by Matt Cardin
More persistent still is his focus on childhood and creativity. Children play an integral part in King’s horror. In his short story “Children of the Corn”—published in his short fiction collection Night Shift (1978)—two adults stumble across an isolated town populated entirely by a cult of murderous children. The story has entered into modern popular culture as an early example of the now familiar trope of the “scary child.” It is an anomaly in King’s oeuvre, however, as his fiction more commonly emphasizes the romance, loyalty, and quiet heroism of childhood. This is foremost in It and the novella The Body (1982), better known through its adaptation into the film Stand by Me (1986). These stories render childhood in nostalgic hues. As the protagonist of The Body says: “I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” (King 1982, 505).
Most of all, King is interested in the imaginative capacity and resilience of children. Children are able to accept and confront the horrors of King’s fiction because their imaginations have not yet atrophied. As Heidi Strengell points out: “Adults without imagination are the worst of his monsters” (Strengell 2005, 14). They are opposed by children and by adults who retain their childhood capacities for romance. Such adult characters are almost without exception represented as writers.
This focus on writers forms a distinct trope of its own in King’s work, as a great number of his protagonists are authors. Through them he indulges in commentary on both the craft and the business of writing, often in defense of genre and accessibility. In ’Salem’s Lot, King’s first author protagonist, Ben Mears, describes literary analysis as an “intellectual game of capture-the-flag” (King 1975, 171). Mears dreams about selling a story to Playboy but laments that “they only do authors if their books are big on campus” (22). This antiacademic stance has waned in King’s later work, but his early novels’ staunch defense of the popular suggests an insecurity about his own literary status—something he has consistently denied. Nonetheless, the issue reaches a climax in the publication of Misery (1987) and The Dark Half (1989). These novels portray authors for whom writing accrues very real, very scary consequence. In The Dark Half, the protagonist, Thad Beaumont, is tormented by the corporeal manifestation of his pseudonym, George Stark, whom he has recently killed off.
The Dark Half seems to be a clear extension of King’s revelation and termination of his own pseudonym. For years King had written under the name of Richard Bachman, producing tight, linear thrillers that avoid the grand canvases of King’s typical work. These four short novels are collected in The Bachman Books (1985). However, when one of the novels, Rage, was found in the locker of a Columbine High School shooter, King withdrew it from publication. All subsequent editions of The Bachman Books omit Rage.
King has continued to be a best seller, and a huge proportion of his fiction has been adapted to film. Though few filmmakers are able to convey the psychological interiority of King’s fiction, a few exceptional films have been made from his work. Notable examples include The Shining (1980), Stand by Me (1986), The Green Mile (1999), and The Mist (2007). Of all King adaptations, perhaps the best known and most loved is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), directed by Frank Darabont, who also adapted the screenplay from King’s novel (and who wrote and directed the adaptations of The Green Mile and The Mist as well). There is a bit of irony in the fact that Shawshank is credited as one of the greatest films ever made, since its source material is a minor novella from a relatively obscure King collection, Different Seasons (1982).
In 1999 King suffered a severe accident when he was hit by a car while walking in rural Maine. He suffered extensive and profound injuries, and his retirement was debated. But in the end he went only one year without releasing a novel, and then returned with Dreamcatcher in 2001. By his own admission, this novel is a failure, marred by his dependence on painkillers. In 2002 he released Black House, a sequel to The Talisman (1984), both of which he wrote in collaboration with fellow horror author Peter Straub.
Following Black House, King finally completed his prolonged Dark Tower series, and he has not slowed down in the years since. Though his more recent novels are less confined to the horror genre, they retain a fascination with the macabre and the dark potential of society. Under the Dome (2009) is a particular instance of this, depicting a town cut off from the outside world by a strange, transparent dome. It feels like a return to King’s roots, filled with eccentric characters, a conflict between the everyman and the powerful, and a richly drawn community. When King also returned to the world of The Shining in its long-gestated sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), it almost seemed as if he had exhausted his creative resources. However, he subsequently completed an entirely new trilogy of crime thrillers featuring detective Bill Hodges. The final installment, End of Watch (2016), marries the streamlined thrills of the Bachman books with King’s own brand of supernatural horror. Tonally, it is something King has not attempted before, and it shows that although he is now in his fifth decade as an author, he is far from done. He has also found new life in collaboration with his sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, both of whom have emerged as professional authors. Hill, in particular, has catapulted into the foreground of contemporary horror, and his novel N0S4A2 intersects with his father’s work, both in theme and in direct reference to some of King’s most iconic characters.
In light of King’s many accomplishments, it is reasonable to speculate that there may never be another author who taps into the public consciousness in quite the same way that he has done. At the height of his popularity, he was a pop-culture icon. Though he may no longer reign quite so high in the best-seller hierarchy, his name still connotes excellence in the genre. The longevity of his career also gives his work added importance, as he was writing horror and mapping collective anxieties throughout some of the most tumultuous decades of American social life.
Neil McRobert
See also: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; The Dark Tower; Hill, Joe; It; Jackson, Shirley; Lovecraftian Horror; Matheson, Richard; Misery; Night Shift; The Shining; Straub, Peter; Vampires.
Further Reading
Beahm, George, ed. 2015. The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror. New York: Thomas Dunn Books.
Gatta, John. 2000. “Stephen King.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement 5, edited by Jay Parini. Scribner Writers Series. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Hill, Joe. 2013. N0S4A2. New York: HarperCollins.
Indick, Ben P. 1982. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 153–167. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller. Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review, vol. 194, 2015, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.
King, Stephen. 1975. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday.
King, Stephen. 1982. Different Seasons. New York: Viking.
King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Magistrale, Tony. 1988. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University.
Sears, John. 2011. Stephen King’s Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Strengell, Heidi. 2005. Dissecting Stephen King: From Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller. 1988. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill.
THE KING IN YELLOW
The King in Yellow (1895) is a story collection by Robert W. Chambers. It contains a time-slip romance, a group of poems, several mainstream stories, and, most importantly, four interconnected stories of supernatural horror set against a common mythological backdrop. It holds an important niche in the genre following Edgar Allan Poe and predating the modern era. The four interconnected stories revolve around a fictitious play titled The King in Yel
low, which drives its readers to a state of illness and possibly insanity. It leaves its readers in a dazed state, speaking of such things as Hastur, Hali, Alar, the Pallid Mask, Carcosa, and the Mystery of the Hyades, terms that are never explained but serve to unify the stories. This common background anticipates Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but Lovecraft discovered the book late, after creating his mythos. The word “yellow” alludes to the “Yellow Nineties” and to contemporary French Decadent literature, as does the character name “Wilde.”
Chambers’s oblique descriptions of the title play in The King in Yellow generate a powerful aura of sinister mystery. The narrator of “The Repairer of Reputations,” for example, describes his experience of reading the play like this:
I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. (Chambers 1902, 6–7)
Matt Cardin
Source: Chambers, Robert W. 1902. The King in Yellow. New York: Harper & Brothers.
“The Repairer of Reputations” is set in a future (1920) that may be a product of the narrator’s imagination. The play provides him and his cohort, Wilde, with a plan to take over the United States. “The Mask” involves a chemical solution that turns living tissue to stone. The play impacts the relationship of the sculptor narrator with his model. His sculpture, “The Fates,” also appears in the previous story. In “In the Court of the Dragon,” the play opens the narrator’s mind to a different and deadly plane of existence. In “The Yellow Sign,” an artist and his model find the eponymous sign from the play, read the play, and suffer the consequences at the hands of a living corpse.
The unrelated fantasy “The Demoiselle D’Ys” is a haunting romance involving a modern man and a medieval woman. It has a human character named Hastur.
Chambers borrowed many mysterious terms from two stories by Ambrose Bierce to embellish his mythology. In Bierce’s “Haita the Shepherd,” Hastur is a benign god of shepherds. Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” quotes the fictional author Hali and also contains references to Aldebaran, the Hyades, and Alar. Chambers repurposed Bierce’s terms, making Hali a lake and Carcosa a city in the sky, and leaving the meaning of many terms, such as Hastur and Alar, unexplained.
Lovecraft alluded to these names in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930). They were later employed by August Derleth, who reimagined Hastur as an evil entity.
Thorns (1967) by Robert Silverberg alludes to The King in Yellow, and James Blish in “More Light” (1970) attempts to write out the actual play. The first season of the HBO television series True Detective (2014) alludes to the book and created a surge in its popularity.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.
Further Reading
Chambers, Robert W. 2000. The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W, Chambers, edited by S. T. Joshi. Hayward, CA: Chaosium.
Joshi, S. T. 2000. Introduction to “The Yellow Sign” and Other Stories by Robert W. Chambers, edited by S. T. Joshi, xi–xviii. Hayward, CA: Chaosium.
Punter, David. 1980. “Later American Gothic.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 268–290. London: Longman.
Weinstein, Lee. 1985. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 739–745. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865–1936)
Rudyard Joseph Kipling was a popular and important English writer (he won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first English-language writer to do so) who has often been condemned for his espousal of imperialist and colonialist attitudes, though in his presentation of these he was by no means uncritical. Horror figures often and almost ubiquitously in Kipling’s work, and even the tales in such well-known juvenile works as The Jungle Book (1894) and the Just So Stories (1902) have their horrific elements: the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi battles two deadly cobras, the feral child Mowgli is abducted and must fight deadly animals, and were it not for his nose stretching, the inquisitive elephant child (in “How the Elephant Got His Trunk,” a.k.a. “The Elephant’s Child”) would have ended as food for the crocodile. Kipling’s best known work for adults is probably “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), and in it Peachey Carnehan describes being crucified between two pine trees, “as Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die. He hung there and screamed, and they took him down the next day, and said it was a miracle he wasn’t dead” (Kipling 1888, 102–103). (Carnehan has also been carrying about with him the “dried, withered head” [103] of his one-time friend Daniel Dravot.)
The horrors of untreatable and lethal sicknesses and diseases are likewise present in many of Kipling’s stories, particularly those set in India, a country with whose people and beliefs Kipling was familiar: “now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously—the midday sun always excepted” (Kipling 1889, 20) states “Thrown Away” (1888), a tale of a callow suicide and the lies told following his passing. A lethal and terrible heat likewise figures in “The City of Dreadful Night” (1885), which concludes by recognizing that “the city was of Death as well as Night, after all” (Kipling 1891, 59). An energetic little boy is killed by fever in “The Story of Muhammad Din” (1886), and epidemics and the supernatural figure in “By Word of Mouth” (1887), in which the ghost of a deceased wife promises a meeting with her physician husband.
“The Mark of the Beast”: British Beasts in India
“The Mark of the Beast” (1890) is perhaps Kipling’s best-known horror story. On New Year’s Eve in Dharamsala, India, a group of English colonials get incredibly drunk, and Fleete, hitherto an amiable and inoffensive man, behaves abominably in the Temple of Hanuman, grinding his cigar into the image’s forehead and calling it the “Mark of the Beast.” A Silver Man—a disciple of Hanuman, a man so leprous that he is silver—lays his head against Fleete, leaving marks that blacken, and Fleete thereafter descends into bestial madness: he eats raw meat, grovels in the dirt, scares horses, and must be restrained from attacking others. The English doctor thinks it is hydrophobia (rabies), but Strickland, a police officer who knows much of India, captures the Silver Man with the narrator’s assistance and tortures him until he releases Fleete, whose malady disappears. The doctor is astonished, and Fleete remembers nothing of his ordeal.
This is one of Kipling’s more ambiguous stories. The title itself exemplifies this ambivalence, referring both to Fleete’s desecration and the marks caused by the leper. But there is yet another level, for the “beasts” are the colonials, and the story depicts their religious comeuppance as well as a quasi-awakening to this by the narrator. Before Fleete’s actions, he says he is fond of Hanuman, for all gods and priests have good points. Then he discovers that the Indian faiths and their magic and curses are
real and devastating, and perhaps even more powerful than the British characters’ Christianity: only by descending to a lower ethical level and actively torturing the Silver Man can the narrator and Strickland restore the uneasy status quo. In the end, the narrator and his fellow colonials are as beasts.
Richard Bleiler
The living dead are encountered in the longer and more explicitly horrific “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885): the feverish hero, out riding, becomes trapped in a crater inhabited by people who were declared dead from cholera but recovered in time to escape being burned; they live in grave-like burrows and survive on crows and such meat as they can scavenge, and their leader is the murderous Brahmin Gunga Dass, who takes it upon himself “to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit” (1888, 52). The dead likewise walk and assist in battle in “The Lost Legion” (The Strand, May 1893), though the narrator worries that the English victory against the Afghanis is so neat that the dead regiment “is in danger of being forgotten” (Kipling [1888] 1893). One forgets the dead at one’s peril in Kipling’s work, however, for they remain active in human affairs, and their ways are not always sympathetic.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Haggard, H. Rider; “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; “They.”
Further Reading
Bauer, Helen Pike. 1994. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1888. The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. Allahabad, India: A. H. Wheeler.