Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King

This collection uses the representation of children and childhood as a lens to examine both Stephen King’s fictional oeuvre and several film adaptations of his works.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

Introduction: Stephen King’s Fictional Children

Debbie Olson

1970s

Ch. 1 Degeneration through Violence and Stephen King’s Rage

by Karen J. Renner

Ch. 2 “Such a tragedy might have been averted”: Gothic Childhood, American Monstrosity, and the Male Gothic in Stephen King’s Carrie

by Sarah Gray

Ch. 3 The Children as Nemesis: a Reading of Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn” and its Adaptations by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay

Ch. 4 Of “Pagan Devil-Children” and Monstrous Plants: Vegetal World, Human Enslavement, and Precarious Existence in “Children of the Corn” by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad

Ch. 5 The Spectacle of Child-Suffering in Stephen King’s The Long Walk

by Joshua Garrison

1980s

Ch. 6 Monstrosity, Ethic of Care, and Moral Agency in Stephen King’s Firestarter

by Ingrid E. Castro

Ch. 7 Boys in The Body

by Jennifer Manthei

Ch. 8 “Not if I see you first”: Playspace, Friendship, and Nostalgia in Stand By Me

by Shastri Akella

Ch. 9 “Performing a kind of self-pyschoanalysis”: childhood revisited through writing (and reading) in The Breathing Method, Misery, Pet Sematary and Charlie the Choo-Choo.

by Andy McCormack

Ch. 10 “Animals, Innocence, and the Terr[or]tories in The Talisman”

by Debbie Olson

Ch. 11 “They Were Not All Found”: Ecosystems of Child Maltreatment in Stephen King’s IT

by Brennan Thomas

Ch. 12 “You’ll Float Too”: King and the Death of Childhood

by James M. Curtis

Ch. 13 “What an enormous act this is”: Children & Sexuality in Stephen King’s IT

by Roxanne Harde

1990s

Ch. 14 (Dis)Abling Dinah: Childhood Agency and the Allegory of the Cave in The Langoliers

by Khara Lukancic

Ch. 15 Girls With Teeth: Fan Identity in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

by Katharine McCain

2000s

Ch. 16 Power, Vulnerability and Duality in Doctor Sleep

by Lauren Christie

Ch. 17 Seeing and Believing as a Child in It and The Outsider

by Kristen Miller Hill