Stephen King (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

237 Pages·2007·1.28 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
STEPHEN KING
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Stephen King,Updated Edition
Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stephen King / Harold Bloom, editor—Updated ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’smodern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9317-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4381-1348-7 (e-book)
1. King, Stephen, 1947—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Horror
tales, American—History and criticism. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title
III. Series.
PS3561.I483Z878 2006
813’.54—dc22 2006025199
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Contributing Editor: Allison Stielau
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Contents
EditorÕsNote vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
King and the Literary Tradition
ofHorror and the Supernatural 5
Ben P.Indick
Stephen King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic 17
Don Herron
Stephen King: Powers of Horror 41
ClareHanson
Tracing the Gothic Inheritance: Danse Macabre 59
Tony Magistrale
ÒThe Face of Mr. FlipÓ:
Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King 67
Douglas Keesey
Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone 83
Michael N. Stanton
The Sin Eater:
Orality, Postliteracy, and the Early Stephen King 95
Linda Badley
vi Contents
Needful Things (1991) 125
Sharon A. Russell
The Rape of Constant Reader:
Stephen KingÕs Construction
of the Female Reader and Violation
ofthe Female Body in Misery 141
Kathleen Margaret Lant
Postmodern Gothic:
Stephen KingÕs Pet Sematary 167
Jesse W. Nash
Cars Are Girls:
Sexual Power and Sexual Panic
in Stephen KingÕs Christine 177
Edward Madden
ÒScreaming While School Was in SessionÓ:
The Construction of Monstrosity
in Stephen KingÕs Schoolhouse Gothic 195
Sherry R. Truffin
Afterthought 207
Harold Bloom
Chronology 209
Contributors 213
Bibliography 217
Acknowledgments 221
Index 223
Editor’s Note
Myintroduction, implicitly echoing Oscar WildeÕs remark that all bad poetry
is sincere, grants the benign social decency of KingÕs Þctions.
Ben P. Indick relates King to such precursors as Poe, Stoker, and
Lovecraft, while Don Herron insists that King is Òliterature,Ó a judgment I
might deplore, but why blow sand against the wind?
Horror Þction, KingÕs included, is judged by Clare Hanson to have a
masculine psychic function, after which Tony Magistrale invokes KingÕs
Gothic heritage.
Douglas Keesey attributes a subtle remedy for homophobia in King,
while Michael N. Stanton Þnds a critique of American politics in The Dead
Zone.
Early King is regarded by Linda Badley as a shamanistic healer, after
which Sharon A. Russell interprets Needful Thingsas a fusion of natural and
supernatural horror.
Kathleen Margaret Lant discovers in KingÕs Miseryasupposed rape of
the female reader,while Jesse W. Nash argues that popular American culture
and King both decline to confront the necessity of dying.
The sexual panic represented in Christine is seen as a national malaise
byEdwardMadden, after which SherryR. Truffin attempts to deÞne KingÕs
contribution to the American genre of Schoolhouse Gothic.
My Afterthought credits King as the appropriate Þgure for our Age of
Information.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
In a brilliant study, Nightmare on Main Street (1997), the critic Mark
Edmundson attributes the immense popularity of Stephen King to our
universal Gothic obsessions as we approach the millennium. Edmundson is
very shrewd in surmising a quasi-religious source for the latest wave of
American Gothic:
Yet if I were pressed to submit one reason for the
contemporary proliferation of Gothic, that reason would in a
certain sense be religious. Though most of us Americans claim to
believe in God, few of us seem able to believe in God’spresence.
That is, we do not perceive some powerful force for good shaping
the events of day-to-day life in accord with a perceptibly
benevolent master plan. Most of us don’t have a story that we can
believe about the way God’s designs are unfolding among us.
Whatever God is up to, he is not busying himself unduly with
worldly events.
Many of us have, I think, turned from hope in benevolent
religion to fascination with the Gothic. There is something to
gain in accepting the harsh belief that the world is infested with
evil, that all power is corrupt, all humanity debased, and that
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