Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks – The Writing Secrets of Stephen King
4 days ago
- #Stephen King
- #Literary Analysis
- #Archives
- Caroline Bicks, a Shakespeare specialist, became the Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine and later connected with Stephen King, finding him surprisingly nice despite her teenage fears from his novels.
- King allowed Bicks to spend a year in his archive, studying drafts of novels like Pet Sematary and Carrie to analyze his 'bibliomagic'—how his word choices create physical effects on readers, such as increased heart rates.
- The archive, housed in Bangor, Maine, contains typewritten drafts with handwritten edits and copy-editor exchanges, offering rich material for literary analysis, like King's defense of words like 'clitter' and 'rattly' for their eerie connotations.
- Bicks interweaves textual analysis with biographical insights, revealing King's frugal habits from his early broke days, such as using narrow margins to save paper, which persisted even after success.
- Her analysis of Carrie focuses on changes between drafts, from a monster-like physical transformation to a psychological 'centre of gravity,' linking to her academic work on adolescent brain development in Shakespeare.