Abstract
Stephen King’s fiction belongs to the tradition of literary apocalypse not only in its images of the end of the world but in its use of revelatory visions and images of resurrection and renewal. This chapter reads King as an apocalyptic writer whose narratives resist closure. It argues that King employs supernatural horror as a discourse of apocalyptic revelation by which the concealed abuses and inequalities of small-town America are made visible. Though King’s fiction resists both definitive narrative closure and belief in a spiritual afterlife, it locates redemptive possibility in a series of returns and renewals that echo images of resurrection in Christian theology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 165. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TG.
- 2.
John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 2.
- 3.
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
- 4.
Stephen King, Wizard and Glass (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 423.
- 5.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 6.
- 6.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 6.
- 7.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, pp. 6–7.
- 8.
Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 12.
- 9.
Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 10.
- 10.
This expression is used frequently throughout The Dark Tower, beginning with TG: 3.
- 11.
The ‘new heaven and earth’ appears in Isaiah 65: 17–25 and Revelation 21–2, where it represents the establishment of a new religious, social and political order that will undo the injustices of the present age.
- 12.
Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 2.
- 13.
Robert Wuthnow, Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 8.
- 14.
James Egan, ‘Apocalypticism in the Fiction of Stephen King’, Extrapolation 25. 3 (Fall 1984), pp. 214–27 (p. 214).
- 15.
Johan Höglund has examined depictions of 9/11 and its aftermath in King’s fiction. See ‘Cell, Stephen King and the Imperial Gothic’, Gothic Studies 17. 2 (November 2015), pp. 69–87.
- 16.
For a detailed discussion of Romantic apocalypticism, see Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
- 17.
Christopher Rowland, ‘“Upon Whom the Ends of the Ages have Come”: Apocalyptic and the Interpretation of the New Testament’, in Malcolm Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 38–57 (p. 43).
- 18.
Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 2.
- 19.
Kevin Mills, Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), p. 164.
- 20.
Christopher Rowland, Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries who Strove for Heaven on Earth (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2017), p. 31.
- 21.
Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse, p. 15.
- 22.
David Seed, ‘Introduction: Aspects of Apocalypse’, in David Seed (ed.), Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 1–14 (p. 12).
- 23.
Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 6.
- 24.
Stephen King, It (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), p. 3. Further references are given parenthetically.
- 25.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 4.
- 26.
Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 9.
- 27.
Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner, ‘Introduction: Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects’, in Botting and Spooner (eds.), Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 1–11 (p. 2).
- 28.
See Chap. 3 for a detailed discussion of this tradition.
- 29.
Robert Morgan, ‘Does the Gospel Story Demand and Discourage Talk of Revelation?’, in Gerhard Sauter and John Barton (eds.), Revelation and Story: Narrative Theology and the Centrality of Story (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 145–73.
- 30.
Jesse W. Nash, ‘Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary’, Journal of Popular Culture, 30.4 (spring 1997), pp. 151–60 (p. 158).
- 31.
Sara Martín Alegre, ‘Nightmares of Childhood: The Child and the Monster in Four Novels by Stephen King’, Atlantis 23. 1 (June 2001), pp. 105–14 (p. 110).
- 32.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 45. For further examination of the relationship between clock-time and narrative form, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
- 33.
This theme is present in much of King’s fiction but is given perhaps its most overt treatment in Hearts in Atlantis (1999), a novel that describes King’s perception of his own generation as having failed to live up to the social and political idealism of its youth.
- 34.
See, for example, Ligotti’s short story collection Teatro Grottesco (London: Virgin Books, 2008).
- 35.
Stephen King, Revival (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014), p. 67. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation R.
- 36.
David Fergusson, ‘Eschatology’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 226–44 (p. 240).
- 37.
A similar concept of the divine as a source of integration and organic unity in the universe is common in Romantic versions of Christianity. For a fuller account, see Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- 38.
Tom Wright, Creation, Power and Truth (London: SPCK, 2013), pp. 10–11.
- 39.
See Jürgen Moltmann, A Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology, fifth edition, trans. by James W. Leitch (London: SCM, 1967).
- 40.
Emil Brunner, Eternal Hope, trans. by Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1954), p. 38.
- 41.
Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007), p. 205.
- 42.
Elizabeth Phillips, ‘Eschatology and Apocalyptic’, in Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 274–95 (p. 292).
- 43.
Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, p. 183.
- 44.
Gunton, The Christian Faith, p. 167.
- 45.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), p. 658. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TDT.
- 46.
Alaya Swann, ‘The Once and Future Earth: Ecology and Narrative in Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series’, Journal of Popular Culture 48.6 (2015), pp. 1327–45 (p. 1336).
- 47.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 23.
- 48.
Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 54–9.
- 49.
Swann, ‘The Once and Future Earth’, p. 1342.
- 50.
Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 50.
- 51.
Stephen King, The Waste Lands (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 206.
- 52.
Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 453.
- 53.
Stephen King, Song of Susannah (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006), p. 313.
- 54.
Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 287.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
———. 2014. Revival. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marsden, S. (2018). The Sense of No Ending: (Re)Reading the Apocalyptic Stephen King. In: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96570-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96571-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)