Monstrous Femininity in Stephen King's Fiction

Horror fiction is a monstrously hybrid, paradoxical narrative mode. Commonly referred to as a body genre, it provokes calculated corporeal reactions of fear and loathing in readers, yet it also offers an intellectual challenge by inviting audiences to criticize prevailing social norms and to embark on a therapeutical imaginative exercise of revisiting collective cultural traumas in fictionalized forms. Korinna Csetényi provides an exciting introduction to the pleasurable thrills of horror through mapping the genre’s historical development, its major theoretical trends, and social critical potentials. Her close reading analysis of the oeuvre of Stephen King coined “a conservative romantic bestsellasaurus rex of horror” tackles a wide range of intriguing topics from King’s colloquial poetics to protean monsters, malevolent machines, and violent/violated women. The case studies focus on the representation of the monstrous female body in two iconic novels, discussing the castrating mother as terrible muse in Misery and the abject border-crossings of a witch-like telekinetic teenager in Carrie. The book concludes with a micro-analysis of a true gem of King’s corpus, concentrating on the vulnerable adolescent’s mythical identity quest in the autobiographically inspired short story “The Body.” Csetényi’s monograph will delight scholars and students of horror studies and fans of Stephen King’s cult classics alike.