What Do Stephen King and Shakespeare Have in Common?
A new book on King’s archives argues his enduring power lies not in shock, but in a disciplined realism that links him to Shakespeare.
Illustration: Chris W. Kim for Bloomberg
If you ask the average Stephen King fan how old they were when they first encountered the master of horror, I’d be willing to put money on the answer being somewhere between 12 and 17. Those middle- and high-school years are when the surface-level sell of King’s work — thrills, chills, and plenty of sex — is most potent. Even if they haven’t kept up with King into adulthood, chances are various Kingisms will haunt them forever: “REDRUM” from The Shining, the refrigerator in It, the Boogeyman in “The Boogeyman.”
The latter made a particular impression on Caroline Bicks, a Shakespeare scholar and author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England. “‘The Boogeyman’ did to me what a great horror story (as King writes) does best: “Dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of,’” she writes in her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (April 21, Hogarth).