Scary Things Stephen King’s Subtle Horror as a Critique of U.S. American Society

Masterarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA)

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Liliia MAKALA

am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachter Univ.-Prof. Dr. M.A. Stefan L. Brandt

Graz, 2019

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Table of Contents

Introduction ______3

1. Smiling Outside, Horrific Inside: Stephen King’s Horror Formula ______10 1.1. As Frightening as a Haunted House: The Presence of Gothic Elements in Stephen King’s Novels ______10 1.2. Beneath the Bloody Surface: The Subtlety of Stephen King’s Horror ______17

2. The Terror Inside Us: Individual Behavior, Affect and Reception in Carrie ______24 2.1. Bullying, Teenage Cruelty, and Willingness to Revenge as Horrific Individual Character Traits ______24 2.2. Holy to Death? – Indirect Criticism of Religious Fanaticism ______31

3. Scared by Surroundings: Subtle Horror in Needful Things as an Invitation for the Reader to Criticize Community ______36 3.1. Scary Societal Things: Consumerism and Commodity Thinking ______36 3.2. Dysfunctionality of Community in Needful Things ______42

4. The U.S. Nation’s Cemetery? – Willingness to Criticize the Façade of U.S. American Nation as the Reader’s Response to Pet Sematary ______51 4.1. The Horror of the Past: Hidden Reflection of the U.S. American Policy towards Native Americans ______51 4.2. Death as a Metaphor for U.S. Myths of Nationality ______60

Conclusion ______65

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Introduction

Would you be scared if one day you met a girl with telekinetic powers who, while taking revenge on her tormentors, caused one of the worst local disasters your town has ever experienced? Would it horrify you if you saw a recently deceased and buried cat return to your house? Would the idea of visiting a shop where you could buy everything you have always wanted still seem attractive to you if you got to know that its shopkeeper was the devil? Or would your blood run cold when you think of societal weaknesses such as bullying, mobbing, cruelty, overconsumption, deception and ignorance of national heritage? No matter what frightens you more – supernatural phenomena or ‘scary things’ in everyday life, all of them seem intertwined in Stephen King’s works. Very often, the truly horrific lies not in the spectacular and outrageous, but in the trivial, the ordinary. In his non-fiction study On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, the author supports this notion of a coherence between the ordinary and the horrific: “[W]hat looked fairly ordinary on Monday sometimes looked like something out of an H. P. Lovecraft horror tale by the weekend.” (King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 44). In Stephen King’s works, as I will argue in this thesis, the ordinary can be scary. And the scary can be ordinary. It is a well-established fact – discussed in a variety of psychology studies and handbooks – that the familiar in everyday life can be perceived as uncanny1. Stephen King’s works illustrate that this connection between the supernatural and the familiar can have a scary fact in the literary imagination as well. Being the author of more than sixty novels, written in the genre of horror2, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction and fantasy, Stephen King continues to be a very prolific and successful author even nowadays, at the age of seventy-one. Clive Barker, an English writer, film director and visual artist who works in the genres of horror and fantasy has once said: “There are apparently two books in every American household – one of them is the

1 In psychological theory, the ‘uncanny’ is defined as the psychological experience of something to seem strangely familiar, mysterious, arousing superstitious fear or dread. It may describe incidents where an everyday object or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context (Royle, 2003). The concept of the uncanny was investigated by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche”, where he describes the strangeness of the familiar, confronting the subject with unconscious, repressed desire (Freud, 1919).

2 Horror genre – a genre of speculative fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle its readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. According to J. A. Cuddon, horror fiction “shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing” (Cuddon, 1984, 11). In The Philosophy of Horror, Thomas Fahy compares horror genre to skydiving, because, similarly to this sport, horror genre promises its readers the experience of “the anticipation of terror, the mixture of fear and exhilaration as events unfold, the opportunity to confront the unpredictable and dangerous, the promise of relative safety […], and the feeling of relief and regained control when it’s over” (Fahy, 2010, 1-2).

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Bible and the other one is probably by Stephen King.” (Ingebretsen, 1996). Indeed, Stephen King’s popularity is undeniable not only in the U.S., but also around the world. His literary achievements attract attention of literary critics who call Stephen King ‘The King of Horror’ and ‘The Master of the Macabre’ (McAleer, 2018, xi), highlighting his contribution to this genre. That is why his works are worth being analyzed, when discussing both horror genre in general, and Contemporary American Horror Literature in particular. From his childhood on, Stephen King has been fascinated by works of an early American horror fiction author Howard Phillips Lovecraft3, whose short stories and novels made King feel like he “had found home” (see interview with Steve Bertrand; cf. Barnes & Noble: Meet the Writers show). Nowadays, the ‘King of Horror’ is a main representative of that same art form of the ‘American Gothic’4 that not only has H. P. Lovecraft in its pantheon, but also literary icons such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson. As Harold Bloom mentions in his partly biographical study of the author: King, […], emerges from an American tradition one could regard as sub-literary: Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft revered Poe, though he also followed the British fantasist Arthur Machen. In King’s instance, the direct precursor would seem to be Jack London, later to be replaced by Lovecraft and Poe and then by an entire range of popular horror fiction. (Bloom, 2002, 1).

Following this assessment, Stephen King, similarly to the canonized writers listed above, holds an eminent position in the tradition of U.S. American literature, often being heralded as one of the richest contemporary writers in the world. Trying to understand what makes Stephen King’s horror works so popular (and so effective, for that matter), literary critics make attempts to categorize the author’s works according to standard literary categories. For example, in his article “The Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries?: Academics, Moralists, and the Stephen King Phenomenon”, Greg

3 Curt Wohleber draws a strict parallel between H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King in his article “The Men Who Can Scare Stephen King”, which, as the title suggests, deals with Stephen King’s fascination with the horror of H. P. Lovecraft and its impact on his works (1995).

4 Gothic fiction – a variation of romance with an emphasis on fantastic, supernatural, mysterious and horrific events. The genre received its name because of its reference to an ‘uncanny architecture’ associated with the Goths. In the 19th century, the genre was called ‘literature of terror’. The American Gothic represents the underside of the American Dream, which includes Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692), Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and Slavery (1610s-1865). Representatives of American Gothic fiction include Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Emily Dickinson. 5

Smith has tried to categorize Stephen King’s works in either highbrow or pulp literature5, referring to this attempt as to a really problematic one, as ‘The Master of the Macabre’ possesses features of both literary types (Smith, 2002). Ross Douthat seems to share this thought, as he has stated that Stephen King “occupies a gray zone between the pulpy authors” and “the writers who stand a chance of winning […] the National Book Award itself” (2007). Indeed, the question of possible reasons for Stephen King’s popularity can not be easily answered, as the author can be perceived from completely different perspectives. On the one hand, some literary critics mention Stephen King to be “practically an industry unto himself” (The Economist, Electronic Journal, 2017), alluding to his way of creating novels according to a commercially successful formula. On the other hand, reviewers have also claimed that Stephen King’s ability to see the terror in everyday life (Stobbart, 2017, 1) is the main key to the success of his works. Thus, the “Praise for Stephen King and Carrie” section of 2011 edition of Carrie by Anchor Books claims that, Stephen King has built a literary genre of putting ordinary people in the most terrifying situations. He’s the author who can always make the improbable so scary you’ll feel compelled to check the locks on the front door. (The Boston Globe, Carrie, 1).

It is the aim of this thesis to show that both commercial strategies and psychological techniques factor are in when it comes to the enormous success of Stephen King’s works. In my argument, Stephen King does not only include standard elements of horror typical of gothic fiction, such as monsters and haunted houses; he is also a master of subtle6 and indirect horror. In other words, the ‘scary things’ in King’s works are so terrifying not because of their ‘blood seeking’ quality, but because of the eerie and unsettling effect on the psyche of readers. This analytic angle makes Stephen King’s horror works an interesting target

5 Pulp fiction is a term for a lowbrow fiction, which derives from pulp magazines that were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from the end of 19th till the middle of 20th century. In that time, horror fiction was considered to be an exclusively pulp genre. For example, the father of Lovecraftian horror (or cosmic horror of the unknown), Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), whom Stephen King was fascinated with, was unknown during his lifetime, as he was published only in pulp magazines. Nowadays, however, horror genre does not automatically refer to pulp fiction, and Howard Philips Lovecraft’s works, such as “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) and others are famous and widely read.

6 Subtle – not loud, bright, noticeable, or obvious in any way (Cambridge Dictionary). 6 of interpretation, especially in the Trump Era when the motif of ‘subtle/indirect horror’ in U.S. American society has proven to be of special significance7. Therefore, this paper will show how horror in Stephen King’s novels is aesthetically designed and built up by means of techniques of storytelling. I will examine what elements King’s horror consists of and how Stephen King invites readers of his horror novels to become more critical of U.S. American society as a whole. I will show in my paper that King’s horror is mainly of psychological nature; it is subtly constructed, creates an uncanny feeling within the reader, and is used to call attention to social problems of U.S. American society on three main levels: it evokes indirect criticism of individual behavior, challenges the community’s moral standing and its dysfunctionality, and encourages the reader to look critically at the U.S. American nation as a whole, mainly because of its reluctance to take responsibility of its past. Since the main point of my investigation is the subtlety of Stephen King’s horror and the emotional effect it has on the reader, I will employ a reader-oriented approach8 in order to support my arguments. I will also use affect theory9 in my research, as it will allow me to concentrate on individual emotional responses to selected texts. In my argument, affect theory is especially applicable when analyzing subtle and indirect horror, because, according to Gregg and Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader, affect theory deals with “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, 1). In other words, affect theory will serve as a tool to investigate the way subtle horror in Stephen King novels’ aesthetics10 affects the reader and encourages him to

7 The Trump Era, or the era of Donald Trump’s Presidency in the U.S. (2016-today), is sometimes compared to the horror genre in fiction. For example, Victoria McCollum in her book Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear (2019) shows how horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of Contemporary American politics (McCollum, 2019). Moreover, in his interview for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2018, Stephen King himself has mentioned that, contrary to Barack Obama, who rewarded King with the National Medal of the Arts in 2015, Donald Trump blocked him on Twitter because of Stephen King’s comments regarding the president’s policy.

8 In my view, a reader-oriented approach is closely connected to affect theory, as both focus on the reader’s experience of a literary work.

9 The term ‘affect’ in literary and art criticism refers to “an individual or generalized emotional response to a text, art work or performance” (Brooker, 2017, 5). Therefore, the affect theory seeks to categorize affects (emotions, feelings) that are evoked within perceivers of an art form.

10 The term ‘aesthetics’ is used “to name the formal or compositional aspect of a work of art as against its content, to refer to a coherent philosophy of art” (Brooker, 2017, 3) in a narrow sense, or to signify “the artistic dimension of culture as a whole” (Brooker, 2017, 4) in an expanded sense. 7 look at U.S. American society from a critical perspective. I will also use a reader-response criticism11 while analyzing selected passages from Stephen King’s horror novels, as it will help me to concentrate on the realm of senses that produces the reader’s reaction to ‘scary things’ described in the author’s texts. Discussing the main texts I have chosen for my investigation12, it is essential to mention that, since I am concentrating on the subtle horror of Stephen King’s novels, I narrowed my text selection down to his novels written in the genre of horror13. As my purpose is to discuss how Stephen King’s horror indirectly illustrates the weaknesses of the U.S. American society on three main levels (criticism of individuals, community criticism and the critique of nation as a whole), I have chosen three novels to represent each type of criticism: Carrie (1974) as an example of criticism of individual character traits, Needful Things (1991) as a critique of community, and Pet Sematary (1983) as an illustration of the criticism of the U.S. American nation as a whole. All three novels show how Stephen King, as Sara Martin Alegre phrases it, puts “his finger on the dark areas of the American lifestyle” (Alegre, 2001, 105). In my argument, ‘The King of Horror’ does so in a subtle and indirect manner, which I will demonstrate in this paper. There are several reasons for me to choose Carrie as a main example of Stephen King’s horror, being an invitation for the reader to criticize individual behavior. Firstly, Carrie is the very first Stephen King’s novel that has brought him popularity and served as a starting point for his literary career, which shows that Stephen King has been using subtle and indirect horror to draw attention to social problems from the very beginning. Secondly, Carrie, being a novel about an unpopular, friendless and bullied high school girl, who lives with her fanatical Christian mother and uses her newly discovered telekinetic powers to revenge people who hurt her, explicitly deals with such individual weaknesses of people as violence, cruelty, mockery, religious fanaticism and willingness to revenge. These drawbacks of individuals, depicted in a

11 According to Lois Tyson, “reader-response criticism focuses on readers’ responses to literary texts” (Tyson, 2006, 169). Lois Tyson also mentions reader-response criticism to be “a broad, exciting, evolving domain of literary studies that can help us learn about our own reading processes and how they relate to […] specific elements in the texts we read…” (Tyson, 2006, 169).

12 Although I have chosen only three selected works of Stephen King, they exemplify the modes of storytelling that are employed in most of Stephen King’s texts, such as It (1986), Misery (1987), The Shining (1977) and others.

13 Other Stephen King’s texts that are written not in the genre of horror nevertheless contain horrific elements. For example, the author’s science fiction and alternative history novel 11.22.63 (2011) features frightening elements, such as a gloomy character of the Yellow Card Man. 8 terrifying way, call the reader’s attention to problems each individual may possess within his own personality. Moving from criticism of individual behavior to a criticism of group or community behavior in Stephen King’s horror books, his novel Needful Things is a good case in point. The main reason for me to choose this book in order to illustrate the way Stephen King’s subtle horror affects the reader and invites him to criticize community is the fact that Stephen King has once mentioned in one of his interviews that he wrote Needful Things as a reaction to his irritation with over consumerism in U.S. American society. Telling the story of a mysterious stranger who opens a new shop called “Needful Things,” in which every inhabitant of the small town Castle Rock14 finds the object of his or her biggest desire (for which one has to pay by performing a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from the town), Stephen King manages to reveal such drawbacks of community as consumerism, hypocrisy, deception, and dysfunctionality. That is why the horrific events depicted in Needful Things both consciously and unconsciously encourage the reader become critical of the fictional community in the text. Finally, speaking about the third and the most overarching type of criticism in Stephen King’s horror novels, I have chosen Pet Sematary as an example of critique of the U.S. American nation as a whole. The novel narrates the story of a family with two children and a cat, who move into a house which is located near two cemeteries: a pet cemetery and an ancient Indian burial ground with sinister and dreadful properties. The image of an ancient Indian burial ground in particular, and the whole horror story in general, draws the reader’s attention to such issues of the U.S. American nation as the problem of it not looking at its national heritage, the problem of the U.S. harsh policy towards Native Americans, and the problem of the U.S. nation’s ignorance of its societal issues. Therefore, Pet Sematary serves as a good example of Stephen King’s indirect horror, used to encourage the reader to think about the U.S. American nation’s problems. As Stephen King has once mentioned, “good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.” Along these lines, the following chapters of this paper will reveal these hidden secrets of Stephen King’s novels, while analyzing the ‘scary things’ that evoke a terrifying affect on readers and serve as an indirect author’s invitation to them to question U.S. American society on individual, community and nation’s levels by means of subtle horror. In other words, I will

14 Castle Rock – a fictional small town which is a part of Stephen King’s fictional topography of the state of Maine, that serves as the setting for many of texts, such as The Dead Zone (1979), Needful Things (1991), Elevation (2018) and others. Together with two other fictional cities, Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock forms a trinity of fictional Maine towns that appear as settings in Stephen King’s works. 9 illustrate in the following chapters how Stephen King uses his ‘horror formula’ to delicately present how intimidating ordinary drawbacks of U.S. American society are in his horror fiction.

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1. Smiling Outside, Horrific Inside: Stephen King’s Horror Formula

1.1. As Frightening as a Haunted House: The Presence of Gothic Elements in Stephen King’s Novels

To begin with, it is important to mention that Stephen King has developed his own formula of constructing horror, which has been noticeable to me while reading his works that I am going to analyze in this paper. Although his horror novels Carrie, Needful Things and Pet Sematary deal with different topics, such as bullying, overconsumption and ignorance of nation’s heritage respectively, all of them share common characteristics that I am going to look at in details in this chapter. According to Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer: King’s work has long been recognized as updating the literary tradition of the American gothic genre, with its violent excesses and quasi-supernatural, horrific atmospherics, into contemporary America. (Simpson, 2014, xvii).

In my argument, this combination of horrific atmosphere and the subtle reflection of contemporary America constitutes Stephen King’s horror formula, which consists of two main parts: typical for gothic fiction elements on the one hand, and not so evident, but rather subtle horror genre components on the other hand. Therefore, the first subchapter of this chapter will deal with the presence of gothic elements in Stephen King’s novels, while the second subchapter will mostly contain the analysis of the subtlety of his horror. Starting with the presence of standard gothic imagery in Stephen King’s horror novels, I would like to quote Andrew Smith, who has stated in his book Gothic Literature that “in the twentieth century the term ‘Gothic’ tends to become replaced with ‘Horror’, at least where popular literature is concerned.” (Smith, 2007, 140). Therefore, it is necessary to define what elements are typical for both gothic and horror fiction, in order to find an evidence that they are present in Stephen King’s novels, especially the ones under investigation. In my argument, one typical element of gothic fiction is its peculiar setting, which is often secluded and liminal, including wild landscapes, ruined buildings, most of which are castles and haunted houses. A gothic setting is often situated on the threshold between one realm and another, comprising both nature and urbanity. Also, a desolate, uncanny and gloomy atmosphere, created by monstrous events, is another archetypal element of gothic fiction. Furthermore, images of ghosts, monsters, dead bodies, black cats are a part of gothic elements. Discussing themes that are typical for gothic fiction, it is essential to mention that gothic works often deal with the theme of death, decay, suffering, curses, and madness. Moreover, themes 11 of the supernatural and the unknown can often be found in gothic literature. Moving from gothic themes to gothic symbols, labyrinths and mazes, closed doors and secret rooms, blood as a visual spectacle, take a central place here. Speaking about typical for gothic literature characters, mad and unreliable personages, fair and dark ladies, demonic alter-ego figures, witches, personified evil forces are worth to be mentioned. Many characters in gothic fiction can possess supernatural power and qualities. Stephen King’s novels do not only contain most of the standard gothic elements that I have listed above, but also, as David A. Oakes mentions in his book Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King, remain within Gothic literary tradition by adapting it for a modern audience and its taste (Oakes, 2000). Ben Indick, in his article dedicated to Stephen King and the literary tradition of horror, states that the author “has absorbed and utilized those qualities which characterize the different types of stories in the horror genre” (Indick, 1985, 175). I support this statement, as, in my argument, many typical for gothic fiction elements, such as setting peculiarities, atmosphere, imagery, themes, symbols and characters can be found in Stephen King’s novels. Therefore, I am going to have a look at each gothic element that is present in his horror works step by step in this chapter, in order to prove that typical for gothic fiction elements are important parts of Stephen King’s horror formula. Beginning with the setting of Stephen King’s novels, I would argue that it shares common with the typical gothic setting characteristics. As Burton R. Pollin points out, Stephen King’s works allude to the heritage of Edgar Allan Poe15 (Pollin, 1993, 3), sharing similar setting. Tony Magistrale16, also draws a parallel between Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, who, according to the literary critic, “taught” Stephen King “how to visualize the confinement of an interior atmosphere” (Magistrale, 1989, 76). Also, in his book Poe’s Children: Connections Between Tales of Terror and Detection, Tony Magistrale examines the parallels between Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution to the Gothic tale and the literary heritage of Stephen

15 Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) – an American writer, who is well-known for his poetry and short stories (for example, the short story “The Black Cat”, first published in 1843), written in genres of mystery and horror. The author was a representative of Dark Romanticism, describing his own style as a ‘negative romanticism’. Also, he is considered to be the ‘father of the detective fiction genre’.

16 Anthony Samuel Magistrale is one of the central scholars when it comes to the literary criticism of Stephen King. Being a Professor in English at the University of Vermont since 1983, he has written numerous books about Stephen King’s literary heritage. Stephen King himself, after reading several Tony Magistrale’s works of literary criticism on his books, has once wittily stated: “Tony has helped me improve my reputation from ink-stained wretch popular novelist to ink-stained wretch popular novelist with occasional flashes of muddy insight.” (see the book cover of Landscape of Fear: King’s American Gothic (2004) by Tony Magistrale). 12

King (Magistrale, 1999). In his article “The Rehabilitation of Stephen King”, Tony Magistrale states that “although Stephen King is writing nearly a century a half after Poe, they share important literary goals”, such as a goal to ‘address the status of the reader’s ‘soul’, perhaps not so much to elevate as to terrify it” (Magistrale, 2018, 5). I can only contribute to these thoughts and mention that Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote primarily gothic fiction, often used secluded setting, as for example a haunted spooky estate in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Stephen King, in his turn, also uses secluded settings in his novels. For example, the following description of an empty house in Pet Sematary clearly illustrates the way the author achieves creepy atmosphere using gothic setting: It should have been a fine evening, but Louis was aware of the empty house waiting for him. Crossing the lawn and feeling the frost crunching under his shoes, he heard the telephone begin to ring in the house. (King, Pet Sematary, 158).

As it is visible from this quote, the depiction of standard for gothic fiction setting such as a haunted house helps Stephen King to create the feeling of fear in his novels. Furthermore, a detailed description of sounds that can be heard in this particular setting of an empty house only contribute to the gloomy atmosphere of the novel: the frost that crunches under the character’s feet, as well as the telephone that rings in the empty house allow the reader to feel himself present in the setting described. One more vivid example of a typical gothic setting in Stephen King’s novels is the state of Maine, where events that are depicted usually take place. In my argument, the author has chosen the state of Maine as a setting for many of his works not only because it is his native state17, but also because it is located in the very North of the USA, it is misty, gloomy, cloudy, not very populous and, therefore, extremely secluded. For example, Stephen King begins his novel Needful Things with the description of its setting, which, according to the author, is depicted as: Western Maine’s part of the state that’s mostly forgotten once the summer has run away and all those people with their cottages on the lake and up on the View have gone back to New York and Massachusetts. (King, Needful Things, 3).

In this quote, the setting of the novel is presented as “mostly forgotten once the summer has run away”, which alludes it to be of a very small population. Also, its detachment from such

17 In his article on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen King, Tony Magistrale compares their texts with the works of regionalism, or local color, which is the sub-genre of realism, that concentrates on the detailed depiction of people, life, customs, traditions and dialects in a certain area of United States. Literary critic states that: “King’s descriptions of his native Maine, the close scrutiny of character, tradition, and the clash between civilized values and the wilderness […].” (Magistrale, 1989, 77) make the reader perceive the author as a regionalist writer. 13 centers of civilization as New York contributes to the atmosphere of the setting of Stephen King’s novels to be perceived as gothic in a standard sense. Furthermore, being an ordinary setting from the first sight, Castle Rock in the state of Maine, which serves as the setting in Needful Things, appears to be the epicenter of horrible events in Stephen King’s novels. As Stephen King himself has once said, “sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters”. Therefore, while depicting a seemingly normal town, the author manages to present it in a gothic way in the novel, which begins with the following words of the narrator who appeals to the reader: You’ve been here before. Sure you have. Sure. I never forget a face. Come on over here, let me shake your hand! Tell you something: I recognized you by the way you walk even before I saw your face good. You couldn’t have picked a better day to come back to Castle Rock. (King, Needful Things, 2-3).

After this quote the narrator goes on describing Castle Rock as a typical small town where “hunting season will be starting up soon” (King, Needful Things, 3), or where “we let October stay just as long as she wants to” (ibid.). On the one hand, the setting of Castle Rock is not depicted as dark or gloomy. However, on the other hand, its description manages to create an eerie feeling of something strangely familiar within the reader, because the narrator says that the reader has “been here before” while depicting Castle Rock. That is why the uncanny description of Castle Rock as a main ground for events in some of the author’s novels serves as one more evidence that gothic setting is typical for Stephen King’s works. Summarizing peculiarities of the setting Stephen King chooses for his horror novels, I would like to draw a conclusion that the author uses typical gothic settings in his books. Therefore, the first element of gothic formula that I have described above is present in Stephen King’s texts. Moving from the setting in Stephen King’s horror novels to their imagery, I would argue that it also resembles standard gothic images, such as monsters, dead bodies and evil forces. For example, there is a strong and vivid imagery of a hideous monster in Pet Sematary: A hideous mewling sound now arose, and for a moment all of Jud’s bones turned to white ice. It was not Louis’s son returned from the grave but some hideous monster. (King, Pet Sematary, 430).

This quote clearly illustrates monstrous images that appear in the reader’s mind while reading the novel. Images of dead bodies are also typical for Stephen King’s horror texts. For example, the imagery of dead people and animals appears quite often in Carrie: Her figure was halfway across the parking lot, and she looked oddly shrunken and crumpled. Sue was reminded of dead animals she had seen on 95-woodchucks, 14

groundhogs, skunks that had been crushed by speeding trucks and station wagons. (King, Carrie, 271-272).

As it is noticeable from the quotation above, images of dead animals are present in Stephen King’s novels. One more example of gothic imagery in the novels written by ‘The King of Horror’ is the image of a cat as one of the key characters in Pet Sematary, because cats are often perceived as mysterious animals: He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved with them. Church was his daughter’s Eileen’s cat. (King, Pet Sematary, 3).

Interestingly enough, the cat whose death serves as a starting point for horrific events to happen in the novel, has green eyes that are also regarded as a part of gothic imagery: “Church was on the white van’s dashboard, looking at Louis with his bright green eyes, […]” (King, Pet Sematary, 23). Furthermore, the name of the cat is important to be mentioned when speaking about the gothic imagery: apart from the fact that it was named after a famous British politician, army officer and writer Winston Churchill, its short name is Church. In my argument, the image of church is also a part of typical gothic imagery: “‘My daughter’s got a cat’, he said. ‘Winston Churchill. We call him Church for short.’” (King, Pet Sematary, 20). Finally, referring to Burton R. Pollin and his thought of Stephen King’s texts alluding to Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic heritage again (Pollin, 1993), it is important to mention that the image of a cat in Pet Sematary has parallels with the image of a black cat in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” (1843), where the cat also plays a crucial role in scary events that are described. Blood is one more gothic image that is frequently found on the pages of Stephen King’s horror novels: “Louis burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood – there was a lot of blood.” (King, Pet Sematary, 69). The reason for blood being present in the author’s texts is the following, according to Stephen King himself: “there’s plenty of blood in most horror stories, of course – it is our stock-in-trade, you might say.” (King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 199). Therefore, the imagery of blood plays one of the crucial roles for Stephen King when speaking about horror and gothic texts. Also, the image of a cemetery itself in Pet Sematary contributes to the gothic atmosphere of the novel: Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, not a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions that Louis tried to read had faded away to partial illegibility. Others bore no discernible mark at all, and Louis guessed that the writing on these might have been done with chalk or crayon. (King, Pet Sematary, 37). 15

Therefore, gothic images such as monsters, dead bodies, cats, churches, blood and cemeteries constitute a part of Stephen King’s horror formula. Not only imagery, but also themes of Stephen King’s horror novel resemble gothic ones. Firstly, the theme of death is among the central themes in the books that I have chosen for my investigation. For example, Carrie deals with events that caused numerous deaths, described throughout the whole novel: I have told this story before, most notoriously before the White Commission, which received it with incredulity. In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, […]. (King, Carrie, 95).

Needful Things, in its turn contains scenes of murder on its pages: ‘Help! Police! Murder! MURRRDURRRRR!’ The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice. Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettie staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward. (King, Needful Things, 371).

Finally, as even the title of Pet Sematary suggests, one of the key themes of the novel is the theme of death. From the very first lines of the book the notion of death is set as a central one: Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did … and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed – badly, most undertakers say – Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The man who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret. (King, Pet Sematary, ix).

As it is visible from the opening passage that I have quoted above, the theme of death is presented as the crucial one in Pet Sematary from its very beginning. Decay, being one more important for gothic literature theme, is also present in Stephen King’s horror novels. For example, Carrie, while depicting the catastrophe Carrie White caused because of her anger and rage, describes the great extend to which the town where the events take place decayed: The explosion destroyed nearly half a block at a stroke, including the offices of the Chamberlain Clarion. By 12:18 A.M., Chamberlain was cut off from the country that slept in reason beyond. (King, Carrie, 236).

In this paragraph, as well as in other paragraphs of the book, Stephen King uses almost a reportage style of writing in order to illustrate the theme of decay. 16

Not only themes of death and decay, but also themes of suffering and madness that are also typical for gothic formula are found in Stephen King’s horror texts18. The theme of suffering is many times referred to in Needful Things: That was a not uncommon pattern in such cases; tumors of the brain stem often caused behaviors the layman might think of as psychotic. One which sufferer feels is a misery was a conclusion that the misery which is shared by either his loved ones or the whole human race; another was the idea that the sufferer’s loved ones would not want to live if he was dead. (King, Needful Things, 238).

Both mental and physical sufferings are presented as one of the key topics in Needful Things by Stephen King. The theme of madness is also frequently touched in the novel: “The core of Nettie’s madness had been beyond Polly’s power to control or alter, […].” (King, Needful Things, 508). Themes of supernatural and unknown are also typical for Stephen King’s literary achievements: in Carrie the protagonist possesses a supernatural telekinetic power, in Needful Things the nature of the character of the shopkeeper remains to be unknown and mysterious till the end of the novel, where he turns to be the embodiment of the evil, while in Pet Sematary an ancient Indian burial ground has sinister properties. Therefore, themes of supernatural and unknown are central in the novels under investigation. From the examples that I have highlighted above it becomes clear that Stephen King’s texts share typical for gothic fiction themes of death, decay, suffering, madness, supernatural and unknown. That is why the usage of standard gothic themes contributes to Stephen King’s horror formula. Discussing characters of Stephen King’s texts, it is not difficult to notice that they also follow typical for gothic fiction pattern. Uncontrollable and unreliable teenage protagonist, who kills many people, including her own mother in Carrie, the personified devil in Needful Things, and the father who goes mad after his family members die in Pet Sematary, all contribute to the statement that Stephen King’s choice of characters in his horror novels resembles typical for gothic fiction personages. Finally, all the gothic elements that I have analyzed above create a desolate, uncanny and gloomy atmosphere of Stephen King’s horror books. For example, the epigraph to Needful Things ends with the following words by which the narrator appeals to the reader: “Keep an

18 One more example of Stephen King’s texts that deal with the themes of suffering and madness is his 1987 horror novel Misery (even the telling title of the novel alludes to suffering), telling a story of Paul Sheldon, a writer who suffers from numerous aches after a car accident while being held captive by his mad fan Annie Wilkes. 17 eye on everything. You’ve been here before, but things are about to change. I know it. I feel it. There’s a storm on the way.” (King, Needful Things, 12). Such foreshadowing19 of the upcoming in the book events sets the gloomy mode of the story, evoking the uncanny feeling that something bad is about to happen within the reader. One more example of gothic elements that are used to create a sinister atmosphere in Stephen King’s books is illustrated by the following quotation: “By the way, a light blew out while I was trying to calm her down. It added the final touch.” (King, Carrie, 24). Thus, the atmosphere that is created by Stephen King in his horror novels correlates with typical for gothic fiction uncanny and gloomy one. In general, based on the arguments that I have mentioned above, I would like to draw a conclusion that the setting, the imagery, themes, symbols, characters and atmosphere of Stephen King’s horror novels resemble typical for gothic formula elements. Therefore, Stephen King’s horror formula consists of the presence of gothic elements in his literary works. As well, similarly to the American gothic fiction, Stephen King’s horror novels work with indirect components that allow the horror to be subtly constructed rather than directly “hitting into the reader’s face”. This subtlety of horror plays a crucial role in Stephen King’s texts, because, in my argument, the indirect horror, which is not so visible for the reader from the first sight, but still terrific, is the key element of Stephen King’s horror formula. Therefore, in the following subchapter I will discuss the subtlety of the author’s horror that is hidden beneath the ‘bloody surface’ of gothic elements.

1.2. Beneath the Bloody Surface: The Subtlety of Stephen King’s Horror

I want to start my analysis of the second ‘ingredient’ of Stephen King’s horror formula, which is the internal and not direct horror, by quoting a passage from the Introduction to his 2001 edition of the horror novel The Shining, which was first published in 1977. In this passage Stephen King states that “truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.” (King, 2001, XVII). This quotation states in a clear way that, according to Stephen King himself, ‘real monsters’ can be found not in the outer gothic elements that I have already dwelt on in the first subchapter, but rather inside people. This thought allows me to draw one more parallel between Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe,

19 Foreshadowing – a literary device with the help of which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, foreshadowing is defined as “the use of details, description, and mood that will take on more meaning later in a written work” (Cambridge Dictionary). Foreshadowing is widely used not only in Stephen King’s horror novels, but also in other works of horror genre, such as short stories “The Lottery” (1948) and “The Summer People” (1950) of an American author Shirley Jackson. 18 whose famous quote states that: “Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” Therefore, sometimes Stephen King’s horror finds reflection not only in typical gothic elements that were discussed previously, but also in something internal and, thus, not so evident from the first sight. In his book Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic Tony Magistrale states that: [W]hat is most horrifying in his [Stephen King’s] tales has less to do with prehistoric creatures roaming the night or vampires cruising for nourishment. Rather, his deepest terrors are sociopolitical in nature, reflecting our worst fears about vulnerable western institutions – our governmental bureaucracies, our school systems, our communities, our familial relationships. In other words, King writes about horrors that operate on a variety of levels – embracing the literal as well as the symbolic. (Magistrale, 2004, 1- 2).

Patrick McAleer, in his turn, contributes to Tony Magistrale’s statement that I have quoted above, and in his Introduction to a collection of essays on Stephen King, which he entitled A More Subtle Macabre, the literary critic claims that: [I]f we are to be honest about King’s fiction, we would all do well to consider that just horror, either as a literary label or an adjective for day-to-day life, is not always a truthful, or honest, classification. (McAleer, 2014, 2).

Thus, the author alludes to the fact that Stephen King’s fiction hides something subtly frightening beneath the visible from the first sight horror surface. I absolutely share both Tony Magistrale’s and Patrick McAleer’s thoughts that I have quoted above, as, in my argument, Stephen King’s usage of standard gothic elements that I have analyzed in the previous subchapter is not as horrifying as his depiction of the not so evident from the first sight evil within individuals, society and nation. This internal and not evident evil, commonly used by Stephen King, goes hand in hand with the subtlety of his horror. In his books, the author often uses the subtle way of depicting a ‘surface’ that smiles at the reader on the first sight, but turns out to be horrific underneath. In his article entitled “Reading Between the Lines: Stephen King and Allegory”, Bernard J. Gallagher mentions that “the insight which King offers into the work of horror is based upon a bimodal or dualistic vision which insists upon the necessity of reading between the lines.” (Gallagher, 1987, 37). In my argument, this strategy of putting the indirect and subtle evil ‘between the lines’ of his works, makes Stephen King’s novels horrifying much more 19 effectively than ‘bloody scenes’ of murders, deaths, monsters, ghosts that he depicts as a surface of his works20. The following quotation from Needful Things illustrates the subtlety of Stephen King’s horror and the way it affects the reader in a vivid manner: “Gaunt smiled. His teeth were crooked, and they looked rather yellow in the dim light, but Brian found the smile entirely charming just the same.” (King, Needful Things, 29). Gaunt’s smile is depicted as charming on the surface, and there are no evident signs of bloody or frightening elements in the passage. However, such tiny details of this smile as crooked, yellow teeth evoke the uncanny feeling of fear within the reader. While reading this passage, the reader of Needful Things is not yet familiar with the true nature of Mr. Gaunt, who turns out to be the devil towards the end of the book, but at this point of the novel is depicted as an elderly, good-natured owner of a new shop: “The guy was quite old, and his face was very kind. He looked at Brian with interest and pleasure.” (King, Needful Things, 28). Thus, only tiny, seemingly unnoticeable hints of Gaunt’s evilness help the reader to understand that he is not as kind as it may seem. Instead of presenting Gaunt as the evil man from the very beginning, Stephen King gives the reader several subtle and at the same time unconsciously terrifying details that allow the reader to feel that there is something that is not so positive about Gaunt’s character. This peculiarity of Stephen King’s writing style makes the reader perceive his horror as subtle.

20 A vivid example of Stephen King’s subtle way of depicting a surface that smiles at the reader, but turns out to be horrific underneath is the construction of the character of a clown in the author’s horror novel It (1986). Although the image of a clown is usually associated with something that is supposed to make people happy, the clown in It appears to be a personification of evil forces. These screenshots, for example, are taken from 2017 same-name film adaptation of the novel It, directed by Andy Muschietti. In my argument, the upper screenshot illustrates “the surface” of Stephen King’s horror, which appears to smile at the viewer, while the lower screenshot shows this “smiling surface” to be horrific underneath and reveals the true nature of the clown. Therefore, Stephen King’s horror is seen by the viewer as not so visible from the first sight, but rather subtle.

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One more interesting detail that can be visible from the quotation above only contributes to the subtlety of Stephen King’s horror if speaking about the character of Mr. Gaunt: although the first meaning of the adjective “gaunt” is defined in Oxford Dictionary as “lean and haggard, especially because of suffering, hunger, or age”, its second meaning sounds like “grim or desolate” (Oxford Dictionary, Electronic Source). Therefore, even Mr. Gaunt’s last name subtly evokes the gloomy feeling within the reader. Moreover, Stephen King does not only present his horror in an indirect way, but also plays with the reader by depicting terrifying things as the ones that make the fear go away at the beginning. This playfulness with the reader, together with Stephen King’s storytelling ability, comprises what Gary Hoppenstand and Ray Broadus call the “dazzle effect”, or “the ability to take the reader outside of himself with fiction, to become intimately involved with fiction, […]” (Hoppenstand, 1987, 2). Again, referring to the character of Mr. Gaunt and the way he is depicted in first several chapters of the book, the following quote comes in handy in order to illustrate the way Stephen King plays with the reader’s expectations in his books: The doorway was masked with a dark velvet curtain. Brian felt a momentary and quite monstrous cramp of fear. Then the glow thrown by one of the spots slanted across the man’s face, and Brian’s fear was allayed. (King, Needful Things, 28).

As it is clear from this quote, the figure of Mr. Gaunt makes Brian’s “momentary and quite monstrous cramp of fear” be allayed, instead of escalating it. Interestingly enough, Stephen King uses typical gothic imagery of “dark velvet curtain” in this passage, which creates the feeling of fear within the reader and serves as the “surface” for the author’s horror construction. However, Stephen King only hints to scary things that are going to happen at the place described, without saying it directly. Apart from Needful Things, the terrifying effect upon the reader of two other novels that I have chosen for my investigation is also achieved by means of subtle horror. For example, such literary device as foreshadowing is frequently used in Carrie and in Pet Sematary. From the very beginning of both books, the reader is not yet aware that something horrific is going to happen in towns that are described, but such sentences as “One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Gogan, tells of entering the girls’ locker room at Ewen High School the year before the events we are concerned with […].” (King, Carrie, 12) create the inner feeling of anxiety within the reader. In my argument, the adjective “surviving” is a key one in the sentence above, as it doesn’t reveal directly that something bad is going to happen, but makes the reader understand that a certain event will cause the death of some classmates so that the other will remain “surviving”. One more example of foreshadowing in Carrie is the constant interruption 21 of the standard storyline with such comments, as “And now there’s this other thing. No one can laugh that off, either. Too many people are dead.” (King, Carrie, 42). The reader, although he has no idea who are the people that are dead, still gets the idea that the murder will take place in the future. This fact makes the reader feel the horror indirectly, not naming the horrific events. Therefore, foreshadowing is frequently used in Stephen King’s horror novels that I have chosen for my investigation in order to contribute to the subtlety and indirectness of horror in the books. One more vivid example of foreshadowing as a literary device that creates anxiety within the reader of Stephen King’s novels is the way the author subtly alludes to horrific events that are about to happen in Pet Sematary. For example, a highway that runs past Creeds’ house, which is full of speeding trucks that will later become ‘the murderers’ of Church and Gage, is several times referred to at the beginning of the novel: Louis walked down the crazy-paved path to the shoulder of the road and had to pause while yet another truck, this one followed by a line of five cars headed in the direction of Bucksport, passed by. (King, Pet Sematary, 22).

Although there is no direct mentioning that Louis’s cat and son will be killed by trucks, the frequent emphasis on the highway next to the protagonist’s house make the reader feel worried about the possibility of something bad to happen on that road. Moving from foreshadowing to other Stephen King’s subtle ways to depict horror, it is worth to say that what really frightens the reader in the author’s novels is something that is not completely understandable or describable: This corpus had also given Carrie endless nightmares […]. Just lately these dreams had evolved into something less understandable but more sinister. The object did not seem to be murder but something even more awful. (King, Carrie, 45-46).

As it is visible from the quotation above, Stephen King appeals to the horrific feeling in his books, however he creates this feeling without naming the cause of it. Such phrases as “something less understandable but more sinister”, or “not […] murder but something even more awful” make Stephen King’s horror to be perceived as subtle. Furthermore, the reader can himself decide what is this “something” in the quotation above, because the author does not tell directly what he is talking about. The way Stephen King mixes ‘bloody scenes’ with the subtle horror is also interesting to have a look at. On the one hand, the author creates the spooky atmosphere of his books by means of ‘the bloody surface’ which is full of ghostly and bloody images: “Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the room.” (King, Pet Sematary, 23); “‘I’m bleeding to death!’ Carrie screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Desjarding’s white shorts. 22

It left a bloody handprint.” (King, Carrie, 13). The image of a bloody handprint on white shorts from the quotation above is definitely frightening and contributes to the feeling of horror. On the other hand, however, it is not such images that make the reader feel himself horrified in Stephen King’s novels, but rather the eerie undersurface images that appear from time to time between these ‘bloody scenes’. For example, the way other characters behave while Carrie is “bleeding to death” is depicted in a much more horrific way than the act of bleeding itself: Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. (King, Carrie, 9).

Although there are no bloody descriptions in the quotation above, still the feeling of terror is achieved by the way Stephen King depicts a real and ordinary situation. After having a look at two examples from Stephen King’s Carrie that I have quoted above, I want to point out that ‘the bloody surface’ of the author’s horror novels is constantly changed by the subtle undersurface images that depict nothing horrific on the first sight, but create the atmosphere of horror in an indirect way, if you look at them in more details. As Burton R. Pollin argues: […] King’s long narratives, […] convey an immediacy of terror and also of horror which ultimately owes nothing to the supernatural but much to a detailed and plausible analysis of the human psyche in anguish. (Pollin, 1993, 2).

I agree with this argument, because the detailed and plausible description of human psyche is perceived as something much more horrific than scenes of supernatural events in Stephen King’s works. Finally, Stephen King often stresses that the fear can be found in ordinary things: “‘No. But I think Carrie should be allowed to go home for the rest of the day. She’s had a rather frightening experience.’” (King, Carrie, 18); “But Mom – when she gets a case, she’s a terror.” (King, Carrie, 33); “‘Go to bed,’ Momma said curtly, and the fear was back in her eyes.” (King, Carrie, 68). In these quotations, the “frightening experience”, the “terror”, the “fear” are connected to everyday things, and have nothing in common with ‘bloody things’. Stephen King stresses that horrific is in the everyday many times in his books: “But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap patina over a darker world – a real world where nightmares happen.” (King, Carrie, 34). Therefore, the stress on the everyday and ordinary things to be horrific is one more contribution to the indirectness and undersurface of Stephen King’s horror. Summarizing the arguments that I have mentioned above, I want to draw a conclusion that one of the key ingredients of Stephen King’s horror, alongside with gothic elements, is its subtlety and indirectness. If gothic imagery, symbols and atmosphere is ‘the bloody surface’ 23 of Stephen King’s horror, its subtle and indirect elements find themselves ‘under this bloody surface’. These ingredients of Stephen King’s horror constantly interchange, as gothic imagery goes hand in hand with foreshadowing and scary descriptions of everyday things that contribute to the indirectness of the author’s way to evoke the feeling of terror within the reader. All in all, in my argument, Stephen King’s horror formula can be compared to something “smiling outside” but “horrific inside”. Consisting of both ‘bloody’ gothic scenes and subtle horror, the author’s way to depict not so evident from the first sight evil things makes his horror indirect. Finally, this manner of narrating horror texts helps Stephen King to subtly invite his readers to criticize the U.S. American society, depicting its weaknesses on an individual, community, and national levels that I’ m going to analyze in details in the following chapters.

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2. The Terror Inside Us: Individual Behavior, Affect and Reception in Carrie

2.1. Bullying, Teenage Cruelty, and Willingness to Revenge as Horrific Individual Character Traits

Having analyzed Stephen King’s horror formula in the previous chapter, I would like to concentrate on how this formula affects the reader in the following chapters. In my argument, the combination of standard gothic elements and psychological nature of the author’s subtle and indirect horror has a strong effect on the reader of his books, inviting him to look at the U.S. American society with a critical eye. Furthermore, in the books that I have chosen for my investigation, the reader is subtly prompted to criticize the U.S. American society on three main levels, as Stephen King indirectly criticizes individual behavior, community’s disfunctionality, and the U.S. American nation in Carrie, Needful Things, and Pet Sematary respectively. In this chapter of my paper, I am going to analyze the way Stephen King’s subtle horror serves as a tool that encourages the reader to look at the individual behavior of people with a critical eye. As Jonathan P. Davis states in his book entitled Stephen King’s America: In the majority of his fiction, Stephen King seems to understand that while the world is broken up into societies and cultures for the sake of organization, individual people themselves are the driving forces behind change. (Davis, 1994, 36).

That is why Stephen King pays special attention to the description of the inner world of individuals, together with its strong and weak points, in his horror fiction. Furthermore, as Thomas Fahy states in his book The Philosophy of Horror, “horror not only plays with our desire to encounter the dangerous and horrific in a safe context, but it also wrestles with the complex nature of violence, suffering, and morality.” (Fahy, 2010, 2). In my argument, the word “morality” is crucial here because, as it will become visible in the course of this chapter, Stephen King uses his horror novels to indirectly comment on morality, or frequently on the absence of thereof, thus inviting the reader to criticize individual behavior of people. The author’s horror novel Carrie (1974) will be employed as a main example of Stephen King’s indirect criticism of the terror that exists inside people, within their individual behavior. As I have already briefly mentioned in the Introduction to my paper, I have chosen Carrie as one of primary books for my analysis, because it is the first novel of Stephen King that made him popular and successful. Being a horror novel, Carrie consists of various subtle moments of terror that I am going to illustrate in this chapter. This argument allows me to state, 25 that from the very beginning of his literary career, Stephen King applied subtle and indirect horror, constructing it in a psychological way, encouraging the reader to think of societal drawbacks as of something scary rather than being frightened by ‘bloody things’ only. Briefly touching a short summary of Carrie, I would like to mention that even it visibly illustrates the individual behavioral weaknesses that I am going to analyze in this chapter. The protagonist of the book, Carrie White, is unpopular, friendless and, therefore, bullied high school girl, whose mother is a fanatical Christian who holds numerous religious (to her point of view) rites and ceremonies at home. Sara Martin Alegre names the main topic of the novel to be “the disastrous relationship between a bigoted, fanatical mother and her tormented, freakish daughter.” (Alegre, 2001, 107). After being cruelly mocked by her classmates, because of experiencing her first menstruation and being punished by her mother, Carrie discovers her telekinetic powers21 and begins to revenge everyone who has ever hurt her, causing a big disaster in the town she lives in. As it is clear from the short summary of Carrie that I have provided above, the main individual character traits that are depicted by Stephen King in order to draw the reader’s attention to them are bullying, teenage cruelty, religious fanaticism, and the willingness to revenge that is evoked within the individual. In this subchapter, I will concentrate on bullying, teenage cruelty and willingness to revenge that are depicted as horrific individual character traits in Carrie by Stephen King, who under the surface of the description of bloody events, invites the reader to look critically at the individual weaknesses people posses that I have mentioned above. Beginning with the analysis of bullying, teenage cruelty, willingness to revenge and the way they are described in Carrie, I would like to mention that the novel is constructed in the following narrative manner: the main storyline of the protagonist Carrie who is bullied at school and punished by her mother constantly interchanges with the detailed reports from newspapers, archives and documented experiments, that reveal the consequences of Carrie’s telekinetic powers. Leigh A. Ehlers calls such mode of narration “a literary framing device, that of multiple self-conscious narrators.” (Ehlers, 1981, 32). The literary critic states that Stephen King “organizes his narrative around a complex compilation, in approximately chronological order, of different reports about Carrie.” (Ehlers, 1981, 33). In my argument, this constant interchanging of narrative modes presents bullying and teenage cruelty as a cause of

21 Telekinetic powers, or telekinesis, according to Stephen King’s explanation in Carrie – “the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone” that “comes to the fore only in moments of extreme personal stress.” (King, Carrie, 6-7). 26 terrific events, while willingness to revenge is depicted as the result of this bullying and cruelty. For example, the novel begins with the following passage: News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: RAIN OF STONES REPORED It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta. Mrs. White could not be reached for comment. (King, Carrie, 3).

This abstract above serves as the example of a newspaper report that, as it becomes clear in the course of the novel, illustrates the damaging effect of Carrie’s telekinetic power which has been caused by the willingness to revenge her mother. Furthermore, such newspaper reports are written in Carrie in a very detailed manner. For example, they often include references to fictional Appendixes that do not exist within the novel: “In the case of Andrea Kolintz (see Appendix II for a fuller history), we are told that […].” (King, Carrie, 76). Such references to fictional Appendixes make the story sound more realistic and encourage the reader to think of individual weaknesses that are invited to be criticized from the point of view of them existing in real life. Going back to the newspaper report from the very beginning of the book that I have quoted above, it is necessary to say that it, after the sentence “What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic” (King, Carrie, 3) is abruptly interrupted by the following passage: Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain: Carrie White eats shit. The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the subterranean sound of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in Period One, and their morning sweat was light and eager. Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. (King, Carrie, 4).

This passage returns the reader back in time, if compared to the newspaper report, and depicts Carrie White, being an outsider among her classmates, to be the victim of the teenage cruelty and bullying. Commenting on the way Carrie is constructed by means of constant interchanging of the storyline of bullied and mocked upon Carrie and the storyline of reports about the ruining consequences of Carrie’s telekinetic power, I would like to mention that foreshadowing as a literary device is frequently used here. As I have already mentioned in the previous chapter, foreshadowing is used by the author to give the reader an advance hint of what is to come later 27 in the story. Speaking about the way Stephen King uses foreshadowing in Carrie, it is worth to point out that by means of this literary device he subtly hints of the drastic consequences of bullying and teenage cruelty that are about to come. In order to illustrate the way foreshadowing works in Carrie, I would like to quote the following passage: Yet the facts are incontrovertible. When Carrie White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of menstruation. One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Gogan, tells of entering the girls’ locker room at Ewen High School the year before the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie using a tampon to blot her lipstick with. (King, Carrie, 12).

Looking at the passage above, it becomes clear that its first paragraph depicts the main storyline of Carrie experiencing her first menstruation and, therefore, being bullied upon. The second paragraph, however, begins with the phrase “one of her surviving classmates”, where the word “surviving” plays a crucial role, as it foreshadows that events that will lead to death are about to come. Stephen King doesn’t mention the exact nature of these events, but only subtly says that they will be the events “we are concerned with”. Being full of such subtle foreshadowing, the novel Carrie creates the uncanny feeling of fear within the reader, who, on the one hand, does not read about anything horrific, but, on the other hand, is hinted that scary events are about to come many times. Not only scenes of foreshadowing of scary events that are about to come, but also scenes of bullying, teenage cruelty and revenge evoke the unsettling horrific feeling within the reader. Analyzing the theme of bullying in Carrie, there is one special sentence in the first chapter of the book I would like to comment on: Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let’s short-sheet Carrie’s bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let’s copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and duck her again, duck her again; Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd’n and the next year as truck-face, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your bum itch?); Billy Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse; Carrie at the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge wind-breakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, falling on her face in Modern Dance during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses; even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached .(King, Carrie, 9-10). 28

Apart from the fact that this quotation deals with bullying in “Christian” setting like “Christian Youth Camp” or “church picnic” (which is on its own a subtle invitation for the reader to criticize religious fanaticism that I am going to look at in details in the next subchapter), it has one more peculiarity: there is no single full stop in the passage, which makes it to be an extremely long sentence that depicts the way Carrie is bullied. In my argument, Stephen King has written such a long sentence to subtly illustrate bullying as a continuing, never-ending process in Carrie’s life. The affect of such writing technique is the sympathy towards Carrie that is evoked within the reader, who, after reading this passage, is encouraged to look with a critical eye on such individual character traits as willingness to bully somebody. Moreover, although Carrie is written in the genre of horror, there is no single description of bloody scenes in the passage above, which, however makes the reader shocked by the cruelty of bullying process. The fact that cruel teenagers find Carrie’s love letter, “copy it and pass it around”, together with facts that they “hide her [Carrie’s] underpants”, put “peanut butter in her hair”, knock her books from her desk, ask her “if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E”, horrifies the reader of the novel. Therefore, Stephen King’s horror is in my opinion of psychological rather than of a ‘blood-seeking’ nature. Continuing with the topic of teenage cruelty in the book, it is also worth to be mentioned that Stephen King usually describes the way teenagers behave with Carrie in a rather disgusting way, but does not ever openly mention this behavior to be bad: Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. They flew like snow and the chant became: “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it-” (King, Carrie, 9).

In the passage above, the author uses attributes “disgusted, contemptuous, horrified” to refer to the act of bullying, however he never openly mentions that it is something negative that the readers should avoid. Only by depicting scenes of bullying in an unpleasant manner, Stephen King encourages the reader to develop his own attitude towards the situation described and to criticize teenage cruelty as a character trait. Carrie is often presented as an outcast22 on the pages of the book: Carrie stood dumpy in the center of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood like a patient ox, aware that the joke was on her (as always), dumpy embarrassed but unsurprised. (King, Carrie, 8).

22 Outcast – a person who has no place in his or her society or in a particular group, because the society or group refuses to accept him or her. 29

The depiction of jokes being “on her” rather that with her emphasizes the outsider’s position of Carrie among her classmates. Moreover, the character of Carrie understands her position of an outcast in the book: “They laughed at me. Threw things. They’ve always laughed.” (King, Carrie, 20). These thoughts come to Carrie’s head while being bullied by her classmates who laugh at her rather than with her. Such way of presenting Carrie as an outcast in the novel helps Stephen King to invite the reader to look critically at how cruel teenagers sometimes are. Moving from the theme of bullying and teenage cruelty to the willingness to revenge as a horrific individual character weakness the book deals with, it is essential to mention that revenge is depicted as a response to bullying and teenage cruelty. For example: Pieces of tinfoil and penny-candy wrappers. They all hate and they never stop. They never get tired of it. A penny lodged in a crack. She kicked it. Imagine Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good. (King, Carrie, 25).

This quotation introduces first Carrie’s thoughts of the bloody revenge she wants to take over her classmates that were bullying her. These thoughts serve as the starting point of the horrific scenes that will be taking place later on in the book. Such cause and effect relationships between bullying and willingness to revenge serve as a subtle illustration of what consequences teenage cruelty can lead to. Stephen King does not mention that Carrie’s telekinetic powers that help her to almost destroy the town appear as a consequence of people bullying her, but he alludes the reader to such an assumption: Behind her, Tommy was climbing tearfully back onto his bike, nursing a scraped knee. He yelled something at her, but she ignored it. She had been yelled at by experts. She had been thinking: (fall off that bike kid push you off that bike and split your rotten head) and something had happened. Her mind had… had… she groped for a word. Had flexed. (King, Carrie, 28).

As it is visible from the quotation I cited above, the process of being “yelled at” Carrie evoked the power to revenge with the help of telekinesis within her head. Therefore, the idea of such drawbacks of individual behavior as bullying and cruelty is shown as a possible cause for the appearance of one more behavioral weakness of an individual – a willingness to revenge. It is also interesting to investigate the way Stephen King individualizes the description of these individual traits in Carrie, as he applies several narrators that are constantly interchanging within the story. For example, the following passage begins with the third person omniscient narrator who depicts what Carrie feels: Carrie hated her […]. She hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of blackheads. She hated her face most of all. (King, Carrie, 50). 30

Then the passage proceeds with another third person narrator, presented as the excerpt from a Dictionary: From Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena: Telekinesis is the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind. (King, Carrie, 50).

Finally, the narration of the passage changes one more time to the third person narrator who concentrates on the perspective of Sue Snell, the character that bullies Carrie at school: When they had finished making love, as she slowly put her clothes in order in the back seat of Tommy Ross’s 1963 Ford, Sue Snell found her thoughts turning back to Carrie White. (King, Carrie, 50-51).

In my argument, such interchangeable narrators and perspectives help Stephen King to indirectly invite the reader to criticize not only individual behavior, but also thoughts of his characters. Moreover, the third person narration with the concentration on perspective of a certain character sometimes changes to the first person narration, which makes the story and, respectively, the weaknesses of individual behavior it depicts, even more personal and internal: So he loved her and this time it was different, this time there finally seemed to be room and there was no tiresome rubbing but a delicious friction that went up and up: Twice he had to stop, panting, and held himself back, and then went again (he was a virgin before me and admitted it i would have believed a lie) and went hard and her breath came in short, […]. (King, Carrie, 57).

This quotation begins with the third person narrator concentrating on the perspective of Sue, however, at some point, the third person narration changes to the first person narration (“he was a virgin before me and admitted it i would have believed a lie”) which, immediately after one sentence changes back to the third person narration. Such blending of different narration modes and narrators is present during the whole story, which allows the reader to look with a critical eye at different people and their thoughts as individuals. Encapsulating all the examples I have mentioned above, it becomes visible that Stephen King indirectly encourages the reader of Carrie to criticize individual behavior of the characters of the novel by depicting teenage cruelty and bullying as a cause and willingness to revenge as a result of human weaknesses. Also, the author uses different narrators and storylines in the novel, which makes this subtle criticism of individual behavior even more realistic and personal. 31

2.2. Holy to Death? – Indirect Criticism of Religious Fanaticism

Not only bullying, teenage cruelty and willingness to revenge are subtly presented as weaknesses of individual behavior in Carrie, but also religious fanaticism is explicitly commented on in Stephen King’s horror novel. These comments on religious fanaticism are, in my argument, the ones that horrify the reader even more than the description of supernatural events in the book. As Edward Ingebretsen maintains in his book Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King: At the core of American cultic memory is a rhetoric shared by colonial theological text, civic ritual, and contemporary pulp horror formula. This rhetoric is partly habit, partly pragmatic social strategy: the duty of remembering the Holy, writing it into society as transparent origin and authority. (Ingebretsen, Preface, 1).

Indeed, Stephen King indirectly integrates religious topics into his horror fiction, thus subtly depicting the religious fanaticism as an individual character trait that is invited to be looked at as at a real problem people face nowadays. That is why the indirect criticism of religious fanaticism is worth to be analyzed in details in the context of subtle horror which is present in Carrie. The theme of religion becomes noticeable in Carrie from its very first page. The novel begins with an allusion23 to The Bible, because it opens with the passage that I have already quoted in the previous chapter and that includes the following statement: “RAIN OF STONES REPORTED” (King, Carrie, 4). This statement indirectly references to the verse from Revelation 16:21 in The Bible, that says: Rain like big stones fell from the sky on men. Each stone weighed about a hundred pounds. Men cursed God because the big rain of stones fell on them. The trouble was very bad. (The Bible, Revelation 16:21).

Opening Carrie with such an allusion, Stephen King from the very beginning of the book subtly hints that “very bad” troubles are going to happen in the course of the novel. Also, the author sets the theme of religion as the one which is connected with these troubles by referring to the rain of stones, which on its own is a powerful biblical image of God’s anger. Therefore, being set at the beginning of Carrie, the topic of religion in general, and of religious fanaticism in particular is frequently commented on throughout the whole novel, and these comments, in their turn, encourage the reader to look at religious fanaticism with a critical eye.

23 According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, allusion is an indirect reference to something (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In literary context, it is a literary device that is used to make an indirect reference to a person, a place, an idea that has a significance in a literary text. 32

As I have already briefly noticed in the previous subchapter, the indirect criticism of the topic of religious fanaticism goes hand in hand with the indirect criticism of the topic of bullying and teenage cruelty that I have already analyzed. For example, in the passage where numerous situations where Carrie is mocked and laughed at are depicted, a Christian Youth Camp and a church picnic are chosen by Stephen King as a setting: “Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let’s short-sheet Carrie’s bed at Christian Youth Camp […]” (King, Carrie, 9); “Carrie at the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge wind-breakage […]” (King, Carrie, 10). The following quotation that depicts Carrie’s memories from the Christian Youth Camp also underlines that sometimes a Christian setting can be full of brutality and cruelty: […] a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol’ prayin’ Carrie and she had come home on bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. (King, Carrie, 27).

In my argument, it is not a simple coincidence that Stephen King has chosen the setting of a Christian Youth Camp and a church picnic while depicting brutal behavior of teenagers towards Carrie. It is rather the subtle criticism of religious fanaticism applied by the author, who has shown that even if a person visits Christian Youth Camps or church picnics, it does not automatically mean that this person is good natured and does not possess individual weaknesses. By pointing this out, Stephen King encourages the reader to be critical about religious fanaticism and not to idealize Christians who claim to believe in God and God’s values. Furthermore, Stephen King does not only hint the reader not to idealize Christian people, but also presents one particular character that is identified with religious fanaticism as a key feature of his character as somebody really horrific in Carrie. This character is Carrie White’s mother, Margaret, who appears in the first chapter of the book: Carrie White’s mother, Margaret White, gave birth to her daughter on September 21, 1963, under circumstances which can only be termed bizarre. […]. Due to the Whites’ near-fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs, Mrs. White had no friends to see her through her period of bereavement. […]. Either Mrs. White’s neighbors on the street did not wish to become involved in a police investigation, or dislike for her had become so strong that they deliberately adopted wait-and-see attitude. (King, Carrie, 15-16).

As it is visible from the quotation above, Margaret White is a character that represents “near- fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs”. She, at the same time, has no friends, and all neighbors on the street dislike her strongly and adopt “wait-and-see attitude” towards her, not 33 being eager to help her. Stephen King does not mention a word about whether Margaret’s fundamentalist religious beliefs are good or bad, but, by presenting her as a friendless and disliked woman, the author subtly alludes to the fact that religious fanaticism can have negative consequences in the context of societal network for an individual. Moreover, the character of Margaret White is depicted as ridiculous in terms of her religious fanaticism. For example, being crazy about religion Margaret does not realize that she is pregnant, as her attitude towards the intercourse is extremely negative: It staggers both imagination and belief to advance the hypothesis that Mrs. Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even understand what the word entails, and recent scholars such as J. W. Bankson and George Fielding have made a more reasonable case for the hypothesis that the concept, linked irrevocably in her mind with the “sin” of intercourse, had been blocked entirely from her mind. She may simply have refused to believe that such a thing could happen to her. (King, Carrie, 16).

Again, Stephen King does not directly state that Margaret is a very narrow minded person due to her religious fanaticism in the quotation above. However, saying that “Mrs. Margaret White did not know she was pregnant”, because she “may simply have refused to believe” that “the ‘sin’ of intercourse” could happen to her, the author indirectly suggests that religious fanaticism as an individual character trait prevents a person from thinking outside the box and evaluating the outer world in an adequate manner. Continuing the topic of impossibility to think outside the box while being fanatical about religion, the following quote is worth to be mentioned: Margaret White was before my time, for which I am profoundly grateful. She told Mrs. Bicente, God rest her, that the Lord was reserving a special burning seat in hell for her because she gave the kids an outline of Mr. Darwin’s beliefs on evolution. […]. Peculiar religious views. Very peculiar. (King, Carrie, 22).

As it can be understood from this quotation, religious views of Margaret, which are “very peculiar”, do not only reject the theory of evolution, but also do it in a very aggressive manner. The character of Margaret White does not only disagree with the Darwin’s theory24, she says that “the Lord was reserving a special burning seat in hell” for those who has different from her own views. In my argument, Stephen King indirectly invites the reader to look critically at radical in religious views people, who, although presumed to believe in loving and kind God, hold a lot of aggression within them. Moreover, by depicting Margaret’s, or as she is often referred to in the book, Momma’s attitude towards other people, Stephen King subtly shows that religious fanaticism

24 Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution states that all species on the Earth arise and develop through the natural selection and the individual’s ability to survive. 34 as an individual character trait encourages a person to think that he is better than everyone else, mainly because of his religious views. This depiction draws an indirect parallel to Puritans’25 point of view, according to which they were chosen by God and better than other people. Looking at the attitude Margaret has towards other people, who do not share her religious beliefs, the reader of Carrie can notice Stephen King’s indirect invitation to criticize the belief of Puritanism to be better than other people: “Momma told her darkly that it was Sin, that it was Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists and that it was Sin and Backsliding.” (King, Carrie, 26-27). Similarly to this quotation, the following one also reveals Momma’s critical, sometimes even aggressive, attitude towards other people: […] Momma said all politicians were crooks and sinners and would eventually give the country over to the Godless Reds who would put all the believers of Jesus – even the Catholics – up against the wall […]. (King, Carrie, 29-30).

Momma’s religious views are depicted as very radical, which also makes the reader think critically of religious fanaticism as something that can evoke cruelty within a person. The following description of Carrie’s father sounds frightening: Ralph was a construction worker, and people on the street said he carried a Bible and a .38 revolver to work with him every day. The Bible was for his coffee break and lunch. The .38 was in case he met Antichrist on the job. (King, Carrie, 31).

Therefore, Carrie’s Momma and father can be perceived as the personification of Puritanism in Carrie and, in my argument, the depiction of their religious viewpoints serves as a subtle invitation to criticize the belief of Puritans to be the ‘chosen people’. The way Momma punishes Carrie throughout the whole book is also worth to be looked at, as these punishments have even more horrifying effect on the reader than mere descriptions of ‘bloody scenes’ in Carrie: Her head began to feel tired and fuzzy, and it throbbed with the beginning of a headache. Her eyes were hot, as if she had just sat down and read the Book of Revelation straight through. (King, Carrie, 29).

This quotation describes the way Carrie feels when Momma punishes her, sometimes making her “read the Book of Revelation straight through”. Such Momma’s way of punishing her daughter evokes, similarly to bullying and teenage cruelty that I have already discussed in the first subchapter, the willingness to revenge within Carrie, who thinks of Jesus as of somebody who is eager to revenge rather than as of a

25 The Puritans – English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the church of England had not been fully reformed and needed to become more Protestant. 35

Savior, as The Bible suggests: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (The Bible, 1 John 4:10). After being laughed at by her classmates and punished by Momma, Carrie thinks: If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd’s crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming – a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness. (King, Carrie, 26).

By creating the image of a “terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness” and reversing His Biblical role of a kind savior to the brutal revenger, Stephen King also encourages the reader to criticize religious fanaticism. Finally, the author presents religious fanaticism as something spooky and even terrific in Carrie. By depicting Carrie’s father as a representative of religious fanaticism, Stephen King says that: “When you saw him coming you crossed the street and you never stuck out your tongue at his back, not ever. That’s how spooky he was.” (King, Carrie, 32). Similarly, by depicting Carrie’s Momma as one more representative of religious fanaticism, the author compares her to a terror: “But Mom – when she gets a case, she’s a terror.” (King, Carrie, 33). These descriptions prove my argument that Stephen King’s horror is of psychological nature rather than of mere depiction of ‘bloody things’. What really frightens the reader of Carrie is the individual behavior of the book’s characters rather than spooky gothic scenes: “I was scared of the Whites. Real religious nuts are nothing to fool with. Sure, Ralph White is dead, but what if Margaret still had that .38 around?” (ibid.). To summarize what I have analyzed in this chapter, I would like to mention that, based on the examples from the book that I have provided, I would argue that Stephen King’s horror in Carrie is subtly constructed and used by him to invite the reader to criticize the individual behavior of people, especially bullying, teenage cruelty, willingness to revenge and religious fanaticism. The author never openly claims that such individual behavior is negative or destructive, but, as most of the key characters that represented bullying, cruelty, revenge and religious fanaticism, including Carrie herself, are dead till the end of the book, Stephen King encourages the reader to look at these individual behavior peculiarities as at something destructive and damaging. The author is not only ‘a master’ of indirect criticism of individual behavior, but he also uses subtle horror to involve the reader in critique of a group of individuals, which I will analyze in the following chapter.

36

3. Scared by Surroundings: Subtle Horror in Needful Things as an Invitation for the Reader to Criticize Community

3.1. Scary Societal Things: Consumerism and Commodity Thinking

After investigating the way Stephen King’s subtle horror affects the reader, inviting him to look critically at such individual behavior peculiarities as bullying, teenage cruelty, willingness to revenge and religious fanaticism, I would like to move on from the analysis of the way individual behavior weaknesses are revealed in Stephen King’s novels to the way the author invites the reader to criticize the behavior of a group of individuals, or community, in his books. Therefore, in this chapter of my paper, I am going to concentrate on the way such ‘scary societal things’ as consumerism and commodity thinking are depicted by Stephen King, and also on the way the author subtly encourages the reader to critically evaluate the dysfunctionality of community in his novels. In order to support my observations concerning the subtle horror as an invitation for the reader to criticize community in his books, I have chosen Stephen King’s novel Needful Things (1991) as the main example. Being the first novel that the author wrote after his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol addiction, Needful Things is considered to be “one of the most underappreciated works of the master of horror fiction” which has “failed to capture the attention of fans and critics” (Lanzagorta, 2010). As Stephen King himself points out, “the book didn’t review well. Either a lot of critics didn’t get the joke or didn’t appreciate it.” (King, stephenking.com, Electronic source). However, as Marco Lanzagorta argues while speaking about the book: [C]areful examination reveals what may well be one of the most intriguing horror yarns from recent years. Indeed, Needful Things boils down to a clever fable that talks about the superfluous value that we often assign to unreachable material possessions which we believe are indispensable to our happiness. (Lanzagorta, 2010).

I completely agree with this thought, because, as I am going to demonstrate in this chapter, Needful Things is a great example of how Stephen King indirectly criticizes consumerism, commodity thinking, and dysfunctionality of community, which in its turn, is the result of greed and self-indulgence of its members. In my argument, the way these problems of the U.S. American society are shown by Stephen King are worth to be looked at, especially nowadays, when, referring back to Marco Lanzagorta, our world is “consumed by an international economic crisis fueled by unrestricted consumption and greed.” (Lanzagorta, 2010). That is why Needful Things now becomes “as […] frightening as it ever was” (Lanzagorta, 2010), 37 which is absolutely true, because, apart from ‘bloody scenes’, the horror in the book is of psychological nature, which I will illustrate in the course of this chapter. Having a short look at the summary of Needful Things, it is essential to mention that it reflects the societal weaknesses that I am going to analyze in this chapter. Being set in a small town of Castle Rock, where all inhabitants know each other, the story begins with the arrival of a mysterious stranger, who opens a new shop called “Needful Things”, where every inhabitant of the town finds the object of his or her biggest desires. In order to get this object, however, one has to pay not with money, but with a seemingly innocent (and, as we get to know later, not innocent at all) prank played on someone else from the town. Stanley Wiater, in his book The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King characterizes the novel as both drama and satire that criticizes not only the American consumerist society, but also the life in a small town in general. (Wiater, 2006). I completely agree with him, because, as it is visible from the short summary of the novel, Needful Things does not only serve as an invitation for the reader to criticize such drawbacks of community as consumerism and commodity thinking, but also depicts the dysfunctionality of community of a small town and the ‘evil sides’ of life there. In this subchapter, I will pay attention to the way Stephen King depicts consumerism and commodity thinking as ‘scary societal things’ by using subtle horror. It is worth to be maintained, that these topics are the central subjects of horror in Needful Things. As Stephen King himself claims on his official webpage while speaking about the channels of the inspiration for the novel, he initially wanted to write a book about 1980s, as he considered this decade to be “really funny”. The author characterizes the eighties in the United States in a following way: It was a decade in which people decided, for awhile, at least, that greed was good and that hypocrisy was simply another tool for getting along. It was the last hurrah for cigarettes, unsafe sex, and all sorts of drugs. It was the final corruption of the Love and Peace Generation – The Big Cop-out – and I thought it was a case of having to laugh. It was either that, or cry. […]. It occurred to me that in the eighties, everything had come with a price tag, that the decade quite literary was the sale of the century. (King, stephenking.com, Electronic source).

Indeed, Needful Things touches the topic of everything coming “with a price tag” in a very explicit way while depicting the mindset of the community in the book as the one of “the sale of the century”. Interestingly enough, Stephen King has divided Needful Things in two parts and named the second part, where the most horrifying events are depicted “Part 2. The Sale of the Century”, while the first part of the book has a title “Part 1. Grand Opening Celebration”. In my argument, it reflects the thought that communities in the U.S. have become extremely 38 consumerist and that commodity thinking prevails within them, which, as the author shows in the book, can have scary consequences. As Jonathan P. Davis states in his book on Stephen King’s construction of America: Being himself an American who has achieved the American dreams26 of wealth and fame, Stephen King has often directed his attention toward what it means to be an American in search of the ultimate goals of riches and recognition. A close reading of the economic commentary in King’s fiction often reveals that he is more concerned with the spiritual corruption capitalism breeds than the promises of luxury resulting from material gain. (Davis, 1994, 77).

Indeed, in his novel Needful Things Stephen King concentrates his attention on the depiction of the drawbacks of the U.S. capitalism, that can cause the spiritual corruption of society. From the first page of the book, the reader is able to notice that it will bexplicitly deal with consumerism, because the first sentence of Needful Things sounds like: “In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.” (King, Needful Things, 1). By beginning the story with such sentence, Stephen King immediately alludes to the novel being about a consumerist community “in a small town”, for which the opening of a new store “is big news”. Also, from this very beginning of the book, Stephen King sets his subtle critical viewpoint of the consumerist community, mentioning that the opening of a new store in a small town is perceived by local inhabitants as an event of a global scale. In the course of the novel, the author frequently depicts different bargains and deals between characters in details, stressing how important they are for the inhabitants of Castle Rock: I remember that car quite well. It was a Honda Civic, nothing special about it, except it was special to Eddie, because it was the first and only brand-new car he’d ever owned in his life. And Sonny not only did a bad job, he overcharged for it in the bargain. That’s Eddie’s side of the story. Warburton’s just usin his color to see if he can beat me out of the repair-bill – that’s Sonny’s side of the story. You know how it goes, don’t you? (King, Needful Things, 7).

By bringing in the image of a bargain in the quotation above, and by showing that each bargain often has two “sides of the story” and, thus, leads to disagreements, Stephen King subtly invites the reader to criticize the community, where bargains are of such big importance. Continuing to analyze the powerful imagery connected to consumerism and commodity thinking in the book, I would like to have a detailed look at the main image of

26 The American Dream – a central idea of the U.S. ideology, which underlines the opportunity to achieve prosperity, success, and upward social mobility through hard work. The moto of the American Dream is ‘from rags to riches’. According to Sharon A. Russell, “Stephen King’s life and work are examples of both traditional and modern views of the ‘American Dream.’” (Russell, 2002, 1). 39

Needful Things – the image of the shop called “Needful Things”. In my argument, it is indicative that the shop where people can buy everything they need serves as the epicenter of scary and horrific events that are described in the book: OPENING SOON! the sign read. NEEDFUL THINGS A NEW KIND OF STORE ‘You won’t believe your eyes!’ (King, Needful Things, 15-16).

From the very beginning of the novel, a mysterious shop that is about to be opened soon remains in the center of attention. It is presented as “big news” (King, Needful Things, 15) and as an object of discussions and gossips for local inhabitants: “‘It’ll be just another antique shop,’ Brian’s mother said to Myra.” (King, Needful Things, 16). A new shop is attracting a lot of attention and fascinates the characters of the book: Brian was not as interested in the new store as his mother (and some of the teachers; […]). Besides, the name of the place fascinated him. Needful Things: what, exactly, did that mean? (King, Needful Things, 16).

As the quotation above suggests, the new store interests both adults and children, which points to the commodity thinking of each member of the community in Needful Things, regardless of the age. Furthermore, the opening of the store is described as something mystifying and puzzling: Written across the front in white letters were the words NEEDFUL THINGS. Polly Chalmers, the lady who ran the sewing shop, was standing out on the sidewalk, hands on her admirably slim hips, looking at the awning with an expression that seemed to be equally puzzled and admiring. (King, Needful Things, 18-19).

The passage above illustrates that the store “Needful Things” remains to be a mystery for the local inhabitants of Castle Rock, which ties in with an idea of mysterious events to be in the center of the book. Also, the shop evokes strong emotions within the characters: “OPEN it said, and OPEN was all it said. Brian stood […], looking at this, and his heart began to beat a little faster.” (King, Needful Things, 25). Brian, who, as it is mentioned at the beginning of the book, “found out quite a lot about Needful Things before his mother or Myra or anyone else in Castle Rock” (King, Needful Things, 22), begins to experience a faster heartbeat when he realizes that the new store is already opened, which indicates the commodity thinking of the character. It is also essential to point out that each time the characters of the book see that “Needful Things” is “OPEN”, new and new frightening events begin to happen. As it is 40 foreshadowed by Stephen King at the beginning of the book, the day when Brian enters “Needful Things” serves as a starting point of the novel’s horror: Look up the street one more time. You see that boy, don’t you? […]. Keep your eye on him, friend. I think he’s the one who’s gonna get it started. […]. Keep an eye on him, I tell you. Keep an eye on everything. You’ve been here before, but things are about to change. I know it. I feel it. There’s a storm on the way. (King, Needful Things, 11-12).

This foreshadowing, which by the way is one of the most frequently used literary devices in both Carrie that I have analyzed in a previous chapter and in Needful Things, creates the feeling of anxiety within the reader. The fact that “there’s a storm on the way” after a new store appears in the town serves as an indirect hint for the reader to criticize community for which consumerism is of a primary importance. The feeling of overwhelming consumerism and commodity thinking in Needful Things is only exaggerated by numerous book’s parts, where the depiction of the events that are happening sounds like a TV commercial: When he got home, his mother was on the sofa, watching Santa Barbara, eating a Little Debbie Crème Pie, and drinking Diet Coke. His mother always drank diet soda while she watched the afternoon shows. (King, Needful Things, 19).

The passage above represents Brian’s mother as a typical member of a strongly consumerist society, as she watches Santa Barbara, eats Little Debbie Crème Pie and drinks Diet Coke. In my argument, the fact that Stephen King describes the way she consumes numerous “goods and services”, giving the concrete names of brands, only deepens the feeling of Needful Things to be about “the sale of the century”. By constantly throwing in the names of famous brands in the plot of the novel, the author subtly encourages the reader to think of how many goods constantly overwhelm the characters of the book, so that the reader can develop a critical viewpoint on consumerism and commodity thinking. Also, the way Stephen King describes the level of obsession characters of Needful Things have towards the things they desire to possess is, in my argument, the most frightening part of the book. For example, as soon as Brian enters the door of “Needful Things” for the first time, he, like other characters of the novel, finds a completely useless from the reader’s point of view, but absolutely needed and desired from the character’s point of view object for which he is eager to pay any price: He pulled a card from the middle of the box like a magician doing a trick and placed it triumphantly in Brian’s hand. 41

It was Sandy Koufax27. It was a ’56 Topps card. And it was signed. “To my good friend Brian, with best wishes, Sandy Koufax,” Brian read in a hoarse whisper. And then found he could say nothing at all. (King, Needful Things, 43).

Probably, from the point of view of the majority of readers, a simple card with the image of a baseball player on it is not a thing that would make a person speechless, but not for Brian. In my argument, there is a kind of irony28 in the fact that Stephen King has turned seemingly useless objects into the biggest desires of the characters of Needful Things, as it subtly hints that usually goods are over-valued in consumerist societies. What also frightens the reader of the book is the fact that the objects that are sold in “Needful Things” do not actually have a price in its standard meaning: “How much… how much would you sell something like that for?” […]. Gaunt did not offer. “Oh now,” Mr. Gaunt said, […]. “With an item like that – and with most of the good things I sell, the really interesting things – that would depend on the buyer. What the buyer would be willing to pay. What would you be willing to pay, Brian?” (King, Needful Things, 37-38).

Offering no fixed price, but rather making the price “depend on the buyer”, Mr. Gaunt, who, as I have already stated previously, serves as the embodiment of the devil, makes the buyer to perform “a deed”: “There are two prices for this card, Brian. Half… and half. One half is cash. The other is a deed. Do you understand?” (King, Needful Things, 45). And, as the reader gets to know in the course of the book, “deeds” that characters perform are really awful and scary, as they offense each other, spoil each other’s property, kill each other’s pets, and, what is the most shocking, murder each other because of the rage that appears after performing these “deeds”. In my argument, by developing such a plot, Stephen King manages to show the idea of ‘selling the soul to the devil’ in order to satisfy one’s desires, and to indirectly encourage the reader to criticize such behavior in consumerist society. Finally, the characters are portrayed as completely obsessed with the things they have bought in “Needful Things”. Returning back to Brian, who has bought a card with Sandy Koufax, the following thoughts of the character sound mad: “Whatever deal they had made,

27 Sandy Koufax (*December 30, 1935) – a former American Major League Baseball (MLB) left-handed pitcher. Interestingly enough, Stephen King is a big fan of baseball, that is why he often includes detailed baseball imagery in his books.

28 Irony – a rhetorical device and a literary technique, that uses words “to express something other than and especially opposite of the literal meaning” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). 42 this was worth it. A card like this was worth practically anything.” (King, Needful Things, 47). As it is visible from this quotation, Brian considers a card that he bought from Mr. Gaunt to be priceless and extremely valuable. All the other characters of the book share same feelings towards the possessions they got at the “Needful Things” store. By depicting such characters’ obsession with things in Needful Things, Stephen King manages to reverse the famous quote “Love people. Use things. The opposite never works.” The author shows in the book how each member of the community loves things and uses people in order to pay for things. Thus, Stephen King provides the reader with the indirect criticism of commodity thinking, which presupposes possessions to be of the greatest people’s value. Putting everything that I have analyzed in this subchapter in a nutshell, I can state that the subtle horror of Needful Things is used by Stephen King as an invitation for the reader to criticize such ‘scary societal things’ as consumerism and commodity thinking. Also, the author depicts in the book how these traits of the community can make it dysfunctional, which I’m going to illustrate in the next subchapter.

3.2. Dysfunctionality of Community in Needful Things

Moving from the way Stephen King writes about consumerism and commodity thinking as ‘scary societal things’ in Needful Things, I would like to concentrate on the subtle horror the author uses to depict the dysfunctionality of community in the novel. In order to prove that the community in the book is encouraged to be criticized because of being dysfunctional, it is essential to briefly define what the phrase ‘dysfunctionality of community’ means. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the main definition of community proclaims it to be “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common”. Two other definitions of community state that it is “a body of nations or states unified by common interests”, and “the people of a district or country considered collectively, especially in the context of social values and responsibilities.” (Oxford Dictionary, Electronic Source). Ivor Chipkin, in his article that touches ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ communities, states that community as a notion should not only be seen as a “delivery of a range of social goods” or “the building of public infrastructure”, but also it should presuppose “an ethical norm, a moral register, […], a certain normative conception of the good citizen.” (Chipkin, 2003, 63). Thus, if a notion of a functional community presupposes that its members should have common interests, work collectively to achieve them, have social and moral norms, everything that prevents the community to be constructed in such a way makes it dysfunctional. 43

Before getting to the actual analysis of how the book indirectly invites the reader to criticize the dysfunctionality of community, I would like to briefly touch two epigraphs to Needful Things that are used by Stephen King as a subtle hint that the story would deal with ‘scary things’ within the community: Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please! Come in close where everyone can see! I got a tale to tell, it isn’t gonna cost a dime! (And if you believe that, we’re gonna get along just fine.) - Steve Earle “Snake Oil”

I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is… - Henry David Thoreau Walden (King, Needful Things).

By choosing the words of Steve Earle and Henry David Thoreau that are quoted above as epigraphs to his book, the author pushes the reader to the understanding that the “tale” he is going to tell is set “in the village streets”, where darkness is “so thick you could cut it with a knife”. In my argument, these words subtly make the reader understand that the book is going to deal with a dark side of a small or closed community. Furthermore, first words that immediately follow the epigraphs are: “YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE” (King, Needful Things). These words create the uncanny feeling within the reader, alluding to the assumption that the events he is going to read about may have already being experienced by the reader in the real life. Interestingly enough, Stephen King continues his story by appealing to the reader personally, using the second person narration: Sure you have. I never forget a face. Come on over here, let me shake your hand! Tell you somethin: I recognized you by the way you walk even before I saw your face good. You couldn’t have picked a better day to come back to Castle Rock. (King, Needful Things, 3).

Such personal appeal to the reader makes the unsettling feeling within the reader of having already experienced the events of the book in the real life even stronger. Therefore, two epigraphs, together with the first lines of Needful Things, introduce Stephen King’s subtle manner of encouraging the reader to be critical of the community that is described from the very beginning of the book. Also, the author depicts the community he writes about as closed and desolated from the first page of the first chapter of the book by saying: Western Maine’s a part of the state that’s mostly forgotten once the summer has run away and all those people with their cottages on the lake and up on the View have gone 44

back to New York and Massachusetts. People here watch them come and go every year – hello, hello, hello; goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. It’s good when they come, because they bring their city dollars, but it’s good when they go, because they bring their city aggravations, too. (King, Needful Things, 3).

By setting the events of the book in Western Maine, which is a very desolated state of the U.S. with a small number of inhabitants, Stephen King stresses that the society he depicts is secluded and detached from the outer world. Moreover, the author mentions in the book that the society he writes about is full of secrets: “It ain’t much of a secret. Secrets can and are kept in Castle Rock, but you have to work mighty hard to do it, […].” (King, Needful Things, 4). The fact that Castle Rock, which is a fictional town in the state of Maine that serves as a setting in several of Stephen King’s books29, as I have already mentioned in the Introduction to this paper, is a place where secrets “can and are kept” only contributes to the uncanny atmosphere of Needful Things. Stephen King states that the population of Castle Rock is really small many times in the book: “But you know how things sometimes get blown out of proportion in a town this size.” (King, Needful Things, 4). As it is visible from this quotation, the author claims that the small number of population of Castle Rock is one of the reasons for things to “get blown out of proportion.” By making such statement, Stephen King prepares the reader for the indirect criticism of community and its dysfunctionality on the later pages of the book. Therefore, Stephen King depicts the community in Needful Things as closed, desolated, and the one that has and keeps its own secrets from the very beginning of the novel. This depiction evokes within the reader the uncanny feeling of something bad to happen in this community and functions as a subtle horror that the author applies in order to make the reader ready for the critical depiction of the dysfunctionality of the community which is described. Also, from the very beginning of the book, it is stressed that the relationships within the community will be of a greater importance in Needful Things, if compared with a stress on individual behavior in Carrie. In the first chapter of the book, the author introduces numerous characters of the story, revealing the relationships between them primarily: Looka down there, you’ll see what I mean. That’s Nan Roberts who just came out of the bank. […]. And comin the other way is big Al Gendron. He’s so Catholic he makes the Pope look kosher, and his best friend is Irish Johnny Brigham. (King, Needful Things, 6);

29 The original cover of Needful Things (1991) proclaimed it to be “The Last Castle Rock Story”. However, Stephen King has also later set his two times revised short story “It Grows on You” (1993) in Castle Rock, proclaiming it to serve as an epilogue to Needful Things. 45

See that Sheriff’s cruiser parked by the curb near the video shop? That’s John LaPointe inside. […]. That’s the snapshot Andy Clutterbuck took of John and Sally Ratcliffe at the Fryeburg State Fair, just about a year ago. John’s got his arm around her in that picture, and she’s holdin the stuffed bear he won her in the shooting gallery, and they both look so happy they could just about split. But that was then and this is now, as they say; these days Sally is engaged to Lester Pratt, the high school Phys Ed coach. (King, Needful Things, 6).

Putting an impact on the relationships between the characters rather than diving into their inner worlds, Stephen King makes the reader understand that the community he has created in Needful Things will receive more attention than each particular individual character of the book. Continuing to introduce other characters of the novel and the relationships between them, Stephen King refers to the reader with a rhetorical question: “Trouble and aggravation’s mostly made up of ordinary things, did you ever notice that? Undramatic things.” (King, Needful Things, 7). By asking this question, the author stresses that truly ‘scary things’ are the ones that are “ordinary” and “undramatic.” By claiming this, Stephen King sets the tone of indirect criticism of the community’s drawbacks as a core of the book, which is more central than a depiction of horrific events. Having set the tone of indirect criticism of how the community of Castle Rock functions from the first chapter of the book, Stephen King touches different aspects of community life in order to illustrate its dysfunctionality as something that is supposed to horrify the reader in the novel. In the course of this subchapter chapter, I am going to comment on the following spheres of community that do not work properly in Castle Rock: religious life and the relationships between local inhabitants that, instead of being healthy and normal, consist of hatred towards each other, constant quarrels, awful deeds, and even murders. It is interesting that Stephen King often depicts religious life rather skeptically in his novels. As I have already illustrated in the previous chapter, Stephen King refers to the description of drawbacks religious life may have not only in Needful Things, but also in Carrie. However, if the stress on the criticism of religion in Carrie is revealed through the skeptical depiction of religious fanaticism as a type of individual behavior, in Needful Things the author concentrates on the portrayal of religious quarrels between different confessions within the community, putting the impact on the way religion can make the community dysfunctional rather than destroy the inner world of the individual as it is shown in Carrie. Analyzing the way Stephen King describes religious life of Castle Rock’s inhabitants in Needful Things, I would like to quote the following passage: 46

Churches in small towns… well, I guess I don’t have to tell you how that is. They get along with each other – sort of – but they ain’t never really happy with each other. Everything will go along peaceful for awhile, and then a squabble will break out. (King, Needful Things, 4).

This quotation illustrates the quarrels between local churches of Castle Rock as one of the elements that proves the dysfunctionality of community described by Stephen King. Appealing to churches of different confessions being unable to live with each other in peace, Stephen King subtly encourages the reader to look at religious life within the community of Castle Rock with a critical eye. One more vivid example of how the relationships between different religious confessions in Castle Rock make the community dysfunctional can be illustrated by the following quotation: When Willie heard that the Catholics meant to spend a night gamblin at the K of C Hall, he just about hit the roof with the top of his pointy little head. He paid for those DICE AND THE DEVIL fliers out of his own pocket, and Wanda Hemphill and her sewing circle buddies put em up everywhere. Since then, the only place the Catholics and the Baptists talk to each other is in the Letters column of our little weekly paper, where they rave and rant and tell each other they’re goin to hell. (King, Needful Things, 5-6)30.

In my argument, the passage above perfectly shows the indirect way Stephen King uses to depict the dysfunctionality of community by stressing on the hatred that the characters that belong to different religious confessions feel towards each other. The depiction of Catholics and Baptists that do not even want to communicate with each other and “tell each other they’re goin to hell” invites the reader to criticize the sphere of religion as a part of community life. Not only the hatred between different religious confessions, but also the hatred between the local inhabitants is many times commented on by Stephen King in the book, which alludes to the indirect criticism of relationships between local inhabitants as a part of dysfunctionality of the community that is portrayed in Needful Things. As the book suggests, the characters give each other nicknames in Castle Rock: He’s actually the Reverend William Rose, and he ain’t never liked Father Brigham much, nor does the Father have much use of him. (In fact, it was Father Brigham who started calling Reverend Rose ‘Steamboat Willie’, and the Reverend Willie knows it. (King, Needful Things, 5).

30 This quotation illustrates the following peculiarity of Needful Things: as it is visible from words and phrases “gamblin”, “put em up”, “goin”, Stephen King uses vernacular language (which is the dialect used in everyday life by the common people) in the novel in order to make the narrator sound more authentic. This tiny detail of Needful Things makes me think of Stephen King as of a local color (a phase in American Realism) author: firstly, being a native citizen of Maine he sets most of his numerous novels in this state; secondly, he sometimes uses the vernacular in order to imitate how people in Maine speak. 47

One more passage that shows the negative attitude of the characters towards each other in Needful Things: Now, watch close! See their noses go up? Ha! Ain’t that a sketch? I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the temperature dropped twenty degrees where they passed each other by. It’s like my mother used to say – people have more fun than anybody, except for horses, and they can’t. (King, Needful Things, 6).

The fact that the relationships between the characters are cold and full of hatred, as they are described in the quotation above, serves as one more proof of dysfunctionality of the community, the members of which have such attitudes towards each other. Quarrels between the local inhabitants of Castle Rock are also one of the crucial parts of their relationships: Well, so Sonny Jackett took Eddie Warburton to small claims court, and there was some shouting first in the courtroom and then in the hall outside. Eddie said Sonny called him a stupid nigger and Sonny said Well, I didn’t call him a nigger but the rest is true enough. In the end, neither of them was satisfied. (King, Needful Things, 7-8).

As the quotation above suggests, the characters of Needful Things are constantly involved in taking each other to courts, shouting in courtrooms, using offensive language towards each other. This fact contributes to the critical picture of the dysfunctional community Stephen King has created in the book. Things only escalate and become scarier as the novel progresses. After the opening of a shop called “Needful Things”, the town of Castle Rock becomes an epicenter of awful deeds characters begin to perform towards each other in order to pay for the things of their biggest desires in that shop. In my argument, the way Stephen King describes these awful deeds creates horrifying and, thus, memorable images within the mind of the reader: Brian didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out in a long, whistling sigh. There was no one in the Jerzyck back yard. Wilma, undoubtedly encouraged by the improving weather, had hung out her wash before leaving for work or wherever she had gone. It flapped on three lines in the sunshine and freshening breeze. Brian went to the back door and peered in, shading the sides of his face with hands to cut the glare. […]. He walked slowly down the steps and into the Jerzyck back yard. The clotheslines, with their freight of shirts, pants, underwear, sheets, and pillow-cases, were to the left. […]. The clothesline closest to the garden was hung with sheets along its entire length. They were still damp, but drying quickly in the breeze. They made lazy flapping sounds. They were pure, pristine white. Go on, Mr Gaunt’s voice whispered in his mind. Go for it, Brian – just like Sandy Koufax. Go for it! […]. He brought his hands forward, hard. The mud slung off his palms in long brown swoops that spread into fans before striking the billowing sheets. It splattered across them in runny, ropy parabolas. […]. 48

Brian looked at his hands, which were caked with mud. (King, Needful Things, 145-146).

In my argument, the quotation above is very indicative and symbolic. Firstly, it in details describes the awful deed an eleven-year-old Brian has done by making the clotheslines of Mrs. Wilma Jerzyck dirty with mud. This description evokes the willingness to criticize community of Castle Rock within the reader. Secondly, “pure, pristine white” clotheslines that become splattered in “runny, ropy parabolas” of mud, which had remained on the boy’s hands convey a symbolic meaning, indicating the evil nature of an individual, who behaves badly towards another individual. This symbolic idea, in my argument, serves as a vivid example of how Stephen King manages to subtly invite the reader to criticize community in Needful Things by using psychological horror. Thirdly, the following sentence from the quotation above also deserves to be looked at in details: “Go on, Mr Gaunt’s voice whispered in his mind. Go for it, Brian – just like Sandy Koufax. Go for it!” (King, Needful Things, 146). This sentence reveals the true nature of the character of Mr Gaunt, which I have already briefly discussed previously in this paper, as the one of a devil. Therefore, a parallel between Mr Gaunt, who has become a member of Castle Rock community after opening his shop in the town, and devil serves as a symbol of demonic spirit to appear in this consumerist society and to start destroying it and making it dysfunctional. This dysfunctionality of Castle Rock’s community only deepens later on in the book, as the characters do not only perform awful deeds towards each other, but also start killing: [I]f Nettie had stayed long enough at Polly’s she might not have had time to go back home, find her dog dead, collect the rocks, write the notes, attach them to the rocks, go over to Wilma’s, and break the windows. But if Nettie had left Polly’s at quarter to eleven, that gave her better than two hours. Plenty of time. (King, Needful Things, 418).

This quotation touches the episode of Wilma brutally killing Nettie’s only family member – her dog. In my argument, it is not the depiction of how the killing process is held that horrifies the reader, but rather the fact that a character is evil enough to kill a living creature. This argument proves that Stephen King’s horror is of psychological nature, although ‘bloody scenes’ are also explicitly described. Also, the quotation above contributes to the illustration of the dysfunctionality of community in Needful Things, the members of which can kill living creatures for no reason. The portrayal of Castle Rock’s community that becomes more and more dysfunctional reaches its apogee when the characters of the do not only kill animals, but each other: 49

Mr. Gaunt suddenly relaxed and straightened up. “Enough of these lies and half-truths. Hugh, do you know a woman named Nettie Cobb?” “Crazy Nettie? Everyone in town knows Crazy Nettie. She killed her husband.” (King, Needful Things, 104).

In my argument, the community, the members of which begin to kill each other, is absolutely dysfunctional. Therefore, Stephen King, by including murdering scenes in Needful Things, only contributes to his critical depiction of the dysfunctionality of community in the book. The story of Castle Rock ends with an indicative passage, which shows what happens to the community, where people lie, bargain, take each other to courts, quarrel, hate each other because of different religious confessions, perform awful deeds towards each other and, finally, kill: “[…] and Castle Rock was gone; the darkness had borne that away, too.” (King, Needful Things, 928). Similarly to many Castle Rock inhabitants who died towards the end of the book, the town disappears and goes away into darkness, mainly because of the dysfunctionality of its community, which wasn’t cooperative and strong enough to fight the evil. The book comes the full cycle after the disappearance of Castle Rock. As I have already claimed previously in this chapter, Needful Things begins with the words “YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE” (King, Needful Things). Interestingly enough, it also ends with the same words: “YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE” (King, Needful Things, 929). After these words, the author begins to describe a new town, similarly to the way Castle Rock is described at the beginning of the novel: Sure you have. Sure. I never forget a face. Come on, let me shake your hand! Tell you somethin: I recognized you by the way you walk even before I saw your face good. You couldn’t have picked a better day to come back to Junction City, the nicest little town in Iowa – at least on this side of Ames. (King, Needful Things, 931).

Later on, Stephen King begins to portray the community members of Junction City, and mentions that a new shop is going to be opened here soon: Can I read the sign? […]. It says OPENING SOON on top, and under that, ANSWERED PRAYERS, A NEW KIND OF STORE. And the last line – wait a minute, it’s a little smaller – the last line says You won’t believe your eyes! (King, Needful Things, 932).

In my argument, this final description of a community of a new small town where a new shop opens serves as a final indirect Stephen King’s invitation for the reader to criticize community, where consumerism plays a crucial role and which is not able to function properly. Also, the fact that the ending of ‘scary things’ in Castle Rock serves as the beginning of ‘scary things’ taking place in Junction City serves as the author’s subtle hint that the human nature, as well as the way people behave in society, does not ever change. 50

Bringing the thoughts that I have been commenting on in this chapter to the conclusion, I would like to state that Stephen King’s subtle horror serves as an invitation for the reader to criticize community in Needful Things. By depicting consumerism and commodity thinking as key characteristics of the book’s community, and by describing it as dysfunctional, the author encourages the reader to look at ‘scary societal things’ that happen within communities with a critical eye. Therefore, as I have illustrated previously in this paper, Stephen King uses psychological horror to depict the weak parts of individual behavior in Carrie, and the drawbacks of community in Needful Things. The author does not stop on individual and community criticism in his horror novels, and also criticizes the U.S. American nation as a whole in his books, and I am going to show that in the next chapter.

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4. The U.S. Nation’s Cemetery? – Willingness to Criticize the Façade of U.S. American Nation as the Reader’s Response to Pet Sematary

4.1. The Horror of the Past: Hidden Reflection of the U.S. American Policy towards Native Americans

Having analyzed the way Stephen King’s subtle horror is used to encourage the reader to criticize individual behavior of characters in Carrie, and community drawbacks in Needful Things, I am going to move on to the most overarching type of indirect criticism that I am going to discuss in this paper – the criticism of the U.S. American nation. I would like to quote Stephen King’s recent post on Facebook from the forth of July, 2019, where ‘The King of Horror’, while congratulating The U.S. Americans with the Independence Day, said: Happy birthday, America! Speaking personally, I love you both for what you are and for what you’ve allowed me to do and become. Many faults, but nobody can say that most Americans aren’t good-hearted. (see Stephen King’s Facebook page).

In my argument, the phrase “many faults” is central in the quotation above, as it underlines the fact that Stephen King pays attention to the U.S. nation’s drawbacks and, as I will show in this chapter, subtly draws the reader’s attention to them in his books. In his book entitled Stephen King: America’s Storyteller, Tony Magistrale states the following: King’s narratives, […], are also associated with describing very particular elements of America – its positive and negative group dynamics, its post-Vietnam identity, New England as a distinct regional place, to mention a few – especially for people reading them in other countries. (Magistrale, 2009, Preface, vii).

In his another work of literary criticism, The Moral Voyages of Stephen King, the literary critic, while providing various reasons why people read Stephen King’s novels, writes the following words which I cannot disagree with: I read Stephen King’s fiction because I take it seriously. He has something to say about contemporary America, the people who are her citizens, and the deathless struggle to define morality, or what it costs to choose good over evil (and vice versa), which has been the subject of all great literature since the first tale was told at an evening campfire. (Magistrale, 2010, 3).

Indeed, Stephen King’s novels provide an insightful view on the façade of the U.S. American nation as a whole, with the depiction of both positive and negative sides of its morality. Therefore, this chapter of my paper will be dedicated to the way Stephen King subtly invites the reader to criticize the façade of the U.S. American nation in his books, mainly by indirectly 52 reflecting the harsh U.S. American policy towards Native Americans and by depicting the theme of death as a metaphor to the U.S. Nationality’s deathbed. In order to support my arguments, I have chosen Stephen King’s horror novel Pet Sematary (1983) as the main example of the authors indirect criticism of the whole U.S. American nation. As I have already argued, the criticism of the nation as a whole is the most overarching type of criticism if compared with the criticism of individual behavior and the criticism of a group of individuals, or community. Coincidentally or not, Stephen King considers Pet Sematary to be the scariest of all his novels: When I’m asked (as I frequently am) what I consider to be the most frightening book I’ve ever written, the answer I give comes easily and with no hesitation: Pet Sematary. It may not be the one that scares readers the most – based on the mail, I’d guess the one that does that is probably The Shining31 – but the fearbone, like the funnybone, is located in different places on different people. All I know is that Pet Sematary is the one I put away in a drawer, thinking I had finally gone too far. […]. Put simply, I was horrified by what I had written, and the conclusions I’d drawn. (King, Introduction to Pet Sematary, xi).

As Stephen King claims in the quotation above, although “the fearbone, like the funnybone, is located in different places on different people”, Pet Sematary makes the writer horrified by what he had written32. Indeed, the book is full of horrific scenes with numerous gothic images and bloody descriptions. However, what really horrifies the reader of Pet Sematary is not only the visible horror, but also the subtle scary reflection of the U.S. American nation and its drawbacks that I’m going to analyze in details in this chapter. Even after having a look at a short summary of Pet Sematary, an indirect critique of the U.S. American nation can be noticed in the book. Pet Sematary attracts the reader’s attention to the depiction of doctor Louis Creed and his family, consisting of his wife Rachel,

31 The Shining – Stephen King’s horror novel, first published in 1977. Being the first author’s hardback bestseller, the success of the book established Stephen King as a preeminent author in the horror genre.

32 It is possible that Stephen King was himself horrified by Pet Sematary, because the book has a lot of parallels with the author’s life. Being written after Stephen King and his family moved to Orrington, Maine where they rented a house next to pet cemetery, the novel reflects the author’s horror after his younger son was almost hit to death by a truck on the road. As Stephen King mentions himself, while commenting on this situation: When you’re really scared, your memory often blanks out. All I know for sure is that he is still fine and well and in his young manhood. But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn’t caught him? […]. I simply took existing elements and threw in that terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down. (King, Introduction to Pet Sematary, xiii).

As it becomes obvious from Stephen King’s words I have quoted above, Stephen King has used the most popular in speculative question ‘what if’ while creating Pet Sematary, and has based it on his own life, that is why he refers to it as to the most frightening books of his own.

53 two children and their cat Church. After moving to a small town of Ludlow in the state of Maine33, the family discovers a pet cemetery next to their house. However, really horrific events start to take place after Church dies and Louis Creed buries it on an ancient Indian burial ground with sinister properties, instead of burying it on a pet cemetery. As it becomes visible from this short summary, the fact that Stephen King chooses an ancient Indian burial ground with sinister properties as a starting point of the horror he writes about, already subtly alludes the reader to the criticism of the U.S. American policy towards Native Americans. Also, it is obvious from the short summary of the novel that the theme of death is symbolic and central in the book. That is why I am going to concentrate on the subtle horror of Pet Sematary and analyze it from the point of view of indirect criticism of the U.S. American nation in this chapter. In this subchapter, I will analyze the subtle horror of Stephen King as the reflection of the harsh U.S. American policy towards Native Americans in the past. As Leonard G. Heldreth accurately mentions: In the fiction of Stephen King, behind the snarling werewolves, lurching zombies, and ghosts holding perpetual parties, stands the less dramatic but more relentless horror of the past. (Heldreth, 1989, 5).

I share this statement, because, as I have already illustrated in the first chapter of this paper, Stephen King’s horror formula consists of both vivid depictions of typical for gothic fiction frightening creatures and subtle allusions to such ‘scary things’, as the “horror of the past”. Although the author does not openly express his attitude to the U.S. American harsh policy towards Native Americans, there are numerous examples in the novel, where he indirectly invites the reader to criticize it, using the subtle horror. Beginning with the setting of the book, Stephen King already hints that the topic of U.S. Americans versus Native Americans’ relationships will be present in Pet Sematary. While depicting the house Louis Creed and his family have just moved in, the author states: Beyond the house was a large field for the children to play in, and beyond the field were woods that went on damn near for ever. The property abutted state lands, the realtor had explained, and there would be no development in the foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian tribe34 had laid claim to nearly 8,000 acres in

33 Choosing a small town of Ludlow in the state of Maine as a setting for Pet Sematary, Stephen King follows his tradition of locating the horrific events he writes about in small towns of his native, not very populous and to certain extend detached from civilization state of Maine. The same tradition is also preserved in both books that I have analyzed in the previous chapters of this thesis: the setting of Carrie is a little town of Chamberlain, Maine, while the setting of Needful Things is a little town of Castle Rock, Maine.

34 Micmac Indian tribe refers to Mi’kmaq people, who are the Native people of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada. 54

Ludlow, and in the towns east of Ludlow, and the complicated litigation, involving the Federal government as well as that of the state, might stretch into next century. (King, Pet Sematary, 4).

In my argument, the passage above is indicative in terms of the topic of U.S. Americans versus Native Americans’ relationships in the book. Firstly, Stephen King refers to history while talking about the woods “that went on damn near for ever”. Secondly, he brings in the conflict of the land division between U.S. American nation and Native Americans, by saying that “the remains of the Micmac Indian tribe had laid claim to nearly 8,000 acres in Ludlow, and in the towns east of Ludlow, […].” Thirdly, the author subtly invites the reader to criticize this conflict by mentioning that it “might stretch into next century”, alluding the conflict to be everlasting. In the abstract to her article on the occlusion of colonial dispossession and signatures of cultural survival in U.S. horror fiction, Gesa Mackenthum points out that: [T]he dispossession and removal of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, as well as the ongoing legal struggle over tribal lands, are occluded (i.e., both remembered and forgotten) in the cultural production of the United States. (Mackenthum, 1998, 93).

She goes on and adds that Pet Sematary, as well as other works of U.S. horror genre, such as movie Poltergeist and another Stephen King’s novel The Shining, negotiates “the history of colonial dispossession” by touching the topics of “property, real estate, and the burial ground.” (Mackenthum, 1998, 93). I agree with this thought because, in my argument, Pet Sematary indirectly comments on the U.S. American superior policy towards Native Americans in both nineteenth century and today. Indeed, the conflict between the U.S. American nation and Native Americans, which touches the question of land has deep roots in the U.S. American history. Right after arriving on the U.S. American continent, European settlers proclaimed the land to belong them, ignoring numerous Native American tribes that were living on these territories. Being stronger in terms of power and weapon, European settlers spread across the continent, making Native Americans, who didn’t have enough power to resist, leave their homes and migrate. The conflict escalated when the U.S. government approved the Indian Removal Act in 1830, according to which Native Americans underwent forced relocations and, thus, suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while on the route to their new designated reservations. Even nowadays, although Native Americans have achieved the U.S. American citizenship, many of them still live in reservations and claim to be ignored by the U.S. American government. In other words, Native Americans’ homeland has no longer belonged to them after European settlers arrived and made the continent their home. In my argument, it is subtly 55 reflected in Pet Sematary, where a U.S. American family of Louis Creed arrives to Ludlow, Maine, the territory of which previously belonged to the Micmac Indian tribe, and settles here: ‘Daddy?’ Eileen said from the back seat. […]. ‘What, love?’ Her eyes, brown under darkish blonde hair and in the rear-view mirror, also surveying the house: the lawn, the roof of a house seen off to the left in the distance, the big field stretching up to the woods. ‘Is this home?’ ‘It’s going to be, honey,’ he said. (King, Pet Sematary, 5).

The quotation above draws a subtle parallel between the Creed family and the European settlers, who both have come to Native Americans’ lands in order to make them their “home”. The subtlety of Stephen King’s horror when it comes to the description of the novel’s setting is visible in the following sentence from the book: “Louis, who thought this strange Maine landscape almost eerily quiet after the constant roar of Chicago, only nodded his head.” (King, Pet Sematary, 18). Here Stephen King does not describe anything scary or horrific, he just depicts the woods where Native Indians used to live in the past. However, this depiction creates an uncanny feeling of something bad to happen in the course of the story, because the author uses the phrase “eerily quiet” while referring to the landscape of Maine, which evokes an unsettling anxiety within the reader when it comes to the woods of Native Americans. The author also uses subtle hints of something bad that is going to happen when he describes the house Louis and his family live in: “Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the room.” (King, Pet Sematary, 23). In my argument, the usage of such adverbs as “ghostly” and “eerily” in the quotations above, while describing the setting of Pet Sematary foreshadows that horrific events are going to take place. Joe Nazare, in his article on the appropriation and reclamation of Native American mythology in U.S literature states that: [T]he Native American might be seen as just another variable to be plugged into horror’s xenophobic35 formula: establishing a monstrous Other which must be vanished to preserve cultural order. (Nazare, 2000, 24).

The literary critic proceeds commenting on a Native American figure in the U.S. literature by comparing it to wilderness and savagism, bringing in the example of a founding text of American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown’s36 1799 novel Edgar Huntly, the various

35 Xenophobia – fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign (Merriam- Webster Dictionary).

36 Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) – the first professional American writer, the predecessor of Edgar Allan Poe, who was inspired by British Gothic tradition. 56 transgressions of which are “ultimately heaped on warmongering Indian ‘savages’” (Nazare, 2000, 25). I agree with thoughts of Joe Nazare, because, similarly to what Charles Brockden Brown does in Edgar Huntly, Stephen King also applies the well-known parallel of Native Americans and wilderness, versus U.S. American nation and civilization in order to make the reader being critical about the U.S. American policy towards Native Americans. The following passage from the book serves as the proof of this statement: ‘Do you know where you are?’ Jud asked Louis. Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head. Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘Plenty of stuff that way,’ he said. ‘That’s town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going on to those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.’ (King, Pet Sematary, 33).

In my argument, this passage has two interesting aspects that are worth being commented on. Firstly, Stephen King once more, similarly to the quotation I have analyzed above, brings in the conflict of land division between the U.S. government and Native Americans, who want the land back. Secondly, this quotation clearly illustrates the opposition between the “civilized” U.S. nation “with its phone and electric lights and cable TV” and the “wilderness” of the lands that Native Americans consider to be their property37. Although the author does not openly express his attitude towards this opposition between the U.S. nation’s civilization and the Native Americans’ wilderness in the passage above, his indirect criticism of civilization becomes clear when he mentions that the Creed family has “the city-bred’s almost instinctive fear of the woods.” (King, Pet Sematary, 33). This phrase reflects the author’s critical viewpoint when it comes to civilization at a cost of total ignorance of “wilderness” or, in other words, nature, because, as the book suggests, there is “no need to be scared in these woods.” (King, Pet Sematary, 34). Besides the comparison of the U.S. nation’s civilization and the Native Americans’ wilderness, the author also draws an opposition between U.S. nation’s Christianity and Native Americans’ pagan religion: “The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.” (King, Pet Sematary, 36). Again, Stephen King does not openly express his attitude towards this opposition, but, by illustrating it in the book, makes

37 This parallel between the U.S. American nation’s civilization and Native Americans’ wilderness reminds me of an 1872 painting by John Gast, entitled American Progress which serves as an allegory for the Manifest Destiny and American westward expansion. 57 the reader think of the problem of Native Americans’ religion being repressed by European settlers, who wanted to turn Native Americans into Christians because of considering themselves to be superior over indigenous people and, thus, having the only “true” and “right” religion. As the book progresses, Stephen King often foreshadows that something bad is going to happen on the lands, previously belonging to Native Americans. While depicting Louis Creed’s thoughts on the blowdown between the pet cemetery and the Indian woods, the author mentions: It occurred to him even then that there was something too convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond, woods to which Jud Crandall later sometimes referred absently as ‘the Indian woods’. Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect, for the work of nature. It- (King, Pet Sematary, 41).

As I have already stated in this paper, foreshadowing is a literary device Stephen King frequently uses while constructing subtle horror in his novels, and Pet Sematary is not an exclusion. The passage above illustrates the way the author foreshadows that the blowdown between the pet cemetery and the depths of Indian woods will serve as a symbol of barrier between an ordinary life of Louis Creed and the sinister properties of the Indian burial ground that are going to be found in the woods, which, as the author states, “was not made to be broken.” (King, Pet Sematary, 135). There are numerous other examples of foreshadowing that hints to the dreadful events to take place on this Indian burial ground. “Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.” (King, Pet Sematary, 133) are the thoughts that come to Louis’s mind as he steps on the Indian burial ground for the first time. The image of the Indian burial background itself is also very symbolic when speaking about the indirect criticism of the U.S. nation’s policy towards Native Americans. In my argument, this image, that is, by the way, used by Stephen King as an epicenter of horrific events that are taking place in the book, stands for Native Americans’ heritage that is being ignored, or, if speaking in figural terms, “buried” by the U.S. American nation. Furthermore, Stephen King actively uses standard gothic imagery while describing the Indian burial ground: “[…] the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.” (King, Pet Sematary, 132). The images of “fading light, the cold and the wind”, which are presented as “eerie and gothic” only escalate the frightening effect of Stephen King’s description of an ancient burial ground. The scary feeling that arouses in the reader while reading about the Indian burial land encourages him to think of frightening 58 behavior of the U.S. nation that led Native Americans’ culture to be forgotten and not paid attention to. Two following quotations support this thought: The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud’s flash was a part of it, glowing like some primitive torch borne deeper and deeper into the woods. He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret. (King, Pet Sematary, 134);

He did not hear any ‘sounds like voices’ […]. Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. (King, Pet Sematary, 140-141).

Passages that are quoted above bring in the images of “deadly cold” wind, “bobbing light”, deep woods, “shrill, maniacal laugh” and the “presence of some secret”. These images, as I have already mentioned, make the reader “feel” the horror of the past, the horror of the harsh U.S. American policy towards Native Americans. Referring back to the quotation above, I would like to comment on a “dark secret” the Indian burial ground has, which, as it becomes clear in the course of the book, is a power to return dead bodies to life: “This place has power, Louis.” (King, Pet Sematary, 135). In my argument, it signifies that, although Native Americans and their culture are commonly ignored by the U.S. American nation, it does not mean that their culture is dead or has never existed. Constant references to power of the Indian burial ground encourage the reader of Pet Sematary to think of Native Americans’ culture as of something alive and powerful, rather than of something that should be ignored and forgotten: “He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was a power here, yes, he felt it.” (King, Pet Sematary, 138). Therefore, Stephen King portrays the Indian burial ground as a powerful place with properties to return dead bodies to life in order to stress that the Native American culture is still alive, although it has already been “buried” by the U.S. American nation. The author also brings in some legends, myths and traditions of a Micmac tribe into Pet Sematary: This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little God Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man’s Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came again. (King, Pet Sematary, 139);

‘Go on and bury your animal,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna have a smoke. I’d help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That’s the way it was done then.’ (King, Pet Sematary, 145);

‘The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place,’ he said. ‘Believed this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east, was magic. They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it – the Penobscots said these woods were full of ghosts.’ (King, Pet Sematary, 146); 59

Later on, not even the Micmacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo38 here, and that the ground had gone sour. (King, Pet Sematary, 147).

In my argument, Stephen King does so in order to make the reader aware of the fact that Native Americans have always had their own culture and, thus, to encourage him to criticize the attempts of European settlers to assimilate Native Americans with them and ignore their own cultural heritage. Although the U.S. American nation has referred to the Native Americans’ culture as to something that has never existed, or, in other words, as to something empty, Stephen King alludes in his book that it is not true, by mentioning the following passage while depicting the Indian land: “The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness – but an emptiness which vibrated.” (King, Pet Sematary, 144). The author depicts Indian burial ground as lonely and empty, alluding to the fact that the indigenous culture is usually not supported or even acknowledged by the U.S. nation. However, Stephen King presents this emptiness of the Indian ground as the one that “vibrates”, so that the reader is invited to look critically at its ignorance by the U.S. American nation. Furthermore, the author presents Native Americans from the positive angle in Pet Sematary: ‘Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here,’ Jud said. ‘No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have.’ ‘Why? Why did they do it?’ ‘This was their burying ground,’ Jud said. ‘I brought you here so you could bury Ellie’s cat here. The Micmacs didn’t discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.’ (King, Pet Sematary, 144).

By depicting Micmacs as ones who “didn’t discriminate”, Stephen King makes a subtle comment on the U.S. American nation, which is a discriminatory society when it comes to different races and nationalities. Bringing all the points that I have brought up in this subchapter together, I would like to state that Pet Sematary explicitly touches such ‘scary things’ of the U.S. American past as the harsh

38 Wendigo – according to the Algonquian folklore, it is a mythical man-eating creature or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of the United States and Canada (Brightman, 1988). According to Meagan Navarro, the presence of Wendigo in Pet Sematary provided the novel with “some of the most intense moments of horror” (Navarro, 2019). She also states that “while King’s novel is heavily themed around grief, the Wendigo manipulates that grief throughout the story.” Finally, Meagan Navarro sees Wendigo as a “pure evil, and the chilling puppet master orchestrating every tragedy and mistake that befalls the characters in the story” (Navarro, 2019). In my argument, the presence, as well as the power of Wendigo in Pet Sematary serves as a subtle allusion to the fact, that Native American culture is still present within the U.S. culture and should not be ignored as if it has never existed. 60

U.S. American policy towards Native Americans and their cultural heritage. Stephen King, in his turn, uses his subtle horror to invite the reader to criticize this policy in the book. The author also applies the theme of death in the novel, in order to emphasize on the deathbed of the U.S. nationality’s myth which I’m going to analyze in the next subchapter.

4.2. Death as a Metaphor for U.S. Myths of Nationality

I would like to begin this subchapter with the words of Richard Slotkin, who in his book Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 states that: The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the “national character.” Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected. (Slotkin, 2000, 3).

Indeed, the “national character” of each country, including the way its citizens perceive the world is defined and shaped by national myths. The U.S. nationality’s myth defines a European settler as a ‘true American’, ignoring the fact that there had already been numerous tribes of Native Americans on the American continent before European settlers arrived. And, as I have shown in the previous subchapter, Pet Sematary subtly touches the horror of the harsh U.S. American policy towards Native Americans and their cultural value. In this subchapter, I want to concentrate on the theme of death, which also plays a crucial role in the way the book indirectly criticizes the façade of the U.S., and which is commented on and touched upon both explicitly and implicitly in Pet Sematary. Furthermore, the theme of death in Pet Sematary is used as a metaphor to the deathbed of the U.S. nationality’s myth in the novel, which I am going to illustrate and prove in this subchapter. Beginning with the title itself – Pet Sematary, it already alludes to the theme of death, as it includes one of the most explicit and common death associations – the symbol of cemetery. Furthermore, the fact that the word “cemetery” is intentionally spelled in the incorrect way as “sematary”, as well as the fact that it is specified as not an ordinary cemetery, but the “pet cemetery”, draws attention to the detail that the theme of death will have a rather unusual shading in the novel. Moving from the title to the foreword of Pet Sematary, I would like to maintain that it also touches the theme of death: Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: 61

John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. […]. Napoleon. Gandhi. […]. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why – at least to a degree – He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed – badly, most undertakers say – Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body-bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The man who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret. (King, Pet Sematary, Foreword, ix).

In my argument, this Foreword to Pet Sematary underlines that people tend not to speak up much when it comes to the theme of death. By counting “people who have not written books, telling what they did”, the author mentions “the man who buried Hitler”, “the man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth”, “the man who cremated William Holden” and even “the man who mummified the Pharaohs”. All these processes that Stephen King touches here are the ones that are closely connected to death and burial process, which gives the reader an understanding that Pet Sematary will explicitly deal with these two topics. Furthermore, epigraphs to chapters of Pet Sematary are taken from The Bible and also have death and burial as their main focus. The epigraph to the Part One of the book states: Jesus said to them, ‘Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go, that I may awake him out of his sleep.’ Then the disciples looked at each other and some smiled, because they did not know Jesus had spoken in a figure. ‘Lord, if he sleeps, he shall do well.’ So then Jesus spoke to them more plainly. ‘Lazarus is dead, yes… nevertheless, let us go to him.’ - John’s Gospel (paraphrase) (King, Pet Sematary, 1).

Similar to the way the Foreword of Pet Sematary functions, the epigraph indicates that the theme of death is going to be the central one in the book. The opening sentence of the novel draws the reader’s attention to the theme of death as to the crucial one: “Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three […].” (King, Pet Sematary, 3). In my argument, the fact that Stephen King begins Pet Sematary with the description of the loss the main character experienced early in his life contributes to the impression that the book revolves around the theme of death. The occupation the main character Louis Creed has also contributes to the centrality of the theme of death in the book. Being a doctor, the protagonist is depicted as the one, who “had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career.” (King, Pet 62

Sematary, 28). This repeated focus on the peculiarity of Louis Creed’s job, tightly connected to people’s deaths, underlines that the theme of death as a key motif. The name of the protagonist’s cat, the death of which serves as a starting point for ‘scary things’ in the book is also connected to the theme of death. Although, as the novel suggests, the name Church is the derivative from Winston Churchill39: “Winston Churchill moved with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat” (King, Pet Sematary, 3), it has another symbolic meaning. In my argument, the name Church serves as one more indirect allusion to the centrality of the theme of mortality, as a church, a church yard, a church building are usually the images that come to people’s minds when they think of death. Therefore, the indirect encouragement of the reader to think of death while reading Pet Sematary is only strengthened by the names the author chooses for some of the characters of the book. In general, as it becomes visible after looking at the examples I have mentioned above, the theme of death is transmitted through the title, the foreword, epigraphs, opening sentence, the protagonist’s occupation, and the name of the protagonist’s cat in Pet Sematary. And, in my argument, Stephen King touches the theme of death in not only direct sense in the book, but also gives it a figurative meaning, indirectly presenting death as a metaphor to the U.S. nationality’s deathbed in the book, which I am going to illustrate in the following paragraphs. In my argument, a character of Judson Crandall serves as the embodiment of nationality in Pet Sematary. And, by depicting the brutal death of this character towards the end of the novel, Stephen King draws a metaphorical parallel between the Crandall’s death and the deathbed of the myth of the U.S. nationality, in order to indirectly invite the reader to criticize the U.S. nation as a whole. There are several reasons why I see Judson Crandall as the personification of the U.S. nationality. If we look at the definition of nationality, it is essential to mention that the term denotes “the official right to belong to a particular country”, or “a group of people of the same race, religion, traditions, etc.” (Cambridge Dictionary, Electronic Source). And, in my argument, the character of Judson Crandall explicitly illustrates the feeling of belonging to the U.S., its history and traditions. Firstly, Judson Crandall is depicted as an old man and his age is frequently stressed in the book: ‘My dad built that house across the way. Brought his wife there, and she was taken with child there, and that child was me, born in the very year 1900.’

39 Winston Churchill (30.11.1874 – 24.01.1965) was a British statesman (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, a Member of Parliament), an army officer (participated in the World War II), and a writer. 63

‘That makes you –’ ‘Eighty-three,’ Crandall said, and Louis was mildly relieved that he didn’t add years young, a phrase he cordially detested. (King, Pet Sematary, 13).

The fact that Judson Crandall is eighty-three years old allows the reader to draw a parallel between him and the U.S. history, as people usually associate an old person with somebody, who is more related to history than a young person. This feeling of Judson Crandall to serve as the embodiment of history is only strengthened by what the character tells about himself: Anyway, I’ve always lived there. I joined up when we fought the Great War40, but the closest I got to Europe was Bayonne, New Jersey. Nasty place. Even in 1917 it was a nasty place. (King, Pet Sematary, 13).

The fact that the character has “always lived there”, participated in “the Great War”, and has spend his all life in the U.S. without ever crossing its borders indirectly makes the reader associate Judson Crandall with the U.S. nationality. The character himself mentions that he has “seen a lot of life right here in Ludlow” (King, Pet Sematary, 14), which encourages the reader to see him as an embodiment of the U.S. history and, therefore, nationality. Moreover, Judson Crandall has a “Yankee accent”41 (King, Pet Sematary, 14): “‘Pretty up here,’ Jud said, […]. Louis thought he had just heard the quintessential Yankee understatement.” (King, Pet Sematary, 31), which only contributes to this image. The way the house of Judson Crandall is described also makes the reader perceive him as a personification of the U.S. nationality: Jud was a vague silhouette behind the screens of the enclosed porch. There was the comfortable squeak of a rocker on old linoleum. Louis knocked on the screen door, which rattled companionably against its frame. Crandall’s cigarette glowed like a large, peaceable firefly in the summer darkness. From a radio, low, came the voice of a Red Sox game, and all of it gave Louis Creed the oddest feeling of coming home. (King, Pet Sematary, 17).

Again, the fact that the character’s house is very old, and at the same time evokes the “feeling of coming home” helps the reader to draw a parallel between Judson Crandall and the U.S. nationality.

40 World War I is meant here, which was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. It was also one of the deadliest conflicts in history that caused over 100 million deaths worldwide. The World War I involved Allied Powers (including France, British Empire, Russia, US and many other countries) fighting against Central Powers (German Empire, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire and other countries).

41 The term ‘Yankee’ is usually used to denote people from United States. 64

Furthermore, the character of Judson Crandall is described as the one, who is a tradition holder: “The Thanksgiving dinner Jud and Norma put on was a fine one.” (King, Pet Sematary, 127). The fact that the first national American holiday Thanksgiving is shown as the one which is held by Judson Crandall contributes to his image of the personification of the U.S. nationality. Therefore, as it becomes visible from the arguments I have presented above, the character of Judson Crandall stands for the embodiment of the U.S. nationality, involving the country’s history and traditions. And the fact that the character is brutally killed towards the end of the book proves that the theme of death is subtly presented as the metaphor to the U.S. nationality’s deathbed in Pet Sematary by Stephen King. When Louis’s dead and risen again son Gage appears in Judson Crandall’s house, he refers to his wife and says: “Norma’s dead and there’ll be no one to mourn you. […]. She’s burning down in hell, arthritis and all. I saw her there, Jud. I saw her there.” (King, Pet Sematary, 432). Then the novel proceeds by the ‘bloody’ depiction of the way Gage kills Judson Crandall: ‘I’m gonna fuck with you, old man!’ The Gage-thing chortled, blowing its poisoned breath in his face. ‘I’m gonna fuck with you! I’m gonna fuck with you all … I … want!’ Jud flailed and got hold of Gage’s wrist. Skin peeled off like parchment in his hand. The scalpel was yanked out of his hand, leaving a vertical mouth. ‘All … I … WANT!’ The scalpel came down again. And again. And again. (King, Pet Sematary, 433).

The quotation above serves, by depicting the way the embodiment of the U.S. nationality, Judson Crandall, was brutally murdered, as an indirect invitation for the reader to think of the U.S. nationality to be at its deathbed and, thus, to criticize the U.S. American nation as a whole. Recapping the points that I have presented in this chapter, I want to state that the reader response to Pet Sematary is the willingness to criticize the façade of the U.S. American nation as a whole. This willingness is achieved by subtle horror Stephen King uses in the book while depicting the harsh U.S. policy towards Native Americans and showing the theme of death, which is central in the book, as a metaphor to the deathbed of the U.S. nationality’s myth.

65

Conclusion

As I indicated in the Introduction to this master’s thesis, the aim of my study was to reveal the ‘secrets’ that Stephen King’s novels, according to the author himself, have. Throughout my thesis, I have shown that one of these ‘secrets’ is the subtlety of Stephen King’s horror and the way the author uses it to indirectly draw attention to the hidden problems and challenges of U.S. American society. In my paper, I have demonstrated that Stephen King’s horror is designed according to the author’s own horror formula, which includes typical gothic elements such as haunted houses, monstrous events, secluded setting, mad characters, as well as images of cemeteries, blood and ghosts. Also, as I have shown, the author makes his books horrifying not by imbuing them with the ‘bloody surface’ of murders, deaths and frightening scenes, but rather by catering to the psychological nature, indirectness, and subtlety of horror, which creates an uncanny feeling of terror within the reader. Furthermore, as I have argued, Stephen King’s horror formula serves as the author’s encouragement for the reader to pay attention to social problems in U.S. American society and to critically look at them on three main levels: the criticism of individual behavior, community drawbacks, and the dark sides of the U.S. American society as a whole. The primary texts I have selected for my investigation helped me to prove that Stephen King’s horror fiction subtly touches upon various problematic aspects of the U.S. American society. The author’s book Carrie served as a key example of how psychological horror of Stephen King puts criticism on such drawbacks of individual behavior as bullying, cruelty, willingness to revenge and religious fanaticism. The horror novel Needful Things helped me to illustrate the way Stephen King’s subtle horror serves as an invitation for the reader to think about consumerism, commodity culture, and dysfunctionality of community as negative sides of consumerist society. Finally, I analyzed the “most frightening” (King, Introduction to Pet Sematary, xi) Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary as a representative example of the way the author criticizes the façade of the U.S. American nation as a whole by reflecting the harsh U.S. American policy towards Native Americans and referring to death as to a metaphor for U.S. myths of nationality, underlining their mortality. The key passages from Stephen King’s novels Carrie, Needful Things and Pet Sematary helped me scrutinize the affect the author’s horror texts have upon the reader and the way this is achieved. As I have shown, the emotion of fear, as well as the uncanny feeling that something bad is about to happen is created by Stephen King in a non-standard for horror 66 fiction manner. ‘The King of Horror,’ still describing murders and deaths in his novels, is not a ‘blood-seeking’ author, but rather a master of psychological horror hidden behind this ‘bloody surface’. In other words, the subtle depiction of the familiar in everyday life becomes even more uncanny and frightening than the detailed description of horrifying scenes in Stephen King’s books. This fact is relevant for the general interpretation and analysis of horror fiction, because it allows the reader to look beneath the surface of a horror text and search for frightening things the author calls attention to while describing them subtly. It is worth noticing, that, as I have shown in the footnotes to my main chapters, the pattern according to which Stephen King constructs horror in his novels so that it serves as an invitation for the reader to criticize the U.S. American society is not only applicable to Carrie, Needful Things and Pet Sematary, but can also be found in other works of the author, such as Misery and It. Furthermore, as I have intimated, Stephen King is not the only horror genre author who uses the subtlety and indirectness of horror as key elements of his horror formula. Such U.S. authors as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson also applied this technique in their horror fiction. That is why not only the subtlety of Stephen King’s psychological horror and the affect it has on the reader of his numerous novels, but also the psychological aspect of horror fiction in general is an interesting topic for further investigation of American horror fiction. This statement is essential, as it opens a new possibility of interpreting a horror story by the reader and raises the question of whether subtle horror is the one that frightens the readers more than direct ‘in your face’ depiction of ‘bloody scenes’. Finally, the main conclusion I have come to in my master’s thesis is that Stephen King’s horror novels make visible the ‘scary things’ of U.S. American society, such as teenage cruelty, religious fanaticism, consumerism, and ignorance to take responsibility for the mistakes of the past. King’s works, in this sense, pinpoint the task that literature has as a reminder of a nation’s cultural heritage. In general, these everyday ‘scary things’ have a more frightening affect on the readers than the overt descriptions of the ‘bloody surface’ they are hidden beneath.

67

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