Abstract
We can further investigate issues to do with Gothic and its dealings with the text, the body and the law by looking at some of the work of a writer who can fairly claim to represent Gothic most fully in the late twentieth century. In his immensely long fiction The Tommy-Knockers (1988), to take one of many examples, Stephen King offers his readers a highly conventional scenario for horror. An alien spacecraft is discovered buried in the ground; from it there come forces which turn the inhabitants of a small town variably odd or murderous. This creeping evil spreads, seeming to sweep all before it, until the town is cut off from the outside world, and its inhabitants have become the servants or hosts of those who control — or used to control — the spacecraft. The lone survivors of an untransformed humanity are picked off one by one, until it seems there is no hope of survival.
Keywords
Child Abuse Small Town Hairline Crack Death Drive Primal ScenePreview
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Notes
- 3.See Stephen King, The Shining (New York, 1977), e.g., pp. 152–66.Google Scholar
- 11.See, e.g., Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Mythology trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago and London, 1986), pp. 33ff.Google Scholar
- 12.See Stephen King, The Sun Dog, in Four Past Midnight (New York, 1990), p. 905.Google Scholar
- 25.See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, 1982).Google Scholar
- 35.See Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or, Lonesome No More! (New York, 1976).Google Scholar
- 36.See, e.g., Paul L. Harris, Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding (Oxford, 1989), pp. 51–80.Google Scholar