ABSTRACT
The 'insoluble equations' which 'paralyse' King's characters usually involve phenomena which appear to belong to a realm outside normal, 'natural' experience, though in fact they are quite familiar in the 'make-believe' world of figurative language. King is very much aware of the importance of getting his readers to acknowledge the possibilities of 'seeing things differently' and to recognize the frequent unreliability of perception. The magical attitudes in operation have social origins and repercussions which are only superficially confronted by token exhortations to 'keep love alive and see that we get on, no matter what'. There is also a proliferation of fictional machines which somehow assume or are possessed by magical and uncontrollable powers - as is the case in Stephen King's short story 'The mangler' which tells of a laundry machine possessed by a bloodthirsty demon or in his novel Christine about a 1958 Plymouth Fury car with evil powers.
