Pennywise Dreadful the Journal of Stephen King Studies
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1 Pennywise Dreadful The Journal of Stephen King Studies ————————————————————————————————— Issue 1/1 November 2017 2 Editors Alan Gregory Dawn Stobbart Digital Production Editor Rachel Fox Advisory Board Xavier Aldana Reyes Linda Badley Brian Baker Simon Brown Steven Bruhm Regina Hansen Gary Hoppenstand Tony Magistrale Simon Marsden Patrick McAleer Bernice M. Murphy Philip L. Simpson Website: https://pennywisedreadful.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @pennywisedread Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pennywisedread/ 3 Contents Foreword …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 2 “Stephen King and the Illusion of Childhood,” Lauren Christie …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 3 “‘Go then, there are other worlds than these’: A Text-World-Theory Exploration of Intertextuality in Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series,” Lizzie Stewart-Shaw …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 16 “Claustrophobic Hotel Rooms and Intermedial Horror in 1408,” Michail Markodimitrakis …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 31 “Adapting Stephen King: Text, Context and the Case of Cell (2016),” Simon Brown …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 42 Review: “Laura Mee. Devil’s Advocates: The Shining. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017,” Jill Goad …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 58 Review: “Maura Grady & Tony Magistrale. The Shawshank Experience: Tracking the History of the World's Favourite Movie. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016,” Dawn Stobbart …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 59 Review: “The Dark Tower, Dir. Nikolaj Arcel. Columbia Pictures, 2017,” Andrew Elliot …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 60 Review: “The Mist. Spike, 2017,” Yann Teyssou …………………………………………………………………………………………………… p. 62 1 Foreword Greetings Constant Readers, and welcome to issue 1/1 of Pennywise Dreadful: The Journal of Stephen King Studies. Pennywise Dreadful is a peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to exhibit quality scholarship on the work of the American writer, Stephen King. Our intent is to create a platform for the publication of research which will sustain an emergent critical demonstration of King’s worth as a subject of scholastic interrogation initiated by publications such as Tony Magistrale’s Landscape of Fear (1988) and John Sears’ Stephen King’s Gothic (2011), and which has continued through the publication of a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television Studies on Stephen King’s Science Fiction, edited by Simon Brown and Regina Hanson (2017), in addition to Brown’s forthcoming monograph, Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (2018). Pennywise Dreadful represents a timely scholastic enterprise which recognises Stephen King’s heightened profile in academic and cultural spheres, as well as the enduring popularity of his literary fiction. Since we instigated the journal, and its accompanying podcast, in September 2016, King has continued to write prolifically, co-writing Gwenty’s Botton Box with Richard Chizmar and Sleeping Beauties with son Owen King. Several filmic and television adaptations of King’s work have also been released in the last twelve months. Nicholaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower and Andrés Muschietti’s IT brought King’s fiction to the cinema screen, while Mr Mercedes, The Mist and Gerald’s Game were all adapted for television. The propagation of King’s cross media convergence was highlighted further in July 2017 through the British Film Institute’s announcement of Stephen King on Screen, a season of film and television dedicated to Stephen King to commemorate the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Pennywise Dreadful welcomes contributions from scholars and academics that offer innovative, original and scholarly rigorous readings of King’s oeuvre, and that examine the tensions and intertextual resonances that cultivate relationships between King’s fiction and contemporary literature and culture. The journal is a celebration of the cultural longevity of King’s work and provides a forum for presenting new research on King’s fiction and his contemporary context. Those celebrations begin at Rereading Stephen King: Navigating the Intertextual Labyrinth at Kingston University on Saturday 11 November 2017; an event which culminates in Pennywise Dreadful’s official launch. Both the papers presented at the symposium, and the articles in this journal will afford both established and emerging voices in King Studies to showcase King’s status as an enduring literary and cultural phenomenon as well as continuing the process of addressing King’s apparent lack of critical recognition for his contribution to American letters. Alan Gregory Dawn Stobbart 2 Stephen King and the Illusion of Childhood Lauren Christie University of Dundee Abstract Stephen King and the Illusion of Childhood explores the application of magic and illusion in IT and The Shining. This article details the function of child characters in both novels, and demonstrates how their presence heightens and accelerates terror. In IT, Pennywise the Clown changes his appearance according to each character’s personal fears, acting as a manifestation of their individual traumatic memories. The first section of this article explores the need for children to acknowledge and confront their fear. Instances that are uncomfortable to the child result in an inadvertent tendency to repress this fear, destined to remain dormant until moments of stress and uncertainty where it will plague the individual throughout later life. The eventual confrontation of Pennywise symbolises each character confronting their darkest childhood fear in order to move on. While Pennywise embodies a variety of external fears and childhood monsters, The Shining’s Jack Torrance represents the fine margin between sanity and insanity. As opposed to a visible monster, Jack is a restructured creation of modern society: a silent monster suppressing a violent temperament and plagued by self-doubt and eventual insanity. The Shining explores the danger of a family unit pressurised by isolation (physical and societal), a wealth of internal psychological battles, and the malevolent forces at work in the Overlook hotel. These forces prey on Jack’s weaknesses in order to accelerate his insanity and attempt to kill his family. King’s obsession with childhood is well documented in his own…writing…Through the perceptions of his child characters, King suspends the “rational” world to let in the nightmare world; he clears away the dulled senses of adulthood to open up the “marvellous third eye” of imagination and heightened perception… King declares it no less than his mission as a horror writer to make adults into children once again (Danse Macabre 407).1 Many iconic Stephen King novels explore a world of monsters, only visible through the ‘marvelous third eye’ of imagination. Nowhere is this more noticeable than during childhood. Samantha Figliola accentuates the link between imagination and perception, pinpointing the fact that children are not yet restricted by the “rational” adult world. This article will consider Stephen King’s illusion of childhood by highlighting key factors in two of his most popular novels: nostalgia for childhood and understanding of reality in IT, and vulnerability as experienced through innocent eyes in The Shining. Children naturally possess a robust imagination. They are certain both magic and evil exist in their world, revealing the 1 Samantha Figola. 1998. “The Thousand Faces of Danny Torrance” In Discovering Stephen King’s “The Shining” edited by Tony Magistrale, 54-61, Wildside, Maryland: Wildside Press. p. 54. 3 wonder (and fear) of an active mind. For every fanciful creature the imagination can create, there lurks a monster coexisting in the shadows. This belief in the unbelievable fades with age; many adults are immune to the monsters of childhood. Stephen King’s literary children remind the adult reader of this world long forgotten. King ensures a loosened grip on reality, allowing the reader to embrace their imagination (and all of the nightmares therein). The adult tendency to repress fear and imagination is present in both novels. Repression is traditionally understood as ‘Some… emotion, or feeling- which has been submerged… The… appearance of the repressed create an aura of menace and “uncanniness,” both in [Sigmund] Freud’s sense of “unheimlich” - something that becomes apparent although one feels it “ought” to remain hidden’ (Clemens 1999, 4). Fear of the ‘unheimlich’ compliments Figliola’s reasoning on the effectiveness of King’s work. Adults abide by the strict rules of rational logic (suppressing juvenile fears). They are immune to supernatural events due to a diminished imagination, requiring proof in order to believe. ‘To experience fear, calamity, and human savagery, however vicariously, is also to gain some appreciation of their reality’ (Clemens 1999, 6). King invites adults to rediscover childhood fear. In accepting this invitation, repressed ‘phobic pressure points’ (King 1981, 19) are brought to the forefront of the mind (re-establishing their existence). The interior disintegration of Jack Torrance demonstrates the danger of allowing these monsters to fester. An overactive imagination during childhood is the cause and origin of many so-called monsters. They are created, expanded upon, and then destined to reside in the closet of a child’s imagination until summoned by uncertainty or fear. King declares that ‘we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones… The dream of horror is in itself an out-letting… it may well