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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > What is the Scariest Book You Have Ever Read?
 
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DirtyRobot
Dec 15, 2003

it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty
Often in Stephen King the horror/terror/fear isn't even very "symbolic." That is, the supernatural element is not the thing you fear, so much as it is a plot device because he's Stephen King and those elements just find their way into his stories. You're not afraid of, like, resurrected zombie cats; you're afraid of your kid being plowed over by a transport truck, and the terror horrible, horrible sense of dread comes from realizing that you cannot absolutely, 100% protect your child. Sometimes bad things happen. You could be watching it happen in slow motion and be impotent to stop it. That's not symbolism, as such. It's not that the zombie cat "symbolizes" the terror of losing a child, whether metaphorically or metonymically or whatever; it's just a plot device to dangle a bit of extra hope for a parent who's lost his child before yanking it away again, so as to emphasise, No, really, sometimes there's nothing you can do, and you can go through that yourself.

Contrast that to, for example, a haunted house, where the supernatural element is itself the thing that symbolizes the thing you fear: the loss of safety even at the one place you call "home" or whatever. In that case, you're still not literally afraid that your house will eat you, but you are in a general away afraid of there being bad places in the world where bad things happen, and it's hosed up if you live in one of those places. It's a different use of the supernatural element.

DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 31, 2016

* # ¿ Jul 31, 2016 16:29
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > What is the Scariest Book You Have Ever Read?