he still has bad dreams about the little girl
6) Death: Lumley fears that his family freezes to death; the words “dead” and “death” appear at various points in the story
3. Textual Analysis
3.1 Plot
The last drink (one for the road) turns out to be a drink necessary to cope with a scary adventure. The “road” is not the direct way home, but leads the main characters to Jerusalem’s Lot, a remote ghostly village.
a typical short story plot
- exposition (297): end of a winter evening at Tookey’s Bar, it’s a rough winter’s night and Tookey and Booth have a last drink the very first sentence already hints towards the development of the story, but can easily be “forgotten” over the following paragraph
- conflict introduced (297): a stranger staggers in, snowed in and near to death
- rising action (297- 311): the stranger, Mr Lumley, tells them that he got stuck with his car in a snow drift and that he had to leave his wife and his daughter behind. When the name of Jerusalem’s Lot comes up Tookey and Booth are really shocked but finally they agree to help him. After a difficult ride, they find Lumley’s car empty. The traces in the snow lead Lumley into the arms of his wife who had turned into a vampire. Tookey and Booth flee.
- climax/ turning point (311): the little girl appears and is about to kill Booth, when Tookey kills her by throwing his mother’s Bible.
- falling action (311/312): Booth realizes that his friend had saved his life.
- denoeuement (312): After a few years time he contemplates the whole story.
three insertions
* (299) the narrator describes the bar and talks about his and Tookey’s “
passed away” wives, this description functions as a characterization and provides background information
* (302-303) the story of the Lot is told and exemplified: Richie Messina never turned up again after going to the Lot by night; here the explanation for the men’s fear and the fateful meaning of the Lot is given
* (304) the whole story takes place during a “Maine blizzard”, this paragraph sets the scene and makes the plot possible
3.2 Writing Style
in general:
- deal with not only supernatural but also realistic horror
- full of imagination
- some sort of relationship between different works
- principle of “ good stories come from free writing”
especially significant for the story:
- folksy, informal narration, incl. vulgar language
- visual perspective and large room of suspense
- life experiences make the works true to life
- use of vivid details
- use of metaphors
3.3 Time
- the concrete time of the story: winter; the 10th of January; quarter past ten and later that night
- the way of story-telling: the narrator tells the story as a memory in a simple straightforward way according to just the same order how the incident happened
- the tempos in contrast: comparing with Lumley in a hurry, the two old men took much time to think and hesitate.( foreshadows the doomed result)
3.4 Space
- the two main settings of the story: indoors (in Tookey’s Bar) - outdoors (towards ‘Salem’ Lot, south part of Falmouth, Maine)
- the opposite elements of the two settings: indoors - outdoors, warmth - coldness, safety - danger, people/voice - no one, light/fire - darkness, life - death
3.5 Narrator
1st person narrator (beginning?! - first appears in line 9), rather reliable, also addresses the reader directly
3.6 Characters
Booth:
o Over 70 years old, grown up in Maine; he’s a widower, rather shy, congregational raised but nevertheless superstitious
o Relationship with Tookey: old friends, he asks Tookey for directions, Tookey gives him confidence, he relies on him and he is finally saved by him
o Relationship with Lumley: thinks that Lumley is a typical stupid city fellow, he looks down on him, but still he pities him
o Booth and the story: he’s the narrator, he is deeply involved in the story and even afterwards he is affected by it (nightmares)
Herb Tooklander: “Tookey”
o 66 years old; owner of Tookey’s Bar
o Like Booth very religious but on the other hand superstitious
o Country gentleman: offers his assistance to rescue the woman and the child, although he knows that it’s probably too late; calm, courageous person
o Relationship with Booth: he is the one who gives the orders and makes the important decisions
o Dies two years after the incidents in Jerusalem’s Lot
Gerard Lumley
o Traveller from New Jersey
o Wealthy city fellow, who doesn’t know how to behave in a Maine winter night
o Very upset and hysterical when he realizes that his wife and little daughter have disappeared
o Considers Booth and Tookey as fools, doesn’t believe in the existence of vampires
Janey Lumley
o Gerard’s wife; typical city woman, beautiful and exotic appearance
o Has already become a vampire
Francie Lumley
o The Lumleys’ 7-year-old daughter
o Has also become a vampire
Richie Messina
o Loudmouthed truck driver
o Doesn’t believe in the existence of vampires; wants to prove that people have just invented these spook stories by spending a night in Jerusalem’s Lot
o Never seen again
3.7 Symbols
- one for the road > this “last drink”, which normally marks the end of an evening, turns out to be the beginning of a nocturnal adventure; it is a means for resuscitation (Lumley) and for giving strength and courage (Booth, Tookey)
- Douay Bible, crucifix > these religious tokens stand for the superstition which reigns among the locals
- sugar, horse, baby > stand for Lumley, who is fragile, fierce and on the same time dependant on Booth and Tookey
- red eyes/ the Lot > concrete representation of the concept of evil
- the empty car/ the girl’s coat > the vestige of the horrible things that have taken place
3.8 Themes
Maine – New Jersey: Both Tookey/Booth and Lumley despise each other’s origins and have different ways of approaching a problem. Still they have to cooperate in finding Janey and Francie.
Belief in God – Belief in supernatural phenomenons: People in Maine wear religious signs to protect themselves from vampires. By throwing a Bible at the little vampire girl, Tookey saves his friend from her.
Old age/Death – Eternity: Tookey is already dead and Booth expects to die soon as well. In contrast to that, the vampires live on until eternity.
4. Topics for a discussion
Why does Booth tell the story? Why did he keep this secret for such a long time?
Literature:
Collings, Michael R. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. San Bernardino, Cal.: Borgo Press, 1985.
King, Stephen. Das Leben und das Schreiben. München: Heyne-Verlag, 2002.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The Handbook of Gothic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Russell, Sharon A. Revisiting Stephen King. Westport, Conn. [u.a.]: Greenwood Press, 2002.
http://www.stephenking.com (02.06.2005)
http://www.planetpapers.com /Assets/3616.php (02.06.2005)
http://www.essays.coo/free-essays/c5/ena195.shtml (02.06.2005)
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm (03.06.2005)
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