Offering an insightful examination of Stephen King’s fiction, this book utilises a psychoanalytical approach drawing on Freud’s theory of the uncanny. It demonstrates how entrenched King’s work is in a literary tradition influenced by psychoanalytic theory, as well as the ways that King evades and amends Freud. Such an approach positions King’s texts not simply as objects of interpretation that might yield latent meaning, but as producers of meaning. King can certainly be read through the lens of the uncanny, but this book also aims to consider the uncanny through the lens of King. Organised around specific elements of the uncanny that can be found in King’s fiction, this book explores the themes of death and the return of the dead, monstrosity, telepathy, inanimate objects becoming menacingly animate, and spooky children. Popular texts are considered, such as IT, The Shining, and Pet Sematary, as well as less discussed work, including The Institute, The Regulators and Desperation. The book’s central argument is that King’s uncanny motifs offer insightful commentary on what is repressed in contemporary culture and insist on the failure of scientific rationalism to explain the world. King’s uncanny imaginary rejects dualistic notions of an experiencing self in an inert physical world and insists that psychic experience is bound up with the environmental. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary and popular literature, gothic and horror studies, and cultural studies.

Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature interrogates the relationships between genre and New Zealand literature. What modes of writing have been deemed more appropriate than others at particular times, and why? Why have some narratives been interpreted as realist when there are significant aspects of them that relate to other genres, such as romance, science fiction and Gothic? What meanings are generated by the meeting points in a text, where one mode meets another? What is at stake in writing, for example, a New Zealand vampire novel or an art world thriller? By rereading canonical texts and exploring writers who have been sidelined because of their use of non-realist genre elements, Telling the Real Story exposes the interplay of realism, Gothic, fantasy, romance and melodrama within New Zealand narratives and demonstrates that the apparently realist monolith of the national literature is infinitely more diverse and exciting than it may seem. Frank Sargeson, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Keri Hulme, Elizabeth Knox and Eleanor Catton are among the major New Zealand writers whose work is seen in fresh and exciting ways.