Rose Red and Stephen King’s Hybrid House of Horrors

Abstract

Commentary on the work of Stephen King usually provides a litany of his shortcomings as a writer. Harold Bloom, for example, insists that he “cannot locate any aesthetic dignity in King’s writing” (“Introduction” 3). Moreover, S. T. Joshi dismisses King as an unoriginal hack, “a panderer to the cheapest of middle-class tastes” (63). King certainly has his shortcomings as a writer, but such claims confine King’s work within strict definitions of authorship. They ignore King’s experiments not only with genre and authorship but also with his broad use of different media. By focusing on King’s weaknesses in writing, King’s critics overlook an even deeper problem—how do King’s own notions of authorship help us understand his larger project? As Linda Badley argues in Writing Horror and The Body, King deliberately distances himself from traditional conceptions of authorship. In fact, King writes for so many different kinds of venues and media that broad terms like “novelist”—or even “writer”—may not apply to him very well at all. Badley goes so far as to suggest that King’s work ought to be defined in terms of performance. In Badley’s view, “King sometimes seems to prefer performing his fictions … more than writing them” (40). The result is that King “might be better defined as a figure or phenomenon whose impact goes far beyond any genre or medium” (xi).