Retracing Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales in Stephen King’s Short Fiction

Abstract

Abstract In his study “Stephen King’s Fiction and the Heritage of Poe,” Burton R. Pollin argues that, despite the fact that the American best-selling writer Stephen King has often acknowledged the important influence that Edgar Allan Poe has exerted on his fiction, the analysis of King’s use of Poe’s writings in his own work has often been overlooked by Poe scholars. King’s references to Poe are so pervasive, especially in interviews, critical essays, and even books on creative writing, that Pollin claims, in his study, that no writer “enters into the substratum of a whole long work” as Poe does in King’s writings. Drawing on Pollin’s statement about the need to approach King’s fiction with respect to Poe’s tales, this article aims to analyze some of King’s stories included in his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes in order to attest Poe’s legacy through displays of Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality. The imagery, motifs, characters, and plots of some of King’s stories in this collection, particularly those of narratives like “It Grows on You,” “Chattery Teeth,” “Dedication,” and “You Know They Got a Hell of Band,” will be analyzed through a comparative approach with regard to some of Poe’s texts, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” with the aim to identify King’s contribution to transforming and updating different features in Poe’s classic tales.