Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a parable of adolescence. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. In Danse Macabre, a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology.

The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America-Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania-and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.” As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer.

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