The King of Eldritch Horrors

Staying up late, though not troubled with an academic-induced affliction of insomnia, but rather nowadays with my own private, self-driven wont for solitary escape and musing (a nice, convoluted way of saying when the mortal coils of everyday worries are unclasped from my brain for a few hours), I considered writing some brief notable reflections about King's storytelling based on Cujo.

The appealing thing about Stephen King, like Ramsey Campbell, so far compared with the cultic high-brow, literary efforts of a predecessor like Lovecraft, is how much more palpable and terrifying the horrors he evokes feel in his writing. His fear is something grounded in real life, psychologically tangible and fearfully possible, like murder and child abuse, if that makes sense, and not hinged on some awry escapist fantasy or spectacle. Mr. King seems to have no need to imagine or search for twisted, unimaginable horrors outside of the human race, let alone the Earth, but rather enjoyably turns Lovecraft on his head. First, he simply looks carefully at our present, real existence and picks carefully objects or crimes of everyday existence. Second, he introduces these many elements in his imagination to that paranoid vision or formula used so aptly by horror-writers that I still struggle (using Frye) to describe. And finally, third, he weaves into a basic plot every deep, unimagined psychological horror, fear and other repressed emotion that erupts from time to time so easily and tangibly from within when something goes awry, leading to worse and more eldritch horrors.

As usual I've managed to say so little with far too many words.