SOURCE: "Sacral Parody in the Fiction of Stephen King," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 23, No. 3, Winter, 1989, pp. 125-41.

In the following essay, Egan discusses how the sacral parody common to gothic literature is at work in King's fiction.

Leslie Fiedler's observation in Love and Death in the American Novel that the Gothic is a parodic medium, "a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of their grotesqueness," has generally been supported by subsequent analyses of Gothic literature. Rosemary Jackson points to Gothic's tendency to "invert romance structures," for example, the quest, by twisting the quest into a "circular journey to nowhere." Coral Ann Howells makes explicit what Fiedler had implied, namely that in Gothic novels the structure of the external world breaks down, that the Gothic idiom destabilizes. William Patrick Day's recent study offers the most sophisticated reading of the parodic tendencies of...