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Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 July 2013, Vol. 3, No. 7, 427-435 D DAVID PUBLISHING

Stephen King or the Literature of Non-exhaustion

Jessica Folio University of Reunion Island, Saint-Denis, France

This paper focuses on ’s (1947- ) long-form narratives and attempts at perceiving the elements accounting for his endless success. As the author chooses this title for her paper, she clearly keep in mind John Barth’s (1930- ) essay. The choice of “punning” Barth’s title is made so as to situate ourselves in the wake of postmodernist studies to try and analyze King’s deconstruction and reconstruction of common ideas, myths, and the Gothic genre, applying them to the contemporary era. The choice of this angle of study is accounted by the fact that the aim is to prove that King has not literarily exhausted himself in spite of his 37 years of writing and is in a constant quest for a renewal of the Gothic genre. The notion of remolding is one of the red threads allowing to weave the intricate cloth of postmodernism. The author will here humbly try to unveil the essential elements perceived in King’s narratives which allow to qualify him as “a postmodern writer”.

Keywords: Gothic, postmodernism, grotesque, parody, deconstruction

Introduction In her thesis completed in 2011, the author dealt with three precise works by three American writers: Stephen King’s (1984), ’s Shadowland (1980), and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby (1980). The cornerstone laid on the notion of abjection in the Kristevan sense of the ambiguous coexisting feelings of repulsion and fascination for the abject object/subject. The author attempted at lifting up the veil on the various strategies used by the authors to almost hypnotize the readers, to lead them into what Stephen King calls the “”. One of the doors the author opened was the reworking by those authors of the Gothic motifs by roaming on the path of postmodernism. In this presentation, the author concentrates on the case of the mainstream American writer, Stephen King, whose works helped to popularize the conventional Gothic tale tropes. The author chose to entitle her presentation “Stephen King or the Literature of Non-exhaustion”, clearly keeping in mind John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (Barth, 1984, pp. 63-76). Barth (1984) suggested that the conventional modes of literary representation have been overused, that modernism has exhausted itself and he foreshadowed the notion of rewriting as a leitmotiv in postmodern works. The author’s aim is to account for the fact that King has not literarily exhausted himself in spite of his 37 years of writing if we consider his novels from (1974) to 11/22/63 (2011). This would be in part explained by the postmodernist touch brought to his narratives and his remolding of the Gothic genre. In Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005), Strengell

Jessica Folio, Ph.D., English Department, University of Reunion Island. 428 STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION enlightened King’s Gothic heritage, his reworking of the Gothic genre along with that of common myths and fairy tales. The author will open a short parenthesis on the controversial term “postmodernism”, controversial for its definition itself which is regularly debated and is hard to grasp entirely. In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), Hutcheon pointed out the ironic quote marks characterizing the postmodern movement. Irony is often combined with black humor and verges on parody1. Considered as a hybrid movement, postmodernism stresses the mingling of unexpected, incongruous elements, establishing a link with the term “kitsch”, which often assimilated to bad taste2. Hutcheon (1988) also suggested an intertextual relation between postmodern novels and past works. The latter are revisited, remolded, and even deconstructed. In the term “deconstruction”, we perceive like Derrida, the absence of a unique meaning, of an absolute link between signifiers and signified. The term “instability” is at the root of the narratives.

A Feminine Angle In King’s first eponymous novel, Carrie (1974), the heroine, who has been the scapegoat of her mother and her peers at school all her life, discovers her telekinetic abilities. The feeling of entrapment, confinement running through the veins of the Gothic genre is transposed to ’s familial house. The house plays the role commonly held by the Gothic castle which “confines, walls up and tortures by its mere architectural presence” (Lévy, 2002, p. 10). Carrie’s house is depicted as the lair of a monster, a devouring cave where even daylight does not get through3. The abusive, sadistic male figure (a monk, a patriarchal figure in Gothic tales) is replaced by Carrie’s fanatically religious quasi castrative mother who wishes to control Carrie and shuts her out from the surrounding world. The town of Chamberlain itself is a locus of entrapment where Carrie tries to escape from people’s prejudices. The images of violence, abuse find a parallel with the blood images that give King’s narrative its circularity: Carrie bathes in her menstrual blood in the girls’ shower at school at the beginning; she is soaked in pig’s blood at the prom. The scene of the shower deserves a short analysis. As Carrie has her period for the first time at the age of 16 in the girls’ shower at school and she has no understanding of why she bleeds the monstrous figures represented by her classmates bombard her with tampons and sanitary towels, chanting: “plug up” (King, 1974, p. 13). There is a grand-guignolesque undertone as King seems to go one step further in the paradigm of excess. There is a reworking of the signified of hygienic towels which are no longer means of protection but weapons and the scene becomes grotesque when one of the napkins remains stuck on Carrie’s pubic hair as a stigmata of both her innocence and humiliation. The expression “plug it up” commonly designates the fact of filling up a hole; it is assimilated to cracks, leaks. Here it is associated with Carrie’s vagina perceived as a monstrous hole, a cave whose entrance has to be obstructed. If, in Gothic tales, the female body is both desired and feared and has to be dominated, King objectifies Carrie’s body and almost makes her a martyr. Carrie eventually lets her darker side bring her own annihilation and the destruction of her town.

1 Parody does not just apply to the strict sense of turning into ridicule an original text but is seen as having an intent. Parodic works have an artistic autonomy and parody is viewed as a form of transgression for Genette in Palimpsests. 2 In his Psychologie du kitsch, Abraham Moles places the latter between art and conformism and makes it correspond to the immediate, to a reflection on contemporary society in its alienation to the object. 3 “Carrie went into the house and closed the door behind her. Bright daylight disappeared and was replaced by brown shadows, coolness, and the oppressive smell of talcum powder”. Stephen King, Carrie (1974), pp. 38-39. STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION 429

The rebellion of the feminine against the feeling of entrapment, isolation, the crushing surrounding world is also visible in (1980). Charlie’s pyrokinetic power is explained by the fact that her parents underwent an experiment called “Lot Six” made by the “shop”. The motto of the pursuit of the defenseless heroines by monstrous villains in Gothic castles or abbeys is transposed into a contemporary USA in which Charlie and her father Andrew McGee attempt at escaping the men working for the Shop. The signified of the noun “shop” is metamorphosed into a secret government agency. The latter is recurrently compared to Big Brother: The omnipresence of the TV monitors and the thirst for power of its leaders echoes the dictatorial state of George Orwell’s 1984 (1948).

The Body Paradigm The intertextual undertone visible in King’s texts allows us to establish a connection with Salem’s Lot (1975). Indeed, the influence of Bram Stoker’s (1897) for this novel has been stated by King himself4. The wand of postmodernism affects this narrative. Gothic elements are tainted with the grotesque. In Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin showed the importance of the tradition of the grotesque in medieval era and its link to seen in a hyperbolic way. The grotesque was regenerative mainly through laughing. King enlightened the theme of the body and its violent destruction. Susan Norton’s death in Salem’s Lot echoes that of Lucy Westenra’s in Dracula. Nevertheless, Susan’s body is depicted as a grotesque, impure double of her former self. If Lucy’s death is described in 13 lines and the term “blood” is only mentioned twice, King on the contrary highlights the bloody and violent aspect of Susan’s death and has it run on 40 lines. Susan’s body is submitted to convulsions, loss of her soiled vital fluid, the deformation of her jaws and her inhuman shouts. We are in a case of what Mellier (1994) calls in his thesis5 “hypermonstration” to refer to an excessive monstration6. In the death of the Dracula figure, the grotesque element surges out when we read the final dance given by Barlow’s finger bones, with his rings clicking like castanets. We have here one of King’s brand marks, an unexpected kitschification of a common element in a climatic situation. Just as the Gothic genre rimes with transgression, excessiveness, and irrationality, King is concerned with the pushing away of limits, the crushing of rationality. In (1977), the Overlook hotel is a modernized Gothic castle7 isolated in the Colorado Mountains. In its maze-like corridors, an innocent hero, Danny, and his mother, Wendy, strive to escape from the lethal grip of the villain represented by the father, . The hotel is haunted by the malevolent ghosts of the past coming back to life to cause the fall into irrationality and monstrosity for Jack. King (1977) wrote in the introduction to The Shining: “monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win” (p. xiii). King re-explored the duality of characters and the blurring of limits between rationality and irrationality. Jack Torrance was already a deviant father and a deviant

4 This can be read in Heidi Strengell’s critical work. 5 In his thesis, Denis Mellier demonstrates Lovecraft’s hyper realistic, hyperbolic description of monstrosity. 6 “Her back arched like a bow, and her mouth stretched open until it seemed her jaws must break. A huge explosion of darker blood issued forth from the wound the stake had made-almost black in this chancy, lunatic light: heart’s blood. The scream that welled from the sounding chamber of that gaping mouth came from all the subcellars of deepest race and beyond that, to the moist darknesses of the human soul. Blood suddenly boiled from her mouth and nose in a tide…” Stephen King, Salem’s Lot (1975), p. 598. The reader perceives an hyperbolic style with the superlative, the comparisons and the metaphors. 7 The gothic underground vault is transformed in King’s narrative into a boiler room situated in the basement of the hotel where Jack discovers notes on the past of the hotel. 430 STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION husband, verbally abusing his wife and breaking his son’s arm. Yet, the evil force in the hotel feeds from this deviance, magnifies it until Jack’s former identity is entirely ruined. The keyword is deconstruction: deconstruction of rationality, of identity, of the father figure, and of signifiers and signified. Jack repeatedly utters the order “take your medicine”. The signifier medicine is normally assimilated with the signified cure, health, but it is here transformed into death. The Overlook is the entrance into a world of doom and destruction where the double nature of man is enlightened and physically perceived with the omnipresence of mirrors. In one of his trances, Danny sees his invisible friend Tony inside a mirror. On the other side of the mirror, Danny is oblivious of the reality and steps into what would correspond to the Lacanian Real8, that is what cannot be expressed and described to his parents, the ultimate unknown. King has this power of having the reader go beyond the looking-glass and step into an impossible but accepted reality, at least for the time of the reading. In (1978) for instance, a biological experiment causes the spread of a virus and the downfall of the whole USA. The country itself becomes a labyrinth and the ultimate quest is the annihilation of the Dark Man, Randall Flagg9. The state of apocalyptic desolation following the plague is considered as viable by the reader. The virus, called Captain Trips, causes the deterioration of the body and ultimately death. The discovery of the first victims, in their car, is first described as a smell (King, 1978, p. 17), then as such:

Their necks had swelled up like inner tubes and the flesh there was a purple -black color, like a bruise. The flesh was puffed up under their eyes, too. […] Their eyes bulged sightlessly. The woman was holding the child’s hand. Thick mucus had run from their noses and was now clotted there. Flies buzzed around them, lighting in the mucus, crawling in and out of their open mouths. (King, 1978, p. 17)

This hypermonstration of the decaying body highlights King’s preoccupation with the themes of the deterioration and fragmentation. In (1979), the protagonist, , has precognitive visions which are explained by the fact that he has a brain tumor revealed after a car crash which leaves him in a coma for four and a half years. His body is repeatedly depicted in a fragmented manner. The Doctor Jekyll and Hyde mask worn by Johnny before going to a fair opens the path of the double and fragmented identity. The fun fair and the wheel of fortune are Gothicized by King. The supposedly fairy land is transformed into a nightmarish place where Johnny turns into a mannequin-like figure with violet eyes. The figure of the villain itself is manifold. Johnny becomes obsessed with the politician George Stillson whose inordinate hubris and fits of violence verge on craziness. Another villain figure, the rapist and murderer Frank Dodd, is depicted as “slick”. The rape of Alma Frechette recalls that of Antonia by Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), but the vault of Lewis’ convent is transposed to a bandstand in a park. The description of the rape offers one characteristic of King’s narratives. King describes Frank Dodd’s movements, the victim’s reaction, her bulging eyes, the blood on her mouth, her finger which caught and slipped, her face which went pink, then red, then a congested purple, but the very act of strangling is left undescribed. There is an oscillation between

8 The Real is for Lacan one of the three orders that structure the human subject. It corresponds to what is outside language. 9 References are stated to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954). Flagg’s Eye is compared to the Eye of Sauron searching for Frodo. If Flagg’s domain is a new land of Mordor, it is a parodic version of it, situated in Las Vegas, mainly defeated by its own people: a character, the Trashcan man sets up the widest fire with the help of a ball of energy ironically created by Flagg himself. STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION 431 hypermonstration, an absence, and an in-betweeness. A part is left to the readers’ imagination. As Eco10 (1988) stated, the readers have to fill in the blanks left in the text and the blanks are filled with the readers’ experiences. The signified “slick” is perceived in different ways (efficient, smart, smooth, polished, and glossy), henceforth the impression of indetermination characterizing the murderer.

The Defamiliarization of the Familiar The reworking of signified is also visible in (1981): The signified “dog” (friendly animal/companion of men) is transformed since a Saint Bernard becomes an auxiliary of death and plays the part of the Gothic villain. The feeling of entrapment is transposed to a car where the naive heroine replaced by a cheating wife, Donna Trenton and her son, Tad, find refuge to escape this unexpected monster suffering from rabies. The death of Cujo’s victims places us once more in this oscillation between hypermonstration and avoidance. If we take the example of Cujo’s first victim, Gary Pervier, King depicts the powerful jaws crushing the naked flesh, the overflowing blood and the desperate attempts at pushing away the dog. Those elements contrast with the brutal final death of the character with Cujo seizing his throat and tearing it open. There is no lingering here and the reader has to imagine the details by himself. King revisits the field of monstrosity and uses unexpected auxiliaries: a dog in Cujo, a car in (1983); in (1983), it is an old Micmac burying ground situated beyond a pet cemetery in . This burying ground—a substitute to the Gothic castle—has the particular power of bringing the dead back to life, transforming them into creatures of evil: King zombifies the resuscitated bodies. In It (1986), the ordinary town of replaces the Gothic castle and becomes the hidden lair of a new villain, an extraterrestrial god-like monster called “It”, feeding mainly from the fear of children. Derry’s maze-like sewers where It is confined take on a Gothic hue: “Knighted chambers and long concrete hallways that roared and chimed with water” (King, 1986, p. 27). The very choice of using the personal pronoun “it” to designate the creature means it cannot be named, linking us to the Lacanian Real, that is what cannot be grasped by the logos (speech). King’s genuine talent lays in having his creature take the form of people’s worst fears, mostly a clown depicted as a grotesque cross between Ronald McDonald and Bozo. The signifier “clown” commonly associated with joy, childhood is transformed into a synonym of abjection and death. It also takes the shapes of the creature from the Black Lagoon, a reference to King’s fondness for horror films of the 80s, a leper, a mummy, the teenage werewolf 11 or Dracula with Gillette Blue-Blades in his mouth. The mingling of incongruous, parodic, and grotesque elements prevails. There is a clear kitschification of the monster figure in a mingling of past and present references. The power of It on children is efficient, because they believe in the unnamable, the unreal and the protagonists have to regain this power in believing in the realm of imagination to kill It once and for all and not to collapse into insanity. King’s willingness to explore a variety of directions even leads him to ponder about the act of writing for instance in (1987). The plot revolves around two characters, a successful writer Paul Sheldon known for

10 In Lector in Fabula, Eco shows that texts—a plurality of signified—are opened to any interpretation because readers give them their own meaning. 11 The kitsch elements are there: The werewolf wears faded Levi Strauss blue jeans and a high school jacket with the words “Derry High School killing team” (p. 856) written on its back. 432 STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION his Misery novels and his number one fan and former nurse, . Victim of a car accident, Annie takes him to her house—which becomes a locus of entrapment—and perform the necessary recovery care. The Gothic classic tale is reversed. A man ends up being the prisoner of a female character. Her dementia becomes more and more apparent, and she sadistically slowly deprives Paul of his limbs and identity. She forces him to resuscitate her favorite character Misery. His rebellion attempts cost him his left foot, left thumb, and a decaying body. Annie is the very epitome of a paradox; she progressively annihilates Paul’s body and identity, but she is also his muse despite her deformed body and her deviant personality. Keeping in mind the motif of enclosure, we can turn ourselves for example towards (1996) in which the Gothic theme of entrapment is transposed to a prison. The corridor up the center of E block, called the Last Mile, and the description of the way to the electric chair give a labyrinthine perspective to the prison. The electric chair is given vampiric undertones: “Stout oak legs, broad oak arms that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in the last few minutes of their lives” (King, 1996, p. 6). The electricity running through the wire before attaining the condemned’s brain inverts Dr. ’s process, depriving of life instead of breathing it into prisoners12. King depicts guard Percy’s merciless, selfish will to take part in the execution of a man, Delacroix, and the burning of the latter’s body places us in a hypermonstration of cruelty. The figure of the monster takes on different masks: a prison warden in The Green Mile; in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), it is represented by a bear, “the god of the lost” (King, 1999, p. 272), that tracks down little Trisha McFarland, lost in the woods on the Appalachian Trail. The monster—referred to as “the thing out there” (King, 1999, p. 107)—is first characterized with sounds, getting closer to Trisha when she sleeps. King deconstructs the signifier bear. It becomes “the lord of dark places, the emperor of understairs” (King, 1999, p. 208), a thing full of wasps on the inside, “the thing that wasn’t a bear” (King, 1999, p. 273). It is an unnamable being whose real nature remains undecipherable and indeterminate. The woods become a maze in which she faces the bites of mosquitoes, wasps, hunger, thirst, fear, hallucinations, dizziness, or sickness due to non drinkable water and pneumonia before eventually confronting the bear and shooting it between its eyes with her quasi sanctified walkman. Henceforth, King Gothicizes and grotesquifies common places (woods in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) or objects (a car in (2002))13. In (2006), a modern technological device—the cell phone—becomes the auxiliary of a virus metamorphosing people into “crazies”. The protagonist, Clayton Riddell, who is immune as he owns no cell phone, sees a man chewing a dog’s ear or a young girl biting a woman’s neck. As this new form of vampirism is engendered by a cell phone, we see the mingling of traditional themes and incongruous elements. Cell phones become a postmodern villain. Clayton decides to leave the burning, exploding city of Boston and his walk through the labyrinthine city as well as his attempt to escape contaminated people recall the flight of Gothic heroines in the Gothic corridors and undergrounds.

12 In a way, guard Percy Wetmore’s vicious will not to soak the sponge for the execution of Del Delacroix is an experiment, leading us to wonder what would have happened to Frankenstein’s creature if lightning had burnt it. 13 The figure of the monster is combined with that of a Buick concealed in Shed B in the state police barracks in Pennsylvania. It does not run over people like Christine, but it causes people to disappear. It devours a policeman Ellis Raffirty like an ogre, leaving no signs of him. The car is a semblance of a car, it is the door to another dimension which we never see; it leaves an impression of oddity with its oversized wheel, fake dashboard controls, no distributor cap, generator, or battery cables. It is a modernized monster devouring a policeman Ellis Raffirty like an ogre, leaving no signs of him. The car redefines signified for it brings things that are qualified by what they are not: “It was a fish no more than the bat-thing was a bat” (King, 2002, p. 271). STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION 433

Language is redefined by the contaminated people for they only speak in guttural sounds such as “rast” or “gluh”; the virus seems to destroy the signifiers themselves. The crazies develop a language only they can understand. The deconstruction is achieved at several levels: community, body, identity, and language. Cells turn normal people into villains. The whole USA almost appears as being haunted by crazies who are monstrous figures, grotesque versions of their former selves.

A Circumvolution of Feelings The exploration of the evil nature of man and the theme of isolation are red threads in (2009). Confinement affects the whole town of Chester’s Mil separated from the rest of the world by an impenetrable dome. The very way of behaving, the common law is slowly destroyed by the invisible and unnamable barrier14. If the Gothic castle had an understandable, concrete shape, the dome is defined by its very absence. If the Gothic castle challenged the 18th century rationalism and was the let out of repressed desires, the dome is an alien barrier which magnifies the villainy of characters and almost normalizes their deviant and abject behaviours15. Junior Rennie’s natural violent temper leads him to kill two women but this deviancy also drives him to keep their bodies in a cellar and consider them as “his girlfriends”. There is no necrophilic act but the cellar is a shelter in which the corpses are a new cure for Junior’s migraines. Big Jim (Junior’s father) is a heartless, cupid villain, a deus-ex-machina taking advantage of the death of the only law-enforcement official to quench his thirst for dominion and fame; he appoints deviant citizens as town cops. Big Jim progressively sets up a totalitarian regime; new rules apply which follow the illogic: “under the Dome, all sorts of things might be possible” (King, 2009, p. 445). King mingles Gothic and elements. The dome is generated by a little box that has been set up by aliens which are depicted as unclear shapes and defined by what is not. They are perceived as leatherheads16 “leaning together and laughing in obscenely childish conspiracy” (King, 2009, p. 605). Those mischievous heartless advanced beings consider humans as mere toys. The dome is a new Big Brother controlled by alien children. As the explosion of a meth lab makes the air unbreathable and car tires are used as a source of oxygen by some survivors, a character, Julia Shumway, mentally communicates with one of the alien child. She uses a traumatic humiliating childhood event to appeal to the alien. Julia has to make the alien understand that humans are not make-believe but are real. There is nevertheless pity from the superior race, a step towards love. Love is also at issue in the final novel the author will present: 11/22/63 (2011). King combines an historical event—John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination—with a tragic romance. King revisits, communizes the literature of time travel17. The action takes place in 2011 and King inserts a gateway for September 9, 1958 in the kitchen of Al Templeton’s Diner. Al has travelled regularly there for four years buying his meat from the 1960s; he has compiled enough evidence in his blue notebook to assert Oswald’s guilt in Kennedy’s assassination and

14 One character Gendron declares as he picks up the remains of an i-pod: “‘I think it’s one of those computer-music doohickies. Musta broke when he hit…’ He gestured in front of him. ‘The you-know’.” Stephen King, Under the Dome (2009), p. 49. The dome is qualified by an absence, a “you-know”. 15 The dome puts an end to any familial love and ties; power and revenge dominate. 16 “Faces arose—only they weren’t human faces, and he would not be sure they were faces at all. They were geometric solids that seemed to be padded in leather…” (King, 2009, p. 604). 17 Jake’s almost enchanted vision of the 60s recalls William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) in which the protagonist wakes up in a utopian future. 434 STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION asks the hero, Jake Epping to save the president’s life. We are in a case of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction”, a fictionalization of actual historical events or figures. Jake’s relation with a teacher Sadie Dunhill during his third time in “the Land of Ago” (King, 2011, p. 276) provides the romance and the double tragic turn of the story. Sadie’s over religious violent husband John Clayton—a modern villain who grotesquely used a broom to separate his space and Sadie’s in the marital bed—assaults her in her house causing her to be badly disfigured. Jake’s attempt at saving Sadie causes her husband to cut open his throat with a knife. King’s narrative is replete with images of violence. The figure of the villain itself appears as multiplied: Sadie’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jake himself who becomes a spy to stop Oswald and kills Frank Dunning. Oswald’s violent behavior towards his Russian wife Marina is stressed as well as his hubris and desire for recognition. Returning in 2011, the butterfly effect reveals a dystopian world: Al’s diner is an abandoned convenience store; there are no stars in the sky, buildings are derelict. King rewrites history itself. Terrible earthquakes have occurred in the Midwest, Europe, and China. Four of the Japanese islands are gone; the earth’s crust is damaged. Kennedy did not withdraw all the troops from Vietnam; there were no civil rights reforms in the 1960s but race riots. Bill Clinton died of a heart attack and Hillary is the president. We have a spiraling vision of the past; “the past does not want to be changed. The past is obdurate” (King, 2011, p. 132). Jake repeats his actions which keep bringing him back to the beginning. This emphasis on repetition likens Jake to a prisoner in Piranesi’s Carceri, a character condemned to an endless wandering on the vertiginous, maze-like halls and stairs of time. Time itself is a maze, an infernal machine whose gears cannot be altered.

Conclusions King’s works are based on the bottomless pit of thematic, narrative, identical, linguistic instability, and the rewriting of the Gothic genre so the oscillation of its pendulum has a hypnotic effect on the reader and inserts the author in our common culture. On the chessboard of postmodernism, King advances the pawns of intertextuality, rewriting, irony, parody, and deconstruction, ensuring an endless thrilling game to his readers. The hourglass of creation knows no finitude, trapping the reader at each reading beyond its magical looking-glass.

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King, S. (1979). The dead zone. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1980). Firestarter. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1981). Cujo. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1983a). Christine. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1983b). Pet sematary. New York: Doubleday. King, S. (1986). It. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1987). Misery. New York: Viking Press. King, S. (1996). The green mile. New York: Signet Book. King, S. (1999). The girl who loved Tom Gordon. New York: Scribner. King, S. (2002). From a Buick 8. New York: Scribner. King, S. (2006). Cell. New York: Scribner. King, S. (2009). Under the dome. New York: Scribner. King, S. (2011). 11/22/63. New York: Scribner. Lévy, M. (2002). Genette (Châteaux). Otrante,12, 7-10. Mellier, D. (1994). La terreur fantastique et l’écriture de l’excès: théorie et pratique du récit terrifiant (Thesis, Université de Lille III, Lille). Moles, A. (1976). Psychology of kitsch (Psychologie du Kitsch). Paris: Denoël-Gonthier. Strengell, H. (2005). Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to literary naturalism. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.