Laws of Recollection and Reconstruction: Stephen King

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.

… the growth of the mind is somehow inextricably tied up with the evolution of the relationship between the self and its internal objects. Consequently, death of the mind is entailed by these objects being expelled, dethroned, invaded, corrupted, or fragmented.¹