King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King

Magistrale and Blouin, English professors at the University of Vermont and Milligan University, respectively, follow up 2020’s Stephen King and American History with an insightful elucidation of noir’s influence on the horror writer. Contending that many of King’s protagonists are, like noir detectives, honorable people in a dishonorable society driven to seek the truth, the authors note how in The Shining, Wendy Torrance resists the Overlook Hotel’s corrupting influence while investigating the supernatural phenomena there. King’s detectives closely resemble those of Edgar Allan Poe in their reliance on intuition over deduction, Magistrale and Blouin argue, discussing how The Dead Zone protagonist Johnny Smith solves crime with clairvoyance. Elsewhere, the authors examine how King upends genre expectations, positing that his 2014 detective novel Mr. Mercedes rejects noir’s typical cynicism, and that his historical thriller 11/22/63 resists the uncertainty and ambiguity characteristic of Raymond Chandler. Detours into the theoretical writings of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson will be tough going for lay readers, but a brief introductory note from King about crime fiction’s influence on his work will be of particular interest (he recounts learning from Patricia Highsmith to “let the reader know everything, but let the characters always be a few steps behind”). This sheds new light on an underexplored facet of King’s oeuvre. (Apr.)