Description
Book SynopsisThis unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Stephen King’s Fictional Children
Debbie Olson
1970s
Ch. 1 Degeneration through Violence and Stephen King’s Rage
by Karen J. Renner
Ch. 2 “Such a tragedy might have been averted”: Gothic Childhood, American Monstrosity, and the Male Gothic in Stephen King’s Carrie
by Sarah Gray
Ch. 3 The Children as Nemesis: a Reading of Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn” and its Adaptations by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
Ch. 4 Of “Pagan Devil-Children” and Monstrous Plants: Vegetal World, Human Enslavement, and Precarious Existence in “Children of the Corn” by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad
Ch. 5 The Spectacle of Child-Suffering in Stephen King’s The Long Walk
by Joshua Garrison
1980s
Ch. 6 Monstrosity, Ethic of Care, and Moral Agency in Stephen King’s Firestarter
by Ingrid E. Castro
Ch. 7 Boys in The Body
by Jennifer Manthei
Ch. 8 “Not if I see you first”: Playspace, Friendship, and Nostalgia in Stand By Me
by Shastri Akella
Ch. 9 “Performing a kind of self-pyschoanalysis”: childhood revisited through writing (and reading) in The Breathing Method, Misery, Pet Sematary and Charlie the Choo-Choo.
by Andy McCormack
Ch. 10 “Animals, Innocence, and the Terr[or]tories in The Talisman”
by Debbie Olson
Ch. 11 “They Were Not All Found”: Ecosystems of Child Maltreatment in Stephen King’s IT
by Brennan Thomas
Ch. 12 “You’ll Float Too”: King and the Death of Childhood
by James M. Curtis
Ch. 13 “What an enormous act this is”: Children & Sexuality in Stephen King’s IT
by Roxanne Harde
1990s
Ch. 14 (Dis)Abling Dinah: Childhood Agency and the Allegory of the Cave in The Langoliers
by Khara Lukancic
Ch. 15 Girls With Teeth: Fan Identity in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
by Katharine McCain
2000s
Ch. 16 Power, Vulnerability and Duality in Doctor Sleep
by Lauren Christie
Ch. 17 Seeing and Believing as a Child in It and The Outsider
by Kristen Miller Hill
