They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”). Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a parable of adolescence. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell. In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). His mother died the same year from cancer at the age of 59. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. Unless you grew up under a rock, you're probably already aware of the Carrie story. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand. Nonfiction: Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra. By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. Related: DreyerâÃôs English, On Writing Well, Get access to my collection of 100+ detailed book notes. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage, then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers. The best form of dialogue attribution is said. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture. By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. In other words, not only has Stephen King written some genius novels (and short stories, novellas, essays, and works of criticism), but he’s written a lot of them—51 novels to date, in fact, with number 52 coming up shortly. The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. Something went wrong while submitting the form. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) Your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story. In this modernization of Frankenstein, King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). Itâs about getting up, getting well, and getting over. I think locale and texture are much more important to the readerâs sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players. Major Works In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. In a scary passage in Pet Sematary, Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. On Writing. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot, a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace. Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. It falls into the categories of post-apocalyptic science fiction and horror fantasy. Oops! Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist, is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. Life isnât a support-system for art. King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a parable of adolescence.Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. But if you… A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears.
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