Excavating Stephen King

Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction combines approaches from science and literary theory to examine the canon of Stephen King’s fiction work in a single critical study. James Arthur Anderson has devised the concept of Darwinist Hermeneutics as a critical tool to combine evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, biology, and literary Darwinism with other more conventional critical theory, including structuralism, narratology, semiotics, and linguistic analysis. Using this theory, Anderson examines King’s works in terms of archetypes and mythology, human universals, affective emotions, and the organization of story to create maximum suspense. This method brings new insights into King’s stories and broader implications for storytelling as a whole.

For use in schools and libraries only. When a highway project leaves him unemployed and threatens to destroy his home, one man takes on the forces of progress as he embarks on a vengeful showdown of epic proportions. A novel originally written under the Richard Bachman pseudonym.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life. In EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present- day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[An] exceedingly complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “A lightning rod . . . brilliantly crafted.”—The Washington Post A most anticipated book by The New York Times • USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Marie Claire • Elle • Harper's Bazaar • Bustle • Newsweek • New York Post • Esquire • Real Simple • The Sunday Times • The Guardian Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

Now a Netflix movie directed by Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Hush) and starring Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. Master storyteller Stephen King presents this classic, terrifying #1 New York Times bestseller. When a game of seduction between a husband and wife ends in death, the nightmare has only begun… “And now the voice which spoke belonged to no one but herself. Oh my God, it said. Oh my God, I am all alone out here. I am all alone.” Once again, Jessie Burlingame has been talked into submitting to her husband Gerald’s kinky sex games—something that she’s frankly had enough of, and they never held much charm for her to begin with. So much for a “romantic getaway” at their secluded summer home. After Jessie is handcuffed to the bedposts—and Gerald crosses a line with his wife—the day ends with deadly consequences. Now Jessie is utterly trapped in an isolated lakeside house that has become her prison—and comes face-to-face with her deepest, darkest fears and memories. Her only company is that of the various voices filling her mind…as well as the shadows of nightfall that may conceal an imagined or very real threat right there with her…

Stephen King is the world's best-selling horror writer. His work is ubiquitous on bookstore, supermarket, and personal library shelves and has been faithfully adapted into some of the most iconic horror films of the twentieth century. This study explores his writing through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through analyses of some of his best-known work, including "Carrie" and "Misery," the authors argue that King offers ways of encountering and understanding some of our deepest fears about life and death, the past and the future, technological change, other people, monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.This is the first extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and will be of interest to students, academics, and fans of horror fiction.