The Modern Stephen King Canon: Beyond Horror 1498572782, 9781498572781

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The Modern Stephen King Canon

The Modern Stephen King Canon Beyond Horror

Edited by Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Simpson, Philip L., 1964- editor. | McAleer, Patrick, 1980- editor. Title: The modern Stephen King canon: beyond horror / edited by Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018042615 (print) | LCCN 2018042656 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498572798 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498572781 (cloth: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: King, Stephen, 1947—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3561.I483 (ebook) | LCC PS3561.I483 Z7844 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042615 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: Beyond Horror

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PART I: SNAPSHOTS OF KING’S CRAFT 1 The Rehabilitation of Stephen King Tony Magistrale

1 3

2 Storytelling and a Story Told: Stephen King’s Narrators in From a Buick 8, The Colorado Kid, and Blaze21 Michael Perry 3 Stephen King’s “Fair Extension”: Of Contemporary America Clotilde Landais 4 The Bazaar of Bad Choices: What It Is to be Female in King’s New World Mary Findley PART II: UBIQUITOUS VIOLENCE

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5 Monsters At Home: Representations of Domestic and Sexual Abuse in Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder61 Kimberly Beal 6 Razors, Bumper Stickers, and Wheelchairs: Male Violence and Madness in Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes83 Rebecca Frost 7 Horrific Sympathies: The Comingling of Violence and Mental Illness in Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes99 Hayley Mitchell Haugen v

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8 From Meat World to Cyberspace: The Psychopath’s Journey in Mr. Mercedes and End of Watch113 Philip L. Simpson PART III: REVIVING THE GOTHIC

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9 Gothic Recall: Stephen King’s Uncanny Revival of the Frankenstein Myth Alexandra Reuber

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10 Traveling before the Storm: Shades of the Lightning Rod Salesman in Stephen King’s Gothic Conny L. Lippert

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11 From Wonder to Horror: Stephen King’s Revival and Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy Dominick Grace

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PART IV: CONTEMPORARY CORNERSTONES

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12 Time Ravel: History, Metafiction, and Immersion in Stephen King’s 11/22/63183 Stefan L. Brandt 13 In the Shadow of the Dark Tower: Stephen King’s Fantasy Epic as 9/11 Literature Jennifer L. Miller

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14 Untangling the True Knot: Stephen King’s (Accidental) Vegan Manifesto in Doctor Sleep219 Patrick McAleer Bibliography235 Index247 About the Editors

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About the Contributors

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Introduction Beyond Horror

What can be said about Stephen King that has not already been shared or expressed over the last forty years? Perhaps not much. After all, from critics to scholars to the growth of blogs and other internet-based forums, there are innumerable voices that have been heard regarding King’s works. Many have expressed praise and adulation, while others have verbalized concern and condemnation, and the remaining space for new conversations appears to be scarce. As such, it would seem that any additions to the dialogue would be repetitive, unoriginal, or otherwise unneeded. The editors and contributors of this volume, along with the contributors, politely disagree. As has been said or implied elsewhere, for many critics the heyday of Stephen King’s long-running career has spawned only a few worthwhile texts—The Shining and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” typically topping these lists—but these early tales have had the time to become enmeshed in the minds, and even lives, of King’s Constant Readers (and Constant Critics). And although time may not be kind to a handful of King’s works (The Tommyknockers almost always comes to mind), perhaps part of the foundation that King’s more warmly received stories stand upon is serious scholarship and analysis. And, yes, the aforementioned early texts by King have received much criticism, and in many cases, immediate criticism, helping to, therefore, establish a foundation for a critical conversation that has provided incisive pathways into the texts and into the mind and craft of a writer who, at the very least, knows how to tell a good story. Of course, the notion of a “good” story is always subjective and open to debate, but it is nonetheless interesting to surmise that the conversations regarding King’s “good” works have been plentiful, keeping the stories themselves alive well beyond their original pages. The beauty of literature is the way that it engages vii

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readers in different ways at different times, and this general malleability is likely an appropriate description of King’s craft—while the words themselves remain the same in each text, year after year and decade after decade, the attitudes, cultures, and experiences surrounding each text change. In response, King scholars are making moves to scrutinize King’s work by eras of his writing career, and reasonably so. In fact, in the inaugural issue of a new journal devoted to the study of King’s works, Pennywise Dreadful, there were four featured essays, three of them focused on King’s post-2000 writings. And while that 3:1 ratio of pre-millennial and post-millennial scrutiny cannot be perpetually maintained in the sense of balanced criticism of all of King’s work, this temporary imbalance can be useful to help scholars and students and Constant Readers, well, play “catch up” with King’s oeuvre. In this game of “catch up” that we must play, one additional concern to consider is the general attention and focus given to the theme/genre of horror. While it would be foolish to declare that King’s later works are absent of horror, it seems rather reductive to return, time and time again, to the well of horror simply because this has become the most common label attached to King. He does, after all, write more than merely scary stories. But what makes many of King’s tales more than simple horror stories are the ways that he approaches horror in new, roundabout ways, sometimes even sidestepping horror altogether. In other words, aside from keeping up with King and his output, we must keep up with the ways in which his writing itself has changed over the years, leading to new “horrors” as well as new themes and concerns to carefully consider and appreciate. To that end, this volume begins with Tony Magistrale’s chapter “The Rehabilitation of Stephen King.” Here, Magistrale takes us through a handful of King’s shorter works and offers up criticisms of King’s enduring craft, a craft that remains engaging and enticing particularly because of King’s conscientious and conscious understanding that stale, recycled writing and old structures of storytelling would likely be the death of his art. Following Magistrale, Michael Perry’s “Storytelling and a Story Told: Stephen King’s Narrators in From a Buick 8, The Colorado Kid, and Blaze” considers the distinction between telling a story and writing a story, focusing on several recent novels that feature narrators who take the Constant Reader into the story at hand rather than merely offering up the pertinent points (almost like a fictional book report). It is a complimentary piece to Magistrale’s chapter that sidesteps the typical look at King’s brand of horror and, rather, takes us deep into King’s craft and artistry. Next, Mary Findley’s “The Bazaar of Bad Choices: What It Is to be Female in King’s New World” examines several of King’s newer shorter works, primarily from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, alongside the novella Gwendy’s Button Box and suggests that King has regressed with his depiction and treatment of the female character,

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offering a sharp (and perhaps deservedly so) criticism of King’s writing beyond the issues of creating stories within the first two chapters. Indeed, Findley’s chapter also speaks to and with another chapter in this volume that discusses the height of King’s feminine renaissance from the mid-1990s, in that, as Findley argues, King appears to have lost the carefully honed tools he once used to carefully and considerately create female characters. In keeping focus on King’s shorter works and the larger concerns that they bring about, Clotilde Landais’s “Stephen King’s ‘Fair Extension’: Of Contemporary America” argues that, with this story, King gives a postmodern twist to the motif of the supernatural devil figure. Drawing upon the religious and literary traditions of the devil, King, according to Landais, re-tells Faust’s and Job’s stories as a mise en abyme of contemporary America and its recent traumas such as 9/11 and the Iraq War (not to mention the transactional, capitalistic dealings at the core of King’s version of the devilish bargain). The next section of this volume consists of three chapters primarily devoted to the works that comprise the Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch). Rebecca Frost, in “Razors, Bumper Stickers, and Wheelchairs: Male Violence and Madness in Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes,” examines two of King’s more brutal antagonists—Norman Daniels and Brady Hartsfield—and compares these two violent figures who appear in King’s works nearly twenty years apart while each character employs similar methods of carrying out their madness. Within this investigative look at two eerily similar characters, Frost offers up the argument that King’s representations of these characters—and indeed, his repetition of the techniques used by each character—is much more than a writer “going to the well” with his imagination; instead, these mirrored characters ultimately reflect the frightening prospect that little cultural change in reactions to male violence and insanity. Next, Hayley Haugen’s “Horrific Sympathies: The Comingling of Violence and Mental Illness in Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes” looks at what appears to be a common thread within King’s canon: the “mixture” of violence and mental illness. As Haugen argues, while many of King’s disabled characters adeptly contend with their disabilities—both physical and mental (from Susannah Dean of The Dark Tower to Edgar Freemantle of Duma Key)—numerous individuals experience a particular “fall” and often end up as dangerous individuals whom may have turned out quite differently with different environments or tools for coping with the stress and obstacles connected with mental disability/illness. And on the heels of Haugen’s chapter, Philip L. Simpson’s “From Meat World to Cyberspace: The Psychopath’s Journey in Mr. Mercedes and End of Watch” provides an acute look at how King’s treatment of psychopathic killer Brady Hartsfield in Mr. Mercedes both builds upon and deconstructs contemporary notions of the serial killer in American popular culture. Simpson considers how King

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presents Hartsfield as cunning but ultimately a small, flawed human being whose growth throughout the Bills Hodges Trilogy first de-mythologizes the serial killer, going sharply against the American cultural grain—but then concludes by re-mythologizing Hartsfield as a quasi-supernatural figure with the ability to transcend the limitations of his physical body through grafting himself into cyberspace to continue his murderous spree and, not incidentally, revisiting some of King’s earlier career focus on telekinesis and other psychic superpowers as objects of horror. As a mirror of sorts to the previous section, the next section of this volume contains three chapters dedicated to, again, a singular focus; this time around, it is King’s novel Revival. First, Conny Lippert writes “Travelling Before the Storm: Shades of the Lightning-Rod Salesman in Stephen King’s SmallTown Gothic” and considers the juxtaposition between the rational and magical, the secular and the miraculous in Revival through the constant presence of one of nature’s most powerful and mysterious forces: lightning. As Lippert contends, Stephen King, who himself has been described as a lightning-rod for polarized critical opinion more than once, has recognized the recurrence and versatility of this figure and its kind within the gothic tale, and develops it much further in his recent novel Revival. Next, Dominick Grace’s “From Wonder to Horror: Stephen King’s Revival and Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy” gives a deep and critical look at one of King’s influences that many have yet to recognize: Robertson Davies. In this examination, Grace not only carefully walks us through the ways in which Davies serves as the unseen influence for Revival, but also that the “magic” and “wonder” at the core of King’s novel, as well as within Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, is a dangerous illusion that carries rather heavy baggage for those who are unable to see “magic” and “wonder” for the empty, self-serving promises that they are. And in “Gothic Recall: Stephen King’s Uncanny Revival of the Frankenstein Myth,” Alexandra Reuber examines Mary Shelley’s influence on Revival and how it is clearly seen everywhere in this text. (Indeed, it almost seems like as if Victor Frankenstein, alias Reverend Charles Jacobs, has been raised from the dead.) Specifically, Reuber utilizes a psychoanalytical approach to the text, discussing numerous psychological theories in order to address the one question that haunts the book (and all of us): “What makes us (in)human?” The final section of this volume follows the first, in a manner of speaking, and approaches King from a wide angle with coverage of several texts. In a response to Mary Findley’s chapter that was unplanned by the editors (but who were beyond pleased to see such a serendipitous conversation emerge), Kimberly Beal’s chapter “Monsters At Home: Representations of Domestic and Sexual Abuse in Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder” examines King’s “Feminine Trilogy” from the early 1990s as a response to critical issues such as domestic abuse as well as King’s development of the

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female voice both prior to and after the publication of these three key novels. This chapter serves as a reminder, or counterpoint, that, at least during one phase of King’s career, his attention and care for the female character was quite adept, and also provides a critical umbrella under which these texts have yet to fully reside under. Next, Stefan Brandt, in “Time Ravel: History, Metafiction, and Immersion in Stephen King’s 11/22/63,”argues that Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 (2011) serves as a striking example of “time ravel,” that is, the entanglement of various temporal lines on the levels of metafiction, intertextuality, and perception. In other words, Brandt suggests the act of time travel is marked in 11/22/63 as an act of physical immersion, similar to the processes of text-creation and perception, and King relies on these entangled strands to negotiate history as a complex and visceral event that involves representation as well as agency (especially that of the Constant Reader). Following King’s fictional take on the watershed moment of his youth, Jennifer Miller considers the watershed moment of King’s adulthood in “In the Shadow of the Dark Tower: Stephen King’s Fantasy Epic as 9/11 Literature.” In short, Miller considers The Dark Tower series in an American light, particularly in terms of how the implied use and reference to 9/11 within this cycle of books provides a pathway to a deeper understanding of these events, particularly through one King tale that overtly situates itself within the chaos and aftermath of the terrorist attacks: “The Things They Left Behind.” Lastly, Patrick McAleer’s chapter “Untangling the True Knot: Stephen King’s (Accidental) Vegan Manifesto in Doctor Sleep” examines the world of veganism and connected ethical philosophies with respect to the vampiric antagonists of the long-awaited sequel to The Shining. Ultimately, McAleer argues that while the inhuman members of the True Knot tend to provoke, among other emotions, dread and disdain in the mind of the reader, such reactions might actually be better connected to the human characters within the text (as well as the human readers of the tale). As editors, we intend for this volume of provocative writing by today’s top King scholars to open yet another doorway into the mind and writing of Stephen King. We invite you to walk through that door into a study tastefully but suitably appointed for such dark meditations, sit a spell, and investigate with us the myriad writings of the Master of the Macabre. We think you will discover, as we have, that King’s brand of the macabre continually grows, quite often, well beyond horror.

Part I

SNAPSHOTS OF KING’S CRAFT

Chapter 1

The Rehabilitation of Stephen King Tony Magistrale

In the “Introduction” to the collection Everything’s Eventual, Stephen King shares some insight into why he likes writing short stories; he informs his “Constant Readers” that he refuses “to let a year go by without writing at least one or two of them.”1 (xxi). Yet in the “Introduction” to his most recent short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, he admits, “I’m a novelist by nature, I will grant you that, and I have a particular liking for the long ones that create an immersive experience for writer and reader.”2 At this point in King’s prolific career, he has no need to preserve a commitment to any genre, so why his long-running attraction to short stories, especially in light of his professed love of longer, more immersive works? After all, King’s reputation rests firmly on his fifty-plus novels, he continues composing new novels, and he has published novels to short story collections at an unequal ratio of roughly seven to ten novels to one short story collection every seven or eight years for the past five decades. Admittedly, something seems awry here. To return to his “Introduction” in Everything’s Eventual, however, King reveals something about his identity as a reader, and it stands in sharp contrast to his perspective on himself as novelist at the point where he acknowledges a personal and nostalgic fondness for the short story form: “For me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.”3 There is much worth examining in this simple self-revelation. First, there is the quaint almost nineteenthcentury portrait of Stephen King—ironically, the same man responsible for terrorizing the end of the twentieth century with an array of hauntings, psychotics, and infernally animated objects—cozy and comfortable, safely ensconced inside a frosty New England winter night, sipping chamomile tea 3

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as he works his way through a good yarn. It is a reassuring portrait of a postmodern man who has not lost touch with the act of reading in a post-literate epoch, the sheer joy—intellectual and sensual joy—that is possible when the imagination is fully engaged with the contents of “a good story.” King’s self-description is almost reminiscent of the scene in Dracula just before the three vampire sisters arrive to titillate Jonathan Harker with their voluptuous red lips after the latter has chosen to disobey the Count’s command to sleep in his own room, instead falling asleep inside a dangerous wing of the castle, “occupied in bygone days . . . where old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the remorseless wars.”4 Through Harker’s consciousness, Stoker continues to reference an atmospheric sentiment that is not far removed from King’s: “Unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”5 King likewise praises the old-fashioned allure of reading—“few pleasures so excellent”—wherein there is no mention of any digital screen, not even a Kindle, to dilute or distract from the pure magic of an entertaining, well-written narrative. The art of the written word is the source for “excellent pleasure”: its ability to transport the reader to a place that may begin within a comfortable chair, but definitely does not conclude there. But isn’t it possible for King’s appreciation of the general act of reading to be reconstructed just as effectively with a novel taking the place of a short story? This is where King’s inclusion that the narrative must be “complete[d] in a single sitting” requires further elaboration. There is little doubt that King’s position borrows at least intuitively from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” one of the great essays in American literature, and a key to comprehending the romantic sensibilities of Poe’s canon (even though the essay was written after the author had already published his most important short fiction). Poe wrote the “Philosophy of Composition” to explain the process that resulted in his famous poem “The Raven,” but the essay also speaks indirectly to his efforts to dignify the importance of a genre—the short story—that in Poe’s lifetime had only recently been invented, and that Poe himself refined to the point where it became the basis upon which his reputation would eventually rest. Whether considering poetry or fiction, Poe believed that “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”6 This emphasis on brevity is directly related to what Poe viewed as paramount to establishing the principles of unity and effect: that is, the kind of impression created in the reader, the depth of that impression, and the success with which the writer succeeded in transporting the reader into a world of the writer’s

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making. These criteria could be attained only when literature “intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.”7 Although Stephen King is writing nearly a century and a half after Poe, they share important literary goals. The size of his gargantuan novels notwithstanding, King also writes to address the status of the reader’s “soul,” perhaps not so much to elevate as to terrify it, which meant roughly the same thing for Poe; Poe was also the type of writer who, like Edmund Burke before him, viewed terror as a refined emotion.8 To produce such tales, which Poe helped to psychologize and perfect, brevity was critical, for eventually “the affairs of the world interfere.”9 To illustrate this tenet, Poe’s most terrifying and riveting stories are often his shortest: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Berenice,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Morella.” King has spent his literary career pursuing many of the same literary goals that occupied Poe. Both writers rely heavily on unity and effect to establish situations where characters are imperiled physically and psychologically, where environments seem on the verge of collapse and extinction, and where readers often exist in a state of near breathlessness in their concern over what will happen next. Novels such as The Shining, The Stand, and IT manage to sustain a constant state of gothic phantasmagoria despite their length, and this is a major reason why Stephen King has emerged as America’s storyteller. But elsewhere in his canon there are plenty of examples of long novels that begin with an excellent premise only to extend that premise for too long a period of time until its effect is diminished. Consider, for example, the level of time and effort that went into the making of The Dark Tower, the longest novel in the English language, and how much more compelling this opus might have been if King had kept in mind his own “single sitting” preference and reduced its girth by a third. As Harlan Ellison was perhaps first to recognize in assessing King’s early career, “I can’t think of any King novels with the possible exception of maybe IT or two [of the] Dark Tower books, that could not have been told just as well as a novella. This is to me the main flaw in Stephen’s work.”10 Perhaps this is also an explanation why so many King scholars and fans are convinced that Different Seasons remains the apex of King’s writing career: novellas that are intimate, controlled, and narratively disciplined in a way that makes them resemble short stories more than fivehundred-page novels. And, all of the novellas in Different Seasons can be read “in a single sitting.” Implicit in the last King quote that began this chapter is that the short story form has one great advantage over the novel: its forced concision creates an intensified effect. Like Poe’s need to control the emotions stimulated in his readers by modulating literary elements such as diction, sentence structure, rhyme, locale, tonal variance, and “a circumscription of space necessary to

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the effect of insulated incident,”11 the short story has the potential to leave a more powerful and immediate imprint on the mind. This ability is of particular importance in narratives that are ever mindful of their psychological implications, their effort to reveal a specific condition or personality disorder. In Poe’s tales that deal with tortured psyches, the effect on the reader is so often profound because we enter into the insular mind of an unstable criminal and follow his actions over a condensed period of time and usually in a highly circumscribed space. We are given no extraneous details, trapped inside a room or a house where we often do not know even the narrator’s name, and this reduction only serves to unnerve the reader further. Accordingly, we witness the last horrific hours of Roderick Usher’s life as he awaits his sister’s return with terrible trepidation, the dark night of despair that ensues immediately after the murders commissioned in “The Black Cat” and “The TellTale Heart,” the climactic death/rebirth throes of Ligeia, the final utterances of the cocooned Fortunato. The short story format forces the water to a boil in paragraphs rather than pages; readers are in the realm of poetry nearly as much as they are the realm of prose; and in the best of them, an action-based plot unfolds before the reader is given much of a chance to establish an understanding of what is going on, much less to decide if she wishes to invest further into the story line. At its most effective, for Poe as well as King, the short story works as a scalpel, cutting sharply and with deep intensity; the effect is quick and it often produces chilling results. The novel, especially in King’s hands, proceeds in opposite means to the scalpel metaphor: it expands outward, contains multiple characters and environments, embracing worlds that require space and time to develop—as exemplified in Poe’s own attempt at a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—and thus its potency is often deferred rather than immediately unleashed. If the short story in King’s hands works as a scalpel, then his novels are the emergency rooms, psych wards, pathology laboratories, and morgues—the hospitals of storytelling. Poe turned out to be one of the great masters of the short story form and its effectiveness in rendering tales of terror. But what of King’s success in this same genre? As this chapter concerns itself with evaluating the shorter work King has published in the new millennium, it makes sense to begin with at least a cursory review of his earliest efforts. In doing so, I will maintain the generic distinction separating short stories from novellas: for example, Night Shift is a short story collection; Different Seasons is a collection of novellas. King authored three compilations of short stories prior to 2000: Night Shift (1978), Skeleton Crew (1985), and Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993), and several of the tales from these volumes have become classics, representing the best of King’s writing and, arguably, some of the quintessential examples of the genre itself. In my opinion, these would include “Last Rung on the Ladder,” “The Woman in the Room,” Children of the Corn,”

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“The Raft,” “The Monkey,” “Strawberry Spring,” “The Reach,” “The Mist,” and “Dolan’s Cadillac.” It is no accident that each of these tales has either already been adapted into a film(s), resides currently in production, or has been optioned to be made into a future motion picture. These are highly engaging tales that leave powerful imprints on the mind of the reader. Their terrors, although couched in personalized contexts, unveil dark truths about the realities of the human condition. The various magazines where King initially published many of the aforementioned short stories also illustrate the dramatic evolution that has occurred over the length of his professional career—from a writer in the seventies and eighties who was aligned with trashy mega-bestselling beachbook novelists, forced to undergo scurrilous reviews of his books in the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere—to the present day, where Harold Bloom remains one of the last elitist holdouts in refusing to recognize the significance of King’s storytelling skills and their resonant cultural impact (Bloom has often pointed out disparagingly that “the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.”12). The places where King originally published his early short fiction paid well enough to encourage a neophyte writer and helped to establish the nonliterary audience that has always purchased his books. But their sensational visuals notwithstanding, the magazines that initially published the stories in King’s first collection, Night Shift (1976), appear to confirm Bloom’s heavy-handed critique: Cavalier, Penthouse, Gallery, Cosmopolitan, and Maine will never be construed as forums for serious literature. Now compare these glossy publications with those that, forty years later, originally printed the individual tales that would constitute The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015): The New Yorker (two), Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Esquire (two), The Atlantic, Tin House, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. These periodicals share the same rarified air in which Professor Bloom luxuriates as they represent several of the most highly selective, upper echelon magazines and journals publishing creative fiction in the world; a writer working in any genre would gladly perform cartwheels to get inked in any—much less all—of these venues. However, has the quality of King’s short stories improved dramatically over the decades demarcating the gap between Night Shift and Bazaar? Forty years later, his stories are generally longer, perhaps more elaborately detailed and narratively structured, “thicker” if you will, but they are still recognizable King products, relying on his intransient efforts to undermine the mundane in order to reveal the surreal and bizarre operating beneath surface reality. The most memorable tales in Bazaar are not appreciably better written or more compelling than the best work found in Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Nor do I believe that any of these early collections contain a greater or lesser percentage of quality stories than King’s

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post-millennium publications. As I enumerated earlier, several of the tales in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew will always rank among the best King has ever written; the stories published in Bazaar, like those found in these earlier books, remain decidedly uneven in merit when the collection is considered as a whole. What has improved unequivocally over the past twenty years or so is Stephen King’s artistic reputation. The books King has published post-millennium have generally garnered unqualified praise in the New York Times Book Review. (In fact, King himself is now frequently asked to review books written by other novelists for the Sunday edition.) His appearances on television command reverential respect from newscasters and commentators such as Stephen Colbert; in 2016, the names of King novels constituted an entire category on the game show Jeopardy. Like a rock star/public intellectual on tour, King is invited to give readings around the world, speaking recently, for example, in front of three thousand people at Le Grand Rex, in Paris, France. Although Harold Bloom still refuses to “locate any aesthetic dignity in King’s writing,”13 the Yale professor nevertheless has devoted two volumes and an e-book of his Critical Views editions to King, thereby including him as one of the few living authors sharing the company of the world’s most prestigious writers who constitute the other titles in Bloom’s exclusive series. King has also begun to take home prestigious literary prizes, such as the O. Henry Best Short Story competition for “The Man in the Black Suit”(for which he submitted his story anonymously, thereby negating any arguments concerning bias); in 2003, he received the National Book Award’s annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and garnered induction as a Grand Master in the Mystery Writers of America in 2007; and in 2015, President Obama provided him with the highest honor that can be given to an individual working in the arts on behalf of the American people, the National Medal of the Arts, “for his remarkable storytelling with his sharp analysis of human nature,”14 as reported by Alison Flood of The Guardian. These are, of course, not minor accolades. It is clear that in the course of his career, King’s reputation has undergone a surreptitious sea-change—from hack populist horror writer to frequent contributor to the fiction section of The New Yorker, arguably the premiere literary magazine in America, and presidential medal recipient. King’s short stories thus present us with a kind of barometer available for measuring the trajectory of the writer’s international status. King is no longer viewed merely as a transient popular phenomenon read by the indiscriminate masses, literary kin to Nora Roberts and James Patterson. While the cultural gatekeepers of High Literature were dozing in their wooden rocking chairs, Stephen King managed to slip past their guardianship at Walhalla and entered the pantheon as an elder statesman of American letters. While he may not yet be a standard inclusion on the

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syllabi of English courses surveying postmodern or contemporary American literature, it is likely that he will be eventually, especially if his curriculum vitae of recent honors and notable periodical publications serve as an accurate harbinger. In the eighties and nineties, he solidified his populist position as America’s storyteller; since the millennium change, his credentials as a serious and respected American writer are no longer in doubt. As King settles into the autumn of his career, a time when the canons of most major writers typically undergo a critical assessment, the weight of his literary and cinematic accomplishments have proven too massive for even his most resolute detractors to refute legitimately. How did this happen—and why at this point in time? I do not profess to have definitive answers to explain this transformation, but I can hazard a few speculations. To begin, some celebrities are more deserving of their celebrity than others, and when an artist produces consistently good work over a long period of time, and when that work is reviewed in important magazines and newspapers across the world, his or her reputation increases proportionately. This is the same argument universities use to justify why they demand publications from faculty before granting promotions and tenure; they want scholars who will enhance the reputation of the institution. A major explanation for why King’s fiction has begun to appear in magazines such as The New Yorker and Esquire is the desire for these high-circulation periodicals to increase copy sales in the age of the Internet where readers can obtain access to so much of what they want to read for free. King’s famous name brings with it a substantial bump in sales each time one of his short stories is featured—still an important consideration even for well-established and prestigious magazines like The New Yorker. Since 2000, this has occurred without any diminishment in the literary standards of the periodical; in fact, because King has published some of his best writing there, his inclusion has served to increase the reputations of both author and magazine, undoubtedly bringing new readers to the periodical and skeptical subscribers to a reevaluation of King’s artistic talent. Places such as Esquire, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker always capitalize on King’s presence in their issues, advertising his name in bold display across their covers. Truth be told, similar to any other important author, King has written his share of less-than-successful short stories, but he has also produced some gems as well. And as King nears the end of a highly productive career, the literati have finally come around to recognizing the gems instead of lambasting the failures. King’s canon often reminds me of Pablo Picasso’s: enormous output, experimental, genre-bending, taking on projects that would have intimidated lesser artists. Not everything in Picasso’s oeuvre was brilliant, but when it was, he gave us “Guernica” and the Dora Maar “Weeping Woman” paintings. Perhaps we are simply witnessing the literary world’s willingness

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to recognize that for every Rose Madder or End of Watch, King has also written a Misery or The Stand. And this holds equally true for King’s short story collections as well: for every “Uncle Otto’s Truck,” “Everything’s Eventual,” or “Morality”—stories that remain stubbornly sophomoric, devoid of even potentially redeeming subtexts—King has bestowed upon his readership small gems in “The Man in the Black Suit” or “The Dune.” The King name is now linked to over seventy Hollywood films. Using writer credit references from the Internet Movie Data Base, Forrest Wickman discovered in 2011 that King was fourteenth (with 127 “writer credits”) on a list of authors whose work has been adapted into film.15 At the time of Wickman’s survey, King was the only living writer on the list of the top twentyfour authors. Many of the King films—such as Carrie, The Shining, Stand by Me, and The Shawshank Redemption—are ensconced in the cinematic pantheon and have become part of America’s contribution to the world’s collective pop culture, like the stories of Poe or the music of Jim Morrison and The Doors, that are famous all over Europe, Asia, and Latin America. At this writing, the top ten films adapted from King novels have, collectively, already grossed over a billion dollars in revenue. Many of the editors working at the top-flight magazines that now solicit Stephen King’s short stories grew up watching these films and reading the novels from which they were adapted; these same editors have now displaced an older, more staid generation where King’s name would have been just as ubiquitous, but never so revered. The same argument holds true for English teachers in high school and college: as the dilettantes retire, so go many of their literary biases. The prejudice against King as a living, popular genre writer of visceral horror was always too reductive and too easily claimed as a reason to dismiss his art, as the breadth and quality of his canon affirms. Additionally, for the past forty years, the academic community has continued to undermine the barriers separating high and low culture to the point where King’s fiction has grown into a legitimate field of study. Twenty years ago, instead of replacing our retiring Milton scholar, my own English Department chose to hire a specialist in television and media studies. While the old guard was initially shocked at our collective departmental decision, this example is no longer considered a scandalous aberration; it represents the way in which academe, and the emergence of the inclusive field of cultural studies, has evolved. For better or worse, treating Harry Potter and Hip-Hop as legitimate areas of scholarship reflect the current cross-disciplinary emphasis that has likewise opened the academic curriculum to analyzing other aspects of popular culture, including the fiction of Stephen King. As Brian Kent recognized twenty-five years ago in prescient anticipation of this discussion, being popular does not always equate with being sub-literary; King’s ability to bridge the gap between literate readers and what the trade refers to as the “non-book audience”16 has

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been and still remains one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Stephen King phenomenon: “While his heart may be with that huge popular audience, his mind often lands him in academic terrain, in terms of his own awareness of the standards and skills around which university English departments cohere. . . . His fiction need not be elevated to another more refined level of literary expertise in order for it to matter. It matters now.”17 The volume you are presently holding represents one of hundreds of books of criticism and academic articles that since the late seventies have analyzed King’s writing and film adaptations, and these studies have become ever more sophisticated and scholarly in their varied theoretical approaches. I review for potential publication at least one or two of these book proposals/ articles every few months, and within just the past month, Routledge Press (a post-Jungian book-length analysis of King’s “transcendent adolescents”) and the European Journal of American Culture (an article placing 11/22/63 in the context of speculative history) solicited my evaluations of scholarly efforts written by King critics residing in Belgium and Australia, respectively. This steady stream of scholarship creates a cumulative effect by way of altering the academic zeitgeist and helping to legitimize an author who was once, merely three decades ago, a near-pariah in academe. Lastly, and perhaps of most importance, King’s influence on American (the world’s?) culture is no longer possible to dismiss. He is now, for starters, the father of a generation of writers (and readers) who learned the art of their craft from studying his fiction and the composition text On Writing18; I don’t think it is too far a stretch to suggest that something similar has happened for filmmakers, screen and television writers, and students attracted to the King ever-expanding cinematic multiverse. King’s screen ubiquity extends in several directions: the co-directors of Lost, Damon Lindelof and Carton Cuse, have both cited King’s writing as an influence on their series; HBO’s Westworld shares thematic parallels with the Western tropes found in The Dark Tower, notably a Dark Man character and others in search of mazes and towers; and the first season of Netflix’s Stranger Things was so closely aligned with the King multiverse that the author tweeted it was like watching his “greatest hits.” As was once the case with Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century, some of his contemporaries may not applaud the cultural impact attendant to Stephen King’s presence, but that impact is finally impossible to ignore. King’s short stories typically start out as unpretentious narratives that commence with a simple premise: a man remembering an event from his childhood when he went fishing and ended up meeting the devil, a kid going off for a bike ride on a summer afternoon, an old judge climbing into his kayak to paddle out to a sand dune. His initial effort in the short work, even more than in his longer novels, is to invite the reader into what appears to be a safe and identifiable setting, to seat her metaphorically in that comfortable chair

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on a cold winter night that King references for himself in the “Introduction” to Everything’s Eventual. The remainder of the narrative’s arc, however, then sets out to complicate this sense of ease, to undermine and dismantle it systematically with supernatural inclusions, or, at the least, events so disruptive as to question the reader’s own complacent faith in a stable, much less benevolent, universe. This is why we read King’s fiction, as a reminder that the world is not a safe place, and to confirm the misgivings of L.T. in the story “L.T.’s Theory of Pets”: “You just never know when you’re going to bust a fiddle-string.”19 Moreover, King neatly summarizes his literary intentions in the “Afterword” to his collection of short novellas, Full Dark, No Stars: “As both a reader and a writer, I’m interested [in] ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers.”20In the age of terrorism and surveillance that we currently inhabit and are still learning to accommodate, King’s fiction has come to seem less about paranoid fantasy projections and more about horrible inevitabilities. The function of King’s art in both his novels and short stories is the same: to place his characters and readers in a dangerous situation that demands immediate action—often some kind of physical action, but also requiring a certain set of mental gymnastics—which serve to expand human tolerance of the unexpected. King’s stories have always worked best when real-life situations are tweaked and complicated by the intrusion of the supernatural/surreal. King’s technique is essentially what literary theorists call “defamiliarization,” that is, presenting the familiar in an unfamiliar way so as to allow for the inclusion of unexpected and sometimes even incomprehensible phenomenon that terrifies at the same time as it delights (the reader). However, when the supernatural overwhelms completely—as it does in “Mile 81,” for example, where a flesh-eating automobile enters midway through—and becomes the centerpiece of the tale, the real-life terror diminishes accordingly and, so, too, the affective powers of the tale. However, in the story “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” King sutures the surreal into the real and the result reveals a deeply unsettling insight into a collapsing marriage. As an estranged couple and one of their lawyers meet for lunch in an upscale Manhattan restaurant to discuss the paperwork pursuant to their divorce, a deranged maître d’ suddenly interrupts their conference, murders the attorney, and begins slashing a butcher’s knife at the husband and wife. His random action makes no sense at all, and yet because he directs this rage specifically at the divorcing couple’s table, the reader is forced into identifying the aggressive actions of the murderer with the couple’s barely repressed hostility. The maître d’s insane fury mirrors and embodies the unresolved acrimony that is currently seething beneath the surface of the marriage he assaults; because he attacks both husband and wife, the maître d’ serves as an alter ego for both spouses and the aggression

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they feel toward one another that threatens to spill out into the larger restaurant even before the deranged killer actually arrives at their table: “I had to put my hands in my armpits. They wanted to kill her, to reach out and wrap themselves around her neck and just kill her.”21 Their mutual anger—expanding to include the smug lawyer who brought them together for this lunch and then demands that they behave civilly—finds full-throated and unleashed expression in the murderous rampage of this unhinged stranger-surrogate. King’s story appears as a compelling expression of Freud’s theory from The Interpretation of Dreams: namely, “that emotions buried in the subconscious rise to the surface in disguised form.”22 Although one might also argue that the hostile emotions of the husband and wife in this story are closer to the surface than either suspects beneath the elegant, bourgeois veneer of this urban environment, King projects the visceral impulses (what Freud termed the “death instincts”) that the narrator-husband and his wife Diane harbor against themselves as well as each other. The nature of this bloody attack discloses the illusion of this civilized lunch meeting to expose the primitive business of a marriage in the process of being ripped apart. In a way, that suggests the influence of both Kafka and Poe as this story underscores the capability of a placid psychological surface to be disrupted violently and abruptly by internal destructive forces; this is a key narrative element often found in King’s stories. Since at least the 1990s, King has centered much of his creative energies on describing American domestic relationships in monstrous disarray. The marriages that constitute Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and Rose Madder, for example, are full of dark secrets, and the majority of those concern masculine sexual violations against women and girls. In these novels, King’s female protagonists grow so disillusioned by abusive male sexuality that they often retreat into asexual, exclusively female relationships. Violent sexual predators roam the landscapes of King’s universe, and, with the notable exception of Annie Wilkes in Misery, they are invariably male. So persuasive are these sexual deviants that one or more of his brethren haunts the perimeters of nearly every King film and fiction; he is the violent antagonist against whom the most compelling of King’s heroines must struggle. In the short tale “The Gingerbread Girl,” for example, Jim Pickering has assembled a home in Florida that is actually a dungeon, used for the singular purpose of torturing and sexually abusing women, the “nieces” he brings home for his forays into perverted pleasure. The gender dynamics I have described above characterize much of the work in Full Dark, No Stars, and particularly the last and best of the stories in the collection, “A Good Marriage,” is another King narrative where a wife must grapple with the sexual maladjustment of her husband when she unwittingly uncovers his secret criminal past.

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No living writer writes better or more knowingly about secret selves—and exclusively masculine secret selves—than Stephen King. He is the legitimate heir to the gothic strain that produced The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Stevenson, King is attuned to the darkly violent undercurrent that frequently lurks beneath placid bourgeois exteriors. In “A Good Marriage,” Bob Anderson, an accountant and rare coin collector (even his name and occupation suggest innocuous anonymity), is a loving husband, father, and Boy Scout troop leader whose alter ego is the misogynist serial killer, “Beadie,” a monster who tortures and kills “snooty” women. When his wife, Darcy, uncovers Bob’s secret life, her accidental discovery raises a moral dilemma not just for the husband who must confront and explain his past deeds, but also for Darcy herself, whose response to his actions cover a range of emotional states from shock, to terror and betrayal, to a determination to abate and avenge the suffering of Bob’s victims. One of the best aspects of this story is King’s ability to enter into Darcy’s consciousness and provide the reader with insights into her varying responses to newly found knowledge. Darcy is confronted with the same set of existential questions that confront characters throughout King’s canon: What is the right course of action that will allow a person to go on living with herself? Is it possible for her to continue living with the knowledge of her husband’s double life? How can she shield his odious history from their children, “who had both idolized their father”?23 Does she need to fear for her own life? Should she trust his promise that he will henceforth stop his behavior? Indeed, Darcy comes to the conclusion “On most nights, the dark was her friend—sleep’s kindly harbinger—but not tonight. Tonight, the dark was populated by Bob’s harem.”24 “A Good Marriage” is filled with the same conflicted knowledge that women experience in the face of perversity and aggression generated by husbands and fathers in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne. And similar to these earlier novels, Darcy eventually acts from a position where confusion and guilt translate into bravery and a bond that connects her to other women.25 In an era where women often are their gender’s own worst enemies (e.g., electing Donald Trump with 53 percent of the female vote), King’s Darcy murders her husband to protect potential future victims—“my honest opinion is that you’ll do it again”26—at the same time that she is revenging the women she never knew personally, but with whom she grows to share an intimate bond. In fact, by the end of the narrative it is Darcy who is now the keeper of secrets—Bob’s history, of course, but also the murder she has committed against him. The tales that make up King’s post-millennium short narrative compilations, Everything’s Eventual, Just After Sunset, Full Dark, No Stars, and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, strike this reader as particularly death-haunted. King’s stories have always maintained a close affinity with death and dying,

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of course, but what was earlier a view of it from a distance, as in the tale “The Reach,” has taken on greater immediacy in these later works, a more personalized dance macabre, if you will, especially in the fiction contained in his most recent collection, Bazaar. Part of this can be explained by virtue of King’s own advancing age. When he was a young writer-father, he wrote stories about imperiled children; on the cusp of turning seventy, the author of Bazaar now includes old men profoundly aware of their mortality, and the aches and angst that accompany this immutable fact of life. The stories that are part of Everything’s Eventual, Just After Sunset, Full Dark, No Stars, and Bazaar, are sober and somber little sketches. King himself categorizes them as “harsh stories.”27 There is not much laughter in any of them, and oftentimes the long-time reader of King’s fiction misses the author’s lighter touch. Most of them focus on mortality, and the close proximity of death in these tales is never peaceful nor serene. While “The Dune” is representative of many of these issues, it is also one of the tightest stories King has ever written. It is a quintessential example of the genre’s form, particularly in the story’s ending twist reminiscent of the surprise denouement from classic O. Henry or Maupassant narratives. The King tale centers on a ninety-year-old Judge Harvey Beecher and his life-long fascination with a “little unnamed island lying like a half-submerged submarine two hundred yards out in the gulf”28 because of its ability to present in bold letters the names of people who “always die. Sometimes it’s within a week, sometimes it’s two, but it’s never more than a month.”29 The tale effectively sets up the reader by making us believe that the reason the judge has summoned his young lawyer, Anthony Wayland, to finalize Beecher’s last will and testament is that the old man has finally seen his own name written in the sands of the dune. It’s not until the final line of the story that we discover, at the same time as Wayland, why the judge is in a hurry to finalize the will and chooses to keep it in his own possession for safekeeping: it is Wayland’s name that the judge has seen carved in the sand, not Beecher’s. The judge becomes, unwittingly, an Angel of Death aligned with whatever supernatural agency operates the dune’s message board: “He smiles a terrible smile, transforming his narrow, pallid face into a death’s-head grin.”30 The dune itself is easily associated with King’s many conduits to worlds beyond our own, and the judge is linked to many of King’s other characters who shuffle between these worlds—Roland from The Dark Tower, Jake Epping in 11/23/63, and John Smith in The Dead Zone: “There on that island, there’s a hatch that’s come ajar . . . all the machinery of the universe, running at top speed.”31 If the disposition that typically occurs to most King short stories continues, a substantial quantity of the fiction in Everything’s Eventual, Just After Sunset, Full Dark, and Bazaar will soon be adapted into cinema. Two stories from two of these collections, “1408” and “A Good Marriage,” have already

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found their way into celluloid; the former a notable improvement on the King story upon which it was based, the latter, not nearly as compelling as the original narrative. “1408” is a case in point to what frequently happens when a King property goes to Hollywood. The King plot supplies a basic plot outline, a starting point that is transformed into a screenplay either condensing the King narrative (e.g., The Dead Zone and Apt Pupil) or expanding it considerably, which is particularly the case for the short stories, often improving the primary source (e.g., The Shawshank Redemption and 1408), depending, of course, on the talent of the adapter. King’s rendition of “1408” posits a haunted hotel room that closely resembles The Shining’s machinery of spectral animation: a history of suicides, the room’s shape continually reconstructing itself, omnipresent ghosts that interact with living humans, insanity beckoning. The film’s screenplay, however, adds considerably more psychological weight to King’s short sketch. Although 1408 is severely weakened by the multiple alternate endings that currently exist on the Internet, the film supplies its main character, Mike Enslin, with a more expansive and convoluted past that is unavailable in the short story. The general stress he experiences in the hotel room is viewed within a context that expands beyond the writerly failings King supplies to include personal information justifying Mike’s nihilism: the death of his daughter, Katie, and subsequent break-up of his marriage. “In an abandoned house of an old castle keep, your unbelief may serve you as protection. In room 1408, it will only render you more vulnerable.”32 King’s story does not provide enough space to explain the gap between belief and unbelief in Enslin’s life; it fails to supply his haunting with sufficient depth and background. The film, on the other hand, goes on to personalize Mike’s nightmare, as the room forces him to encounter ghosts from his own past. His choice, for example, to return to New York, the place where Katie and his father (pictured alone suffering in a nursing home) died and his wife still resides, suggests an unconscious need to confront himself— that part of himself and his past that remains unresolved—and find atonement. “1408” is one of those rare occasions where a King concept proved deserving of more effort, not less—a novella, at least—to explore the psychic drama of an unraveling psyche turned inward against itself. The short story only frames what Håfström’s film explores in greater depth: the breakdown of physical space in a hotel room that produces a corresponding collapse in psychic space as Enslin is forced to open himself to alternate worlds. Lastly, the movie’s transformation of physical space into a psychological metaphor reveals again the close affinity that continues to exist between Poe and King. As many of the chapters in this book attest, King’s post-millennium novels persist in inspiring fan and critical admiration even as that fiction has now progressed into the last phase of a prodigious writing career. The same can be about his short stories. As I have alluded in the course of this brief survey,

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King’s novels and stories continue to complement one another: similar themes, tropes, utilization of supernatural incursions, images, and narrative strategies can be found interlacing both genres. The King short stories can be viewed as intimations for material the writer would eventually develop into future novels, or, as is more likely the case, further explorations of issues King has already explored elsewhere (e.g., “The Dune” supplying a similar conduit to the future that John Smith employs in The Dead Zone, female empowerment narratives in “The Gingerbread Girl” and “A Good Marriage” that continue feminist contentions found in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, “Afterlife” cataloguing similar secret sins to those found throughout Needful Things). Even individual stories from different collections sometimes speak to one another: on the one hand, “The Dune” resembles both “The Reach” and “The Monkey”; “Riding the Bullet” shares something in common with “The Woman in the Room”; on the other hand, the dozens of short stories spanning the entirety of his career appear also to have provided this writer with a literary escape hatch: a chance to compose something completely different and apart from where a novel-in-progress might be tracking. We witness evidence of this in the fact that none of the stories that were authored during the same era that produced King’s trilogy of Bill Hodges novels (2014–­2016) qualify as true detective tales. Given his sheer productivity in publishing both short fiction and novels, King has established a remarkable canon in terms of both size and thematic range. A lesser talent might well have reduced his output by this point in time over such a long career, or retired altogether. But King continues to challenge himself and his potent imagination, and his short stories have always provided an active means for keeping that imagination greased and operating at a highly functioning level. King often alludes to his general readership using the sobriquet “Constant Reader” in many of his book Introductions and Afterwords, but, truly, it is King himself who has earned the honorific “Constant Writer,” a fair and worthy assessment of his steadfast literary commitment and productivity.

NOTES 1. Stephen King, Introduction to Everything’s Eventual (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), xxi. 2. Stephen King, Introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 1. 3. King, Introduction to Everything’s Eventual, xx. 4. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1897; 1997), 41. 5. Ibid., 4–41.

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6. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales, ed. James M. Hutchisson (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2012), 504. 7. Ibid., 504. 8. For Burke, moments of terror are enjoyable and even elating because they produce “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. . . . Terror is a passion which always produces delight” (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton [Notre Dame, IN: Nortre Dame UP, 1757; 1968], 39). 9. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 504. 10. Harlan Ellison, “An Interview with Harlan Ellison,” in The Stephen King Companion, ed. George Beahm (Kansas City: Andrews andMcMeel, 1989), 147. 11. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 510. 12. Harold Bloom, Introduction to Stephen King: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 2. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Allison Flood, “Stephen King to receive National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama,” The Guardian, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/bo​oks/2​015/s​ep/07​/step​hen-k​ ing-n​ation​al-me​dal-o​f-art​s-bar​ack-o​bama.​ 15. Forrest Wickman, “Bond Beats Brontë: Who’s the Most Adapted Author in Cinema?” Slate, http:​//www​.slat​e.com​/blog​s/bro​wbeat​/2011​/03/1​1/bon​d_bea​ts_br​ ont_w​ho_s_​the_m​ost_ adapted_author_in_cinema_html. 16. Brian Kent, “Stephen King and His Readers: A Dirty, Compelling Romance,” in A Casebook on The Stand, ed. Tony Magistrale (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1992), 40). 17. Ibid., 64. 18. King’s non-fiction textbook On Writing is frequently taught in composition classes and fiction writing workshops in American high schools and colleges. It was released recently in a tenth-anniversary edition. 19. Stephen King, “L.T.’s Theory of Pets,” in Everything’s Eventual (New York: Scribner, 2002), 325. 20. Stephen King, afterword to Full Dark, No Stars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 365. 21. Stephen King, “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” in Everything’s Eventual (New York: Scribner, 2002), 430. 22. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan, 1913), https​://ww​w.sig​mundf​reud.​net/t​he-in​terpr​etati​on-of​-drea​ ms-pd​f-ebo​ok-js​p., 52. 23. Stephen King, “A Good Marriage,” in Full Dark, No Stars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 346. 24. Ibid., 314. 25. Darcy appears motivated to act against her husband for several reasons. She is outraged by his infidelity (“wondering if he had kissed them” [335]); she is disgusted by the secret self he brings into their home (via the “souvenir” licenses and identification cards of the victims that are employed by “Beadie” to taunt the police)

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yet keeps from her; and when she does discover his “other self,” Bob expects her to join him in a collusion that forces her to assume responsibility for maintaining the secret; all of this compromises Darcy’s personal morality, as she envisions an afterlife where she is confronted “by a ghastly receiving line of strangled women branded by her husband’s teeth, all accusing her of causing their deaths by taking the easy way out herself” (312). While she comes to empathize with the suffering he has inflicted on these female strangers, Darcy’s nightmares featuring own daughter, Petra, bound and hooded awaiting Bob’s awful ministrations, indicate how intimately his transgressions have affected her. Further, the fact that Petra calls out to her mother in the dream, “Mama, is that you?” (333) indicates that Darcy’s subconscious is identifying with the victims and challenging her to act in their behalf. 26. King, “A Good Marriage,” 349. 27. King, afterword to Full Dark, No Stars, 365. 28. Stephen King, “The Dune,” in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 107. 29. Ibid., 120. 30. Ibid., 123. 31. Ibid., 120. 32. Stephen King, “1408,” in Everything’s Eventual (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 469.

Chapter 2

Storytelling and a Story Told Stephen King’s Narrators in From a Buick 8, The Colorado Kid, and Blaze Michael Perry

Annie Wilkes, from Stephen King’s novel Misery, becomes increasingly impatient with Paul Sheldon’s inability to finish his novel. Near the climax of the story, Annie demands that the story being written be told instead. Paul responds: “I’m a rotten story-teller”;1 and after a rebuke from Annie, Paul clarifies: “I didn’t say I was a rotten story-writer. I actually happen to think I am pretty good at that. But as a story-teller, I’m the pits.”2 Recognition of this particular distinction saves Paul’s life by keeping alive his role as Scheherazade to the unhinged Wilkes, and perhaps this distinction is just as critical for Stephen King himself. In addition to offering his readers main characters who happen to be writers, King often embeds his work with a more complicated and nuanced meditation on the craft of writing itself, and does so through a variety of characters who, while not necessarily writers, are certainly storytellers. Indeed, King addresses the distinction between a story told and storytelling throughout his oeuvre and does so in myriad works not limited to main characters who happen to be writers. King, while certainly achieving a recognizable and distinctive voice in American literature, has never been one to shy away from varied narrative structures and use of multiple perspectives in order to utilize their effect on storytelling. In particular, King’s 21st-century work includes two “shorter” novels that explicitly deal with the act of storytelling: From a Buick 8 and The Colorado Kid both entail the relating of stories experienced (first and second hand) by the tellers to individuals outside the main narrative. While one tale deals with the supernatural and the other with the “real” world, neither story told offers a clear ending, suggesting a failure on the part of the storyteller. However, both narratives do provide closure within the larger narrative 21

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structure. In King’s self-proclaimed “trunk novel,” Blaze, we are told a story without explicit storytelling—much of the story happens as we read it. Even so, within the novel, the act of storytelling and a story told merge seamlessly, thus further complicating an already complex relationship between reader, writer, and text. With these novels in mind, we must consider that much theoretical attention is directed at the nuanced relationship between storytelling and a story told; in particular, critics have developed a language to wrestle with not only notions of narrative strategies and perspectives, but have further developed concepts of narrative, embedded narratives, narrators, and even “addressees.” Beginning with a synthesis of previous thought on this varied and, at times, arguably untenable subject, I will turn to the three aforementioned novels. To begin, The Colorado Kid offers an attempt to write a “story told,” and in so doing, demonstrates the power of storytelling and simultaneously the limits of attempting to put such telling into fixed, printed word. From a Buick 8 doesn’t so much rest as it fluctuates repeatedly along the spectrum between storytelling and a story told as it offers King’s constant readers with one of his most ambitious, inconsistent, yet inventive narrative structures to date. Located on the opposite side of the spectrum, Blaze shows the story to the reader without evoking the presence of an author—written or spoken—and, on the surface, appears to simply be a story told. DISGUISING THE AUTHORIAL VOICE In the opening pages of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth addresses the reality of mixed and multiple theoretical approaches to narrative fiction: “Whatever our ideas may be about the natural way to tell a story, artifice is unmistakably present whenever the author tells us what no one in so-called real life could possibly know.”3At face value, this appears to be an obvious and straightforward statement. However, just as I cringe at my own use of the clichéd introductory clause of the aforementioned sentence, I simultaneously appreciate the possibilities inherent in what that phrase may offer. “Face value” attempts to signify something that can be seen and/or observed. The problem with the descriptor lays within the temptation to simply conclude that artifice must then be when an author takes us “inside” the head of a character—or comments upon the narrative from an all-knowing perspective. While this is certainly one of the ways in which artifice manifests itself, Booth’s statement encompasses so much more—and King, within the space of the three novels under consideration here, explores the multitude.

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Historically, as Booth notes, the greater literary community increasingly accepted a “call for eliminating certain overt signs of the author’s presence.”4While referring to a conscious move away from the author commenting upon the narration within the narrative, another way to articulate the move would be to view the author as paying greater attention to not only point of view (1st, 2nd, 3rd) but also perspective (who tells the story, when do they tell the story, and from where do they tell the story). To say this is something that only 20th-century writers and beyond consider is simply wrong; however, the language with which to apply critical analysis to a good deal of these techniques is, indeed, far more recent in origin. Moreover, the slippery slope entailed in “eliminating” signs of the author pertains not just to sticking to a point of view and perspective (which often makes sense for short stories, but certainly less so for longer works) would rid narrative of all authorial “tricks” from metaphor, to rhythm, and beyond. It may be pertinent to go back even further and refer to W. J. T. Mitchel’s “Representation,”5 wherein he notes “Aristotle says that representations differ from one another in three ways: in object, manner, and means. The ‘object’ is that which is represented; the ‘manner’ is the way in which it is represented; the ‘means’ is the material that is used.” Consider the object being represented in Kid, Buick, and Blaze as the act of storytelling itself. Also consider the manner as referring to the authorial decision made by King on how he purports to represent storytelling. Finally, consider the means as the medium of the novel and subsequent collection of printed words held within (not to mention the cover, the size, the material, and the space between the words). Above all else, the “manner” is of utmost concern here (alongside the assumption that one is aware not only of the identity of object but also the expectations of the means). As such, J. Hillis Miller’s observation in the same collection, titled “Narrative,” offers a fine starting point: “Narrative would be a process of ordering and reordering, recounting, telling again what has already happened or is taken to have already happened.”6 To put it another way (in the context of writing), “what” happens is not nearly as interesting (or as ripe for analysis) as “how” it happens and “why.” When critics/ readers focus on the “what,” criticism too often devolves into a discussion of values-based subjective opinions on what one likes or dislikes—what is “better” or “worse.” Indeed, much King scholarship addresses critiques of “what” happens in the stories, rather than “how” King decides to craft the narrative and “why,” often spiraling into the problematic means of criticism just mentioned. One area in which to hone an even more specific language with which to couch this particular analysis, though, rests in what Mieke Bal refers to as

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“Narratology.” He too breaks down the act of studying narrative into three parts: Narrative text: a text in which an agent or subject conveys to an addressee (“tells” the reader) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof; Story: content of that text, and produces a particular manifestation, inflection, and “colouring” of a fabula; Fabula: (presented in a particular manner) is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experience by actors.7

While the narrative texts in this case are obvious—the novels—the connection between story and fabula represent the thrust of my study. Indeed, said connection speaks directly to Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the importance of “manner” and to my more simply worded: “how.” To borrow an often used term from structuralism, the narrative text occurs when the fabula, ordered into a story, is converted to signs not by an author, but rather a narrator, who “utters” said signs.8 In short, King has a story to tell. It stems from a larger idea of a fabula (a story “pre-ordered”). Because he is a writer, he converts his story into words and formulates in them within what is identified as a novel. When we begin to identify narrators, things get interesting. Granted, this approach, these terms, could be used not only to study all of King’s work, but also all literature ever written. However, what is of particular interest herein is what occurs when we combine the specific “object” under study—the very act of storytelling— with the language of narratology and its subsequent focus on the narrator and “addressee.” While I alluded to Misery in the opening, that particular early novel, while addressing the act of writing and storytelling, structurally is far more traditional than Kid, Buick, or Blaze. Unlike the aforementioned texts, Paul Sheldon is clearly the singular narrator of Misery. Furthermore, I refer once again to Misery in order to invoke a moment near the end of the story where Paul, responding to the idea of writing his story, balks at the notion as he fears he could not be truthful: “It would start out as fact, and then I’d begin to tart it up. . . . Simply to create that roundness.”9 Vince Teague, in Kid, offers a similar sentiment: “We didn’t tell him about the Colorado Kid because he would have taken a true unexplained mystery and made it into just another feature story. . . . Not by changing any of the facts, but by emphasizing one thing . . . and leavin something else out.”10 In Buick, the men and women of Troop D hold a similar sentiment in regards to the titular vehicle, which they hold dearly to themselves not because they don’t want to share the story, but rather they fear what will become of the mystery if they allow it in the hands of those whose need for closure, for “roundness,” may invoke a tragedy or lead to the creation of a weapon of heretofore untold power.

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Nearly a generation after King put those words into the mouth of Paul Sheldon, he offered a much more deliberate meditation on the nature of storytelling, which was, in a sense, what Paul was being asked to do: tell his story. What we get are Kid and Buick, which Grady Hendrix argues “feels like King’s protests again the unreality of fiction, about how the needs of drama sometimes flatten the mysterious, beautiful, unknowingness of life.”11 What we also get, after the two, is King’s self-proclaimed “trunk novel,” which he describes as not a noir novel as he had originally intended but rather a “stab at [a] sort of naturalism-with-crime.”12Blaze shares with both Kid and Buick a conscious attempt at verisimilitude over style (hence the move away from the self-proclaimed noir attempt of his youth), as well as a meditation on the power of story—paradoxically in both a more nuanced and more obvious way. GO TELL THE KID Written under the guise of “Hard Case Crime,” The Colorado Kid involves two simultaneous fabulas: the mentoring of Stephanie McCann and the disappearance of the titular Kid. If one were pressed to identify a frame, wherein one story resides within the other, it could be argued that chapter 5—“But it was Dave who actually began”13—begins the “actual” story of the Kid. However, what becomes clear (by actually become much more opaque), is that it is very possible to argue that the story of the Kid is not, necessarily, the “main” story; neither, however, is the mentoring of subsequent decision by Stephanie to stay after her internship ends. But this gets too far ahead. To begin (again), consider Booth’s notation of the “artifice.” The term itself in connection to literature is rather expansive—one could argue that the very act of translating experience to words necessitates artifice. In regards to Kid, more specifically, the pertinent artifice involves King’s decision to relate the story of the Kid via the oral tale of Vince Teague and Dave Bowie. The paradox of such artifice on King’s part in Kid is that the presentation of the novel is meant to lessen the presence of artifice by having the tale “told” rather than written. As King strives to remove “overt presence” of the author via the creation of two storytellers, the reader is still provided with information that belies the artifice of the story. Prior to the tale being told, the novel begins in traditional fashion with the center-of-consciousness moving from character to character; in fact, we even begin inside the head of the Boston Globe feature writer. Later in the same scene, the reader “watches” confused as Vince seemingly pockets the large tip meant for the waitress. These narrative transitions not only clearly point to the presence of an author (one

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could argue the presence of the book itself points to the presence of the author) but more importantly, while moving in and out, they do clearly attach themselves to a singular character, and, as such, do keep the “authorial” voice silent. In Kid, the object that is presented is like much in the novel, twofold: one, the novel attempts to present a truly unexplained mystery and how the act of writing the story often tends to turn something unexplained into something more understandable; two, the novel presents a coming-of-age apprenticeship that harkens to a sense of nostalgia and small-town life that, for all intents and purposes, does and does not exist. The manner in which King presents these objects is by narrating a conversation (the apprenticeship) that involves a story told (the mystery). As such, with one narrative embedded within another, Vince and Dave become participants in one object (apprenticeship) and creators of the other object (mystery). Stephanie, who is also participant (or one could argue she is the protagonist) in the “apprenticeship,” actually diverges quite clearly from Vince and Dave in regards to the “mystery.” Stephanie becomes, at once, the protagonist of one storyline and the audience for the other, thus inviting an immersive experience for King’s actual readers as they at once find themselves identifying with Stephanie as the focus of the apprenticeship, as well as becoming Stephanie as they sit down for a conversation with the two old newsmen. As for the embedded story, King attempts to have the entire story of the Kid told by Vince and Dave. Not once does the story “flashback” or “dissolve” into showing a previous moment/occurrence. In a sense, such a tactic significantly decreases the level of artifice as people tell stories all the time; in the case of the Kid, though, the level of verisimilitude increases. The artifice comes forth, however, in the relation of dialogue; where at times Vince and Dave paraphrase conversations, occasionally King includes double quotes as if Vince (or Dave) are reciting word for word (with he said/she said) conversations, verbatim, they had in years previous.14 The fabula, as Mieke Bal would call it, consists of a collection of what I have described above. The story, however, is much more direct. King writes a novel that offers a meditation on how we approach the truly unexplained by striving, often beyond all rationality, to make it “fit” into something slightly more acceptable. That, I would argue, is the story. Everything else—the apprenticeship, the mystery itself, the guise of a “Hard Case Crime” novel— is all fabula. Indeed, the layers of fabula created within this tiny little book, including the parting words by the author himself as he nearly apologizes (wink wink) for what he just did, tie into the overall effect of just how difficult it is to write as though one is telling a story—and to do so within a story that one writes.

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A TALE OF TWO BUICKS From A Buick 8, published three years prior to Kid, similarly wrestles with an unexplained mystery embedded with a larger narrative that follows a story told to a younger character by his elders. One could argue that is where the similarities end, but that is not the case. Sandy Dearborn, lead storyteller, asks and answers early on in the tale: “Does knowing really satisfy? Rarely, in my experience.”15 In a sense, King warns his readers upfront: You will not know; or, if you do know, you will not be satisfied. Therefore, the artifice in Buick becomes more prominent as the story continues. By this, I am not referring to the concept of a monster car from another dimension that shoots lightning; rather, I refer to the conscious decision by King to not only involve shifting narrative perspectives, but to also combine aspects of storytelling and a story told side by side. From the outside, it appears as though the story, told in 1st person, will be Sandy Dearborn’s to narrate. Indeed, while shifting 3rd person is a common trait of many novelists, shifting 1st person is a rarity at best. But then we get “Then,” ostensibly the second chapter of the novel (which we soon realize are not numbered) when the point of view shifts from 1st person to 3rd person. The perspective is not limited to one person, but rather leans more toward the omniscient narrator, who even speaks “directly” to the reader: “We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then.”16 The layers of narrative here become rather complex: essentially King employs a filmic device wherein the picture dissolves and the reader is left to imagine Sandy relating some verbal version of the narrative that we are reading to Ned. On one hand, this increases the level of artifice insofar as it amounts to King recognizing that the story is not something that can be “told” in the level of detail that a written novel demands. On the other hand, employing such a filmic device increases the verisimilitude of the related scenes unlike Kid, where supposedly Dave and Vince are restating word for word with dialogue attribution conversations that happened years previous. Therefore, rather than bother with worrying about artifice, King transitions the narrative into a more conventional narrative form. “Then,” at the end of the chapter, the sentence dissolves: “And that was how” begins the following chapter, titled “Now: Sandy,” with “‘we got into it,’ I said.”17And just like that, the novel returns to a 1st person perspective from Sandy’s point of view. As the novel progresses, we eventually receive other 1st person perspectives in the Now, with their names in italics just as Sandy’s name was above. We then get their version of “Then,” which, like Sandy’s, is written in 3rd person and the reader is, once again, meant to imagine a different version being related in real time. In this way, Buick does not simply provide an embedded narrative within the proper narrative, but rather offers countless embedded

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narratives with thematic connections from various narrators presented in both 1st and 3rd person. What ties them together, and is similar to Stephanie in Kid, is that this time Ned plays the dual role of participant in the narrative as well as audience for the tale being told. This tactic further complicates the relationship between reader, writer, and text. Further, King, in addition to being less concerned with concealing artifice in Buick, also presents more Aristotelian “objects” in this novel. Object number one: A son coming of age and coming to terms with the premature death of his father; object number two: a group of friends/colleagues who come into possession of a dangerous secret and hold it for generations; object number three: a truly unexplained mystery that refuses to obey rational thought; object number four: distrust of letting said mystery lose upon a corrupt world. The final object, interestingly, shares striking similarities with Vince and Dave’s distrust of the larger news media co-opting a true mystery into a feature story; except in this narrative, Sandy and his colleagues fear what could happen if curiosity and greed were applied to the study of the titular Buick. With the layering of significantly more objects, the actual “story” becomes harder to articulate. However, if we consider the sheer complexity of the fabula created, then it becomes possible to hone in on a concrete and focused story: how do we reconcile questions that have no answers? Within each of the objects under consideration, and presented in an elaborately plotted and intricately stylized manner, rests a singular story—one’s ability to live in a world suffused with mystery that relies heavily upon how one is able to accept a life without answers. Not only does the existence of the Buick represent such a mystery, but so does the nature and “meaning” of the death of Ned’s father so suddenly and randomly. Indeed, the mystery surrounding the “meaning” of the latter may just be the more difficult concept for both reader and character to reconcile. Moreover, the plotting certainly suggests a level of interconnectedness that would imply meaning and fate; the end result, however, which we know much of in the beginning, refuses to offer answers to the mysteries that propel the plot throughout, and any conclusions drawn speak from more about the desire of the reader (and characters in the novel) for closure where there is none. GEORGE, MEET BLAZE Of the three texts under consideration herein, Blaze certainly appears to be the strangest fit—the biggest stretch. Not only does the story not necessarily involve an embedded narrative or a framing device (unless one counts King’s own introduction and near dismissal of the book about to be read— which I don’t . . . at least mostly), but the story also is presented in a fairly

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conventional way: 3rd person limited with the occasional flashback. Unless, that is, we slow down, consider the two novels prior, consider the fact that the book itself was resurrected from nearly three decades previous, and consider that it not only includes, at its heart, an unanswerable mystery but that King himself intimates a connection to not only Of Mice and Men, but also Kid and Hard Case Crime. The novel begins: “George was somewhere in the dark. Blaze couldn’t see him, but the voice came in loud and clear, rough and a little hoarse.”18 From the opening pages, King presents the reader with a story told as it happens. Writing in 3rd person limited, the reader soon realizes that they are alongside and within the titular character, Blaze, and that events are unfolding as we read. Unlike Kid and Buick, there is no storyteller embedded in the narrative. As such, neither is there an audience embedded in the narrative through a character at the receiving end of the storytelling. Unless, that is, the reader not only imagines Blaze as main character, but also as a receiver of sorts to the storytelling of George’s inner-monologue. The artifice in Blaze manages to proceed fairly uninterrupted until chapter 4, which begins “Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., was born in Freeport, Maine.”19 Unless, of course, we consider the myriad ways in which artifice arises: what does the author tell us that no one “in real life ought to know”? That, of course, is a loaded and unfair question—considering the personage of Blaze is a fictive creation, one can know everything and nothing. It is here that we can slide down the slippery slope into relativism and, simultaneously, literalism. Rather, consider the use of the “voice” of George. We first hear George speaking to Blaze in the opening line of the novel, and by the 19th page, we come to understand that George is, in fact, dead, and that “Blaze was making his voice up in his mind, giving him the good lines.”20 Not only does the allusion to “lines” reference the act of writing, but the dialogue between George and Blaze, which is really between Blaze and Blaze, simultaneously creates a narrative structure that enables the reader to both at once identify with George and with Blaze, thus taking on role not only of the main character, but also the character seemingly informing another character (or himself) how to act and what to do—very much akin to the audience member talking to the characters on the screen at a movie. Recognition of this potential dialogue enables the reader, much like in Kid and Buick, to recognize simultaneous narratives within Blaze. And rather than one embedded within another, myriad narratives embedded with Blaze create multiple objects which King presents in a seemingly straightforward narrative that belies its own complexity. The first object concerns the legacy of abuse, where the disembodied narrator of the flashback notes “Unfortunately, Clay never thought twice about much of anything again.”21 Referring to the time Clay’s father threw him down the stairs in successive turns, the protagonist (and often narrator) clearly suffers a permanent disability from

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the abuse. Coming as it does in the third chapter, and not immediately from Blaze, the prior and post narrative experience changes when the reader is confronted with Blaze’s own perspective. This leads to another object: that of mentorship. Just as in Kid and Buick, mentoring resides at the heart of the story; however, in the case of Blaze, the mentoring had ended prior to the beginning of the novel, and through the imagined back and forth between George and Blaze, the reader sees the effects of said mentorship. A third object, and one that speaks to a larger genre concern, deals with the attempt to create an empathetic act of child abduction. And that may be the most discomforting and honest aspect of the all three novels under consideration herein. Unlike Kid and Buick, the story itself may appear rather straightforward, especially as the fabula in this particular novel is much more traditional—it is primarily a story told, whereas the other two novels explore the act of storytelling. However, the existence of several objects, multiple narrators and, yes, even addressees, belies the seemingly simplicity of King’s trunk novel. Written prior (at least an earlier version) and published after, Blaze can be said to be even more complex in its subtlety and nuance. As Blaze’s story nears the end, the perspective occasionally switches to the men pursuing Blaze. In a way, the perspective shift is a reminder to the reader of how horrific Blaze’s actions appear to all besides him—and rightly so. This additional layer of perspective, while disrupting the narrative flow expected by the reader, speaks to agency and responsibility, which reflects back upon the abuse as well as the perverse yet loving mentorship Blaze encountered (George took him in when no other would). King even ends in yet another perspective that is at once omniscient and at once an attempt to see the world through the eyes of the baby Blaze kidnapped. It is this final perspective shift that is at once the most curious and, possibly, the most problematic. King’s decision to continue the narrative after the death of Blaze essentially demands that the reader disassociate him/herself from the main character and become, during the final chapter of the novel, a traditional reader—no longer balancing the role of Blaze and audience to George, but rather as an outsider being told how things end. MISERY ONCE MORE It seems rather unfair, and certainly too tidy, to return full circle to Misery: beware the artifice that lay ahead. However, I can’t help but return to the story King told of Paul Sheldon, and his experience of captive storytelling to a captive audience while he, himself, was being held captive. Despite the violence, Misery offers a hopeful, almost idealistic vision of the power of storytelling—and the belief that reader expectation can not only shape narrative but

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can also demand it. It may be this demand, years later, that King responds to in successive turns in Kid, Buick, and Blaze. As King increasingly strips the artifice from his work, as he pays more attention to the possibility and limits of narrative structure and perspective, he begins to present a world where the desire for story and the demands of narrative are at odds. And by including within each narrative (even Blaze) an embedded addressee who is also the protagonist, he puts his readers in the position of receiver, actor, and creator. Another way to put it: he consciously blurs the line between the relationship among reader, writer, and text. Combined, the mystery and untenable nature of narrative as presented in Kid, Buick, and Blaze each result in a story wrapped in a fabula one calls a novel. Combined, these three novels speak to the potentiality of considering what happens in a novel wherein storytelling and a story told merge. Combined, Kid, Buick, and Blaze expand upon and explode the straightforward structure of Misery and stand as King’s invitation to participate more fully in the creation of a fabula that merges readers, writers, and characters alike. Such a merging explores the inherent paradox discussions of artifice and authorial presence necessarily invite while simultaneously encouraging both readers and writers alike to participate in telling stories and listening to stories told.

NOTES 1. Stephen King, Misery (New York: Signet, 1987), 247. 2. Ibid. 3. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 3. 4. Ibid., 16. 5. W. J. T. Mitchel’s “Representation,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Second Edition, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1–2, 13. 6. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Second Edition, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 66–79, 71. 7. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Third Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 5. 8. Ibid., 9. 9. King, Misery, 332. 10. Stephen King, The Colorado Kid (New York: Hard Case Crime, 2005), 175. 11. Grady Hendrix, “The Great Stephen King Reread: The Colorado Kid.” Tor. com. July 19, 2017. 12. Stephen King, “Full Disclosure,” Blaze (New York: Pocket Books, 2007), 1–7. 13. King, The Colorado Kid, 51.

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14. This is particularly pronounced during the investigation of the body with George Wournos and Doc Robinson (see Stephen King, The Colorado Kid, 69–73). 15. Stephen King, From a Buick 8 (Scribner: New York, 2007), 23. 16. Ibid., 25. 17. Ibid., 32–33. 18. King, Blaze, 9. 19. Ibid., 33. 20. Ibid., 19. 21. Ibid., 34.

Chapter 3

Stephen King’s “Fair Extension” Of Contemporary America Clotilde Landais

The devil is one of the main figures of supernatural fiction. Known as Satan or Lucifer, it comes from Christianity: a fallen angel who rebelled against God, he is also known as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, or as the accuser of Job. The biblical figure of the devil is thus identified as a tempter, a persecutor, and a divider. Such representations reappear in later literature, in works such as Dante’s Divina Commedia—Inferno (circa 1320), Christopher Marlowe’s play Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (circa 1604), John Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost” (1667), M. G. Lewis’ Monk (1796) or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–1816). If Hoffmann’s novel notably develops the Doppelganger motif attached to the figure of the devil as the persecutor, Marlowe’s play gives birth to one of the most famous motifs involving the devil: the Faustian bargain. The play would be based on the life of Doctor Faust, a German alchemist of the early 16th century who studied black magic in Poland. Moreover, the real Faust would have said things that let people believe that he did sign a pact with the Devil with his own blood to gain infinite knowledge, including predicting the future. This motif of a man selling his soul to the devil—or to one of his representatives, like Mephistopheles—for absolute knowledge has notably been re-told by German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust I (1808) and II (1832) and Aldebert von Chamissoin Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1813). Chamisso’s short story is often considered as the source of the literary representation of the devil as a peddler dressed in gray, yet the narrative is actually a variation of the Faustian bargain, since Peter Schlemihl sells his shadow instead of his soul to the devil for endless wealth. With the development of what will become psychoanalysis, both the soul and the shadow are indeed understood as equivalents.1 Both are what makes a man whole, because they are part of the Self’s unity. As a result, when Faust or 33

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Schlemihl sell this part of their Self to the devil, the divider par excellence, they lose their unity and become alienated, strangers to themselves. In his short story “Fair Extension,” published in 2010 in the collection Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King expands these different representations of the Faustian bargain and gives a postmodern version of the motif that serves a mise en abyme on contemporary America. “Fair Extension” first appears as a rewriting of the Faustian bargain through different references to Chamisso’s short story. The first of these intertextual references is the devil figure, George Elvid. As he sells all sorts of extensions under a gray umbrella on the side of the road, he appears to be the peddler in gray. The second reference to Chamisso’s short story is the object of the bargain, the shadow: “His scrawny shadow, the Ghost of Streeter Yet to Come, trailed out behind him.”2 This reference to a Dickens’ character, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, signals that Dave Streeter’s shadow represents his death, or, more specifically, his cancer. The parallel with Chamisso’s short story allows the reader to understand that Streeter is ready to sell his shadow to the devil. Another intertext, coming from Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936)—itself inspired by Washington Irving’s short story “The Devil and Tom Walker” (1824)—, confirms such reading through the extension motif: in Benét’s short story, Jabez Stone asks for a three-year extension after the initial seven years of prosperity; in King’s short story, the devil only sells “extensions, a very American product.”3Finally, in case inexperienced readers missed all these intertextual references and did not understand what the narrative was about, Stephen King spells it out for them: “You’d probably like a life extension?” [Elvid said.] “Can’t be done, I suppose?” Streeter asked. . . . “Of course it can. . . for a price.” Streeter, who had played his share of Scrabble in his time, had already imagined the letters of Elvid’s name on tiles and rearranged them. “Money? Or are we talking about my soul?” . . . “No, money’s the answer, as it usually is.”4

King further spells out the American-ness of his Faustian rewriting as Streeter says, “I’m a businessman, not a character out of ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’.”5 Such intertextuality allows metafictionality, giving a first postmodern twist to the Faustian bargain motif: in Marlowe’s tradition, the Faust character is often tricked into the bargain. Here, Dave Streeter signals that he knows his classics and is not ready to give up his soul. However, the devil also is conscious of these previous representations, as seen notably in the reference to Vincent Benét’s short story. In order to trick Streeter-Faust into accepting the bargain, the devil thus says he is not interested in Streeter’s soul, only in

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money. However, he also needs a sacrifice—but, in another postmodern twist to the motif, it cannot be an anonymous one anymore. To convince Streeter to give him the name of “someone [he] hate[s],”6 the devil then draws upon the main themes of the archetypal narrative: ambition, desire, fate, and free will, which is “the power to make your own decisions without being controlled by God or fate.”7 This argument proved the most efficient with most previous Faustian characters, and Streeter is no exception: seizing the possibility of avoiding his own fate—dying from cancer—he reveals his crushed ambition and secret desire for his friend Tom Goodhugh’s success, and in the process, submits to the proposition that their roles can indeed be reversed, and that it would be some sort of cosmic justice. To understand how Goodhugh’s fate can have an impact on Streeter’s and be of interest to the devil, we now need to explore the motif of the Doppelganger and see how Stephen King gives another twist to the Faustian bargain motif. The motif of the Doppelganger in literature goes back to myths, themselves based on what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the savage mind,”8 that is, the untamed human thought which organizes its thinking in binary oppositions based on natural duality such as night and day, light and dark, good and evil, or body and soul. As psychoanalyst Otto Rank noted, “The belief of primitive peoples all over the world in the human soul as being an exact copy of the body, first perceivable in the shadow, was also the original soul-concept of ancient civilized peoples.”9 In fantastic fiction, the embodiment of this exact copy carries the questions and fears surrounding the dissolution of the united Self and the concepts of subconscious and dark half. As Noel Carroll wrote, “The genre is populated by beings of comprised multiple selves or creatures undergoing disintegration.”10 The figure of the devil, or diabolus in Latin, from the Greek “διάβολος” meaning “to disunite, to divide,” is naturally associated with the Doppelganger motif as the divider par excellence. As mentioned in the introduction, once someone has dealt with the devil, they lose their unity—as clearly shown with Schlemihl’s shadow, for instance, which literally disappears after the deal and makes Schlemihl himself a shadow. The devil thus usually originates the duplication, as in Chamisso’s short story. However, in “Fair Extension,” it does not appear to be the case. Streeter is indeed presented as a divided Self in King’s short story per se, when he explains that “when [Tom and I] were seniors . . . I was really two students: Dave Streeter and Tom Goodhugh.”11 Thus, he has always been Goodhugh’s Doppelganger, his shadow. In fantastic fiction, the embodiment of the double creates a conflict with the Self because only one can survive, as notably illustrated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The Self indeed feels persecuted by his Doppelganger who, according to primitive beliefs, announces his death.12 It thus seeks to destroy it. A physical

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combat often follows, as the embodied Doppelganger wants to stay alive as well. In Stephen King’s short story, when the Doppelganger Streeter realizes that his life could be saved if he sacrifices his Self Goodhugh, he really becomes the latter’s persecutor by making a pact with the devil. Indeed, by giving up his own shadow to the devil, the part of him that is Goodhugh’s double, Streeter transfers his cancer to the Self and his family. Even though the Self does not die—not in the first eight years of the deal, anyway—, the Doppelganger survives and even thrives. Streeter’s jealousy of Goodhugh, as his cancer, ceases to eat him alive; he is then capable of enjoying his life, as it is, and in particular his marriage. As Cécile Kovacshazy noted, “The devil is certainly the great Tempter, but each time, he is also the one who offers an alternative, that is freedom. His temptations are prospects towards a larger and deeper world.”13 In “Fair Extension,” the devil—who is called, among other names, Lucifer, “the one who brings light”—liberates Streeter through his exercise of free will. Such freedom gives him a new prospect, a new perspective, that is the capacity to appreciate things in life as they are. More the point, by sacrificing the part of him that was Goodhugh’s shadow, Streeter seems to have become his own Self. However, through onomastics, Stephen King reveals who Streeter has really become. In old English indeed, the name “Streeter” refers to “someone who works on and dwells by the road,”14 just like a peddler—that is, the devil. Following the deal then, rather than becoming a united Self, Dave Streeter has become an alter ego of the devil himself. He is thus still an alienated being, although to another Self. Such fate for the Faustian character in Stephen King’s short story leads to another postmodern twist in regard to the motif of the Faustian bargain. In Marlowe’s or Goethe’s narratives, Faust struggles all along with the bargain and the ultimate price to pay. Such doubt takes much space in the plays and in the end, both characters regret what they have done—that does not change Dr. Faustus’s fate, but God, through Gretchen, redeems Goethe’s protagonist. In “Fair Extension” however, there is no internal struggle or, to put it in Algirdas Julien Greimas’s terms, no opponent to the realization of his quest for a long and healthy life.15 This is first visible through the change of speed in the narrative: the first part, which covers only four days, is twenty pages long. It details Dave Streeter’s two encounters with the devil: the first time, when the deal is explained and the devil cures Streeter’s cancer temporarily to prove his good faith; the second time, after Streeter’s doctor told him some tumors disappeared, to seal the deal—and Tom Goodhugh’s fate. The second half of the short story stretches over a period of eight years, from August 2001 to September 2009, but is only seven pages long. This second part only uses summaries and ellipses, and alternates Goodhugh’s downfall and Streeter’s good fortune. The heterodiegetic narrator in internal focalization allows seeing that the more tragedy hits the Goodhughs, the happier

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Streeter becomes. It is notably reflected in the use of verbs such as “enjoyed” or “was delighted” to describe Streeter’s reactions to what happens to the Goodhughs: “[Streeter] enjoyed watching Tom feed his damaged son, and he enjoyed the hopeful look on Carl’s face.”16 Reading Streeter as the devil’s alter ego following the deal explains such lack of remorse, and even cruelty. Streeter’s duality reflects another duality in the narrative: the literary duality between the tragic hero and the postmodern antihero. In the tradition of the Greek tragedy as defined by Aristotle in De Poetica (circa 335 BC), a tragic hero is a virtuous character who faces adversity with courage, but is ultimately destined for downfall. Tom Goodhugh embodies such a heroic figure in Stephen King’s short story, whereas Dave Streeter appears a postmodern antihero: a character both flawed and good, but lacking the positive values of the hero. Goodhugh incarnates the tragic hero inasmuch as he is likened to the Bible character Job. An extremely righteous man, and very prosperous, Job is the object of a bet between Satan and God. Satan believes that Job is pious only because God has “put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has [and] blessed the work of his hands.”17 However, if God were to stretch out his hand and strike everything that Job had, then Satan is sure the man would curse God. God thus gives Satan permission to test Job’s righteousness. When all Job’s possessions are destroyed and his ten children killed, Job still blesses God’s name. Then Satan tortures his person and, in the end, Job curses “the day of his birth.”18 But, as per the terms of the bet, God forgives Job, restores his health, and gives him a new family and twice as much livestock as previously. In Stephen King’s short story, Tom Goodhugh first appears a successful entrepreneur blessed with a happy family, health, and wealth, which he exhibits without any embarrassment. As such, Goodhugh embodies a core value in the American psyche inherited from the Puritan tradition. As the German sociologist Max Weber analyzed in his book Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–1905), unlike Catholics for instance, Protestants and especially Puritans view the successful pursuit of happiness and wealth and the accumulation of possessions as a sign of God’s favor.19 As Daniel Walker Howe explained more precisely, “Work became a form of self-discipline and a religious regimen for all, as it had once been only for monastics. . . . A person whose honest toil had turned a profit must have been blessed by God; if one enjoyed God’s favor in this life, was it not logical to suppose him among those elected for eternal life?”20 Tom Goodhugh embodies such value in “Fair Extension,” all the more so because—his name meaning “good heart” in old Germanic—he always acknowledges the fact that Streeter had a part in his good fortune: Goodhugh “never fails to tell people how [Streeter] stood up to the bank and put [his] job on the line. ‘Dave carried me, just like in high school,’ [Tom] says.”21 Such constant humility confirms his heroic status, albeit tragic.

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Indeed, like Job, Goodhugh pays the price of his righteousness when Streeter makes his deal with the devil. The deal in Stephen King’s short story parallels the original, biblical, bet between God and Satan about Job, but also confirms the reading of Goodhugh as Job’s alter ego. However, in Goethe’s Faust for instance, the bet between God and Satan is about Faust himself, not a third party—which saved Faust as it saved Job. In “Fair Extension,” even though Goodhugh stands for Job, it does not save him because the deal on him is not between God and the devil, but between the devil and his alter ego. However, when everything goes wrong, Goodhugh, unlike his biblical model, does not turn his back to God. Instead, he supposes that God abandoned him because he, Tom Goodhugh, did something wrong. Such faith goes together with how a tragic hero is supposed to face adversity, but also with the Puritan belief that people get what they deserve, or, to put it differently, that life is fair. On the other hand, Dave Streeter is presented as a postmodern antihero. He is not a bad person per se: he loves his wife and children, and enjoys his new life with them. Nonetheless, he feels petty jealousy toward somebody he considers his “best friend since grammar school.”22 Although Streeter is not as financially comfortable as he would like to be, “knocking on through life at a salary of sixty thousand or so a year”23 and although Tom Goodhugh married his first girlfriend, he is happy, but he cannot get over the thought that Tom “‘fucking stole her!’”24 Such feeling of jealousy seems trivial, and the condemnation of Goodhugh and his family for such a reason seems all the more cruel. This is why, if not a villain, Streeter appears an antihero: he prefers to condemn Goodhugh and his family rather than accepting his fate. His perspective on fate, at the beginning of the short story, is thus opposite to Goodhugh’s. Even though he never says the word—unlike the devil who evokes “the unfairness of the world”25 or his wife who finds the situation “so hard and unfair”26—Streeter’s jealousy toward Goodhugh clearly represents his feeling on the question: he is a hard worker with no particular talent who graciously helps his friend repeatedly and, as a reward, gets to be a cancerous shadow with an unsatisfying position and salary. According to the traditional Puritan values, such fate means that Streeter has not been chosen by God; he is not an elect: “The theology [of Puritanism] was in the Reformed, or Calvinistic, tradition, affirming predestination.”27 Streeter goes against this belief of predestination when he chooses to exercise his free will and takes his fate into his own hands. As such, he follows the opposite Protestant value of individualism, which “empowered the common lay person to assume control over his or her destiny in the next world—and eventually in this world as well.”28 Following the deal with the devil, however, Streeter’s perspective changes as he seems to embrace the Puritan values of self-interest and capitalism. He thinks about his own well-being first—which includes not struggling over his responsibility in Goodhugh’s downfall—and it pays: he gets a miracle, he

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and his family are happier, and he finally becomes bank manager. Reading Streeter as the alter ego of the devil explains such a change in belief. In Stephen King’s short story indeed, the devil himself reflects the Puritan values of self-interest, capitalism, and consumerism as well, but at its most extreme. First, as already mentioned, the devil limits his business to “extensions, a very American product.” Consumerism indeed pushes consumers to always want more than initially agreed, as illustrated in Vincent Benét’s short story and in Streeter’s last words. Second, although he claims not being interested in souls anymore because “‘the souls of humans have become poor and transparent things,’”29 the devil still needs a sacrifice. When Streeter sells him his shadow, Goodhugh’s fate changes: he loses everything that counts—except his faith. Goodhugh’s downfall, his alienation, can thus be read as a consequence of the loss of his shadow, that is, his soul, sold to the devil by his Doppelganger. Moreover, in Stephen King’s short story, the devil asks for money in exchange for Streeter’s life: “Fifteen percent of your income over the next fifteen years should do it. An agenting fee, you could call it.”30 According to Ronald Schenk, in the American psyche, money and spirit—that is, soul— are associated,31 and such equivalence confirms the hypothesis that the devil still collects human souls, notwithstanding his claim; further, the devil puts the money he collects through deals in a tax-haven—in a nonreligious and nonviolent charity fund for children, reflecting another Puritan value taken to extreme: “Puritans like [Cotton] Mather justified wealth that was consecrated to God and the community through generous charity.”32At the end of the short story, Dave Streeter, as the devil’s alter ego, has thus completed the switch as he declares: “Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snakeeyes. It’s just how the world is.”33

Such new belief could also be read as the conversion experience defining Puritanism, as Howe explains: “Puritanism may be considered a religious revival . . . through a conversion experience. . . . To be sure, the conversion experience was caused by God’s grace.”34 However, when Streeter embraces the Puritan values of self-interest and capitalism, it is not because he has finally been chosen by God, but rather by the devil. Such twist in the conversion experience confirms Streeter in his antihero status and creates an effect of irony. Irony, defined as “a conflict between what might be expected and what really happens,”35 occurs in the whole short story. It notably appears as a dissonance in the reader’s mind regarding the (anti-)heroic status of the main protagonists. According to William Flesch, as readers, “we are on the side of

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certain characters and against others, and we wish the narrator to share and effect our desires.”36 Readers usually want the heroes, the ones who sacrifice themselves—whether they are aware of it or not—to win, and feel “negative feelings . . . toward defectors and toward second-order free-rider.” In Stephen King’s short story, readers certainly root for Tom Goodhugh and his family, while understanding that, as the tragic hero he is, he is destined for downfall. However, the lack of empathy for his trials, compared to the boisterous and somewhat undeserved happiness of Streeter, the antihero, does not meet the readers’ expectations and creates an effect of irony. Such irony serves the underlying meaning of the narrative, which is based on the motif’s archetype. Goethe’s Faust I and II notably were written to denounce the corruption of mankind. Faust’s desire for infinite knowledge and power is only a pretext for a political and social satire on Romanticera Germany.37 The Faustian bargain, as a folkloric motif anchored in the Christian tradition, has not been serving as a warning to humans “striving for supernatural powers”38 for a while, however, due to the evolution of the motif of the devil itself. As Maximilian Rudwin notes: the modern Devil is a great improvement on his prototype of medieval days. . . . The Devil as a human projection is bound to partake in the progress of human thought. . . . The Devil advances with the progress of civilization, because he is what men make him. . . . In modern literature, the Devil’s chief function is that of a satirist. . . . He spares no human institution.39

Like Goethe and other modern and contemporary authors, Stephen King uses the Faustian bargain motif as a hermeneutic device: the explicit intertextual references draw a reading frame that should help readers understand “Fair Extension” as a political and social satire. The representation of the devil as capitalist drawing upon Puritan values at their most extreme certainly is a criticism for the religious basis of the United States and its contemporary society. From its origins, the country has indeed been full of paradoxes which originated in Puritanism and are still topical: it is a democracy built on personal justice and extreme violence; it claims an egalitarian philosophy as well as self-interest and capitalism; its people believe in individualism without being individualist, etc. Therefore, Goodhugh and Streeter’s dual personality can then be read as an allegory of the dual essence of the United States. The first indication that Goodhugh and Streeter represent the two faces of the United States is the fact that the country is as affected by the deal as they are: “‘Our dealing is done.’ [Elvid said.] That was in August of 2001, less than a month before the fall of the Towers.”40 Such juxtaposition shows that, just as the deal reveals Streeter to himself, the trauma of 9/11 reveals contemporary America to itself. Following the fall of the Towers, the American

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people reaffirm its national motto: “In God we trust,” born from the trauma of the Civil War and meant to assert God’s protection over the country—just as Goodhugh-Job reaffirms his faith while tragedy repeatedly hits his family. However, the ironic tone of the second part of the short story as well as its structure of successive summaries signal that contemporary America did not choose the right half as its synecdoche. The internal focalization of the heterodiegetic narration indeed indicates that Streeter embodies the post-9/11 nation. Because Streeter sold his shadow—Goodhugh’s soul—to the devil, he has become the devil’s alter ego. Rather than becoming a true Self, he has become an alienated and corrupted being after the deal. Similarly, the country has become alienated when threatened, has turned to extreme values of capitalism, consumerism, and self-interest, and sees everything bad that happens to other people as “a joke.”41 This feeling of seeing everything as a joke also appears in the narrative through the juxtaposition of good things happening to the Streeters and bad things happening to the Goodhughs—or to US celebrities: In December (on the same day Winona Ryder was busted for shoplifting, in fact), Dr Roderick Henderson proclaimed Dave Streeter cancer-free. . .. At Derry Home Hospital, . . . Norma Goodhugh . . . listened numbly as her doctor told her—as gently as possible—that the lump in her left breast was indeed cancer, and it had spread to her lymph nodes.42

Such juxtapositions show that Streeter’s, the Goodhughs’ and the country’s fate are tied. Streeter’s lack of respect for others’ tragedies is readable through the internal focalization in irreverent verbs such as “busted” or expressions such as “The good news was . . . The bad news was.”43 These techniques translate the irony in the narrative serving Stephen King’s satire on the current American values. For example, in 2005, after Jacob Goodhugh and his bride went to Belize for their honeymoon and he suffered from gastroenteritis: “My own darn fault,” he said. Over eight hundred US troops died in Iraq. Bad luck for those boys and girls. Tom Goodhugh began to suffer from gout, developed a limp, started to use a cane. That year’s check to the Non-Sectarian Children’s Fund was of an extremely good size, but Streeter didn’t begrudge it. It was more blessed to give than to receive. All the best people said so.44

The irony, readable here again through the juxtapositions and tone carries King’s message: if Streeter represents the true face of contemporary America, then America is corrupted. All the Puritan values have evolved

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into something akin to lack of respect, here the Christian notion of giving and the sense of mission. As Ning Kang notes, “Since the founding of the United States, Americans have believed that it is their mission to spread social justice and liberty across the world.”45 Once again, intertextuality helps understanding the underlying message here. Goethe’s Faust II in particular clearly denounced imperialism,46 and, clearly, Stephen King places his short story in such literary tradition. The tragedy of 9/11 could have been a wakeup call for contemporary America regarding its tendency to extreme selfinterest, capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism; instead, it has hardened its dark side and led to more tragedy and trauma, such as the Iraq wars and the financial collapse of 2008: “2008, what a year! Holy fuck! China hosted the Olympics! Chris Brown and Rihanna became nuzzle-bunnies! Banks collapsed! The stock market tanked! And in November, the EPA closed Mount Trashmore, Tom Goodhugh’s last source of income.”47 Here again, the juxtaposition in internal focalization of serious and tragic events with gossip creates irony, along with the exclamation points and swear word. With “Fair Extension,” Stephen King writes a postmodern version of the Faustian bargain motif to comment on the contemporary US society, and more specifically, on the Puritan values that are part of the American psyche. Anchored in the literary tradition of the conflict between Good and Evil, the motif has been revised to include a metafictional reflection on the mechanisms of the deal itself. Thanks to a postmodern development of the Doppelganger motif, “Fair Extension” allows an allegorical reading of the narrative through the duality of the main character. Streeter’s alienation to the devil and his corruption following the traumatic event of cancer diagnosis parallels the United States’ alienation to its dark side following the traumatic event of 9/11. Irony in Stephen King’s short story, along with a modern representation of the devil and the Doppelganger motif, serve a pessimistic satire on contemporary America: a self-centered nation exercising its free will through extreme capitalism while denying this right to others. Stephen King, however, is by nature optimistic, and readers want the good guy to win.48 Maybe it is then possible to believe that, if “[l]ife is fair,”49 as Streeter claims, the clouds will roll out (to borrow from King), and both Goodhugh and the nation will become one united Self again. NOTES 1. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 62. 2. Stephen King, “Fair Extension,” in Full Dark, No Stars (New York: Scribner, 2010), 232.

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3. Ibid., 234. 4. Ibid., 235. 5. Ibid., 249. 6. Ibid., 237. 7. Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, s.v. “Free Will,” accessed October 9, 2018, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/free-will?q=free+will. 8. See Wladimir Troubetzkoy, “Les Cycles d’Incarnation du Double,” Otrante 8 (Winter 1995–1996), 7–23. 9. Rank, The Double, 63. 10. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 178. 11. King, “Fair Extension,” 238. 12. Rank, The Double, 58. 13. Cécile Kovacshazy, Simplement Double: Le Personnage Double, une Obsession du Roman au xxe Siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), 43–4 (translated by author). 14. Surname Database, s.v. “Streeter,” accessed October 9, 2018, http://www. surnamedb.com/Surname/Streeter. 15. Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique Structurale: Recherche de Méthode (Paris: Larousse, 1966), 178. 16. Ibid., 253. 17. Job 1:10. 18. Ibid., 3.3. 19. see Eric Luis Uhlmann, et al., “Implicit Puritanism in American Moral Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011), 312–20. 20. Daniel Walker Howe, “The Impact of Puritanism in American Culture,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 1066–7. 21. King, “Fair Extension,” 240. 22. Ibid., 237. 23. Ibid., 241. 24. Ibid., 239. 25. Ibid., 233. 26. Ibid., 243. 27. Howe, “The Impact of Puritanism,” 1057. 28. Ibid., 1059. 29. King, “Fair Extension,” 249. 30. Ibid., 235. 31. see Ronald Schenk, American Soul: A Cultural Narrative (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2012). 32. Howe, “The Impact of Puritanism,” 1067. 33. King, “Fair Extension,” 258. 34. Howe, “The Impact of Puritanism,” 1057–9. 35. Sands Boehmer, Kathleen (ed.). The American Heritage Dictionary for Learners of English, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002, s.v. “Irony.”

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36. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signing, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 130. 37. See Cyrus Hamline, “Teaching Goethe’s Faust: Introductory Remarks,” in Approaches to Teaching Goethe’s Faust, ed. Douglas J. McMillan (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1987), 17–25. 38. Edith Potter, “The Faustian Theme in European Literature, Painting, and Music,” in Approaches to Teaching Goethe’s Faust, ed. Douglas J. McMillan (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1987), 126. 39. Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (Chicago: Open Court, 1931), 63–4. 40. King, “Fair Extension,” 250–1. 41. Ibid., 253. 42. Ibid., 251. 43. Ibid., 255. 44. Ibid., 254. 45. Ning Kang, “Puritanism and its Impact upon American Values,” Review of European Studies 1, no. 2 (2009), 150. 46. again, see Cyrus Hamline, “Teaching Goethe’s Faust.” 47. King, “Fair Extension,” 256. 48. Flesch, Comeuppance, 126. 49. King, “Fair Extension,” 258.

Chapter 4

The Bazaar of Bad Choices What It Is to be Female in King’s New World Mary Findley

Stephen King is certainly no stranger to criticism when it comes to his fictional portrayal of women. In fact, it has long been understood that three of King’s novels—Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder—all of which feature strong female protagonists, were born as a response to early feminist critics that laid claim to the idea that King only wrote shallow, stock female characters that had neither the depth nor accuracy of his male protagonists. King’s determination to shine the spotlight on three strong female protagonists, however, did much to temper the critics and prove that he was more than capable of creating real, strong, and even sympathetic, female characters. As a result, feminist critics stopped banging at the door of King’s fiction quite so loudly and all has been rather quiet in recent years on that front. But should it be? Two of King’s most recent works, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, a collection of short stories published in 2015, and the novella Gwendy’s Button Box, published in 2017 and cowritten by Richard Chizmar, both feature shallow, stock female characters that, if given a true voice in a realistic world, would be lighting up the #metoo movement, and demanding retribution for the proliferation of social and cultural stereotypes related to women that King, in theory, would do better than to create or perpetuate. Indeed, it seems as if King is falling back into a lackluster reputation; in his own words, he may realize that he has a reputation as a horror writer— “The point is, you write some scary stories and you’re like the girl who lives in the trailer park on the edge of town: you get a reputation”1—but even his words here, referring to a female with a dubious reputation, suggests a backslide relating to King’s feminist awakening. More to the point, King’s most recent depiction of women makes it not only relevant, but absolutely critical to revisit the decades-old debate related to his works that seeks to examine and understand why one of the world’s most prolific and popular authors 45

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simultaneously captures the essence and pulse of contemporary popular culture, yet continues to consciously populate his fiction with weak stereotypes of women that make it difficult to argue any point other than that he just may be an unregenerate misogynist after all. In Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, Kathleen Lant and Theresa Thompson state, “Although King must be praised for his accurate and potent rendition of Everyman in the late twentieth century, his representations of Everywoman often provoke hostility as well as admiration.”2 Almost twenty years after this was written, perhaps it is safe to say that any admiration King may have earned has gone by the wayside, or is at least open for reevaluation. If life is like a wheel that winds back around again, as King states in his novel Revival and other works (like The Stand), the subject of his representation of women, especially in his latest works, is not something he wants clinging to the spoke as his literary life comes full circle. The various camps of scholarly criticism on this subject have hashed it out through the years, including arguments that “King a misogynist . . . [while some] describe King as a feminist,”3 but no single determination on the subject and no single label has ever stuck. This is, it can be assumed, largely due to the fact that King did respond in kind, beginning in 1992 with Jessie Burlingame, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Daniels, not to mention one that is grossly overlooked, young Trisha McFarland in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Ultimately, it can be argued that these are strong, autonomous women and their apt characterization shows that Stephen King has what it takes to create solid female leads. This, then, makes it all the more disturbing and pronounced when faced with female character after female character in King’s more recent works defined or reduced to basic and problematic identifications, including weight, sexuality, career, marital status, ability or inability to procreate, status as an addict, mental inadequacies or, simply, role as an ever-present constant for male objectification. To that end, the women in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, and twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson in Gwendy’s Button, Box offer horrendous characterizations that throw women back into the confines of patriarchal proprietorship and body dysmorphia, toward which King would, theoretically, have greater awareness and a sharper sensitivity. To begin, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a landmine of poor choices when it comes to female characterization. Beginning with the first story, “Mile 81,” King sets the tone for how women in this collection will be defined—largely by their weight, their role as a sexual object, their poor choices or their perceived mentality. Our introduction to the first substantial female character in the collection, Julianne Vernon, is a gay, overweight, former mud wrestler who “missed the push-and-bump with the audience”4 like when a heckler yelled out “Grab her by the cunt, she’s a dyke, she likes that!”5 and who once

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stood with her team “wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison.”6 King also makes it very clear that, “Now, at thirty-five, she would have dressed out closer to two eighty, and had no interest in making any man a good wife.”7 None of this perceived history or backstory has any relevance to the role that Julianne plays in this story, namely a horse owner that happens upon two stranded vehicles at the entry ramp to a deserted rest stop where she investigates a deserted car that happens to be an other-worldly vehicle and that devours all 280 pounds of her. Given that her role is so nominal, one must wonder why King went overboard in creating such a caricature, an almost cartoon-like female. Is her role ultimately just that of a random victim, or is King utilizing an old-school horror trope that she is being punished due to her sexual preference, past career choices and inability to control her weight? One would hope that the King of popular culture would be more in tune with current trends in the horror genre over the last decade whereby “the genre has moved from taking pleasure in victimizing women to focusing on women as survivors and protagonists.”8 Just like Julianne Vernon, the remaining list of female characters introduced and defined in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams are depicted in ways that handicap and disempower them, as opposed to the male characters that are often introduced and defined in by their heroic roles, which is, to say the least, distressing. In using this tactic, King creates a dynamic where his male characters occupy positions of power and importance in the reader’s mind right from the start, while his female characters do little more than occupy space; in short, they are disposable and often disposed of rather easily. This, however, is not overtly obvious when reading each story separately. In many cases, King masks this power-play of masculine superiority by using descriptions that seem harmless and informative. Consider the following male characters and the groups, positions, or associations that they have, all of which carry a level of recognition or prestige not afforded to their female counterparts: George Simmons from “Mile 81” is introduced and defined as a part of the gang known as the Rip-Ass Raiders; Judge Harvey Beecher from “The Dune” is introduced and defined by his title of retired judge; Sheriff Barclay from “A Death” is introduced within his occupation of Sheriff; Wesley Smith from “Ur” is introduced within his occupation as an English professor at Moore College; Sanderson from “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation” is introduced as a jewelry store owner; Phil Henreid from “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” is described and introduced as a seventy-eight-year-old former National Book Award winner; Chad Callahan from “Morality” is introduced as a teacher and would-be writer; Ollie from “Mister Yummy” is described as a former graphic designer; Mr. Newsome from “The Little Green God of Agony” is introduced as the sixth richest man in the world; Wilson from

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“That Bus Is Another World” is described as a business owner; and Michael Anderson from “Obits” is introduced as a reporter. There is nothing seemingly overt or particularly disturbing about our introduction to these male characters at first blush, but a swift survey yields a very different picture. Whether a retired judge, professor, writer, teacher, gang leader, businessman, graphic designer, reporter or self-made billionaire, King’s men hold positions of power and authority. Yet, as noted, the same is not true of his female characters. When we first meet Mary from “Premium Harmony,” for example, she is described as a 200-pound woman who is so big she has to sidle. Where she was once considered at least good looking, she is described by her husband as someone whose “dashing days are over”9 and who is so stupid that when he speaks it goes, “In one ear, out the other. Nothing to slow down what he says in the middle.”10 Marlee Jacobs, the nine-year-old from “Bad Little Kid,” is described as “soft in the head”11 but not quite the village idiot because “She could read a little, and do some simple addition, but subtraction was beyond her.”12 Ellen Silverman from “Ur,” who is actually a talented basketball coach in her own right is, instead, introduced according to her role in Wesley Smith’s life, as “his other friend, and one with benefits.”13 She is described and defined by Smith as “five-two (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctively elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish.”14 Interestingly and tellingly, it should be noted that no physical description of Wesley Smith is rendered at all. Candy Rymer, also from “Ur” is described, again by Smith, as someone whose “face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. . . . Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.”15 Jasmine, from “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” is described as a welfare recipient who has had three different men, four kids and who hates her parents because her father “broke her in a week after her fifteenth birthday.”16 And Katie Curran from “Obits” is described by Michael Anderson as a “tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust”17 who offered “a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top”18 and was also a “long-legged vision in faded jeans.”19 Even when the female characters are given an occupation that they excel at, such as Ellen’s job as a coach in “Ur” or Katie’s job as a writer/ reporter in “Obits,” it is mentioned in passing and is secondary to their physical characteristics or lack of mental acuity. So, what can be gleaned by looking at just this aspect of King’s representation of females in Bazaar of Bad Dreams? Is it too early and too simplistic to formulate a theory that he purposefully objectifies women and denigrates them to second-class citizens beneath the all too familiar patriarchal male gaze? Or is he held harmless because as noted by scholar Heidi Strengell,

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his characterization of female characters, perhaps, “derives from his personal experience.”20 Or, does his representation of females speak less about the females themselves, and more about the misguided male characters, reflecting more on their moral misgivings and character flaws? It is difficult to speculate which of these reasons, if any, are the cause for King’s stereotypical and problematic representation of women in this collection, but one thing is certain: Just as the #metoo movement has brought to light the decades-old problem of the physical and sexual harassment of women by males in a position of power, here, too, are females that are harassed, objectified, and denigrated by male characters in positions of authority and a writer in a position of power that should definitely know better by now. Moreover, as if King’s introduction and positioning of the female characters in this collection isn’t disturbing enough, his further treatment of them within each story is equally as problematic. Often relegated to the role of either problem or caretaker within the context of the story, nearly every female is also considered a mere sexual object. It’s so overt here that it’s more a matter-of-fact, an accepted part of King’s fictional landscape that is so commonplace it has seemingly acquired a sense of normalcy. In “Premium Harmony,” for example, women are treated as objects, and Mary is clearly nothing more than a problem for her husband Ray. Married for ten years, Ray blames the deterioration of the marriage and the incessant arguing that takes place within it on the fact that Mary couldn’t get pregnant: “He thinks it might be different if they had kids, but she couldn’t have kids. They finally got tested, and that’s what the doctor said. It was her problem. Something in her.”21 The blame here lies solely with Mary. She’s a problem— the problem. Not only could she not fulfill her role to procreate like a good little wife should, but also fails as a woman/wife because she is overweight, ugly, and stupid as well. When she dies of a heart attack inside the convenient store, King uses the opportunity to prostitute her as she lies on the floor “with her legs spread and her arms by her sides.”22 She is also near a display of kickballs and a sign that reads “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” inviting the reader to see her as both toy to kick around and abuse, and a female body with an open invitation to screw around with as well. This sexualization of Mary’s dead body is further pronounced when Ray fantasizes about a dark-skinned male observer “putting his mouth on Mary’s. Frenching her, sort of.”23 This detachment from decency is further pronounced as Ray observes a woman jogging from the store toward his car as “heavier than Mary; [with] great big tits shuffle back and forth under her blue smock.”24 He even fantasizes that this particular woman might “toss him a mercy fuck”25 if he were to come back later and play his cards right. The characterization of Mary and the other woman in the story is, to say the least, problematic. They are overweight and their weight issues are used

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to define them and belittle them. Mary is literally disposed of after she is “stored” in the ambulance like an extra can of tuna tossed in the kitchen pantry, and the other woman is not even given a name because she is defined by their weight and, well, that says it all, doesn’t it? The fate of females in “Bad Little Kid” is even more dire. The story begins with convicted child killer George Hallas telling the story of why he emptied a forty-five revolver into a little kid to his attorney, Len Bradley. The first female we come upon here, his mother, is a casualty who died at the age of twenty-two of a pulmonary embolism just hours after he was born. Hallas chalks it up to a genetic defect, and while seemingly innocuous, this character portrayal reveals one of two things: his mother was genetically damaged in some way—not quite solid goods—and her untimely death in some way lead to the tragic trajectory of what would become George’s life. The next female in this story is a black housekeeper named Nona McCarthy. She is referred to as Mama Nonie by George and his description of her is telling: “She was black. I suppose he [George’s father] slept with her, although when I slipped into her bed—which I did on many mornings—she was always alone.”26 The fact that she was black, coupled with the immediate assumption by George that his father was sleeping with her though he had no proof of it, places Mama Nonie back in the shackles of slavery when masters slept with the female slaves within their charge. And King, it seems, is aware of this connection because George makes a statement immediately afterward that is out of context within the scene when he says, “I didn’t know what black had to do with anything. She was good to me, she made my lunches and read me the usual bedtimes stories when my father wasn’t home to do it, and that was all that mattered to me.”27 But clearly it wasn’t all that mattered. Her color becomes an issue in George’s mind, one that he must defend and contend with, thus putting it out for display to the reader who is held harmless in his or her reading of this character as a contemporary slave. This becomes even more pronounced later when they move and Mama Nonie gets her own living space, which sounds suspiciously like slave quarters. King writes, “Mama Nonie liked it because my father turned the garage into a two-room apartment for her.”28 Sadly, what King provides here is a black housekeeper adept at making lunches and reading stories, who is probably sleeping with her boss, and who seems pleasantly content with a two-room apartment in the garage. Her willingness to be content with so little speaks volumes to what we can assume is her lack of education and opportunity. She is a caretaker, and a black one at that, which positions her even lower on King’s female totem pole. With Mama Nonie tucked safely away in her second-class quarters, the reader then is introduced to eleven-year-old Marlee who sees the world “all soft and out of focus . . . [as she is] soft in the head.”29 She “was a big girl,

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at least four inches taller than me and already getting her breasts”30 and she quickly becomes a target for the titular bad little kid. The bad little kid, it seems, is actually out to torment George Hallas through the years, and yet the casualties that occur as a result—all females—are par for the course. Consequently, they become mere pawns in King’s disposable landscape of female characters found within Bazaar of Bad Dreams, almost suggesting that the bad dream at the root of this volume has two X chromosomes and therefore needs to be mitigated, forgotten, or even eliminated. To that end, Marlee is killed when the bad little kid strategically throws her Steve Austin lunchbox (how implausible to have a little girl with a female role model like the Bionic Woman) into the path of an oncoming car whose accelerator happens to stick. Marlee is then struck and killed by the kind and jolly first grade teacher, Mrs. Peckham, who was “the kind of teacher you remember forty years later.”31 Here King destroys two female lives in one shot. And yet King is not finished. Another female in this yarn, Vicky Abington, is “a beautiful girl with masses of curly blond hair, very thin and high-strung . . . [but with] a great sense of humor, which is something many beautiful women seem to lack.”32 Later, she is described as a pill-popping actress with mommy issues who “knew she wasn’t good enough,”33 and, of course, the bad little kid targets this insecurity. She is taunted after a mediocre audition and hangs herself. Meanwhile, George’s father passes away, and within a year Mama Nonie “bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck.”34 These changes are attributed to the bad little kid who prank calls her and spews names like “nigger bitch,”35 but is this the reason? She readily admits, “I don’t mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back,”36 but one must wonder if this fortitude is genuine. Or, for that matter, one must wonder why King would create such a thin character whose only real purpose is to care for her white employers and endure the typical stings of racist rhetoric. Regardless, Mama Nonie ends up dying alone of a heart attack on the kitchen floor, a room that is hardly a coincidental choice on King’s part. The only woman that survives in “Bad Little Kid” is Carla, Vicky’s friend who ends up marrying George, but her survival comes at the cost of being pummeled down a flight of stairs that causes a miscarriage to the child she was hoping for. As a result she turns away from her marriage and loses faith in her religion. When all is said and done, all of the women in this story are nothing more than collateral damage in George Hallas’s life as he works out whatever karmic debt the bad little kid seems to be doling out. These women didn’t stand a chance because even if they knew they were in the line of fire, King created them in such a way that none of them would have had the wherewithal or sense to get out of the way.

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In yet another instance of depicting the female in a denigrated role, the two women of note in “Ur,” Ellen Silverman and Candy Rymer, both fulfill stereotypical roles. Ellen is simultaneously the “source of spite that moved Wesley to buy a Kindle,”37 causing the problem that becomes the impetus of the entire story, and she also fulfills the role of damsel in distress that Wesley must save to stroke his male ego. Described by her “dynamite figure” and ability to “kiss like a dervish” established earlier, Wesley further dismisses any intelligence she has by calling her an “illiterate bitch.”38 Ellen is not actually illiterate, but Wesley nonetheless gives her this moniker because “the only book she’d read for pleasure since coming to Moore was Reach for the Summit: The Definite Dozen System for Succeeding at Whatever You Do, by Tennessee Lady Vols coach Pat Summit,”39 which is apparently an intellectual far cry from his reading of James Dickey’s Deliverance. Though a successful basketball coach that leads her team to victory, Ellen’s coaching skills are largely dismissed and her role in the story becomes the helpless female that needs a male to save her from a fate that she doesn’t know is coming—death by bus accident, a fate that she inadvertently sets into motion by prompting Wesley to purchase a Kindle that provides him with news and information from the future, and it is in this (potential) future that Ellen dies because of Wesley’s ill-fated attempt at being the hero who tries to ensure that Ellen will not die. Indeed, she both creates the problem, and must be the problem that he fixes—the damsel he saves—because women in King’s universe, or at least his most recent universe, are apparently not capable of saving themselves. Candy Rymer, the drunken driver set to crash into Ellen’s bus, is not worthy of being saved, however. She’s little more than a “booze bomb waiting to happen . . . [a] drunken who-gives-a-shit bitch,”40 a woman whom Wesley slaps three times, splitting her lip, in a lame attempt to sober her up. The fact that she is a single mother of three has no bearing on him. He would have continued his physical attack if not stopped by his student, Robbie. Candy is a hopeless, friendless alcoholic who has failed at AA, received at least half a dozen DUIs, and lost her license multiple times. Clearly, she’s beyond the ability to help herself and is little more than a disposable entity and sordid problem that Wesley has to deal with in order to save Ellen. She is a shallow husk that did not have to be female to make this story work, yet she fit the bill for this collection and is cast as a driver with the potential to crash into the bus because, quite possibly, King’s more professional and powerful male characters would have been far too bright to allow their worlds to sink to such levels of dysfunction. Perhaps the most baffling element to all of this is that King, himself, fails to see the stereotypical, shallow female characterizations he has put forward in this collection. In an interview with Diane Rehm in November of 2015,

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shortly after The Bazaar of Bad Dreams was published, King was asked how he thought his writing has changed since the publication of Carrie. In response he said: There are things in those early books that strike me as clumsy, and there are characterizations that seem a little bit shallow to me, but they have a great deal of forward motion, a great deal of energy that's a young man's energy so that I have a tendency to see, you know, it's like something's lost, and something's gained, not to sound like a Joni Mitchell song. But really as you get older, you might lose some of your narrative drive, but you gain in terms of characterization and texture.41 

Where is the “characterization and texture” he is talking about? Since this interview focuses on the release of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, one can assume he is referring to this collection as one that has gained in these ways, yet there is nothing gained here. If anything, his characterization of women has taken a huge backslide right into the days before Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder. Heidi Strengell discusses the positive aspects of King’s portrayal of women once his trilogy of female novels was published, and points to an interview whereby King claims, “A lot of my efforts in writing about women were made because I wanted to understand women and try to escape the stereotyping that goes on in so much male fiction.”42 While this may have been true at one point, most of the stories within The Bazaar of Bad Dreams really do not seem to attempt to understand women or escape the stereotyping; rather, it appears that they seek to promulgate it. Assuredly, King doesn’t fare any better in his portrayal of 12-year-old Gwendy in the novella Gwendy’s Button Box. She is introduced, walking, jogging, then running up what she calls the Suicide Stairs in a desperate attempt to lose weight. Her hair hangs in sweaty clumps, she is bent over and out of breath, but there is a degree of satisfaction because “when she straightens up and looks down the length of her body, she can see the tips of her sneakers.”43 She is completely obsessed with her weight, which lends itself to a conversation and an opening for her to meet Richard Farris, a creepy man in a black coat and hat who ultimately gives her a button box that will consume her even more than her preoccupation with her weight. Farris says, “‘I notice you are a bit on the plump side,’”44 and then theorizes that, “somebody tweaked you about your weight, or how you look, or both, and you decided to take the matter in hand.”45 It is this particular weakness that King exploits, and Farris jumps on, as a way to get the button box into Gwendy’s hands. After all, it dispenses small chocolate treats that will satisfy her sweet tooth, curb her appetite, and fix the overarching weight problem that seems to only plague the females in King’s literary landscape (save, say,

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Billy Halleck from Thinner). Since her appearance is her main preoccupation, she takes the box, almost like a lamb walking blindly to the slaughter, and before she realizes it, she is now the hand-picked steward of the world’s most dangerous box. But to what end? What is Gwendy’s purpose in having this box? To ultimately kill a bully at the end of the story? Other than a preoccupation with Gwendy’s weight, and watching her stress out over her responsibility as the steward of the potentially dangerous button box, little happens in this story. In the review titled, “Nothing Happens in Gwendy’s Button Box,” author Max Booth aptly states: For a book about a doomsday box, there is almost no tension found within the pages. Even the ominous black button, which hints at some form of cancer or massive destruction, never really comes into play. It’s a classic Chekhov’s gun if I’ve ever seen one. . . . Even the characterization here is very lazy, which is not typical for a King story. The titular Gwendy is the least interesting person I think I’ve ever read about, and the villainous bully couldn’t have been more predictable.46

What King and Chizmar have accomplished here is little more than a cruel psychological experiment whereby a stranger entrusts a potentially dangerous item to an overweight girl in order to observe her soul-crushing struggle as she grapples with the responsibility of protecting the world from destruction. And struggle she does. Gwendy is, pardon the pun, eaten alive by the enormity (again, pardon the pun) of the secret she must hide. She realizes early on that “secrets are a problem, maybe the biggest problem of all. They weigh on the mind and take up space in the world.”47 To be sure, King and Chizmar cannot resist the constant reminders regarding Gwendy’s physical appearance—“biggest,” “weight,” “take up space,” yet beyond these almost callously specific word choices, Gwendy is further relegated to a weak, imperfect woman as she too shallow to realize the extent to which she is being manipulated and controlled by the button box. She sees the problem the box creates, but refuses to fully acknowledge how much her life is taken over by her role as guardian of it. Her “worries about the box being discovered or stolen are like a constant background hum in her head,”48 but this is quickly mitigated because “those worries never come close to ruling her.”49 This is, of course, a lie: Gwendy is constantly on high alert, worrying that she will fail at her duty to keep it safe. She is so ruled by this that she wakes up with her hands pressed over her mouth to hold in a scream, still in the grip of the most vivid nightmare she’s ever had. In it she looked out the window over the kitchen sink and saw Henry sitting in the tire swing. . . . He had the button box in his lap. Gwendy rushed out, shouting at him, telling him not to press any of the buttons, especially not the black one.50

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Gwendy, however, chooses to dismiss the overwhelming burden of how this box takes over her life because she has a huge lack of faith in her own ability to change her world, even though the novella opens up with her clearly in the throes of doing just that—running to lose weight and change her life. Instead of seeing her own power (and embracing her ability to change her world, even if she is merely the custodian of a tool that will accomplish such a feat), she attributes all of the positive things in her life to the button box, thereby relinquishing her own power to an inanimate object. King also writes that she resents Mr. Farris at times, but mostly she doesn’t because the box gives gifts: Small recompense, he said, but the gifts don’t seem so small to Gwendy; her memory is better, she no longer wants to eat everything in the fridge, her vision is twenty-twenty, she can run like the wind, there’s something else, too. Her mother called her very pretty, but her friend Olive is willing to go farther. “Jesus, you’re gorgeous,” she says.51

Here it is clear that Gwendy has no faith in her own personal power and ability for transformation, a transformation that would have most likely occurred without the interference of Farris or the button box. In fact, the inclusion of the button box in her life robs Gwendy of personal power as all of the positive changes she experiences are attributed to it, to something outside of her, as opposed to the internal strength she actually possesses. If anything, the button box keeps her right where King likes his females: in a state of personal disempowerment so they are easily controlled. The story continues along in this vein right up until the end as Gwendy never fully realizes or embraces her own power. In short, Farris enters her life, uses her weight issues as an inroad to gain her trust, gives her a ridiculous responsibility, robs her of any understanding of her own personal power, then disappears, presumably watching from the sidelines. Toward the end, when Gwendy finally achieves some semblance of happiness and normalcy as a young adult about to enter college, the novella’s predictable bully jumps out of the closet, kills her boyfriend with the button box for no reason and, in a short and feeble fight, he is condemned to hell by Gwendy’s use of a knife and her use of the red button. She will now have to carry the encumbrance of seeing her first love murdered, and of killing someone else in the process. This is a huge cross to bear that is sure to further squelch any belief in herself long after the box is gone. Gwendy, like the female characters in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, gains nothing from her experiences in this story. Yes, the neat little chocolate treats from the box helped curb her appetite and she succeeds in losing weight, but this could have been achieved quite easily with, say, a diet of Slim Fast and more jogs up the Suicide Steps. There is no logical reason for Gwendy to

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have been made the steward of the button box at all, except for the fact that she was an easy target and, based on her weight issue, was insecure enough to be manipulated. All in all, Gwendy is nothing more than some sort of bizarre experiment for Farris and she gains nothing having been through this experience that she couldn’t have gained easier and more effectively on her own. King and Chizmar offer a somewhat positive ending with the insinuation that Gwendy will eventually become a writer, but what good is a disempowered writer who believes that her own success derives from outside of herself? King’s characterization of women in his recent literary landscape is a far cry from what he achieved with the writing and publication of Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder. He has fallen back into shallow and stereotypical portrayals of female characters that render them powerless and disposable. He is clearly populating his fiction with a literary culture of women whose only power lies in their ability to speak directly to the sense of the reader, pointing out the inexcusable lack of responsibility and the literary laziness that has become part and parcel of King’s recent worlds. His female characters may not have the ability to save themselves, but they are screaming for King to save their future sisters, many of whom will most likely fall into the cracks of patriarchal dominance and imposed frailty just as they did. But they shout nonetheless, and they smash their fists into the air, demanding that the reader, King’s Constant Reader, no longer stand for the perpetual stereotypes that women across the world are currently fighting to free themselves from. Still, King can write strong, well-rounded, powerful female characters. But with respect to his more recent fictions, one is left to ask the following question: So why isn’t he? NOTES 1. Stephen King, Introduction to “Drunken Fireworks,” in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster: 2015), 447. 2. Theresa Thompson and Margaret Lant, Introduction to Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1998), 4. 3. Carol Senf, “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice,” in Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, eds. Theresa Thompson and Margaret Lant (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1998), 91–110. 4. King, “Mile 81,” 24. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Beth Younger, “Women in Horror: Victims No More,” The Conversation, June 25, 2017. http:​//the​conve​rsati​on.co​m/wom​en-in​-horr​or-vi​ctims​-no-m​ore-7​8711.​

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9. Stephen King, “Premium Harmony,” in Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2015), 54. 10. Ibid., 55. 11. Stephen King, “Bad Little Kid,” in Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2015), 104. 12. Ibid. 13. Stephen King, “Ur,” in Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2015), 211. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 254. 16. Stephen King, “Herman Wouk is Still Alive,” in Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2015), 270. 17. Stephen King, “Obits,” in Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2015), 414. 18. Ibid., 415. 19. Ibid. 20. Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 147. 21. King, “Premium Harmony,” 53. 22. Ibid., 57. 23. Ibid., 58. 24. Ibid., 57. 25. Ibid., 59. 26. King, “Bad Little Kid,” 103. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 104. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 105. 31. Ibid., 108. 32. Ibid., 112. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 118. 35. Ibid., 119. 36. Ibid. 37. King, “Ur,” 210. 38. Ibid., 213. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 256. 41. “Stephen King: The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams.” The Diane Rehm Show, November 3, 2015. https​://di​anere​hm.or​g/sho​ws/20​15-11​-03/s​tephe​n-kin​g-the​-baza​ar-of​ -bad-​dream​s. 42. Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King, 16. 43. Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, Gwendy’s Button Box (Baltimore: Cemetery Dance, 2017), 8.

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44. Ibid. 11. 45. Ibid. 46. Max Booth, “Nothing Happens in Gwendy’s Button Box.” Dark Moon Digest, n.d., http:​//www​.dark​moond​igest​.com/​nothi​ng-ha​ppens​-gwen​dys-b​utton​-box/​. 47. Ibid., 28. 48. Ibid., 47. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 49. 51. Ibid., 48.

Part II

UBIQUITOUS VIOLENCE

Chapter 5

Monsters At Home Representations of Domestic and Sexual Abuse in Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder Kimberly Beal

Since 1974, Stephen King’s job has been to terrify readers and, plainly put, he is very good at his job. His fiction is populated with every kind of horror imaginable, from classic horror-genre monsters such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves (oh, my!), to more unique monsters such as shit-weasel aliens, a murderous Plymouth, and a demonic, otherworldly clown. King also makes use of many non-supernatural monsters in his novels, such as shadowy government organizations, psychotic serial killers, and a rabid St. Bernard. The horrors that King is most adept at describing, however, are the horrors of the everyday: the school bully who terrorizes and traumatizes fellow students, the inexplicable loss of a loved one, the abusive parent or spouse. It is this last type of horror that this chapter will focus on. Indeed, King’s oeuvre is rife with examples of domestic violence and child abuse, beginning with Margaret White’s treatment of her daughter in Carrie and continuing up through some of King’s most recent works. More to the point, women and children are almost universally the victims of this kind of violence and, in many of King’s earliest works, the primarily female victims are unable to escape their abuse or to protect their children from the abuse. The abuse may stop, but it is through the intervention of another, such as in Cujo when Joe Camber’s abuse of his wife, Charity, is ended when he is killed by his son’s dog. This lack of agency is one of the main reasons that King has been criticized for his portrayal of women in his fiction. King has made some attempt to combat his problematic female characters by publishing works that center on women and women’s issues. The criticism often leveled at King’s female characters is that they are 61

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unrealistic and undeveloped as compared to his male and child characters. The criticism is best summed up by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: “It is disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength and vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty.”1 In response to this negative reaction to his early female characters, King wrote several novels in the early to mid-1990s—Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder—that focus on female characters and female issues. These novels all feature strong women—Jessie Burlingame, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Daniels—who are able to overcome their horrifying circumstances without the aid of male characters as, simply put, these three female characters display a depth that is missing from King’s earlier novels. The novels each deal primarily with the horrors of domestic abuse, the difficult struggles the female protagonists face in escaping their abusers, and the various ways in which they attempt to rebuild their lives and heal the psychological wounds left by their experiences. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie Burlingame is forced to deal not only with emotional abuse from her husband and his attempted sexual assault, but also with sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Dolores Claiborne’s titular character is first forced to face physical abuse from her husband, and then must contend with his continued abuse of their three children, particularly his sexual abuse of their daughter. Finally, Rose Madder focuses on Rose Daniels’ experiences with extreme physical, emotional, and sexual abuse perpetrated by her psychotic husband and his pursuit of her after she finally escapes their marriage. In these three novels, however, King is doing much more than just describing the horrors of domestic violence in order to scare or unnerve his readers. He is actively highlighting domestic violence as a social problem, both by debunking many problematic myths surrounding domestic abuse and by exposing the ways in which society compounds the trauma of victims and prevents them from escaping their abusers or healing psychologically. In her article, “Even Stephen Gets Even,” Sally Owen discusses King’s focus on domestic violence in these three novels. Owen focuses on the question of King’s role as a feminist, first recounting King’s words—“In the world we live in,” King says, “feminism is a commitment and entertainment can be a luxury. My writing is entertainment”2—and then further commenting Hundreds of thousands of women, whether they call themselves feminists or not, read Stephen King’s stories. King would like his books to speak for themselves. Rose Daniels is counseled: Men are beasts. Should we sit by the side of the road . . . bewailing our fate? . . . Rogue beasts must be dealt with. And we must go about that task with hopeful hearts, for the next beast may always be different. What they say is subversive as hell.3

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For Owen, King’s writing represents a subversive, even feminist, view on domestic violence and sexual assault. Although King denies that his fiction falls under the umbrella of feminism, it is clear to Owen, and to many who have read Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder, that these novels are feminist. This fact is significant to the examination of these novels because it is their feminist influence that sets them apart from his early works. King is attempting to portray female characters in these novels as not merely victims and as capable of rescuing themselves from the abusive situations that they find themselves in. King is also pointing to society—patriarchal and conservative—as co-conspirators in the abuse that women suffer. Ultimately, King is using his status not only as a famous writer but also as a man to call attention to these issues, an act that, as Owen points out, it both subversive and feminist. In her book Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling, Janice Haaken points to three types of domestic violence narratives that are most often seen in popular culture: The first genre, stories of bondage, centers on the female protagonist’s awakening knowledge of the household as a site of danger. . . . During periods of feminist mobilization, literary portraits of domestic confinement tend toward the gothic, dramatizing the seductively pernicious trap of marriage and family. Menacing forces surround the female protagonist, as she begins to discern the shadowy figure of her husband in the engulfing darkness. The second genre, stories of deliverance, casts the woman as an active agent in plotting her escape. Whereas stories of domestic bondage center on an interior world where the female protagonist creates distance through madness or submission to her beastly husband, stories of deliverance center on the obstacles negotiated in charting a path out of this state of pernicious confinement. The third genre, stories of struggle and reparation, dramatizes engagement in ideals that elude full realization and exceed the standard denouements that offer means of containing the conflict.4

In essence, stories of bondage are stories in which the female protagonist discovers that the central male figure in her life is physically, emotionally, and even sexually dangerous or abusive. These stories focus on the protagonist identifying abuse as abuse. Stories of deliverance are stories that focus on a woman’s escape from her abuser. Stories of struggle and reparation focus on the challenges women face after they have left their abusers and often do not have neat, satisfactory endings. Haaken’s three domestic violence story types are helpful in examining King’s three novels in three ways. First, Haaken’s definitions provide a way of delineating King’s earlier works that involve domestic violence from these three novels that focus on it. While many of King’s earlier female characters

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are obviously being abused, many are not able to articulate it as abuse. Wendy Torrence from The Shining, for instance, is clearly being emotionally abused by her husband, Jack, particularly when he is drinking and as he descends into madness at the Overlook. However, Wendy never acknowledges that she is, in fact, an abused woman. Even when his earlier female characters are able to identify their own abuse, their understanding or revelations are sidelined in favor of the overall plot of the novel. For instance, Charity Camber from Cujo knows that her husband’s occasional physical abuse is abuse, but her acknowledgment of that is secondary to the novel’s focus on Cujo’s progressing rabies. The second way that Haaken’s three story types are useful is in the ways in which they can be combined within a particular work. Although Haaken does not consider this—her definitions suggest three distinct and mutually exclusive categories—it is clear that Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder each begin with a character unwilling or unable to acknowledge that she is being abused, examine her struggles to escape her abuse, and, most importantly, highlight the consequences—negative and positive—of her escape. Thus, each novel begins as a story of bondage, evolves into a story of deliverance, and eventually becomes a story of struggle and reparation. What makes each novel distinct from the others is that each focuses more heavily on different areas of this evolution—Gerald’s Game focuses more heavily on being a story of bondage, Rose Madder is primarily a story of deliverance, and Dolores Claiborne is principally a story of struggle and reparation. Finally, Haaken’s story types are useful because they provide a framework for looking beyond the protagonists and their abusers to construct a more holistic view of domestic violence. Stories of bondage must not only explore the protagonist’s discovery of her own danger and abuse, but of the societal norms that mask or normalize her abuse. Stories of deliverance must not only focus on the mechanics of escape but also on the social pressures that can often prevent escape. Finally, stories of struggle and reparation, by definition, focus on the healing process, which also involves dealing with the social stigma of being an abuse survivor. HEARING VOICES: VICTIM BLAMING AND SELF-HEALING IN GERALD’S GAME Gerald’s Game tells the story of Jessie Burlingame, a middle-aged housewife who finds herself in the most unlikely of life and death struggles. After she lashes out at her husband, Gerald, to protect herself from being raped by him, he dies of a massive heart attack and Jessie is left handcuffed to the bed of her lake house, miles from any neighbors and with no one coming to rescue

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her. Jessie is forced to search her repressed memories of being molested by her father in order to come up with a way to escape her bonds. All the while, she is being stalked by a mysterious figure—the Space Cowboy—a figure Jessie alternately perceives to be her father’s corpse and the specter of death, and who ultimately turns out to be a very real, Ed Gein-esque fiend. While the plot of the novel seems far-fetched, even by King standards, the story highlights some very real issues concerning domestic violence: that it is often unseen, that the lack of obviously recognizable abuse leads many victims to blame themselves, and that victims must confront their experiences in order to heal and move on. There is very little critical scholarship that is focused on, or even mentions, Gerald’s Game. The novel is, unfortunately, caught in the dead zone (pun very much intended) of King scholarship. Essentially, there is very little scholarship on anything King has written since around 1987 (hence the book you now hold). Even articles on the subject of women’s issues in King’s writing tend to ignore Gerald’s Game, an odd phenomenon, considering the novel’s connection to Dolores Claiborne and its focus on similar issues of domestic and sexual violence. Nonetheless, domestic violence and abuse are the central focus of the novel. The most obvious instances of abuse that Jessie faces are her father’s sexual molestation and Gerald’s attempted rape of her. However, there are actually three people who abuse Jessie throughout the novel, and the abuse is not just sexual. First, Jessie is emotionally abused by her mother. She describes her mother as having emotional outbursts toward her, including one particularly frightening scene in which Sally screamed “at the top of her lungs that the next time Maddy forgot to wrap her used tampons in toilet paper before throwing them in the trash she would kill her.”5 Through Jessie’s recollection, King is describing a mother who is emotionally and mentally abusive to her children, especially her two daughters. Her tirades, as Jessie refers to them, left her daughters frightened and, in Jessie’s case, so traumatized that the incidents had a dramatic impact on Jessie’s life. The most obvious example of this impact comes in Jessie’s refusal to tell her mother that her father molested her. Sally’s emotional abuse of Jessie seems to stem from Jessie’s relationship with her father. After Tom asks his wife if Jessie can remain behind with him at the lake house during the eclipse, the two argue. During the fight, Sally tells Tom, “Sometimes you behave as if she were your girlfriend instead of your daughter!”6 Sally clearly sees Jessie as a threat to her marriage, that the attention Jessie gets from her father as taking attention away from her. This places Jessie in a difficult position: her father, the only parent she feels she can talk to, betrays her trust in the most horrific manner, but she cannot turn to her mother for help because her mother’s behavior has led Jessie to mistrust and fear her.

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Jessie also suffers abuse, both sexual and psychological, at the hands of her father. Jessie, who loves her father and prefers his company to that of her mother and siblings, asks her father to allow her to remain at home during the eclipse. She believes that her father convinces her mother to agree to the new plan because he loves her, but it is clear that it is because he intends to molest his daughter. Tom’s preplanning is evinced in his request that Jessie wear her new sundress. Of the dress, King writes, “It was pretty enough . . . but it was also too small and too tight.”7 Later, after Tom has abused Jessie, he tells her, “Why don’t you go inside and change into jeans, Punkin? I guess maybe the sundress wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”8 While it does not occur to Jessie at the time, it is clear to readers that not only has Tom molested his daughter, he planned the abuse well in advance. Further, after he sends Jessie into the house to change clothes, Tom follows her in and compounds his sexual abuse by manipulating her into never telling anyone what had occurred. He presents first a parental concern for her well-being, asking, “Are you all right, Jessie? . . . Not feeling faint or anything?”9 He then feigns vulnerability by seeming to be near tears as he apologizes to his daughter. When Jessie asks if they have to tell her mother what has happened, Tom strikes. He tells her that they do, indeed, need to tell her mother: “‘I hate to . . . because things have been pretty tense between the two of us just lately, hon . . . A thing like this could make them a lot worse. She hasn’t been very . . . well, very affectionate lately, and that was most of the problem today. A man has . . . certain needs. You’ll understand about that somed—.’”10 Jessie interrupts, begging him not to tell Sally, claiming that “‘if she finds out, she’ll say it was my fault!”11 Tom responds by saying, “Oh, no—I don’t think so. . . . No-ooo . . . I’m sure—well, fairly sure—that she . . .”12 Tom is capitalizing on the emotional abuse his wife has shown Jessie in order to hide his crime by leading his daughter to believe that she is correct, that her mother will blame her for what her father has done and also that she is, in fact, to blame for what happened. In addition, by assigning some of the blame to his wife for not being affectionate enough, Tom not only absolves, in his daughter’s eyes, his own responsibility for his actions, but ensures that Jessie will never reveal his secret. The abuse from her parents informs Jessie’s entire life, including her marrying a man who is equally as abusive. Gerald is not only sexually abusive, but emotionally abusive as well. Long before the bondage games begin, Gerald isolates Jessie by forcing her to give up her substitute teaching job. For Jessie, her teaching “formed a bridge to the life she had lived before she’d met Gerald at that Republican mixer,”13 a life she lived on her own while gainfully employed and without any bonds to anyone. This passage is important, particularly as Finley acknowledges that “other forms of abuse include

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isolating victims from loved ones or supporters, and then manipulating or controlling them through a variety of means.”14 Gerald tells her that quitting her job will make dealing with their taxes easier, but readers recognize it is a common tactic of abusive husbands: to take away their connection to other people and the outside world. Gerald’s interest in and desire to participate in bondage are not abusive in their own right, but they become abusive when he refuses to see that Jessie is not interested in participating anymore. Jessie quickly loses interest in Gerald’s games, but she continues to go along with them because “It has been years since she’d seen that much heat in Gerald’s gaze when he looked at her,”15 but her actual feelings toward the games were much different as, to put it lightly, “They made her feel demeaned.”16 She also goes along with his bondage games, even though she is not interested and even disgusted by them, in order to keep from causing conflict and to keep Gerald happy. This abuse comes to a head when Gerald listens to her pleas to be uncuffed from the bed and chooses to attempt to have sex with her anyway. Jessie has at first agreed to the bondage game, this time with handcuffs, but after she is cuffed to the headboard, she decides that she no longer wants to go along with Gerald’s plans. She first asks, then demands, to be uncuffed, requests that Gerald chooses to ignore. Instead, he chooses to pretend that Jessie’s protestations are part of the bondage game: “He knew she wasn’t kidding about not wanting to go on with it. He knew, but he had chosen not to know he knew.”17 This time, however, Jessie refuses to be victimized, lashing out at Gerald with both feet and subsequently causing his fatal heart attack and placing herself in a far more dangerous situation. The first aspect of domestic violence that King is highlighting in this novel is the tendency for victims to blame themselves for their abuse. Finley notes that “Women who are psychologically abused often feel as though there is something wrong with them . . . because their abuser typically tells them that it is their fault”18 and that “abusers and rapists almost always claim it is the victim’s fault, not theirs.”19 For Jessie, this happens with all three of her abusers. First, she begins to believe that she is somehow being a difficult child, as her mother insists, and that her being difficult is what has caused her father’s abuse. And as an adult, trapped in her own lake house, Jessie’s thoughts return to her mother: “Her mother might not have come right out and said so, but yes—she would have believed it was Jessie’s fault”20 These thoughts clearly indicate that Jessie has internalized her mother’s critique of her, often referring to Jessie as “the squeaky wheel,” and that she would have been blamed by her mother for what her father has done to her. Jessie does not just fear that her mother will blame her for what happened, however. She quickly comes to believe that she is actually responsible for

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her father abusing her. After the molestation, Jessie’s father sends her into the house to change. There, Jessie first begins to blame herself for what happened: She turned on the light and pulled the sundress over her head in one quick jerk. She threw it into the laundry hamper, glad to be rid of it. She looked at herself in the mirror, wide-eyed, and saw a little girl’s face . . . [and] a little girl’s body, too—flat-chested and slim-hipped—but it wouldn’t be that way for long. It had already started to change, and it had done something to her father it had no business doing.21

Jessie first blames her body for what her father has done, but then just as quickly shifts to blaming herself and her own behavior. As she is trying to figure out what story to tell her mother about the underwear she has washed, Jessie has her first encounter with one of the voices she will hear as an adult: “Already you’re thinking like a criminal, the voice that would one day belong to the Goodwife mourned. Do you see what being a bad girl gets you, Jessie? Do you?”22 Jessie, in the space of a few moments, has gone from fearing that she will be blamed for her father’s actions by her mother, to blaming her changing body, to finally blaming it on her own supposedly bad behavior. The Goodwife voice that Jessie first hears as a child represents the guilt and shame that Jessie feels and the voice often pushes Jessie to punish herself for things that are not her fault. This voice is horrified when she kicks, and accidently kills, Gerald for attempting to rape her, both because she had gone along with his bondage games in the past and because he is her husband and therefore should be in charge. After the initial strike, Goodwife Burlingame is stunned at Jessie’s action; even more startling, the voice had initially urged Jessie to “Just lie there quietly and let him shoot his squirt,”23 so it is clear that Jessie’s experiences as a child have conditioned her to be quiet and passive and not make a fuss, even to protect herself. When she does lash out at her husband, a part of Jessie’s psyche is stunned—what King calls the Goodwife voice (which is a repressed and guilt-ridden aspect of Jessie’s mind)—and immediately tries to punish Jessie for her outburst. When Jessie starts to assess her situation, and realizes that there is a good possibility that she could die before anyone realizes where she is, this thought breaks in: “You had to kick him in the guts and the nuts, didn’t you? . . . Let’s cut to the chase, dear: you murdered him. So maybe you deserve to be right here, handcuffed to this bed.24 After decades of believing that, because she wanted to stay home with her father to watch the eclipse, she was responsible for Tom Mahout molesting her, Jessie has come to believe that any attempt to change the established routine will, and should, result in her being punished. The Goodwife side of her psyche gives voice to

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this belief: Jessie refused to just let Gerald rape her, so now she deserves to die. The mention of Jessie as being “Tom Mahout’s good little girl” clearly indicates that Jessie, at least unconsciously, has connected these two events together. King is also acknowledging in the novel that healing is a necessary step for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. As Finley states, “Rarely does popular culture present the healing process. . . . One exception to this is in popular fiction books, which, because the medium allows for more extensive coverage, sometimes present victims in the healing process. . . . Therapists are . . . depicted as the key component of healing, although in reality many victims do not seek therapeutic assistance.”25 In ­Gerald’s Game, King is breaking from this pattern. Although the healing process is the main focus of the final chapter of the novel, King does not have Jessie see a therapist. In fact, King actively prevents Jessie from returning to her previous therapist, Nora who dies of leukemia. So, instead of sending Jessie to a therapist, King focuses more on self-healing. King demonstrates his version of self-healing through the different voices that Jessie hears as she is trying to escape the handcuffs. Jessie hears many voices in her own head during her ordeal at the lake house, including those of herself; Ruth Neary, her college roommate and the voice that represents her anger; Goody Burlingame, who represents her willingness to go along with Gerald to avoid conflict; Punkin, the child version of Jessie who represents her childhood innocence; her mother; her therapist, Nora; and several other mystery voices that Jessie refers to as UFO voices. Probably the most important voice is that of Ruth Neary. Not only is it Ruth’s voice that leads Jessie to fight back against Gerald and prevent herself from being raped, it is Ruth’s voice that confronts Jessie about blaming herself for her father’s abuse. In response to Jessie’s repeated minimizing of her father’s culpability, Ruth’s voice interrupts her: “You’re still making excuses for him, aren’t you? . . . He planned it, Jessie. Don’t you understand? It wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment thing, a sex-starved father copping a quick feel; he planned it . . . ask yourself this—whose idea was it for you to wear the sundress? The one that was both too small and too tight?”26 She very clearly tells Jessie that she is not to blame, that her father is responsible for his actions, and, earlier, that Jessie need not feel guilty about Gerald’s death. Ruth’s voice is the strongest in the novel and this shows that Jessie has come to a point where she is tired of blaming herself and wants to be angry at her father and her husband. It is also significant that it is the real Ruth Neary that Jessie writes her cathartic letter to. At the end of her letter, she tells the real Ruth, “I love you, dear Ruth. You and your tough talk were a big part of saving my life last October.”27 Jessie’s letter to Ruth is a symbolic representation of her shift from merely living with her abuse to actively attempting to heal her psychological and emotional wounds. By acknowledging the real Ruth,

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Jessie is showing that the no longer needs the Ruth-voice to tell her that she is not to blame for her own abuse because she has finally accepted that truth. The most important myth the King is attempting to debunk is that victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse are somehow the cause of their own abuse. The most horrific part of Jessie’s story is not that she was molested by her father, not that she was nearly raped by her husband, not that she was left handcuffed to a bed by her dead husband, not that she is menaced by Raymond Joubert. Rather, it is that she was forced by her father’s manipulation, her mother’s emotional abuse, and society’s apathy toward issues of domestic and sexual abuse, to keep silent about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Jessie’s inability to talk about her abuse leads her to blame herself for what happened and prevents her from moving toward recovery. King is attempting, through Jessie’s story, to expose the damage that blaming victims can cause. ISOLATION AND THE HORRORS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE IN STEPHEN KING’S DOLORES CLAIBORNE Dolores Claiborne is not a horror story, but a novel about the horrific. Dolores and her children are the victims of her husband’s verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and, throughout the story, Dolores finds nearly every path to freedom from Joe St. George blocked to her except one—murder. The novel is unique among King’s works because of the choice of narrative voice that King uses: Dolores’s is the only character who speaks; all the other voices in the novel are “spoken” through Dolores. The novel is often seen by critics as an attempt by King to address the criticisms leveled at his female characters by focusing on women’s issues. However, the unique narrative voice in this novel indicates that something more complicated is going on in the novel. King is doing more than just highlighting the horrors of domestic abuse and demonstrating the resolve of Maine women. Instead, he is attempting—through both Dolores’s story and through the stylistic choices he makes—to call attention to an even worse horror: the isolation that victims of domestic abuse often face both while they are being abused and when they try to leave their abusers. The novel continues one of King’s most prevalent themes: that of the domestic space being the site of the most damaging horrors. Dolores Claiborne somewhat breaks King’s typical pattern of holding domestic monsters—typically parents who abuse their children—up next to supernatural horrors in order to show that no monster can be as terrifying as those you love, by not including a supernatural villain for the characters to fight. Instead, King chooses to focus solely on the horrors of domestic violence.

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Dolores recounts, in her blunt, matter-of-fact way, how her husband used to beat her on a regular basis, until she responded to his violence with her own: breaking a cream pitcher over his head and threatening him with a hatchet. The true horror of the novel is revealed when Selena reveals to her mother that Joe had been molesting her: “he’d done just about everything a man can do to a woman short of fucking her . . . and frightened her into doing any number of things to him, as well.”28 In a novel lacking any supernatural monsters, Joe St. George is more than monstrous enough to frighten readers. Although the central part of the novel focuses on Dolores’s attempts to escape her abusive husband, first by leaving and then by murder, the novel is not a story of deliverance, it is ultimately a story of struggle and reparation. Haaken says of these types of stories: Over time, movements must be capable of generating stories that move beyond idealized conceptions of the victim, set against the villainy of perpetrators, to more variegated dramas that allow for enlarged capacities to engage history and human conditions . . . stories of struggle and reparation are particularly important in sustaining the vitality of a social movement in that they acknowledge inter-group conflict as an ongoing human dilemma, rather than as an oppressive state to be simply overcome.29

Dolores is far from an idealized victim. She is a bold, sometimes crass, unattractive, middle-aged woman who is unafraid of using violence when she deems it necessary. And her story does not end with the death of Joe St. George—the after-effects of his abuse are felt by Dolores decades after he dies. The importance of her story, then, is not in how she handles her abusive husband, but in the struggle she faces in rejoining a community that distrusts her and a family that has been irreparably damaged. Dolores Claiborne has received a small amount of critical attention centered on its depiction of domestic horrors. Joe Abbott discusses the novel as part of his examination of King’s “preoccupation with paternal authority figures and fatherhood.”30Abbott argues that one of the reasons King’s fiction remains so popular is that it taps into a cultural fear of the monstrous father figure, figures such as Joe St. George. Of Dolores Claiborne, Abbott contends that “when Dolores can no longer ignore the effect her husband’s advances on their daughter are having on the entire family, she resolves to kill him. . . . The juxtaposition here of love and death emphasizes the complexity and ambivalence underlying Dolores Claiborne’s act of murder as well as the reader's response to that act. Is child abuse sufficient grounds for murder?”31 What Abbott fails to realize here is that Dolores does not automatically decide to kill her husband; she turns to murder as a last resort once she is convinced, through the lack of support and help from others, that

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leaving Joe is impossible. Considering the morality of Joe’s murder misses a more interesting question: why did Dolores feel compelled to use murder to solve her problem? Dolores Claiborne, however, goes beyond just showing how the most monstrous beings we encounter come from our own homes. King is also highlighting the isolation victims of domestic abuse face in their communities. Finley acknowledges that “Those who speak out about abuse and assault often face repercussions at school, home, and work, and in their relationships with others.”32 For Dolores, the major repercussion of her admitting the abuse that her family is suffering at the hands of her husband is isolation from her community and from her own family. Four moments from the text highlight this isolation. First, Dolores’s decides to leave Joe after finding out that Joe was sexual abusing Selena. When she arrives at the bank to take the money out of her children’s college savings accounts, she is informed that Joe has already closed the accounts. Dolores confronts the bank manager, demanding “If it had been the other way around . . . if I’d been the one with the story about how the passbooks was lost and ast for new ones, if I’d been the one who started drawin out what took eleven or twelve years to put in . . . wouldn’t you have called Joe?”33 Dolores, and the readers, understand that the social norms of the time placed Joe as the head of the household, and therefore able to do as he pleased with the savings accounts. Dolores, as merely Joe’s wife, is forcibly placed in a subservient role, and thus isolated from the kinds of decisions that would have allowed her to move away from Little Tall Island. The gender roles of marriage, reinforced by societal norms, affect more than just women who are in abusive relationships, but these enforced roles make it difficult for abused women to leave their husbands, as Dolores’s experiences illustrate. The second moment that displays Dolores’s isolation as a victim of domestic violence comes after she asks the bank manager, Mr. Pease, to check if Joe had placed the money from the accounts into his own account. Mr. Pease eventually agrees to help her, but will not do this out in the open: “‘I can’t check something like that with you sitting right here, Mrs. St. George,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you go down to the Chatty Buoy and order yourself a cruller and a nice hot cup of coffee? You look like you could use something. I’ll join you in fifteen minutes. No, better make it a half an hour.”’34 Despite the fact that Dolores tells him “You’re helping a woman who don’t have nowhere else to turn,”35 Mr. Pease is extremely reluctant to help her. Although he does not know of the physical abuse that Dolores and her daughter have suffered at the hands of Joe, it would not have been difficult to see that Dolores had been placed in a difficult position by her husband’s actions, and that Joe’s taking of the money, while technically legal, was an abusive act in itself. Mr. Pease’s reluctance to help Dolores is indicative of a cultural reluctance

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to help the victims of domestic violence, especially if helping victims poses any risk to themselves. Although he does reveal that Joe has deposited most of the money into a separate account, Mr. Pease’s assistance is minimal and does nothing to help Dolores out of the situation she is in. Once it becomes clear to Dolores that she will be unable to take her family away from Little Tall Island to protect them, she becomes distraught. She breaks down crying in front of Vera Donovan and reveals all of the details of the situation to her employer. Vera’s response to Dolores’s predicament is “Husbands die every day, Dolores. Why, one is probably dying right now, while we’re sitting here talking. They die and leave their wives money. . . . An accident . . . is sometimes an unhappy woman’s best friend.”36 This is the third moment that underscores Dolores’s isolation. Vera Donovan is an extremely wealthy woman, wealth she inherited from killing her own husband. She could have given Dolores money to leave Little Tall Island; instead, she all but tells Dolores to kill her husband, which is not the reaction of a healthy, well-adjusted woman. Later in the novel, it is discovered that she has spent years pretending that her children, who were killed in a car accident, are still alive, and it becomes obvious to readers that Vera Donovan has serious mental issues. Yet she is also the only person who willingly offers help—such as it is—to Dolores. Therefore, isolation has prevented Dolores from receiving help from any source but a woman with obvious mental problems. Because Vera Donovan is the only person willing to offer Dolores any real help or sympathy, Dolores comes to believe that her only option is to murder Joe. She does this during a major solar eclipse—a meteorological event that itself implies isolation, darkness, and secrecy—by causing him to fall through the rotting cap of a dry, old well. Once she has reported Joe as missing, Selena asks her mother, “Do you do anything to him?”37 Dolores, who had earlier promised Selena that she would not do anything to harm Joe, is forced to lie to Selena. Dolores tells the police, That was when the coldness started to come in, though, that afternoon in the garden. And when the first crack in the wall families put between themselves n the rest of the world showed up between us. Since then it’s only gotten wider n wider. She calls and writes me just as regular as clockwork, she’s good about that, but we’re apart just the same. We’re estranged. What I done, I done mostly for Selena, not for the boys or for the money her Dad tried to steal. It was mostly for Selena that I led him on to his death, and all it cost me to protect her from him was the deepest part of her love for me.38

This is the fourth, and most significant illustration of Dolores’s isolation. After being unable to get help from a sane or logical source, Dolores turns to

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murder to protect herself and her family. Her reward is that she is isolated and estranged from her daughter. Although King implies that this estrangement may end by including a newspaper clipping in the “Scrapbook” epilogue that says that Selena is coming to visit her mother for the first time in two decades, the resolution—if there is to be one—is left uncertain. Furthermore, the narrative style of Dolores Claiborne reinforces the plot’s focus on Dolores’s isolation. Other than the section titled “Scrapbook” which serves as an epilogue to the novel, the novel is written entirely in Dolores’s voice. The text is, in effect, a kind of transcription of Dolores’s statement to the police about the death of Vera Donovan, but only a transcription of what she says. The opening lines of the novel illustrate this point: What did you ask, Andy Bissette? Do I “understand these rights as you’ve explained em to me”? Gorry! What makes some men so numb? No, you never mind—still your jawin and listen to me for a while. I got an idear you’re gonna be listenin to me for most of the night, so you might as well get used to it. Coss I understand what you read to me! Do I look like I lost all m’ brains since I seen you down to the market? That was just Monday afternoon, in case you lost track. I told you your wife would give you merry hell about buying that day-old bread—penny wise and pound foolish, the old saying is—and I bet I was right, wasn’t I?39

There is a clear erasure of other voices when Dolores says, “No, you never mind,” indicating that Andy Bissette, the police officer, has responded to Dolores’s statements even though words never appear on the page. Throughout the novel, Andy, Frank Proulx (another officer), and Nancy Bannister (the stenographer) occasionally interrupt Dolores with questions, but their voices are never heard. The reader understands the general gist of what they are saying based on Dolores’s responses, but their exact words are unknown. All of the other characters that appear in the novel appear only as Dolores’s recollection of them, not as actual characters themselves. The lack of any other characters speaking does three things for the novel. First, it forces the reader to identify solely with Dolores, as none of the other characters’ internal thoughts are heard. Joe St. George is clearly the monster of the novel, the central source of the horror. It is highly unlikely that insight into his thought process or internal emotional turbulence would change how the reader views him. There are several other characters, Vera Donovan and Mr. Pease, for example, who may have been viewed differently by the reader if their internal thoughts and conflicts were presented. But, by not presenting the internal life of any of the other characters, King forces the reader to see the events of the novel only from Dolores’s perspective. By doing so, the reader, regardless of his or her understanding of or personal experience with

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domestic violence, is forced to empathize with Dolores’s predicament and the actions she takes in order to get out of that situation. By doing this, King is forcibly calling attention to the plight of Dolores, and thus the plight of real women in similar positions. Second, the lack of any other voices in the text forces the reader to rely on Dolores’s description of events, people, and places. In the majority of King’s novels, the narrative voice is third person and, often, the narrative focus shifts from character to character as the story goes on. In Dolores Claiborne, however, the reader is not given an independent description or evaluation of characters, events, or locations. The reader has no way of knowing if Dolores has misjudged another character or if she is remembering events or places correctly. By doing so, King has gone beyond just showing readers what Dolores is going through; he has placed them—so far as a novelist can—in her position. The reader has no more information than Dolores has in order to make judgments and decisions. So, while the reader has not had to actually experience the abuse that Dolores has, he or she does experience a measure of her frustration and doubts. Thirdly, and most importantly, the lack of any other voices in the text underscores Dolores’s isolation from the other members of her community and her family. Throughout the novel, Dolores finds herself alone: she is given no significant help from her community, her only friend places her on a path toward murder, and her children—especially her daughter—pull away from her after she kills Joe. By not allowing the reader to hear any other voices besides Dolores’s, King is—through style rather than plot events— identifying Dolores as essentially alone. She interacts with others, as made obvious by her responses to Andy, Frank, and Nancy, but those interactions are one-sided, indicating that she is not a part of the community; she lives in her own world, cut off from meaningful relationships. The act of sharing her secrets with others, an act that typically brings people together, is in this case a separating and isolating act. This deliberate choice of narrative style reinforces the themes raised by the plot: that victims of domestic violence are often isolated by their communities and their families. In Dolores Claiborne, King presents a story of domestic violence, isolation, and murder. Throughout the story, it is clear that all it would have taken to prevent Dolores from murdering her husband—an act that only deepens her isolation—is the help of one person. Dolores makes it clear that most of Little Tall Island knew that Joe was physically abusive to her and that many of them believed that she killed him to stop the abuse. Everyone knew, but no one would interfere. King underscores this isolation and lack of help by making Dolores’s voice the only voice that is heard in the novel. The emphasis that King places on Dolores’s isolation, and the part that her community and her family play in that isolation indicates that instead of merely calling

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attention to the problem of domestic violence King is attempting to point out that the problem goes beyond just the domestic space. Communities who do nothing to help or protect victims of domestic violence, who isolate victims through their refusal to offer aid, are complicit in the violence. King, through Dolores’s story and through his stylistic choices, reveals this hidden horror, in order to force readers to consider their own role in isolating victims of domestic violence, to wonder at their own complicity in the violence, and to, hopefully, prevent Dolores’s story from becoming someone else’s reality. FANTASY AND MYTH: THE IMPORTANCE OF ROSE MADDER Rose Madder is, at its core, a story about domestic abuse, focusing on Rose Daniels’s attempt to break free from her psychotic and abusive husband and to make a new life for herself. But it is also the story of Rose Madder, a mysterious figure capable of both ferocious love and extreme violence, and whose similarities with Rose Daniels provide insight into what Rose Daniels is capable of, for good or for ill. Rose Madder is by far the easiest novel to classify in Haaken’s three types of domestic violence stories. Although it is clear that Rose does not realize for the first part of her marriage just how dangerous Norman is, she comes to that realization early in the novel. And while the epilogue of the novel focuses on Rose literally and symbolically burying her anger, the novel does not dwell upon her struggle. The novel is, instead, a story of deliverance, focusing on Rose’s flight from Norman and his pursuit of her. Because of the focus on domestic violence and its consequences, the critical attention given to Rose Madder is, for the most part, focused solely on its status as one of King’s feminist novels and how it attempts, to varying degrees of success, to combat the criticism directed at King’s female characters. While the focus on the feminist aspects of the novel is certainly warranted, this narrow approach virtually ignores the other significant features of the text. Many scholars make note of the novel’s obvious connection to The Dark Tower universe, and some point out the novel’s obvious borrowings from Greek mythology, but very few engage with these topics in a very critical way. Only Michael Woods discusses Rose Madder’s mythological borrowings at any length, but his work is more book review than critical discussion. What this leaves, then, is a sizable hole in the critical study of this novel, and while covering both of these aspects is certainly preferable, I will, at the least, open the conversation with a focus on the mythology at the center of this story. In short, this connection forces a re-conceptualization of the novel as something more than just an anti-domestic abuse tale. Rather than

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just highlight the suffering of abuse victims King uses the mythic world of the Greek Minotaur to highlight and respond to two—unfortunately—widely held beliefs that make getting justice for abuse victims difficult: that abuse victims are somehow complicit in their own abuse and that women who protest against domestic abuse are seeking to control and disenfranchise men. In the original Greek myth, the Minotaur is the offspring of Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, and a magnificent bull sent to King Minos by Poseidon as Pasiphae developed an unnatural lust for this bull.40 Some accounts have attributed this lust to Pasiphae being a descendant of Helios, the god of the sun, who was cursed by Aphrodite,41 while others make Poseidon responsible for cursing Pasiphae in retaliation for King Minos not sacrificing the bull as he was supposed to.42 In either case, Pasiphae called on Daedalus to create for her a mechanism that would allow her to consummate her love for the bull. Daedalus creates a hollow wooden cow, and Pasiphae, inside Daedalus’s creation, is able to have intercourse with the bull. Out of that union is born the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a human and the head of a bull. The creature was so horrific that King Minos has Daedalus construct the Labyrinth, an inescapable maze, in which to house the creature. King Minos then demanded tribute from Athens of seven virginal young women and seven virginal young men who would be placed in the Labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur. Eventually, Theseus, with the help of Ariadne and Daedalus, was able to traverse the Labyrinth and slay the Minotaur.43 The myth of the Minotaur is arguably one of the most well-known of the ancient Greek myths. However, King makes three specific and significant alterations to the Minotaur’s story. The first alteration is that the first bull encountered in the novel, Erinyes, is described only as a bull, not as the same human/bull hybrid as the Minotaur. The second change King makes is to make Erinyes not a ravenous, indiscriminate eater of humans but a watchman guarding something valuable. Erinyes does not attack and eat Rose Madder’s infant daughter, although the child could neither run from him nor defend herself against him; instead, he simply seeks to prevent anyone from removing the baby from the labyrinth. The third, and most significant, alteration to the story is that of the name of the monster. In the original Greek myth, Pasiphae gives her child the name of Asterion, which means “the Starry One,”44 while King names his bull-monster Erinyes. The name change may not seem that significant, since the Minotaur is rarely called by his given name in retellings of the myth. However, the name King chose to give his monster is significant. Erinyes is the Greek name for the Furies, and according to tradition, the Furies “were three in number: Allecto, Megaera, Tisiphone. They were denizens of the underworld, from which they emerged to track down, torment, and bring to justice the evil-doers among men, murderers in particular. . . . Occasionally their functions seemed broader; they become protectresses of universal

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order.”45 Therefore, through this name change, King evokes themes of retribution, justice, and order. By drawing on the Minotaur myth (as well as the aforementioned fantasy world of The Dark Tower), King is able to add layers to an otherwise straightforward tale of escaping domestic abuse. If the name change to Erinyes and the creature’s new role as protector are taken together, a much more detailed picture of Rose Madder and her child appear. It is pointedly stated at several moments in the novel that Rose Madder is violent, dangerous, and insane. It is a reasonable assumption that Norman is not the only death she is responsible for, and so it is possible that Erinyes, as a punisher of those who commit murder, is tormenting her by keeping her from her child. Another, more likely, possibility is that Erinyes, in the Furies other role as protectors of the natural order, is not keeping Rose Madder’s child to torment her, but to protect the world from the child, indicating the possibility that the infant Rose Daniels rescues is potentially a dangerous one. This allows King to create a situation that is similar, but not identical, to Rose Daniels’s miscarriage at the hands of Norman. If we see Erinyes as either tormenting Rose Madder or preventing her possibly unnatural child from being unleashed on the world, and Norman is intended to be Erinyes’s counterpart, then Norman’s abuse of Rose Daniels becomes somewhat problematic. It would seem to indicate that Norman’s physical attacks are in some way punishment for some crime Rose has committed and that his causing of her miscarriage in the novel’s prologue would be preventing that child from being unleashed on the world. However, Erinyes and Norman are not exactly the same, just as Rose Madder and Rose Daniels are not exactly the same. Erinyes is a described as a bull, whereas Norman, after he enters Rose Madder’s world, becomes fused to his rubber bull’s head mask, making him a creature with a human’s body and a bull’s head, or the Minotaur. Norman, then, becomes the unnatural monster, the indiscriminate killer, that the original myth describes. Therefore, Norman is a false-Fury: he punishes Rose Daniels for false crimes and his causing her miscarriage is an upsetting of the natural order, not a protecting of it. In this way, King is doing more than just highlighting the plight of abused women; he is also pushing back against the unfortunate, but recurring belief that victims of domestic abuse have somehow provoked their abusers or done something to justify the abuse. But King goes even further than that. As the novel progresses, Rose Daniels transforms from a meek, timid, abused housewife to a strong, independent woman with a career and control over her own life. Her growing independence is fueled in large part by her experiences with Daughters and Sisters, the women’s shelter she stays at after she first leaves Norman, with Daughters and Sisters serving as stand-ins for feminism in the novel.

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Norman, a misogynist to his core, comes to hate Daughters and Sisters for the same reasons he despises feminism: it represents autonomy and equality for women. As Canfield notes about both this novel and Dolores Claiborne, “it is evident in these two works that Rose and Dolores were not abused because they were feminists. They were abused because they could be.”46 If Rose Daniels and Daughters and Sisters represent feminism, Rose Madder, with her insanity and violence, must represent a type of extreme feminist, the misandrist, often called the feminazi: the man-hating feminist seeking not equality with men, but domination over them. Rose Madder makes her feelings toward men perfectly clear: “‘Men are beasts,’ she said conversationally. ‘Some can be gentled and trained. Some cannot. . .. But rogue beasts must be dealt with.’”47 There is a clear threat in those words and later, when Rose Daniels leads Norman into Rose Madder’s trap, she makes good on that threat by eating him. Because King has established Rose Madder and Rose Daniels as similar, but ultimately different characters, Rose Daniels is able to reject Rose Madder’s extreme feminism while still maintaining her independence. After killing Norman, Rose Madder inspects Bill Steiner, Rose Daniels’s new boyfriend, telling Rose Daniels, “‘He’s a good one, I judge. . . . Good hocks. Good flanks. . . . Fine loins. . . . A good beast. Protect him and he’ll protect you.’”48 Rose Daniels responds, “‘Don’t you call him a beast again. . . . And get your diseased hand off him.’”49 Rose Daniels’s violent reaction to Rose Madder reflects her desire to take on the role of protector, a decidedly feminist impulse, but also her unwillingness to view him as less than her, a belief so often ascribed to the misandrist feminist figure. It would be easy to see King’s painting Rose Madder as a radical misandrist as a way of protesting against such views, while still supporting the more equality-driven feminism represented by Rose Daniels. It is also possible to see that because Rose Madder, despite her appearance, is considered less of a monster than Norman, King is arguing that misogyny and abuse are far worse evils than women who seek dominance over men. But neither of these views take into account that Rose Madder’s origins are from a fantastic world where magic is common place and monsters, and monstrous people, are everywhere. By insisting that Rose Madder is not of the “real” world, Rose Daniels’s world, King is arguing that the existence of this kind of radical, misandrist belief system is itself a fantasy. As Rose Madder’s closest counterpart from the “real” world, Rose Daniels’s rejection of Rose Madder’s version of feminism shows that it is neither accepted nor condoned by real feminists. King has never shied away from depicting the horrors of domestic life. The importance of Rose Madder, both as part of King’s body of work and as a social commentary, lies in the powerful and important statements King makes about feminism and in support of abuse victims. Rather than just using Rose’s experiences as a plot device to increase the readers discomfort and fear, King

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tells Rose Daniels’s story in order to reveal just how horrific domestic abuse is and to state definitively that not only are abuse victims not responsible for their own abuse, that supporting abuse victims and demanding justice for them is not born of a hatred of men, but a hatred of abuse. In doing so, King produces a novel that layers fantasy and myth together with the everyday and the horrific to show how, sometimes, reality is more terrifying than fiction. CONCLUSION These three novels present readers with the most pervasive, realistic, and terrifying kinds of monsters: those right in our own homes. Each novel, in its own way, highlights these monsters and the horrors they perpetrate against those they are supposed to love the most. The women around whom these novels are centered face the same horrors that many real women face on a daily basis. To that end, Owen asks the question, “But can a man ‘know’ the experience of being a woman in this culture?”50 The question is an interesting one, given King’s history of portraying women as underdeveloped victims who either must be saved by a man or who become sacrifices to King’s horrific monsters. While these three novels represent King’s attempt to correct some of the problems with his earlier female characters, the question remains whether King, or any male author, can accurately portray the female experience. However, that question, while thought-provoking, is not the most important way of examining Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder. Far more important than whether King is able to fully understand and explore the ways in which women respond to domestic and sexual abuse is the fact that, as a male writer, King is not only tackling the subject from a female perspective, and that he is pointing out social and cultural failings that permit this kind of violence to continue. NOTES 1. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, “Cinderella’s Revenge: Twists on Fairy Tale and Mythic Themes in the Work of Stephen King,” in Fear Itself: The Early Works of Stephen King, eds Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (San Francisco: UnderwoodMiller, 1993), 49. 2. Sally Owen, “Even Stephen Gets Even,” On the Issues 4, no. 4 (1995): 47. 3. Ibid. 4. Janice Haaken, Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 2010), 84. 5. Stephen King, Gerald’s Game (New York: Viking, 1992), 177.

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6. Ibid., 144. All italics are as they originally appears in the text unless otherwise noted. 7. Ibid., 138. 8. Ibid., 161. 9. Ibid., 181. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 182. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 102–3. 14. Laura L. Finley, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault in Popular Culture (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016), 4. 15. King, Gerald’s Game, 5. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. Ibid., 15–6. 18. Finley, Domestic Abuse, 4. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. King, Gerald’s Game, 178. 21. Ibid., 164. 22. Ibid., 166. 23. Ibid., 16. 24. Ibid., 31. 25. Finley, Domestic Abuse, 122. 26. King, Gerald’s Game, 187–8. 27. Ibid., 331. 28. Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne (New York: Viking, 1993), 100. 29. Haaken, Hard Knocks, 84. 30. Joe Abbott, “Why is Stephen King So Popular? or, Meditations on the ‘Domestic Monsterdrama.’”Popular Culture Review 6, no. 2 (1995), 29. 31. Ibid., 39–40. 32. Finley, Domestic Abuse, 119. 33. King, Dolores Claiborne, 125. 34. Ibid., 128. 35. Ibid., 129. 36. Ibid., 146–7. 37. Ibid., 228. 38. Ibid., 229. 39. Ibid., 1. 40. Richmond Y. Hathorn, Greek Mythology (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1977), 311. 41. Ibid. 42. H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology Including its Extension to Rome (New York: Dutton, 1959), 183. 43. Hathorn, Greek Mythology, 311–4. 44. Ibid., 314. 45. Ibid., 220.

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46. Amy Canfield, “Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder: A Literary Backlash Against Domestic Violence,” Journal of American Culture 30, no. 4 (2007), 398. 47. Stephen King, Rose Madder (New York: Viking, 1995), 233. 48. Ibid., 390. 49. Ibid. 50. Owen, “Even Stephen,” 47.

Chapter 6

Razors, Bumper Stickers, and Wheelchairs Male Violence and Madness in Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes Rebecca Frost

When real-life criminals and serial killers are asked to tell their own life stories, they have the benefit of being able to shape their biographies into a narrative that follows the broad strokes put forth by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.1 Special Agents interviewed numerous incarcerated criminals in the 1970s and 1980s and their results, gleaned from the talkative prisoners, led to a cohesive narrative of what, exactly, makes a violent criminal do what he—the narrative of the violent criminal skews overwhelmingly male—did. Everything from his childhood to his adult relationships has been mapped out by those same Special Agents, and real-life criminals need only ensure that their own autobiographies align with these expectations. Additionally, it helps that “the ideal offenders are the outsiders, strangers, foreigners, aliens, and intruders who lack essential human qualities,”2 since this means that there will be few people in the violent criminal’s life to contradict his shaping of his own story. Aside from being part of the expected narrative, the fact that a violent criminal can be identified as a loner allows him to take control of his history and present it in a way that he perceives might earn him sympathy. The biographies and profiles constructed by the BAU—formerly the BSU—are structures meant to help with broader understanding and expectations of the criminal, who is often all too willing to play to type. True crime, then, has been described as “writing by numbers” because the basic narrative structure is already present and only waits for the specific details to be filled in. Crime fiction, then, is not necessarily bound by these same expectations, and especially not crime fiction written by Stephen King, aka the Master of Horror, who needs not restrict himself to placing all of the action within our known world. 83

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Fictional violent criminals—especially violent men—find so many realworld foils that the true crime expectations bleed over into crime fiction. Granted, the fact that Stephen King indeed writes horror allows him the freedom to “explore extreme states of behavior or consciousness, but usually with the certainty that the events portrayed cannot happen,”3 reassuring his Constant Readers that the contents of his novels will not, in fact, go bump in their nights. In Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes King does indeed include elements of the supernatural, but his main adversary—the violent man—remains not only true to real-life type, but very much true to himself. Rose Madder, published in 1995, is not the story of Norman Daniels but of his wife, Rosie. Norman is a police detective, “and he’s crazy.”4 Rosie flees from married life after years of marriage during which she has been bitten and beaten constantly, up to and including badly enough to put her in the hospital. While Rosie builds herself a new life in a new city, Norman makes it his mission to bring her back and teach her a lesson. Mr. Mercedes (2014), on the other hand, takes killer Brady Hartsfield as a major player in a battle of wits between Mr. Mercedes and the retired police detective who failed to identify him. Just as readers are aware of Norman’s movements as he searches for his absent wife, they are also aware of Brady’s identity long before the other characters. Brady’s goal, initially, is likewise centered around a single person: he wishes to speed up the suicide of retired detective Bill Hodges. But Brady ultimately focuses on a new plan centered on mass murder, rather than just the singular death of Hodges, that will net him the “highest score ever.”5 Nearly twenty years apart, the distinct figures of Norman, the recently promoted detective, and Brady, member of the Cyber Patrol and friendly neighborhood ice cream man, find themselves faced with a similar quandary: in order to reach their respective goals, each has to enter a public event at which a lone male would be quickly noticed and at which these two specific men might be recognized. With their similar backstories, each man comes upon the same idea of how to infiltrate that public space, one just before a concert and one for its duration. Brady Hartsfield is, in essence, Norman Daniels reborn. CONTROL Little is seen of Norman’s childhood, although he recalls certain aspects of his parents that serve to partially distance him from another fictional serial killer that shares his first name, Norman Bates. His mother, before leaving the family when Norman was in his early teens, “was a fat slob who never stopped yelling,”6 although Norman recalls her as being a good cook. She may have caused harm through with her words and her absence, but Mrs. Daniels does

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not seem to have made any overt motions to harm Norman. His father, on the other hand, is a “world-class crotchgrabber (and, on at least one memorable hunting trip, world-class cock-gobbler as well)”7 who seems to have had his hands on Norman since before he was old enough to remember. Incest and pedophilia are not addressed directly, but when Norman recalls that his father’s favorite saying had been “if they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me,”8 readers’ suspicions are confirmed. Norman’s parents are not present for the narrative, however, and since Norman himself is nearly a secondary character, these brief references to his otherwise unknown childhood are easily overlooked. Brady’s mother, on the other hand, is alive and well, at least at the start of the story. His father left when he was eight years old, and Deborah almost immediately began to lean on her older son as the new man of the house. After Brady’s younger brother’s death—not accidental, but not discussed by his surviving family members—Brady took up his position of her Honeyboy, making them “more girlfriend-boyfriend than mother-son.”9 When Brady gets his bad headaches, he climbs into bed with his mother so she can take care of him—an act they likewise never discuss afterward. Although Brady does his best to keep his relationship with his mother a secret, even his coworkers know that he can be a bit “freaky”10 about her. Although neither Norman nor Brady is a serial killer by the strictest definition, their backgrounds still mimic the results of the FBI’s behavioral profiling team. In this instance, Brady’s situation is the more predictable: many serial killers confess to having an absent father and an overbearing mother. In Norman’s case it is his mother who leaves, although he still suffers sexual and physical abuse at the hands of his father. Norman’s relationship with his father is offered as an explanation for his oft-used phrase “take you up,” such as when he tells Rosie he has to “take her up” for disobeying him. Although Norman seems to only abuse his wife physically, when he recalls the phrase, it is noted that his father would at times mean it sexually. Additionally, Norman’s childhood is further in the past emotionally than Brady’s, since Norman has been married and controlling his own household from a young age. He married Rosie soon after she graduated from high school and was aided in keeping the details of their relationship a secret by the car accident that took Rosie’s parents and younger brother, allowing him to isolate her further. Brady, at twenty-eight, still lives with his mother, works his two jobs either to support her or to avoid her, and spends much of his time at home in his basement “control center” rather than around Deborah, struggling with dual reactions of desire and disgust. Since his father left, and certainly since his younger brother died, Brady has been struggling with his complicated position as man of the house, lover, and little boy, all at once. In spite of all this, Brady, at least, is not one to draw attention to himself. He is nondescript instead of good-looking and is easy to forget. He learned

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how to bite his tongue and present the world with a happy face at a young age so that others do not know what to expect of him, and certainly would not expect him to have murderous secrets. Bill Hodges pins him down when working up an informal profile of the Mercedes Killer, guessing that “he’s good at fitting in, so good that a lot of his associates don’t realize he’s basically a loner.”11 And although Brady’s coworkers do recognize that his attitude toward his mother might be strange, they certainly do not guess at any of Brady’s other hobbies. To them, Brady might lack ambition, but he is a good listener, and the customers always seem happy with his work. Indeed, from a very young age Brady has practiced control. Norman, likewise, has to clamp down on the face he shows the world, although he has the opposite problem. Where Brady is cold—as cold as the ice cream he sells in the evenings—Norman is full of anger. His palms are crisscrossed with the scars of his fingernails, labeled “the stigmata of his temper,”12 and for Norman, gaining control is his only way of controlling that temper. Whereas Brady, cool and calculating, seems able to remain in control for much of his life—at least until his plans begin unraveling—Norman’s day-to-day existence is a constant battle between the simmering of his anger and the reassertion of control over himself, much less over his wife. Norman is a man who must control others and is so thoroughly rocked by Rosie’s sudden disappearance not only because it means she has moved beyond his circle of control, but because he no longer knew her every thought and could not anticipate her every move. Norman’s profession as a police detective reflects this interplay between chaos and control in his work as well as in his personal life. As a detective he is routinely called to scenes where something has gone wrong, and it is his job to bring order to the situation by invoking laws. Granted, Rosie reflects that Norman loses interest in attempting to solve cases once they are more than a few weeks old, but the nature of his job requires him to assess situations that have gotten out of control and to bring them under control, albeit not necessarily without causing more chaos in the first place. As much as Norman can become violent and unpredictable, his career, as his life, is ultimately completely in his command—at least until Rosie leaves him. Norman reminds himself that “you had to abide by the rules of the game . . . or at least not be caught breaking them.”13 When he manages to not be overtaken by his temper, Norman is able to follow the rules, but he knows how much of a hindrance his anger can be. For example, when Norman cleans out his current office because he has been promoted, he reflects that, had he been granted a premonition of that scene earlier, he would have assumed he was being fired for one of his impulsive actions that he could not cover up afterward. Ultimately, Norman Daniels has thrived on luck and the ability to cover his tracks afterward so that no one can see what, exactly, his technique entails.

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Brady, on the other hand, is so conscious of the idea of control that he uses it as one of his spoken passwords in his basement command center. When Brady says the word “control,” the lights come on and banish the darkness. The duality shows in his second password, “chaos,” as his row of computers—where he plans and executes his schemes—turns on, and a third password, “darkness,” prevents them from self-destructing. For Brady, control comes first and allows him to proceed with his plans for chaos. His moments of being out of control are rare. He plans ahead to avoid being caught, instead of doing some quick thinking and having a band of brothers to lie for him afterward, which is the way Norman relies on his police “brothers.” Brady does not have these sorts of friends to begin with, and thus he has to look after himself, and therefore his mother, all on his own. When Brady begins plotting ways to make Hodges’s life more difficult, he thinks, “And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Because actions have consequences.”14 For Brady, the thought of consequences shapes his actions, and he plans ahead, using a fake ID and ordering incriminating evidence to be sent to Speedy Postal instead of his home address. It is only when his plans start unraveling that this forethought disintegrates. Furthermore, Norman and Brady share one more attribute in common outside of their specific ultimate plans: headaches. When Norman looks ahead to the possible nothingness beyond his reunion with Rosie, he thinks, “Just knowing there would be no more headaches, not ever made that seem like a fair trade.”15 As long as Norman is able to deal with his wayward wife before the darkness descends, he will welcome it as an end to the headaches that he associates with his anger and impulsive, regrettable actions. Said actions are only regrettable because they might impede Norman in his final search for his wife, and not because he, personally, feels any moral guilt about what he has done. Conversely, Brady’s headaches are the “little witches” that send him crawling into his mother’s bed, looking for relief. While they do not cause him to act out violently, the headaches still lead him to a situation that is not discussed afterward, one that likewise leads to feelings of guilt. These feelings are wrapped up in his complicated, incestuous relationship with his mother—a situation made worse when Brady’s control starts to fray. CHAOS Norman and Brady each have a clear goal at the start of their narratives: Norman to teach his wife a lesson for daring to run off on him (and for using their bank card as she did it) and Brady to egg Hodges on to suicide. Each also seems to have a plan: Norman uses his spare time and his cop’s credentials to hunt for Rosie and then even pretends to be her once he has located the

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right city; Brady, who has already used similar techniques on the owner of the Mercedes he used to commit mass murder, starts by sending a letter to Hodges and escalates to plotting against the family of the young man who takes care of chores around the house, or, rather, against the family’s dog. In the middle of this planning, though, chaos overwhelms their attempts at control. For Norman it begins in the bus terminal where Rosie sought help from the Travelers Aid volunteer Peter Slowik. In order to learn that Slowik directed Rosie to a women’s shelter, Norman tracks Slowik down at home and, after an intense “conversation,” cannot quite recall what he did to make his jaw ache so badly. Norman does have the presence of mind—again, after the fact—to shower and even take the bar of soap with him, but the fact that he lost his temper also means that he left bite marks and bodily fluids behind. Although the police do not identify him right away, when Rosie hears about the murder she immediately knows that it must be Norman who killed Slowik. But that is not the only death. Next comes Rosie’s friend, Pamela. Norman happens to overhear her talking about the concert and the picnic, where he has already determined it would be easier to find Rosie than breaking through the tight security at the women’s shelter, and he follows her into work. Pam’s death is mostly an accident as she struggles to get away, although Norman is able to look through her locker and find the security code he could, and later does, use to enter the women’s shelter. Bradly similarly kills two people who were not his intended targets. When he receives a response from Hodges that makes his blood boil, Brady loses his sense of cool and his careful control. Instead of waiting for the poison he ordered to be delivered to his fake identity, Brady immediately goes to the store in order to buy some in person. Although he attempts to disguise his purchase of gopher poison among other gardening implements and does remember to pay cash, Brady chastises himself for making such a purchase so close to home and not even wearing sunglasses while he does it. Bent on the belief that “the Det-Ret doesn’t get to win,”16 Brady mixes the poison with some hamburger and leaves it in his personal fridge. When he comes home from work the next day, ready to poison the dog, he discovers that his mother has come upon it and cooked herself a little meal. Despite the number of times that Brady has thought that she—and he—would be better off with Deborah dead, this method of dying is far from antiseptic. Brady hides in his control room until his mother is dead and then drags her body upstairs, thankful that Deborah had no close friends and that the neighbors were not used to seeing her come and go. Although this has been a mistake, it does not have to interfere with his larger plans. Her death does, however, wear away at Brady’s patience and he decides that Hodges is refusing to play the game. Retrieving some of his inventions

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that allowed him to steal the Mercedes and commit his first crime, Brady decides to plant a bomb in Hodges’s Toyota and detonate it personally. Unfortunately for Brady, he identifies the driver of Hodges’s car by the fedora that he had been wearing that morning, although someone else is wearing it. So now, along with killing his mother instead of a dog, “he’s managed to kill someone else instead of the fat cop, and that’s worse.”17 This is no longer a mistake that Brady can hide in the upstairs bedroom and keep to himself, but an explosion and a murder that attracts immediate police attention. The pressure on Brady to act before he can be caught is now severe. At this point, Brady has already begun hearing voices, or, rather, one voice in particular: that of his dead mother, a phenomenon that might remind readers of the Norman who could be found running the Bates Motel. Always apparently just out of sight, Deborah’s voice comes from the next room or around a corner, urging her Honeyboy to both be careful and to be quick. There is still the chance that he might be reunited with her, but when Brady thinks of “after,” he sees only darkness. DARKNESS The big day for Norman comes at a picnic at Ettinger Pier. Especially after his interactions with Peter Slowik, Norman is highly aware that those planning the event will be on the lookout for him. As a cop he also knows that a disguise, especially in the daytime, looks like nothing more than a disguise, and thus in preparation for the day Norman has decided to become someone else entirely. The first step in his preparations was to go to a barbershop and ask for his head to be completed shaved, a la Michael Jordan. The barber rather dubiously agrees, and Norman is impressed with his pale, almost fragile-looking skull with its scholar’s forehead instead of that of a cop. With a few trips around the city, Norman then collects the rest of his persona: a leather jacket, a wheelchair, and some bumper stickers that proclaim his admiration of women. He also selects a Taser as his weapon instead of his police-issued gun and constructs his backstory, turning himself into “a man who respects women”18 instead of plain old Norman Daniels. In the parking lot, out of sight, Norman climbs into his wheelchair and becomes “Hump” Peterson, ready to enter the women’s shelter picnic as a man who will be both visible and overlooked. At first it seems he may have been recognized, since the park attendant calls him back, but it turns out to be a mistake of his own making. Although he has in essence become Hump, Norman gave the man the entrance fee for an adult instead of a handicapped person. It is in the park, under his persona as Hump and during his search for Rosie, that Norman begins to hear his own voices. At first, one of them, like Brady’s,

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is the voice of a deceased parent: Norman recognizes the tone and beliefs of his father, who ridicules him for being beaten in a fight by a woman. Norman’s disguise of Hump was imperfect and resulted in his being recognized, although Norman was able to escape the picnic and go on to kill three more people(two of them policemen) before finally confronting Rosie and meeting his own grisly fate. His disguise works well enough for him to spent hours at Ettinger Pier before he is recognized, although Norman likely would not have been able to continue his search much longer. Around the time when one of Rosie’s friends was starting to wonder about the man in the wheelchair, Norman has cornered another by the bathrooms and was talking to her “up close.”Once again his anger has gotten the best of him. Norman could not imagine another place that Rosie might be, not when all her friends from the shelter are at the Pier, and the fact that he could come so close to finding her and yet still fall short gets the better of him. Even if he had not come under suspicion as being Rosie’s husband, the fact that the man in the wheelchair stood up and attacked one of the women, breaking her nose and once again using his teeth, would have drawn attention to him all the same. The unraveling of his disguise that began when he paid for entry for an adult instead of a handicapped person is completed by his uncontrollable anger at the fact that Rosie was, yet again, out of his grasp. Comparably, after his two accidental murders, Brady sets his sights not on Hodges, but on one final event that he calls a “big score.” Although he had previously managed to kill nine people using the stolen Mercedes, Brady would like to increase that body count and, like Norman, has no real expectation of getting out alive. The question Brady faces, however, is a similar one: as a single white male in his late twenties, he will stand out like a sore thumb at his chosen event unless he presents himself in a way so that he will be overlooked. Brady’s method of entering the concert venue echoes the choices Norman Daniels made two decades earlier. Being both in his hometown and in possession of technology of the twentyfirst century, Brady has an easier time completing the transformation that will allow him to carry a bomb unnoticed into the concert. Brady can shave his head himself and, since he buys his ticket online, he does not have to worry about giving an attendant the wrong amount of cash, although he still runs the risk of being seen getting into his wheelchair from his car or having the wheelchair’s bags searched and the bomb discovered. Instead of a reformed biker, Brady decides to play the role of a man who lost his child and the use of his legs in a car accident. A photograph of his long-dead little brother stands in for his supposed ‘Round Here superfan son and provides Brady’s pass into a venue where a lone man would otherwise be heavily scrutinized. Whereas Norman has no hope of finding Rosie at the picnic, since she is not in attendance, Brady seems posed to execute his plan perfectly. His only

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flaw, which keeps him alive for the second and especially third installment of the trilogy, is in waiting too long. Brady has decided he will detonate the bomb during the band’s biggest hit song, “when the little chickie-boos are screaming their very loudest and going out of their little chickie-boo minds.”19 And he has spotted another bonus: Hodges’s lawn boy’s sister is in the crowd with her friends and her mother, and he wants to meet her eyes before he flicks the switch. Luckily he hesitates just long enough for Hodges and his helpers to catch up to him and put him out of commission . . . at least until book three. Nearly twenty years apart, two King villains are thus presented with the same situation: entering a ticketed venue in which single men will be closely scrutinized and there are people on the lookout for them specifically. And they each manage it in exactly the same way: by shaving their heads, buying a wheelchair, plastering it with relevant bumper stickers, and adopting a new persona. Neither man plans for a future beyond this event, since neither expects to live beyond it. They simply hope to achieve their respective goals: Norman’s to settle his score with Rosie, and Brady’s to achieve the sort of high score that will make him go down in history. This will be the end to the voices, to the headaches, and to the memory of sexual abusive, pedophiliac parents. Interestingly, despite these similarities, there is no nod in Mr. Mercedes to Brady having picked up this mythology elsewhere; indeed, the only references to King’s actual or other works are to the movie versions, and yet both his character and his grand scheme mirror Norman Daniels. As such, what does it mean that King presents his readers with the same villain and same villainous plan two decades apart? CONDEMNED TO REPEAT The most interesting criminals, at least from a narrative standpoint, are serial criminals. The story of a single crime—be it robbery, murder, forgery, or what have you—is over when the criminal is caught and convicted. A single crime offers little in the way of developing suspense, since the only opportunity in which to draw out the story comes in identifying the perpetrator. In the case of murder, single instances rarely garner much attention since they tend to be hot-blooded cases in which the murderer is closely related to the victim. A crime narrative without the threat of a future crime surrenders the idea of a lingering threat. Of course, neither Norman Daniels nor Brady Hartsfield is a serial killer in the traditional sense. Many of Norman’s crimes have to do with abuse or police brutality, although he had “strangled one of the women he had been with since Rose left.”20 Most of Norman’s violence is limited to his wife or to suspects in the course of his work, and the one case of mistaken identity

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in which Norman and his partner got more than a little carried away haunts him; not his conscience, of course, but there is the risk of having a notation on his permanent record. When Norman’s temper gets the best of him, part of his damage control is ensuring that there will not be a record of it. Brady, on the other hand, has the claim of multiple murders, although the first nine are lumped together as the Mercedes killings. The instance in which he goaded the owner of that stolen Mercedes to commit suicide likewise differs from the usual methods associated with serial killing. At the same time, Brady, like Norman, has engaged in multiple instances of breaking the law that cause a minimum of bodily harm. Each of these narratives is driven by the looming threat of one final crime, murder or mass murder that may be preventable should Norman and Brady be found and recognized in time. Serial criminals, and especially serial killers, are the darlings of crime fact and crime fiction alike. The American true crime boom of the 1980s capitalized on the apparent increase in serial killers brought on by the creation of the term and its popularization through such figures as Ted Bundy and the duo of Henry Lucas and Otis Toole. Others, including Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, continued to draw attention through the 1990s and into the new millennium, joined by such fictional figures as Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan, who is referenced when Hodges does an informal profile of Brady Hartsfield. Serial killers as a category of criminal arose in the 1980s with the FBI, and especially its Behavior Sciences Unit (BSU), as the experts. The BSU, headed by John Douglas, conducted multiple interviews of criminals in order to begin to put together the information they would use for psychological profiling, which made its way into popular knowledge with Thomas Harris’ book The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and the film version three years later. Serial killers were at once mysterious and knowable, following the FBI’s sometimes vague descriptions while at the same time striving for individuality and recognition. Not every serial killer is a Ted Bundy: the good-looking boy-next-door who was attending law school and murdering college co-eds who looked eerily similar to the young woman who had slighted him. Ted Bundy was threatening because he could not be recognized as a threat, and intriguing because he seemed to be understandable. Not every man who is jilted by a woman decides to murder her multiple times via the use of stand-ins, but the emotions that drove him to do so are not entirely out of our reach. Much of the stereotypical serial killer, seen both in crime fact and crime fiction, is based on Ted Bundy and the narrative, like the figure himself, follows a predictable path. Jean Murley outlines the traditional American true crime book that focuses on a serial killer as opening with the crime in action, then having chapter two introduce the killer’s biography and later showing interest in the killer’s love life as well as playing out the cat-and-mouse game

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between law enforcement and the killer.21 The case of Ted Bundy also plays into many of the serial killer tropes introduced and supported by the FBI: an absent father, a mother who, at least in hindsight, can be questioned, and early indicators that he would turn out to be a serial killer. Bundy’s personal contributions to the serial killer Mythos, reflected in such figures as Hannibal Lecter and held up as comparison points for all successive killers, include his good looks, his boyish charm, his intelligence, and his clear, almost logical selection of victims. Peter Vronksy argues that Ted Bundy is as much a turning point in American culture as the JFK assassination, marking Bundy as the tradition from the killer being “one of them” to being “one of us.”22 Norman and Brady both have the dubious advantage of having been written in a post-Bundy, post-true crime boom world. Just as true crime seeks to reassure its readers that they and their children are not in danger, King’s inclusion of details from Norman’s and Brady’s childhoods add to the same: they each come from a household with one sexually abusive parent and one absent parent. This provides both an explanation for why Norman and Brady grew up to become violent and reassurance that, should readers avoid abusing their own children, they will have no such ready cause for the same transformation. King relies on the FBI-sanctioned biographical details as a quick, shorthand explanation for his killers’ violent tendencies. Further, there is no full-blown biography for either Norman or Brady, and Norman suffers the most here. Norman has only a handful of fleeting memories of childhood—fat and then absent mother; sexually and physically abusive father—in the midst of his descent into madness. Again, the simple presence of an abusive parent is explanation enough for his actions, but, tellingly, Norman is certainly not at the center of Rose Madder. He may be the clear antagonist, the man who first forced Rosie to flee and then pursued her to put her (and her friends) in danger. He may even be the driving force behind the narrative, but he is a clear outsider, even when King allows the readers inside Norman’s head. The few glimpses into Norman’s childhood are explanation only, and not intended to elicit pity. Regarding Mr. Mercedes, Brady’s mother is still alive for a large part of the tale, and as such she has a greater influence on Brady’s life and personality. She is still influencing his actions from her place in the house (generally drunk on the couch) and their sexual relationship is continual. Brady, like Norman, battles thoughts of suicide in the wake of his mother’s accidental murder. Brady thus has emotions other than anger and might indeed inspire empathy or pity from the reader as he is shown to struggle with this turn of events. The man who rather gleefully drove his stolen Mercedes into a crowd of job-seekers, and who has shown no remorse over those injuries and deaths, flounders in the wake of his mother’s poisoning. An unrepentant mass murderer is yet at the same time a lost little boy without his mother, one whose

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life narrows to have little meaning beyond his death. Brady chooses his last meal because it is what his mother would have ordered, and he continues to hear her voice urging him to complete his mission. It is perhaps fitting that each of these men is defeated by a woman, or at least, a supernatural being in female form. Norman’s end, apparently just as violent as the murders he himself committed, comes at the hands of a goddess who is the mirror image of his Rosie; Brady is prevented from setting off his wheelchair bomb not by Hodges, who has been waylaid with a heart attack, but by his self-proclaimed partner Holly Gibney, who repeatedly smashes Brady in the head with Hodges’s “happy slapper.” This is perhaps a deviation from the true crime expectation that the violent male criminal will be apprehended thanks to police and detective work and will face the consequences of the legal system instead of female-bodied vigilante justice, but there is an element of the supernatural in each of these encounters: Norman is quite literally not in the real world as we know it when it comes time for this final confrontation, and Brady’s brainwaves are affected to the point where the rest of the trilogy moves slowly away from a realistic, gritty cop story toward King’s usual inclusion of both the improbable and the impossible. It would seem, perhaps, that sticking to the real-life expectations of male violence might not be quite enough to make a King novel, after all. ‘ROUND IN A CIRCLE But why the repeat of the violent male’s final stand in the first place? King may have kept Norman’s and Brady’s backstories exactly as they were, acknowledging that criminal investigators these days are more likely to hunt “personalities”23 instead of individuals, without resorting to the razors, bumper stickers, and wheelchairs. Indeed, if the FBI has not updated its basic violent criminal narrative since its creation, why should it be necessary for King to change more than an element of two of his criminals’ biographies? The absent father, abusive mother, and lonely childhood trope is more than enough of a background to shape the type of man his other characters need to face. After all, “the assumption that the cause of compulsive violence resides ultimately in childhood trauma has become canonical”24 in both crime fact and crime fiction, and the glimpses King provides into Norman’s and Brady’s pasts are more than enough to support this narrative. The resulting tautology is that the violent man has not changed simply because the violent man has not changed, but what of the shared strategy? Is the repeat of the shaved head, a new identity, and a wheelchair simply an indication of King’s laziness? Although Mr. Mercedes includes references

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to past King narratives, the characters only reference the movie versions. There is no movie of Rose Madder, and thus no wink to the Constant Reader who may (or may not) recall the character of Norman Daniels. When Brady first looks for his mother’s razor or when Hodges sees the hair in the sink, Constant Readers with good memories might indeed flash back to Norman Daniels in the barbershop and therefore pick up on the large object Brady has to maneuver in and out of his car, as well as his ‘Round Here memorabilia— including those bumper stickers. This might add a level of suspense not felt by the casual reader, who merely wonders when Hodges and company will discover what Brady is up to. The discerning Constant Reader might also be on pins and needles waiting for that nod, that reference to the fact that, within King’s oeuvre, this has already happened. Brady Hartsfield is Norman Daniels reborn, resurrected from the other side of the painting and given a mother instead of a Rosie but still in possession of the same plan. Perhaps, this time, it will work. Yet there is one nod that acknowledges Brady is not functioning around the mid-1990s the way Norman is: Brady’s obsession with getting a big score, or the “highest score ever,” reflects changes in American culture concerning violence, this time concerning school shooters and other mass murderers. Both Norman and Brady see nothing past the immediate future of getting into that wheelchair: Norman only wants to take Rosie with him into death—everyone else along the way is merely incidental; Brady, however, is not content with committing suicide at the home where he accidentally killed his mother. Brady may have given up on killing the Robinson family dog, but he lucks into attending the concert with two members of the Robinson family who represent part of the high score Brady desires. Indeed, whereas Norman wanted to make a statement to one person and one person only, his runaway wife, Brady wanted to make a statement to the world. In this way, Brady is perhaps ahead of the times instead of living two decades in the past. His decision to bring a bomb into a concert venue where the target audience is teen and tween girls is more reminiscent of the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing after an Ariana Grande concert than Norman’s attempt to find Rosie at Ettinger Pier. Where Norman was confronted with bad luck from the time he attempted to pay the admission fee for an adult instead of a handicapped person, Brady, courtesy of his pre-printed ticket, has the relatively good luck of not having his wheelchair searched before he entered the concert. Had Holly Gibney been just a bit slower reaching his seat, or had Brady not wanted to wait for the flashiest song of the concert, the plan that failed Norman in the mid-1990s might have succeeded. But Brady Hartsfield was not inspired by Norman Daniels, or even by some unnamed paperback he may have picked up in a secondhand store. Although

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Brady’s biography, told through flashbacks in a manner that seems to be as truthful as Brady can manage, fits him perfectly to the mold of the violent man, and especially a serially violent man, he somehow stumbled on the idea of shaving his head, getting a wheelchair, and adopting a different persona in order to enter a concert venue and enact his revenge without knowing that his plan mimics, step for step, one enacted in a city also near a large lake more than a dozen years previously. Is a plan so clever that King wanted to reuse it with the hopes of reaching a wider audience than that of Rose Madder? Did he hope that, no matter how Constant, his Readers may have forgotten that they had already read this part? Or is it just another acknowledgment that male violence really only takes one form and that there is in fact nothing special about Brady Hartsfield, after all? King’s true intentions may never be known, but the evidence in the texts suggests that the answer to the last question, at least, is affirmative. NOTES 1. Sara L. Knox, “The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty,” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 3 (2001), 6. 2. Ray Surette, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities, and Policies (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2007), 206. 3. Philip Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994), 106. 4. Stephen King, Rose Madder (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 467. 5. Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (New York: Gallery, 2014), 360. 6. Ibid., 268. 7. Ibid., 473. 8. Ibid., 527. 9. King, Mr. Mercedes, 349. 10. Ibid., 337. 11. Ibid., 191. 12. King, Rose Madder, 129. 13. Ibid., 126. 14. King, Mr. Mercedes, 157. 15. King, Rose Madder, 396. 16. King, Mr. Mercedes, 198. 17. Ibid., 294. 18. King, Rose Madder, 426. 19. King, Mr. Mercedes, 272. 20. King, Rose Madder, 128. 21. Jean Murley, The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and American Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 44.

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22. Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (New York: Berkley Books, 2004), 6. 23. Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 24. 24. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 256.

Chapter 7

Horrific Sympathies The Comingling of Violence and Mental Illness in Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes Hayley Mitchell Haugen

The unnamed persona of Stephen King’s “The Man Who Loved Flowers” strolls confidently through the streets of New York City on a beautiful spring evening with a look of young love on his face. People of all sorts notice him and wistfully watch after him as he passes, with a kind of longing in their hearts, an appreciation of his free spirit. Soon, the man stops at a flower vendor to buy a small bouquet for his love. He jokes with the vendor while a transistor radio “poured out bad news that no one listened to.”1 This news reports a “hammer murderer was still on the loose,”2 notes casualties of the Vietnam War, says a dead body was pulled out of a local river, and gives updates on drug wars and Russian nuclear tests. For the citizens of New York, however, “None of it seemed real. None of it seemed to matter.”3 After purchasing his flowers, the man heads off into an alleyway, presumably to meet his love, Norma. When he sees a young woman and tries to give her the flowers, she says he is mistaken—that she is not Norma. At this point, the man pulls a “short-handled hammer out of his coat pocket where it had been all along. ‘They’re for you, Norma . . . it was always for you . . . all for you.’”4 He then beats the woman with the hammer even though he knows she wasn’t Norma, Norma was dead, she had been dead for ten years, and it didn’t matter because she was going to scream and he swung the hammer to stop the scream, to kill the scream, and as he swung the hammer the spill of flowers fell out of his hand, the spill spilled and broke open, spilling red, white, and yellow tea roses beside the dented trash cans where cats made alien love in the dark, screaming in love, screaming, screaming.5

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Readers soon learn that the man who loved flowers has killed five women because “none of them were Norma.”6He leaves the alley, aware of his own name but not wholly aware of his actions, and eerily comments “It was . . . was . . . Love.”7 He then smiles, regains the bounce in his step, and goes about the rest of his day as a woman on a porch looks after him, thinking, “if there was anything more beautiful than springtime, it was young love.”8 In their introduction to The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, editors Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne argue that “The Man Who Loved Flowers” “exhibits a differing quality that is not part of King’s defined genre levels or his symbolic, cultural, and personal functions.”9Here, instead, the reader is played with, manipulated, teased, shown a scenario that looks like it’s all sunshine and saltbox houses with picket fences. King, then, gives the reader a sharp slap to the face, and the reader’s vision changes. The sunshine darkens quickly as if a thunderstorm is on the way. The paint on the saltbox houses cracks and peels and blisters; the picket fences rot and amazingly, the reader wipes the crust from the collective eyes and says: I see it clearly now. The houses are skulls and the fences are jagged teeth. The young man who loved flowers does not. He loves death.10

While ironically beloved by those he passes on the street, the man who loved flowers is a thing of readers’ nightmares—a monster for which we, the knowledgeable reader, have no sympathy. Just as the New Yorkers hear the news on the radio but do not listen to its horrors, they notice the man who loves flowers but do not see the horror walking amid them. “And thus for King,” Hoppenstand and Browne contend, “The horror lies not so much with the monsters but with a faulty perception of the monsters, seeing them as something that they’re not, something harmless or innocent.”11 Of course, the man who loved flowers is frightening not only because in Stephen King’s America he could be anyone, but also because he has sprung out of us. As Tony Magistrale writes in Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half, No literature, not even the literature of supernatural terror, can be understood as discrete from the culture out of which it arises. At the heart of King’s fictional universe is a profound awareness of the most emotional and deep-seated American anxieties. Behind the supernatural veneer of wolfmen and spiders, which remains one of the great popular attractions of his fiction, his world mirrors our own.12

And in our America, this happened: Kindergarteners Charlotte Bacon and Dylan Hockley left their homes and traveled to Sandy Hook Elementary

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School in their quiet town of Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, just like any other normal school day. What no one could have possibly known is that twenty-year-old Adam Lanza would shoot and kill his mother at home that day and then head to Sandy Hook Elementary School where she had worked, to enact his plans for a violent shooting spree. By day’s end, Charlotte and Dylan, eighteen of their young classmates, and six adults at the school would die by Lanza’s hand. As a nation, collectively horrified, we wondered aloud how such a tragedy could occur, much as we would do the same with the Parkland, Florida school shooting several years later. We mourned the victims, we searched for answers, we blamed guns, we blamed violent video games, and in the case of Sandy Hook, we also blamed Adam Lanza’s mother. Above all else, we marveled at the monsters among us. Even Adam Lanza’s father ultimately admitted that he wished his son had never been born: “You can’t get any more evil,”13 Peter Lanza told The New Yorker Magazine. Judging by America’s public condemnation of both Adam Lanza, who committed suicide before he could be apprehended by police, and his mother, Nancy, whom many refused to acknowledge among his victims, we agree. Then there’s Stephen King’s literary America of Mr. Mercedes, where on a foggy pre-dawn morning as hundreds of Great Recession jobless line up at a City Center for a job fair, twenty-eight-year-old Brady Hartsfield, wearing yellow rubber gloves and a pullover clown mask and driving a stolen Mercedes, plows deliberately into the crowd. Just as our nation’s sympathies lie with the Sandy Hook victims’ families, King’s readers’ sympathies lie firmly with Hartsfield’s victims—characters we hardly get a chance to know before they meet their untimely demise. As the novel continues to unfold, King reveals the depraved monstrosity that is Brady Hartsfield: he is an otherwise ordinary guy who not only works as a Geek Squad home computer repairman for an electronics merchandiser, but also as a Mr. Tasty ice cream man, both of which are public personas that allow him to continue to wreak havoc in the aftermath of his bloody crime by giving him easy access to key people affected by his acts. Brady torments Olivia Trelawney, the owner of the stolen Mercedes, for example, by preying on her insecurities until she commits suicide. Just as Adam Lanza’s murdered mother was vilified in the press, depicted, surprisingly, as an accomplice to her son’s crime because she encouraged his fascination with firearms and had easy access to them in her home, so, too, is Olivia publicly blamed for allegedly leaving her keys in her Mercedes. On Brady’s trail, it is not long before the book’s protagonist, retired detective Bill Hodges, surmises that Mr. Mercedes had a hand in Trelawney’s death because he “certainly would have known about the anger and contempt with which the public had showered her in the wake of the killings; all he had to do was read the Letters to the Editor page of the local paper.”14

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The assumption that Brady is in tune with the media is important at this junction of the novel. Attuned to human psychology—to readers’ psychology—King understands that in the wake of such a tragedy, people are desperate for answers, are eager for somewhere to place their blame. King uses this knowledge of human nature to skillfully manipulate readers’ sympathies throughout the novel. At first, readers easily detest Brady Hartsfield for the sick joy he gets out of tormenting not only Olivia, but also his second target: Kermit William “Bill” Hodges. Hodges retires from the police force before he has an opportunity to solve the Mr. Mercedes killings, but Brady makes email contact with Hodges through an anonymous chat site to taunt him with this fact and to prey on Hodge’s own recent suicidal tendencies. Rather than pushing Hodges into despondency, however, Hartsfield gives Hodges a renewed sense of purpose through this cat and mouse game. King writes, “Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that.”15 He thinks Mr. Mercedes’ soul is like that, and it worries him. Hodges goads Brady in hopes that Hartsfield will tip his hand to his true identity. Enraged, Hartsfield fantasizes about poisoning the Mr. Tasty ice cream with arsenic or warfarin. But he knows that plan is too risky. Instead, he settles on poisoning the dog that belongs to Hodges’s college-aged sidekick, Jerome. This plan falls through, however, when Hartsfield’s drunken mother dies a horrible death after cooking up the poisoned meat meant for the dog. Of course, every killer has a mother, a childhood, a background story, and the entrance of Hartsfield’s mother undeniably complicates our understanding of, and even sympathy for, the son, in the same way that our reaction to Adam Lanza is complicated once we hear his story. According to Peter Lanza, when Adam was a boy, he was “‘just a normal little weird kid’ who used to spend hours with his father playing with Legos.”16 But as Adam grew older, he began to exhibit signs of mental illness that increased once he entered middle school: “‘It was crystal clear something was wrong,’” Lanza said. “‘The social awkwardness, the uncomfortable anxiety, unable to sleep, stress, unable to concentrate, having a hard time learning, the awkward walk, reduced eye contact. You could see the changes occurring.’”17 According to Connecticut State Police documents, “a Yale University professor diagnosed Lanza in 2006 with profound autism spectrum disorder, ‘with rigidity, isolation, and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications,’ while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.”18 A psychiatrist also diagnosed him with Asperger’s syndrome at age thirteen. While Asperger’s syndrome is not generally associated with violence, Lanza’s father believes “‘the syndrome ‘veiled a contaminant’ that wasn’t Asperger’s. . . . I was thinking it could

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mask schizophrenia.’”19 King and his readers are used to these all-too-familiar post-shooting profiles of mass killers in the news. These characterizations have become so embedded in our national narrative that it is not surprising to see them replayed in popular fiction. As a range of mental illness symptoms enveloped him, Adam Lanza became increasingly fascinated by guns, violence, and mass killers, on which he began to do extensive research. And, as implied, certainly there were signs that Adam’s mental health was destabilizing before the attack. Abby Ohlheiser reports in Post Nation on the “missed opportunities” to help Adam noted in a report by Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate two years after the attack. Although the report does not draw a causal link between Adam’s mental illness and the attack, it does argue that “‘weaknesses and lapses in the educational and healthcare systems’ response and untreated mental illness’ played a role in [his] continued mental deterioration.’”20 Nonetheless, Adam “‘retained access to numerous firearms’ and ammunition magazines as his mental health conspicuously deteriorated . . . [and] it is not clear that any measures were taken to curtail his access to guns,’ even when Lanza’s mother noted that her son seemed “despondent” and refused to leave the house.’”21 Finally, Ohlheiser notes that, like previous investigations into the shooting, this report admits Adam’s motivations for the Sandy Hook shootings remain inconclusive: “‘There is no way to adequately explain why Adam Lanza was obsessed with mass shootings and how or why he came to act on this obsession. . . . In the end, only he, and he alone, bears responsibility for this monstrous act.’”22 We may never fully understand Adam Lanza’s motives for killing innocent children, but we do recognize that real-life villains, like the villains in fiction, can be placed “along a moral continuum,”23 as Jessica Morrell notes. To resonate with readers, Morrell writes, fictional villains “all need a specific level of integrity, decency, and honesty,”24 attributes that King reveals in Brady Hartsfield as a child and that even real-life villain Adam Lanza held at some time. In his article “Newtown Tragedy: Actions of Shooter Adam Lanza’s Mother Mystify,” Associated Press writer Michael Melia notes how Americans looked naturally to Lanza’s mother in search of that moral continuum. As humans, we get this. Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy even notes, I think that we will always be bewildered by someone who did express her concern for her son, why she sought to have him engage with firearms. Not even those folks who oppose reasonable gun safety legislation would argue that it was a good idea to have someone who was evidencing this kind of disturbance have possession of the kinds of weapons that he had possession of.25

In this light, it is understandable how some people view Nancy Lanza as “more enabler than victim,”26 but others, according to Milea, were more

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sympathetic. Lanza’s friend, Marvin LaFontaine, claims she “did her best raising her son even though he was difficult and resisted help from others or talking about issues such as other children picking on him.”27 James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, agrees that Nancy Lanza should not be blamed for her son’s actions: “She was a victim, not an accessory,” he said. “We can easily second-guess parents, and there’s a lot there we can question, but the fact of the matter is many people commit horrible crimes despite the best efforts of parents, siblings and others.”28 Mark Joseph Stern also explores the lack of sympathy for Adam Lanza’s mother, for whom the Newton community’s hatred ran so deep that they refused to acknowledge her death in the bells tolled for her son’s other innocent victims: “Whatever blame people assign to Nancy Lanza, Adam Lanza is the one who fired the bullets: first at his mother, then at the schoolhouse, then at himself.”29 Stern warns that although a “black-and-white picture of villain versus victims [may be attractive], it sells our humanity short. Painful though it may be to acknowledge, Adam Lanza and his mother were humans, every bit as much as the other victims were.”30 Stern further argues It’s tempting to call this evil—but “evil” implies some reasoning behind the action, some motive, some comprehension of the awful pain inflicted on the innocent. There is nothing to comprehend about Sandy Hook. There is no sense, no logic in a mass shooting. The usual rules of human behavior simply don’t apply. There is no reason to those five minutes of brutality. There is only the total darkness of a mind gone mad.31

Indeed, violence is complex, and the motives for violence are even more so when comingling with mental illness, surely as evidenced by Lanza and, as readers soon discover, also by Hartsfield. Morrell reminds us that just “as in real life, when a character in a story is mentally ill, this factor can provide all sorts of problems for the people around him, especially if the illness is serious, such as schizophrenia or severe depression. . . . The bottom line is that when mental illness is present, the protagonist and antagonist will have different coping skills and versions of reality.”32 Assuredly, what we know about mental illness, what we know about evil, and, perhaps, what we know when the two combine, is that none of this occurs in a vacuum. As Morrell also argues: if people come from a fragile or troubled family, research proves that they’re often at risk to go on to create the same problems or patterns as adults. As children in a dysfunctional home, they often learn these cardinal rules: don’t trust; don’t talk; don’t feel. This means that if a parent is a raging alcoholic, has a propensity for violence, or is involved in criminal activities, the kids will often cover it up and something within them will shut down.33

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Stephen King knows this, and this is exactly why readers both despise Brady Hartsfield and still have room for some compassion for him, whether we want to or not. Like Adam Lanza, Brady Hartsfield was an average happy kid. Even after his father was killed in an electrocution accident, Brady moved on, accepting his mother’s eventual new boyfriend. Fate, however, dealt the Hartsfields a losing hand when his younger brother choked on an apple. Although he did not die from the event, Frankie is left brain damaged, changing the family’s lives forever. Hartsfield’s mother is forced to quit her job to take care of Frankie, and as the family funds dwindle, life becomes more and more stressful. Although King, in typical fashion, does not reveal the crime all at once, at the end of chapter 11 the narrator reveals that Brady killed Frankie and his mother covered up the crime. The adult Brady recalls how, with a nod of approval from his mother, he pushed his brother down the stairs as Frankie had begun to descend into the basement seeking a toy fire-truck he had dropped. After the murder, Brady’s mother retreats into alcoholism and Brady becomes her “honeyboy.” As an adult, Brady, even with the affectionate moniker he has been given, clearly despises his drunken mother. When he comes home to her one night to “only a moderate slur, which is good for this hour of the evening,” he thinks, “If I was her liver, I’d jump out of her mouth some night while she’s snoring and run the fuck away.”34 Brady’s feelings of disgust for his mother, however, are complicated by other feelings, including a scene about a quarter of the way into the novel when Brady is clearly aroused by seeing his mother in her white silk robe that reveals her thighs and nipple shadows. Though he tries not to think of his mother as sexy, the scene announces to King’s readers that something is not right in this relationship. These suspicions are quickly confirmed when Brady’s mother gives him a lingering open-mouthed kiss. Brady reflects that he and his mother do not only have Frankie’s death on their hands, but that they also “share a gothic rainbow of a secret, a thing not to be thought of unless it is absolutely necessary. When it does become necessary, it must be dealt with and put away again. Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There’s Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t use it. He wants it to burn.”35 Brady’s shame is palpable in this scene in which he also reveals that the only time he did not feel the weight of his family secrets was when he was driving into the crowd at the City Center, suggesting that he will likely kill again to regain that ecstatic sense of control. He begins making a suicide vest full of plastic explosives and fantasizes about his own death as an escape from what his life has become: “It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot’s CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.”36

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Hartsfield, we learn, does accept on the evidence of his actions that he is mentally ill. When Hodges profiles Hartsfield, Hodges is correct in surmising that the killer is “broken. And evil. Like an apple that looks okay on the outside, but when you cut it open, it’s black and full of worms.”37 However, Brady poses a key question: “Can he be blamed for striking out at the world that has made him what he is? Brady thinks not.”38 King understands Hartsfield’s brand of evil, but he also understands sympathy, leading his readers to feel it for even his most vile of characters. Some of us will feel for Adam and Nancy Lanza because we acknowledge that somewhere along the way, something in their lives went horribly, irrevocably wrong. And we feel for Brady Hartsfield in the same way. In her chapter “Sympathy for the Devil,” Morrell explains readers’ complex feelings of sympathy for characters who commit heinous acts: “Sympathy doesn’t necessarily stem from likability,” she says, “but, rather, from readers recognizing characters’ basic human qualities, aspirations, and sensibilities.”39 While she notes that “empathy for characters means that the reader feels like he’s identified with or has experienced a character’s goals or emotions,”40 a sympathetic villain’s “goals won’t necessarily be ones that the reader identifies with because those goals are going to be harmful, immoral, or even evil.”41 Sympathetic villains, Morrell concludes, are simply humanized, “so that the reader might come away with a haunting understanding of his twisted soul.”42 We recognize this humanization of villains not only in the works of Stephen King, but elsewhere in popular culture as well. Take, for instance, Tony Soprano from The Sopranos on television and Dexter Morgan of Dexter in both print and film. Murray Smith examines Tony Soprano as a character and accurately and clearly concludes that Soprano is unlikeable, not only violent and unfaithful, but “corrupt, injust [sic] and irresponsible in numerous ways.”43 Sopranos fans, however, are drawn to Tony’s character, and Smith notes that individual episodes of the show “focus on the theme of sympathy and admiration for Soprano.”44 Smith adds: As the contemporary example par excellence of the gangster drama, The Sopranos is a very apt case to explore the grounds for ethical worries over the nature and effects of fictions that focus on immoral characters and actions. For along with the horror film, and certain related genres of popular song like the “murder ballad,” the gangster film is one of the paradigms of the morally “dangerous” cultural object.45

What helps us sympathize with Soprano on such morally dangerous ground, Smith suggests, is the fact that the show frames Tony as a tragic hero—one who is in therapy even. Tony Soprano, despite his extraordinary circumstances, is actually “sufficiently ordinary.”46 His psychotherapy sessions

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highlight his “vulnerability and sense of guilt . . . [that] reveals him to be a moral being even as it drives him to further deplorable acts. He is without question morally sentient.”47 Dexter creator Jeff Lindsay similarly discusses his creation of Dexter in his essay “Sympathy for the Devils,” and in his development of his first Dexter novel, Lindsay says, “I thought I was writing something creepy, repellent, perhaps a little wicked. To balance that, I also made him vulnerable and funny, I gave him a fondness for children, and I wrote in the first person—all elements intended to bridge the gap between a homicidal psychopath and readers, who I assumed would, nevertheless, be appalled.”48 Yet readers aren’t appalled by Dexter. They love him. Although readers and television audiences adore Dexter, Lindsay suggests that his audience can’t help themselves: “There’s a special sense of dread that comes with that phrase, ‘serial killer.’ It represents an inhuman psychology that is beyond us, and because of that, we can’t look away.”49 While average people may be able to imagine killing someone in self-defense or at war, the “homicidal psychopath—a serial killer—delights in killing.”50 What else can we call such inhuman cruelty, Lindsay asks, but “evil”? And yet, Lindsay reminds us, just as King shows us in “The Man Who Loved Flowers” and Mr. Mercedes, the research I read to write my “Dexter” books predicts that, when they catch him, he will probably look just like us. He will be known as a charming and thoughtful co-worker, a nice man who helps his ailing neighbor carry her groceries, and no one will have suspected what he really is. You can’t know; but by watching, you know it could never be you. I think that’s good. We can’t deny that evil exists—but it’s not who we are. And the existence of evil implies its opposite: there is good, too.51

That there is good is a good thing to remember. In Mr. Mercedes, as in many of King’s works, good triumphs over evil. King is also smart in Mr. Mercedes to remind readers that although Brady Hartsfield is clearly mentally ill, he does not stand as a symbol for the mentally ill in America any more than Adam Lanza does. Certainly, King is attuned to the cultural arguments that warn against focusing too much on the mental illness of a perpetrator after a horrific, much publicized crime. Again, like the rest of us, King hears these arguments after every shooting massacre in America, be it Sandy Hook, Aurora, Vegas, or Sutherland Springs. In one such argument, Arthur Chu laments, “I get really really tired of hearing the phrase ‘mental illness’ thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like ‘toxic masculinity,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘misogyny’ or ‘racism.’”52 Referencing the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina shooting at Emanuel African Methodist church by Dylann Roof, Chu notes that the media barely knew

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anything about Roof at all before they started talking about mental illness as a possible factor in the atrocity. Chu further reminds readers: We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. . . . We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day—it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.53

King avoids this perpetuation of shame through his depiction of Holly Gibney, the niece of the deceased Olivia Trelawney. At forty-five and a spinster, Holly suffers from a variety of mental issues that are referenced (ad nauseam, some might rightfully argue) throughout the novel. Significantly, though, she is also the ultimate hero of the story, forced to step in during the final scenes while Hodges suffers a heart attack. When we are first introduced to Holly, she is presented as weird; she mutters, refuses to make eye contact. Hodges thinks of her as having the look of a beaten dog and that “she doesn’t have a damn thing going for her, not a single scrap of wit, not a single wile,”54 but in a subtle moment of authorial foreshadowing, we learn that he will later regret this inaccurate perception of her. Holly munches her own lip, bites her nails to the quick, and doesn’t always remember to take her Lexipro. And although Holly seems fully under the thumb of her pretentious, overbearing mother, it turns out that when given a chance to prove herself, she is actually quite a whiz with computers: it is Holly, despite her perceived failings, who helps Hodges and Jerome make significant strides in tracking down Brady Harstfield and deducing his plans for additional mass carnage. At times, Holly’s mental illness is a benefit because she can put herself in Brady’s mindset. To wit, when Holly is trying to retrieve Brady’s password for his complex computer system, Jermone says that Brady’s mental illness and drive toward secrecy is likely too great an obstacle to overcome. Holly responds that she understands the challenge because she too is mentally ill and tries to hide it, suggesting that she is perhaps better equipped to navigate the complex secrets that Brady attempts to conceal (like his passwords) because she knows how (as well as why) one goes about such obfuscation. Fortuitously, but not necessarily incidentally, Holly does indeed discover Brady’s passwords. Moreover, despite her mental illness, in the climactic scenes of the novel, when Hodges is having a heart attack and Brady Hartsfield is set in place to blow up an arena full of teenage girls, Holly is the only character who can

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see clearly what is happening. King waits until this high-tension moment in the novel to unveil more about Holly’s past and her mental illness in particular. Readers might wonder why King would stop the forward flow of the novel to devote a number of pages of exposition on Holly that could have easily, and with less distraction, come earlier. First, of course, is suspense; King makes readers wait just a bit longer for the final showdown. But King also wants to clearly reveal Holly’s motivations. After so many reminders through the novel that Holly is not whole, readers need some convincing that she will be able to pull off the task at hand, that she is strong enough emotionally to stop Hartsfield. It turns out that she is, as Holly garners her strength by recalling those who have damaged her in the past. These chapters reveal that Holly had been institutionalized in her teens and twenties due to psychotic breaks. Her breakdown in her twenties was due to sexual harassment by her boss at work, and her first breakdown was also precipitated by a male, a boy named Mike Sturdevant. Already prone to anxiety, depression, and insomnia, Holly also engaged in “stimming”: “Starting at roughly age eight, Holly began wrapping her arms around her shoulders and shivering all over, muttering to herself and making facial grimaces. This would go on for five or ten seconds, and then she would simply continue with whatever she had been doing— reading, sewing, shooting baskets in the driveway with her father.”55 Witnessing such an attack on the playground one day, Mike Sturdevant nicknamed Holly “Jibba Jabba,” a name that caught on throughout her high school until just after the Christmas break when she threatened to commit suicide if her mother made her go to Walnut Hills again. Although Holly subsequently changed schools and never saw Sturdevant again, she still has dreams in which she is humiliated by people calling her Jibba Jabba. When she is forced to muster all of her strength and face Brady Hartsfield, she remembers the hated nickname as she calls out Mike Sturdevant’s name in a moment of feigned mistaken identity to get Brady’s attention. Significantly, Holly taps into one of the root causes of her mental illness to find strength and purpose. While she could have become a hateful and violent person, like some mentally ill perpetrators, it’s important to note that like most people with mental illness, she does not. Despite our capacity for sympathy, our striving to understand what it is that creates the Adam Lanzas and the Brady Hartsfields among us, we can’t help but feel a little sense of gain inside, to gloat just a bit when the likes of such evil is rendered incapacitated. The citizens of Sandy Hook, Connecticut did not receive the catharsis of bringing Adam Lanza to justice, but they made a small step toward healing in March 2015 when the Lanza home was razed to the ground. King, however, knows his readers have come to expect a kind of deliverance that real life doesn’t always offer. As King writes in Danse Macbre, after all,

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Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile. In the old E. C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival. Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theatre or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure.56

King provides this punishment when Holly Gibney whacks Brady Hartsfield upside the head with Hodges’s “Happy Slapper” (an argyle sock full of ball bearings), not once, but twice. The blow renders him unconscious before he can detonate his wheelchair bomb at the packed concert. King does not allow Hartsfield an easy exit through murder/suicide. Consequently, we cheer because we want Brady to suffer the pain of a beating as much as we want him to be accountable. Like the citizens of Sandy Hook who cheered when the Lanza home came down, we cheer to celebrate whatever power we might wield to rid the world of evil. And, maybe even more tellingly, we cheer because we are human . . . perhaps horrifically so. NOTES 1. 1 Stephen King, “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” in Night Shift (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 300. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 304. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 305. 9. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne, Introduction to The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 11. 10. Ibid., 1–3. 11. Ibid. 12. Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade. Danse Macabre to The Dark Half (New York: Twayne, 1992), 150. 13. “Adam Lanza’s “Dad Wishes Son Had Never Been Born,” Fox News, March 10, 2014. http:​//www​.foxn​ews.c​om/us​/2014​/03/1​0/ada​m-lan​za-da​d-wis​hes-s​on-ha​ d-nev​er-be​en-bo​rn-sa​ys-ca​nt-ge​t-any​-more​-evil​.html​.

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14. Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (New York: Scribner, 2014; Kindle Edition), 88. 15. Ibid., 30. 16. “Adam Lanza’s Dad.” 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Abby Ohlheiser, “New Report Examines ‘Missed Opportunities’ in Newtown Shooter Adam Lanza’s Past,” Post Nation, November 21, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ post-​natio​n/wp/​2014/​11/21​/new-​repor​t-exa​mines​-miss​ed-op​ portu​nitie​s-in-​newto​wn-sh​ooter​-adam​-lanz​as-pa​st/?u​tm_te​rm=.7​4260e​4dc94​1. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Jessica Morrell, Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest, 2008), 16. 24. Ibid. 25. Michael Melia, “Newtown Tragedy: Actions of Shooter Adam Lanza’s Mother Mystify,” Portland Press Herald, November 27, 2013, http://www.pressherald.com/2013/11/27/ in_fo​cus__​the_n​ewtow​n_tra​gedy_​_acti​ons_o​f_sho​oter_​s_mot​ her_m​ystif​y_/. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Mark Joseph Stern, “For Whom the Bells Tolls: Not for Adam Lanza—Or His Mother,” Slate, December 12, 2013, http:​//www​.slat​e.com​/arti​cles/​news_​and_p​oliti​ cs/ crime​/2013​/12/n​ewtow​n_ann​ivers​ary_s​hould​_nanc​y_and​_adam​_lanz​a_be_​mourn​ ed.ht​ml. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Morrell, Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches, 105. 33. Ibid., 206. 34. King, Mr. Mercedes, 100. 35. Ibid., 102–3. 36. Ibid., 107. 37. Ibid., 192. 38. Ibid., 323. 39. Morrell, Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches, 197. 40. Ibid., 197. 41. Ibid., 199. 42. Ibid. 43. Murray Smith, “Just What is it That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?” in Ethics of the Cinema, eds. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011), DOI: 10.10​93/ac​prof:​oso/9​78019​ 53203​98.00​1.000​1. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid.

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46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Jeff Lindsay, “Sympathy for the Devils,” The New York Times, June 25, 2011, http:// www.nytimes. com/2011/06/25/opinion/25Lindsay.html. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., emphasis added. 51. Ibid. 52. Arthur Chu, “It’s Not about Mental Illness: The Big Lie that Always Follows Mass Shootings by White Males,” Salon.com, June 18, 2015, http://www.salon.com/ 2015/06/18/ its_ not_a​bout_​menta​l_ill​ness_​the_b​ig_li​e_tha​t_alw​ays_f​ollow​s_mas​s_ sho​oting​s_by_​white​_male​s/?ut​m_ source=facebookandutm_medium=socialflow. 53. Ibid. 54. King, Mr. Mercedes, 268. 55. Ibid., 408. 56. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House, 1981), 368.

Chapter 8

From Meat World to Cyberspace The Psychopath’s Journey in Mr. Mercedes and End of Watch Philip L. Simpson

Brady Hartsfield, the psychopathic antagonist of Stephen King’s “Hodges Trilogy,” comprised of the novels Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2016), undergoes as remarkable a character arc as any villain in King’s fiction. Hartsfield begins his journey in End of Watch as a mother-fixated serial killer possessed of nothing more remarkable than low cunning and a savant-like skill in setting traps for the unwary using machines and technology—really rather a stock character in thriller fiction. Sure, King works hard throughout the narrative to foil all reader expectations of Hartsfield as any kind of super-villain, but by the end of the first novel, when Hartsfield is beaten into a coma by Holly Gibney, a friend and future business partner of the series protagonist, Bill Hodges, the stage is set for Hartsfield’s transformation into just that: a posthuman super-villain. Hartsfield’s brain, already physically damaged and its functions rearranged in unknown and unpredictable ways by the beating, is further reconfigured by repeated injections of an experimental drug secretly given to him by his unethical doctor. As revealed in End of Watch, Hartsfield’s consciousness, reawakened by both the passage of time and the catalyst of the drugs, is now able to separate from his physical body, travel the digital world at will, and control other consciousnesses and, hence, other bodies. Freed of his profound physical constraints, Hartsfield manipulates his latest victims into killing themselves. This dramatic transformation in both Hartsfield’s character and capabilities, though foreshadowed in Mr. Mercedes when Hartsfield exists in the mind of his pursuers as only a menacing cyber entity for most of the novel, shows King in his late-stage career as self-referential, acknowledging his legacy as a “horror” writer. But it also shows him at this most playful, both busting 113

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and fusing normally discrete genres (the detective thriller, the psychological thriller, the paranormal thriller) into one series of novels. THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PSYCHOPATH: HARTSFIELD IN MR. MERCEDES Using the unrelenting economic bleakness and human desperation of the recent Great American Recession as its contemporary noir backdrop, Mr. Mercedes pits its computer-savvy reboot of a Norman Bates-ish psychopath against retired homicide detective Hodges in a cat-and-mouse game that will be quite familiar (or over-familiar) to devotees of the detective or crimethriller genres in both film and fiction. Instead of through the physically grounded territory of dank alleyways and Venetian-shuttered offices of the classic noir, the protagonist and antagonist of King’s novel stalk and match wits with each other mostly through cyberspace, primarily that provided to them by the fictional anonymous social media site of “Debbie’s Umbrella.” As is often the case in King’s fiction, technological advances are fraught with peril; in this novel, the virtual limitlessness and anonymity of the online world provides the killer, Mr. Mercedes, with both the knowledge and camouflage he requires to enact his grandiose designs. Practically invisible to all, his identity unknown to all except the reader, Mr. Mercedes is undeniably a frightening figure whose spectacular act of mass murder empowers him and traumatizes an entire city. However, rather than portray Mr. Mercedes as a larger-than-life super-villain striking with posthuman impunity from his lair in the cyber world and possessed of quasisupernatural powers of mental acuity, King deliberately presents the killer from the outset as a pathetic slacker in meat world, one whose inaugural act of mass murder was more spontaneous than planned and whose subsequent crimes are fatally flawed both in concept and execution. In other words, Mr. Mercedes is the worst kind of Internet troll: an incredible shrinking psychopath who is anything but a diabolical mastermind. Hartsfield is a relatively standard-issue young male sexual psychopath with Freudian mother issues whose murderous fantasies compel him, in the novel’s opening pages, to steal an aging female socialite’s Mercedes-Benz SL500 and drive it as a murderous instrument of rolling iron(y) into a crowd of downsized, laid-off, and otherwise unemployed or underemployed job seekers—the down-and-out victims of the Great Recession, whom King likens to the dispossessed sharecroppers of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath— at the First Annual City Job Fair at the City Center Auditorium. Eight people are killed and many others injured. As the plot unfolds through Hodges’s off-the-reservation investigation, Hartsfield is further revealed to have driven

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the Mercedes’ guilt-stricken owner, Mrs. Olivia Trelawney, to suicide. He did so via manipulative messages sent to her through “Debbie’s Umbrella,” messages that portray her as complicit in the mass murder through her carelessness in leaving her key fob in her car’s glove box for the killer to find. He has also surreptitiously planted into her computer a digital audio file of a crying baby set to play at pre-designated times through the computer speakers to “gaslight” her into thinking she is being haunted by the ghost of a baby who died at City Center. These initial acts of crafty mayhem seemingly imbue Hartsfield, both in the mind of the reader and the characters within the narrative, with the qualities of diabolical cunning, intricate planning, invincibility, and extraordinary malevolence. However, King just as quickly begins to deconstruct these self-same qualities in Hartsfield, gradually but thoroughly stripping away the villain’s formidable layers of menace (heightened greatly by his anonymity to all except the reading audience) until he is ultimately revealed to both the characters in the narrative and the readers of it as little more than an incompetent bungler, albeit a murderous one. To wit, intending to poison a dog belonging to Hodges’s young ally, Jerome, Hartsfield instead inadvertently kills his own mother, who in a fit of drunken “munchies” cooks and consumes the poison-laced hamburger stored in Hartsfield’s garage mini-fridge. Hartsfield also blows up Janey Patterson, Trelawney’s younger sister and Hodges’s romantic interest, with a car bomb meant to kill Hodges. Even Hartsfield recognizes his own incompetence during a tantrum born of frustration at himself, walking into a closet to scream and punch the shelves. Finally, his climactic act of suicide/mass murder, to take place at a sold-out concert by the boy-band ‘Round Here, is foiled at the last second by the combined actions of Hodges, Jerome, and Janey’s borderline psychotic but nevertheless endearing cousin Holly—the kind of team that King in the Dark Tower series calls a ka-tet, assembled by fate to carry out a quest that individually none of those called would successfully complete. Given the interconnectedness of the King fictional universe, it is not surprising that at one point in the breathless tracking of Mr. Mercedes, Hodges pauses to reflect on the machinations of a controlling fate in an otherwise fairly down-to-earth, grittily realistic detective story: “[Hodges is] not so naïve as to believe that every homicide is solved, but more often than not, murder does out. Something . . . comes to light. It’s as if there’s a fumblefingered but powerful universal force at work, always trying to put things right.”1 What King suggests is that the universal guiding force is not necessarily omnipotent or omniscient, but ultimately more powerful than limited human agency, and that destiny is cajoling events, and the ka-tets caught up in the circumstances of those events, toward light even though surrounded by darkness and what King unapologetically calls evil. Contrast Hodges’s

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cosmological musings against those of Hartsfield, who believes that religion is a lie, morality a delusion, and the only truth is a dark void. By comparison, Hartsfield’s view of fate is that there is no fate, no higher guiding force. Just as much as Hodges and Hartsfield test each other’s wits, so too does the narrative test their competing philosophies. By the end of the story, it is quite clear which cosmology King favors. The destiny of Hodges’s ka-tet is to stop the career of a paradoxically cunning but inept mass murderer, one who himself attempts to write his own fate toward a dark, nihilistic end but is ultimately defeated by an external fate’s magnetic draw toward the power of what King calls “right” or even “the White.” There is nothing particularly warm or personal about the forces of right in King’s cosmology, but to paraphrase the famous quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., they do bend toward a just outcome—a balancing of the scales and a temporary erasure of a formidable but finally transient evil. Throughout his lengthy writing career, King has periodically utilized the figure of the non-supernatural multiple murderer (an umbrella term encompassing mass murderer, spree killer, serial killer and all the gradations between these labels) as villain. Given that such killers already occupy a quasi-supernatural psychic space in the American imaginarium, such a choice is not surprising for King, given his indelible status as horror writer. Further, the American reading public has long had fixed in its collective awareness not only the media-hyped specter of real-life mass and serial murder, but the genre tropes that have coalesced around such figures as they are deployed in fiction and film. As Rebecca Frost has noted in her study of King’s serial killers, King both works with and against these generic expectations. If the intelligent, charismatic antiheroes as embodied in the characters of Dr. Hannibal Lecter or Dexter Morgan are what contemporary audiences have been primed to expect of their literary/cinematic serial killers, King consistently subverts this trope. Frost expounds upon this subversion: Instead of raising the serial killers to such a level that they can be viewed with awe and almost respect. . . . King writes his serial killers as mundane humans who have become twisted in ways that . . . are not worthy of empathy or sympathy from outsiders. In this way King robs his serial killers of their usual power and charisma. . . . In King, the mystique of the serial killer is erased in favor of the true evil: the man next door, someone who would never be a suspect, just intelligent enough to get away with it and with a face that would get lost in a crowd.2

Frost’s analysis is equally applicable to Brady Hartsfield. He combines characteristics of both the mass and serial killer to become his own lethal singularity, to crib a phrase from Stephen Michaud’s biography of woman slayer Ted Bundy.

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Hodges, at Janey’s request, profiles Mr. Mercedes (before he knows his true identity) for her, calling him a hybrid between a mass killer and a serial killer. When Janey compares Mr. Mercedes to Dexter Morgan, Hodges rejects the comparison, stating that Dexter knows why he does what he does and Mr. Mercedes doesn’t. Elaborating, Hodges says: “His actions suggest he’s a creature of impulse and opportunity. . . . I think ideas for murder flip through this guy’s head as fast as cards in a good dealer’s fast shuffle.”3 As the novel dips in and out of Hartsfield’s point of view, the reader realizes how accurate Hodges’s profile is, and how both organized and disorganized an offender, to use the FBI parlance for criminal classification, Hartsfield is. Both methodical and impulsive, Hartsfield relies as much on intuition as forethought for his crimes, as demonstrated by his reflection upon how his plans for Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes evolved from wanting to steal it for a joyride to some instinct telling him to leave the car as it was for some larger, later purpose. Clearly, then, by pitting Hartsfield against Hodges, King is both drawing upon and commenting upon the serial criminal versus detective profiler trope so familiar in contemporary thrillers—territory long explored and charted by writers such as Thomas Harris, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, and many others. So what, if anything, is King contributing to the crime-thriller genre that is new or under-explored with Mr. Mercedes? The answer is clear. King’s novel is intended to demystify the stock character of the serial psychopath, to reduce him from the antiheroic, practically posthuman status he has achieved in the audience acceptance of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan as points of empathy and identification. To the extent that Hartsfield is a blandly handsome, nondescript, psychosexually stunted, and completely unremarkable man of limited employment prospects in the worst years of the Great Recession, he resembles nothing more than the ur serial killer of the contemporary age: Norman Bates—right down to the dead mother he stashes in a bedroom. King walks us back, in other words, from the era of Dexter Morgan to the serial killer template introduced to the cultural world in 1960 by Robert Bloch, Joseph Stefano, and Alfred Hitchcock, thus un-inscribing the posthuman psychopath as best as King can from the scar tissue of genre history. This demystification project is best summarized by Hodges when he first sees a photograph of Hartsfield: “The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his fair share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting.”4 To Hodges, now that he knows who Mr. Mercedes is and thus Hartsfield no longer enjoys anonymity, the posthuman monster is now an ordinary man: psychopathic, yes, but human. Other scholars have written about the serial psychopath as posthuman; Camilla Griggers, for one, writes that the serial killer “can only sign in the

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public sphere as manifestly posthuman, in that it signs as the concrete form of expression of an abstract machine mediating social violences.”5 The machine Griggers references is serial murder as game played against the rational logic of the law and the surveillance/control police apparatus of the state and its representatives. Viewed through this critical lens, the serial psychopath narrative is always both the immediate (the specific killer and detective) and the abstract (the game against the state) conjoined; the serial killer and his nemesis need one another to consecrate each other’s socially mediated value. So too does Hartsfield gravitate toward Hodges as the detective assigned to the City Center massacre case, to the extent of reopening the game when Hodges retires without having caught Mr. Mercedes. Luxuriating in his anonymity (known publicly only as Mr. Mercedes), Hartsfield can continue to strike at Hodges’s embattled, fragile sense of self through the cover provided to him by the Internet. Mr. Mercedes exists for Hodges through most of the narrative as only a digital ghost in the machine, for all and intents and purposes posthuman or even transhuman, a malign consciousness divorced from the human body and lurking in cyberspace. However, by the narrative’s end, Hartsfield is fully ensconced in meatworld, and as a particularly degraded version of himself at that: shaven like Travis Bickle sans Mohawk and pretending to be crippled in a wheelchair (surreptitiously loaded with plastic explosive) so that no one will look askance at this older man at a boy’s band concert full of joyfully shrieking tween girls. His only real advantage over Hodges is his bland anonymity and computer skills, none of which remain to Hartsfield by the climax of the story. King unsympathetically reduces Hartsfield from unseen monster in the opening pages to dreadfully flawed and broken human throughout the rest of the pages. Probably the last word on Hartsfield in this novel rightly belongs to Hodges, who when asked by Holly if Hartsfield is a “master criminal” like those found in James Bond movies, replies: “I think just crazy.”6 Hartsfield may indeed be, simply and no more than, crazy. And had his story ended in Mr. Mercedes, that is how he would be remembered by the reading audience. However, King has another reverse planned for the remainder of the story, one that brings Hartsfield back full circle from meatworld into cyberspace. MIND OVER MATTER: HARTSFIELD AS PSYCHIC SUPER-VILLAIN IN END OF WATCH The third novel in the “Hodges Trilogy,” End of Watch (2016), is dedicated to Thomas Harris, the creator of three of the most famous of all fictional serial killers: Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Red Dragon; Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo

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Bill; and Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, first interviewed in a supporting role in Red Dragon (1981) and then stealing the show in every one of Harris’s published serial killer novels to date. The dedication to Harris, the modern master of the serial killer novel, is no doubt meant to reinforce within the minds of King’s Constant Readers that End of Watch will tread the same (or at least similar) Gothic criminology ground as Harris’s thrillers, which, to some extent, is actually true. Brady Hartsfield, as noted earlier, is a psychopathic murderer (admittedly curiously inept or a “dumbass”) who resembles nothing so much as a cyber troll reboot of Norman Bates, enslaved to the same kind of domineering, oversexed mother who takes the brunt of the narrative blame for the genesis of both Norman’s and Brady’s sickness. Harris’s characters Francis Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb also owe much of their psychopathology to overbearing, sexualized maternal figures in their lives. The trope of the Evil Matriarch is well established in serial killer fiction, and her controlling presence in the life story of Brady Hartsfield is too obvious to be anything other than an Easter Egg, or a shout-out to fans of the genre, deliberately planted within the narrative by King. As one of the most media- and genre-savvy of contemporary writers, King signals his intent to create a popular culture murderous antagonist in the spirit of those fashioned by Harris. In fact, King wants to do Harris one better in this novel. Harris’s killers, especially Dr. Lecter, are so cunning and gifted in the killing arts that they for all intents and purposes take on the guise of supernatural, or supra-natural, monsters, even though they are merely so in comparison to the common lot of what Dr. Lecter contemptuously calls “those other poor dullards,” that is, the likes of you and me. By contrast, King’s killers tend to rather bathetic: intentionally crafted to be ordinary schmucks defying one’s conventional expectations of them as charismatic, preternaturally wily super-predators. Hartsfield, as introduced in Mr. Mercedes, was one of King’s typical serial killers whose deeds spoke to potent, seemingly invincible monstrosity but whose reality as a murderous bungler was ordinary, all too human, even banal in the extreme. To put it lightly, throughout the course of events in Mr. Mercedes, King deliberately demystifies Brady from monster to mook. However, by the end of the second “Hodges” novel, Finders Keepers, King, as if to personally confound all critics who smugly think they have him pegged, departs from the demystification project of the first novel to begin remystifying Brady as not only a master criminal but one possessed of a murderous array of the kind of Fortean wild talents—telekinesis, mind control— found in many of King’s other works, from The Shining in his early career to Dr. Sleep in his most recent novels. Hodges, who periodically visits Brady in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic to taunt his nemesis, has been hearing rumors, which Brady’s physician Dr. Babineau (more on him later) is quick

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to dismiss as hospital urban legend. According to the hospital nurses, Brady, though otherwise in a semi-vegetative, non-communicative state, can turn the water in his sink on and off with the power of his mind. The nurses believe “that being whopped repeatedly in the head on the night he tried to blow up Mingo Auditorium has somehow rearranged Hartsfield’s brains. That being whopped repeatedly gave him . . . powers.”7 Though suspicious that Brady is more aware of his surroundings than he is letting on, Hodges, at the end of Finders Keepers, fails to get any kind of undeniably conscious reaction out of Brady and leaves him alone in his room. However, in a final scene witnessed only by King’s Constant Readers, Brady uses telekinesis to turn on his Zappit tablet (a device that will play a critical role in Brady’s scheme to engineer a suicide wave in the third novel), to run the water in his sink, and to knock over a framed photograph of his mother and him. Thus, in a series that has heretofore been solidly rooted in the dangerous but light-of-day, rational gumshoe-and-criminal milieu of King’s frequent recent forays into detective fiction, Brady’s resurrection as a psychic super-villain is jarring but familiar, as if that part of King’s fiction that trafficked in supernatural phenomena such as telekinesis suddenly slipped from where it had been held at arm’s length and crashed through the pages of this crime thriller. Denise Mina, reviewing End of Watch for the New York Times, notes the same slippage when she writes that King “is never bound by the parameters of one genre. Raymond Chandler is said to have advised detective-story writers, when stuck with a plot, to have a character walk through a door with a gun. But when King gets stuck, his character could walk through a door with a ghost or a box that opens into another dimension or a dog in a top hat who can recite poetry.”8Mina’s tone in making that observation is ambiguous but in context is probably an approving acknowledgment of King’s easy versatility with genre mashups. Not so for James Kidd, when he observes, rather caustically, that: Oddly, the person King reminds me most of these days is Bob Dylan. They are two greats in their artistic dotage, and like Dylan, whose two previous albums are filled with cover versions, King seems to be exploring the genres and stories that formed him. He honours these influences and traditions without ever escaping them, or imposing his own considerable voice on them. Droning on endlessly about Wi-fi might update hoary old mind-control shockers, but it does little to improve them.9

More charitably, Kidd admits that what King might be up to in his “late,” aka recent, works is a “preoccupation with the tolls taken by time and age.”10 From this critical perspective, then, End of Watch is not only a reference to Hodges’s last case as mortality looms but a metatextual reflection of King

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upon King: King’s own self-assessment of his career as he enters his, in Kidd’s less-than-charitable term, dotage. Of course, whether in early, mid or late career, King as a fabulist of a literary realism/naturalism bent always strives to ground even his most outré tales in our mundane world of natural physical laws and cause-and-effect daily experience, even if the fabric of that reality is shredded by some kind of interdimensional rift that allows the monsters in the mist (or Mina’s dog in a top hat who can recite poetry) from another reality to pour through. The conflict between the rational world and those other worlds than these is an uneasy truce at best in King’s fiction, which the prosaic detective Hodges is forced to reflect upon as he hears more rumors about Brady’s strange powers: “Hodges’s rational mind insists there’s nothing to these rumors, and certain strange occurrences have rational explanations, but there’s more to his mind than the rational part on top. Deep below that rational part is an underground ocean— there’s one inside every head, he believes—where strange creatures swim.”11 Within End of Watch, these strange swimming creatures of the underground ocean of the mind find their digital avatars in the brightly colored fish in the Fishin’ Hole video game app bundled in the discontinued Zappit tablet. (A subplot in the novel details how Brady maneuvers his mind-controlled minions into buying up lots of the discontinued tablets and distributing them to his intended victims.) The hypnotic effect caused by watching these fish renders the players’ minds vulnerable to Brady’s telepathic control. King bases the mass hypnosis sparked by the Fishin’ Hole app upon the apocryphal tales of video games such as the infamous Polybius, alleged in the 1980s to have contained subliminal messages of unknown but presumably sinister content that caused adverse psychoactive reactions in its teenage players, such as insomnia or photosensitive epileptic seizures. Though not of the same order of mass hypnosis as portrayed in End of Watch, the phenomenon of photosensitive seizures triggered by the bright flashing lights of television is documented, such as the hundreds of children in Japan in 1997 who suffered seizures after watching an episode of the cartoon Pokemon. King mines this contemporary anxiety about the deleterious impact of digital media, especially computer and video games, upon impressionable children’s and teenagers’ minds to create a scenario in which Brady, flexing his newly acquired psychic powers as a kind of lethally deranged Professor Charles Xavier, can potentially mass murder thousands more kids, harnessing his mind to the vast reach of the Internet, than he ever could have while confined to his flesh-andblood body. Indeed, anxiety about the corrosive effect of the Internet upon the psyche pervades the text of End of Watch. In the opening pages Hodges ruminates upon the blessings and curse of the range of knowledge that can be immediately accessed on the web by anyone for any purpose, be that purpose noble

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or base or downright evil: “You can find anything on the Internet. . . . Some of it is helpful. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is funny. And some of it is fucking awful.”12 Most relevant to End of Watch’s plot about mass suicide, some of this “fucking awful” content includes easily accessible, detailed online instructions for how to construct home suicide kits involving warm bath water, helium canisters, a terrycloth robe belt, a length of tubing, and a plastic bag to fit snugly over one’s head. Yet the availability of this information, as helpful as it is in aiding Brady’s crime, is not the worst part of the online environment. As anyone who has been the target of cyber bullying can attest, the trolls who use their keyboards to inflict terror upon others are the worst hazard. Brady, having left his own body behind to invade Dr. Babineau’s body and make it his own, reflects upon how even his formidable psychic powers pale next to the reach of the Internet: “He thinks (and not for the first time) that a touch of telekinesis is nothing compared to the power of the Internet. He’s sure thousands of suicides have incubated in the potent soup of its social media sites, where the trolls run free and the bullying goes on endlessly. That’s real mind over matter.”13 As a preternaturally empowered online troll, Brady stands as the kind of Gothic monster identified by Edward Ingebretsen as a “vehicle for the presentation of social ills”14 which must then be ritually purged to restore some sense of normality. The Hodges trilogy spends much of its running time, so to speak, following Hodges and his merry misfit band of amateur detectives as they struggle to purge (successfully in the end, but at cost) Brady from the social body like the cyber virus that he literally becomes. The compulsion to murder is itself viral or a kind of contagion in the shadowy moral swamp of Gothic criminology, which makes this book’s dedication to Thomas Harris even more appropriate. Beyond the dedication, the climactic confrontation between Brady and Hodges reinforces the connection to Harris in this description of Brady’s body following his karmic fate of being run down as he did to his victims in Mr. Mercedes: “Brady’s hijacked body has been laid open to the backbone. His guts are spread out around him like the wings of a red dragon. Pools of steaming blood are sinking into the snow.”15 Besides the explicit allusion to Red Dragon, the scene visually echoes the last shot of Dolarhyde’s lifeless body in a spreading pool of blood on the white kitchen floor in Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, the cinematic adaptation of Red Dragon. Additionally, the full name of the woman who becomes Brady’s hapless pawn in carrying out the mass suicide is Frederica Bimmel Linklatter, which readers familiar with Harris’s work will be quick to cross-references to Buffalo Bill’s first victim, Frederica Bimmel, in The Silence of the Lambs. In Harris’s oeuvre, those who stare into the abyss of fighting monsters such as Lecter and Dolarhyde are themselves either swallowed by the abyss or greatly compromised by the experience.

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Will Graham of Red Dragon, through his empathetic link to the murderous point-of-view, nearly loses his life and does lose his marriage in the pursuit of Dolarhyde. Clarice Starling, through the two-novel arc of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, finds her initially promising attempt to penetrate the patriarchy of the FBI stymied at every turn by men out to do her harm and ends up as Dr. Lecter’s chattel. Though nowhere near as compromised as Harris’s protagonists, Hodges, Holly, and Jerome in their ka-tet team up to mortally injure Brady and then provide him with the means to commit the suicide he has aimed toward all along. While Brady’s fate within the context of the moral universe established in the novel is richly karmic, the three private detectives are operating extra legally in the best film noir/Gothic criminological tradition. Following Brady’s death, which so far as the rest of the world knows was apparently Dr. Babineau’s death at the hands of Hodges and his allies, Hodges’s ex-partner Pete shows up as the epilogue’s deux ex machina to let the worried ka-tet know they’re in the clear because (a) Babineau was a corrupt doctor and (b) no one cares about his death anyway. Pete’s official exoneration of Hodges, Holly, and Jerome serves a larger code of justice than the rigid, unimaginative legal system, never built to contain, let alone comprehend, a monstrous threat such as Brady Hartsfield. It falls to those who fight monsters to carry out true justice—again, a message that both Harris and King convey in their respective tales of mass murder, with each both mythologizing and demythologizing their villains to interrogate, push, prod, and poke the boundaries of a genre that insists on casting murderers in Gothic cloaks. CONCLUSION The incredible psychopathic journey of Hartsfield from “ordinary” to posthuman serial killer signals a profound shift in tone and theme from the first novel in the series to the third. Mr. Mercedes is a realistic detective procedural with nary a whiff of other worlds than these at any point in the narrative. Hartsfield may loom large as an unknown murderer in the imaginations of the frightened public and his relentless pursuers, but in the end he is revealed to be a pathetic boy-man whose schemes inevitably fall apart. All of that changes by End of Watch, in which Hartsfield resurrects from his death-like state by sheer force of will as a chilling, seemingly unstoppable psychic monster more in keeping with the first part of King’s career as a horror brand name than his more literary, genre-busting later years. If Mr. Mercedes deconstructs the largerthan-life, quasi-supernatural conventions of the serial killer genre, End of Watch reconstructs those conventions firmly in the realm of the supernatural (albeit with a pseudo-scientific explanation behind the supernatural events)

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and certifies serial killer Hartsfield as both more and less than human. King’s playfulness in the margins of genre fiction, at odds with and reinforcing his aspirations to serious literary recognition, is nowhere more evident than in his portrayal of Hartsfield’s transformation in the “Hodges trilogy.” NOTES 1. Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (New York: Scribner, 2014), 238. 2. Rebecca Frost, “A Different Breed: Stephen King’s Serial Killers,” in Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror, eds. Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 130–31. 3. King, Mr. Mercedes, 192. 4. Ibid., 339. 5. Camilla Griggers, “Phantom and Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) Killing Machine,” in Posthuman Bodies, eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995), 171. 6. King, Mr. Mercedes, 311. 7. Stephen King, Finders Keepers (New York: Scribner, 2015), 430. 8. Denise Mina, “Review of End of Watch, by Stephen King,” The New York Times Book Review, June 10, 2016, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​016/0​6/12/​books​/revi​ ew/st​ephen​-king​s-end​-of-w​atch.​html.​ 9. James Kidd, “Stephen King Retreads Old Ground in New Novel, End of Watch,” South China Morning Post, July 2, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/magazines/ post-​magaz​ine/b​ooks/​artic​le/19​83585​/step​hen-k​ing-r​etrea​ds-ol​d-gro​und-n​ew-no​vel-e​ nd-wa​tch. 10. Ibid. 11. Stephen King, End of Watch (New York: Scribner, 2016), 425. 12. Ibid, 17. 13. Ibid, 289. 14. Edward Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5. 15. King, End of Watch, 415.

Part III

REVIVING THE GOTHIC

Chapter 9

Gothic Recall Stephen King’s Uncanny Revival of the Frankenstein Myth Alexandra Reuber

“This book is for some of the people who built my house” reads the opening statement to Stephen King’s novel Revival (2014), a book that illustrates once again the author’s indebtedness to the genre of gothic fiction and its literary representatives, developments, and diversions. It is a genre that had a profound influence on his writing, but that he also helped shape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To say the least, Revival is a good example of the old and postmodern gothic. Filled with typical gothic archetypes ranging from the solitary house up on a hill top, the secluded laboratory, and the villain’s conflict between good and evil, to disturbing dreams and the horrifying graphic description of the reanimation of the dead body of Mary Fey, the reader cannot miss the novel’s literary influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as its current take on controversial scientific experiments. However, the one literary influence that stands out the most is Mary Shelley’s. While focusing on the exploration of death and loss, Revival returns to the pursuit of scientific knowledge as a means to overcome the loss of a loved but lost object. It revisits “the theme of moral responsibility in scientific research”1 as well as “the concept of free will,”2 themes that Shelley addressed in her gothic masterpiece Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1883) and that King himself already explored in Pet Sematary (1983), his own literary appropriation of the Frankenstein myth. Yet Revival distinguishes itself from its literary precursors in two important aspects: first, in the choice of matter and reason for the experiments with “secret electricity,” and second, in the degree of objectification and the “lack of consideration for others, honesty, and callous pursuit of one’s own ends.”3 The focus of Revival is different than the one of Frankenstein or of 127

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Pet Sematary; its focus has shifted from the monstrous result of reanimation of the dead to the horrific consequences of a weak self-image and its related revival of suppressed personality disorders, leading to the deliberate pursuit of the lost self at all costs. Free will, the mistaken notion of superiority, and the refusal “to take personal responsibility for one’s actions”4 have never been as clearly pronounced as in Revival. This said, Revival replaces the artificially created monster from the past, the monster that lives within our direct surrounding, but yet outside, with the monster that lives inside each of us and that, upon externalization, becomes “the voice of a coaxing devil.”5 As such, it becomes a threat to everybody, oneself included, and confronts the reader with the task to answer Judith Halberstam’s question: “Who rather than what is the object of terror?”6 In short, this psychoanalytical study of King’s novel will explain both the revival and the transformation of the Frankenstein myth into a terrifying study of the human psyche. GOTHIC RECALL AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION As “a literature of nightmare” that focuses on “amorphous fears and impulses common to all mankind,” gothic fiction “gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind.”7 Mostly delocalized in the nineteenth century, the gothic setting and its evil villain were far removed from civilization. However, in King’s twenty-first century postmodern gothic text, the notion of evil has reached our direct surrounding and has transformed into the “psychic grotesquerie and landscapes of the mind.”8 In Revival, the notion of evil is set in relation to Reverend Jacobs’s illegitimate quest for knowledge, exploitive and abusive behavior toward his fellowmen, as well as his way of saying “things that we would be afraid to say out straight”9 without almost ever taking personal responsibility for his actions. Via the depiction of Reverend Jacobs’s engagement in experiments on his fellow citizens—experiments whose sole goal is his own personal advancement—Stephen King returns to the discussion of the opposing forces of morality versus monstrosity and of good versus evil already alluded to in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and he openly discussed in his own appropriation of the 19th gothic text, Pet Sematary. Making the corrupted nature of the human mind again the main point of interest, King reminds its readers of the concept and gothic dilemma of free will to do good, versus the deliberate “decision to do evil.”10 Yet, he returns to and revives the familiar in an unfamiliar highly psychological way, thus, giving his postmodern gothic version of Frankenstein an uncanny twist. In Frankenstein and Pet Sematary, Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed dismiss morality when they choose to

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reanimate the dead in attempt to overcome their sorrow and to recreate their family unit. Mary Shelley’s famous nineteenth-century medical student, Victor Frankenstein, desires to overcome his grief for the loss of his mother through the creation of a “new species.”11 His twentieth-century doublegänger, Louis Creed, a medical doctor from Chicago, wishes to reclaim the loss of his family: first, of the cat Church; then of his dead son, Gage; and finally of his deceased wife, Rachel. “Obsessed with death and endlessly dying,”12 both men are blinded by their urge to understand the unknown that surrounds death, to fight against it, and to retrieve what was lost to it. As a consequence, both men depart on a selfish journey during which the opposition of good versus evil effaces until the “inside evil”13 dominates and manifests itself in their immoral choice to repossess the lost object via the reanimation of the dead. In the Reverend’s case, it is the loss of his son, Morris, and his wife, Patsy, that turns his life and belief system upside down. Similar to Victor and Louis, the Reverend seeks consolation and comfort through scientific experimentation. However, his “scientific approach” differs from the one of his literary predecessors. Instead of “collecting bones from charnel houses”14 for his experiments, or burying dead bodies in sacred Indian burial grounds, he finds participants for his experiments among fellow citizens attending state fairs. In other words, whereas Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed attempt to retrieve the lost object through experimentation on and reanimation of the dead, Reverend Jacobs pursues the lost object via his experimentation on the living, especially on those who suffer from severe medical conditions or who are terminally ill. For Reverend Jacobs, the participants in these experiments are nothing more than “lab rats”15 and “guinea pigs,”16 which will eventually die anyway. The man’s lack of respect for his fellow citizens and their individual stories, however, goes far beyond the use of degrading vocabulary; it shows in his overall behavior and his approach to his human subject research. His parasitic relationship with his fellowmen revisits, then, the theme of the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the consequence of those immoral choices. By carefully outlining Reverend Jacobs’s life and diligently crafting his character, King addresses issues pertinent to human behavior in contemporary American society, such as greed, hubris, egotism, and a false self-image. As King’s novel shows, these characteristics, when revived and fueled over time, easily lead to the return and (re)birth of the monster, which, in Revival, is no longer associated with the walking dead, but more so with the Reverend’s dark cluster personality disorder, the dark triad, composed of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. This though said, whether as a supernaturally crafted object composed of dead body parts, a miraculously revived family member in the secret earth of the Micmac burial grounds, or an allegorical representation of the dark triad, any monster “criticizes the

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status of nature, society, scientific progress, and humanity.”17 It is an object that is not only “out of nature,”18 but an affront to human nature and society. Consequently, it has no natural place in the world of the living, a world that is ruled by social and moral laws and customs. As an outsider within the realm of human society, the monster then becomes an antagonistic force to natural order and “an implicit threat to society”19 and reason, as well as to “the whole concept of morality.”20 As a result, it questions the notions of existence and identity; it becomes an object that represents what Judith Halberstam calls “negative identity.”21 The monster as opposing force to existence and identity is clearly illustrated in Frankenstein and Pet Sematary. In Frankenstein, the monster is a loathsome wretch with “watery eyes” and a “yellow skin”22 born in “a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house.”23 It is an artificially created being composed of an endless number of parts stemming from many different dead bodies. It is a being without a name, without any ties to anybody, confined to a solitary existence within the realm of human society. The monster in Pet Sematary is not artificially created, but “born” in the Indian burial ground. In other words, whereas Victor bestows “animation upon lifeless matter,”24 Louis Creed discovers the secret of resurrection and burial. Burial in Pet Sematary has multiple meanings. First, as already mentioned before, it refers to the custom of burying a dead body. Second, it has to be understood in a more abstract sense, namely Louis Creed’s increasing burial of rationality, morality, and of self-hood, which, in the end, results in “the denial of psychic reality,”25 leading to the burial of identity, on the one hand, and to the birth of something monstrous, on the other. Louis’ deep devotion for his family and over-identification with the role of the father, namely protector of the family circle at all costs, turn the once goodhearted man and rational scientist into a madman who convinces himself to no longer view death as “part of life,”26 but instead to use it “to create order out of chaos and strength out of weakness.”27 Instead of listening to Victor Pascow’s warning to never “go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to,”28 Louis’ secret burials and reanimations exemplify his pathological form of mourning and “incapacity for dealing with death.”29 In addition, it shows his conscious choice to abandon reason and morality with the purpose to reconstruct his family unit and to revive his protective father image, which is a deeply ingrained self-image. As a result, Louis does not only commit an atrocious act against nature but gives birth to monstrous breeds: a weird cat, a destructive and cannibalistic son, and a zombie-like spouse. Most importantly, he gives birth to the “escalating, cyclical, spiraling pattern of death and resurrection that organizes the novel’s narrative”30 all the while he carefully buries his initially rational belief that “the dead do not [yet cannot] return.”31 By giving birth to the monster—in person and in thought—Louis Creed

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dismantles normality, morality, and familiarity. He embraces otherness that results in his non-belonging neither to the world of the living (his remaining family members), nor to the world of the dead. Even though it seems that due to appearance and behavior, cat, son, and even his wife are the monsters in King’s novel, the reader has to come to terms with the fact that Louis Creed’s obsession with death and revival and his consequential negation of and opposition to the natural order turn him into the monster himself. He becomes the “perfect figure for negative identity.”32 Similar to Louis Creed, Reverend Jacobs “doesn’t care what price has to be paid”33 in order to overcome the loss he feels. The difference between the two men, however, is that Louis is concerned about preserving his family unit, whereas Jacobs is solely focused on his personal advancement. Consequently, the main focus of Revival is no longer Shelley’s or King’s own reanimation of the dead of the external object and the subsequent rebuilding of a close family circle, but rather the author’s understanding of men’s selfish pursuit of self-definition and personal gain at the cost of others. While centering on the “oscillation between repetition and difference as a symbolic vacillation around and across the border of death”34 and the consequential selfish quest to understand the meaning of “dead city,”35 Revival takes the form of an appropriated and uncanny version of the two previous novels. It actually becomes the textual manifestation of Jacobs’s laboratory tucked away on the Skytop of the Goat Mountain Resort, a place that holds all of the Reverend’s suppressed “memories of past fears, of distant traumas”36 and illegitimate desires. It is in this particular laboratory that Stephen King allows his readers to look into the “inhuman staring eyes”37 of Mary Fey only to discover that these eyes are a gateway into Jacobs’s psychopathic, selfish, conniving, and highly immoral psychological composition. Readers are looking at “the true world”38 of dead city, the symbolic barrier for the psychoanalytical understanding of King’s text in general and of the Reverend Jacobs’s self in particular. Much like King’s fictional characters Louis Creed in Pet Sematary, Jacobs’s psychological and emotional disposition seems to change after losing his wife and son “on a warm and cloudless midweek day in October of 1965.”39 Although Jacobs is seemingly a firm believer in God and in the gospel prior to the incident, he turns away from God and toward his secretive studies thereafter. No longer is God his refuge and strength, and no longer does religion fulfill the comforting function “when the hard times come.”40 On the contrary, in his Sunday sermon, Jacobs now compares religion to “the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam,”41 which at the end of the day, one discovers “does not, in fact, exist.”42 Jacobs now chooses blasphemy over prayer and disbelief over belief in the gospel. While perceiving life as “a struggle of all against all”43 after the incident, Jacobs “moves against people.”44 Cynicism in addition to a hard and demeaning language become

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his new forms of expression. He turns from community preacher, healer, and protector to community aggressor and mad scientist. First, he only projects his anger and bereavement onto his parishioners in his Sunday sermon. Soon thereafter, he allows much larger crowds at fairgrounds to experience him as a preacher and “healer.” His “new parishioners” are those who, like him, are fate stricken: the lonely, the sick, the dying. They are easy targets for his self-identified grief work with secret electricity, his remedy to overcome the emotional loss. (RE)GAINING CONTROL— REVIVING THE LOST OBJECT Being of seemingly genuine appearance on the outside with the apparent goal to heal those who are marked by long-term illness or even the slowly approaching death, the reader discovers soon that Jacobs’s experiments are nothing else than a front to heal himself. His experiments are a symptomatic expression of his apparent nonacceptance of “the limitations of the physical world”45 on the one hand, and his need to regain control over his life as well as “control over others,”46 on the other. Jacobs is fueled by his deep urge to discover whatever he thinks is behind “the door into death.”47 To fulfill this urge, he pushes aside any empathy for his participants, as well as any attempt Jamie Morton, once a neighbor boy, now a young man who functions as his voice of reason, makes to stop Jacobs’s “carny wonder show.”48 The Reverend’s reaction to such a “stupid” request is simple: “And why would I do that, Jamie, when it’s done so much good for so many?”49 Jacobs’s word choice of “so many” as opposed to “all” or “everybody” indicates his disregard for those participants who still suffer, in many instances more than before their treatment with electricity. There is, for example, “Robert Rivard who was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends. . . . That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City [who] had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. . . . That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim [who] had suffered what she called ‘interruptions of visions.’”50 The list goes on. In addition, there are also those who died due to the aftereffects, such as “Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008”51 and “Cathy Morse, a pretty little Sooner gal.”52 The fact that Jacobs claims doing good while many of his followers suffer serious aftereffects reveals two things about his character: first, it is representative of Jacobs’s irresponsibility toward his fellowmen; second, it shows his deceptive nature and “strong need to exploit others, to outsmart them, [and] to make them use to himself”53 at all times. Jacobs’s feeling of compassion for the sick and altruism has been

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replaced with his lack of concern for people and “lack of guilt or remorse when [his] actions harm others.”54 When Jamie reminds him of his calculating and deceptive attitude toward his fellow men and compares him to a Josef Mengele, Jacobs not only refuses “to acknowledge and thus repent his wrongdoing,”55 but rather chooses to maintain his sense of superiority by not engaging in the conversation with Jamie. Instead of answering Jamie’s questions, Jacobs chooses to respond to Jamie with a question: “Does anyone call a neurosurgeon Josef Mengele just because he loses some of his patients?”56 That the Reverend is unwilling to engage in a conversation with Jamie exemplifies his “callousness, emotional coldness, and unsentimentality.”57 In addition, it hints at his true motive, which is far from taking care of his sick followers. His alleged acts of healing only have one purpose, namely to bring Jacobs one step closer to the understanding of what is hiding behind “the door into death”: the barrier that the young student Victor Pascow in Pet Sematary warned Louis Creed to never ever open. However, Jacobs’s compulsive obsession for knowledge goes hand in hand with his followers’ longing to believe in the good of mankind and in the possibility to be healed. As his former parishioners in Harlow came to his Methodist church to listen to him preach, his new followers flock to country fairs to hear his words and to participate in his “healing” practices. By doing so, the attendees of his “healing shows” encourage him to continue with his experiments. Indeed, their willingness to participate on his stage allows him to (re)gain control and power over his own life. Jacobs’s misuse of his followers’ naivety and desperation for his own benefit and personal advancement, in combination with him ever taking any responsibility for his actions, is proof of Jacobs’s “conscious decision to do evil.”58 But are these really new traits of character? And if so, does his interest in finding out what comes after death reflect his concern for his lost son and wife, or is it rather a symptomatic expression for his unsatisfied desire to retrieve what was intentionally suppressed, and which now, that the external institutional aggressors of marriage, fatherhood, and ecclesiastical vows have been eliminated, reemerges with full force? In short, has Reverend Jacobs unconsciously, and maybe fatalistically, adopted the new persona of a gothic villain, or is it rather his long-repressed double figure that reemerges and replaces the once loving persona of Methodist priest with the conniving dark half of a more Machiavellian character? To answer these questions, it is important to understand the psychological construct of the lost object and its relation to the self, a psychological entity that can be described as “a composite structure derived from the integration of multiple self-images”59 (bodily, impulsive, affective, and reflective) and “an integrated view of the other.”60 In other words, the self and its subject only forms and develops through object relationships. Hence, the object, whether internal or external, “establishes the social nature of the self in regard

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to the other,”61 thus, defines it. As a result, a weak self-image in combination with an over-identification with and internalization of the external object can easily lead to the development of a so-called false self, a self that has a strong need to accommodate “to the reality of the other”62 leading to the adoption of a persona that camouflages one’s true being and that ultimately results in “the despairing loss of self at the hands of the inner object,”63 as well as of reality. In Jacobs’s case, this kind of loss of reality becomes apparent after the tragic accident, due to which he lost everything that once defined his false self and adopted identity as father, husband, preacher, and community leader in the small town of Harlow. The adoption of these social roles allowed him to comply with the social expectations associated with each individual role. In role, he was soft-spoken, understanding, amicable, loving, and giving. Now shellshocked and out of role, he is unpredictable, aggressive, and sociopathic. It can even be argued that Jacobs’s adopted self-images are so intertwined with his created reality, that right after the loss of the external objects (the community, his wife, and his son), his “self representation remains [initially] cognitively intertwined with the object representation,”64 making a separation between himself and his artificially imposed roles almost impossible. The result is a “sense of disorganization”65 and non-belonging as exemplified in his Thanksgiving sermon. However, when fully realizing the absence of the object(s), Jacobs completely breaks with his former life and imposed roles and starts seeking inner peace through his experiments with electricity. It is on the stage of numerous state fairs that his false self seeks to compensate for the sudden loss using objectification of and projection onto others as its means. Unfortunately, instead of finding relief through the experiments, Jacobs’s “projective identification”66 with the external does not satisfy, but only nourishes his desire to find more and more “substitute attachment object[s]”67 onto which he can project his “obsessive desire for knowledge”68 that eventually will lead him to the laboratory of Goat Mountain, the (re)birth chamber of his true self. At this point, we can conclude that similar to his literary predecessors Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed, Reverend Jacobs “deliberately chooses evil”69 as a means of compensation for his loss. This choice illustrates two things: on the one hand, it voices the rejection of formerly imposed social roles; on the other hand, it expresses the adoption of a new role that is more aligned with or representative of their true self. To that end the reader can draw the following three conclusions: First, Victor abandons his role as beloved son, brother, and fiancé, and follows his innermost calling to take on the role of a modern Prometheus. Second, Louis Creed exchanges his role of the “loving father and capable physician into a madman.”70 Third, Jacobs frees himself from his social roles as priest, husband, and father in order to

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rediscover his true self that is hiding behind the ivory covered door of “dead city.” Similar in their opposition to their pre-imposed roles, and their “turning away from reality”71 via their pursuit of forbidden knowledge through experiments with secret electricity, the men’s execution of scientific experiments does differ. As already pointed out, Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed attempt to revive dead matter for the sole purpose to reunite with their beloved family members; Reverend Jacobs, however, aims to rediscover and to embrace his true self by regaining control over his self as well as over others. This said, instead of seeking to distance or free themselves from their lost objects, Victor and Louis chose to prolong their existence through reanimation of the dead. By doing so, both men usurp the role of God as the ultimate life-giving force, and the role of the mother, the life-giving body. In contrast to Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed, Reverend Jacobs seeks to fight against this “perilous dependence on”72 the lost external object through which he falsely identified himself for too long. Even though, readers first may have the impression that what he seeks is his family, they have to realize that wife and son are only placeholders for what Jacobs really attempts to recapture: the ownership of his true self that shall be freed from all social constraint, a state of being that goes far beyond the day of the accident. DISSECTING THE REFERENT’S DARK TRIAD: HIS NARCISSISM, PSYCHOPATHY, AND MACHIAVELLIANISM Even though different in their choice of material and their approach of (re) animation, it seems reasonable to argue that, in all three cases, the men’s behavior results from unresolved grief work that has become a symptomatic expression of a pathological form of mourning. In Jacobs’s case, this form of mourning exemplifies the deeply rooted personality disorder, known as the dark triad: a complex personality cluster that is characterized by “entitlement, superiority, dominance (i.e., narcissism), glib social charm, manipulativeness (i.e., Machiavellianism), callous social attitudes, impulsivity, and interpersonal antagonism (i.e., psychopathy).”73 It is a psychological constitution of the self that is in constant need of self-affirmation and the maintenance of power over others by using “emotionally manipulative behaviors”74 to ensure the achievement of one’s goals. The dark triad then is an “agentic, exploitive social strategy”75 that allows oneself to fulfill one’s desires and needs without ever feeling remorse for one’s actions or empathy for one’s victims. According to psychologists Peter K. Jonason and Gregory D. Webster, the most

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central psychometric properties of the dark triad can be reduced to “the dirty dozen” and categorized as follows (with Charles Jacobs’s alignment with each trait denoted with a Check): Narcissism: 1. I tend to want others to admire me. -Check 2. I want others to pay attention to me. -Check 3. I tend to expect special favors from others. -Check 4. I tend to seek prestige or status. Psychopathy: 5. I tend to lack remorse. -Check 6. I tend to be callous or insensitive. -Check 7. I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions. -Check 8. I tend to be cynical. -Check Machiavellianism: 9. I have used deceit or lied to get my way. -Check 10. I tend to manipulate others to get my way. -Check 11. I have used flattery to get my way. -Check 12. I tend to exploit others toward my own end. -Check When comparing Reverend Jacobs’s behavior and character traits to this list constituting “the dirty dozen,” a very strong overlap between Jacobs’s individual properties and the ones of the respective personality disorder is apparent. From the very beginning of the book, the reader learns that Reverend Jacobs enjoys his assignment as a Methodist preacher and, more importantly, the resulting popularity and social status and value that come with this assignment. Being surrounded by people that love and admire him gives him strength and a sense of being. However, Jacobs’s definition through others is indicative of his profound lack of self-esteem and emotional dependence. In addition, his need for admiration fuels his narcissistic belief that he is “special.” Stephen King alludes to this psychological juxtaposition, when Jacobs “borrows” Jamie, a young boy at the time, to introduce him to his fantasies of success and brilliance when conducting experiments with secret electricity. The author’s choice of words—“to borrow”—seems to point to an innocent act of substitution at the time: Jamie filling in for Jacobs’s son Morrie and his wife Patricia who have not yet arrived in Harlow. This substitution of one for another though foreshadows the course of events that follows the fatal accident. It is then that the preacher’s illness-stricken victims become his surrogates fueling his ever-increasing entitlement of taking “advantage of others to achieve his own ends.”76

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On a deep level, Jacobs’s experiments on the sick and helpless are of an acute narcissistic nature. Their sole goal is to recapture what was lost, and what is needed for him to feel whole again. In this sense, Reverend Jacobs shows similarities to Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed who also opt for illegitimate experiments to recreate what was lost. Yet, Jacobs’s form of narcissism differs from Frankenstein’s and Creed’s. Frankenstein and Creed’s narcissistic acts result from a pathological form of mourning for the loss of the external object to which their libido is still bound. Both men struggle “with separation conflicts and searching for the lost object.”77 Hence, their narcissistic acts represent a form of “denial and protest [that] coexists with depression and awareness of loss.”78 Jacobs’s narcissism, however, goes beyond any form of pathological mourning that would imply a “longing for reunion and reinstitution”79 of the lost object. As stated previously, he does not strive for the revival or reconstruction of the family unit as a means of self-preservation, but solely for the reconstruction of “the subject’s self-image as a complete and autonomous being”80 that is freed from the dominance of the external object(s). His narcissism, then, is of a secondary degree showing signs of megalomania on the one hand, and interpersonal disesteem, on the other. Whereas megalomania is a delusional mental state “that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur”81 leading to a sense of superiority, an overt idealization of one’s own ideas as well as the devaluation of others, interpersonal disesteem comprises “an exploitative, selfish interpersonal orientation”82 toward one’s fellow men. In addition, the latter expresses itself in an “arrogant and haughty behavior,”83 lack of empathy and remorse for others, as well as in a hypersensitivity to criticism. From this it follows that even though at first glance similar in their narcissistic behavior, the psychological composition of the three men differs significantly. Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed are concerned about reconstructing the family unit and, by doing so, making everybody suffering from loss and fear of extinction, whole and well again, themselves included. Jacobs’s actions, however, are solely directed at him. As the redefinition of his former self at all costs is his sole focus, his narcissistic tendencies are much more pronounced, even show an overlap with the psychometric properties of psychopathy and Machiavellianism. In addition to the second degree of narcissism, Jacobs exemplifies also traits that are associated with psychopathy, the second Cluster B84 personality disorder: cunning, irresponsibility, low empathy, lack of remorse or guilt, and the failure or refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions.85 Stephen King introduces the reader to Jacobs’s “healing hands” and irresponsible use of electricity already in the second chapter. Here, the Reverend manages to give Jamie’s brother Con, who was suffering from a speech impairment, his voice back. He did do so by simply applying a special cloth belt and a set of “small

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batteries-which are of [his] invention”86 to the boy’s neck. Whereas Con and Jamie believe in a spontaneous miracle, their sister Claire does not allow herself to be blinded by Jacobs’s performance. By stating that he had already been “working like a demon”87 on this particular experiment that he could finally see through when Con agreed to serve as his test object, Claire questions Jacobs’s good intentions. She points to the Reverend’s highly developed notion of self-importance, personal grandeur and exploitive nature. This being said, it is Jamie’s sister Claire who provides the reader with the first hint of the Reverend’s high “affective factor,”88 a psychological attribute that, in addition to megalomania and interpersonal disesteem, manifests itself in constant cunning, lying, and taking advantage of others. Whereas the research and use of secret electricity can only play a secondary role in Jacobs’s life while complying to the social norms affiliated with his false-self, Jacobs’s pursuit of the forbidden becomes all-consuming after the accident in October 1965. Yet it is important to notice that, at no point in the book, does he ever pursue his research in order to help others. He only seeks to help himself and does so delinquently without showing any concern for the consequences or the immorality of his actions. Jacobs’s notion of superiority, callousness, and desire for and choice of the external object shows especially in his discourse when seeking volunteers for one of his performances at the Tulsa State Fair. Here, he openly states what he needs and desires: “I want a pretty gal! A pretty little Sooner gal! . . . And Jacobs, who had surely already picked out his mark, pointed his cordless mike toward someone in the front of the crowd. “How about you, miss? You’re about as pretty a gal as anyone could want! . . . “Sit down, honey. . . . What’s your name, miss?” “Cathy Morse.”89 As Cathy’s long blond hair reminds the reader right away of Jacob’s dead wife Patricia, her family name “Morse” recalls Jacobs’s dead son Morris, whose innocence and purity also finds recollection in the name Cathy, the diminutive short version for the Greek name Catherine, meaning pure. Hence, the young woman serves as a reminder of the once imposed social conventions affiliated with the role of the father and husband, conventions from which Jacobs seeks independence and against which he now revolts. Thus, it is of no surprise that Cathy Morse marks the beginning of Jacobs’s scientific career. Jacobs’s deceitful and all-exploitive attitude toward and use of others for his own good is also symptomatic for his third personality disorder: Machiavellianism, “a personality type that does not choose to be, but simply is, a master manipulator.”90 The excerpt’s repetitive use of the adjective “pretty” and the chosen address of “gal” and “honey,” implying a certain degree of familiarity, illustrates Jacobs’s strength to manipulate others. The fact that he is at the very beginning of his “electrifying career” shows in his disclosure

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of not really knowing electricity. He states: “Electricity! . . . Some claim to understand it. . . . Do I understand it? No, I do not. Not fully. Yet I know its power to destroy, to heal, and to create magical beauty!”91 By combining his revelation of not truly understanding electricity with his power to “create magical beauty,”92 Jacobs once more uses flattery and charm to cater to his audience and to find a volunteer for his experiment. But why is “Mr. Electrico” interested in taking pictures of girls? At no point does he reveal his true intentions. More importantly, he is reckless when executing the experiment leaving behind a woman with a time bomb of sorts in her head that leads to criminal behavior and suicide in the end. Instead of showing empathy when learning about Cathy’s side effects from participating in Jacobs’s photo shoot or expressing a commitment to Jamie’s request “to fix her up,”93 Jacobs dismisses any responsibility for his actions and refuses to reflect on complications post-treatment. He simply declares “what’s wrong with her . . . her compulsion . . . will wear off on its own. She’ll be fine.”94 The use of ellipses could indicate that Jacobs actually reflects on Cathy’s symptoms; however, the fact that he ends his train of thought with “She’ll be fine” exemplifies the opposite. He discounts her symptoms as being serious, which stresses the previously made affirmation that he actually is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions. In addition, the exclamation “She’ll be fine” highlights his emotional detachment from “his patients” and his tendencies to “treat people as objects or means to ends.”95 Jacobs’s low level of empathy together with his well-developed mechanisms of deception and manipulation of his fellow men also shows through his speech and behavior at the Norris County Fair. Remembering what he is best at, the Reverend seems to have returned to the pulpit to spread his “message of love and healing to a wider audience.”96 He announces: “Once I was married, and had a little boy. . . . There was a terrible accident, and they drowned. . . . I turned my face from God then, and cursed Him in my heart. . . . And then one day . . . God told me I had work, and that my work would be to lift the burdens and afflictions of others.”97 What stands out in this statement is the ease and comfort Jacobs displays when telling lies, beginning with the cause of death of his family and ending with the reason for healing his followers. Similar to the previous excerpt, he conscientiously misleads his followers for the sole purpose of regaining control over his true self. Aligned with the psychometric properties of the dark triad, he disguises his emotional indifference and “calculating, conniving, and deceptive”98 attitude toward his followers as a friendly verbal outreach. As “a master at projecting emotion”99 and with a clear goal in mind, he analyzes “the situation dispassionately and proceed[s] according to strategy,”100 then invents stories about his family’s drowning. Playing his role well, he makes his audience believe that despite his hardship, he returned to God.

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Yet the lack of adjectives solidifies Jacobs’s “emotional coolness”101 toward others, his own family members included. Jacobs’s detachment combined with his strong need to manipulate others for his own self-advancement finds further articulation in the accompanying gesture of holding up “his right hand” to show the audience that “on the third finger was another thick gold band”:102 a second band that is symbolic for his “marriage to the teachings of God through His Holy Word and the teachings of His son, Jesus Christ.”103 Even though “every word is a lie,”104 the audience’s naivety and compulsive longing to believe and to be healed prevent them from reasoning. Thus, their only possible reaction to his story is “applause and hallelujahs.”105 Jacobs being of a Machiavellian type, the peoples’ reaction to his words and actions only nourish his “selfish, manipulative propensity” as well as his “fundamental tendencies for grandiosity and self-affirmation.”106 In addition, their submissive and celebratory reaction strengthens his false belief that he has the right to treat each one of them as inferior to him, thus solidifying his self-interested and exploitive approach of others. In short, Jacobs’s behavior exemplifies two things: “a cynical view of human nature”107 and his separation from any “moral precepts.”108 Moreover, his statements and actions show an almost perfect alignment with the twelve psychometric properties of the dark triad as identified by psychologists Peter K. Jonason and Gregory D. Webster109. Whereas he exemplifies only three out of the four properties representative for narcissism, Jacobs holds four properties representative for psychopathy: He is callous, often insensitive, and neither reflects on the morality of his actions, nor shows any signs of remorse. In addition, his behavior also exposes all four properties associated with Machiavellianism: He manipulates, deceives, and exploits others, and uses flattery to get his way110. It almost seems as if his highly developed notion of self and personal grandeur gives him the right to use others for his own benefits. On a scale of 0 to 100, where each of the four psychometric properties for narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism counts 25 percent, Jacobs then scores 75 percent on narcissism, and 100 percent on psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These last two personality disorders encompass his “dark” traits and dominate his personality. They are “socially undesirable, beneficial for oneself, and detrimental for others,”111 and most importantly, they make Jacobs a very dangerous man. CONCLUSION We can conclude that even though different in their approach, Victor Frankenstein, Louis Creed, and Reverend Jacobs are obsessed with their longing for and revival of what they lost. Whether the desired and lost object takes

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the form of the dead mother, as is the case in Frankenstein, of the dead family cat, the son, and the wife as outlined in Pet Sematary, or of one’s repressed self as described in Revival, the desire to retrieve what has been lost is a narcissistic one and reflects the longing to revive a broken self-image via projection and introjection identification with the other. From this follows that Frankenstein’s and Creed’s dead material as well as Jacobs’s terminally ill patients have to be understood as uncanny doubles of the highly desired but lost other. Whether dead or alive, the men’s revival of the dead in whichever form or shape symbolizes the absent presence as well as present absence of what was lost. Whereas Frankenstein’s monster as well as Creed’s revived family cat, son, and wife exemplify the possible danger and resulting horror affiliated with the recaptured presence of the lost external object, it is Jacobs’s chosen psychopathic approach to life that is the most unsettling. In contrast to Victor, Jacobs’s “collection of material” is not random. He pursues it with precision and the clear goal in mind to (re)discover what is hiding behind “the inhuman eyes”112 of his last victim, Mary Fey. Whereas the woman’s first name refers back to Mary Shelley, one of the authors who built King’s house of fiction, Mary Fey’s “utterly blank”113 eyes recall all too clearly the watery eyes of Victor’s monstrous creation. However, whereas in Frankenstein, Victor only looks at the monster, in Revival, Jacobs looks deep into Mary Fey’s eyes. Understanding Mary Fey as Jacobs’s final surrogate onto which he projects all his hope to ever being able to revive his long-suppressed self and the organ of the eye as the entry to one’s soul, it is no wonder that Jacobs, after looking into Mary Fey’s eyes, retreats from his sought-after object in horror. What he discovers in these eyes leading to “dead city” is (M)other: His long-repressed true self, the host and mother of his dark passenger who demands “one thing and one thing only: to silence the voice of negation.”114 It is here that he encounters the world of the other that is freed from all social constraints and diverse roles that at one point were imposed on him and that constructed his “negative identity.”115 He finally looks into his own soul through the eyes of the other, only to rediscover the soul of the monster. But what does the monster here refer to? It refers to what you and me, to everything we think we are and pretend to be, try to achieve by taking advantage of others. In this sense, Reverend Jacobs functions as Stephen King’s surrogate to express his view on today’s society: a society that pretends to be inclusive and caring, pretends to give everybody equal chances. Unfortunately, though, it is an ego-centric society whose members all too often liberate themselves of conventions and norms, disregard long-established values and social etiquette, and are only concerned with their individual personal advancement, no matter the loss or harm done to their fellowmen.

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NOTES 1. Heidi Strengell, Stephen King: Monsters Live in Ordinary People (London: Duckworth, 2007), 73. 2. Ibid., 55. 3. Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 68. 4. Strengell, Stephen King: Monsters, 32. 5. Stephen King, Revival (New York: Scribner, 2014), 68. 6. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 28. 7. Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 3. 8. Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 28. 9. Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half (New York: Twayne, 1992), 31. 10. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1983), 62. 11. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (New York: Bantam, 1991), 39. 12. John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 68. 13. King, Danse Macabre, 62. 14. Shelley, Frankenstein, 39. 15. King, Revival, 261. 16. Ibid., 176. 17. Alexandra Reuber, “Oh Mother, the Monster is Inside! Victor Frankenstein’s Déjà Vu Experiences of His Repressed Self,” Nineteenth Century Literature in English 12, no. 1 (2008): 180. 18. Denise Gigante, “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” ELH 67, no. 2 (2000): 568. 19. Strengell, Stephen King: Monsters, 53. 20. Ibid. 21. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 73. 22. Shelley, Frankenstein, 42. 23. Ibid., 39. 24. Ibid., 37. 25. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation (London: Hogarth, 1975), 262. 26. Stephen King, Pet Sematary (New York: Signet, 1984), 52. 27. Vernon Hyles, “The Grotesque as Metaphor in the Works of Stephen King,” in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, eds. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 59. 28. King, Pet Sematary, 87.

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29. Leonard Mustazza, “Fear and Pity: Tragic Horror in King’s Pet Sematary,” in The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, ed. Tony Magistrale (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 81. 30. John Sears, “Fathers, Friends, and Families: Gothic Kinship in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary,” in Gothic Kinship, eds. Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 99. 31. King, Pet Sematary, 83. 32. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 73. 33. Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner, The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King, Rev Edn. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), 211. 34. Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 68. 35. King, Revival, 380. 36. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 72. 37. King, Revival, 379. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 53. 40. Ibid., 70. 41. Ibid., 73. 42. Ibid. 43. Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 63. 44. Ibid. 45. Emily D. Edwards, “A House that Tries to be Haunted: Ghostly Narratives in Popular Film and Television,” in Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, eds. J. Houran and R. Lange (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 83. 46. Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 64. 47. King, Revival, 366. 48. Ibid., 154. 49. Ibid., 258. 50. Ibid., 242. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 257. 53. Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 65. 54. O’Boyle, et al., “A Meta-Analysis of the Dark Triad and Work Behavior: A Social Exchange Perspective,” Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 3 (2012): 558. 55. Strengell, Stephen King: Monsters, 54. 56. King, Revival, 261. 57. O’Boyle, et al., “A Meta-Analysis,” 558. 58. King, Danse Macabre, 62. 59. Althea Horner, Psychoanalytic Object Relations Therapy (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 1991), 9. 60. Ibid., 27. 61. Alexandra Reuber, “In Search for the Lost Object in a Bad Place: Stephen King’s Contemporary Gothic,” in Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics, eds.

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Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 103. 62. Russell Mears, Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma, and Personal Being (New York: Routledge, 2000), 21. 63. David E. Scharff, Refinding the Object and Reclaiming the Self (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 1992), 27. 64. Horner, Psychoanalytic Object Relations, 21. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 67. 67. Ibid., 18. 68. Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 67. 69. Strengell, Stephen King: Monsters, 57. 70. Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King, 63. 71. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, vol. 14, eds. and trans. James Strachey and A. Tyson (London: Hogarth, 1966), 244. 72. Melanie Klein, “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 21 (1940), 131. 73. Peter K. Jonason, et al., “Occupational Niches and the Dark Triad Traits,” Personality and Individual Difference 69 (2014), 119. 74. S. R. Kessler, et al., “Re-examining Machiavelli: A Three-Dimensional Model of Machiavellianism in the Workplace,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 40 (2010): 1886. 75. Peter K. Jonason and Gregory D. Webster, “The Dirty Dozen: A Concise Measure of the Dark Triad,” Psychological Assessment 22, no. 2 (2010), 420. 76. Jerry Scheff, “Narcissim,” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, October 16, 2017, http:// www.m​iddle​wisco​nsin.​org/n​arcis​sisti​c-per​sonal​ity-d​isord​er/. 77. Harold Blum, “Psychic Trauma and Traumatic Object Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51, no. 2 (2002), 422. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Tammy Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (2002), 47. 81. Webster’s Dictionary, s.v. “Megalomania,” accessed October 15, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/megalomania. 82. Paul M. G. Emmelkamp and Jan Henk Kamphuis, Personality Disorders (New York: Psychology Press, 2007), 150. 83. Ibid., 151. 84. Personality disorders have been categorized into three different clusters: Cluster A consisting of “the paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders, Cluster B comprising “the antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders, and Cluster C including “the avoidant, dependent and obsessivecompulsive” (Emmelkamp and Kamphuis, Personality Disorders, 5, 9, 14) disorder formations.

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85. see Emmelkamp and Kamphuis, Personality Disorders, 168. 86. King, Revival, 44. 87. Ibid., 51. 88. Emmelkamp and Kamphuis, Personality Disorders, 168. 89. King, Revival,139. 90. David Hartley, “Meet the Machiavellians,” Psychology Today, September 8, 2015, https:// www.p​sycho​logyt​oday.​com/b​log/m​achia​velli​ans-g​ullin​g-the​-rube​s/201​ 509/m​eet-t​he-ma​chia vellians/. 91. King, Revival, 142. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 176. 94. Ibid. 95. Kessler, “Re-examining Machiavelli,” 1877. 96. King, Revival, 229. 97. Ibid., 226–27. 98. Hartley, “Meet the Machiavellians.” 99. King, Revival, 301. 100. Tamas Bereczkei, “The Manipulative Skill: Cognitive Devises and Their Neural Correlates Underlying Machiavellian’s Decision Making,” Brain and Cognition 99 (2015), 24. 101. Ibid. 102. King, Revival, 228. 103. Ibid., 227. 104. Ibid., 228. 105. Ibid. 106. Quoted in Pailing, Boon, and Egan, “Personality,” 81. 107. Bereczkei, “The Manipulative Skill,” 24. 108. Ibid. 109. See Peter K. Jonason and Gregory D. Webster, “The Dirty Dozen: A Concise Measure of the Dark Triad,” 422. 110. Ibid. 111. John F. Rauthmann and Gerald P. Kolar, “How “Dark” are the Dark Triad Traits? Examining the Perceived Darkness of Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy,” Personality and Individual Differences 53 (2012), 885. 112. King, Revival, 379. 113. Ibid., 378. 114. Ibid., 381. 115. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 73.

Chapter 10

Traveling before the Storm Shades of the Lightning Rod Salesman in Stephen King’s Gothic Conny L. Lippert

This chapter delineates and analyses the characteristics of the lightning rod salesman as a long-standing trope in American gothic literature, specifically in Stephen King’s small-town gothic horror stories. The small town in American literature has a bifurcated history, functioning in equal parts as quaint idyll and as gothic place. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem to the eponymous Peyton Place of Grace Metalious’s notorious novel, the small town has continuously been shown to possess a sinister element, and the location and its inhabitants have become a trademark component of King’s writings. Small-town gothic narratives tend to bring forth a great number of threatening forces, both internal and external, and the character of the outsider is a staple in this regard. The lightning rod salesman often personifies this external threat, as he is traveling the country, from town to town, in order to sell his merchandise, and is thus necessarily an outsider to the communities he visits. King has played on this trope and its long ancestry in gothic literature on multiple occasions, and this chapter makes explicit some of the meanings it can carry. Combining a multitude of features associated with the lightning rod salesman or the electric showman, King’s 2014 novel Revival serves as a particularly fruitful example. LIGHTNING AND ELECTRICITY IN THE GOTHIC Traditionally, thunder and lightning have served as reflections or expressions of mood and action in literature. Instances of so-called pathetic fallacy, such as the storm in King Lear mirroring the king’s inner turmoil and anger, can 147

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also be found in Stephen King’s writing. In Needful Things, for example, “the thunder roared and lightning flashed”1 as the inhabitants of Castle Rock are getting ready to wage war on one another. Throughout the book, the storm is building, just as tensions are, and the first thunderclap marks the climactic unleashing of the small town’s collective rage. At the end of Duma Key, the protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, employs the supernatural powers inherent in his paintings to quite literally conjure up a storm which will destroy the place and rid the world of its evils. King chooses to end his narrative with a cleansing tempest after having utilized the evocative powers of heavy weather at key stages throughout the book. In Revival, storms and lightning play a central role, with the narrative’s climax building alongside, and being reliant on, the electricity provided by the discharge of lightning. Imagery of lightning and electricity tend to act as carriers of meanings and metaphors far surpassing mere pathetic fallacy. Romantic poets and thinkers, for instance, often take it as a metaphor for inspiration, creative genius, or intense emotional or physical experience. Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” may come to mind as an example of the latter, while Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “dream-power” in The Poet, describes inspiration as a “power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”2 In the gothic tradition, this metaphorical connection between the electric and inspiration often becomes the link between electricity and transgression, which is a key action of the gothic plot. In the early days of its discovery, a variety of different theories about the workings and meaning of electricity prevailed, which inspired people to reimagine other relationships, particularly those of the material world, as well as those of the spiritual. Further, the German concept of naturphilosophie framed electricity as animating agent of organic life and ultimately the very soul of the universe.3 Correspondingly, astounding scientific discoveries and inventions such as the steam locomotive and the telegraph sat side by side with elaborate theories of spiritual electricity and ideas about mesmerism or animal magnetism.4 While these pseudoscientific concepts have since lost their credibility, the popularity and marvel associated with “Romantic electricity” has led to not only fictional but also conventional forms of electricity becoming an attribute of liminal characters such as spiritualists, devils, and witches in gothic literature. As a metonymical cipher representing the suspected transgressive nature of unchecked scientific progress it is also associated with alchemists, mad scientists, and other overreachers in the genre. Various outdated, discredited, and pseudoscientific theories persist in the gothic, which, as a genre, helped fill the imaginative void left in the place of religious and spiritual wonder in a rational and secularized Enlightenmentworld. Fred Nadis describes the way in which “wonder” was seen as a powerful motivation for research, even during the scientific revolution, up until

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the nineteenth century “when magicians were taking to theatre stages, [and] wonder became vulgar.”5 However, it did not disappear entirely, but found a place in romantic and gothic literature, as well as theatre and commercial culture. Wonder furthermore reemerged in the form of the “technological sublime,” or “the modern tendency to view the technological object with the awe once reserved for dazzling displays of nature’s majesty,” which includes the aforementioned pseudoscientific theories such as mesmerism and electrical healing.6 It holds the promise of things outside of the ordinary and mundane. As Nadis writes about nineteenth-century “wonder shows,” “[posing] as a natural magician in an era when scientists were promoting a clockwork universe filled with clockwork organisms, [offered] audiences the temporary appeal of a universe imbued with magical possibilities and meaning.”7 Moroever, Martin Willis describes how “Romantic notions of electricity as a cosmic and spiritual force”8were better able to captured the public’s imagination than materialist theories, and how “materialist science was often perceived as reductive and unimaginative in the minds of the popular science audience.”9A similar sentiment appears in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where Victor’s interest in the natural sciences is originally kindled through occult ambitions to raise devils and discover the elixir of life, as promised by the alchemists, and then, albeit reluctantly, guided toward modern science by his tutors at Ingolstadt. At first, Victor is unenthusiastic about this new view on nature and its secrets, especially as the vista of possible discovery appears restrictive to him and he feels “required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”10 Yet one of Victor’s teachers, Waldman, describes modern science in a manner that manages to strike the right chord with the young scientist: The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers . . . have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. . . . They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.11

Indeed, Waldman conveys a sense of power over nature in order to cater to Victor’s ambitions and help him see the natural sciences as a possible means of fulfilling them. While Victor is inspired by this depiction of the modern scientist as master over the natural world, the reader questions whether he would have been able to achieve his eventual breakthrough without the foundations laid in his thinking by the initial study of the alchemists and magicians.

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Frankenstein was written at the height of the vitalism controversy, a debate regarding the origins and nature of life, and about whether purely materialist science could account for life itself. Some thought that an additional force or substance—a Promethean spark—was required for animation, and that this force could be seen as “analogous on the one hand to the soul and on the other to electricity.”12 Vitalism presupposes a teleological, goal-oriented order of the world, which is not dissimilar to spiritual ideas in alchemy and magic, suggesting the existence in nature of a higher power or principle. This force often takes the anthropomorphic shape of an intelligence with which it is possible to communicate. Prayers, symbols, spells, rituals, and incantations are all connected to this idea, and therefore composed of a specific arrangement of signs. The properties assigned to these signs are originally arbitrary, as is the relationship between the linguistic signified and signifier in language. Only the initiated are able to find and combine the correct signs in order to communicate in this language. Above all else, this idea of a responsive higher principle in nature, as we will see, has been picked up by Stephen King and other gothic authors. In Stephen King’s writing, lightning tends to denote the ignition of action or a force that pushes things into motion. In Danse Macabre, King divides all horror narratives into two groups: “those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will—a conscious decision to do evil—and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lighting.”13 This simile directly links lightning to its traditional interpretation as divine intervention; a connection which is reflected, for example, in the beginning of Needful Things when the narrator announces: “I think trouble—real trouble—is on its way. I smell it, just over the horizon, like an out-of-season storm full of lightning.”14 King consistently employs storm and lightning imagery to herald a gothic eruption of chaos in the normalcy of his typical small-town scenes, and not only lightning itself, but also people linked to lightning and electricity as they often embody this external threat. This is a long-standing association in literature, and, specifically, the gothic genre. In H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” the sinister Asenath is reportedly able to raise and quell thunderstorms at will. In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, head-witch Alexandra is likewise described as capable of summoning thunderstorms, and Darryl van Horne, the book’s devil figure, is portrayed as an inventor looking for a way to “generate electricity without further energy input.”15 Occasionally, characters will utilize electric imagery as a metaphor, as, for instance, when Melville’s Ahab likens his own charisma and ability to “galvanize” his crew to shocking “into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.”16 To put it simply, the attribute of electricity connotes power, and in the gothic genre, powerful figures are oftentimes dangerous.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has become the archetypal manifestation of electricity being associated with perilous scientific transgression. This is the case despite the original text only ever implying, rather than stating, the use of electricity in Victor’s experiments. At the time of the novel’s conception, the idea of “galvanic” reanimation was not an entirely outlandish one, especially after Luigi Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini famously tried to revive human corpses using electricity in 1802.17 Still, the Romantic belief in the electrical fluid as the Promethean spark of life is reflected in Victor’s memories of that fateful, dreary November night when he beheld the accomplishment of his toils after infusing “a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at [his] feet.”18 No detailed scientific explanation regarding the method or process Victor employs to achieve his objective is provided and the lack of such detail in the narrative is attributed to Victor’s wish to spare Walton the temptation of pursuing the same doomed goal; as such, electricity and lightning are cast as a mysterious and fearsome—yet realistic—force which can be harnessed only by the bold and knowledgeable. Beyond Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Ray Bradbury’s Tom Fury is an initiate into the secrets of lightning and an electric figure who has made a particular impression on Stephen King, who paid direct homage to him in The Dead Zone, as will be shown below. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fury is introduced as the archetypal lightning rod salesman who functions as a harbinger of gothic doom. The storm present in the opening pages, as the narrative reveals, is metaphorical: The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.19

Fury travels before the storm and “glances over his shoulder” as if he is being pursued. He is a liminal and ambiguous figure: “Was he or was he not your friend, the lightning-rod salesman, always on the road, never settling, ever-moving, facing no encounters, running ahead of the lightning and selling rods, yes, but leaving others to face the storm.”20 He does not seem focused solely on making a profit and even gives away a lightning rod for free in order to fortify the protagonist’s house. Jim Nightshade’s home, he divines, will otherwise be destroyed, as there are “some folks [who] draw lightning”21 and this will be no ordinary storm. Fury heralds the coming of a great threat, which arrives shortly after in the form of the demonic carnival at the center of the story, rather than an actual weather event. He, then, comes to represent a new breed of electric characters and gothic outsiders: the itinerant salesman.

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ITINERANT SHOWMEN AND TRAVELING SALESMEN Electricity was the preeminent popular science in the eighteenth century because it made visible and tangible natural phenomena that were usually invisible and intangible. While Benjamin Franklin’s harnessing of this seemingly divine power made electricity, especially in the form of lightning, somewhat less mysterious and threatening, it also pushed it center stage as the preferred science of showmanship. Experiments and demonstrations often involved audience members physically experiencing the scientific theory, which made electric performances a popular entertainment of the time, including in the gothic tradition. When Victor Frankenstein witnesses the destruction of a tree by lightning strike, he asks his father for an explanation, who responds by recreating a number of electrical performances, including Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite-experiment: “He constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds.”22 Those who could afford it often had the means to perform electrical performances in their own homes, like Ebenezer Kinnersley, who worked with Benjamin Franklin and became a highly successful itinerant lecturer on the “electrical fire” which was part of a thriving profession that helped spread the word all over the country. The traveling lecturers’ and salesmen’s careers were made possible by the quickening of communication across the Atlantic, as well as the spread of newspapers and easier travel.23 Shows such as Kinnersley’s were mainly aimed at a non-expert audience and designed to make the scientific discovery tangible and entertaining. For example, audience members were asked to join their hands together and “take simultaneous electric shocks in a human circuit”24in order to experience the effects of electricity on their own persons. As “there was no clear boundary between electrical performers who acted as magicians, and lecturers who delivered more serious information about the powers of nature,”25 the itinerants who conducted these wonder shows carried connotations of the supernatural or occult and entered the roster of gothic figures as mysterious, as well as mystic, characters. Romantic electricity and the traveling salesman in the gothic genre complement each other extremely well as they share associations with mystery and the unknown. In the gothic, the lightning rod salesman and his cousins, such as the Bible salesman or the electric showman, personify threat, but even beyond the genre, the figure has more specific connotations of disruption, disturbance, and insincerity. As he is traveling the country, this outsider, or unnatural force, employs various and dubious techniques in order to sell his merchandise. In Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man,” this figure is portrayed as traveling with the storm to better frighten people into buying his product. Joshua Matthews gives a more detailed account of

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such scare tactics employed both by Franklin himself as well as other lightning rod salesmen, ultimately framing lightning as a “domestic invader”26 against which defenses were required. Mohun furthermore suggests that lightning rod salesmen rapidly gained a bad reputation as conmen,27 which is reflected in the attitude Melville’s narrator displays toward the salesman he encounters. He himself appears terrified of the possibility of lightning strike and seems to be sincerely concerned for the narrator’s safety. Instead of being swept up in the salesman’s supposed panic and convinced to order—to buy!—the narrator proclaims himself steadfast in his religious faith and thus not in need of any further protection. Assuredly, some have cast Melville’s lightning rod salesman as the personification of ever-present temptation or even the devil himself,28 cementing the notion of suspicion connected to these itinerant outsiders. In a less readily allegorical reading, the lightning rod salesman was also picked up as a poignant interlude in Mark Twain’s “Political Economics.” Here, the narrator is repeatedly interrupted in his work by a salesman who exploits his lack of knowledge on the subject of lightning protection, as well as his distractedness, to sell him an extraordinary amount of lightning rods. This leads to the narrator’s house being struck by lightning hundreds of times within one storm before he removes the majority of the rods again. If used incorrectly, this new technology is shown to be dangerous rather than advantageous, and the disrupting and shifty persona portrayed here links the lightning rod salesman with the confidence man or the charlatan. The lightning rod salesmen in Melville’s and Twain’s stories interrupt the respective protagonists with the express intention of making a sale. Everything they say and do is guided by this aim. In the gothicized version of the character, however, this simple, transactional connection is rendered as quite complicated and a sense of mystery as to the ultimate purpose of the sale is introduced; indeed, the gothic salesman’s ulterior motive is unclear to the prospective customer. Leland Gaunt, for instance, seems to sell trinkets with specific emotional value in his shop called “Needful Things” but, really, he is striking Faustian bargains with his customers without their knowledge. He tricks them by using what they perceive as their own “needful things” against them, just as Mr. Dark in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes did before him. Other protagonists are fully aware of striking a deal with the devil, such as Dave Streeter in King’s “Fair Extension,” who enters into a contract with the unsubtly named George Elvid. Yet within Bradbury’s novel, Tom Fury does not merely wish to sell lightning rods: he also aims to warn and protect. Moreover, Revival’s Charles Jacobs, as will be shown soon, does not merely want to entertain or heal people—he also tests the properties of his special “secret” electricity on them. These gothic peddlers, in short, are selling something else quite apart from the product they

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ostensibly offer. These figures are ambiguous and lack transparency, which leads others to be suspicious of them. King returns to Tom Fury as Bradbury’s interpretation of the lightning rod salesman in The Dead Zone and inserts a seemingly out of place interlude foreshadowing things to come. Like Furry did before him, Andrew Dohay, “the seller of lightning rods,”29 arrives on the scene “carrying his satchel full of insurance against the wrath of God—maybe the only kind ever invented”30while storms are imagined to be brewing not far behind. He unsuccessfully tries to sell lightning rods to a bar owner whose establishment is later destroyed by lightning. In Revival, King returns to Bradbury’s electric imagery again. A main character temporarily styles himself “Mr Electrico,” as “an homage to Ray Bradbury,” who famously encountered an electric showman of the same name at age twelve and was inspired by the experience to becoming a writer.31Bradbury’s interpretation of the peddler has influenced other gothic authors—especially those writing about the small town—who have rendered him increasingly more threatening and intrusive as a character. Often these itinerant showmen or salesmen retain associations with the carnival or the traveling circus. In Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which openly pays homage to Bradbury’s classic in a number of ways, one character toys with an idea for a novel with the plot revolving around “the destruction of a small town by Dr. Rabbit foot, an itinerant showman who pitches camp on its outskirts, sells elixirs and potions and nostrums.”32 This dark trickster-figure, often portrayed with satanic qualities, seems to be part of a whole array of such characters, informing and cross-fertilizing one another. This includes the aforementioned Darryl van Horne, as well as King’s own Leland Gaunt and George Elvid. André Linoge in The Storm of the Century is another descendant of this tempestuous line. Linoge arrives, in true lightning rod salesman fashion, with the eponymous storm. These outsiders all fulfill a multivalent role of simultaneously embodying a community’s corruption and sin, while further inflaming them. As the lightning rod salesman exploits people’s fear of a heavy thunderstorm, in most of these stories he is portrayed as arriving before the storm, and can thus be seen either as profiting from preexisting conditions, or, in a more gothic tradition, as a harbinger or an omen—an instance of foreshadowing. King often openly acknowledges the significant influence H. P. Lovecraft’s writing has had on him and pays homage on numerous occasions.33He has tried his hand at Lovecraft’s trademark “cosmic horror,” which relies for its effect on humanity’s insignificance and the terror of the unknowable. In Revival, King combines this approach with the lightning rod salesman’s potency as a gothic trope. Even before this, however, there have been electric characters in King’s writing that hark back to Lovecraft. The latter’s character Nyarlathothep, for instance, who deals in spectacles “of electricity and

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psychology—and [gives] exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless”34 influenced the ultimate itinerant showman in King’s writing: Randall Flagg in The Stand.35Lovecraft describes Nyarlathotep as “a kind of itinerant showman or lecturer” whose “exhibitions consisted of two parts— first, a horrible—possibly prophetic—cinema reel; and later some extraordinary experiments with scientific and electrical apparatus.”36 Flagg, once even addressed as “Nyarlathothep” in the novel, is described as “the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology”37 against the survivors of an apocalyptic epidemic. Like Nyarlathothep, the pharaonic creature coming out of Egypt, Flagg is an ancient being traveling his new home, America, to recruit followers to his way of thinking. They both embody the idea of scientific discovery being preached like religion and sold like a product by traveling salesmen. Significantly, Flagg eventually settles down to make his stand in Las Vegas, that great city of itinerant showmen. Both Nyarlathotep and Flagg combine their electrical and technological wonder shows with the pseudo-religious trappings of cult leaders gathering followers. BIBLE SALESMEN AND MAD SCIENTISTS Ebenezer Kinnersley, Benjamin Franklin’s associate who worked very successfully as an itinerant electrical showman, was originally trained and ordained as a Baptist minister and therefore knew the importance of religion in America. He aimed to make the cultivation of reason and piety inseparable.38 By framing the electrical performance as a way to improve the self and therefore be better able to understand and appreciate God’s works, these electrical performers set themselves in contrast to other, and more frivolous, entertainments. In the display of electricity as one of God’s active powers, these showmen portrayed themselves as physico-theologians, casting nature and its laws into the framework of God’s design. As we will see, Reverend Charles Jacobs echoes this sentiment when he explains his passion for electricity, which he also uses to aid in his Bible teachings early on in Revival: “‘God said Let there be light, and there was light, and the light was good.’ Only I’m not God, so I have to depend on electricity. . . . Such a gift from God that it makes us feel godlike every time we flip a switch.”39 He regards electricity and its use as God-given and, by encouraging its study in parallel with God’s word, implies that scientific study and investigation constitute a closer communication with God’s works. Bradbury’s lightning rod salesman is portrayed as a different type of physico-theologian (perhaps rather a physico-spiritualist) who, by linguistic means, employs a systematic method of countering the anthropomorphic and supernatural powers of the lightning storm. His sample rod is shaped

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half-crescent, half-cross, perhaps symbolizing a mixture of Christianity, Islam, and pagan religions. The surface of the rod is described as “finely scratched and etched with strange languages, names that could tie the tongue or break the jaw, numerals that added to incomprehensible sums, pictographs of insect-animals all bristle, chaff, and claw.”40 When questioned about the multilingual inscriptions on his lightning rods, Tom Fury responds: Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? . . . Boys, you got to be ready in every dialect with every shape and form to hex the St Elmo’s fires, the balls of blue light that prowl the earth like sizzling cats. I got the only lightning rods in the world that hear, feel, know, and sass back at any storm, no matter what tongue, voice, or sign. No foreign thunder so loud this rod can’t soft-talk it!41

His lightning rods combine Franklin’s science with the power of the sign harking all the way back to alchemy and magic. Like a more advanced version of the inscriptions on old church-bells, typically proclaiming the bell’s ability not only to draw men and women by its sound, but also to dispel thunder and lightning and all the demons in the air,42 Fury ascribes to his rods the power to communicate with the storm. Of course, these are only two different versions of the same method: on the one hand, using signs as an incantation, and, on the other hand, using them in the form of God’s word, all for the purpose of warding off supernatural or divine wrath. This alignment between different salesmen offering protection from higher powers makes it unsurprising that the Bible salesman is one of the closest cousins of the lightning rod salesman in the gothic genre. The character has gained impact as a gothic figure through Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and is exemplified by Greg Stillson in King’s The Dead Zone. The traveling stranger whose business it is to sell a defense against divine wrath—lightning or otherwise— remains an eerie character full of foreboding symbolism. In Revival, King makes the connection between these two figures—lightning rod salesman and Bible salesman—quite explicit. It is a tale inspired by, as already noted, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, a story revolving around a neurosurgical experiment which allows the test subject, Mary, to see the eponymous deity. A surgical alternation of her brain lets her glimpse beyond the veil into the spiritual realm, and the outcome of this transgression is precisely what is expected of a gothic horror story. Explaining his plan to the narrator, Dr. Raymond says: Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the

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foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, the words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voices of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.43

Raymond here uses the discoveries of electricians as a yardstick of what he himself aims to achieve. In his search for new and undiscovered boundaries to cross, and when combined with a lack of concern regarding the consequences for his test subject or anyone else, he transgresses. Revival has a very similar theme. The story follows Jamie Morton through roughly five decades of his life, but the real focus is his connection to Charles Jacobs, whom he encounters and re-encounters repeatedly throughout the book. Jacobs arrives in the early pages of Revival as an outsider to the small town of Harlow, Maine, and literally throws a shadow over Jamie’s life from their very first meeting onward, like “a human eclipse.”44 Nevertheless, Jacobs starts out as a good friend to Jamie. He is not a Bible salesman, but a pastor. A wholesome and respectable young man, devoted to his family and congregation, Jacobs has a strong interest in electricity, which he uses to illustrate the religious principles he is trying to teach. Jacobs’s trajectory changes, though, when his wife and young son are killed in a car accident. He loses his faith in the face of this tragedy and, driven to despair by his grief, preaches what becomes known as “The Terrible Sermon,” giving voice to all the doubts and anger he directs toward God and religion. He states that “Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam”45and that “behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.”46 “If you want true power,” Jacobs says, “a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning.”47 After this, he is cast out of the small-town community and set adrift toward the more ambiguous, electrical character he eventually becomes. As an adult, Jamie re-encounters Jacobs as “Dan the Lightning Portrait Man” who sells extraordinary moving portraits of people at fairs, which he creates with the help of his “secret” electricity (essentially an updated version of Frankenstein’s “spark of life,” and remaining just as unexplained). Here, Jacobs is already a traveling electrical showman, casting himself as something akin to a stage magician. As Jamie says, he has gone from “preaching to huckstering,”48and for Jacobs, harking back to the “Terrible Sermon,” the two have become the same: both are “a matter of convincing the rubes.”49 Jacobs’s portraits in lightning are reminiscent of a favorite trick of Ebenezer Kinnersley’s: the “king’s portrait,” “whose wired-up frame delivered a sharp shock to any anti-royalist dinner-party victim who yielded to the temptation of dislodging the royal crown.”50Jacobs sells “portraits in lightning,” similarly presenting them as an electrical stage trick, but this “magic” actually relies on the secret electricity he has been studying. Less politically charged

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than Kinnersley’s portrait, Jacobs’s portraits depict his customers in elegant garments, playing on their vanities. To put it lightly, Jacobs is not a new hand at deceiving people, having admitted that his healing of Jamie’s brother was likely accomplished by tricking him into overcoming a largely psychosomatic ailment. This is also reminiscent of his “Peaceable Lake” display, which simulates Jesus’ walking on water by electrical means. He calls this “kindling faith,”51 a skill, taught in Divinity School, at which he excels. Now, however, the con has become more sophisticated. He is fooling his customers into believing that he is indeed playing a trick on them, and that there is a conventionally scientific explanation for his “portraits in lightning,” an explanation in which they are not interested. Being photographed by Jacobs in this manner can furthermore have severely negative consequences and aftereffects. Nevertheless, Jacobs uses the secret electricity on Jamie, for whom he still harbors great affection, to cure him from his drug addiction. This indicates that Jacobs has moved closer to Machen’s Dr. Raymond, who puts his own goals before the well-being of those in his care. Years later, Jamie re-encounters Jacobs in the role of “Pastor Danny,” an evangelical faith healer performing “old-time tent revivals,”52 which, of course, plays on one of the book’s title’s meanings. Jacobs is using the “secret” electricity to heal the sick—often successfully—but almost always with side effects, while ostensibly ascribing these miracles to God. Just as Kinnersley was, Jacobs is very adept at exploiting the theatrical potential of electrical display due to his background as a pastor. Kinnersley, despite his “outspoken dismissal of the revivals”53 of the Great Awakening of the 1720s to 1740s, co-opted some key techniques, including the “crafting of a studied showmanship.”54 Jacobs has fallen away from his faith but similarly uses the tent revival scenario as a guise for his healing-experiments. Jacobs, in other words, uses electricity to prop up religion both in the beginning of his career as a pastor, for instance with the aforementioned Peaceable Lake display, and at the end, when he pretends to channel the power of God to heal people, but in reality uses his secret electricity to do it. The change is not in what he does, but in his intentions behind doing it. Instead of using electricity as a means to further religious study, he ends up using religious activity to further his studies of electricity. Exploiting what he sees as the ruse of religion, Jacobs, as Pastor Danny, has become extremely wealthy through his followers’ love offerings. He uses this wealth to advance his experiments and eventually retires from faith healing altogether in order to devote himself exclusively to his studies. With the help of Ludwig Prinn’s grimoire De Vermis Mysteriis (which Lovecraft Circle fans will recognize as Robert Bloch’s creation), Jacobs is hoping to tap into the potestas magnum universum, the ultimate source of his secret electricity, which he plans to harness through the power of lightning. Like

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Machen’s Dr. Raymond before him, Jacobs aims to use a human test subject as a key to open the door to another realm of existence. And through this same test subject we can also open a door to some of the literary heritage on which this book openly draws. Revival’s “Patient Omega” is a woman called Mary Fey—the daughter of Franklin Fey and Janice Shelley. Not only was Machen’s test subject in The Great God Pan called Mary as well, but the nomenclature is also reminiscent of the religious subject matter and imagery in the book. (The names are furthermore an obvious allusion to Mary Shelley, as well as to Benjamin Franklin and Charles Fay, two people famous for their input into the study of electricity.) Mary is a key, opening a door into the beyond, which is described as a Lovecraftian vista of cyclopean ruins, insane gods, and eternal torment. The main evil hiding behind that veil is a creature called “Mother,” who, by grotesque “birth” through Mary, attempts to cross over into our world. THE MYSTERY BEHIND A SMALL DOOR Young Reverend Jacobs calls electricity “one of God’s doorways to the infinite.”55The use of the word “doorway” here is significant as transgression is one of the main actions of the gothic plot, and evoking the idea of a door puts into the reader’s mind the concept of permeability. A door can keep spaces separate but, unlike a wall, is built for the possibility of being opened. The sight and sound of a door opening and thus permitting passage to what might be lurking in the dark are an effective staple element of the genre. Imagining and not actually seeing what could be knocking, scratching, or pounding on the door is, arguably, more frightening than actually seeing the would-be visitor. The final scene of “The Monkey’s Paw” (to the author of which King may be alluding by naming Revival’s main character “Jacobs”) demonstrates this excellently: while the narrator manages to wish his reanimated son away just before his wife unlocks the door the reader is already imagining, in gruesome detail, the mangled corpse they would otherwise have encountered.56 Further, in Pet Sematary, which strongly echoes “The Monkey’s Paw” and contains other building blocks similar to those of Revival, the protagonist receives supernatural warning about the Indian burial ground’s reanimating powers being a “door [that] must not be opened,”57 and, as Louis disregards the warning, he causes the boundary between life and death to become permeable. The integrity of his home is compromised as dead things intrude, and, eventually, so is the integrity of Louis’ own mind: “(!Click!) That click was in his head. It was the sound of some relay fusing and burning out for ever, the sound of lightning stroking down in a direct hit, the sound of a door

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opening.”58 Likewise, the opening of a metaphorical door in Revival commences with the “sound” (more felt than heard) of a lightning strike: first “just a click, very loud”59 when Jacobs uses the secret electricity to heal Jamie from his drug addiction, and then “Not a click this time but a SNAP”60 when they revive Mary Fey. This “small door covered with ivy”61 is not entirely metaphorical. On its other side an evil entity awaits, and although Jacobs claims he only wants to peek through the keyhole to discover what happens to people after they die, his careless experimenting “smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.”62 If, however, doors are by their nature indeed meant to be opened, we may then read the brief allusion to the biblical serpent (“A snake, maybe”63) in the description of Jacobs’s invention as pointing toward the concept of temptation. Much like Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed before him, Jacobs is unable to accept life’s ultimate mystery as such—a mystery that would do well to remain unanswered or at least unexplored—especially when he can conceive of a way to unravel it. Jacobs, despairing, perhaps, over his lost ability and willingness to believe in things unseen, asks angrily: “What would you call a door that’s closed against all of humankind?”64 Edward J. Ingebretsen argues that the answer to this question is “religion” and that “horror serves as a misappropriated religious response to mystery.”65 The closed door, in other words, is the apple in the garden. While Jacobs initially regards God’s doorway to the infinite as a promise, he comes to see this promise as broken when he begins to suspect that the “infinite” is meant to remain a mystery to us. Much as opening the door and beholding the monster in the horror genre tends to dispel the suspense that has been building,66 Jacobs aims to peek behind the door separating this life from the next, and let the carefully cultivated spiritual tension dissipate. This is reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s thoughts on the sublime, particularly the necessity of obscurity for the retention of terror: “When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.”67 Jacobs’s ultimate goal is not merely to gain knowledge of what lies beyond death’s door, but to “violate that mystery”68 which lies at the heart of religion and “drag it into the light.”69 Once we have seen, per the implication, what lies behind the door, we will no longer have to be afraid, and we will no longer have to be reverent. As Benjamin Franklin was said to have “seized the lightning from the heavens and the scepter from the tyrants,”70 so too Jacobs is hoping to steal the Promethean fire of knowledge—if not to revive the dead, then at least to rob death of its tyranny. While Jamie is apprehensive due to his recurring prophetic nightmares, he is nevertheless curious to see Jacobs “lift the lid on Pandora’s Box and peer inside.”71Perhaps he has experienced sufficient loss and hardship to be receptive to the idea of staging a Promethean revolution—if only

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until he fully realizes that “Mother” is real and there is neither a heaven nor any fire to steal from it. Knowing the truth, it turns out, is, as Lovecraft has been claiming all along, much worse than not knowing. Much as the initial discovery of electricity inspired a rethinking of previously well-established relationships of the material and the spiritual world, contact with the secret electricity in Revival causes a change in how reality is viewed. This electrical breakdown in perception is reminiscent of Lovecraft’s story “From Beyond” in which the mad scientist Tillinghast builds an electrical apparatus that alters perception in order to “overleap time, space and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.”72 The narrator experiences the machine’s effects in a “scene [that] was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and [a] jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions.”73 Jamie’s friend and employer Hugh Yates suffers from what he calls “prismatics” as aftereffects from Jacobs’s cure for his deafness. He describes these episodes as a dizzying visual effect consisting of a combination of form and color, which seems to shatter his perception of reality, as “The world filled with reds, blues, and greens at the edges of things.”74 This disorientating impression seems to let Hugh “look through the world, and there was another world right behind it. A realer world.”75 This shattering of perception is echoed at various points in the narrative, as, for instance, when Reverend Jacobs first gives his “Terrible Sermon,” denouncing religion, at which point “the light from [the church’s] stained glass window [put] blue and red diamonds on his left cheek”76 indicating that the tragic loss of his family has caused his own reality to fracture into a version of the prismatics, setting him on his ultimately destructive path. Both stories end with the protagonists having to live with the knowledge that the boundaries between our reality and what lies beyond can be breached, and that this opening of a doorway might, in fact, be irreversible. King has previously experimented with Lovecraftian cosmicism, particularly in the aforementioned Pet Sematary, as well as in IT. There are several links tying IT and Revival together, including, among others, a “foreshadowing” of the potestas magnum universum. In their battle with the book’s macrocosmic evil, the protagonists encounter the so-called deadlights, reminiscent of Lovecraft’s blind, insane gods, and echoed in Jamie’s vision of the afterlife. Richie realizes that the deadlights are, in fact, alive: “More than alive: it was full of a force—magnetism, gravity, perhaps something else.”77 The mention of gravity and magnetism suggests that this mysterious “something else” may well be the source of Jacobs’s secret electricity. According to Lovecraft’s own method of maintaining suspense by only opening the door a crack, we catch a mere glimpse of “Mother” in Revival. Emerging from Mary Fey’s dead mouth, after her supernatural electrification, is the leg of a dark and frightening insect, reminiscent of Pennywise’s penultimate shape as a large, female spider. Ultimately, however, IT is much more optimistic (and

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therefore much less Lovecraftian) than Revival. Not only is Its lair, and with it large parts of the corrupted town Derry, destroyed in a lightning storm at the book’s climax, but the protagonists receive support from a higher power opposing It, which helps them to create their own power, “like static electricity”78 only much stronger. Revival, on the other hand, suggests that while Jacobs denounced religion, he never really lost his faith; just his willingness to believe in God without scientific proof. He is told, however, that the entity waiting behind death’s door is “not the one you want.”79 The potestas magnum universum—the deadlights—manifests a culmination of gothic beliefs about the negative potentials of Romantic electricity. For the protagonists, the only way to protect themselves and their sanity is to resist the temptation of glancing through the keyhole and interfering with the power beyond. For the reader, however, the gothic horror text itself is a lightning rod able to guide and disperse the current of anxious potential, and to get a good look at what lies beyond the veil is the only way to disperse the tension. CONCLUSION Charles Jacobs, like so many other close relatives of the lightning rod salesman in the gothic, combines elements of the Bible salesman or preacher, and the mad scientist or peddler of knowledge. He oscillates between selling his wares purely for profit and being driven by an ulterior motive, first religious and then (pseudo-)scientific. He embodies the hopes and fears regarding scientific innovations as so many other characters in gothic literature do, and as Victor Frankenstein did before him. But like Mephistopheles, the tempting fiend in Goethe’s Faust, who, when he first appears in human form, does so clad in the garb of a traveling scholar, Jacobs, with the “voice of a coaxing devil”80 sells the illusion of control to the “rubes.” He is a figure in a long line of peddlers who sells protection against divine wrath or general misfortune, whether in the form of bibles or lightning rods, or cures worked through his secret electricity. When tragedy strikes like sudden lightning, Jacobs transforms from a charitable pastor to an unsympathetic zealot. Jamie’s father predicts Jacobs’s trajectory when he says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions—and lit with electric lights.”81 The rod both draws lightning and guides it away from where it can do harm. King himself has been likened to a “lightning conductor for American disquiet”82 and described himself as such elsewhere. King’s work and the gothic horror genre in general are seen as lightning rods for societal anxieties, allowing a concentrated and guided exposure to such “phobic pressure points,”83 which is sometimes compared to a safety valve used to let off

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steam. Consuming gothic and horror texts supposedly lets us examine and experience, from a safe distance, those situations and emotions we would seek to avoid in real life. Like lightning drawn into a Leyden Jar, the energy derived from the mind’s dealing with reactions to such phobic pressure points can be usefully redirected and channeled. NOTES 1. Stephen King, Needful Things (London: Signet, 1992), 651. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Nature and Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 1982), 283. 3. Paul Gilmore, “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 475. 4. Kelly Hurley, “Science and the Gothic,” in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 173. 5. Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 8. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines: Science Fiction and the Culture of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2006), 83. 9. Ibid. 10. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 28. 11. Ibid., 29. 12. Marilyn Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science,” in Frankenstein (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 406. 13. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Macdonald, 1981), 29. 14. King, Needful Things, 9. 15. John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (London: Penguin, 1984), 134. 16. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Wadsworth, 1993), 137. 17. James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 257. 18. Shelley, Frankenstein, 35. 19. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (London: Orion, 2008), 5. 20. Ibid., 185. 21. Ibid., 9. 22. Shelley, Frankenstein, 24. 23. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, 96. 24. Ibid., 88. 25. Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (London: Icon, 2002), 47.

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26. Joshua Matthews, “Peddlers of the Rod: Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man’ and the Antebellum Periodical Market,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 12, no. 3 (2010): 64. 27. Arwen Mohun, “Lightning Rods and the Commodification of Risk in Nineteenth Century America,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 99, no. 5 (2009): 175. 28. Douglass Verdier, “Who is the Lightning-Rod Man?” Studies in Short Fiction 18, no. 3 (1981): 27–79. 29. Stephen King, The Dead Zone (New York: Signet, 1980), 86. 30. Ibid. 31. Ray Bradbury, afterward to Something Wicked This Way Comes (London: Orion, 1962; 2008), 155. 32. Peter Straub, Ghost Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), 155. 33. King, Danse Macabre, 118. 34. H. P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep,” in H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2008), 122. 35. Will Murray has drawn parallels between this itinerant electrical showman and Nikola Tesla, developer of the alternating current electrical system and one of the most prominent figures in electrical research and performance in Lovecraft’s time. 36. H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, ed. S. T Joshi and David E. Schulz (New York: Hippocampus, 2005), 200. 37. Stephen King, The Stand (London: Hodderand Stoughton, 1990), 853. 38. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, 103. 39. Stephen King, Revival (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014), 17. 40. Bradbury, Something Wicked, 7. 41. Ibid. 42. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 119. Unfortunately, the placement of these bells in the church steeple—the highest point in most villages and cities—meant that they are especially vulnerable to lightning strikes. 43. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams (London: Dover, 2006), 11. 44. King, Revival, 1. 45. Ibid., 67. 46. Ibid., 88. 47. Ibid., 68. 48. Ibid., 155. 49. Ibid., 156. 50. Fara, An Entertainment for Angels, 64. For more detail on the “king’s portrait,” see Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, 129–30. 51. King, Revival, 77. 52. Ibid., 181. 53. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, 96. 54. Ibid. 55. King, Revival, 29.

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56. See W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” for full effect. 57. Stephen King, Pet Sematary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), 88. 58. Ibid., 453. 59. King, Revival, 150. 60. Ibid., 347. 61. Ibid., 279. 62. Ibid., 350. 63. Ibid., 344. 64. Ibid., 355. 65. Edward J. Ingebretsen, preface to Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), xxix. 66. See King, Danse Macabre, 133–35. 67. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48. 68. King, Revival, 345. 69. Ibid. 70. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, 3. 71. King, Revival, 312. 72. H. P. Lovecraft, “From Beyond,” in H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2008), 116. 73. Ibid., 118. 74. King, Revival, 198. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 64. 77. Stephen King, IT (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986), 1045. 78. Ibid., 838. 79. King, Revival, 297. 80. Ibid., 340. 81. Ibid., 32. 82. Geoff Ward, The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 8. See also George Beahm’s Stephen King Country (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1999), 67. 83. King, Danse Macabre, 8.

Chapter 11

From Wonder to Horror Stephen King’s Revival and Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy Dominick Grace

Stephen King has always been open about acknowledging the influences on his work. These range widely, from the popular (e.g., other writers primarily associated with horror or genre fiction) to the literary—which, of course, sometimes overlap, as in the case, for instance, of Mary Shelley. Some of these influences may be surprising. For instance, when reading King, one might not immediately think of Robertson Davies as an influence. On the face of it, significant overlap between the work of Robertson Davies and Stephen King might seem unlikely. Davies was a luminary of Canadian letters, a literary writer and university professor; King, by contrast, is firmly rooted in genre literature and, despite his popularity and the amount of academic attention he has received (as evidenced by this project, among many others),as well as other accolades such as the National Book Award in 2003 or his 2015 National Medal of Arts,is not widely regarded as a literary luminary (as the controversies over his receipt of such awards suggests), though that is changing.1 Nevertheless, there are illuminating connections between their work, particularly since King has, on several occasions, acknowledged his admiration for Davies’s work. As early as in a 1976 guest column for the New York Times, King’s awareness of Davies has been part of the public record, and in defending “accessible” books, King states, “Robertson Davies, who is perhaps Canada’s accessible white to Joyce Carol Oates’s more difficult black, calls this accessibility the Plain Style.”2 In a 2007 review of Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork, King compares that novel to the work of Davies: “Reading Fieldwork is like discovering an unpublished Robertson Davies novel; as with Davies, you can’t stop reading until midnight (good), and you don’t hate yourself in the morning (better),”3 and he reportedly praised many 167

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Canadian works of fiction, “mainly Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy,” at a BOOKED! Event in Toronto, also in 2007.4 Furthermore, King’s familiarity with and respect for the Deptford Trilogy, consisting of Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975), is also expressed within his fiction, as is evident from his extended reference to them in The Tommyknockers (1987). The narrator begins the chapter: “Mr. Robertson Davies . . . has suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that our attitude toward magic and magicians in large part indicates our attitude toward reality, and that our attitudes on the matter of reality indicate our attitudes toward the whole world of wonders in which we find ourselves.”5 Davies is not referenced again in the book, nor does the bulk of the novel reflect much explicitly about the Deptford Trilogy, other than the embedded reference here to the third novel in that series, World of Wonders—unless Davies’s passing reference to a character “with a silver plate in his head”6 links obliquely with the steel plate in the head of Jim Gardener, the protagonist of The Tommyknockers, which inhibits the malign alien presence from influencing him. King also references Fifth Business in passing in Needful Things (1991), when Leland Gaunt, seeking suggestions for an appropriate figure to spy on Alan Pangborn for him, gleefully accepts the suggestion that he use the custodian, Eddie Wartburton: “‘The Janitor! . . . Yes! Excellent! Fifth Business! Really excellent!’”7 Nearly twenty years later, King's interest in Davies returned—as so much does in King's work—as an informing idea in his recent novel Revival (2014), though the novel lacks any explicit acknowledgment of Davies. Revival has a prefatory note listing numerous authors King identifies as “the people who built my house” (that is, whom he is identifying as key influences on his work generally and this novel specifically), all of whom are horror authors, with special emphasis given to “ARTHUR MACHEN, whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life,” and H. P. Lovecraft, from whose work the novel’s epigraph is drawn and who is referenced within the novel, as well. Davies does not appear on the list. Nevertheless, Davies’s work informs Revival at least as deeply as does that of the genre writers King explicitly credits. The novel proper begins by identifying Reverend Charles Jacobs as narrator Jamie Morton's “fifth business,” a term coined by Davies as the title of his 1970 novel. The epigraph to Davies’s novel (a quotation invented by Davies) defines the fifth business by suggesting that the main four roles in drama belong to the Hero, Heroine, Confidante, or Villain, and roles not so categorized but that “were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.”Though King does not explicitly refer to the novel Fifth Business or mention Davies by name, he adopts and adapts

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the concept of the character who functions as the “fifth business,” stating that the filmic character who appears only occasionally and at key moments “is known as the fifth business, or the change agent.”8 While his definition differs from Davies’s, the source of the term is clear. Furthermore, in Revival King borrows and adapts both plot and thematic elements from Fifth Business (and arguably to a lesser extent from the second and third volumes in the trilogy), albeit with key shifts in focus. One of the key instances involves the character of Mary Dempster, from Fifth Business. Mary Dempster is an important secondary character in the novel, designated a saint by its protagonist/narrator Dunstan Ramsay, and whose miracles include supposedly resurrecting Ramsay’s dead brother. Another involves early parallels between Mary’s husband and town preacher Amasa Dempster, and Charlie Jacobs, though their plots diverge significantly as the novels proceed. Furthermore, Davies and King play on the relationship between material and spiritual realities, and both also have much to say about religious hypocrisy, but King treats the supernatural considerably differently than does Davies. Whereas in Fifth Business “magic . . . is a beautiful illusion, a creation by human beings in the ordinary world who imaginatively invoke a miraculous realm where ordinary laws are momentarily suspended,”9 King literalizes the importance of the possibility of magic—which possibility is also the focus of his references to the novel in The Tommyknockers—to render the “miraculous realm” instead something horrific. To put it simply, King transmutes Davies’s concept from wonder to a realm King is more familiar with: horror. Both Davies and King explicitly link the concept of the character known as the fifth business to the realm of artistic construction: Davies’s Fifth Business to drama and opera, King’s Revival to film. In Fifth Business, the fifth business is “’the odd man out, . . . the one who knows the secret of the hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody’s death if that is part of the plot . . . you cannot manage the plot without the Fifth Business!’”10 as Leisl explains to Ramsay late in the novel. In Revival, the fifth business is “the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis”11 and is also known as the aforementioned “change agent.” In both cases, he or she is character as plot contrivance, but in each case what this contrivance implies about one’s relationship with the world is quite different. King has his protagonist Jamie Morton identify his fifth business, Charles Jacobs, explicitly as a “nemesis” and associates his role in Morton’s life with horror, whereas in Davies, the fifth business role is not inherently either positive or negative, only transformative: “it is a good line of work”12 for an actor to specialize in such roles. Interestingly, though the fifth business is functionally understood not to be the protagonist but a secondary character, Davies’s protagonist is in fact the eponymous fifth

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business, whereas in Revival, the antagonist is assigned the fifth business label. Ramsay narrates Fifth Business while being identified within its world as the fifth business; Jamie Morton narrates Revival but identifies Jacobs as his fifth business, thereby assuming for himself the protagonist role, though insofar as parallels to Fifth Business go, Jamie is perhaps himself more akin to the Ramsay character. King’s Charles Jacobs, however, echoes and amalgamates a few characters from the trilogy, and especially from Fifth Business. Charles Jacobs is a minister who, early in the novel, experiences a profound and tragic loss in which his wife and son die. Similarly, in Fifth Business, Amasa Dempster is a minister whose wife is injured by an errant snowball, thereby bringing on premature labour and apparently madness, making him experience a loss not nearly as profound as that experienced by Jacobs but nevertheless one that causes a traumatic transformation in him which alienates him from family and community. Much like the villain who keeps the hermitess to her cell, he takes to tying his wife up in the house so she cannot wander in the community. Dempster is a fanatically devout Baptist who objects to all frivolity and prohibits Davies’s protagonist, Dunstable Ramsay, from teaching Dempster’s young son Paul magic tricks involving sleight of hand—though after disappearing from Deptford as a child, Dempster does eventually resurface as a magician using the stage name Magnus Eisengrim, becomes involved again with Ramsay (who in fact ghost writes Eisengrim’s biography), and ends up playing a key role in the novel’s climax. By contrast, Jacobs is interested in illusion and how it can be used to inspire awe and wonder; his experiments with electricity lead him to create a mechanical device that makes an automaton Christ appear to walk on water, for instance. After the traumatic loss of his family, though, his use of illusion converts to something much darker. In this regard, Jacobs perhaps recalls, to a lesser extent, the character Willard in World of Wonders, who kidnapped young Paul Dempster (Paul’s disappearance from Deptford being the result of this abduction, rather than simply of him running away with the circus, as was originally assumed by the townsfolk—and Ramsay) and uses him as an assistant, in ways that might be loosely compared to how Jacobs uses Jamie. The use by both of automatons is the point of contact here. An important plot element in World of Wonders is Abdullah, the apparent automaton that is really powered by Paul, hidden inside the putative machine. The sleight of hand apparently performed by the machine is in fact performed by the human agent hidden inside it. Jacobs’s relationship with Jamie lacks the sexual abuse inflicted by Willard on Paul (Willard kidnaps Paul after raping him, to conceal his crime), but across the novel, Jacobs manipulates Jamie, first into being his carnival assistant and then into assisting him in his attempt to pierce the veil; one might therefore find a slight echo of the Willard/Paul relationship. More significant, though,

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is that Jacobs also suggests in some respects Paul Dempster himself, once he assumes the identity of Magnus Eisengrim. As even the name Eisengrim suggests, with its etymological links to grimness and iron, the magician is an ominous figure; he also uses the stage name Faustus LeGrand, which carries its own devilish intimations. Despite being a stage magician, Eisengrim is an ominous and morally ambiguous character (his morally transgressive acts being played up in Ramsay’s book about Eisengrim), and may be responsible for the death of Boy Staunton, who threw the snowball that rendered Mary Dempster mentally unstable. Near the end of Fifth Business, Staunton is found, an apparent suicide, with that stone in his mouth, shortly after a meeting between Ramsay, Staunton, and Eisengrim, at which time Eisengrim learned what really happened to his mother when he was a child. Whether he palmed the stone and used it as part of an elaborately staged fake suicide, thereby punishing Boy for what happened to Mary, or whether Staunton did so himself and tried to swallow it during his suicide, as an acknowledgment for his culpability, is never resolved across the trilogy, but the association of Eisengrim with the dark side of human nature is nevertheless established and exploited throughout the trilogy. Across Revival, therefore, King welds together aspects of different characters from the Deptford trilogy to create the figure of Charles Jacobs. The echoes are strongest in the earliest chapters of Revival and Fifth Business. Early in Revival, Jacobs uses the idea of the miraculous to create the illusion of a cure for Jamie’s injured brother, a plot element that resembles a key early moment in Fifth Business. In Davies’ novel, Ramsay’s brother undergoes an apparent death and resurrection. When Willie seems to his young brother to die—“I hurried to fetch my mother’s hand mirror and held it over his mouth; it did not cloud. I opened one eye’ it was rolled upward in his head”13 Ramsay reports (54)—Ramsay runs, not for the doctor, but for the apparently mad wife of Amasa Dempster. When she arrives, she takes Willie’s hands and prays for several minutes, and then “in a low, infinitely kind and indeed almost a cheerful tone,”14 she calls Willie’s name three times; afterward, “Willie sighed and moved his legs,”15 seemingly in response to her dulcet incantation which Ramsay interprets as a miracle. This experience, among others, underlies his specific belief that Mary is a saint and his general quest throughout the novel to explore sainthood; he then spends much of the book investigating saints’ stories in order to determine whether Mary Dempster was indeed a saint with miraculous powers. The novel posits an answer to this question that stresses the importance of belief rather than objective reality: Ramsay’s friend, the elderly Jesuit Padre Blazon, suggests, “‘If you think her a saint, she is a saint to you. . . . This is what we call the reality of the soul; you are foolish to demand the reality of the world as well.’”16 Magic is, therefore, subjective and faith-based, not (necessarily) objectively

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verifiable, but also not (necessarily) false, either; it, instead, works by playing on the desire for magic. As Ramsay speculates, “Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable fact? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge . . . that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?”17 In this speculation lies an underlying theme of the novel, and the underlying basis of the quest ultimately assumed by Jacobs in Revival. This plot device is echoed in King having Jacobs perform an apparent miracle to cure Morton’s brother’s damaged throat. In Fifth Business, the nature of the “miracle” remains ambiguous. In Revival, however, Jacobs rigs up an electric device that he claims will effect a cure. Initially, the device’s effect is presented as a genuine instance of healing. However, Jacobs later admits that there was no basis for this claim. Instead, the belief in the possibility of the miraculous helped make the injury heal in a version of the placebo effect. Jacobs explains that he believes that Jaimie’s bother Con was healed psychosomatically, by his belief in the cure rather than by anything Jacobs actually did. As with Blazon’s explanation of how saints and miracles work, Jacobs here argues for the power of faith—something he will subsequently exploit in the novel. Finally, though, Jamie determines that the cure was indeed genuine, as Con ends up suffering from the same sort of mental breakdown that afflicts a significant number of the figures “cured” by Jacobs in Revival. In this respect, Con’s name hints at King’s play with the grey area between genuine transformative experiences and conmanship, which is a central aspect of Jacobs’s character in the novel and a recurrent theme in the Deptford trilogy as well. Ultimately, the resurrection theme becomes the core of the horror in Revival, and part, perhaps, of a very different sort of con. At the novel’s climax, Jacobs attempts to resurrect Mary Fey,18 not to restore her to life but rather pierce the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead and to try to contact his dead wife and son, which I will consider later in this chapter. King also plays on Amasa Dempster’s response to the tragedy that strikes his life with Jacobs’s response to the tragedy that strikes his. In both cases, a sermon figures prominently. After the incident in which his mentally imbalanced (or sainted, if one accepts Ramsay’s reading) wife had sex with a tramp, Dempster resigns his mission from the pulpit; he is a broken man who takes to tying his wife up in the house whenever he is out. King gives Jacobs a far more apocalyptic sermonic resignation. If Dempster’s life is destroyed, Jacob’s faith is destroyed, and his final sermon is a stinging rebuke to God and faith. This loss and subsequent rejection of God puts him on the path to trying to control supernatural forces, which sets up King’s shift of association. For Davies, in Fifth Business it is the Dempsters’ son, Paul, not Amasa, who runs away, joins the circus, and eventually becomes

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the famous illusionist Magnus Eisengrim.19 In Revival, after the tragic loss of his family annihilates his religious faith, Charles Jacobs leaves his town to become, first, a carny huckster, using a device of his own rigging to create “PORTRAITS IN LIGHTNING”20 and then, under the assumed name C. Danny Jacobs, an itinerant faith healer, performing his shtick in his “OLD TIME TENT REVIVAL”21 show, again using electrical gimmickry of his own design to facilitate his cures. Though his assumed identities are not as lavishly theatrical as Paul’s (Magnus Eisengrim, Faustus LeGrand), they do reflect a similar and theatrical adoption of identity. The cures are real (or some of them are), but Jacobs uses the showmanship of a carnival man and the veneer of religious revivalism to conceal what he is really doing: manipulating mysterious and incomprehensible electric forces to effect physiological and psychological change for his own long-term ends. It is perhaps worth note at this point that Fifth Business also includes a character who changes his identity to become a preacher: the tramp with whom Mary Dempster had sex—thereby fully alienating her husband and most of the community, leading them to assume she is mad—who appears later in a new identity, Joel Surgeoner, and running a religious mission. Confronted by Ramsay, he admits his identity and even that he uses trickery and fiction in his sermons, acknowledging that what he says is not true in an objective “policecourt facts”22 sense: “‘There’s a certain amount of artfulness about it, of course, but a greater end has been served, and nobody has been really hurt.’”23 It may be a stretch to suggest that Jacobs’s quasi-medical interventions can be linked to the surgical-sounding name of Davies’s similar religious showman.24 It is, however, less of a stretch to suggest that Surgeoner’s justification of his trickery to serve a higher end without really hurting anyone hews fairly close to Jacobs’s claim that his own hucksterism (e.g. faking some evidence of cures) is also in the service of a higher purpose: “‘Did I sometimes display fake tumors when I was on the circuit? Yes, and I’m not proud of it, but it was necessary. Because you can’t display something that’s just gone.’”25 Unlike Surgeoner, though, whose trickery serves the end of what he perceives as a higher religious truth (and which are not suggested to have done any harm to anyone, unlike Jacobs’s cures), Jacobs’s serves his own end of wishing to pierce the veil between the mundane and the marvelous and is ultimately not really grounded in an interest in the marks. Jacobs’s earlier response when Jamie accuses him of having shifted from preaching to “hucksterism” on the carny circuit is telling: “‘No difference. . . . They’re both just a matter of convincing the rubes.’”26 Nevertheless, like Surgeoner, Jacobs claims that his hucksterism served a greater good. However, whereas for Surgeoner, that greater good is faith in God, for Jacobs it is his own pursuit of occult knowledge, rationalized in terms of the number of genuine cures he achieves—or believes he achieves.

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The tragedy that changed Jacobs’s life did not just alienate him from faith in God; it also drove him, in good mad scientist fashion, to pursue relentlessly the means to reverse death, to break on through to the other side to get his wife and son back, or at least to find out what afterlife they enjoy. Though his methods are ostensibly scientific, he becomes in effect a necromancer who conceals his real magic under carnival tricksterism. He also resembles, therefore, the character Magnus Eisengrim, introduced in Fifth Business, and whose own story takes up the bulk of World of Wonders. Eisengrim begins life as Paul Dempster, the son of Amasa and Mary Dempster, and his traumatic childhood and adolescence turn him into a performer, a façade through which he can captivate an audience. However, he seems to have no emotional core in real life. Moreover, Ramsay is hired to produce his official story, inventing a history for him that fits the mysterious identity of a master magician, and the resemblance to Jacobs’s manufactured identity is perhaps most evident in an invented detail from Ramsay’s “official” account. In recounting Eisengrim’s perfection of his illusions, Ramsay “hints that girls had sometimes been terribly injured in some device that was not quite perfect; of course Eisengrim had paid to have them put right again; I made him something of a monster but not too much of a monster.”27 This fiction about Eisengrim is transformed into a truth about Jacobs. His carnival show, and then his revival-show faith healing, is an act designed to allow him to perfect his own device by experimenting on oblivious audience members. While Jacobs often does cure these people, his experiments also in fact at times lead to some terrible if not immediately apparent injury to mind or body. Significantly in this regard, when we first encounter Jacobs’s lightning picture carnival attraction, he insists on using attractive young women as his primary subjects—no doubt for the same reason that stage magicians such as Eisengrim tend to use beautiful and scantily clad women. Furthermore, the first account we get of an earlier subject suffering deleterious after-effects also involves a young woman whose mind has been affected by the device. Subsequent to her illusory transformation, she has become a thief and faces jail because she is trying to transform herself in reality into what she looks like in the picture Jacobs created of her. Less clear in Fifth Business is whether there is a truth behind the fiction about Eisengrim, and though World of Wonders purports to be Eisengrim’s account of his own life, one can remain skeptical after reading it whether the account is to be taken at face value, given that other narrative voices in the book occasionally interject and challenge Eisengrim’s perspective on events, while at other points characters dissect Eisengrim’s claims, questioning their reliability. Fifth Business, especially, repeatedly invokes the idea that the mythic might lurk beneath the real, and even that what lurks might be horrific. For instance, early in Fifth Business, Ramsay notes, “I have been sometimes praised, sometimes

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mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives.”28That is, for Ramsay, the mythical is real and present in the quotidian world. For instance, many of Ramsay’s fellow townsfolk find far-fetched a sermon likening the local gravel pit (site of clandestine meetings and licentious conduct) to Gehenna, as this equation of the familiar world to the biblical one strains against their preconceptions. That which is known and present cannot also be mysterious and supernatural. The young Dunstable, however, “saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited a few of them since.”29 Nothing that can be construed as a literal hell appears in any of the novels in the trilogy; however, the idea of myth being papered over by reality, of some hermetic truth that can be revealed, informs Ramsay’s understanding. He believes the opposite of his boyhood friend Boy Staunton, to whom “the reality of life lay in external things. . . . [And that] the only reality was of the spirit.”30 Ramsay senses the existence of invisible forces in the world, that “I was being used by powers over which I had no control for purposes of which I had no understanding.”31 In context, he is referring to the forces of history that led to the Second World War, but he also makes clear that he sees a correlation between history and myth, in his belief that “the oddly recurrent themes of history . . . are also the themes of myth.”32 One might—and indeed commentators do—read Jungian or Platonic notions into Fifth Business, finding philosophical or psychological resonances for how the novel treats the human need for wonder and the miraculous—and for good reason.33 The earliest academic article on Fifth Business, “Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and That Old Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners, C. G. Jung” by Gordon Roper, explores that novel’s debt to Jung, as have subsequent studies. The second volume in the trilogy, The Manticore, devotes a significant proportion of the text to an account of Boy Staunton’s son David’s analysis by a Jungian psychologist, and its climax involves his descent into a cave clearly symbolic of the unconscious to visit the relics of ancient bear worshippers, which links directly to Jungian archetype in the novel. King, too, has been influenced by Jung. Tony Magistrale has pointed out that King has cited Jung’s influence,34 for instance. Similarly, Heidi Strengell has discussed Jungian influences on King, notably in his invocation of the shadow in The Stand. Even Revival briefly brings Jung into play, when Jamie mentions that his analyst “quoted Jung to me: ‘The world’s most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.’”35 Like David Staunton in The Manticore, who is in therapy to cope with the traumatic impact on him of the death of his father, Jamie also ends up in therapy in Revival. However, The Manticore begins with protagonist/narrator David Staunton’s therapy, whereas Revival ends with the protagonist/narrator Jamie’s therapy. Furthermore, Revival’s

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climax contrasts with that of The Manticore. In The Manticore, the climax involves Staunton’s metaphorical return to the womb and encounter with a Jungian archetype in the form of a bear god (not literally manifested in the novel), deep in a mountain cave where Leisl says “men once came to terms with the facts of death and mortality and continuance.”36 Revival’s climax, by contrast, involves a direct confrontation with horror which does literally manifest. Though Staunton finds the experience terrifying, Leisl argues that the unseen world is wonderful: “The heroic world is all around us, waiting to be known.”37 In The Manticore, therapy is restorative and leads to a quasimystical encounter with healing properties. In Revival, therapy is the only refuge for Jamie after his horrifying encounter with the facts of death and mortality and continuance that he discovers in his encounter with the god/ monster. In King, then, what is behind the veil is unambiguously horrific rather than wonderful. In contrast to Eisengrim, who plays a devilish role on stage (though also in life, possibly), Jacobs is much more clearly doing the devil’s bidding. The Faustian bargain played with in Fifth Business becomes real in Revival. Jacobs’s experiments lead, finally, to his ability to rupture the veil between the mundane and the otherworldly, manifested in his attempt to use a reanimated Mary Fey as a portal. Ramsay speaks of visiting hell’s local habitations on Earth in primarily metaphorical terms. For instance, Magnus Eisengrim metaphorizes the day he joined the traveling carnival as “’the day I descended into hell, and did not rise again for seven years,’”38 whereas Jacobs literally accesses such a local habitation, albeit temporarily, by opening a gateway into a spiritual realm governed by creatures of profound horror. When the gate opens, Jaime learns that “the whole living world was an illusion. What is thought of as reality was nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as old nylon stocking.”39 King explicitly brings the fifth business concept back into play at this point when Jamie reminds us that he views Jacobs as his fifth business.40 Ramsay self-defines as the fifth business in Fifth Business whereas Jamie sees himself as protagonist and Jacobs as the change agent. The creature behind the scrim furthers the Fifth Business resonances. It is identified as Mother, an unsurprising label, of course, for the archetype of the monstrous other, but also one with ties to how Ramsay has defined his own mother. To wit, in Davies’s novel, Ramsay sees his mother as a monstrous consumer: “I knew she had eaten my father, and I was glad I did not have to fight any longer to keep her from eating me.”41 Again, what Davies treats metaphorically, King threatens to make literal. Jamie Morton may not be as lucky as Ramsay. Magic in his world is not a metaphor for wonder (even in World of Wonders, the World of Wonders carnival is a shabby and perverse, pale reflection of the transformative power of the imagination) but a literal gateway to horror. His only hope, as he says

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at the end of the book, is that what Jacobs’s rending of the veil reveals is itself only an illusion: “One idea saved my sanity, and I still cling to it: the possibility that this nightmare landscape was itself a mirage.”42 That is, his only hope is that the real magic is just as much a carnival huckster’s trick as are the illusions generated by Jacobs at the carnival or on his healing tours— or by Magnus Eisengrim, whose own show purports to offer a gateway to the beyond, via the oracular answers provided by the Brazen Head (a stage trick in which a false head makes oracular pronouncements about audience members, mentalism being a common component in magic shows). These are faked, of course, but also true, in a way; the entire Deptford trilogy depends, to some extent, on what the Brazen Head has to say. The climax of Fifth Business is a query to the Brazen Head about who killed Boy Staunton, the answer to which precipitates Ramsay’s heart attack. in The Manticore, we learn that the question was shouted by David Staunton, and precipitated the therapy which takes up that novel, in which he confronts his own status as the metaphorical manticore. Finally, World of Wonders provides Eisengrim’s own account of the final hours of Boy Staunton’s life.43 Jacobs’s question is far more fundamental—where are my wife and son?—but the answer from the beyond differs radically from what Davies suggests about the order of the universe, which is that good and evil are in balance, and that some larger force dictates everyone’s fate, which Magnus calls the Great Justice: It’s rough and tough and deeply satisfying. And I don’t administer it. Something else—something I don’t understand, but feel and serve and fear—does that. It’s sometimes horrible to watch. . . . But part of the glory and terror of our life is that somehow, at some time, we all get what’s coming to us. Everybody gets their lumps and their bouquets and it goes on for quite a while after death.44

Jamie expects to get what’s coming to him after death, though he does not phrase it in those terms. Instead, he acknowledges that his role in what has happened, and his rejection of Mother, has opened him up to “some final and apocalyptic act of revenge,”45 which he envisions occurring “in the great and bottomless chasm where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.”46 In other words, the balance of light and shadow suggested by Davies doesn’t exist for King, at least in Revival. Did King need the Deptford trilogy to write a novel of the monstrous reality concealed beneath the veil of the mundane? No. Does he slavishly duplicate the novel? No. Revival is not a rehash or reworking of Davies’s work. Nevertheless, I contend King uses its metaphoric and allusive treatment of the idea of what lurks beneath, as well as aspects of its plot and characters, not to mention the titular conceit of its first book, to inform his own exploration

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of the terrifying possibilities represented by the transformation brought about by that change agent, the mysterious fifth business. And it is through this homage of sorts that King further explores the same shadow that he has cast upon many of his other works: magic is not an omnipresent lullaby that will lull the monsters to sleep; indeed, the only magic is the illusion that his characters weave for themselves in order to sidestep the terrible realities that their imaginative, curious, and wondrous minds, and actions, have unleashed. NOTES 1. As of May 2, 2018, the MLA international database lists 139 peer-reviewed publications on King, over a third of them (55) published from 2010-present. As this upsurge suggests, King is certainly receiving more academic attention than he used to, but his status as a canonical, literary author is still under development, and the preponderance of work on King (over twenty of the aforementioned fifty-five articles) continues to appear in publications devoted to genre or popular culture studies. On the other hand, as of the same date, the MLA lists only seventy-one refereed publications on Davies, so literary status does not necessarily correlate with frequency of study. 2. Stephen King, “Not Guilty: The Guest Word,” The New York Times, October 24, 1976. https​://ar​chive​.nyti​mes.c​om/ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/b​ooks/​97/03​/09/l​ifeti​mes/k​ in-v-​guest​.html​. 3. Stephen King, “Letting ‘Fieldwork’ Go to Waste,” Entertainment Weekly, April 15, 2007, http://ew.com/ artic​le/20​07/04​/15/l​ettin​g-fie​ldwor​k-go-​waste​/. 4. “God Save the King.” Quill and Quire, June 9, 2007. https://quillandquire. com/u​ncate​goriz​ed/20​07/06​/09/g​od-sa​ve-th​e-kin​g/. Davies, by contrast, had little to say about King, as far as I can find. Asked in an interview, “What do you think of the Stephen King horror movies,” Davies responded, “A large part of a person is irrational. With the deep emotion of religion lost, there is still the need to be moved strongly. George Bernard Shaw said that he quit believing in God when he was a child and prayed for something and didn’t get it. He was trying to startle people. That’s not the idea of God. Praying is a chance to come to terms with the good and evil inside yourself” (Harvard, “Dr. Robertson Davies,” 238). However, overlaps between King’s tastes and Davies can be found easily enough. For instance, King cites Arthur Machen as the primary influence on his work in the acknowledgements in Revival, and Davies has also acknowledged an interest in Machen: “About the age of sixteen or seventeen I became very interested in the work of that now rather neglected writer, Arthur Machen” (Thompson, “Interview with Robertson Davies”). 5. Stephen King, The Tommyknockers (New York: Signet, 1987), 257. 6. Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (New York: Penguin, 1996), 198 7. Stephen King, Needful Things ((New York: Viking, 1991), 159. 8. Stephen King, Revival (New York: Scribner, 2014), 1–2. 9. Barry Wood, “In Search of Sainthood: Magic, Myth, and Metaphor in Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business,” Critique 19, no. 2 (1977): 27. 10. Davies, Fifth Business, 231.

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11. King, Revival, 1. 12. Davies, Fifth Business, 231. 13. Ibid., 54. 14. Ibid., 55. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 175. 17. Ibid., 202. 18. Does the name Mary Fey echo Mary Dempster, especially as “Fay” means “fairy” or magical? I would hesitate to assert a deliberate echo, but the possibility is intriguing. 19. In the version of his story recounted in World of Wonders, Paul Dempster/ Magnus Eisengrim reports that he was sodomized and then kidnapped by the circus’s magician, Willard. Such recastings of narrative events are typical of the Deptford trilogy. 20. King, Revival, 139. 21. Ibid., 196. 22. Davies, Fifth Business, 131. 23. Ibid., 132. 24. It is almost certainly a stretch to suggest that King may have picked up the idea of associating the harnessing of electricity with magic and deception in the context of a traveling carnival show from Davies’s passing reference to how the magical effects in the theater are often achieved by electricity—in World of Wonders, Magnus Eisengrim mentions watching “how the electrician contrived his magic” (189) to create theatrical effects. 25. King, Revival, 261. 26. Ibid., 168. 27. Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (New York: Penguin, 1977), 234. 28. Davies, Fifth Business, 40. Ramsay returns to this theme in World of Wonders, when querying what myth underlies Eisengrim’s self-conception:”What is the mythical element in his story? Simply the very old tale of the man who is in search of his soul and who must struggle with a monster to secure it” (140). Ramsay further notes, “In hagiography we have legends and all those splendid pictures of saints who killed dragons, and it doesn’t take much penetration to know that the dragons represent not simply evil in the world but their personal evil, as well. Of course, being saints, they are said to have killed their dragons, but we know that dragons are not killed; at best they are tamed, and kept on the chain” (140). I would suggest that this comment resonates with King’s depiction of the monstrous Mother in Revival and its function as representing not only the monster inside Jacobs but also inside Jamie. And it is of course not killed. 29. Ibid., 41. 30. Ibid. 112. 31. Ibid., 108. 32. Ibid., 116. 33. Davies’s interest in Jung is well known and a frequent subject of commentary not only by critics of his work but also by Davies himself. See, for instance, his

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comment on how he has “spent so much time, over the past twenty-five years, in the study of Dr. C. G. Jung,” in One Half of Robertson Davies (143). Jung’s influence on his work has also been explored in detail by Patricia Monk (see The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies). 34. Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade. Danse Macabre to The Dark Half (New York: Twayne, 1992), 4. 35. King, Revival, 388. 36. Robertson Davies, The Manticore (New York: Penguin, 1996), 263. 37. Ibid., 260. 38. Davies, World of Wonders, 17. 39. King, Revival, 379. Additionally, note the theatrical metaphor, by the way: rather than a veil, we have the translucent screen used in theatrical productions. 40. Ibid., 381. 41. Davies, Fifth Business, 78. 42. King, Revival, 381. 43. I will not spoil the novel—or the magic trick—by quoting its answer here. 44. Davies, World of Wonders, 313–14. 45. King, Revival, 398. 46. Ibid., 403.

Part IV

CONTEMPORARY CORNERSTONES

Chapter 12

Time Ravel History, Metafiction, and Immersion in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 Stefan L. Brandt

Time travel fiction1 has been called “the most discursive of popular genres.”2 Unlike any other genre, it deals, by way of its narrative focus, with “its own mechanics of self-construction.”3 The minute we grab a book—any book— and start reading it, we go back in time. In time travel stories, this moment of turning back the clock is deployed as an aesthetic pattern. The movement of the fictional time traveler who goes back in time is reflected in our own experience of embarking on a literary journey into the past. Like the character of a time travel narrative, we, too, become time travelers, embracing the sensation that the chronological structure of time has, for once, been interrupted, which is an unsettling, yet also potentially emancipatory experience. Indeed, Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 serves as a prime example of what I call “time ravel,” namely, the aesthetic entanglement of temporal lines set in motion by the “time travel” genre. These temporal lines involve the weaving of historical fiction with intertextual/metafictional elements as well as the imaginative faculties that allow readers to immerse themselves into the fabric of the text. 11/22/63 offers us a literary vision of time traveling that facilitates a warping and weaving of narrative aspects into an aesthetic whole. As such, readers are encouraged to unravel this rich tapestry and put it together in their imagination. Taking the historical incident of the Kennedy assassination into the fictional realm of an alternative historiography, King’s novel revolves around the protagonist, Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old high-school English teacher in a provincial town in Maine. As the novel’s first-person narrator, Jake guides us through the book’s various timelines, from 2011, the plot’s starting point in the narrative present-day, back to the years between 1958 and 183

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1963, where Jake first prevents a family tragedy involving his future school’s physically handicapped janitor, then attempts to keep Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating U.S. president John F. Kennedy. The novel’s geographical gateway is a mysterious loophole in a local diner that belongs to Jake’s friend, Al Templeton, who urges him to embark on his journey into the past. Insecure at first, Jake is finally convinced by one simple argument: Going back to 1958 will enable him, if all goes well, to save the life of John F. Kennedy, who will be assassinated five years later. Together with JFK, Jake comes to believe, he will also save millions of lives during the Vietnam War, which, under an uninterrupted Kennedy administration, would not have taken place. Despite only receiving the chance to be a hero due to his futural knowledge, Jake’s potential for heroism (and its consequences) are nonetheless fascinating. In its compositional structure, 11/22/63 seems to be a typical “time slip” narrative: it “crosses three distinct genres (fantasy, historical fiction and contemporary realism) and takes the reader to a time that is quite distinct from current time.”4 The novel’s fascination, like that of other time travel texts, stems from the fact that it encourages readers to consider the question “what if” that is so characteristic of all “speculative fiction.”5 Unlike other sci-fi texts, however, 11/22/63 uses a unique blend of compositional techniques and narrative patterns that create what I describe as the novel’s “aesthetics of time ravel.” Here I will discuss what can be considered the most salient features of this aesthetics as I have singled out three dimensions which seem essential to understanding these structures and reference points: (a) alternative historiography as a means of questioning the stability of history; (b) metafiction as a strategy to highlight the meaning of literature in processes of imagination; and (c) immersion as an aesthetic device to connect the aspects of time and space. It is my goal to illuminate the narrative strategies behind these three dimensions and discuss how they are capable of impacting our reading experience. Since we are “all time travelers, whether we know it or not,”6 as sci-fi writer Harry Turtledove has put it in his “Introduction” to The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, passionate readers can easily relate to the book aficionado Jake Epping who travels back in time to relive one of the most vibrant episodes of modern history—the era preceding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or what some have called America’s Golden Age. King’s novel finds a way of articulating this fascination with the vitality and inherent volatility of the postwar era by connecting us—almost viscerally—to his time-traveling protagonist Jake Epping. King has explained in an interview from 1985 that he usually constructs his literary characters as highly relatable in their personal situations: “In most cases, [my] characters seem very open and accessible. They seem like people that you would like to know, or even people you do know.”7 These “parallels between the world of King’s novels

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and our own,”8 Tony Magistrale contends, resonate powerfully in an age that has us “spin blindfolded” into an indeterminate future. The postmodern era, with its penchant for historical fluidity and insecurity concerning our place in the world, facilitates the popularity of novels which playfully negotiate the inconsistencies of time and space. Writing in 1988, Magistrale makes the following, almost prophetic remarks on the appeal of King’s fiction: In an age . . . where the constant threat of war in the Middle East and Latin America threatens to escalate into one final conflagration; where instruments of mass destruction increase in capability and sophistication, while those in charge of them seem less responsible and prudent; and where random and purposeless acts of violence have tacitly become an accepted element of Western life, King’s fictional plots are appearing less and less surreal.9

This notion of spinning blindly into the increasingly insecure geopolitical constellations of the contemporary world is reflected in 11/22/63 within the aesthetic realm of a time travel narrative. In the process of reading King’s novel, we are gripped by the uncanny sensation of the historically accurate and the wildly fantastic being melded before our very eyes.10

HISTORY AS A “HOUSE OF CARDS” One of the most important decisions an author has to make is the selection of the title. By choosing a very specific date for his novel, the 22nd of November, 1963, King immediately draws our attention to the dimension of time, and, more specifically, to the power time has over us.11 It is on this date that Kennedy was shot and the course of history was altered. Notably, the book’s first part is called “Watershed Moment,” referring to the observation that history—and life in general—offers us these crucial points in time from which, retrospectively, everything seems to develop. Like in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” (1920), these “watershed moments” become the defining markers of life itself. By taking one road and not the other, Jake Epping influences not only his own life, but also those of others. “Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?”12 Al Templeton asks Jake in one of the novel’s early passages (50), only to continue that “when it comes to the river of history, the watershed moments most susceptible to change are assassinations—the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed.”13 Instead of a stable view of history, in which every event is firmly inscribed into a predestined set of processes, we are confronted in 11/22/63 with a deeply illogical and chaotic world view—a concept that can be described as “alternative historiography.”14 It is no coincidence that King begins his novel

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with a longer epigraph citing from Norman Mailer’s nonfiction book on Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald: It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us and we live in a universe that is absurd.15

In the same vein, history in 11/22/63 seems like a fragile “house of cards”— a metaphor King uses many times throughout the novel.16 Jake realizes that by changing only a little facet of the overarching structure, he may cause the whole system to collapse. This sense of imminent collapse becomes more and more intense as Jake approaches that fatal day when Kennedy is about to be assassinated: November 22, 1963. Just hours before the countdown, the narrator tells us: “I was no longer just walking around the house of cards; I was living in it.”17 To underline this effect, the novel employs a well-known term that figuratively describes the precariousness of historical processes—“the butterfly effect.”18 Coined by sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury in his short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), this vivid image plays a crucial role in 11/22/63, functioning as an omnipresent reminder of the precariousness of history. The motif of the “butterfly” itself is also integrated into the plot line as a dynamic component: on his second trip to the past, Jake feels he can actually see the butterfly flapping its wings: “I thought I was watching that butterfly unfurl its wings right before my eyes. We were changing the world. Only in small ways—infinitesimal ways—but yes, we were changing it.”19 In one of the novel’s key passages, the first-person narrator lets us share his meditations on the fluidity of history: If there’s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don’t know what it is. Chains . . . are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I tell you, they are a house of cards.20

This sense of fragility described in 11/22/63 allows readers to playfully question the dominant narratives told in history books. Within the universe of King’s novel, as Betty Latham has argued, history functions not as a firm set of events, but as a shape-shifter that keeps adapting and altering its ultimate appearance—in other words, “The original (history) becomes a ‘changeling.’”21 Notably, King does not portray the Kennedy assassination (and related events) from a strictly historiographic angle, but “revisits the

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past through fiction.”22 In the fictional universe of 11/22/63, the history of the world appears as a phantasmagoric patchwork. “Save Kennedy,” Jake’s buddy Al Templeton tells him, “save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe.”23 (61). Although Al’s mantra, “Save Kennedy and everything changes”24 is revealed as treacherous (since everything becomes indeed worse after Jake saves JFK’s life), the novel still evokes the notion that history could be altered in one way or the other (and is constantly being altered in little steps).25 When King’s protagonist realizes that his “well-meaning work”26 has only served to destroy “Reality itself,”27 it is almost too late. A whole series of butterfly effects already threaten to knock history off its hinges. METAFICTION AND THE LITERARY IMAGINARY The novel’s reference to “reality itself” reminds us of a primary goal of (neo-) realist narrative literature: namely to represent the “real world” and grasp the human condition in an accessible fashion. King’s 11/22/63 can be seen—in a literal sense—as “metafiction.”28 Not only as fiction about fiction (Jake himself writes a novel called The Murder Place), but also as fiction about books, and moreover, about the act of reading. Jake himself becomes an active reader in a book that he is writing anew. When he and Sadie are hurrying through Dallas on November 22, 1963, trying to foil Oswald’s plans to kill Kennedy, it occurs to Sadie that her partner must experience the ongoing events as “a living history book.”29 Jake rejects this claim: “Not anymore”30 because he now feels actively involved in the events of history and is determined to change them. This is the moment where Jake finally steps out of the shadow of being a character in a book to being an agent of “living history.” Jake’s transformation from “literary character” to “agent of historical change” reflects the general claim of (realist) literature to seek a change. Literary fiction aspires not only to connect the reader to the world of the text, but also desires to encourage audiences to relate these fictional realities to the realities he or she encounters in everyday life. Narrative literature thus participates in what can be called the “literary imaginary,”31 a complex process in cultural practice that produces the illusion of reality through the discourse of writing. Time travel fiction, in particular, capitalizes on the analogy between reality (symbolizing life and history) and literature (being the representation of this reality). The literary text aesthetically transfers real occurrences into the realm of fiction and, by means of this appropriation, becomes a “living event” itself.32 In his advice book/memoir On Writing (2000), Stephen King even compares the act of composing a book to “telepathy,”33 the mystic bridging of space and time through mental superpowers.34

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This notion of spatial and temporal transgression connects literature to a time travel experience that mysteriously ties together various spheres of experience. “Books,” King adds, “are a uniquely portable magic.”35 As reservoirs of cultural memory, books have the power to shape and reconstruct reality, but also to excavate the hidden possibilities of life. They magically create a reality which they purport to merely represent, thus virtually shifting between various stages of physicality and time. In On Writing, Stephen King repeatedly connects his own literature to other books that he has perused throughout his life (and especially to the act of reading frequently). “If you want to be a writer,” he tells his audiences, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”36 King scholar John Sears, who picks up these very lines, insist on the importance of these two aspects in King’s oeuvre: Reading and writing . . . are insistent activities in King’s works. They locate texts and their production and consumption at the moral and political centres of the universes he constructs, and establish writing as crucial to King’s constructions of social relations, a pivotal element of his popular appeal.37

Given the high degree of self-referentiality38 in 11/22/63, it seems safe to say that “a kind of reading” is required “which is also . . . an inauguration of readerly recognition that is also (in typically gothic terms) a resurrection of previous readings.”39 Reading King’s11/22/63 also means returning in one’s imagination to the places and persons of previous King texts—for example, the spooky small town of Derry in Maine, New England, that we have already encountered in the horror novel It, and the characters of Beverly Marsh, Richie Tozier, and Norbert Keene from that same book. In this sense, the novel itself travels back and forth in time, reintroducing locations and figures that had another life in another text, and sending readers on an intertextual journey through their own memories. The symbolic connection between writing/reading and time traveling may be the reason why books and, more specifically, libraries (their equivalent on a larger scale) are such popular motifs in time-travel novels. In Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), the male protagonist himself is a librarian. In Jack Finney’s classical time-travel book Time and Again (1970), the main character’s journey through time and space is permeated by references to various libraries: small-town libraries, main public libraries, even the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D. C. Likewise, Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is full of intertextual allusions to books, book lovers, and libraries. Not only does it explicitly mention Finney’s Time and Again, but it also inscribes the “book” motif into virtually all of its protagonists.40 To start with, King’s hero Jake Epping is a teacher of American Literature and ardent reader of world fiction. In the beginning of 11/22/63,

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the narrator Jake describes his imminent endeavor to save Kennedy’s life to the experience of reading a book: “I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination.”41 Notably, the final trigger to actually embark on his journey into the past comes when Jake reads an essay by the school’s physically disabled janitor, Harry Dunning, in his writing class. Harry’s essay—which touches Jake so much that he grades it as “A+”—describes a massacre committed by his own father on the night of Halloween 1958, during which his mother and his siblings are killed. At this point in the novel, it is the chance to change Harry Dunning’s life—rather than the more than utopian idea of saving JFK—that motivates Jake to travel back in time. It is no coincidence that we—that is, the readers of 11/22/63—see Jake in a situation very similar to our own, that of a reader responding to a narrative: “Remember, we are first situated with Jake as a reader who reacts to a story, and is then given the improbable chance to change that story, which he does.”42 The valorization of the reader’s position in this crucial passage (and, by implication, of literary practices in general) is, as I will demonstrate in the following, symptomatic of King’s aesthetic strategy in his novel. Notably, Jake’s love interest and later fiancée Sadie Dunhill, who helps save Kennedy’s life, is also associated with books. Sadie is a librarian, who, in one of the novel’s crucial scenes discusses Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder” that coined the term “Butterfly Effect.” Mimi Corcoran (“Miz Mimi”), another librarian figure, assists Jake in getting a job as a high-school teacher. In another key passage, Mimi reveals her penchant for J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951)—that archetypal meditation on nonconformism in the Fifties (and one of 11/22/63’s companion texts within the plot). After “George” (Jake’s adopted name while living in the past) gives a flaming speech in defense of Salinger’s novel, “Miz Mimi” becomes so enthralled with his enthusiasm that she decides to convince her boyfriend, the school’s Principal, Deke Simmons, to recruit him as a school teacher. A main reason, we understand, is that Mimi needs “George” as an ally to bring Salinger’s “cri de coeur”43 to the school library. We can vividly imagine the series of “butterfly effects” triggered in the plotline by this move alone. When Deke speculates that the “Catcher book will never be in our library,”44 Mimi briefly comments that “Times change,”45 thus indicating that books can indeed initiate such groundbreaking alterations. The Catcher passage in 11/22/63 revolves around the key function that books—and librarians—can assume in making social change happen.46 Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) easily tops this list of intertextual references in King’s 11/22/63 that broaden the scope of the tale’s time-bending nature. Apart from the “rabbit-hole” image, which

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I will discuss in the following section on the metaphor of “immersion,” the two books also share a sense for the fantastic and absurd, since they both confront their protagonists with their own sanity (or potential insanity). “The first time, I actually fell down those stairs,” King’s character Al muses, “like Alice into the rabbit-hole. I thought I’d gone insane.”47 Jake perceives his trip into the past as a “madman’s journey”48 that keeps challenging him psychologically. In a later passage, after already having traveled to the year 1958, King’s protagonist Jake finds himself questioning his mental state. “I’m crazy, I thought. Crazy and having a terribly involved hallucination in a mental hospital somewhere.”49 Another key text in 11/22/63 is Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) which is picked up both as a plot device and as an aesthetic reference point, prefiguring the key motif of the “butterfly effect” to which Jake and Sadie find themselves exposed. The Bradbury reference seems to be one of the essential techniques of King’s toying with intertextuality, since the aforementioned story encapsulates the protagonist’s key dilemma: how to deal with what he calls the “obdurate past,”50 that strange phenomenon that history keeps altering itself each time a character makes a tiny change.51 Various other books and short stories play crucial roles as textual analogies in 11/22/63, either initiating or foreshadowing events in the plot development. John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men (1937) functions as a mirror text within the aesthetic composition of 11/22/63.52 It is the high-school adaptation of Steinbeck’s drama which firmly establishes George as a key agent of events. In this function, George/Jake is literally the stage director who brings together the other characters in an overarching choreography. Being a key story in “Part 3” of 11/22/63 (which is suitably titled “Living in the Past”), the Of Mice and Men episode also illustrates how George/Jake immerses himself into the past and establishes a sense of belonging in the small town of Jodie. The protagonist’s deeply felt sympathy with Mike Coslaw, who plays Lennie in Of Mice and Men, creates a dynamic which further ties Jake to the past. It is after the untimely death of Vince Knowles, who plays “George” in Of Mice and Men, that Jake realizes that Jodie has become “home” for him: “Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together.”53 Finally, the novel’s showdown is set in a book storage warehouse, the Texas School Book Depository, which was indeed the site of a major historical change in American history: the assassination of President Kennedy.54 Like the other book-related signifiers in 11/22/63, the School Book Depository becomes highly integrated into the novel’s aesthetics, sometimes even assuming the role of the protagonist’s nemesis. The image of the Book Depository as a spatialized metaphor of ultimate evil will be a topic in the following section that deals with the motif of immersion and its connection to the discourses of time and space.

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“IN THE LOOP”: IMMERSION AND GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE The timelines in 11/22/63 are intimately conjoined with geographical spaces that the narrator immerses himself in: first, Derry, that uncanny small town in Maine55 that embodies the evils of a conformist society; then Jodie, its friendly counterpart in Texas, where Jake meets Sadie and finally feels at home; and, finally, Dallas, the companion city to Derry, full of hatred and hypocrisy. King needs these emotionally charged— sometimes uncanny, sometimes inviting—spatial fields56 in order to make history visible. I will argue in the following that 11/22/63 employs signifiers of “time-space” as vehicles of immersion,57 on the part of his characters, but also on the part of the readers. By employing historiogeographical places such as Dallas (the location of Kennedy’s assassination) and New Orleans (the city where Oswald lived for a period before moving back to Texas to shoot Kennedy) as plot devices, King enables us to delve into the history connected to them and viscerally experience their “haunted pasts.” King’s use of time and space as conjoined discourses evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” or, literally, “time-space”: “We will give the name chronotope,” Bakhtin writes, “to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”58 In King’s universe, time is—quite literally—condensed in space, becoming history incarnate. This metaphorical condensation of time in space occurs first in the scene with the fallen chimney at the Kitchener Ironworks in Derry which invites the viewer to “come in and see.”59 It reoccurs later in various passages revolving around the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas—that place steeped in history, which is literally watching the protagonist with its “blank” eyes.60 Here, King conveys a sense of embodied history, in which the places of an uncanny past communicate with us. The Book Depository seems to figure as a person of flesh and blood, acting, looking, and even speaking to the characters (and to us). When Jake moves to Dallas to take up his observations, he soon notices this eerie sense of enfleshment: “I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was—like Nietzsche’s abyss—looking back at me.”61 In later passages, the Book Depository is metaphorically equipped with an organism, including eyes and even a voice: The windows overlooking Houston and Elm Streets glittered in the chilly afternoon sun. We know a secret, they said. We’re going to be famous, especially the one on the south-east corner of the sixth floor. We’re going to be famous, and you can’t stop us.62

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Here, King evokes the impression of a haunted space, which is simultaneously a frightening, staring monster haunting the protagonist and the reader alike. On New Year’s Eve of 1963, Jake is struck by “a sudden image of the Texas Book Depository, an ugly brick square with windows like eyes.”63 Reading these lines in 11/22/63, one feels reminded of Bakhtin who describes the timespace nexus in literary works as follows: “Time . . . thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.”64 These “movements of time, plot, and history,” to pick up Bakhtin’s phrase, are aptly visualized and enfleshed in King’s novel. The thought of being able to “turn back the clock” and undo terrible things has always fascinated mankind65; it obviously still mesmerizes many readers today who have celebrated King’s book in blogs and reviews.66 The illustration of the hardcover edition of King’s novel alone has certainly struck a chord with readers, sparking multiple discussions in online forums. While on the front cover, which is designed like an old newspaper, we see the familiar report of JFK’s death, the back cover presents us, in a stunningly realistic fashion, with an alternate history to the actual events, complete with the following headline: “JFK Escapes Assassination, First Lady Also OK!” Indeed, King’s book has been advertised as an invitation to participate in this alternate history. The first promotional announcement for the book on King’s official website thus asked readers: “If you had the chance to change history, would you?”67 The paperback edition features a keyhole image of JFK and his beautiful wife just seconds before the shooting. The caption reads “The Day That Changed the World. 11.22.63” and is followed by a question directly addressing the reader: “What If You Could Change It Back?” It lies in the nature of traumatic events that we wish to undo them, erase them from the books of history and from our memories.68 King’s 11/22/63 caters to this desire to reconstruct time and extinguish its painful aspects. The book offers us—and Jake as our alter ego—various loopholes and bubbles that function as entrance points to the past. The “hole” metaphor is first reflected in the “rabbit-hole,” as Jake’s friend Al, alluding to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, calls the mysterious gate in his diner. The “rabbit-hole” motif lies at the heart of all acts of immersion taking place in King’s 11/22/63. This has to do, as Kathryn Schulz observes in The New Yorker, with the enormous cultural “recall value” of Carroll’s metaphor: “Of all the contributions that Lewis Carroll made to the English language,” Schulz writes, “by far the most useful to contemporary culture is ‘rabbit hole.’”69 By focalizing on the “rabbit-hole” as a literary metaphor, Carroll managed to single-handedly “turn those holes into something that people could fall down—literally, in Alice’s (or Al Templeton’s or Jake’s) case or . . . figuratively for the rest of us.”70 As if to underline its function as a portal into another world, the rabbit-hole/ loophole in 11/22/63 is equipped with a gatekeeper, the enigmatic “Yellow Card Man,” who turns into the “Orange Card Man” (92) and ultimately the

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“Black Card Man.” Correspondingly, in the course of the novel, the “rabbithole” becomes a kind of “wormhole” and finally a “knothole”71 capable of taking the protagonist back in time. In a sense, the readers as well immerse themselves in these “loopholes” which transport them not only into the midst of the fictional events told in the novel, but also—symbolically—back in history to the years before Kennedy’s assassination. To a certain extent, we can freely control this process of “literary time-traveling” (since we could always decide to stop reading), yet, we are also limited in this liberty, since we are “awaited” on the other side by an authority that influences and shapes our access to this world—be it Stephen King as the creator of the novel or the “Yellow Card Man” as a metaphorical gatekeeper.72 King scholar Jennifer Jenkins has argued that, through its subtle revaluation of readerly activities (in the form of numerous acts and characters that personify the act of “reading”), 11/22/63 endorses an aesthetics of empowerment of the audience.73 Being invited to delve into the protagonist’s mental framework and his battle to save Harry Dunning’s and JFK’s lives: “we are most certainly maneuvered into taking active roles as we at least consider those thoughts, feelings, and actions.”74 At the end of the novel, Jake has decided to never go back to the past, not even symbolically. But he cannot resist one specific keyhole—the Internet: “There’s an old saying: peek not through a knothole, lest ye be vexed. Was there ever a bigger knothole in human history than the internet?”75 However, what Jake finds out when he “googles” Sadie’s name is rather more encouraging than unsettling: the woman he had fallen madly in love with during his stint to the “Land of Ago” is still alive and doing well. Neither has she developed lung cancer (as Al Templeton) nor has she died by “a combination of booze and sleeping pills”76 as Jake fears. By adding this reassuring, even “happy,” ending, King, in the last passages of 11/22/63, manages to turn his book into a kind of consoling fantasy. As with other time travel narratives, the novel “enables the reader to step back from contemporary life and see the struggles of human existence from a more distanced, reflective perspective.”77 Being invited to imagine how Jake and Sadie dance peacefully in the novel’s last lines, we feel reminded of an earlier passage, in which the protagonist—in a moment reminiscent of the “reverse zoom” technology in film—distances himself from the terror of everyday life and begins to see everything from an elevated angle: It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning. For a moment, everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.78

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In its very final passage (which subtly echoes the “single lighted stage” from the earlier scene), we see Jake and Sadie engage in one last dance: “The music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.”79 In its closing passage, 11/22/63 elegantly adapts the motif of time traveling (“the music rolls away the years”), only to embrace another theme that has pervaded the novel from the very beginning—that of dancing. “Dancing is life,” one of the novel’s epigraphs tells us before the plot actually begins. This seems to be King’s essential message to his readers: to focus on the moment itself and enjoy its precious and unique presence. CONCLUSION I have argued in this essay that 11/22/63 follows three parameters that help reconstruct the notion of time traveling in the book’s “literary imaginary”80: 1.) The novel challenges the idea of a stable history, depicting historical processes as a proverbial “house of cards”81 and illustrating how life “turns on a dime”82; 2.) It uses metafictional elements (e.g., the motifs of the “book,” the “library,” and the “librarian”) to highlight the transformational power of books, their capability of transporting us into a different epoch (the key character even imagines “teaching a six-week block called The Literature of Time Travel”83; 3.) The book employs the key topos of “immersion” (Jake’s fall into the “rabbit-hole”) to interconnect the dimensions of place (first Lisbon Falls, later Derry, Dallas, and Jodie) and time (the years between 1958 and 1963 on the one hand, the year 2011 on the other). Thus conceived, 11/22/63 follows an aesthetic pattern that seems symptomatic of the genre: first, it focuses on a specific date in history, a watershed moment, which becomes the fulcrum of events; second, it portrays the acts of reading a book and time traveling as analogous experiences for both the characters and the readers; third, it encourages us to enjoy the illusion of immersing ourselves in time in order to see things change, if only for the duration of the plot. In my reading, Stephen King’s 11/22/63 employs all three movements: (1) alternative historiography, (2) metafiction, and (3) immersion. It produces a kind of “time ravel”—a net of temporal and aesthetic lines that enhance the illusion of a visceral involvement in the act of time traveling. Here, I want to exploit the “ravel/travel” pun for all it is worth: indeed, the book makes us revel in an aesthetic illusion, namely, that of being able to undo history and, if this cannot be done, to at least learn from past mistakes and savor the positive in each fleeting moment of life.84 Simultaneously, the book evokes an experience that lies at the heart of all literature—that of overcoming the boundaries of time and space and immersing ourselves in temporal and spatial situations which are far removed from our own. This readerly activity is mimicked in

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11/22/63 by the first-person narrator’s immersion in the past via time traveling. As Jake decides to go through the “rabbit-hole” and dwell in the “Land of Ago” longer-term, readers, too, find themselves captured by the novel’s “time ravel,” and its capacity of luring us into a temporal and spatial experience that seems impossible and eerily possible at the same time. NOTES 1. For the sake of convenience, I am using the terms “time travel fiction” (Wittenberg, Time Travel, 26), “time-slip fantasy” (Erlandson and Bainbridge, “Living History,” 1), and “literature of time travel” (Wittenberg 2) synonymously in most parts of this essay. In addition, Erlandson and Bainbridge suggest “historical fantasy, time-warp fantasy, . . . or past-time fantasy” (1) as alternative terms. The more active term “time travel” will be of significance in the essay’s third section on immersion, in which the time traveler’s agency is paired with the reader’s activity of delving into the fictional world of the text. The term “time slip” will be relevant regarding literary conceptions of history. 2. David Wittenburg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 206. 3. Ibid., 205. 4. Bonnie Erlandson and Joyce Bainbridge, “Living History through Canadian Time-Slip Fantasy,” Language and Literacy 3, no. 2 (2001): 1. 5. See Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 2011). In this study, Margaret Atwood defines “speculative fiction” as a type of science fiction “about things that really could happen” (6). Referring to the fantasy novels of Jules Verne and Ursula Le Guin, she explains that the fascination of such texts lies in their historical possibility, their potential to become real history. The parallels to the time travel genre are obvious, since both subgenres play with the thought of tiny alterations resulting in major historical changes (the so-called butterfly effect in time-slip fantasy). It is no coincidence that King’s novel at one point meditates upon this phenomenon by recalling Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 song “From Small Things”: “Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come” (260). 6. Henry Turtledove, “Introduction” to The Best Time Travel Stories (New York: Ballantine, 2005), ix. 7. Quoted in Douglas Winter, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (New York: Berkely, 1985), 251. 8. Tony Magistrale, Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 13. 9. Ibid. 10. This impression is created by the melding of an obviously fantastic plot (that of time traveling) with a focus on historical settings. This includes King’s efforts to accurately portray the Texas School Book Depository—which he, according to his own statement in 11/22/63’s “Afterword,” visited on a tour with the executive

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director of the Sixth Floor Museum, Nicola Langford (738). The book employs seemingly minute details such as the 1958 price for a haircut (40 cents) and that for a pint of root beer (10 cents) (see Alter, “Stephen King’s New Monster”). Together with his research assistant Russ Dorr, King was even able to locate Lee Harvey Oswald’s former domicile in Dallas (now a private home) and the home of Gen. Edwin Walker (whom Oswald attempted to assassinate seven months before Kennedy), as he states in the “Afterword” (cf. Alter, 73–8). 11. King uses a similar technique of temporal exactness in his choice of time lines in the plot. Every journey through the portal in Al’s Diner carries the time traveler to the exact same point in time: September 9, 1958, 11:58 a.m. Yet, this notion of exactness is continuously suspended throughout the novel by a notion of time volatility. Thus, Al declares, much to Jake’s bewilderment, that he could infinitely extend the two minutes that every trip to the past takes (until high noon): “It’ll take as long as you want . . . because it’ll only take two minutes. It always takes two minutes. Take an hour and really look around, if you want” (King, 11/22/63, 22). This paradox alludes to a differentiation made by physicist Stephen Hawking between “Real Time” (i.e., objective, measurable time) and “Imagined Time” (i.e., individually perceived time) (172–78). In A Brief History of Time, Hawking contends that time can assume the form of a “personal concept, relative to the observer who measure[s] it” (182). 12. Stephen King, 11/22/63 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2012), 50 13. Ibid., 51. Interestingly enough, the novel maintains a balance between a deterministic viewpoint and a perspective that accentuates agency and change as important factors of historical processes (since assassinations are conducted by individuals or groups which do affect the “river of history,” as this organic metaphor illustrates). 14. I am using the term “alternative historiography” in allusion to the concept of “alternate history,” which is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, as “a timeline that is different from that of our own world, usually extrapolated from the change of a single event” (Prucher, Brave New Worlds, 4). Reading 11/22/63 as “alternative historiography,” enables us to further explore King’s playful use of time lines and his suggestive interpretation of the “what if” behind the Kennedy assassination. 15. Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (New York: Random House, 1995), 198. 16. See King, 11/22/63, 226; 260; 372; and passim. 17. Ibid., 623. 18. See Ibid., 53; 62; 191; and passim. 19. Ibid., 94. Further, when Jake/George first tells Sadie about the factuality of the “Butterfly Effect” during a walk through Jodie’s late-summer landscape, which is teeming with wild flowers, his words are literally supported by all the butterflies in the environment: “There were hundreds of them fluttering on the slope before us, as if to illustrate that very fact” (568). 20. Ibid., 260. 21. Betty Latham, “Down the Rabbit Hole: 11/22/63, Stephen King’s Historical Changeling,” Linguaculture 1 (2016): 29. 22. Ibid., Latham also goes as far as to extrapolate from the intratextual function of history as a “changeling” in 11/22/63 to the extratextual dimension of the novel’s

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adaptation into the 2016 Hulu television miniseries 11.22.63, which was co-produced by Stephen King and J. J. Abrams. Both the novel and its television adaptation, Latham contends, “explore the consequences of re-visioning and revisiting the past” (29). In her view, the TV adaptation deserves special praise for its “ability to integrate the Kennedy assassination back into popular culture, inviting . . . a ‘new’ younger audience . . . to ‘experience’ history by accompanying [the] characters” (Latham 27). 23. King, 11/22/63, 63. 24. Ibid., 213. 25. In his study Whose History? Engaging History Students through Historical Fiction (2013), Grant Rodwell has maintained that the time travel genre—and King’s 11/22/63, in particular—can deliver a more complex and necessarily paradoxical image of the past “[in order] to counter students’ deterministic views of history” (“Caught In Time’s Cruel Machinery,” 121). 26. King, 11/22/63, 698. 27. Ibid., 699. 28. According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries, “metafiction” is a type of fiction that employs references to its own fictionality. It is defined as “fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques” (“Metafiction”). Following Linda Hutcheon’s more specific concept of “historiographic metafiction,” this type of historically oriented metafiction seems marked by both “theoretical self-awareness of history” and an insistence on “historical events and personages” (Poetics, 5). 29. King, 11/22/63, 631. 30. Ibid., 632. 31. The concept of the “literary imaginary” can be traced back to Winfried Fluck’s notion of the “cultural imaginary” (see Das kulturelles Imaginäres, 7–29) that makes reference to both Lacan’s notion of the “Imaginary” (l’imaginaire) and Benjamin’s idea of the “ideal image” (see Wunschbild, 62). In this sense, the “literary imaginary” encompasses a vast set of pre-verbal images and fantasies, “mirror images, identifications and reciprocities” experienced by the infant in association with the mother (Bowie, Lacan 92), as well as “dialectical images” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 473; 943–45) that metaphorically unite past and present in a mystic “nowbeing ‘Jetztsein’” (Benjamin, 392). By the same token, the concept takes its cue from Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization of nation states as “imagined communities” that form a sense of unity through shared modes of remembering and forgetting, even constituting a kind of “geo-biography” to connect individual discourses and strands of memory (Imagined Communities, 211). 32. I take the notion of the literary text as a “living event” from Wolfgang Iser who speaks of the (potential) “unfolding of the text as a living event” during the process of reading—an act that may result in the “impression of lifelikeness” (“The Reading Process,” 64; emphasis added). 33. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 103. 34. According to Oxford English Dictionaries, “telepathy” is defined as the “communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses”

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(“Telepathy”). What telepathy shares with the concept of “time traveling” is its rejection of the established laws of nature and its bridging of spatial difference. Like other King novels, 11/22/63 is obsessed with “themes bordering on the very edge of possibility” (Magistrale, Landscape of Fear, 13). Telepathy plays a key role in various King novels, for example in Carrie (1974), where the title character is endowed with the powers of “telekinesis” (50; cf. 263), and in It (1986), where the eldritch monster apparently kills via telepathy (813). 35. King, On Writing, 104. 36. Ibid., 145. King was most obviously inspired by the works of American sci-fi and horror writers Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson. Jonathan P. Davis further mentions that “King was highly influenced by writers such as Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and William Carlos Williams” (24), often citing from their works in his own fiction. Literary scholar Burton Hatlen, who mentored King at the University of Maine, reports that during his academic career “King read an average of a book a day” (qtd. In Davis, Stephen King’s America, 24). 37. John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 3. 38. 11/22/63 is by no means an exception in its fascination with fictionalized acts of reading and writing. As John Sears has convincingly shown in Stephen King’s Gothic (2011), King’s works are teeming with references to readerly and writerly activities which are meticulously integrated into the novels’ plots. In The Stand (1978), the deaf-mute character Nick Andros writes his “Life HHistory” (165; 168–69), while Harold “The Ledger” Lauder, another key character, produces a “solid block of writing” (845, cf. 914), a hate-filled account of the events in apocalyptic America (see Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 3). Most notably, King’s Misery (1987) can be read as an extended meditation on the writer-reader relationship, examining “a struggle over the meanings of texts and over the different kinds of authority exerted by the reader and the writer” (Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 4). 39. Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 6. 40. King honors Jack Finney in the “Afterword” to 11/22/63 as “one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers” (740) and confesses that “originally I meant to dedicate this book to him” (ibid.). To what degree Time and Again can be read as a companion text to 11/22/63 becomes clear when King, in one of the novel’s very last lines, calls it “the great time-travel story” (ibid.). 41. King, 11/22/63, 51. References to Thomas Hardy, notably a British realist writer from the late-Victorian period, reappear throughout King’s novel, especially in passages concerned with personal crises experienced by one of the main characters. As Sadie slowly recovers from Clayton’s almost fatal attack, she and Jake find themselves “sitting side by side on her couch” and “read[ing] books . . . —The Group for her, Jude the Obscure for me” (564). When Jake becomes hospitalized a few weeks later, Thomas Hardy is again the author of his choice: “Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first Jude the Obscure, then Tess of the D’Urbervilles (592). Not only do these readings take Jake (and Sadie) many decades back in time, the books they read also revolve around characters who feel strangely alienated or even dislocated from their environments, thus subtly underlining the novel’s aesthetics of time traveling.

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42. Jennifer Jenkins, “Fantasy in Fiction: The Double-Edged Sword,” in Stephen King’s Modern Macabre, eds. Patrick McAleer and Michael A. Perry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 21. 43. King, 11/22/63, 272. 44. Ibid., 273. 45. Ibid., 274. 46. In a key scene, George/Jake tells Mimi that controversial books such as The Catcher in the Rye “should be checked out only to certain students, and at the librarian’s discretion” (King, 11/22/63, 273). When Mimi responds, “The librarian’s? . . . Not the parents’?” (ibid.), Jake/George affirms. His insistence on the librarian’s responsibility in shaping the students’ personalities reminds us—the readers of the novel 11/22/63—which crucial function books can assume in the construction of realities and lives, historically, psychologically, and symbolically. 47. King, 11/22/63, 40. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 105. By the same token, Carroll’s Alice is confronted in her imagined world with characters such as the mad “Hatter” who is sentenced to death for “murdering the time” and the White Rabbit. The “rabbit” motif is picked up in 11/22/63 in yet another intertextual way by comparing Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to a “Mr. Rabbit,” calling him “Oswald Rabbit” (607), in reference to Henry Koster’s 1950 comedy film Harvey which features a giant imaginary rabbit that can drive anyone insane. Since the key reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is based on the analogy between the “rabbit-holes” into which the respective protagonists fall, I will discuss it in greater detail in the following subchapter. 50. Ibid., 184; 228; 237; and passim. 51. The intertextual relation between 11/22/63 and the Bradbury story is recognized even on the plot level. When Jake mentions the term “butterfly effect,” Sadie immediately concurs, “There’s a Ray Bradbury story about it. . . . It’s called ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ It’s very beautiful and very disturbing” (King, 11/22/63, 568). 52. The passages revolving around the theater performance of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men take up a huge chunk of “Part 3’ of King’s novel (281–88). Parallels can be found in the rural setting of both Steinbeck’s novel and the “Jodie” sections in 11/22/63 as well as in the climactic structure of the two novels, both of them culminating in an assassination. On top of this, in both assassinations (that of Lennie in Steinbeck’s drama and that of JFK/Lee Harvey Oswald), a character named George is involved, since this is both the name of Steinbeck’s protagonist and the alias name Jake assumes when he travels back in time. The pivotal role of Steinbeck’s play is accentuated by the fact that King returns to it repeatedly throughout 11/22/63, such as when the actor who plays “George” in the play dies in a car accident (312; cf. 349; 391). 53. King, 11/22/63, 350. Additionally, in Part 1 of 11/22/63, Shirley Jackson’s Gothic short story “The Summer People” assumes a similar function of anticipating events that will later take place in the novel. Jake is confronted with the story, a short narrative about the creepy encounters a New York City couple makes in a small town after deciding to extend their summer cottage past Labor Day, right on his very first

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visit to the past (King, 11/22/63, 36). The main reference points are the temporal setting (early September, which is also the time where the portal in Al’s Diner leads the time traveler) and the uncanny atmosphere of the narrative which foreshadow the gloomy events about to happen later. 54. In the parallel universe of 11/22/63, the Depository ultimately becomes a site of triumph, signaled by the prevention of the attack on Kennedy. Simultaneously, the location is also the embodiment of defeat and the dominion of evil, since Jake’s fiancée Sadie dies here and world history is, in fact, plunged into nuclear disaster— against Jake’s intentions. 55. The U.S. state of Maine (the region where King was born and lives most of the time) plays a significant role in almost all of the author’s works. “King’s Maine,” Tony Magistrale points out, “is a place of terrifying loneliness where nature seems antagonistic to human habitation and where men and women often feel the same degree of estrangement from one another as they do toward the supernatural creatures who threaten their lives” (Landscape of Fear, 18). King’s literary regionalism may be connected, in particular, to rural Maine, but it is also tied to the author’s fascination with U.S. small towns in general. Following Jonathan P. Davis, “King’s small towns create settings that [he] believes are multiple epicenters of the human spirit in America” (Stephen King’s America, 25). In 11/22/63, this applies equally to the small towns of Lisbon Falls, Derry, and Jodie. Each represents one vital part of America in a specific temporal context: “Within the frameworks of each individual small town are social and personal networks that resemble in and of themselves one giant organism. . . . By using these settings, King creates an effective foundation for social commentary” (ibid.). 56. There are many more such places in 11/22/63 that function as specters of the uncanny. There is, for example, the public toilet in North Carolina that the protagonist sees on his road trip through America. Equipped with three signs—“Men,” “Ladies,” and “Colored,” this “facility” makes African Americans walk through a thorny path covered with poison ivy to do their “business.” The narrator uses this place as a marker of postwar racism: “If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy” (King, 11/22/63, 248). In another scene, a fallen chimney in Derry figures as the epitome of suppressed evil and violence in small-town America of the postwar era (a vague reminder of the monstrous “It” from King’s eponymous novel that also plays partly in the late 1950s): “From inside the pipe . . . something moved and shuffled. Come in and see, that something whispered in my head. Never mind all the rest of it, Jake—come in and see” (King, 11/22/63, 159). The Derry chimney in 11/22/63 operates as a kind of perverse mirror image to the “rabbit-hole” that has transported Jake into the past: “Maybe it’s . . . another rabbit hole,” the voice in Jake’s head whispers, “Another portal” (ibid.). Answering that very question, the narrator muses: “Maybe it was, but I don’t think so. I think it was Derry in there—everything that was wrong with it . . ., hiding in that pipe” (ibid.). 57. According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, “immersion” defines the process of “deep mental involvement in something” (“Immersion”). In a literary text, the act of immersion is characterized by the conjunction of narrative aesthetics and readerly activity. We literally follow the plot closely and find ourselves in a situation that

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allows the fictional world to seem real. Immersing ourselves into a text means that we adopt many of the assumptions and emotional parameters underlying its fictional aesthetics. In a time travel narrative, furthermore, we follow the patterns of immersion that the protagonist goes through as well. In 11/22/63, the reader is invited to accompany Jake on his journey into the “rabbit-hole” and back to the “Land of Ago” (King, 11/22/63, 323), as the narrator repeatedly calls the world of the 1950s and 60s (ibid., 368; 401; 443; 488; and passim). 58. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 59. King, 11/22/63, 159. 60. Ibid., 521. 61. Ibid,. 261. Notably, King’s Misery begins with the same idea, borrowed from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, of the abyss looking back at the spectator: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” 62. Ibid., 620. Also note that in all further quotes from 11/22/63 the italics are in the original. In the event that italics have been added, it will be noted. 63. Ibid., 463. Similar ghostly images, fragmented and dream-like, keep haunting Jake after he regains his memory weeks after he is beaten up by his former bookie’s thugs (see King, 11/22/63, 610). Sadie shares Jake’s visceral reaction to the Book Depository” “She looked at the squat red cube with the peering windows, then turned a dismayed, wide-eyed face to me. I observed . . . that large white goosebumps had broken out on her neck. ‘Jake, it’s horrible! . . . But . . . what’s wrong with it?’ ‘Everything, Sadie . . .” (ibid., 647). 64. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 84. 65. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) are usually mentioned as the first modern time travel narratives from the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. However, the second part of Goethe’s Faust already contains a scene in which the protagonist visits Helen of Troy (maybe as part of a demonic vision). I want to thank Ky Kessler for this hint to the “time traveling aspect” of Goethe’s work. 66. See “JFK Escapes Assassination, First Lady is OK Also” (blog), http://www. demo craticunderground.com/10021546774. 67. The theme of “changing the course of history” is equally essential for other King novels, such as The Dead Zone (1979), Insomnia (1994), and, to a lesser degree, The Dark Tower series (1982–2012). 68. Thus, Jonathan Safran Foer’s protagonist Oscar Schell in the 9/11 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) symbolically resuscitates his father, by letting him float up to the 105th floor of the North Tower. 69. Kathryn Schulz, “The Rabbit Hole Rabbit Hole,” The New Yorker, June 4, 2015, https​://ww​w.new​yorke​r.com​/cult​ure/c​ultur​al-co​mment​/the-​rabbi​t-hol​e-rab​ bit-h​ole. 70. Ibid. 71. King, 11/22/63, 729. 72. Remember that another key figure in King’s novel, Harry Dunning, works as a janitor at Jake’s school, his job literally being that of a gatekeeper.

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73. See Jenkins, “Fantasy in Fiction.” 74. Jenkins, “Fantasy in Fiction,” 21. 75. King, 11/22/ 63, 729. 76. Ibid. 77. Erlandson and Bainbridge, “Living History,” 1. 78. King, 11/22/63, 540. 79. Ibid., 734. 80. As I have explained, the notion of a “literary imaginary” encompasses a combination of ideas by Winfried Fluck, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and Benedict Anderson concerning a nation’s “collective imagination” and its modes of articulating these notions in a literary form. 81. King, 11/22/63, 2. 82. Ibid., 3. 83. Ibid., 29. 84. 11/22/63’s philosophy of “dancing is life” reminds us of John Steinbeck’s well-known concept of “is thinking” (198) described in his 1951 diary The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Like the narrating voice of King’s novel, Steinbeck suggests that we should always focus on the “present,” rather than on the past or the future, since cause and effect are highly volatile factors in our lives. Rather than wondering “why is this happening?” we should understand that “it’s just ‘so’” (Steinbeck, The Log, 195). “In the non-teleological sense,” Steinbeck states, “there can be no ‘answer.’ There can only be pictures which become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases” (The Log, 199). In a similar vein, 11/22/63 ends with a picture, that of a couple dancing intimately and enjoying the moment. All of Jake’s initial fears regarding Sadie fate in the past forty-eight years have proven to be groundless. With its mystifying, happy ending, 11/22/63 is one of King’s more optimistic books: Jake recognizes that, despite his repeated attempts to change the course of history (he even considers sending out a warning message to Sadie’s future employer), it seems wiser to leave things as they are. In a reversal of “Murphy’s Law,” Jake’s (and our) insight could easily be that “everything that can go right will go right.” This is also King’s consoling message to us. We may not be able to change history retrospectively, but with some trust in the “good powers” (we could call this type of thinking “serendipity,” or perhaps even the “White” as King calls it in Needful Things and The Dark Tower series) things will eventually turn out fine.

Chapter 13

In the Shadow of the Dark Tower Stephen King’s Fantasy Epic as 9/11 Literature Jennifer L. Miller

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a work that chronicles the quest of the gunslinger Roland Deschain to find the Dark Tower, the nexus point for all worlds, is analyzed by scholars in several main ways. One key method of scholarship is comparing King’s epic series to older source material, specifically Robert Browning’s 1855 poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which tells of the quest of an untested knight to reach the Dark Tower, and the struggles (both real and imagined) that he faces along the way, as well as the Arthurian legend and the Grail quest. Another common approach to the series is to look at it through the lens of Gothic or horror fiction, both common trends throughout King’s fiction as a whole.1 Yet a third major strategy is to look at the series in terms of what makes it specifically American, focusing especially on the elements of the Western that pervade particularly the first novel, The Gunslinger. Such an approach is validated by King himself, who, in the 2003 introduction to The Gunslinger, writes, “I saw a film . . . called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”2 And of course, there are many who emphasize the hybridity of genres and influences that appear in the series, such as James Egan in his essay “The Dark Tower: Stephen King’s Gothic Western” and Heidi Strengell, who writes, “The Dark Tower series can be labeled a Western, a Gothic novel, an apocalyptic fantasy, a tale of horror, and a myth.”3 As makes sense with a work of epic fiction that spans three decades, eight volumes, and over four thousand pages, The Dark Tower series is a work that can be approached from many different angles. 203

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And yet, one approach that has not been used on The Dark Tower series is to situate it in relation to the literature of September 11, 2001. The events of 9/11 don’t actually even appear directly within the epic, yet reading King’s short story “The Things They Left Behind” (2003), which tells the story of a 9/11 survivor who is haunted by possessions of his now-deceased coworkers, draws attention to a several key thematic connections between this story and The Dark Tower series, connections that suggest that The Dark Tower can be read as part of the larger body of 9/11 literature in spite of the fact that King began writing it before September 11, 2001. Although The Dark Tower has been primarily categorized as a work of American fantasy, Gothic literature, and horror fiction, King’s short story “The Things They Left Behind” can be used as a lens to illuminate key thematic connections between The Dark Tower series and literature of 9/11, specifically those themes of haunting, temporal disruption, and repetition.4This connection to “The Things They Left Behind” not only reinforces a hopeful interpretation of the ambiguous ending of King’s epic, but also positions The Dark Tower series as part of the literature of 9/11 as a whole, an epic fantasy that pushes this developing genre forward into new forms and concerns. King alludes to the 9/11 attacks late in the Dark Tower series when Jake and Father Callahan hide Black Thirteen in a long-term storage locker in the basement of the World Trade Center. Black Thirteen is one of the thirteen glass balls of the Wizard’s Rainbow and is used by Susannah/Mia in Song of Susannah to travel to 1999 New York to give birth to her “chap” Mordred.5 Jake and Father Callahan seek to contain Black Thirteen’s malevolent power and choose the storage lockers under the World Trade Center because they are allegedly “the safest storage area in Manhattan.”6 While these events take place two years before September 11, 2001, this sequence of events still draws attention to the events of 9/11, particularly because of Jake and Callahan’s conversation after they finish their task: “It’s good to go until June of two thousand and two, unless someone breaks in and steals it.” [Callahan says] “Or if the building falls down on top of it.” [Jake says] Callahan laughed, although Jake hadn’t quite sounded as if he were joking. “Never happen. And if it did . . . well, one glass ball under a hundred and ten stories of concrete and steel? Even a glass ball filled with deep magic? That’d be one way to take care of the nasty thing, I guess.”7

Even though the novel itself never directly mentions the attacks of 9/11, this conversation is a clear reference to that event, particularly given that Song of Susannah was published in 2004. In this way, Song of Susannah functions very similarly to a film like Man on Wire—a film about events involving the

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World Trade Center that chronologically take place before September 11, 2001, but that was written and distributed after that day. The chronology of the writing and publication of Song of Susannah transforms a seemingly innocuous conversation into something much more significant. The appearance of the World Trade Center in the novels is part of the series’ larger turn toward metafiction in the final books of the series, a narrative strategy that amplifies the importance of the 9/11 attacks within the epic. The metafictional qualities of the series are seen most obviously in the way that King inserts himself into the series as a character. As Heidi Strengell notes, “In the last volumes of The Dark Tower series [King] also intrudes in the novels as a more or less autobiographical persona.”8 Roland and his companions learn that King is the one writing their story, and in Song of Susannah, travel to find him to urge him to finish the work. According to a letter King wrote to Strengell, this shift was caused when King “rediscovered a little of that urgency of his early works—the feeling that the story is writing him instead of the other way around. That sense, he states, is stronger in these books, where he finds himself an actual character—neither quite fact nor fiction, but a mingling of the two.”9The appearance of King as an actual character emphasizes the importance of metafiction in The Dark Tower series and encourages readers to pay more attention to other, similar, connections between elements in the novel and their real-world correlatives, particularly the attacks on the World Trade Center. Readers are even encouraged to think of the possible connection between the Twin Towers and the Dark Tower itself. When Callahan tells Jake not to worry, that “if the Tower falls, you’ll be among the first to know,”10 even though he is describing the Dark Tower, the similarity in language to how the events of 9/11 are described, along with the metafictional allusion several pages later to the attacks of 9/11, invites readers to consider the possibility that Roland’s quest is not just to protect the Dark Tower, but to protect the Twin Towers as well. Such metafictional allusions to both Stephen King and the World Trade Center not only cause the reader to think about the attacks on 9/11, but potentially reconfigure the series in its entirety as a response to 9/11, in spite of the fact that it was begun almost twenty years before the attacks. The metafictional aspects of the last several novels of The Dark Tower series further connect the epic to the literature of 9/11 by aligning King’s work with other well-known works of 9/11 fiction that use similar strategies, including Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2003) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). For both of these works, as Arin Keeble writes, “Nearly all of the existing critical work on these texts focuses on some aspect of their postmodernist or meta-fictional aesthetics.”11 Windows on the World, for example, is a novel “comprised of a narrative that focuses on a writer who is trying to write a novel about 9/11

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and of the 9/11 narrative that he writes.”12The result of this metafictional element, Magali Michael argues, is not just merely playful, but enables the novel “to acknowledge and overtly engage the difficulties of the task at hand, explore the ethical and political implications of both attempting to represent the events and choosing not to do so, and . . . [provide] a narrative that seeks to ensure that those who perished are neither forgotten nor reified as faceless victims.”13 As Michael’s comments suggest, this tendency toward metafiction can be attributed, perhaps, to the general discomfort with treating these events in a fictional way. As Jay McInerney writes, “Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did. For a while the idea of ‘invented characters’ and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated.”14 Such scholarship shows how the metafictional aspects of The Dark Tower series not only draw attention to the attacks of 9/11 in and of themselves, but are connected to the larger concerns about representation and ethical responses to catastrophe seen in literary responses to 9/11 as a whole. The connection between The Dark Tower series and the literature of September 11, 2001, is further strengthened by comparing the series to King’s story “The Things They Left Behind,” which was published just two years after the 9/11 attacks. In this story, Scott Staley is a man who has survived the destruction of the World Trade Center because he skipped work on September 11, 2001, and as a result, he struggles with intense survivor’s guilt. This guilt physically manifests itself in physical objects owned by his dead coworkers, which appear unexpectedly in Scott’s apartment. The first of these objects was a pair of sunglasses that had belonged to Sonja D’Amico; the second was a baseball bat with the words “CLAIMS ADJUSTOR” burned along the side. When Scott recalls seeing the baseball bat, he notes, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m sure that at that moment I looked as though I had just seen one.”15 Other objects join these first two—a conch shell, a whoopee cushion, a cube of clear plastic with a penny inside, and a ceramic mushroom with Alice in Wonderland on top, for starters, and each of these objects brings whispers that keep Scott awake at night. The owners of the objects “talked about the picnic at Jones Beach—the coconut odor of suntan lotion and Lou Bega singing ‘Mambo No. 5’ over and over from Misha Bryzinski’s boom box. Or they talked about Frisbees sailing under the sky while dogs chased them.”16 Amid these imposed memories, Scott wonders, “How many of the kids that day had lost a guardian Mom or a Frisbee-throwing Dad? Man, that was a math problem I didn’t want to do. But the voices I heard in my apartment did want to do it. They did it over and over.”17 Perhaps even most concerning for Scott is when he tries to get rid of the objects, they simply reappear in his apartment as if they had never been taken out. While

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whoopee cushions and red sunglasses are unconventional ghosts, the physical presence of these objects in Scott Staley’s apartment haunts him nevertheless. Like Scott Staley, Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower also struggles with ghosts. From the very first chapter of The Gunslinger, Roland is haunted by those he had once known: “Once he had known a boy named Sheemie who’d had a mule. Sheemie was gone now; they were all gone now and there was only the two of them: him, and the man in black.”18 Roland’s haunting becomes even more complicated at the beginning of The Waste Lands, when he is haunted by the memories of Jake, the boy whom Roland allows to die at the end of The Gunslinger, that he knows are impossible. As he tells Eddie and Susannah, “‘There was a boy,’ . . . And then, in the very next breath, ‘There wasn’t a boy.’”19 These are no ordinary memories, however; the cognitive dissonance between these two remembered versions of reality is slowing pushing Roland into madness. He tells Eddie and Susannah “I’m going insane an inch at a time, trying to live with two versions of the same reality. I had hoped at first that one of the other would begin to fade away, but that’s not happening. In fact, the exact opposite is happening: those two realities are growing louder and louder in my head, clamoring at each other like opposing factions which must soon go to war.”20

Like Scott, Roland carries with him a physical object that is connected to these hauntings—the jawbone from Walter’s skeleton, which reminds him of the jawbone that he took from the way station when he found Jake. As he tells his ka-tet, “I thought, ‘It was bad luck to throw away what I found when I found the boy. This [jawbone] will replace it,’”21 giving life to the memory of Jake that part of his mind denies. In short, not only are both men suffering because of memories of those they have lost, but they also both have physical artifacts that provide them with a tangible connection to these losses. While the madness-inducing haunting of his conflicting memories of Jake is resolved when Roland and his ka-tet pull Jake back into Mid-World, Roland remains a man haunted by others he has left behind. At the beginning of Wizards and Glass, when describing a “thinny” to his ka-tet, Roland recalls the first time he saw one of these purported rips in the fabric of reality and existence: “The first one I ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry.”22 Then, without explanation or context, the words of Susan Delgado, Roland’s long-lost love, spring into his thoughts: “Love me Roland. If you love me, then love me.”23 Dreams and memories of Susan are sprinkled throughout the epic series, with readers (and Roland’s ka-tet) finally learning the full history of Roland and Susan, along with his fellow gunslingers from his youth, Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, in Wizards and Glass. While this novel-length flashback is the most substantial instance of haunting

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in the series, perhaps the most significant comes at the very end, as Roland ascends the stairs of the Dark Tower itself. As he begins to climb the stairs, he sees faces carved into the stone walls, many of which he knew, and as he gets higher and higher, he finds artifacts from his own life—an umbilical cord clip wrapped in blue ribbon, the collar of his first dog, the feathers of his hawk David—along with voices whispering words from the past: “Look, Gabby, look you! He’s smiling! Smiling at me! And he’s got a new tooth!”24 Roland keeps climbing the stairs, revisiting these objects from his past: “Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted Roland Deschain’s life and quest. Each held its memento; each its signature aroma.”25 As the reader learns just a few pages later, this quest is one that Roland has undergone time and time again; he has revisited his own life in a seemingly infinite loop. While the memories of Sheemie, Jake, and Susan certainly do haunt Roland throughout the series, this final climb through the Dark Tower emphasizes that he ultimately haunts himself. Connecting Roland’s haunted memories to the objects and voices that haunt Scott Staley can shine light on another way The Dark Tower series is connected to the larger body of literature of 9/11. Of particular interest to many scholars of this literature is the way in which technology creates digital ghosts, images, and sounds of the attacks and the victims of 9/11 that will exist forever on airwaves and website servers. In The Rhetoric of Terror, for instance, Marc Redfield argues that the attacks of September 11, 2001, inflicted virtual trauma because of the way so many experience them “as mediated events”26 through computers, television screens, and other forms of mass media. These mediations, Redfield suggests, create a “world of ghosts” in which “the voices, sounds, and images of vanished people, times, and places circulate constantly.”27 These ghosts, as Jacques Derrida describes “the subject that haunts” in Specters of Marx, are unidentifiable: “One cannot see, localize, fix any form, one cannot decide between hallucination and perception.”28 But at the same time, the specter is “a figure for or reiteration of iterability . . . because it is singular: because its life, figure, and voice are utterly irreplaceable.”29 While the attacks of September 11 and the subsequent war on terror absolutely had “terribly real”30 consequences, as Redfield emphasizes, the role that mass media played in the representation of these events created virtual ghosts that are simultaneously without form yet invoking a specific figure, creating an endless loop of haunting images. Indeed, in Out of the Blue, Kristiaan Versluys makes a very similar point, noting how the “relentless repetition of the images of the collapse of the towers on television . . . makes us all part of the tragedy, live and in real time.”31 Like Scott Staley and everyone who sees the images of 9/11 in unending repetition, Roland Deschain, too, experiences the unrelenting reappearance of both those that he has loved and his own life.

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The critical discussion of ghosts in 9/11 literature draws attention to another key theme seen in this literature a whole—the disruption of linear time, specifically through looping, repetitive structures—which provides further connection to both “The Things They Left Behind” and The Dark Tower series. In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” a title that itself suggests a distortion in the traditional linear representation of time, Don DeLillo explains how time seems different after 9/11: “We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted.”32 This obviously calls to mind what Roland says to Jake in The Gunslinger: “But something has been happening. Just in my own time. ‘The world has moved on,’ we say . . . we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time. It’s softening.”33 The retrospective narrative structure of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close can be seen as one example of such a temporal distortion; as such, Jenn Brandt argues how it provides a demonstration of how “new understandings of knowledge and time—demonstrated most readily through Oskar [the 9-year-old narrator]—are a necessary act post-9/11.”34 Further, Charlie Lee-Potter looks at Foer’s novel, as well as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and argues that both works “envisaged a world in which the attacks took place but, on another imaginary level, could be arrested or even sent backwards in time.”35 Even in Windows on the World, a novel that as Versluys notes, “insists on the inexorable linearity of time.”36 The imagined reappearance of both the protagonists and the towers themselves leads to the events of 9/11 “transgressing their own time frame, [leaving] behind ghostly presences and spectral after-imaginings.”37 Indeed, even the naming of the literature of 9/11 suggests a temporal rupture, a dividing of linear time into what happened before 9/11 and that which happened afterward. Even more specifically, this disruption of linear time leads to circularity in some works of 9/11 fiction. James Gourley describes how in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, for example, after the events of 9/11, “characters begin to perceive a loop in time, linked to the progress of public discourse.”38 This twisting of time in Pynchon’s novel challenges the primacy of what Patricia Tobin calls the “genealogical imperative . . . [in which] events in time come to be perceived as begetting other events within a line of causality similar to the line of generations, with the prior event earning a special prestige as it is seen to originate, control, and predict future events.”39 By looping back to the events of 9/11, as well as having the events of 9/11 intrude into the novel before the attacks actually happen, Pynchon’s novel calls into question the privileging of cause over effect, and, Gourley also argues, challenges the way in which focusing specifically on the events of 9/11 might be used “to manipulate public perception of the past and how this contributes to the planet’s future.”40 The circularity of time seen in 9/11 novels such as Pynchon’s,

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therefore, resists straightforward causal analysis and enables a more nuanced, interwoven understanding of the attacks. Ultimately, it is this circular representation of time that we see in both “The Things They Left Behind” and The Dark Tower series. In “The Things They Left Behind,” Scott uses the language of repetition when describing both the voices that whisper, phrases such as “over and over.”41 Even more significantly, the objects that haunt Scott keep reappearing. When he tries to get rid of them, throwing them into a trash basket on the corner of 75th and Park, they are there, “on the table where [he] leaves bills that need to be paid, claim checks, and overdue-book notices”42 when he returns to the apartment. The looping of time enforced by the physical reappearance of these objects forces Scott to relive his memories of the objects’ owners—Bruce Mason reenacting Lord of the Flies with the conch shell, Jimmy Eagleton telling him about his son’s learning disability, and Maureen Hannon analyzing Alice in Wonderland. These objects take Scott back to specific moments in time, such as the conversation with Jimmy just days before September 11, 2001, or the night after the attacks where he saw Roland Abelson’s widow on the news. Both through their physical reappearance and the memories they evoke, the objects in “The Things They Left Behind” disrupt a clear-cut, linear sense of time, leaving loops and swirls instead. The circularity of The Dark Tower series functions, obviously, on a much larger scale. There are loops within the narrative itself, particularly with regard to Roland’s memory. For example, the series begins with memories of Cuthbert, but these memories aren’t fully developed until the fourth book in the series, Wizard and Glass. Even more importantly, the entire series is a cycle. Roland himself even reflects on the cyclical nature of ka, or fate, relatively early in the series, though without recognition of what it would ultimately mean for him: “Ka was a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started.”43 It isn’t until the end of the series, however, that he realizes just how much this affects his own quest for the Tower. When he finally reaches the top of the Dark Tower, Roland realizes with horror that he has been reliving his quest, over and over: “How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? . . . How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many times would he travel it?”44 The language King uses here explicitly invokes the idea of circular time, both through words such as “loop” and through the repetitive phrasing of “peeled back, curved back, turned back.” Matthew Butkus succinctly summarizes the implications of Roland’s realization, explaining, “At the end of the series, we learn that this pursuit [of the Dark Tower] is part of a cycle. Roland has traveled this path before—many times before, in fact, and many more times to come.

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It promises him more hardship, an apparent cyclic cruelty of exposure, thirst, starvation, disease, maiming, violence, and death.”45 Perhaps nowhere is the circularity of the series clearer than in the first and final line (and then first again) of the final book: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”46 Many scholars have discussed the possible roots and implications of the circular structure of The Dark Tower series, and Matthew Butkus uses the cyclical nature of Roland’s quest to explore the connection between The Dark Tower and Hindu philosophy. Garret Merriam, however, connects Roland to Sisyphus, the figure from Greek mythology who “was condemned by the gods to spend all of eternity pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again when he got it to the top.”47 For Michele Braun, the cyclical nature of The Dark Tower series is a way to reinforce both Roland’s status as hero within the series and the listeners’ role in the story as she connects Roland’s story to the “Addonis-Tammuz cycle where the god dies for a time, only to arise again”48; Braun’s argument, then, is that this pattern is “associated with the heroic epic and its pattern serves to affirm the listeners of their place within society . . . [as well as] reaffirm[s] the enduring importance of Roland to the myth.”49 In the context of 9/11 literature, however, the circularity of The Dark Tower series can be seen as disrupting a linear representation of history, allowing King, along with other authors of 9/11 literature, to craft a more complicated, interwoven narrative. Noticing these thematic connections between The Dark Tower and “The Things They Left Behind,” and consequently, the larger body of 9/11 literature, has several effects for the reader beyond simply adding another category into which The Dark Tower series can be placed. For starters, The Dark Tower’s thematic connections to “The Things They Left Behind” draws attention to one additional commonality between the two texts—the importance of concrete, material items as objects of hope and redemption in a world filled with the specter of trauma. One of the lingering questions about The Dark Tower series is whether to interpret the ending—Roland’s cyclical return to the beginning—in a positive or negative light. T. Gilchrist White sees the series as exploring “the implications of technology gone wrong and humankind’s response to it,”50 arguing that the cyclical nature of the ending suggests that “we like Roland haven’t gotten it quite right.”51 Many scholars take an even stronger stance, arguing that the ending emphasizes emptiness, darkness, or even eternal suffering. Mary Findley, for one, sees in King’s most recent fiction, including the final novels of The Dark Tower series, a “dark, hopeless and non-resolute world”52; Merriam uses the cyclic nature of Roland’s quest to consider a nihilistic reading of the series: “We have to wonder if Roland would perhaps have preferred the emptiness of the void to this eternal recurrence. Or perhaps it amounts to the same things, since either way

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Roland is denied satisfaction, the salvation for which he has quested”53; and Patrick McAleer argues that “Roland’s quest is destined for failure no matter what . . . [which] holds true to [King’s] label of being a horror writer, as failure, in any scope, is indeed rather horrific.”54 In the final lines of his essay, McAleer writes, “This maddening ending of the Dark Tower series serves as a constant marker of horror that dominates the entire path to the Dark Tower, a path promising eternal damnation for a man who, like those who came before him, cannot accept that failure is indeed an option.”55 For these scholars, for a variety of reasons, the ending of King’s epic reinforces what Eddie told Roland near the beginning of their quest together: “if you kill what you love, you’re damned.”56 However, others, including Butkus, see the ending as “potentially redemptive,”57an interpretation that is strengthened by the shared importance of physical objects between The Dark Tower series and “The Things They Left Behind.”As the voice from the Tower fades in Roland’s mind at the very end of the epic, it tells him, “This [the Horn of Eld] is your promise that things may be different, Roland—that there may yet be rest. Even salvation.”58 While this promise on its own is no guarantee that things will change, the presence of the Horn of Eld at Roland’s side—“the ancient brass horn [that] had once been blown by Arthur Eld himself”—in this next iteration of the story gives material witness to this promise of salvation. As Roland once again begins his quest, he “touched the horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched it before.”59 This is a very different feeling than the loss and regret described at the beginning of the series: “His hat was gone. So was the horn he had once carried; gone for years, that horn, spilled from the hand of a dying friend, and he missed them both.”60 The importance of Roland having this horn calls to mind the resolution of “The Things They Left Behind,” in which Scott Staley finally realizes that he can stop being haunted by these objects by returning them to their rightful owners. When he returns the conch shell to Janice Mason, the widow of the man who had owned it, Janice tells Scott, “Thank you, Mr. Staley. For coming out and bringing me this. That was very kind”61; for Scott, that kindness is, in some respect, repaid as he now knows “that the conch, at least, would never come back to my apartment. It was home.”62 This additional parallel between “The Things They Left Behind” and The Dark Tower epic reinforces the interpretation of the ending as hopeful: with Roland’s horn now with its rightful owner, resolution is possible and the cycle of repetition and haunting can be broken, just like it was with Mr. Mason’s conch shell. In fact, Scott’s reflection at the end of “The Things They Left Behind” could just as easily apply to Roland’s horn: “When it comes to returning things which people believe have been lost forever, things that have weight, there are compensations. Even if they’re only little things, like a pair of joke sunglasses or a steel

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penny in a Lucite cube . . . yeah. I’d have to say there are compensations.”63 By reading The Dark Tower series together with “The Things They Left Behind,” it emphasizes the redemptive importance of Roland’s regaining of the Horn of Eld, underscoring an interpretation of the ending that is ultimately hopeful, and possibly even pointing toward salvation.64 But perhaps even more important than adding support for a particular interpretation of the ending of the series, by recognizing The Dark Tower series as a work of 9/11 fiction, we can also see how this epic fantasy pushes the corpus of 9/11 literature forward. Many of the scholarly works on 9/11 begin their analysis with examinations of the trajectory of literary responses to the attacks. As Martin Randall writes in the introduction to 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, “First responses tended to be survivor/eyewitness reports that provided commentators with empirical evidence to being to formulate what was happening at the time and then in the bewildering aftermath”65; even early responses from novelists such as Amis, McEwan, and DeLillo were in the form of journalistic essays, rather than fiction. And when authors did turn to fiction, Randall posits that they felt “a strong sense of ethical and aesthetic difficulty in representing such massive trauma, . . . [even wondering] what could possibly be added to the reality of the events that hadn’t already been revealed.”66 Additionally, in their introduction to Literature After 9/11, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn describe a similar progression: The history of literature written about and after 9/11 can also be seen, at least in part, as a sequence of genres. That is, shorter forms appeared first—essays, brief personal reminiscences, and poetry. It took several years longer for novels and full-length memoirs to appear. Early works often attempted directly to capture and convey the events of 9/11 and emotional responses to the events; as time has passed, the approach to the attacks has become more nuanced. 9/11 has come to seem less what these works are about than an event to which they refer, one element among many.67

While Randall, Keniston, and Quinn focus on the progression of genres in literary responses to 9/11, Arin Keeble, in The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity, notices a different type evolution in the literary responses as well, arguing that responses have shifted from those with “unorthodox formal qualities . . . [that strain to] balance references to history and individual trauma”68 to those works completed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that “cultivate and capture the politicized mood of dissent”69 of that time period. These are but three descriptions among many of the ways in which the literature of September 11, 2001, has developed over the last decade and a half. Yet in spite of these shifts in genre, form, and even political mood, the focus of the literature of 9/11 (and the scholarship on that literature) remains

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primarily situated in the domestic sphere. In their introduction to Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre, Heather Pope and Victoria Bryan summarize how “literary critics in the first decade after 9/11 tended to emphasise the ways that 9/11 narratives . . . fetishise the domestic and perhaps narcissistically focus on personal wounding as a somewhat neurotic diversion from the global and political implications of 9/11.”70 Certainly, there are works of 9/11 literature that extend beyond the borders of the United States, though even in many of these works, such as Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, while the effects of 9/11 on other nations are a key part of the narrative, the focus remains firmly on the United States. The implications of this trend are most notably seen in Michael Rothberg’s essay “A Failure of the Imagination,” which is written in response to Richard Grey’s critique of the domesticity of 9/11 fiction and subsequent call to turn 9/11 fiction toward issues of otherness and immigration. For Rothberg, though, the real value in these works of fiction is “their deterritorialized recharting of the ‘altered geographies’ of a ‘mixed, plural’ America.”71For Rothberg, though it is certainly important to embrace a pluralist vision of the United States in a post-9/11 world, it is even more important to leave behind exclusively domestic concerns about citizenship and civil rights, for “to dwell only on this dimension of the problem would risk reproducing American exceptionalism and ignoring the context out of which the terror attacks emerged in the first place.”72 Overlaying the attacks on the World Trade Center onto Roland’s quest for the Dark Tower can expand thinking about 9/11 beyond the domestic sphere and encourage readers to think of this single event as part of a larger, more complicated narrative. Furthermore, the genre of the fantasy epic provides a space in which readers can consider the broader implications of 9/11 in a way that does not threaten the primacy of the actual attacks. Alex Houen, like others mentioned earlier, sees literature of 9/11 falling into various categories, one of which is “a departure from the real to the extent that it poses other possible worlds.”73 For Houen, this trend within 9/11 fiction provides the most value as a political tool, as “the text’s power of critique is thus retained by self-consciously bringing the status of its fictionality into question.”74 However, not only is this power achieved through the elements of metafiction and self-reflexivity throughout the text, but also by providing “alternative forms of ‘outer space’ for us as subjects and other worlds of possibility,”75 both of which we see taking place in King’s series. Thinking of The Dark Tower series as a work of 9/11 literature, therefore—a series in which the real world of New York City and the United States is both key to Roland’s quest to find the Dark Tower, while also being but one world among many—can help simultaneously “provincialize the claims of ‘the first universal nation’ . . . [as well as] mark its asymmetrical power to influence

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world events,”76 providing readers with a way to think of the effects of September 11 not only on those within the United States itself, but also those in Mid-World and beyond. NOTES 1. For example, see the following works of criticism on King’s work: John Sears’ Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011); Gary Hoppenstand’s and Ray B. Browne’s The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987); Heidi Strengell’s Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Popular Press, 2005); Tony Magistrale’s The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); Tony Magistrale’ s Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University State Popular Press, 1988); and Clive Bloom’s Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 2. Stephen King, Introduction to The Gunslinger, Revised Ed. (New York: Signet, 2003), xiv. 3. James Egan, “Stephen King’s Gothic Western,” in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmare, eds. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 117. 4. The title of this short story, “The Things They Left Behind,” is an obvious reference to Tim O’Brien’s classic collection of linked short stories, The Things They Carried. This connection, while outside the scope of this essay, suggests another interesting area of inquiry, that is, the relationship between King’s story and the literature of the Vietnam War, and, by extension, the relationship between literature of the Vietnam War and literature of the War on Terror. 5. Black Thirteen, however, is much more than a means of facilitating travel between worlds and times; it is also described as the disembodied eye of Roland Deschain’s mortal enemy, the Crimson King. 6. Stephen King, Song of Susannah (New York: Pocket Books, 2006), 447. 7. Ibid. 8. Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 246. 9. Ibid., 247. 10. King, Song of Susannah, 440. 11. Arin Keeble, The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 41. 12. Magali Cornier Michael, Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 34. 13. Ibid. 14. Jay McInerney “The Uses of Invention,” The Guardian, September 17, 2005, https:// www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​books​/2005​/sep/​17/fi​ction​.vsna​ipaul​.

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15. Stephen King, “The Things They Left Behind,” in Just After Sunset (New York: Pocket Books, 2008), 224. 16. Ibid., 238. 17. Ibid. 18. Stephen King, The Gunslinger, Revised Ed (New York: Signet, 2003), 16. 19. Stephen King, The Waste Lands (New York: Signet, 2003), 54. 20. Ibid., 93. 21. Ibid., 71. 22. Stephen King, Wizard and Glass (New York: Signet, 2003), 81. 23. Ibid., 81. 24. Stephen King, The Dark Tower (New York: Pocket Books, 2006), 1024. 25. Ibid., 1025. 26. Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 2. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136. 29. Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror, 10. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 6–7. 32. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001, 39. 33. King, The Gunslinger, 188. 34. Jenn Brandt, “9/11 as ‘Death of the Father’ and the End of Time: Re-Reading Jonathan SafranFoer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” in Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre, eds. Heather E. Pope and Victoria M. Bryan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 127. 35. Charlie Lee-Potter, Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 74. 36. Versluys, Out of the Blue, 123. 37. Ibid., 128. 38. James Gourley, “Twisted Time: Pynchon’s 9/11 in Bleeding Edge,” in Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre, eds. Heather E. Pope and Victoria M. Bryan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 70. 39. Patricia Tobin, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 7. 40. Gourley, “Twisted Time,” 69. 41. King, “The Things They Left Behind,” 238. 42. Ibid., 236. 43. King, The Waste Lands, 552. 44. King, The Dark Tower, 1028.

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45. Matthew A. Butkus, “Rāma of Gilead: Hindu Philosophy in The Dark Tower,” in Stephen King and Philosophy, ed. Jacob M. Held (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 84–5. 46. King, The Dark Tower, 1031; King, The Gunslinger, 3. 47. Garret Merriam, Garret, “‘Gan Is Dead’: Nietzsche and Roland’s Eternal Recurrence,” in Stephen King and Philosophy, ed. Jacob M. Held (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 79. 48. Michele Braun, “Roland the Gunslinger’s Generic Transformation,” in Stephen King’s Modern Macabre: Essays on the Later Works, eds. Patrick McAleer and Michael A. Perry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 69. 49. Ibid. 50. T. Gilchrist White, “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’: The Heroic Aspects of the Gunslinger,” in Stephen King’s Modern Macabre: Essays on the Later Works, eds. Patrick McAleer and Michael A. Perry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 91. 51. Ibid. 52. Mary Findley, “The World at Large, America in Particular: Cultural Fears and Societal Mayhem in King’s Fiction Since 1995,” in Stephen King’s Modern Macabre: Essays on the Later Works, eds. Patrick McAleer and Michael A. Perry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 63. 53. Merriam, “‘Gan is Dead,’” 76. 54. McAleer, “Failure is Indeed an Option: Pride, Prophecy, and Roland Deschain’s Perpetual Quest for the Dark Tower,” in Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror, eds. Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 72. 55. Ibid. 56. King, The Drawing of the Three, 462. 57. Butkus, “Rāma of Gilead,” 85. 58. King, The Dark Tower, 1031. 59. Ibid. 60. King, The Gunslinger, 5. 61. King, “The Things They Left Behind,” 260. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 261. 64. In his analysis of Stephen Daldry’s film version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), Guy Westwell points out the importance of photographs of people falling from the tower—“material objects”—in Oskar’s quest to find the lock that matches the key his father left him, and describes how at the end of the film, “Oskar’s mother (Sandra Bullock) discovers a scrapbook Oskar has made to record his quest to find the owner of the key” (“Acts of Redemption,” 77), a quest that is ultimately redemptive, both in terms of Oskar’s grief for his father and in terms of his father’s choice to jump from the towers. Westwell also highlights the redemptive power of the actual “Falling Man” photograph. 65. Martin Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 2.

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66. Ibid., 11. 67. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, “Introduction: Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance,” in Literature After 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3. 68. Keeble, The 9/11 Novel, 14. 69. Ibid., 15. 70. Heather E. Pope and Victoria M. Bryan, Introduction to Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 1. Actually, the overall goal of Pope’s and Bryan’s collection is to challenge the idea that the focus on the domestic in 9/11 fiction is, in fact, a limitation, seeking to “problematise the language of limitation and recontextualise some of the early criticisms of 9/11 narratives” (2).Here, my intent is not to reinforce the limited thinking about domesticity in 9/11 fiction that Pope and Bryan see as problematic, but rather, to emphasize the difference between common trends in 9/11 fiction and King’s work in The Dark Tower series, thus opening up new (though not necessarily superior) ways of representing and thinking about the events of September 11, 2001. 71. Michael Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel, A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 156. 72. Ibid., 157. 73. Alex Houen, “Novel Spaces and Taking Place(s) in the Wake of September 11,” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 421. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 424. 76. Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination,” 158.

Chapter 14

Untangling the True Knot Stephen King’s (Accidental) Vegan Manifesto in Doctor Sleep Patrick McAleer

Within the 2013 text Doctor Sleep, the much-awaited sequel to The Shining, Stephen King creates a new enemy to battle, one that does not have labyrinthine hallways or a precariously problematic boiler—this adversary that Danny Torrance and his companions must confront and combat is a group of creatures called the True Knot. This collection of, essentially, mutated humans, feed off the “steam,” or psychic energies, of humans with particularly useful (and apparently satiating) abilities, such as telekinesis, telepathy, or even a sense of clairvoyance (much like Danny Torrance’s shine),1 but this “steam” tends to be taken only after a human has died or has been tortured to death in order to give the “steam” a reportedly enhanced quality, or flavor. What occurs inside the novel, though, is much more than a cast of outsiders merely seeking survival by taking the life of humans in order to acquire their specific food needs/desires; what the Constant Reader encounters is a collection of beings that, much like the humans they kill for sustenance, choose to live in a particular manner at the cost of another’s life, and who consciously decide to kill presumably lesser beings for not just nourishment but also for pleasure. Ultimately, within Doctor Sleep, the True Knot’s dietary habits, when analyzed through a vegan lens, reveal a certain mindset, or myth, about the purported superiority of one species over another. In short, this chapter will examine the “nature” of the members of the True Knot in respect to their “feeding” habits and juxtapose their lifestyle to typical human dietary habits and attitudes. Indeed, the True Knot’s actions are despised (much like the bloody diets of vampires) while common, human dietary habits are, conversely, generally met with approval and agreeable compliance. The ensuing battle between what is normal and abnormal results in what I would call 219

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Stephen King’s “accidental” vegan manifesto. Of course, this examination is not intended to be a sermon and it is not necessarily aimed at converting the reader to a vegan diet; rather, this chapter considers King’s contribution to the arena of “monstrosity” and what his creations tell us about ourselves, especially how something as seemingly trivial as one’s diet may constitute a link between humans and barbarity or depravity. Regarding monsters and the monstrous, if the vampire, for example, is a literary embodiment of lust, oppression, disease, and numerous other anxieties that reflect varying human concerns and problems over the centuries, then it is not unreasonable to consider the True Knot as a timely and contemporary reflection (again, perhaps accidental) of current human concerns regarding food and consumption. More to the point, these creatures challenge the reader’s sense of identity, especially if/when the reader sees him/herself reflected within these individuals. With respect to food in and of itself, a seemingly innocuous aspect of life and literature, Fabio Parasecoli states “Food is pervasive. The social, economic, and even political relevance cannot be ignored. Ingestion and incorporation constitute a fundamental component of our connection with reality and the world outside our body. Food influences our lives as a relevant marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, ethnic, and religious identities.”2 If one holds to this claim, then it stands to reason that an analysis of the True Knot and their dietary habits can unveil much about not only this collection of individuals who are no longer technically human (yet exhibit many human qualities when it comes to consumption), but also the humans that unwillingly serve as their food. Concerning Stephen King, Doctor Sleep, and veganism, a few key aspects of the larger conversation about veganism and its inherent tie into animal rights is crucial to the discussion at hand. First and foremost, a brief definition of veganism should be brought forth, and the most succinct definition of veganism is as follows: a theory and practice of abstaining from the use of animal products, whether for dietary, environmental, or ethical reasons. With a primary focus on the ethical vegan diet,3 there are numerous arguments that come into play that facilitate an understanding as to how the existence and actions of the True Knot instigate King’s (accidental) vegan manifesto in Doctor Sleep. Above all else, the elephant that may be in the room (pardon the potentially speciesist language) is that veganism is not a popular practice or world view. Indeed, as Bob Torres notes, “many reject veganism as the province of know-it-all food police,”4 indicating that many reactions to vegan practices or views come equipped with the supposition that a vegan view is based upon perceived superiority or even arrogance. But if one can refrain from a visceral reaction to or rejection of a vegan perspective, at least for the sake of the argument that is beginning to form, then a potentially revealing analysis may take place.

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So, to start, as it is implied that veganism is much more than a practice of abstention, the reasons for a vegan’s abstention from animal products provide most of the groundwork for the current debates regarding veganism that help to more fully analyze the True Knot. Among the most crucial aspects of the vegan ethic is the issue of pain and suffering, such as how even free-range chickens are still oppressed commodities that exist solely to produce eggs, and how these aspects of food production are often justified or rationalized as being consistent with the “natural” or “traditional” aspects of human life. At its core, the human identity tends to center on the notion of the natural, as “we are taught to perceive our body as natural”5 and, therefore, many consider the “natural” aspect of the human identity—the ability to eat meat—as ethically/morally, or, rather, naturally, justified. Indeed, Michael Pollan, noted author on the topic of food, claims, “we’ve evolved to defeat the defenses of other creatures so that we might eat them.”6 This particular argument suggests that evolution is a reason, or a justification, for typical human actions and attitudes regarding certain types of food, almost rejecting the idea that evolution is a matter of adaptation and that, rather, evolution is some sort of genetic directive that necessitates the use of a set of available skills that have been developed, or mutated, within a living being. According to Pollan (and likely many others), it seems reasonable to conclude that ability to utilize a certain skill necessarily warrants the use of such an ability, which is akin to the argument that because humans have teeth capable of tearing flesh and stomachs that are capable of digesting (cooked) meat that they ought to do so (especially if the species to be consumed is viewed as inferior). However, it seems just as reasonable to conclude that evolution, whether speaking of humans or the True Knot, is not necessarily some sort of magical or divine development that dictates one’s decisions. Or, as Marjorie Spiegel notes, “Evolution occurs as the result of genetic mutations and there is no moral basis for declaring that the mutated form is better than the unmutated ancestral form,”7 suggesting that any sort of “natural” progression of the human form is not, in and of itself, reason enough to perform particular actions, especially on a moral/ethical basis that largely has no actual connection to evolution. What has occurred, though, with respect to evolution and the “natural” arguments for meat consumption that follow, is a view of the animal body (or the human body, in the case of the True Knot) that is necessarily and naturally subjugated, or subjected, to any sort of use that a “superior” being with certain traits and abilities sees as appropriate. As Spiegel also notes, “Despite the huge scandal the theory of evolution caused in Darwin’s age—enraging the church and its leaders—with a quick twist in meaning and intent it was used to serve one of the same purposes as institutionalized religion once had: justifying the exploitation and oppression of others based on their differences.”8 And it is with this notion of difference as facilitated by

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certain views of evolution and the elevation of one species over the other that issues of superiority, or human exceptionalism, come into play as not only a reflection of the True Knot’s general mentality toward their food sources, but also human attitudes toward, say, cows, pigs, and chickens (among others). To clarify, the overarching idea that is being alluded to in this initial analysis of Doctor Sleep focuses on speciesism, which, according to Peter Singer, is “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”9 These interests often appear to come down to perceptions of survival or even tradition, both of which, however, come with their logical baggage. Regarding the True Knot, their mantra concerning their relationship with the individuals whom they murder, or, rather, slaughter for consumption, is “‘They are the makers; we are the takers.’”10 The viewpoint that is forwarded with this notion is that humans primarily exist for the sole purpose of facilitating the continued existence of the True Knot—the product that humans produce, or make (“steam”), is, apparently, primarily meant for one critical end: to feed the True Knot. For instance, Rose the Hat, the leader of the True Knot, thinks of her potential prize, Abra Stone, as a Mount Everest of “steam,” almost like Abra is a Golden Goose whose “golden eggs” would serve the master more fittingly than the simple, subservient creature who produced the eggs. Indeed, Rose the Hat depicts Abra as not a living being but a product, or tool, that can, or must, be utilized in the very same way that humans often treat bovines: “‘Think cows . . . You can butcher one and get a couple months’ worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight.’”11 This thinking certainly comprises a fair comparison between the True Knot and the typical human and his/her views regarding food sources as an object—with either Abra or a cow being seen as a mere “maker” rather than an autonomous entity—which ultimately leads to the idea of exceptionalism that facilitates a general desire, rather than a need, for a steady supply of sustenance by way of distancing oneself from a potential, and sentient, food source. Consider the following as Rose the Hat’s more complex, or more rationalized, view of Abra: “She [Rose the Hat] was tired of spending so much of her time—the whole family’s time—scrambling for nourishment. Of living like tenth-century Gypsies when they should have been living like the kings and queens of creation. Which is what they were.”12 The idea that Rose the Hat and the True Knot are, essentially, scavengers assaults their sense of importance, and the promise of a strong supply of “steam” facilitates the idea that they are superior creatures, at least if they can acquire the “mother load” of steam within Abra and fulfill some sort of self-constructed sense of regality and superiority that seems to be connected to their immortality (that is, if they can find enough steam for their continued existence). Such an interpretation

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may be unfair or slanted, but it does lead to the notion of human exceptionalism that resides within the circles of vegan criticism. In other words, Rose the Hat thinks of herself and the True Knot as superior creatures to humans because they can lead nearly immortal lives; for that matter, and briefly setting aside the topic of exceptionalism, the issue of language within Doctor Sleep reveals even more about the True Knot and their self-importance and perception that they are elevated above humans (or their food) as the True Knot refers to humans as “rubes,” which is certainly similar to how a cow is often reduced and referred to as steak or hamburger, or how a pig becomes bacon or sausage. As Carol Adams states, “Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. . . . The absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity.”13 In the case of naming, or labeling, humans (i.e., “rubes”) in the same manner that humans name animals (i.e., pork, pot roast, nuggets), and alongside as the actual action of taking “steam” from living beings by the True Knot, the resultant meshing together of human and True Knot practices into a generally indifferent protocol of taking sustenance from creatures who are stripped of their identities, both literally and figuratively, seems to suggest that the True Knot is not necessarily as evil as originally thought; they are just relishing in ideas, ideals, and practices that humans have generally embraced, approved, and enacted for millennia. To that end, the typical Constant Reader would, theoretically, be hypocritical to shudder at the way that Rose the Hat and the True Knot perceive humans; yet the same reader likely exhibits disgust when Rose constantly looks at humans, namely Abra Stone, as things rather than living beings, which is, as has been alluded to in the last few paragraphs, contrary to a vegan perspective that this analysis sees as becoming more and more foregrounded rather than dismissed within Doctor Sleep. Indeed, consider another passage in which Rose dehumanizes Abra through language and labeling: “‘I think this one’s [Abra] still getting stronger. We’ll let her ripen a bit.’”14 In this passage, Rose depicts Abra almost like a piece of fruit, an object that reportedly has but one function—to become food; and while thinking of Abra like an apple or an orange rather than some meat-based product seems to create a somewhat innocuous image as fruit does not possess a central nervous system and thus cannot feel pain, this imagery still subjects Abra to the demeaning powers of language that the Constant Reader cannot so easily dismiss. In this case, if one accepts the basic premise that language “serves to perpetuate and reinforce prejudicial attitudes,” then one can observe the lack of impartiality behind the thinking of Rose the Hat and the other members of the True Knot, as well as the general human population that may have largely abandoned, say, racial epithets as a part of everyday speech yet still uses similarly charged and biased language regarding their food.15 Of course, while any comparisons

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between animals and humans, like comparing Africans who have endured countless pains and tortures even just within the short history of the United States to animals who have also arguably endured similar pains and tortures, looks to be problematic, this “dreaded comparison” is actually quite apt. There are those who, however, think of animal exploitation as something wholly incomparable with human existence (which is how the True Knot separates their existence from the deaths of those who die in order to nourish this tribe). To put it another way, Michael Pollan looks upon animals much in the same way as the True Knot—as different and therefore inferior—and says “chickens [for example] depend for their well-being on the existence of their human predators. Not the individual chicken, perhaps, but Chicken—the species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life.”16 This particular view, when folded into Doctor Sleep, suggests that human existence, by extension, is merely a means to a particular end—the survival of the True Knot. But if one were to reject this analogous argument because human life is somehow special, or different, than animal life, then the issue of human exceptionalism comes back into the picture and King’s (accidental) vegan manifesto. The idea that humans are, at least to the True Knot, anything but special, different, exceptional, or even superior creatures is clearly part of the distaste that the Constant Reader develops for the True Knot. Recall that the members of this tribe chant “‘We are the True Knot, and we endure. . . . We are the chosen ones,’” indicating a belief that they are the pinnacle of existence while also, perhaps, creating a sense of dread for the Constant Reader who may refute this notion by way of another problematic idea—a sense of moral superiority in that it is inhumane of the True Knot to willingly take the lives of those who have not freely given their lives to this group.17The idea that humans are, in contrast, the rightful “chosen ones,” and that an arbitrary sense of superiority stemming from the concept of morals, or even the pride grounded in human innovation by way of, for example, firearms, motor vehicles, and/or Facebook, indicate a particular sense of greatness and, therefore, a position at the top of an arguably fabricated food chain. Such a view can then often be used to justify particular actions, especially regarding animals, particularly as the True Knot looks at “steamheads” as inferior creatures whose sacrifice/slaughter is righteous because it enables the True Knot’s continued existence. Perhaps even more tellingly, it facilitates particular pleasures that overshadow the process involved in acquiring “steam.” In this instance, the pleasure comes from exercising power over an arguably defenseless creature (perhaps akin to the “thrill of the kill” that hunters claim to experience) which creates a wide gulf between the consumer and the consumed, which is quite similar to how many humans are detached and distanced from the animal products that they eat by way of the aforementioned labels given to heaps

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of animal flesh. Further, regarding the notion of human exceptionalism that facilitates animal slaughter in the real world, and which becomes appropriated by the True Knot as a means to justify their actions, Gary Francione provides an example of how human standards of “excellence” are often misguided: “We claim that humans are the only animals (apart perhaps from some great apes) who can recognize themselves in mirrors. Even if that is true, what is the moral significance of that supposed fact?”18 With this inquiry, Francione indicates that whatever measures of “greatness” that humans, or the True Knot, use to separate and distance themselves from their food is fallacious, just as Spiegel follows in Francione’s footsteps and states “It is only human arrogance that is able to find beauty and perfection exclusively in those things human,” which serves as a reminder that the way in which the True Knot develops its sense of self and superiority is likely no different than how humans develop their own questionable means of merit, especially when used to justify a hierarchical and violent relationship with animals.19 To be sure, what one considers to be meritorious—drawing, construction, bodybuilding, etc.—is not necessarily any more important or indicative of evolutionary or ethical advancement when contrasted with, perhaps, swinging from trees, chasing down gazelles, or even having a spine flexible enough to allow one to lick his or her own crotch. Furthermore, when exploring the realm of exceptionalism and encountering the various contrasts that humans draw between themselves and animals, one of the common rebuttals that vegans or animal rights advocates/academics encounter involves analyses of animal behavior. This rebuttal, commonly known as the naturalistic fallacy, claims that since animals eat one another, then that this very nature of their existence extends to humans and their dietary habits. Indeed, this very same line of thinking is reflected in Doctor Sleep. Toward the end of the novel, as Rose the Hat has sent a handful of True Knot members to abduct Abra Stone, one member, Snakebite Andi, is captured and questioned about why she and her kind could possibly want to abduct a childlike Abra (and is also queried as to why they have tortured other young children such as Bradley Trevor); Andi’s response is “‘Your people slaughter pigs and cows and sheep. Is what we do any different?’”20 Abra’s father, Dave, then says, “‘In my humble opinion, killing human beings is a lot different.’”21 The latter statement here, that killing a human is somehow different than killing an animal smacks of the exceptionalism discussed earlier and also beckons to the sentiment that “non-humans may have a different sense of what it means to have a life than normal human adults do, but this does not mean that they have no interest in continuing to exist.”22 Assuredly, differences do not automatically imply or necessitate a separation and hierarchical order; but, more importantly, Snakebite Andi’s commentary runs aground of the naturalistic fallacy, which is a matter of, first,

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promoting a separation between one species and another, and then looking to the reportedly inferior species for moral or ethical guidance, to which Peter Singer says, “It is odd how humans, who normally consider themselves so far above other animals, will, if it seems to support their dietary preferences [not needs], use an argument that implies that we ought to look to other animals for moral inspiration and guidance.”23 In other words, Singer perhaps says it better when he states, “While we overlook our own savagery, we exaggerate that of other animals.”24 And in the case of Doctor Sleep, the “rubes” that the True Knot despises become their moral compass, using the general brutality that is enacted by humans against animals as reason enough to take “steam” from unwilling parties. In the process, those who see the similarities between the practices of the True Knot and humans see a situation that the vegan lens understands as just another weak link in the chain of oppression concerning how one group chooses to position itself over another. The divisions that stem from the promotion and practice of exceptionalism within Doctor Sleep and anti-vegan rhetoric must also consider issues of pain and not just issues of differing abilities and “accomplishments” across species. To wit, Michael Pollan once again enters the conversation and comments on the notion of pain among humans and animals that can be used to better understand the True Knot and their own views concerning pain. Pollan advocates for consumption of animals as he claims that any sort of pain that they feel pales in comparison to the pain that humans feel: “human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not.”25So, by this line of thinking, does, somehow, the ability to process pain, and to make it more “bearable,” positions humans as more attuned, and therefore more justified, in doling out pain to others? Just because animals, or “rubes,” cannot process the idea of pain and suffering in the same manner as others does not mean that the pain is absent, which actually appears to be the implied human argument against the True Knot, that their dietary choices cause unnecessary pain because humans can understand and process the pain in a different manner than the animals that humans eat. However, Pollan seems to suggest that, in food form, the animal pain and suffering that precluded the meat-making process somehow becomes acceptable because human pleasure is not only a desirable outcome, but also does not come with much emotional baggage as animals cannot process their mortality in the same way as humans. Yet, as Peter Singer states, “The capacity for suffering . . . is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language or higher mathematics,”26 suggesting that utter dismissal of animal pain, or categorizing animal pain into a conveniently lesser degree, is just another example of exceptionalism

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and self-interest at work. Moreover, Michael Pollan makes another awkward attempt to rationalize his view that human understanding of human practices and procedures is enough to warrant the current and typical human-animal relationships as he suggests that, for example, “A trip to the dentist would be an agony for an ape that couldn’t be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure,”27 ultimately indicating that because humans understand the purpose of dentistry, or the constructed purpose of slaughter for sustenance, any resulting lack of understanding by outside parties is their “natural” fault and therefore subjects them to the “superior” practices that have been developed, justified, and rationalized by other groups. More to the point, through the previous explorations of exceptionalism as the bedrock for certain views and decisions regarding “inferior” creatures, it can then be argued that the members of the True Knot almost take on the role of the human looking at the animal as merely a source of sustenance as they hunt and kill humans with “special” mental capabilities so as to feed and survive. Yet the idea of “survival” in this case is abhorrent to Danny Torrance and the young Abra Stone as the existence of the True Knot ultimately necessitates, in a loose sense of the word, their extermination. Indeed, Danny, Abra, and others like them have become “animals” that are hunted and have chosen to fight back, and many readers come to champion the actions of Danny and Abra because they are fighting against an oppressive group. But, as has been implied and stated, there is a rub. With the True Knot, the band of nonhumans who scour the country for food sources, King’s Constant Reader is given (again, perhaps accidentally) a collection of individuals whose actions, attitudes, perceptions, and rationalizations come under much negative scrutiny throughout the course of the novel. But the True Knot members are hardly the individuals most open for critique within Doctor Sleep—they are, in my estimation, hardly distinguishable from the humans that hunt and exterminate them. Of course, the True Knot, in terms of their general existence and biological composition, are notably different from humans as Eleanor Ouellette, a dying woman whom Danny Torrance comforts in her dying moments, gives a broad but critical insight into the nature of the True Knot: “‘The empty devils are on the land like a cancer on the skin. Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across eastern Europe. They eat screams and drink pain.’”28 This is as close of an origin story as we get for the specific type of creature that comprise the True Knot, and whether or not these individuals were born or made themselves into what they are, perhaps through some sort of strange magic that is only real within the Stephen King universe, the larger quandary to navigate is how and why these beings have perpetuated their existence in the way that they have chosen, and why new members choose to live among this tribe. While members of the True Knot have much more

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control over their initial existence and identities, whereas human children are born because their parents procreated (whether naturally or through scientific means), both members of the True Knot and the human race have choices to make regarding their survival and existence that further reveal a particular vegan view within the text. Regarding issues of choice, like the choice one has to eat or refrain from consuming animals and animal products, King’s development and exploration of the True Knot reveals two critical points about choice that warrant attention. First and foremost, the choice to become a member of the True Knot is revealing as to the nature of the individuals who comprise this group. To clarify, while the origins of the True Knot, as a whole, are clouded, most members made the choice to join this collective. Consider one of the earliest scenes within Doctor Sleep in which Rose the Hat identifies a certain level of “talent” within the character who becomes Snakebite Andi, a girl with the power to lull people into deep sleeps through a real power of suggestion (rather than a carnival-esque version of hypnosis). In this situation, Rose ultimately sells Andi on the benefits of becoming a member of the True Knot, if she were willing to undergo a little pain for a life of potential immortality. As a part of this sell, Rose the Hat says to Andi that if she were to decide against joining the True Knot, she would have her memory wiped and would be left alone in a random town, which certainly facilitates the sell as this false dilemma—isolation or belonging and contributing to a powerful group—makes the choice seem easy. But aside from the minor threat of being left alone to fend for herself, Rose goes further and argues that Andi and her talent is not necessarily beneficial or useful to the True Knot as it currently stands: “‘You don’t have enough steam to bother with, dear, and what you do have would be far from yummy. It would taste the way the meat from a tough old crow tastes to a rube.’”29 With these words, Andi’s choice is almost made for her—she has been persuaded that a life of immortality, and a life that could enhance her currently “tasteless” power, is preferable to the life she currently leads. Yet, Andi does have a choice—she can choose to be forgotten, cast aside, and left to defend herself from the world—but later in Doctor Sleep, she claims “‘We didn’t choose to be what we are any more than you did. In our shoes, you’d do the same.’”30 Here, the twists and turns of the preceding sentences meet at a key point: Andi’s declaration that there is no choice in terms of her existence or her actions. However, as the Constant Reader knows, Andi had the option to remain outside the circle of the True Knot, and that Rose’s appeal to Andi’s ego (and libido) brought her into the tribe. Therefore, any choice that Andi makes after her “becoming” is not a matter of automatic or necessary action—her choices are questioned because she did indeed choose to live a certain life, a life which she came to discover (perhaps after voluntarily avoiding or rejecting the reality of her

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new lifestyle) would generally involve the constant death of certain, special humans so that she could live a life that she chose, and not a life that she was born into. So when Andi says that she had no choice but to participate in the brutal murder of Trevor Bradley, and that she had no choice but to agree to hunt down Abra Stone so that her tribe could feed off Abra’s “steam” so as to “survive,” her actual origins as a member of the True Knot largely contradict and erase the argument that there is no choice for her or her “family” to kill humans with exceptional abilities that can become nourishment for another species. But even if one were to argue that a complete denial of the “nature” of the True Knot would lead to their extinction, and that they have to do what they do in order to survive, a few important additional considerations must be made first. Assuredly, the True Knot may not have the dietary choices that humans have—from meat, to dairy, to fruits and vegetables, etc.—but this is not to say that they can only survive off the torture of others. Indeed, as humans possess the ability to communicate with the True Knot, at least beyond screams of agony that tend to constitute the muddled but clearly painful communication between slaughtered animals and humans, it stands to reason that some sort of accord might be made between the True Knot and the specific types of humans that populate their dinner menus. Of course, this venture into “rewriting” Doctor Sleep is not merely a matter of trying to envision some sort of vegan utopia within the Stephen King canon, but, rather, it is a matter of revealing a sense of hypocrisy among the True Knot that their human food sources share. To be sure, returning to the idea that Snakebite Andi would not be a “tasty” meal for the True Knot, the proposition that certain humans are “tasteless,” but still likely a functional means of nourishment, tells us much about Rose the Hat, the True Knot, and King’s (accidental) vegan manifesto. Indeed, the most revealing aspect of Rose’s words to Andi is the use of the word “yummy”—this single word indicates that Rose, and the rest of the True Knot, are, to a degree, connoisseurs, with telekinetic/telepathic “steam” operating much in the way a well-seasoned steak would for a human: the pepper, salt, butter, and so forth are certainly a means of making a form of sustenance more pleasurable, but the added pleasure involved is rather unnecessary if one is arguing upon the basis of survival above all else.31 Setting aside issues of pleasure, hedonism, and the potential problems of complete and utter personal denial, whether related to food or other activities, one must consider that Rose the Hat, like Andi, has also made a rather telling choice regarding her identity and diet. In other words, had Rose the Hat and the True Knot been in a dire need for their form of “food,” Andi’s small and tasteless amount of steam would have been useful; yet, Rose’s attitude and language suggests that she and her tribe would rather “suffer” in order to find and enjoy particular meals, one of which happens to occur on September 11, 2001. The point here

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is that Rose and the True Knot are more human than we, or at least Danny and Abra, might like to let on—they view “life” as simply a means to an end, and the primary end is their pleasurable survival that comes about by way of violent ends to human life, which is really just a matter of seasoning their food, to extend the metaphor. To be sure, throughout Doctor Sleep, the attitudes toward “food” that the True Knot expresses can tell us much about their perspectives and perceptions, especially regarding issues of pleasure and taste that coincide with typical human diets. With the True Knot, they are like most any living creature in that most forms of nourishment can sustain life, and as such, taste is actually rather immaterial when it comes to mere survival, and whether one is thinking of an Abra Stone and her exceptional stores of purportedly delicious “steam” or Snakebite Andi’s small, tasteless quantity of “steam,” all the True Knot genuinely needs is some form of “steam” to feed on. As King himself says, “You couldn’t always have steak. Sometimes you had to settle for bean sprouts and tofu. At least they kept the body and soul together until you could butcher the next cow.”32 However, Rose the Hat and the True Knot are not interested in the steam equivalent to tofu, as is implied with King’s addendum (“until you could butcher the next cow”), perhaps partly in the same way that many humans dislike vegetables or soy-based foods—there is reportedly often little pleasure involved. Therefore, King tells the Constant Reader that there is some reason, albeit a bit skewed, as to why the True Knot embraces torture and pain as part of their food production: “‘The more they [the True Knot] hurt them [“steamheads”] before, the stronger that stuff is.’”33 In this sense, the True Knot torture their food/victims, or seek out various disasters like tornadoes touching down upon trailer parks or even 9/11—“There might only have been a couple of true steamheads among those who died when the Towers fell, but when the disaster was big enough, agony and violent death had an enriching quality”34—in order to consume “stronger” food that is arguably not really more nourishing than any other form of steam that could be consumed by, say, entering into some sort of contract with a “steamhead” who might be willing to surrender his or her steam to feed the True Knot. While humans cannot enter into a rational or completely symbiotic relationship with animal food sources, it stands to reason that the True Knot, conversely, could have facilitated a “golden goose” deal with an individual who possesses the steam that they require for their survival, regardless of the “taste” of such steam. Indeed, while King writes that the pain a human endures somehow seems to strengthen the steam that the True Knot “ingests,” the veal-like quality in play here suggests that a different meal is likely more appropriate for actual, rational survival. Less tasty, but still fully nourishing, steam from, say, terminally ill adults who consciously and willingly allow the True Knot to consume their psychic energies might seem like a far-fetched scenario,

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especially concerning the fictional nature of the story at hand. But such is not unreasonable to conceive. Undoubtedly, reason, or at least a limited human conception of reason, suggests that the True Knot, like the humans they devour, is not necessarily a collection of rational people. Even Abra recognizes this and asks Rose the Hat “‘What’s reasonable about killing kids so you can steal the stuff in their minds? What’s reasonable about that, you cowardly old whore?’”35The use of the word “reason” here indicates that there may be a logic behind the actions of the True Knot, just as there is a particular logic behind humans eating meat, but logic is hardly foolproof or even ethical (consider the general business logic— make money no matter what, even if that involves the death of a worker; just hire a new, and perhaps, cheaper one). With Abra’s query alongside the numerous criticisms that have already been highlighted here, it is likely accurate to adapt Abra’s ultimate view of the True Knot: “‘A tribe of cowards is what you are. . . . You think you’re so talented and so strong, but the only thing you’re really good at is eating and living long lives. You’re like hyenas. You kill the weak and then run away. Cowards.’”36With this declaration, one could take Abra’s words to serve as a reminder that as theoretically rational creatures, humans and the True Knot are able to enter into clearly agreed upon “contracts” regarding moral/ethical behavior, yet defer to views and attitudes that are “barbaric” and clearly subjugate and demean the lives from which both parties try to separate themselves. The question, though, is if humans, or King’s fictionalized “monsters,” will utilize this critical aspect of their existence—the ability to consider reasonable, painless alternatives to current habits and desires—or, instead, transform into and embrace the very “animalistic” creatures that they have labeled, defined, and treated as lesser beings deserving of terrible fates because of their inability to be, well, human. In other words, both the humans and members of the True Knot in Doctor Sleep fail to meet the definition of “human” that they implicitly forward, allowing the Constant Reader to be highly critical of their actions and attitudes, and perhaps, if only slightly, aligning with a vegan perspective that extends far beyond dietary choices. If the Constant Reader can look at the True Knot as not necessarily monstrous individuals, but, rather, just another form of “humans” that engage in the same forms of mental gymnastics that actual humans engage in for personal pleasure and comfort, then perhaps Doctor Sleep gains a status as much more than a sequel to one of the most popular horror stories of the last fifty years. By way of the vegan lens, one can read Doctor Sleep as a text of overcoming addictions and demons that are not always in a bottle of booze or in a line of cocaine (as the AA angle of the text is hard to ignore within the larger conversation at hand). As Kim Socha has noted in her examination of animal rights and the atheist perspective, when it comes to looking at human beliefs and actions regarding anything from food to religion, “It is not easy to deviate

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from the norm, especially when said deviation includes calling out long-held beliefs, some of which determine an individual or group’s identity. Further, it is difficult to muddle these traditions when they have served humans well in some ways and continue to serve us well within specific contexts.”37 And as the True Knot comes under fire for their views and practices within Doctor Sleep, the same anger, or at least concern with an arguably destructive practice, reaches beyond the page and reminds the Constant Reader of the many obstacles that humans also face when asked to analyze their own identities against those of the True Knot. Still, it would seem safe to say that most would nonetheless consider the members of the True Knot to be automatic monsters who deserve to die for what they practice and believe. Yet, to wish for the demise of the True Knot is to wish for the end of many things that currently comprise the human condition, namely a desire for power and submission on behalf of those who are seen as lesser, inferior beings that are “needed” for survival. Defeating the True Knot, in one sense, is defeating ideas and ideals that make individuals more inhuman and inhumane. Or, as I see it, Doctor Sleep is not a story in which good triumphs over evil; rather, I read it (perhaps accidentally) as a story in which, simply put, one evil triumphs over another evil. In this case, humans triumph over the True Knot only to replace them at the top of the food pyramid and, thus, take up the same identities that they have largely condemned throughout the text, ultimately embracing their own monstrosity and perpetuating it despite the option for more reasonable, but apparently less exceptionally human, alternatives. NOTES 1. This general plotline is quite similar to that of Black House as Tyler Marshall is a coveted child with a particular shine or “steam” that makes him a powerful “breaker,” a term reserved for individuals within the Dark Tower series whose exceptional abilities are desired much in the same way that Abra Stone’s “steam” is desired by Rose the Hat and the True Knot in Doctor Sleep. 2. Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2008), 2. 3. “Vegansim” can be classified in several ways (dietary, environmental, and ethical), and from the ethical standpoint, such vegans chose not to consume animal products from meat to eggs, or utilize items from leather to wool, and even abstain from ingesting honey to certain types of alcohol that, for example, have been filtered through fish bladders during the filtration process because of the ethical concerns related to how such products are created (via animal suffering or oppression). It is imperative to note that veganism is not always necessarily a matter of idealism; many vegans look toward their practices and lifestyles as mere attempts to lessen the use of animal products in their lives as much as practicality and possibility afford. 4. Bob Torres, Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 137.

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5. Parasecoli, Bite Me, 12. 6. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2007), 6. 7. Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror Books, 1996), 22. 8. Ibid., 87. 9. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Harper-Collins, 1975; 2002), 6. 10. Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (New York: Gallery, 2014), 160. 11. Ibid., 217. 12. Ibid., 218. Additionally, as is explored in Doctor Sleep, between feedings off individuals who possess great quantities of steam, like the potential source of sustenance found in Abra Stone and the actual quantity, and quality, of sustenance found in Trevor Bradley, the True Knot is often relegated to functioning as scavengers, as it were—they are able to utilize something similar to clairvoyance to anticipate destructive disasters that would kill a large enough amount of people so that, theoretically, a strong “steamhead” or two would be among the dead, thus serving as nourishment (rather than scraps) for the True Knot. 13. Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2006), 51. 14. King, Doctor Sleep, 174, emphasis added. 15. Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, 38. 16. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 332. 17. King, Doctor Sleep, 30. 18. Gary Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia UP, 2008), 141. 19. Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, 24. 20. King, Doctor Sleep, 363. 21. Ibid. 22. Francione, Animals as Persons, 10. 23. Singer, Animal Liberation, 224. 24. Ibid., 222. 25. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 316. 26. Singer, Animal Liberation, 7. 27. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 316. 28. King, Doctor Sleep, 257. 29. Ibid., 26. 30. Ibid., 364. 31. Interestingly, King revisits this same mindset with El Cuco in his 2018 novel, The Outsider, perhaps furthering his “accidental” vegan manifesto (or perhaps intertextually explaining the origin of this creature as kin to the True Knot). 32. Ibid., 154. 33. Ibid., 293, emphasis added. 34. Ibid., 155. 35. Ibid., 447, emphasis added. 36. Ibid. 37. Kim Socha, Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed (St. Paul: Freethought House, 2014), 188.

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Index

9/11, 40–42, 203–15, 229–30 11/22/63, 11, 183–95 1408 (film), 16 “1408” (short story), 15–16 Abelson, Roland, 210 Abington, Vicky, 51 abuse. See violence Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 189–90, 192, 199n49, 210 Allgood, Cuthbert, 207, 210 Anderson, Bob (“Beadie”), 14, 18– 19n25 Anderson, Darcy, 14, 18–19n25 Anderson, Michael, 48 Babineau, Felix, 119, 122–23 “Bad Little Kid,” 48, 50–52 Bannister, Nancy, 74, 75 Bates, Norman, 84, 114, 117, 119 “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” 47 The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 3, 7–8, 14–15, 45–56 Beecher, Harvey, 15, 47 Bissette, Andy, 74, 75 Black House, 232n1 Blaisdell, Jr., Clayton, 29–30 Blaze, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28–30, 31

Bleeding Edge, 209 Bloch, Robert, 117, 158 Bloom, Harold, 7–8 Bowie, Dave, 25–28 Bradbury, Ray, 151, 153–55, 186, 189–90 Bradley, Len, 50 Bundy, Ted, 92–93, 116 Burkett, Mary, 49–50 Burkett, Ray, 49 Burlingame, Gerald, 64–69 Burlingame, Jessie, 46, 62, 64–70 Callahan, Chad, 47 Callahan, Father Donald, 204, 205 Cambers, Charity, 61, 64 Cambers, Joe, 61 Carrie, 10, 61, 198n34 Castle Rock, 148 The Catcher in the Rye, 189, 199n46 Chambers, Jake, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 203 “Children of the Corn,” 6 Chizmar, Richard, 45, 54, 56 Church (Pet Sematary), 129 Claiborne, Dolores, 46, 62, 70–76, 79 Cocoran, Mimi, 189, 199n46 247

248

The Colorado Kid, 21, 22, 24, 25–28 Coslaw, Mike, 190 Creed, Gage, 129 Creed, Louis, 128–31, 133, 134–35, 137, 140, 159–60 Creed, Rachel, 129 Cujo, 61, 64 Curran, Katie, 48 D’Amico, Sonja, 206 Daniels, Norman, 76, 78–79, 84–95 Daniels, Rose, 46, 62, 76–80 Danse Macabre, 109, 150 The Dark Tower, 115, 201n67, 202n84, 203–15 David (The Dark Tower), 208 Davies, Robertson, 167–74 The Dead Zone, 16, 17, 151, 156 Dean, Eddie, 207, 212 Dean, Susannah (Mia), 204, 207 Dearborn, Sandy, 27–28 Death, 14–15, 16, 28, 30, 34, 35, 71, 84, 95, 127, 129–33, 159, 224, 229–31 “A Death,” 47 Delgado, Susan, 207, 208 Deptford Trilogy, 167–79 Derry, 162, 188, 194, 200n55–56 Deschain, Roland, 205, 207–15 devil, the, 11, 33–42 Dexter, 106, 107 Different Seasons, 5, 6 Doctor Sleep, 219–32 “Dolan’s Cadillac,” 7 Dolarhyde, Francis (the Red Dragon), 118, 119 Dolores Claiborne, 13, 14, 17, 45, 53, 56, 62–65, 70–76, 79, 80 Donovan, Vera, 73–74 Doppleganger, 33, 35–36, 39, 42 Dracula, 4 Drew, Stefan, 132 “The Dune,” 10, 15, 17, 47 Dunhill, Sadie, 187, 189–91, 193–94, 196n19, 198n41, 199n51, 200nn53, 62, 201n63, 202n84

Index

Dunning, Harry, 189, 193, 202n72 Eagleton, Jimmy, 210 Elvid, George, 34, 40, 153–54 End of Watch, 113, 118, 119–23 Enslin, Katie, 16 Enslin, Mike, 16 Epping, Jake, 15, 183–95, 196nn11, 19, 198n41, 199nn46, 51–52, 199–200n53, 200nn54, 56, 201nn57, 63, 202nn72, 84 Erinyes (Rose Madder), 77–78 Everything’s Eventual (collection), 3, 12, 14, 15 “Everything’s Eventual” (short story), 10 “Fair Extension,” 33–42 Faulkner, William, 198n36 Faust, 33, 38, 40, 42, 162 feminism, 17, 45–56, 61–80 Fey, Franklin, 159 Fey, Mary, 127, 131, 141, 156, 159, 160, 161, 172, 176 Fifth Business, 168–78 Finders Keepers, 113, 119, 120 Flagg, Randall, 155 Frankenstein, 127–41, 149–50, 151, 156–57 Frankenstein, Victor, 128–29, 134– 35, 137, 140–41, 151, 152, 160, 162 Franklin, Benjamin, 152–53, 155–56, 159, 160 Franklin, Ollie, 47 Freemantle, Edgar, 148 Freemont, Veronica, 132 From a Buick, 8, 21–25, 27–31 Full Dark, No Stars, 12–15, 34 Fury, Tom, 151, 153–54, 168 Gardner, Jim, 168 Gaunt, Leland, 153–54, 168 Gerald’s Game, 13, 14, 17, 45, 53, 56, 62–70, 80 Ghost Story, 154

Index

Gibney, Holly, 94–95, 108–9, 113, 115, 118, 123 Gilmore, Blake, 132 “The Gingerbread Girl,” 13, 17 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 46 “Good Country People,” 156 Goodhugh, Tom, 35–42 “A Good Marriage,” 13–15, 17 gothic, 5, 119, 122, 123, 127–41, 147– 63, 203, 204 The Great God Pan, 156, 159 Greek myth, 76–78 Gumb, Jame (Buffalo Bill), 118–19, 122 The Gunslinger, 203, 207, 209 Gwendy’s Button Box, 45, 46, 53–56 Hallas, George, 50–51 Halleck, Billy, 54 Hannon, Maureen, 210 Harris, Thomas, 92, 117, 118, 122 Hartsfield, Brady, 84–96, 101–3, 105– 10, 113, 116, 119–23 Hartsfield, Deborah, 85, 88–89 Hartsfield, Frankie, 105 Haverford, Pamela, 88 Henreid, Phil, 47 “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive,” 47–48 Hitchcock, Alfred, 117 Hodges, Bill (Kermit William), 17, 84, 86–92, 94–95, 101–2, 106, 108, 1110, 113–29 Huntley, Pete, 123 Iraq War, 42 IT, 161, 188, 197–98n34 Jacobs, Charles, 128–41, 153, 155, 157–62, 168–69 Jacobs, Marlee, 48 Jacobs, Morrie, 136 Jacobs, Patricia, 136, 138 Jasmine (“Herman Wouk Is Still Alive”), 48 Job, 33, 37–38, 41 Johns, Alain, 207 Just After Sunset, 14, 15

249

Keene, Norbert, 188 Kennedey, John F., 183–93, 196nn10, 14, 197n22, 199n44, 200n53–54 Kinnersley, Ebenezer, 152, 155, 157–58 Knowles, Vince, 190 Lanza, Adam, 101–9 “Last Rung on the Ladder,” 6 Lecter, Hannibal, 92–93, 116–17, 119, 122–23 “The Lightning-Rod Man,” 152 Linoge, André, 154 “The Little Green God of Agony,” 47 Lovecraft, H. P., 150, 154–56, 158–59, 161–62, 168, 198n36 “L.T.’s Theory of Pets,” 12 “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” 12 Machen, Arthur, 156, 158, 179n4 Machiavellianism, 129, 133, 135–40 Madder, Rose, 76–79 Mahout, Sally, 65–66 Mahout, Tom, 65–69 “The Man in the Black Suit,” 8, 10 The Manticore, 168, 175–77 “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” 99– 100, 105 Marlowe, Christopher, 33–34, 36 Marsh, Beverly, 188 Marshall, Tyler, 232n1 Mason, Bruce, 210 Mason, Janice, 212 McCann, Stephanie, 25–26, 28 McCarthy, Nona (Mama Nonie), 50–51 McFarland, Trisha, 46 Melville, Herman, 150, 152–53 mental illness, 102–4, 106–9 Mephistopheles, 33, 162 “Mile 81,” 12, 46, 47 “The Mist,” 7 “Mister Yummy,” 47 “The Monkey,” 7, 17 “The Monkey’s Paw,” 159 “Morality,” 10, 47 Mordred (The Dark Tower), 204 Morgan, Dexter, 92, 106–7, 116–17

250

Index

Morse, Cathy, 132, 138–39 Morton, Jamie, 132–33, 136–39, 157–58, 160–62, 168–73, 175–77, 179n28 Mother (Revival), 159–61, 176–77, 179n28 Mr. Dark (Something Wicked This Way Comes), 153 Mr. Mercedes, 83–84, 91, 93–94, 101– 2, 107, 113, 118–19, 122–23 Mr. Newsome (“The Little Green God of Agony”), 47 Mr. Pease (Dolores Claiborne), 72–74 narcissism, 129, 135–37, 140–41 Neary, Ruth, 69–70 Needful Things, 17, 148, 150, 168, 202n84 Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 6–7 Night Shift, 6–8 Norma (“The Man Who Loved Flowers”), 99–100 Nyarlathothep, 154–55 “Obits,” 48 O’Connor, Flannery, 156 Of Mice and Men, 29, 190, 199n52 On Writing, 11, 187–88 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 184, 186–87, 191, 196n10, 199nn49, 52 Ouellett, Eleanor, 227 Pangborn, Alan, 168 Pascow, Victor, 130, 133 Patterson, Janey, 115, 117 Pennywise (IT), 161 Pennywise Dreadful, viii Peterson, Gwendy, 46, 53–56 Pet Sematary, 127–28, 130–31, 133, 141, 159, 161 “The Philosophy of Composition,” 4 Picasso, Pablo, 9 Pickering, Jim, 13 Poe, Edgar Allan, 4–6, 10, 13, 16, 198n36

“Premium Harmony,” 48–49 Proulx, Frank, 74, 75 psychopathy, 107, 113–23, 129, 131, 135–40, 141 Rackley, George, 29–30 “The Raft,” 7 “The Reach,” 7, 15, 17 Revival, 116, 127–41, 147–63, 167–78, 179n28 “Riding the Bullet,” 17 “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” vii Rivard, Robert, 132 Robinson, Jerome, 102, 108, 115, 123 Roof, Dylann, 107–8 Rose Madder, 10, 13, 45, 53, 56, 62, 64, 76–80 Rose the Hat (Doctor Sleep), 222–23, 228–31, 232n1 Ruiz, Sheemie, 207, 208 Rymer, Candy, 48, 52 Sanderson (“Batman and Robin Have an Altercation”), 47 Sandy Hook Elementary School, 100– 101, 103–4, 107, 109–10 serial killers, 83–85, 91–93, 113–19, 123–24 The Shawshank Redemption, 10, 16 Sheldon, Paul, 21, 24–25, 30 Shelley, Janice, 159 Shelley, Mary, 127–29, 131, 141, 149, 151, 156, 159, 167 Sheriff Barclay (“A Death”), 47 The Shining, vii, 5, 10, 16, 64, 119, 219 short story, 3–6, 8, 10, 16 The Silence of the Lambs, 92, 122–23 Simmons, Deke, 189 Simmons, George, 47 Skeleton Crew, 6–8 Sliverman, Ellen, 48, 52 Slowik, Peter, 88, 89 Smith, John, 15, 17 Smith, Wesley, 47, 48, 52

Index

Snakebite Andi (Doctor Sleep), 225, 228–30 Something Wicked This Way Comes, 151, 153 Soprano, Tony, 106 The Sopranos, 106 “The Sound of Thunder,” 186, 189, 190, 199n51 Staley, Scott, 206–8, 210, 212 The Stand, 5, 10, 46, 155, 175, 198n38 Stand by Me, 10 Steinbeck, John, 114, 190, 198n36, 199n52, 202n84 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 14, 35 St. George, Joe, 70–75 St. George, Selena, 71–74 Stillson, Greg, 156 Stone, Abra, 222–23, 225, 227, 229–31, 232n1, 233n12 Stone, Dave, 225 The Storm of the Century, 154 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 14, 35 Stranger Things, 11 Straub, Peter, 154 “Strawberry Spring,” 7 Streeter, Dave, 34–39, 41, 153 Sturdevant, Mike, 109 Teague, Vince, 24–28 Templeton, Al, 184, 185, 187, 192, 193 “That Bus Is Another World,” 48 The Things They Carried, 215n4 “The Things They Left Behind,” 204, 206, 209–13, 215n4 Thinner, 54

251

The Tommyknockers, vii, 168 Torrance, Danny (Dan), 219, 227, 230 Tozier, Richie, 188 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 33 Trelawney, Olivia, 101–2, 108, 115 Trevor, Bradley, 225, 229, 233n12 Troop D (From a Buick 8), 24 The True Knot (Doctor Sleep), 219–32 Twain, Mark, 153 “Uncle Otto’s Truck,” 10 Updike, John, 150 veganism, 219–32, 232n3 Vernon, Julianne, 46–47 Vietnam War, 94, 194, 197, 215n4 violence: against children, 29–30, 61, 65–67, 72, 95, 102; against women, 13, 49, 61–80, 85, 91, 170 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 33, 36, 38, 40, 42, 162–63 Warburton, Eddie, 168 War on Terror, 208, 215n4 Wayland, Anthony, 15 Wilcox, Ned, 27–28 Wilkes, Annie, 13, 21 Wilson (“That Bus Is Another World”), 47–48 The Witches of Eastwick, 150 “The Woman in the Room,” 6, 17 World of Wonders, 168, 170, 174, 176–77, 179nn19, 24, 28

About the Editors

Patrick McAleer is cochair of the Stephen King Area of the Popular Culture Association’s Annual National Conference and has presented papers on Stephen King every year he has attended this conference since 2005. He is the author of Inside the Dark Tower Series (2009) and The Writing Family of Stephen King (2011), and he is the coauthor of two anthologies on Stephen King: Stephen King's Modern Macabre (2014, with Michael Perry), and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics (2014, with Philip L. Simpson). Philip L. Simpson received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Eastern Illinois University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and his doctorate in American Literature from Southern Illinois University in 1996. His first book, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction, was published in 2000 by Southern Illinois University Press; his second book, Making Murder: The Fiction of Thomas Harris, was published in 2010 by Praeger Press.

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About the Contributors

Stefan L. Brandt is a full professor of American Studies at the University of Graz. His notable publications include The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America (1945 - 1960) (2007), and the forthcoming edited collection Fantastic Cities: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (with Michael Fuchs and Steve Rabitsch). His research interests are varied and include Spaces of Liminality, New Metropolitanism, and Transnational Bildungsroman. Kimberly Beal is currently working on her PhD at Kent State University. Her work focuses primarily on twentieth-century and twenty-first-century popular fiction and popular culture. She works mainly within the horror genre, but is also interested in the science fiction, fantasy, and mystery genres. Mary Findley is a tenured faculty member at Vermont Technical College where she teaches, among other courses, “The Films and Novels of Stephen King,” “The Vampire in Literature, Culture and Film,” “Gothic Themes and Social Issues in Film” and “Popular Culture: Zombies and Consumerism.” She has published various essays on Stephen King's fiction and has been reading and studying his works for as long as she can remember. Rebecca Frost is the author of The Ripper's Victims in Print: The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929 (2018). She is the Assessment/Accreditation Coordinator at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College, where she also teaches composition and a popular course on true crime. Dominick Grace is Professor of English at Brescia University College. His primary area of scholarly interest is popular culture. His publications 255

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About the Contributors

include The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb: A Critical Reading, as well as numerous articles on topics on film, genre literature (especially science fiction), and comics, along with canonical authors such as Shakespeare and Chaucer. He has also coedited several books with Eric Hoffman, including The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novel; Dave Sim: Conversations; Chester Brown: Conversations; Seth: Conversations; and Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series. Patrick McAleer is co-chair of the Stephen King Area of the Popular Culture Association’s Annual National Conference and has presented papers on Stephen King every year he has attended this conference since 2005. He is the author of Inside the Dark Tower Series (2009) and The Writing Family of Stephen King (2011), and he is the co-author of two anthologies on Stephen King: Stephen King’s Modern Macabre (2014, with Michael Perry), and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics (2014, with Philip L. Simpson). Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century Century American Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University Southern, where she teaches courses in composition, American literature, and creative writing. She edits the poetry magazine Sheila-NaGig online (https://sheilanagigblog.com) and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Clotilde Landais is Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Her research includes North American imaginative fiction, translation studies, and postmodernism. She has notably published articles in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, in the @nalyses journal published by the University of Ottawa, and in the Oxford journal Literary Imagination. She is also the author of Stephen King as a Postmodern Author (2013). Conny L. Lippert received her doctorate from the University of Bristol in 2014. Her thesis focused on topographies in Stephen King’s and H. P. Lovecraft’s gothic works. She earned a Master’s degree from the University of Nottingham in 2008 and Bachelor’s degree from the University of Bayreuth in 2007. Her research interests are gothic and horror fiction, popular literature, popular culture, and American literature, and her doctoral thesis focused on topographies in Stephen King’s and H. P. Lovecraft’s gothic works. Tony Magistrale is a Professor of English at the University of Vermont and has published numerous books and articles on the works of Stephen King. Some of his more recent books on King include Stephen King: America’s

About the Contributors

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Storyteller, The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to the Mist (2012), and The Shawshank Experience (2016, with Maura Grady). Jennifer L. Miller is a faculty member in English at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. Her research focuses on science fiction/fantasy literature and multicultural American literature, though she enjoys exploring a wide range of topics in popular culture, from Disney movies to Stranger Things. When not reading or writing, she enjoys camping, hiking, and quilting. Michael Perry is an Associate Professor of English at Rockford University. He currently serves as Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and as Faculty Athletic Representative. He teaches twentieth-century literatures in English, creative writing, and rhetoric. He lives in Rockford with his wife, Karen, a registered nurse; three kids, Caleb, Julian, and Zoey; and a new Mastiff puppy named KD. Alexandra Reuber earned her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University and is currently a Senior Professor of Practice of French at Tulane University. Her research interests focus on gothic and horror fiction, popular culture studies, adaptation theory, second language acquisition, and foreign language pedagogy. Regarding Stephen King, some of her recent publications include “In Search of the Lost Object in a Bad Place: Stephen King’s Contemporary Gothic” in Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror (2014) and “More Than Just Ghost Lore in a Bad Place. Mikael Håfström’s Cinematographic Translation of 1408” in Stephen King’s Modern Macabre. Essays on the Later Works (2014). Philip L. Simpson is Provost of the Titusville campus and eLearning at Eastern Florida State College. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Eastern Illinois University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and his doctorate in American Literature from Southern Illinois University in 1996. His first book, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction, was published in 2000 by Southern Illinois University Press; his second book, Making Murder: The Fiction of Thomas Harris, was published in 2010 by Praeger Press. He is co-editor of two anthologies, one on Stephen King and another on The Walking Dead, as well as the author of numerous articles on film, literature, and popular culture.