Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half

by Tony Magistrale

The popular success of Stephen King's novels is, of course, a fact beyond dispute. Perhaps because of his popularity, however, he has been denigrated or ignored by most literary critics and scholars. A previous volume in Twayne's United States Authors Series, Joseph Reino's Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary (1988) redressed the balance for King's works published between 1974 and 1983. In the present work, Tony Magistrale takes a critical look at the novels and non-fiction of King's second decade, devoting extended analyses to King's study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, and to the novels published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Magistrale shows that King cannot be confined to the reductive categories of genre fiction. Rather, the master of the macabre has drawn on many literary traditions from both high culture and low culture in the composition of his novels. Moreover, Magistrale makes a convincing case that King's art has a depth and subtlety rarely found either among "serious" or "popular" writers, and that his work is characterized by an astute knowledge of fundamental American mythys and archetypes.

Especially notable features of this book include the extensive interview with Stephen King that makes up the bulk of the first chapter, and the author's insightful and well-informed analysis of the "gothic inheritance." Stephen King: The Second Decade is an important revaluation of a fascinating writer, and will appeal to students and scholars of American literature and popular culture.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 16, 1992

About the author

Tony Magistrale is the author of three books of poetry: What She Says About Love, winner of the 2007 Bordighera Poetry Prize, which was published as a bilingual edition in 2008; The Last Soldiers of Love (Literary Laundry Press, 2012); and Entanglements (Fomite Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Over the past two decades, Magistrale's twenty-plus books and many articles have covered a broad area of interests. He has published on the writing process, international study abroad, and his own poetry. But the majority of his books and articles have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. He has published three separate interviews with Stephen King, and from 2005-09 Magistrale served as a research assistant to Mr. King. Accordingly, a dozen of his scholarly books and many published journal articles have illuminated the genre's narrative themes, psychological and social contexts, and historical development.