Stephen King: Powers of Horror

Abstract

In order to approach the power of horror in Stephen King’s work we must move circuitously, towards the glimpsed abyss via accounts of the origins of personality offered by psychoanalytic theory, specifically by Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva. King’s fiction is concerned above all with origins, with the grounds of being. His work betrays a fascination with those primary/primal movements and experiences which impel or force the construction of the self as a gendered social being. I shall argue that his work itself displays or follows an exemplarily ‘masculine’ trajectory, moving as it were from ‘mother’ to ‘text’: in order to show this I must reverse this experiental order to follow the epistemological order of psychoanalytic theory, which developed from a concentration on ‘text’ to a concentration on ‘mother’ in its movement from Freud to Kristeva.