Genealogies of Fear and Magic: Inheritance, Lineage and the Transmission of Terror in Stephen King’s Fiction

Genealogy is about the things that are transmitted from one generation to the next: blood, name, property but also grief, guilt, belief and dread. A genealogical reading of Stephen King’s fiction suggests that this is the last category of inheritance that preoccupies the writer’s imagination and that the entire oeuvre is more concerned with the transmission of fear and supernatural power through kinship, community and place than with the terror of the haunted subject alone. In King’s fiction, fear is inherited rather than merely experienced, supernatural power is transmitted rather than acquired and horror is reproduced through families, communities and social institutions. This study, which uses King’s novels as evidence rather than as objects of close reading and draws on genealogy studies, cultural and collective memory theory, trauma studies and family-systems thinking, traces four recurrent genealogical structures: the family lineage of fear; the inheritance of supernatural capacity as a form of cultural transmission; the ancestral burden carried by communities and reproduced through their memory; and the consolidation of these into durable genealogies of identity, power and trauma. King’s fiction thus provides an underutilized archive for genealogy studies: a popular genre in which cultural fears of lineage, descent and social reproduction are performed at the interface of the affective and the supernatural. In all these novels, the struggle to break free from what one has inherited is hard and it is this struggle that the present study examines.

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