The (un)death of the author: Authorship as horror trope in Stephen King’s fiction

Abstract

Both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, Stephen King has reflected in more depth on authorship than most of his peers. Critically negotiating Roland Barthes’s declaration of the death of the Author (1967), King ‘resurrects’ the author persona in his fiction and turns it into an ‘undead’ horror trope. This article explores how this narrative mechanism operates in four King novels: Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story. King’s development of authorship into a fictional horror trope, the analysis demonstrates, metaphorically negotiates King’s anxiety regarding his own authorship and its literary status.