This PhD consists of two parts, a creative element and a critical element, which together examine Stephen King’s place within the American Gothic genre.
The first part is a collection of four short stories which each engage with themes and ideas frequently explored in the writing of King and other American Gothic authors, such as domesticity, trauma, masculinity and the past returning to haunt the present. In ‘The Doberman’s Grin’, ‘The House on Montrose Avenue’, ‘The Legend of Robert Jacobson’ and ‘The Milk Carton Kids’ — like in so much of King’s work — a glimpse of the “American Nightmare” that must surely run parallel to the “American Dream” is offered.
The second part is a thesis which, through close readings of novels by King, Shirley Jackson, Robin Cook and Toni Morrison, examines how these authors use place and setting as a source of terror in their novels, as well as how their writing reflects on wider American societal issues. Chapter one looks at how the temporarily adopted ‘home’ becomes a site of haunting for the central character — both in the supernatural sense, and by reminding them of their own traumatic past — in King’s The Shining (1977) and Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Chapter two examines the ways in which both extremities of the consequences of American capitalism are represented in King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and Cook’s Coma (1977), thus reducing the human body to a commodity for a capitalist-like figure. Chapter three focuses on the union between trauma personally experienced by the main character and a shared national trauma integral to the history of America, whether that is colonialism or the Atlantic Slave Trade, in King’s Pet Sematary (1983) and Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
