ABSTRACT
Stephen King repeatedly narrates American History as a kind of endless cycle: the circular—rather than linear—depiction of a society that cannot get out of its own way in order to “make progress.” Due in part to his status as America’s most popular horror writer, King obsesses over figures as well as communities trapped in repetitive loops in which the future is only ever a reiteration of a self-destructive past. In King’s multiverse, this entropic vision of American History stems from a variety of sources: toxic masculinity ( Pet Sematary), class and capitalism (The Shining), and imperial lust (Hearts of Atlantis and Dreamcatcher ). Earlier chapters illustrate how King’s novels present American History as horrifyingly and deathlessly repetitive. However, King’s works also harbor optimistic alternatives to this doom-and-gloom model. Specifically, this chapter will consider the ways in which King’s more recent texts diverge from his earlier star-crossed loop, examining unique moments in which his corpus seems to suggest a different kind of history that has been freed from the oppressive, self-destructive forces that delineate his earlier work.
