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.Magic works because the audience is tricked intobelieving.The magician misdirects us.When Alan understands this concepthe understands how Gaunt operates.But magic is so powerful that we mayfall under its spell even if we know there s a trick.Alan falls under Gaunt sspell until Polly helps him see Gaunt s mistake.Alan s magic is human inorigin, but it becomes transformed when he meets Gaunt.Contact withGaunt releases the supernatural in others.Gaunt believes in the power ofmagic, and his belief turns human magic into the supernatural.In Needful Things King explores the relationship between thesupernatural and natural worlds.He is concerned not just with the horror weusually find in the genre.He is worried about the natural horror whichresults from the way humans treat each other.He looks back on the past ofCastle Rock.Some of the town s problems have a supernatural origin, as inNeedful Things (1991) 139the monster dog released by the photographs in  The Sun Dog. Otherconflicts in Castle Rock may combine natural and supernatural forces.In TheDead Zone special powers lead to the discovery of a serial killer.In this novelindividuals are responsible for the human horror.Cujo is just a poor rabiddog who attacks the humans and causes the death of a child.Thesupernatural is not really important in Cujo.Thad Beaumont does not wishhis evil half to come alive in The Dark Half, and Thad needs help fromsupernatural forces to overcome him.In Needful Things a single evil beingsets the townspeople against each other.Gaunt accomplishes some of hisgoal by using the evil in us all.King still employs supernatural elements toexplore the horror genre in this novel.But he also suggests that humanhorror is more destructive than any which comes from outside of us.CastleRock has been the scene of both natural and supernatural horror.King hasused this town as a setting to examine the many kinds of evil possible in thehorror novel.He finally destroys the town by combining the power of asupernatural evil with the destructive power of the average human being.WORKS CITEDBeahm, George.The Stephen King Story.Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992.King, Stephen.Needful Things.New York: Viking, 1991; New York: New AmericanLibrary, 1992.KATHLEEN MARGARET LANTThe Rape of Constant Reader:Stephen King s Construction of the Female Reader andViolation of the Female Body in MiseryIs the pen a metaphorical penis?Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 3 Here s your book, Annie, he panted, and his hand closed on morepaper.This bunch was out, dripping wet, smelling sourly of spilt wine.She bucked and writhed under him.The salt-dome of his left kneewhammed the floor and there was excruciating pain, but he stayed on topof her.I m gonna rape you, all right Annie.I m gonna rape you because all Ican do is the worst I can do.So suck my book.Suck my book.Suck on it untilyou fucking CHOKE.He crumpled the wet paper with a convulsiveclosing jerk of his fist and slammed it into her mouth, driving the halfcharred first bunch farther down.Stephen King, Misery, 292Is the pen a metaphorical pistol? Are words weapons with which thesexes have fought over territory and authority?Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man s Land, 3Writing a book is a little like firing an ICBM.only it travels over timeinstead of space.Stephen King, Misery, 257From Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Spring 1997), pp.89 114.Republished in Imagining theWorst: Stephen King and the Reprensentation of Women.© 1998 by Greenwood Publishing Group.141142 Kathleen Margaret LantIn the past few years, Stephen King s relationship with his audience hastaken several horrifying turns.King is arguably the best selling,1 certainly themost lucratively rewarded,2 author in American history, and his rise to thisposition may have had some rough moments at the beginning, when as heputs it  I began to have long talks with myself at night about whether ornot I was chasing a fool s dream ( On Becoming a Brand Name 19).Butoddly enough, King seems to be facing the most taxing and drainingmoments of his career at the zenith of his success.As King himself asserts,  Istarted out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force(Beahm 17), and the popularity of the stories which have made him such aneconomic force has cost him dearly.George Beahm, compiler of theexhaustive Stephen King Companion, asserts that  King is a publishingphenomenon and.a celebrity in his own right (16) but adds that this verysuccess has not been good for King:He is a victim of his own celebrity status.King is a householdname, a contemporary figure of popular culture.His face isrecognizable, in part because of the many book-jacket photosand the media interviews, but mostly because of the campyAmerican Express ad in which he played himself.When you refamous, popular, and rich, he has found out, everyone wants apiece of you.Understandably, that is what King detests themost; he called it in his Time profile  the cult of the celebrity.(Beahm 17)King can no longer attend conventions or book fairs; he is so heavily indemand that he finds himself threatened physically by the affection of hisfans.He cannot comply with his publishers desires to participate in booksignings since, as Beahm explains,  Experience has shown him that the linesmay be longer than he can accommodate in a single session (17).RichardPanek reports that fans often camp outside his Bangor, Maine, home (32),and King s safety and the safety of his family are now less than secure, asituation which seems to trouble King greatly.In fact, in 1985, he said of hiscareer,  Sometimes I feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia.I knew enough toget the brooms started, but once they start to march, things are never thesame (Panek 29).In fact, King and his family have been forced to learn the dangers ofKing s popularity.In April of 1991, King s wife, Tabitha, was surprised intheir home by an intruder carrying a fake bomb.Apparently the would-beterrorist, Eric Keene, a native of San Antonio, Texas, was convinced thatThe Rape of Constant Reader 143King had stolen the plot of his novel Misery from a woman Keene claimed tobe his aunt, Anne Hiltner.To make matters more complex, it seems thatHiltner herself has written to King for about ten years, accusing him ofburglarizing her Princeton, New Jersey, home 150 times ( Man Threatens toBlow Up Stephen King s Home ).Another obsessive fan, Steven Lightfoot, a 28-year-old native of SanFrancisco, has recently made himself conspicuous in Bangor, Maine, King shometown, sporting a bumpersticker on his van which reads,  Photos proveit s Stephen King, not Mark David Chapman, getting John Lennon sautograph.No joke, folks ( Personals ).Lightfoot s point is, of course, thatit was King and not Chapman who murdered Beatle John Lennon [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]