Stephen King's Gothic

Stephen King is the world's best-selling horror writer. His work is ubiquitous on bookstore, supermarket, and personal library shelves and has been faithfully adapted into some of the most iconic horror films of the twentieth century. This study explores his writing through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through analyses of some of his best-known work, including "Carrie" and "Misery," the authors argue that King offers ways of encountering and understanding some of our deepest fears about life and death, the past and the future, technological change, other people, monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.This is the first extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and will be of interest to students, academics, and fans of horror fiction.

'Sears offers an insightful and nuanced analysis of how King's narratives both speak to and work against major Gothic writings, traditions and themes such as repetition, doubling and allusion, secrecy and concealment, the writer and the text, uncanny features of time and place, resurrection and its hazards, degeneration, abjection and monstrosity . . Sears has produced a sound critical examination of Stephen King's Gothic that is both thoroughly researched and highly readable. His study provides an opening for more serious and comprehensive critical examinations of King's work and suggests that King's fiction is best understood as part of an intricate intra- and inter-textual network. Sears' text is one of the few that offers an extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and it will be of interest to critics and fans of Gothic fiction alike.' Natasha Rebry - The Gothic Imagination