Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King, and I came to wonder about the horror writer’s political ideas.
Several right-leaning essayists have already noticed a seeming disconnect between King’s politics and the spirit of his fiction. Tim Cavanaugh labels King a “lefty,” yet notes that his stories are full of “hard-headed pragmatism and traditional morality,” which “seem clearly conservative.” Rachel DiCarlo Currie notes that King is left leaning, but she also quotes an essay in which he describes horror movies as “innately conservative, even reactionary” in the sense that they “re-establish our feelings of essential normality.”
Currie argues that the horror genre has a conservative slant because it is pessimistic about human nature. In Thomas Harris’ novel The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter declares that he is simply “evil,” not a victim of circumstance. Such fiction, Currie says, implicitly rejects “the ‘nurturist’ view of humanity.”
That observation struck a chord with me since I remember thinking that this theme was handled very strangely in King’s Misery. There’s one moment in the book that resembles Lecter’s description of himself. King’s villain, Annie Wilkes, grins at the protagonist, and we read:
There was craziness in that grin, but he saw something else in it as well, something that really frightened him. He saw conscious evil in it—a demon capering behind her eyes.
Throughout the rest of the novel, however, Annie is portrayed as self-righteously insane, not knowingly evil. Perhaps King had conflicting instincts about how the character should be handled. But even outside of that passage, he leaves it ambiguous whether Annie is deranged because of her “upbringing” or “the funny little glands inside her” or “both.”
Leftist horror author Paul Tremblay contends that conservative horror stories generally end happily, with a restoration of normality. In contrast, progressive ones tend to close on a note of despair, with the notion that the characters can never “be the same again.” (Impressively, Tremblay manages not to see this as an indictment of the progressive mindset.)
King’s novels tend to feature happy endings. The Shining has a bittersweet denouement, but King made it more clearly positive when he adapted the book for a television series. In Misery, the protagonist may never be “the same” as the plot reaches its conclusion, but in some ways, he is better than he was before his ordeal. He is plagued by trauma but ultimately overcomes it. In The Eyes of the Dragon, King uses a demonic villain fit for horror but places him in an upbeat fantasy tale with a sunny resolution. It’s a bold choice but one that speaks volumes about how King portrays evil: not as a force that renders the protagonists helpless but as a challenge to be overcome. All told, King’s work should be right leaning by Tremblay’s standard. It’s also very “American”—that’s the word I thought of when I first noticed the can-do attitude in his fiction.
Additionally, Cavanaugh is right that King’s books uphold “traditional morality.” In The Shining, divorce is part of the horror. Using his psychic ability, Danny senses that his parents have contemplated divorce, and it terrifies him. King even puts “DIVORCE” in all caps, as he does with “MURDER” near the novel’s climax. King himself is still married to his first wife and has three children with her. How many celebrities of his age and caliber can claim that?
But King also uses left-wing issues, like societal racism, to instill fear. Annie Wilkes’s name is a clear allusion to John Wilkes Booth, and Africa is mentioned repeatedly in the book, Annie even using the n-word at one point. The evil hotel in The Shining also uses racial slurs.
Children of the Corn is a good example of how King’s work can yield vastly different political implications. The antagonists are uptight religious fanatics. Yet they are also rebellious kids who have rejected the ways of their parents. There’s something for liberals there and something for conservatives, too.
One might expect that the contrasting ideas in King’s literature would come together into a political outlook that was somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. And that is roughly what we see. King may be left-wing, but he’s an old-school liberal—or was, until the last few years.
As we have seen, King’s books are politically eclectic, not one-sided. In general, I feel he likes to explore a wide range of human phenomena, which is why he has tried out so many genres and topics. In that same essay, King wrote that “the best horror films” were simultaneously “reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary.” I think he was onto something but was mainly describing himself. In this age of fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, the openness we find in his work—again, before recent times—is a relief.
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Image credit: public domain
