“Scars Can’t Come Back” – Why Stephen King? Why Now?

“Many of us . . . have had the experience of reading a great novel and suddenly becoming aware that it is reading us as well . . . The writer has created a living world with words, a vital communion that cannot be taken merely as an object of study but one that draws out our meanings even as we draw its meaning out.” - Parker Palmer

Stating that popular culture is in the midst of a Stephen King renaissance would not be a controversial statement by any metric. Aside from the author’s steady stream of novels and short stories - most recently co-authoring Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King - both television and cinema have been overflowing with adaptations from the Master of Horror. From the recent record shattering cinematic adaptation of IT, to the critically acclaimed Netflix one-two punch of Gerald’s Game and 1922, to the upcoming JJ Abrams produced series Castle Rock, Stephen King is a hot Hollywood commodity once again.

Why the resurgence? On some level it could be as simple as an American institution finally receiving his due. Since the publication in 1974 of his first novel Carrie, King has been churning out bestsellers, influencing other artists and storytellers, and placing an indelible stamp on the wider culture overall. His still unique style of merging Roger Corman-esque horror exploitation tropes with intellectual and often poetic prose is just as powerful in his 2014 novel Revival as it was in the 1978 apocalyptic classic The Stand. If, however, we simply left the enduring legacy of King to the fact that he’s an excellent writer, that would still leave many unanswered questions.

Stephen King is intimately aware of the connection between the monstrous and the dominant narratives of power within society. The monsters that King conjures are filled with dark meaning and dire admonitions, shambling and slithering out of our fretful collective political and religious psyche, portents or warnings to the characters within his books – as well as the reader – to venture no further for fear of losing one’s grip on reality. These monsters are hegemonic, symbols of the oppressive forces within American history that coalesce into a common theme throughout King’s oeuvre; the past is never dead . . . and it is hungry.

In the novel IT, the eldritch monster Pennywise stalks and brutally kills the children of Derry approximately every twenty-seven years. The townspeople seem to accept this without question, the horrors regularly explained away with contorted logic or simply forgotten, a mysterious amnesia afflicting most of the inhabitants of the small Maine town. This lack of communal solidarity has enabled the despotic monstrousness of Pennywise to return again and again, making Derry conspirators in maintaining their own oppression.

It’s not difficult to see, then, how the terror bubbling up from the sewers of Derry might come to embody our own current national landscape. Whether it be the return of nothing less than consequence free public lynchings of Black bodies, the resurgence of white nationalism following the election of President Donald Trump, or renewed assaults on women’s access to family planning resources, the conservative rallying cry of “Make America great again” could easily be read as “They all float down here!”

In the novel, the children that comprise the Losers’ Club survive a battle with Pennywise and make a promise to return if the monster comes back, slicing their palms with a broken glass bottle in a binding blood oath. As an adult being called back to Derry, Bill Denbrow is shocked to discover the scars from that day - scars that had vanished - have become clearly visible again. “Scars can’t come back,” he says, speaking to our uncanny collective ability within America to forget our own disfigurements, our trespasses, and the sins of our elders. It is that denial which allows the monsters to feed, whether it be Pennywise or the legacy of Jim Crow laws being played out today within our legal system and prisons.

In many of King’s narratives, whether It, ‘salem’s Lot, Desperation, or any number of his dark fables, there is a leitmotif of constructing solidarity within an oppressed community. Villains such as Pennywise, Barlow the vampire, or the otherworldly Tak are effectively challenged and defeated only when characters forego working independently, instead taking active steps together to more effectively address their oppression. As such, King is constructing revolt metaphors through the lens and imagery of the phantasmagorical. These stories then might promote other narratives of suffering and the courage it takes to combat such forces of overwhelming evil, powerful narratives that rage like rivers carving new futures into the bedrock of society. “I think this bravery in the face of horror," King explained in a 1979 interview, "is one of the things that people respond to in my work.”

So, why Stephen King? Why now? The works of King speak to survival, both individual and communal, serving as contemporary manuscripts of lamentations that, like their biblical namesake, are a ferocious and unrelenting onslaught against the idea that human suffering might have an ultimate purpose. Rather, this literature (and cinema) of survival is meant to remind us of death, of oppression, of the merciless forces that seek endless power and consumption in our troubling and frightening times. The sharing of these narratives, whether in a movie theater or at a book club, can become an act of resistance that challenges social patterns of oppression, i.e. horror literature as praxis. In other words, King’s narratives change the world by changing the reader.

Indeed, the work of Stephen King coalesces into a rich literary tradition that, as his series The Dark Tower confirms, conveys the ongoing story of unspeakable oppression and the marginalized characters who, often at great cost, choose to resist. The author leads us to a larger consideration of not only what it means to be alive in the face of death, but what it means to be alive together. IT didn’t become the highest grossing horror film of all time simply because it was scary, it spoke to our national condition, serving as a roadmap of solidarity and resistance against the forces that seek to dominate and destroy; and challenges us to remember our scars, venture into the sewers together, and to confront the very monsters that seek to devour us all.