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 2 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 3 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). 4 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.