Why Teach King?
As of 2015, Stephen King has published more than fifty books and “every single one [of his novels] has spent time on the best-seller list” (Cowles, emphasis original). His books have sold over 350 million copies and according to Forbes, King “earned $45 million in the 2007–2008 fiscal year alone” (Keneally). He is a household name, synonymous with contemporary horror, and his work has inspired over one hundred film and television adaptations, ranging from excellent—such as the Frank Darabont-directed The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999)—to awful and even downright inexplicable, like the profusion of Children of the Corn sequels. King’s popularity and mass-marketability are undeniable. However, popularity does not necessarily denote literary merit and bestseller status does not ensure an author’s work entry to the academic discussion or the high school or college classroom. So why teach King?
The Debate
In the last few years, King has begun to achieve the type of literary validation and accolades that had escaped him for the majority of his prolific and otherwise successful career. As Jane Ciabattari writes in “Is Stephen King a Great Writer?”, “the respect of the literary establishment has always evaded King. For years, the question of whether he was a serious writer was answered by a quick tabulation of book sales, film deals, income, and sheer volume of output, which added up to a resounding ‘no.’ Commercial triumph did not equal literary value. Being a bestseller was anathema.” The perception of King’s literary merit began to shift when King was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and named Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America in 2007, though as J. Madison Davis writes, “Neither award came without controversy” (16). As David D. Kirkpatrick wrote of King
being recognized for his Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, this “is the first time that the organization, the National Book Foundation, has awarded its medal to an author best known for writing in popular genres like horror stories, science fiction, or thrillers. Very little of Mr. King’s work would qualify as literary fiction.” This elite definition of the literary left many critics combative and dismissive of King’s award and within the ranks of the genre fiction so easily dismissed by Kirkpatrick, there was also some resistance to King’s being named a Grandmaster. As Madison explains, King’s work arguably expands beyond the scope of the traditional boundaries of the mystery genre and “King clearly writes stories of sensation and usually includes the supernatural, which is exactly why some mystery writers and readers have grumbled in private about his being granted Grandmaster status” (19). At the core of both of these discussions is one of definition, an inclusion or exclusion based on what “counts,” either as literary fiction in the former or as true mystery in the latter. While the often contentious discussion of whether or not King should be accepted into these hallowed halls rages on, he continues to transcend and trespass genre boundaries, pushing out of the clearly demarcated “horror” box within which many of his critics have penned him, as was recently demonstrated anew when his 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar Award for crime writing. Most recently, in September 2015, President Barack Obama presented King with the National Medal of Arts, honoring King as “one of the most popular and prolific writers of our time [who] combines his remarkable storytelling with his sharp analysis of human nature” (“President Obama to Bestow”). Despite critical objections to King being considered a “literary” writer, his popularity and growing prestige are undeniable.
The debate over King’s literary merit has been going on for decades, almost since the publication of his first novel Carrie in 1974, and its most recent incarnation played out in the pages of The Los Angeles Review of Books, between Dwight Allen and Sarah Langan, beginning with Allen’s “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes.” King has often been dismissed out of hand as “just” a genre writer and in this assessment his popularity has frequently been marshaled against him on the argument that fiction that appeals to the masses cannot be simultaneously literary. These familiar criticisms are part of Allen’s rejection of King, as he questions why “some people in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a ‘major’ contributor to American literary culture? . . . [D]o we believe that commercial success on the King scale signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?” Allen also defends the type of writing he sees as truly “literary”—which by definition, within Allen’s argument, King is empathically not—explaining that
“Among the things I hope for when I open a book of fiction is that each sentence I read will be right and true and beautiful . . . that I will be continually surprised by what a particular writer reveals about particular human beings and the world they inhabit. A great book of fiction will lead me toward some fresh understanding of humanity, and toward joy” (Allen). In contrast to this ideal, Allen argues, King’s characters are flat and predictable, moralistically divided into camps of good and evil, his prose is “dull” and his approach to narrative construction “workmanlike.” Allen concludes his critique of King by admonishing readers that he does not recommend reading King “unless you are maybe fifteen and have made it clear to your teachers and everybody else that you aren’t going to touch that literary ‘David Copperfield kind of crap’ with a ten-foot pole,”1 recommending instead authors whom he deems more worthy of the reader’s time, including Roberto Balaño, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon.
A couple of weeks after Allen’s article was published, fellow Los Angeles Review of Books writer Sarah Langan responded in defense of King with her essay “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic.” Langan begins by rejecting Allen’s argument that the popular cannot be simultaneously literary and challenging the dichotomy upon which Allen based his critique, arguing that “Allen’s oppositions—workmanlike/artistic; literary/genre; educated/blue collar, New Yorker reader from Louisville/dumb fuck from Bangor—are contrived. They distract us from real issues by splitting groups that aren’t actually different, or at least not opposites.” At the heart of the debate waged between Allen and Langan are the meanings and importance of literature itself, the impact that fiction can have upon its reader, and the connection possible through the written word. While Allen described his nearly transcendent requirements for the literary, Langan situates her analysis of effective literature a bit differently. While she acknowledges that not all of King’s works are masterpieces, she argues that
[A]ll of his novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. By this I mean, his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgment. Innocent Carrie White wakes up with her period and telekinesis at the height of the women’s movement. No wonder everybody craps on her, and no wonder we’re delighted that she slaughters them all. In Cujo, the materialism of the 1980s American family tears itself apart from the inside, as represented by a family dog gone mad . . . In some King novels, the stakes are the soul of the individual—will Johnny assassinate the senator to save the world’s future (The Dead Zone)? In others, it’s the family unit: Will Wendy take responsibility, punch Jack in the face with a cleaver, and save her son (The Shining)? In others (The Stand, The Gunslinger Series, Running Man), he asks, Will we be the heroes of our societies, and start steering this ship in the right direction? Do we have the courage to save the world? (emphasis original)
These larger themes speak to a common, shared experience of humanity, the existential questions with which we all collectively struggle, combining the immediate and visceral appeal to readers’ emotions with the larger thematic concerns of King’s novels and their connections to the world around them. Another frequent criticism of King is the height of this emotion, which often crosses the border into melodrama. As Langan continues, “No one except King challenges us so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters. That’s because he’s a believer,” possessing a sentimentality and faith in goodness and humanity that are often transmitted to his readers. As Langan admits of some of King’s stories of world-saving heroism and love triumphant, “even as my intellect rebels, a part of me believes” (emphasis original). This immediacy of emotion, in combination with the rich possibility for critical literary and thematic analysis, makes King especially well suited to reading and discussion, both in and outside of the classroom.
At the heart of King’s novels are the characters themselves, individuals who often haunt readers long after they have closed the book’s cover or put down their Kindle. It is because of these characters that King’s appeals to emotion—however melodramatic and schlocky they may at times be—are effective, can capture the imaginations and hearts of readers as powerfully as they do. As Langan argues, “We never forget his characters. They live, they breathe.” King may be best known for his supernatural horrors, but it is readers’ investment with and fear for individual characters that make the terror of his novels truly effective. As King said in an interview with the BBC prior to the release of 2013’s Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, “You can’t be afraid for the characters if they are just cardboard cut-outs. What I want the audience to do is fall in love with these people and really care about them and that creates the suspense you need. Love creates horror” (quoted in Stock). While the monsters King writes about are often fictional, his characters have the ring of truth, an authenticity that resonates with the reader. As King reflects in “I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie,” “I may have told a few whoppers about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and the living dead, but I like to think that I have told the truth, as best as I’ve been able to manage it, about the human beings that the books are mostly about” (15).
In addition to the resonant themes and rich characterization of King’s short stories and novels, King’s work is often dynamically in tune with the culture that surrounds him, from the simple details of brand names and omnipresent popular cultural references to the fears and anxieties that keep readers awake at night. As Ciabattari argues, “At a time when we are barraged with horrifying events—beheadings, Ebola, serial killers, plane crashes, police shootings, mass murders, cyberbullying—his visceral stories provide a catharsis, sometimes even a sense of order. Some victims can be avenged in fiction, if not in life.” King’s short stories and novels work on
a variety of different levels to effectively appeal to and terrify readers: in the common experiences at the heart of many of his horrors, the reader may recognize a bit of themselves, feeling a thrill of emotion either at that resonance or as a result of their investment with specific characters, all while negotiating the larger, real world anxieties of King’s contemporary moment.
Teaching Stephen King
According to M. Jerry Weiss’s educational guide to teaching King’s short stories, “Recent surveys of high school and college students indicate that the fiction of Stephen King is highly read” (2). Weiss identifies some of King’s main strengths—and supporting reasons for his inclusion in the classroom, if not the literary canon—as good storytelling, varied horror techniques, characters of a wide range of ages, and consideration of “the dark side of humanity” and “the fragility of life” (ibid.), themes which often catch the interest and imagination of readers and which similarly resonate through much less controversial examples of classic and literary fiction. There are a wide range of opportunities for incorporating King into the classroom, from the focused inclusion of a specific short story or novel to a dedicated unit or, at the college-level, even an entire single-author seminar on King’s work. This book is organized into three key sections, with each focused on a different approach to bringing King into the classroom, including through connection with more classical Gothic or horror novels, highlighting the wide range of realistically based horror featured in King, and examining the many ways in which King has actively negotiated the publishing process and formats.
The first section, Variations on Classic Horror Tropes, explores the ways in which King has negotiated familiar figures in his own fiction. In his critical consideration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), King outlines the tradition’s key figures: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name” (51). As he reflects, “these three are something special . . . [A]t the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls ‘the myth-pool’—that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (ibid.). King excludes the figure of the ghost from this core lineup because, as he says, “the Ghost is an archetype . . . which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, no matter how great” (ibid.). However, it fits perfectly here in a critical discussion of King’s larger literary connections to the Gothic tradition and will be included in the final chapter of this section. These chapters are designed to engage with the larger genre context of horror and the Gothic, connecting King back to the established and accepted
canon, while also highlighting the ways in which he reinvents and reimagines those familiar horror figures. This section takes these classic works of literature and connects them with King’s negotiations of these archetypal figures. Chapter Two focuses on the vampire, building upon Bram Stoker’s Dracula to explore King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), “One For the Road” (1978), “The Night Flier” (1993), and American Vampire, Volume 1 (2010, with Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque). Chapter Three examines the dualistic figure of the werewolf, contrasting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1985), Christine (1983), Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990) and The Dark Half (1989). Chapter Four explores the “Thing Without a Name” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to analyze the monstrous undead in King’s Pet Sematary (1983), Cell (2006), and Revival (2014). Finally, Chapter Five draws upon a rich tradition of ghost stories to critically consider hauntings in King, including his novels The Shining (1977) and Bag of Bones (1998).
While King is best known for his horror, including the supernatural figures of the previous section, much of King’s horror is based in real life situations and instances of violence. That real life horror often proves an incredibly productive source of conversation in the classroom and over the course of several semesters, many students have told me that these are the stories and novels that stick with them, the ones that continue to haunt them long after they’ve finished reading. After all, these are things that could really happen, anywhere and to anyone. Finally, each of the themes explored here—school shootings, sexual violence, and coming of age—are ones that resonate especially powerfully with the young adults of these high school and college classrooms. Chapter Six focuses on King’s first-person school shooter novella, Rage (published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977), which he pulled from publication after it was found in the locker of a school shooter, and explores the highly contested connections between popular culture and violence, as well as the disturbing trends of school shootings and rampage-style violence in our contemporary culture. In the early 1990s, King wrote several novels depicting strong female protagonists who face sexual violence and domestic abuse, including Dolores Claiborne (1992), Gerald’s Game (1992), and Rose Madder (1995), and these representations are explored in Chapter Seven. Finally, the adolescent coming of age is rarely clear or uncomplicated, but instead often fraught with trauma and horror of its own, the subject of Chapter Eight, which includes the novellas The Body and Apt Pupil (both from the 1982 collection Different Seasons), as well as the female bildungsroman of Carrie.
The final section, Playing with Publishing, examines the ways in which King has engaged in experimental publishing over the course of his career,
especially in recent years. As Ciabattari explains, King “keeps millions of readers engaged at a crucial time in the world of books, as technology continues to transform reading in unpredictable ways. King has been one of the first to experiment with new technologies, coming up with online serial novels and the first downloadable ebook, Riding the Bullet.” King has been consistently prolific since his first publication of Carrie in 1974. However, in addition to publishing the usual novels, short story and novella collections, and short stories in magazines and journals, King has also been—and continues to be—dedicated to pushing the envelope when it comes to publication possibilities, including his experimentation with the nineteenth-century tradition of serial publishing with The Green Mile (1996); his embrace of new twenty-first-century technology with ebooks, including UR (2009) and Guns (2014), which are available exclusively in that format; and the graphic novel adaption of his own works, from The Stand to his Dark Tower series. A close consideration of these different publication formats creates a unique opportunity to talk not exclusively about the literature itself, but also about the way in which literature is communicated from author to reader, bringing in issues of commerce, accessibility, audience, and constantly evolving literacies. Chapter Nine focuses on the rich history and recently reenergized tradition of serial publishing, including King’s The Green Mile. With the exploding popularity of e-readers and digital content, King has published multiple ebook exclusives, which are the subject of Chapter Ten, including UR, Mile 81 (2011), A Face in the Crowd (2012, co-written with Stuart O’Nan), In the Tall Grass (2012, co-written with Joe Hill), and his non-fiction essay Guns, King’s reflection on gun violence in American culture in the wake of the 2013 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Chapter Eleven examines graphic novel versions of King’s work, beginning with a quick overview of visual literacy and graphic novel terminology before examining N. (2010), The Little Green God of Agony (2012), and Road Rage (2012, co-written with Joe Hill).
Finally, the book’s conclusion looks beyond the pages themselves to consider King’s seemingly unflagging productivity, address the interdisciplinary consideration of film adaptations of King’s work, and reflect upon future possibilities for incorporating King into the high school and college classroom.
The Vampire
King’s fiction is dynamically invested in traditional figures of the Gothic, including vampires, werewolves, monsters, and ghosts. As John Sears explains in his Stephen King’s Gothic, “Gothic figures, obsessed with death and endlessly dying, refuse to die, becoming posthumous versions of and re-enactments of their own traditions” (68). These familiar Gothic tropes continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, infinitely fluid as they adapt and adjust to meet the needs, anxieties, and tensions of each new age. This constant change reflects their adaptation to “new contexts, in new disguises, [which] suggests versatility, a mobile pervasiveness that insists against its own putative borders” (ibid.). The vampire is the ultimate monster of the liminal space, challenging and permeating borders previously considered inviolable, including boundaries between the Self and the Other. As with the Gothic figures of the werewolf, monster, and ghost, the vampire’s continued impact rests in its constant evolution. As Nina Auerbach argues in Our Vampires, Ourselves, “what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become . . . [E]ach feeds on his age distinctively because he embodies that age” (1). Our monsters are not just those fictional bogeys that go bump in the night, but rather the symbolic manifestation of the cultural moment’s deepest fears and anxieties.
One of the first written records of the vampire figure can be traced back to 1725, when an Austrian medical officer chronicled how “the Serbian hajduks (peasant-soldiers) under his supervision had exhumed a corpse, transfixed it with a stake, and burned it to ashes. They did so, he explained, because they believed that the dead man had returned from the grave at night, climbed atop sleepers, throttled them, and thereby caused them to die after twenty-four hours of illness” (Butler 27). They referred to “persons of this sort” as “vampyri” (ibid.). One of the first appearances of the vampire figure in fiction is Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poem,
“The Vampire” (1748), which foregrounds the sexual transgression of the vampire figure as he seduces a young female victim: “as softly thou art sleeping / To thee shall I come creeping / And thy life’s blood drain away. / And so shalt thou be trembling / For thus shall I be kissing / And death’s threshold thou’ it be crossing / With fear, in my cold arms.” In 1816’s The Vampyre, John Polidori creates Lord Ruthven, an aristocratic vampire, one of whose most horrifying skills is his ability to pass unnoticed among the upper classes and lead others—including the story’s hero, Aubrey—to do his bidding. He is also capable of a more sexual seduction: he marries, then feeds on and kills Aubrey’s sister, while Aubrey dies driven mad trying to prevent the marriage. In the mid-nineteenth century, vampires began to make their way into reading for adolescents in the “penny dreadfuls,” an early form of horror-based comic books, with the serialized Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer, which introduced several iconic characteristics of the vampire, including “having fangs leaving two puncture wounds, coming through a window to attack a sleeping maiden, hypnotic powers, and superhuman strength. Varney is also the first example of a sympathetic vampire who loathes his own condition but is helpless to stop it” (Laming). Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla adds further erotic elements to the vampire mythology, introducing a couple of key themes that continue to influence vampire fiction and popular culture, including the sexy female vampire and the vampire as representative of same-sex desire. However, the most well-known vampire novel of all time is Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which more than a century later is still considered the “quintessential vampire book” (Laming). As Scott Laming explains, Stoker’s Dracula “mixed medieval myths and previous vampire fiction with sex, blood, and death . . . [while] Stoker’s vampire hunter, Abraham Van Helsing, helped create a trend for heroes willing to fight the undead.”
These vampire figures challenge and obliterate borders, running roughshod over the boundaries that separate the Self from the Other and the living from the dead, penetrating the body as well as the psyche, and leaving nothing sacred and inviolate. Veronica Hollinger asserts that vampires are more culturally resonant and powerful than other supernatural creatures such as werewolves and Frankenstein’s Monster, arguing that “the deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is the monster-of-choice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure; it is the monster that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us” (qtd. in Duda 12, emphasis original). Attesting to the perennial popularity and constant negotiation of the vampire figure, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have experienced a resurgence of vampire mania, from the action tropes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer television
and spin-off comic book series and Blade film franchise to the romantic vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Charlene Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, as well as the film and television adaptations each have inspired.
Drawing on the traditional Gothic horrors by which he has been inspired and responding to the contemporary discourse surrounding the vampire, King has reimagined the vampire at various points throughout his career and in a wide variety of mediums, ranging from the short story to novel and even graphic novel, including ’Salem’s Lot, “One for the Road,” “The Night Flier,” and American Vampire, Volume 1.
’Salem’s Lot and “One For the Road”
King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, reinvents the familiar vampire narrative for a new generation, transporting the vampire from the shadowed mountains of Transylvania to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. King views ’Salem’s Lot as an homage to Stoker’s Dracula. Reflecting on ’Salem’s Lot, King likens it to a “game of literary racquetball: ’Salem’s Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again” (Danse Macabre 26). In addition to reinventing Stoker’s familiar count for a new place and time, King also drew upon the over-the-top, gruesome monsters of E. C. comics, “a new breed of vampire, both cruder than Dracula and more physically monstrous” (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xvii–xviii). With ’Salem’s Lot, King creates a pastiche of the vampires of the classic Gothic tradition and those of his childhood popular culture, exploring “how Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E. C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xx). ’Salem’s Lot also reflects the contemporary cultural anxieties Auerbach comments upon, as King writes that “in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me” (ibid.). In revisiting Stoker’s Dracula, King’s novel echoes the tenor of cultural change while using the shift in setting to highlight the evil lurking behind the façade of small town America,1 upset the accepted vampire conventions, and challenge the collective strength of the vampire hunters.
Stoker’s Dracula was set in a time of great cultural and scientific change, and as Carol A. Senf explains in Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, was a moment poised at “the intersection of myth and science, past and present” (7). The post-Watergate era of ’Salem’s Lot was similarly a time
of dynamic change and uncertainty and King uses the vampire as not only a literal monster, but also as a vehicle to embody “important metaphors of the seductiveness of evil and the dehumanizing pall of modern society” (Winter 37). As King said of the early 1970s cultural influence on his novel,
I wrote ’Salem’s Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the White House tapes, the shadowy, ominous connection between the CIA and Gordon Liddy, the news of enemies’ lists, of tax audits on antiwar protestors and other fearful intelligence . . . [T]he unspeakable obscenity in ’Salem’s Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. The secret room in ’Salem’s Lot is paranoia, the prevailing spirit of [those] years. It’s a book about vampires; it’s also a book about all those silent houses, all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem. (qtd. in Winter 41)
In this climate of suspicion and mistrust, the threat is not only external— the coming of the vampire to Jerusalem’s Lot—but internal as well, stemming equally from “the corruption that emerges from within the town itself” (Magistrale, Hollywood’s Stephen King 180). Both historically and, even more powerfully, in the national imagination fueled by literature and popular culture, the idea of the small town is cloaked in idealized nostalgia. As Miles Orvell argues in The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community, “Americans dream of Main Street . . . as an ideal place; they have also dreamed it into being, created it and re-created it, as a physical place, the material embodiment of the dream” (7). On the surface, Jerusalem’s Lot seems to be just such an idyllic small town and as King writes early in the novel, “Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there” (’Salem’s Lot 42). However, as Orvell argues, the “glow of nostalgia . . . obscures some of the harsher realities of life on Main Street, realities of social division in the small town” (129). Beyond these common distinctions of class and social status, Jerusalem’s Lot hides its own horrors and even before the coming of the vampire, there are everyday evils taking place just out of sight and dark secrets are hidden behind drawn shades, including child abuse, rape, and murder.
This chronicling of change is also reflected stylistically in the epistolary approach of both novels. Dracula is made up of a series of letters and diary entries, including those written in shorthand by Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray Harker, Dr. Seward’s phonograph journal, and a range of professional communications, as well as clippings from newspapers providing accounts of inexplicable occurrences. As Leah Richards argues, “As a group of manuscripts from various sources, collected, arranged, standardized, reproduced, and distributed with the intent to inform a wider audience
of a significant state of affairs, Dracula is a representation of the periodical, and more specifically the newspaper, of the 1880s and 1890s” (440). In fact, it is Mina’s collation and transcription of the varying accounts that provides the vampire hunters with the information they need to find and destroy Dracula. However, while the transmission of information is more widespread and easily accessible in twentieth-century America, the epistolary in ’Salem’s Lot offers nothing but unanswered questions and a lack of awareness that results in further death. While the epistolary form runs throughout the entirety of Stoker’s novel, the epistolary approach in King’s novel serves to bookend the central narrative, which is told from a third-person omniscient perspective. King’s prologue features a newspaper article titled “Ghost Town in Maine?”, which relates that “a little over a year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalem’s Lot that was not usual. People began to drop out of sight” (’Salem’s Lot 7), with “The list [of the missing] . . . of a disquieting length” (’Salem’s Lot 9). Ben Mears is monitoring the news out of Jerusalem’s Lot from afar, from his and Mark Petrie’s latest refuge in Mexico, as two of the town’s few survivors who, having been outnumbered by the vampires, fled Jerusalem’s Lot. The articles themselves offer very little true understanding of what is going on; instead, Ben has to read between the lines, to see what others can’t—or perhaps more accurately, won’t—even with the evidence in black and white before them. It is a series of articles relating strange occurrences in Jerusalem’s Lot, from “funny noises” (’Salem’s Lot 622) in the night to suspicious deaths and disappearances from nearby homes and communities, which prompt Ben and Mark’s return to Jerusalem’s Lot. In both Dracula and ’Salem’s Lot, the epistolary format reveals the vampires’ secret to the vampire hunters, though with varying degrees of success: while Stoker’s vampire hunters succeed in finding and destroying Dracula, the articles Ben finds instead underscore their failure in eradicating the danger that haunts Jerusalem’s Lot.
Stoker’s Dracula builds upon well-established vampire tradition and the characteristics Van Helsing enumerates have become standard: Dracula is immortal, has no shadow and no reflection, possesses great strength and is “so strong in person as twenty men,” cannot cross running water under his own power, must be invited in, can hypnotize his victims, can be destroyed by sunlight or a stake through the heart, is repelled by garlic and holy symbols, and “can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him: he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and become unknown” (Stoker 250). King’s Kurt Barlow bears several similarities to his monstrous predecessor. Barlow is ancient, aristocratic,
and European. He and his fellow vampires must be invited in, but those who look into his eyes are unable to resist his power; as Dud Rogers, one of the Lot’s first inhabitants to meet Barlow reflects, Barlow’s “eyes seemed to be expanding, growing, until they were like dark pits ringed with fire, pits that you could fall into and drown in” (’Salem’s Lot 225). The epidemic that begins with Barlow spreads with terrifying and indiscriminate rapidity, the monstrous quickly outnumbering those who are willing to believe and strong enough to fight. However, while some of the protections against vampires hold firm—for example, Mark is able to drive off the undead Danny Glick with a plastic cross from his monster model (’Salem’s Lot 361)—many of the tried and true vampire defenses falter and fail. The cross itself is powerless without the belief to support it, as Father Callahan finds when he attempts to stand against Barlow, undone by his wavering faith (’Salem’s Lot 525). A prisoner in Dracula’s castle, Harker laments that “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (Stoker 37). While the concept and historical moment of “modernity” has changed in ’Salem’s Lot, the overwhelming power of the vampire remains; the isolation and skepticism of modern life in Jerusalem’s Lot provides the vampire hunters with no new tools for fighting against Barlow and, compounding the horror, many of the traditional means prove ineffective. In ’Salem’s Lot, the struggle is unwinnable because, as King reflects, “the garlic doesn’t work, the cross doesn’t work, the running water doesn’t work, the stake doesn’t work, nothing works: and basically you’re fucked. There’s nothing you can do” (qtd. in Auerbach 160, emphasis original). Even when Ben stakes Barlow, watching the head vampire’s body disintegrate into nothingness, this fails to truly destroy his terrifying power. With Barlow reduced to nothing but a handful of teeth, even these meager remains retain Barlow’s power and hate as “they twisted in [Ben’s] hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite” (’Salem’s Lot 617). Finally, even after Barlow’s destruction, the vampires he has created remain, stalking the night, feeding on the inhabitants of nearby areas, even after the town itself has been largely deserted.
In Dracula, the vampire is defeated only through the collective power of the vampire hunters, what Van Helsing calls “the power of combination” (Stoker 251). All of their insights and written accounts are necessary to identify and locate the threat, illuminated by Mina’s transcription and collation of the various letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. Each of the vampire hunters brings a unique contribution to their shared effort: Harker’s knowledge of the law and personal experience in Transylvania, Mina’s quick mind and organizational skills, Dr. John Seward’s medical and psychological expertise, Arthur Holmwood’s wealth and aristocratic position, and Quincey Morris’s daring and bravery. They are led by Van Helsing,
with his intimate knowledge of the supernatural threat, and his own personal “power of combination,” as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day . . . [with] an absolutely open mind” (Stoker 119). In fact, the greatest threat to their individual and collective safety comes when they are separated, when Van Helsing excludes Mina from their discussion and planning on account of her gender, leaving her alone and vulnerable to the Count’s predations. ’Salem’s Lot also brings together an eclectic crew of vampire hunters, each with their own unique set of skills: author Ben Mears, English teacher Matt Burke, medical doctor Jimmy Cody, monster aficionado Mark Petrie, and Father Callahan. However, “’Salem’s Lot produces no Van Helsings” (Auerbach 159), no one who truly knows the vampires beyond their own limited scope of expertise, whether literary, medical, or pop cultural. While King’s vampire hunters quickly become believers, none of them has the Renaissance-man knowledge or wealth of experience Van Helsing possesses. They are finding their way in the dark, through trial and error, and unlike Stoker’s vampire hunters, those of Jerusalem’s Lot never come together as a cohesive group— they are, in fact, never all together in the same place at the same time—with Barlow picking them off one by one until only Ben and Mark remain, forced to flee. In the end, Ben and Mark fail to defeat the vampire threat and as Sears argues, “King’s version of the vampire in this novel expresses the negative, pessimistic fulfillment of this myth. ’Salem’s Lot is a novel of failure and despair, the failure of belief and faith . . . the failure of Fathers to rule and of heterosexual love to redeem and, in its representation of the undead and their uncanny, persistent afterlives, a novel of the failure of endings” (Sears 18). Unlike Dracula’s death and Mina’s return to a state of grace at the end of Stoker’s novel, the horrors of Jerusalem’s Lot prove indestructible.
King’s short story “One for the Road,” which was included in his first short story collection, Night Shift, underscores this sense of dark hopelessness and futility. “One for the Road” takes place two years after the purifying fire that Ben and Mark set and which has obviously not achieved its intended purpose. Booth, the first-person narrator of “One for the Road” reflects that “two years ago, in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad” (“One for the Road” 302). A few months later, “the town burned flat . . . It burned out of control for three days. After that, for a time, things were better. And then they started again” (ibid.). Jerusalem’s Lot is drawn back to the forefront for Booth and his friend Tookey when a traveler comes rushing into Tookey’s Bar in the midst of a blizzard after he and his family went off the road in the storm. Venturing out into the storm with the out-of-towner Gerard Lumley, Booth and Tookey steel themselves for the worst, on high alert and armed with brandy and religious totems, including Booth’s crucifix and Tookey’s family Bible. As Booth explains, “I was born
and raised Congregational, but most folks who live around the Lot wear something—crucifix, St. Christopher’s medal, rosary, something” (ibid.). As the men set out, they try to warm Lumley, telling him that if they don’t find his wife and daughter in the car, they’ll go for the sheriff and if they see anyone, “we’re not going to talk to them. Not even if they talk to us” (“One for the Road” 306). Just as Booth and Tookey fear, when they find Janie and Francie Lumley, it’s too late. Lumley’s wife Janie calls to him from across the snow and when he goes to her, “she grinned [and] you could see how long her teeth had become. She wasn’t human anymore. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm” (“One for the Road” 310). Janie falls upon her husband and when Booth and Tookey turn to flee, they find Lumley’s daughter, Francie—or rather, the monster that Francie, like her mother, has become. They make their escape, saved by Tookey’s mother’s Bible, though it is a near thing; Tookey suffers a heart attack in the process and years later, the nightmare still haunts Booth. Echoing the direct address of “you” that punctuates “The Lot” chapters of ’Salem’s Lot, Booth ends by offering sage words to the reader: “my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don’t go up that road to Jerusalem’s Lot . . . Especially not after dark” (“One for the Road” 312). Like Ben and Mark, Booth and Tookey fought and won a small victory: their own survival. However, neither duo has been able to truly defeat the horror that lurks in Jerusalem’s Lot.
“The Night Flier”
While the distinction between human and monstrous is clearly demarcated in ’Salem’s Lot and “One for the Road,” in King’s story “The Night Flier,” protagonist Richard Dees must face the ways in which he himself is not so different from the monster he pursues, blurring the lines between the human and the inhuman. Dees is a journalist for a salacious tabloid called Inside View, which puts a premium on scandal and gore, with little concern for journalistic accuracy or integrity. Like the vampire itself, Inside View feeds upon the misery and carnage of the world around it, zooming in on the bloody aftermath of tragedy for the prurient titillation of its readers. Dees is on the trail of a monster dubbed “the Night Flier,” a presumed serial killer who has left death in his wake at one airport after another. In his quest for a photograph of the Night Flier, Dees is staying true to “the things that had made Inside View a success in the first place: the buckets of blood and guts by the handful” (“Night Flier” 117). The tabloids, their mass-marketed horrors, and the readers who consume them are parasitic, their clamoring demand sending Dees and others like him out in search of human misery to meet their endless need.
While the vampire and human, the hunter and hunted, are often shown as diametrically opposed, from early in “The Night Flier” Dees is implicitly likened to the vampire himself through the use of blood imagery, depicted as a predator hunting down the prey of the story he seeks. He begins to track the story and, as a journalist “made for sniffing blood and guts” (“Night Flier” 118, emphasis original), Dees feels the old, familiar charge of a juicy lead and “the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow it all the way to the end” (“Night Flier” 113). Driven by this hunger—in this case for the both metaphorical and literal “blood” that Inside View’s readers crave—Dees is a hunter, willing do anything and sacrifice anyone to catch his quarry. As the story progresses, the similarities between Dees and the Night Flier become even more pronounced and flying to one of the Night Flier’s scenes of carnage, “In the combined light of dusk and the instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a bit like a vampire himself” (“Night Flier” 117). Dees’s use of blood becomes more literal when he is forcing a landing at the Wilmington airport, risking his life and the lives of those in other airplanes in his desperate need to land before the Night Flier can make his escape, taking a knife and cutting himself on his arm and beneath his eye to feign injury (“Night Flier” 130). Drawing his own blood, Dees makes himself a partial sacrifice, shedding his own blood— and even consuming some of it when it runs down his face and into his mouth before he spits it out—in the heat of the hunt. Finally, when Dees stands face-to-face with the Night Flier’s carnage, rather than shrinking in horror he feeds in his own way: snapping pictures as he consumes the suffering, the violence, and the blood splattered before him. Running into the terminal, “Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Dees saw a foot clad in a black Converse sneaker; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it” (“Night Flier” 142). Even when he comes across a mutilated though still living victim, his instinct is not to help or alleviate suffering, but once more to feed, shooting another photo to splatter the pages of Inside View with the blood its readers crave. In his pursuit of the story, Dees is nearly as inhuman as the monster he chases.
Despite this callousness and his overwhelming thirst for the story, no matter what the cost, Dees is not a literal vampire and as he follows in the footsteps of the Night Flier, he doubts the true identity of the Night Flier himself as well. Like many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem’s Lot who refuse to believe, Dees feels safe in his belief that the Night Flier is not a real vampire, though he does concede that “the guy thought he was a vampire” (“Night Flier” 115, emphasis original). As with King’s other vampires, “The Night Flier” negotiates familiar tropes. Eyewitness accounts of the Night Flier and the paper trail documenting his movement point toward what
Dees sees as potential masquerade, playing on tropes and clichés: graveyard dirt below his plane’s cargo door, a black tuxedo and voluminous cape, and the signing of his name on logs as Dwight Renfield, in homage to the literary and cinematic incarnations of Dracula’s most loyal servant, a combination of the name of Stoker’s madman and Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in the 1931 classic film. However, the Night Flier differs from his traditional counterparts in significant and grotesque ways, with large-scale bite marks on opposite sides of the victims’ necks rather than discrete, sideby-side puncture wounds (“The Night Flier” 127). Dees never doubts that he is chasing a flesh and blood man; while the Night Flier may be capable of monstrous acts, it doesn’t occur to Dees that he may actually be following in the footsteps of a monster until he finds himself face-to-face with the bloodbath of the Wilmington airport.
Dees’s pursuit hinges on the need to see, to have visual evidence. He takes the photos that accompany all of his stories and it’s the concrete images rather than the comparatively static stories that keep Dees hunting: “He liked to touch them. To see how they froze people either with their real faces hung out for the whole world to see or with their masks so clearly apparent that they were beyond denial. He liked how, in the best of them, people always looked surprised and horrified. How they looked caught” (“The Night Flier” 135). The photographs are his evidence, his truth, his real quarry. However, in the end, the monster he seeks evades him, even as it stands directly at his shoulder, breathing on his neck, speaking into his ear. Dees is pushed to his breaking point, forced to realize that the monsters he has spent years exploiting sometimes turn out to be real. He can’t see the Night Flier in the mirror over his shoulder, knows that the vampire is un-photographable, and can’t even turn to see the Night Flier with his own eyes: in this case, to see is to die. Dees catches only an incomplete glimpse as the Night Flier destroys his photographs, pulling his film with “a long white hand, streaked with blood . . . ragged nails silted with filth” (“The Night Flier” 145). After years of selling the unbelievable to his Inside View readers, Dees now has his own beyond-belief tale, one for which he has no proof and which no one will believe, though the images seem likely to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Though Dees has been irreparably changed by his encounter with the Night Flier, the vampire escapes into the darkness while Dees himself once more becomes the monster. As the only living person standing in the midst of the airport abattoir and with no other suspect remaining, Dees is pegged as the murderer as the cops descend. Dees’s blood is once more spilled, this time against his will, as “the cop was slamming Dees up against the wall hard enough to make his nose bleed and he didn’t care, he didn’t care about anything” (“The Night Flier” 146). Dees has seen the horrors beyond
his reckoning that lurk in the shadows and with that knowledge, he has reclaimed some small scrap of his humanity in this knowledge, at just the moment when he becomes a monster in the eyes of the rest of the world.
American Vampire, Volume 1
The first decade of the twenty-first century was dominated by romantic vampires, including the glittery vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and its film adaptations, as well as the romantic vampires of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, its adapted HBO series True Blood (2008–2014), and the CW series The Vampire Diaries (2009–present). However, with the 2010 comic series American Vampire, 2 Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King refused this sympathetic, dreamy vampire by creating a new, violent, and brutal take on the familiar figure, reclaiming it for the ranks of true horror. As King writes in “Suck on This,” his introduction to the trade edition of American Vampire, Volume 1,
Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and only work at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boys with big dewy eyes.
What should they be?
Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. (v)
American Vampire, Volume 1 introduces Skinner Sweet, a new kind of vampire, with unique characteristics and several twists on the familiar mythology. The individual issues switch back and forth between the 1880s Western frontier and 1920s Hollywood, encompassing the transformations of first Skinner Sweet and later, Pearl Jones. Snyder wrote to King asking if King would be willing to provide a review blurb for the comic; however, taken in by Snyder’s story, King ended up becoming a co-author, writing Skinner Sweet’s backstory instead (King, “Suck On This” v–vi). The result is a back and forth collaboration, with Snyder and King passing the story from one to the other, Snyder writing Pearl’s story—the first half of each issue—and King contributing Sweet’s, the second half of individual issues. Snyder, Albuquerque, and King create a new breed of vampire with Skinner Sweet. As Julia Round explains in Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach, “American Vampire is a taxonomy that classifies vampires by nationality; all with different natures, strengths, weaknesses, and
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