There are two kinds of attitudes toward how to read King’s stories. Avid fans of horror are usually satisfied with the thrills of breathless tales replete with gruesome details. Don Herron, for instance, in “The Biggest Horror Fan of All,” proposes to enjoy rather than labor over King’s fiction: “isn’t it enough that King’s work is enjoyable to read? Why bother complicating it?” (qtd. in Magistrale, Landscape 53).1 Since the excitement comes mostly from not knowing what is going to happen next, readers demanding entertainment from King’s fiction are unlikely to re-read the stories, not to mention to look for their symbolic import. Readers searching for meaning in King’s stories are so greatly outnumbered by those who enjoy the action that David Punter raises the questions “Does anybody ever re-read King?
Are his texts susceptible to re-reading?” (“Laws” 160). The answers to these questions are
1 Magistrale also finds Herron’s reluctance to read between the lines contradictory with King’s belief in the symbology of horror literature in Danse Macabre, King’s “treatise on the symbolic representations of horror”
(Landscape 53).
positive for readers who believe in the social relevance of horror literature. Apart from being fantasies about nonexistent creatures and impossible events, horror stories, ever since the inception of their predecessor, Gothic fiction, in the eighteenth century, have been closely related to reality. No matter how otherworldly it appears, Gothic fantasy, as William Patrick Day asserts, springs from a writer’s views on the specific time he or she was born into: “The study of the gothic illuminates the unbroken connections between our imaginative life and our economic, social, and political life. . . . As a type of ‘fancy,’ it shows us how our imaginations, our escapes, our dreams, are influenced and formed by our place in history . . .”
(191). The association between imagination and reality is not lost when the Gothic literary tradition is carried into the twentieth century by modern horror writers. For example, King deems horror stories an ideal way for readers to exorcise their fears without having to confront them directly, thanks to the distancing effect of the incredible events and imaginary monsters: “The element of allegory is there only because it is built-in, a given, impossible to escape. Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight, with the bark still on . . .” (Danse 43).
King’s Gothic predecessors usually situate their stories in exotic places or in the past.
Though being historical and exotic, the trappings and devices of Gothic fiction, such as a decrepit castle located in a far-off land, still hint at fears of writers and their contemporaries:
“Gothic narratives never escaped the concerns of their own times, despite the heavily historical trappings” (Botting, Gothic 3). Nevertheless, the reference to reality in Gothic fiction tends to be so indirect that Tzvetan Todorov calls into question a symbolic reading of Gothic fantasy, such as a political or psychoanalytical interpretation, when there is no evidence in the text to support such a reading: “We must insist on the fact that we cannot speak of allegory unless we find explicit indications of it within the text” (73-4). Though American writers in the nineteenth century begin to include in their fiction portrayals of
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existent places and depictions of characters whose values and manners are not unlike their contemporaries, some writers, such as Hawthorne, prefer having their tales read as romance rather than realistic descriptions of the moment: “The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. . . .[I]t exposes the Romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment” (4). This is not to say that Hawthorne’s tales have little to do with the concerns of his time, though. In Tony Magistrale’s view, the addition of realistic elements to Gothic romance has the effect of strengthening the link between horror fiction and reality: “Melville and Hawthorne . . . contrived to ‘refine’ the gothic by highlighting and advancing the sociological and philosophical implications inherent in the horror story” (Landscape 106).
Unlike Hawthorne, King does not balk at the idea of having his stories located in reality.
He believes that horror stories that qualify as art usually have two levels. The first level provides readers with a spectacular show of monstrosity and mayhem while the second level hints secretly at real life. He recognizes the importance of horror stories’ social relevance by claiming that horror fiction can be defined as art because of the association on the subtextual level between fictive horrors and real-life fears: “Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points” (Danse 18). The addition of realistic details to an otherwise fantastic narrative helps ground fantasy in reality. Fears and anxieties that accompany major political, social and historical crises are commonplace in King’s fiction. For example, the devastating effect of Nazism lingers long after World War II was over when the boy in “Apt Pupil” lies and murders to cover up his falling grades and wayward behaviors as a result of a morbid craving for stories of unimaginably brutal deeds told by his neighbor, an ex-Nazi officer. In
“Hearts in Atlantis” the half-crazed passion for poker shared by a bunch of college students runs parallel to the senselessness of the Vietnam War. Poker marathons go on and on in the boys’ dormitory in spite of the fact that the boys would be sent off to war if they were to flunk out of school. Scott Staley, in “The Things They Left Behind,” worked in the World Trade Center in New York before it was attacked on September Eleventh, 2001. On the morning of the terrorist attacks, he got lucky by happening to be in the mood to skip work.
Then, the things that used to belong to his ex-colleagues who were killed in the incident began to show up in his apartment, a terrifying mystery that refused to be explained away even when New Yorkers try to move on with their lives by letting go of the traumatic memory of the horrible incident. No matter how incredible his imaginary monsters and supernatural occurrences are, King’s constant allusions to reality, including real places, brand names, celebrities, and events, make sure that readers will not lose their footing in reality. King’s horror landscape is never a fantasyland where readers are completely free from worries and anxieties about their everyday existence. As Edwin F. Casebeer points out, King’s ability to associate fantasy with reality suggests to readers that the world of fantasy that they wander into shares some disquieting similarity with the world that they try to escape from by reading: King “grounds fantasy in realism” and thus his work “offers more than escape fiction or ‘adrenaline’ fiction; it urges readers to confront squarely and disturbingly the horror in their own lives” (“Art” 43). As far as Magistrale is concerned, the connection between fantasy and reality serves at the foundation for King’s strength: “the use of the horror story as sociopolitical allegory is one of King’s major contributions to the genre” (Landscape 19-20).
Given the association of fantasy with the everyday world in King’s fictive universe, the supernatural elements are gradually construed as a “lurid metaphor” for horrible events in reality (Wood 147). For instance, the horrible deeds of the children in “Children of the Corn”
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suggest the story’s relevance to what happened in Vietnam in 1964 so long as the supernatural tale is read symbolically. Without the “major historical event” in view, the story might appear as an absurd story about a group of children who turn fanatically murderous for no apparent cause (Magistrale, “Inherited” 46). King understands and explores the parallel between fears aroused by horror fiction or films and fears caused by historical events. In Danse Macabre, he recalls the time when he was viewing a sci-fi movie about the invasion of the earth by the aliens. The manager of the theater abruptly interrupted the movie to announce a piece of disturbing news: “the Russians have beaten us into space” (22).2 The young King suddenly realized that the aliens in the movie were not really aliens from outer space; they were Russians, a real, rather than supernatural, threat to the United States. Speculating on the coincidence between major historical events and the production of books and films of horror, King cannot fail to notice how effective horror films and fiction are as a means to express fears and anxieties of people overwhelmed by terrible historical events: “Horror films and horror novels have always been popular, but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. Theses periods almost always coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties . . .” (Danse 40).
The real horror in King’s fiction is not so much about the collapse of the barrier between the human world and the supernatural; it is about the disintegration of “the barrier separating the human world from the bestial” (Magistrale, Landscape 40). The supernatural horror in King’s stories mostly results from man’s failure to maintain moral integrity which leads to both individual wickedness and the corruption of social institutions: “the gothic machinery . . . is more often than not revealed and/or aggravated by the failure of human love,
2 The announcement is “the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it . . . Spootnik” (King, Danse 21).
immoral choices, and the dysfunction of cultural institutions and social bonds” (Magistrale,
Landscape 26). The dominant issues in King’s canon enumerated by Magistrale are not
concerned with the intrusion of supernatural forces into the mundane world; rather, they are problems that many contemporary Americans find themselves grappling with day after day:“drug abuse, familial discord, fear of technological advances, the xenophobia of small-town America, religious zealotry, the general inability of social institutions to maintain their viability in the face of changing values and needs” (Introduction 3). Richard Bleiler notes that King’s fictive universe mirrors our own in that the individual is constantly under the threats of violence, sickness, and death: people’s lives are endangered by “random violence, the AIDS virus, ethnic cleansing, rapid genocide, rabies, car crashes, irrational imprisonment, the government run amok” (526). In Gary Hoppenstand’s opinion King’s fiction epitomizes modern American society, where people are not only intimidated by dangers in the surroundings, but also harrowed by the pressure of their day-to-day existence: the collective nightmare of American people includes “the stresses of living, the threat of terrorism, nuclear war, pollution, income taxes, IRAs, and the children’s college education” (9). Jonathan P.
Davis believes the feelings of uneasiness and dread that readers of King’s stories vicariously experience echo almost every kind of fear that they are forced to face in real life: “Fear comes in a variety of shapes and sizes—fear of rejection, failure, embarrassment, breaking taboos, bodily harm—but, as Stephen King points out, the granddaddy of all fears may well be the one that people most avoid addressing: death” (15). Besides the deteriorating natural environment, dangerous surroundings, and the stresses of life, King’s generation have been caught, like many generations in American history, between the idealist longing for national greatness and the brutality involved in progress and expansion. King and his contemporaries have faith in America’s safety and prosperity with an uneasy awareness of heightened tensions and growing risks as a result of more and more severe competition in nuclear
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armament between the First and Second Worlds: “We were the fertile ground for the seeds of horror; we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth . . . but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay after we won the war” (Danse 23). In King’s portrayal of American society, horror is indeed mundane and ubiquitous: “King’s monsters are found not on planets light years away or in other exotic foreign locations. Instead, they inhabit the groundfloors of American factories, high schools, and rectories” (Magistrale, Landscape 15). King’s horror landscape, as Lisa Rogak concludes, is painted by a man who finds everything fearful and accordingly lives in fear: “It’s probably no surprise that his fears rule every second of Stephen King’s existence. He is surrounded by them, and anyone who’s read even one of his novels knows that the most innocent item can be the harbinger of terror” (1). She goes on to cite a list of things King confesses that he is afraid of and makes use of in his fiction: “At various times through the years, King has rattled off a veritable laundry list of his fears: the dark, snakes, rats, spiders, squishy things, psychotherapy, deformity, close-in spaces, death, being unable to write, flying—fill in the blank, the list is long” (1).
In addition to having his stories set in specific historical contexts, King prevents his readers from losing track of reality by creating incredible events happening to ordinary people in recognizable surroundings. The realistic effect in King’s horror stories is partly achieved through the choice of ordinary people as main characters and the technique of characterization. It is King’s belief that a horror writer’s skill in rendering characters’
behaviors, personalities, and psychology convincingly is no less important than his or her ability to design or employ Gothic apparatus: “The stories themselves may be unbelievable.
But within the framework of the stories I’m concerned that what people do in these stories should be as real as possible and that the characters of the people should be as real as
possible” (King, “Interview” 232). Gresh and Weinberg observe that King prefers to feature fictitious human characters rather than imaginary monsters. Since his first novel Carrie: King
“produced a hybrid, a mainstream horror novel that focused on character development and ordinary people while keeping the monsters offstage and mostly in the background” (Gresh and Weinberg 2). For example, apart from those uncannily gifted children—their power is usually the only supernatural element in the otherwise realistic world in the stories—in some of King’s horror tales, most characters that people King’s fictive universe are common people:
they are “middle class men and women eking out a living in contemporary America” who are
“not superhuman but ordinary, flawed, and vulnerable” (Magistrale, “Inherited” 43). King’s portrayal of characters, praised by Casebeer, is almost as precise as photographs because of the attention King pays to details: “King is a highly accomplished realist with a keen eye for the nuances of image and voice” (45). In addition, the places where we find these highly realistic characters are no less convincing. King is most celebrated for his portrayals of small towns in the U. S.: “King is superb at drawing the realistic small town” (Foote 206). King’s small towns are not purely imaginary; they are based on those that really exist. King spent most of his childhood in Durham, Maine, where his mother was hired to take care of her aging parents.3 This fact leads some critics to figure that several fictional towns in King’s fiction were modeled on Durham: “The town of Durham was also important in King’s early life. It is the basis for Derry, Castle Rock, ’salem’s Lot, and all other small Maine towns in his work” (Russell, Revisiting 4). Magistrale supposes that the small towns in King’s writings are so realistically described that any movie director attempting to adapt his fiction for the screen
3 Before settling down in Durham, Nellie Pillsbury King and her sons, David and Stephen, moved from one place to another all over the country. She had been working hard to raise her sons after her husband abandoned the family. In Danse Macabre, in his usual playful manner when relating things about his past, including those unpleasant ones, King recalls: “We hopscotched our way across the country during those nine years, always returning to New England. In 1958 we returned to Maine for good. My grandfather and grandmother were into their eighties, and the family hired my mother to care for them in their declining years” (99). According to George Beahm in Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman, the cities where the King family had lived before they returned to Maine include “Malden, Massachusetts; Stratford, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; West De Pere, Wisconsin; and Fort Wayne, Indiana” (qtd. in Russell, Revisiting 2).
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might find it easy to have the fictive scenes set in a typical New England small town: “New England’s northern tier consists of scattered towns, rolling meadows, impenetrable woods and bogs. This is Stephen King’s country. Lancaster, New Hampshire, or Skowhegan, Maine could seamlessly be transformed into the sets for movie remakes of ’Salem’s Lot, It, or Stand
by Me” (Magistrale, Hollywood 1).
4 King disagrees with the critics about the importance of Durham in his writing and claims that he envisions Bangor, Maine rather than his hometown when creating small towns for his stories. During one of his interviews with Magistrale, he points out that it was Bangor, rather than Durham, that he had in mind when he created Derry and Castle Rock. Derry, one of the most famous fictional towns in King’s work, is named after Derry, Ireland, because of the association between Bangor and Derry: “in the geography of my mind, Bangor became Derry. There is a Bangor in Ireland, located in the county of Derry, so I changed the name of the fictional town to Derry. There is a one-to-one correlation between Bangor and Derry. It’s a place that I keep coming back to, even as recently as the novel Insomnia. And the same is true of Castle Rock” (King, “Steve’s” 4).5 King’s insistence on realistic renderings of characters and settings also testify to the weight of culture and interview with King. Besides, King also denies the link between Castle Rock and Lisbon Falls, where he went to high school: “There was a piece that appeared last week in the Sunday Telegram called ‘Stephen King’s Maine.’The writers said that Castle Rock was really Lisbon Falls, which is where I went to high school, but it’s not.
Castle Rock is a lot more fictionalized than Derry. Derry is Bangor” (King, “Steve’s” 4). However, Durham or Bangor or Lisbon Falls, King admits to the power that place has over his imagination. He even confesses to Magistrale his inability to set his stories in places other than Maine: “Sometimes I’ll deliberately move out, but
Castle Rock is a lot more fictionalized than Derry. Derry is Bangor” (King, “Steve’s” 4). However, Durham or Bangor or Lisbon Falls, King admits to the power that place has over his imagination. He even confesses to Magistrale his inability to set his stories in places other than Maine: “Sometimes I’ll deliberately move out, but