Stephen King's Bookish Boys: (Re)Imagining the Masculine

In his meditation on horror fiction and film, Danse Macabre, Stephen King indicates that his interest in horror was indirectly a gift from his father. One day when Stephen was two, his father, Donald King, went out for cigarettes and never returned. King left his wife, Nellie, and two sons, one biological, Stephen, and one adopted, David, behind to fend for themselves. Nellie King subsequently held a number of service jobs, "scrambling" to provide for her sons in small towns around New England. Eventually she moved her family to Durham, Maine, in order to care for Stephen's grandparents and receive family assistance raising her children.

After the family returned to Durham, Stephen and his brother often passed time in his aunt and uncle's attic. While playing, David discovered a home movie featuring his father; the two boys repeatedly and ritualistically viewed this film clip, looking for clues about the missing man. Stephen also discovered a box containing both rejection slips for his father's weird stories and works by H.P. Lovecraft. King indicates that Lovecraft, "courtesy of [his] father—opened the way," and led to his reading other horror authors: Ray Bradbury, Frank Belknap, Robert Bloch, etc. (Danse Macabre 102). Shortly after King found the box of books and stories in his aunt's attic, they disappeared. King suspected the books were removed by the same aunt, who disapproved of either his father, weird fiction, or both. In an interview with Mel Allen in Yankee magazine King reiterates the link between father-absence and horror, revealing that the former resulted in a lack of masculine power, a lack which he remedied through writing horror fiction. King says:

King critic Joseph Reino suggests that these biographical sketches are significant because these life events will contribute details to King's fiction. [1] Reino argues that most critics fail to explore the "psychological dimension" and "depth of feelings about father-son relationships that are central [to King's fiction]." Critics concentrate instead on "elements of terror, horror and the supernatural" (120). While I agree with Reino that King's representation of father-son relationships merits scrutiny, I am also interested in the ways his personal experiences resonate with larger cultural anxieties about proper masculinity, the lack of male-male intimacy and of good male role models. This personal anecdote, then, functions as a symptom of a larger social "problem." King's works further suggest that the solution to this problem—male alienation and suffering—is two-fold. The solution lies in the establishment of male-male intimacy, ideally in the form of all-male communities, and in a broadening of the definition of acceptable masculinity. I offer this conclusion through a reading of "The Body: Fall from Innocence," a novella published in Different Seasons.

In "The Body," King presents the reader with a boy hero who possesses many of the qualities and behaviors typically used to designate actual women or femininity. As such, the novella marks a shift in the category of acceptable male heroism/subjectivity. This shift in normative male subjectivity to include feminine characteristics does not, however, deconstruct the gender binary, although it articulates a veiled protest against definitions of masculinity that preclude emotion and meaningful relationships with other men. King's version of heroism necessarily departs from traditional definitions of masculinity to embrace stereotypic feminine qualities but not to such a degree as to construct the hero as homosexual or monstrous: King's boy heroes give voice to fairly explicit homophobic panic. Nonetheless, "The Body" critiques traditional masculinist and patriarchal values and offers a new, feminized version of masculinity. In short, the novella valorizes loving, nurturing relationships between men.

Father Absence and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement

King's childhood preoccupation with his missing father resonates with larger cultural concerns of the last twenty-five years. Indeed, a number of religious, spiritual and political movements have bemoaned the lack of fathering on the national landscape. For instance, in a 1995 speech at the University of Texas, President Clinton asserted that "The single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children's homes . . ." (Qtd. in Glassner 96). Similar arguments are made by Frank Ancona in Father Absence: Crisis in America, who blames the lack of fathers for the AIDS epidemic, illiteracy, the increase in societal violence, child abuse, the welfare state, and the emasculation of America. David Popenoe takes a more moderate position in Life Without Father, but nonetheless asserts that boys need father (146). This missing "paternal function," in Ancona's words, is necessary to provide the country with law, order and discipline; without it, the country is lost (xvi).

In a related vein, members of the mythopoetic men's movement bemoan the effects of father-absence on boys and the lack of positive male role models for male-male intimacy. In Iron John, Robert Bly refers to this longing as "hunger" for a father (92). In a similar vein, the authors of King, Magician, Warrior, Lover, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, argue that men need role models of the "mature masculine," a version of a maternal man who is nurturing and supportive rather than destructive and "immature" (145-46). Father-absence and more broadly, father-neglect, it would seem, has left men, and by extension the country, in a state of psychological and political despair.

King's fiction and the various factions of the men's movement are, in fact, the unintended consequences of 1970s feminism. For all of these individuals and their affiliated groups, feminism and shifting gender roles are the root of the problem. For instance, Ancona argues that feminism has crushed patriarchy and become "oppressive and destructive" to men and that the country should return to strict patriarchal values (83). For Popenoe, feminism has meant that women have too much control over parenting boys, and we should return to gender-differentiated parenting. Similarly, mythopoet Robert Bly asserts that contemporary men are overwhelmed by feminists who attack them, and that men today need "a sword to cut . . . [themselves] away from the mother-bound soul" (165).

According to sociologists Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman, the mythopoetic men's movement is "the cry of anguish of privileged men . . . in a society where both men's power and rigid gender definitions are being challenged by feminism" (263). This movement, "augurs a social return to turn-of-the-century masculinist efforts to retrieve manhood and a personal effort to recreate a mythic boyhood" (277). Kimmel and Kaufman further argue that mythopoetic mythology is characterized by the following themes: an idealization of childhood and lost boyhood; a veiled critique of patriarchal ideals for masculinity that exclude emotion and meaningful bonds with other males; and a search for lost fathers and/or an exposure to bad or absent fathers. I would add to this list rampant fears of homosexuality (along with explicit critiques of homophobic behavior). [2]

King, too, indicates that feminism has given him pause and says: "I was fully aware of what women's liberation implied for me and others of my sex . . . the book [Carrie] is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from the future of female equality"(Danse Macabre 170). In a quite explicit manner, the threat of feminism invokes female monstrosity for King. Faced with the possibility of female equality and the subsequent threat to the penis=power equation, King constructs a telekinetic, menstruating monster who literally burns down the house and everyone in it. Carrie can, for example, be read at the level of the narrative as a protest against feminism and, perhaps, at the level of the genre, against father-absence. [3]

King, however, is not just dismayed by 1970s feminism, but also by flawed patriarchal figures and institutions. For instance, King's fiction abounds with adolescents whose biological fathers fail them; thus, they search for new loving mentors. This narrative trope is explored in "The Body," The Shining [4] 'Salem's Lot, [5] It, [6] The Talisman, [7] and Hearts in Atlantis. [8]

The cure for this cultural malaise differs for various authors and groups. For instance, Popenoe calls for gender-differentiated parenting and Ancona for the return to strict patriarchal values. Robert Bly and other mythopoets, however, see things slightly differently. They contend that a complementary problem is the bad father. It is not only that men are not powerful or that the patriarch is absent but also that the patriarch is neglectful, corrupt or unloving. [9] The desire is not so much for resurrection of the patriarch as for reconfiguration of the masculine, not for an identification with the authoritarian father, but identification with and love from a loving father.

The father-fantasy of the popular media is reconfigured in King and men's movement literature as a search for nurturing father figures or male role models. Rather than yearning for the punitive patriarch who re-establishes law and order, King and men's movement proponents desire a loving father. Writing the ideal male role model functions as both a protest against his absence (or the badness of other patriarchs) and a form of wish fulfillment about his return. In this manner, both literatures offer a critique of hegemonic masculine ideals and a construction of new feminized models of male subjectivity as the ideal. [10]

In addition, the overtly masculine is also unavailable to King's protagonists, either because the characters fail to measure up to masculinity, or because such masculinity is characterized as undesirable. Stereotypically patriarchal figures—male policemen, army officers, teachers, doctors and biological fathers—are revealed to be threatening (although not horrible/abject) in their cruel and callous disregard for emotion and human connections. They are frequently violent (although not supernatural or monstrous) and abusive, beating or sexually abusing children.

In Tales of Love Julia Kristeva points out that longing for an "Imaginary Father" "who loves us, not the one who judges us," is not necessarily a return to the authoritarian Father or to the Symbolic (313). Instead, this longing is for an Imaginary Father who exists before the advent of the Symbolic. Working from Freud's theory of the Father in Individual Prehistory, Kristeva argues that the "Imaginary Father" is an agent who allows the child to negotiate abjection and the Symbolic in the service of his/her own subject-formation. This father is "intrasymbolic" rather than fully Symbolic, pre-Oedipal instead of Phallic (125). This father figure differs from the stern Father of the Law in that he is both masculine and feminine, a "father-mother conglomerate" who has no sexual difference. Kristeva suggests that he is, in a fashion, a stand in for the mother(40 and 26). The "Imaginary Father" allows for a primary identification that mediates the trauma of splitting from the mother (an undifferentiated/abject state) but is an identification informed by love as well as lack (155-156). Thus the subject can identify with a loving father figure instead of the distant and authoritarian father of the Symbolic.

Although Kristeva is speaking about psycholinguistic structures and subject-formation in general, her discussion of an "Imaginary Father" who serves as a third term between the child's relationship with the mother's body and his/her own subjectivity (between abjection/undifferentiated drives and symbolization) is historically specific, and in many ways anticipates the concerns of Bly, Keen, Moore and Gillette in the early 1990s. [11] According to Kristeva, the loss of faith in a Christian God in the West, the increasingly mass-media saturated society, and the absence of a secular version of the loving father, all contribute to an increase in pathological narcissism and a "crisis of love" (7). Kristeva posits that the "cure" for this situation lies in the analyst's assumption of the position of the third term; in place of a loving father, the analysand will have the loving analyst. Kristeva asserts:

The above passage, although quite different in the language it uses to articulate male suffering, does not differ radically from Moore and Gillette's observation that many men long "to love and be loved by the mature masculine," by a gentle and affirming father figure who is "nurturing and generative, not wounding and destructive" (xix and 6). Similarly, Sam Keen, author of my opening epigraph, indicates that an ideal man needs to reject the destructive warrior myth of his father and learn to value intimacy (263). Further, Narcissi's crisis, their desire to be other/women is echoed in Bly's statement that men, like women, suffer. The desire to be the other is also an attempt to appropriate the place of suffering in the public imagination (which according to popular logic, has been usurped by women and feminism) and therefore, warrant attention.

Different Seasons

The novella, "The Body," features a first-person narrator who tells about his alienation and suffering in the face of an indifferent, hostile or terrible world. This world, of course, is our contemporary culture, which is organized around destructive patriarchal values. Feminist author John Stoltenberg describes it thus: "The world of other men can be, we know, a scary and dangerous place [for men]" (187). King's text engages with the scariness of patriarchy and offers a critique of bad patriarchs (or patriarchal structures). The novella also features atypical (feminized) male heroes and male-male intimacy as a community ideal and depicts the abject body—a corpse—as the locus of horror. At the level of the narrative, "Body" demonstrates that storytelling or reading literature functions as one means to realize/support male intimacy or community. Such intimacy, however, is difficult to sustain, and the novella posits that male love, although desirable, is also unstable and even untenable.

"Body's" narrator, the adult Gordon Lachance, describes the summer of 1960 when he and three twelve-year old friends—Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio and Teddy Duchamp—journeyed to look at the dead body of a boy their age, Ray Brower. Along the way, Gordon and his friends encounter a series of obstacles: an angry dump worker who does not want them to use his water pump, a corrupt store owner who tries to overcharge the boys for their purchases, a disgusting leech-filled pond they must traverse, a narrow train trestle spanning a bridge they must cross, a frightening night in the woods, older boys who threaten to beat them and take credit for the discovery of the dead boy's body, and finally, the horrific and unsettling encounter with the body itself. As Gordie tells about this childhood experience, the adult narrator indicates his dissatisfaction with both his vocation as a writer (he wonders "if there is really a point" to what he is doing) and his life in general (432). He announces his loneliness by plaintively stating, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?" (337). The adult Gordon further relates that his three childhood friends are now dead, and although he is married and financially successful as a popular writer, he is lonely and alienated, longing for connection with other males.

"The Body" does not foreground a heterosexual romantic subplot [12] (although the protagonists are nominally heterosexual) but rather one of homosocial intimacy. This homosocial intimacy is potentially problematic situation given the larger society's homophobia. If the means to contain the queer threat invoked by male bonding is typically a heterosexual subplot, horror fiction which lacks such a subplot will necessarily have to supply another mechanism. [13] In the case of "The Body," the means to contain the threat of homosexuality resides in the deferral of male intimacy.

Several critics have noted that King is overly concerned with proper forms of masculinity. His heroes frequently find their masculinity the focus of other characters within their respective narratives (and by extension, of the texts' readers). For instance, in 'Salem's Lot, Ben Mears' status as a writer casts his heterosexuality as questionable. In It, the protagonists, a group of self-proclaimed (unathletic) "losers," are repeatedly mocked for being "pussies" or "faggots." Indeed, King's fiction reflects a preoccupation with societal responses to smart, sensitive or bookish boys. Douglas Keesey argues that King's "fictions address the problem of how one can be something other than a football player—say a writer—and still retain respect for oneself as a man" (195). Keesey's observation that anything short of rugged masculinity may be problematic for King, reflects our larger cultural ideals of masculinity, what Marc Fasteau refers to as the "male machine." [14] King's response to this ideal is to people his novels with male figures who are emphatically not football players or any other version of empowered masculinity such as construction workers, Don Juans, captains of industry, etc. Instead, he offers his readers men and boys who possess many feminine characteristics, who are frequently social misfits and suffer as a result of their nature and/or social circumstances. Initially, King invokes this new masculine ideal through his critique of corrupt patriarchal institutions.

The Bad Father

The critique of bad patriarchs functions as a point of comparison between the protagonist and his male role model's good behavior. The bad patriarch and his respective affiliates are invested in establishing dominance and lacking in compassion (they are overtly cruel or simply indifferent). The heroes, on the other hand, are generous, loving and egalitarian. King's protagonists are atypically masculine in their social position, emotional or hysterical behavior, aesthetic inclinations, and ability to recognize the value of emotional connections with other men. In addition, their lack of connection with other males is the source of their alienation and suffering, a situation which is articulated a number of times.

In "The Body," Gordie wants love from a father who is distant and uncaring. Gordie feels that his father is so enamored with his dead son Dennis—a former football star and war hero—that he cannot see his younger son's pain and isolation, a younger son who is bookish and not athletic. Gordie feels like the "invisible man" described in Ralph Ellison's novel, a boy whose pain and suffering does not register with his parents (306).

Other adult male figures are equally callous. Chris Chambers' father is a drunk with a "mean streak" who regularly beats him severely enough to necessitate repeated trips to the emergency room. Another of Gordie's friends, Teddy Duchamp, is mutilated by his father, an unstable veteran of WWII. Teddy's father suffers a breakdown and alternately holds both of Teddy's ears to the stove, permanently scarring him. Despite Mr. Duchamp's brutality, Teddy still loves him, a situation Gordie finds perplexing, given his feelings of indifference toward his own father, who although extremely neglectful, has "never laid a hand on him" (349). Other corrupt adult males include a store owner, Mr. Dusset, who tries to cheat Gordie by overcharging him for food; a truancy officer, Mr. Halburton, who ignores the fact that Mr. Chambers beats Chris regularly; a sadistic dump worker, Milo Pressman, who takes pleasure in "siccing" his dog on the boys; and finally, a group of older boys—Ace Merrill, Eyeball Chambers (Chris' brother), Billy Tessio (Vern's Brother), Charlie Hogan and Fuzzy Bracowicz—who harass, threaten and finally beat all four boys, sending Chris and Gordie to the hospital. Rather than having an ideal patriarch to identify with and emulate, Gordie and Chris must look to each other for support.

Bookish Boys

"The Body" tells of a boy who is misunderstood by the larger society and is consequently isolated and alienated. Indeed, King's corrupt patriarchs (Moore and Gillette's immature masculine), cannot recognize the value of atypical forms of manhood; hence, they are cruel or indifferent to the bookish heroes of King's narratives. The male protagonists are not exactly the epitome of machismo. For instance, Gordie and his friends are social outcasts, adolescent boys from the wrong side of the tracks who lack many future prospects. [15] King describes two of the boys in this fashion: "Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern Tessio would never be spending any of his spare time on "College Bowl" either" (296). Gordie's father refers to his son's friends as "a thief and two feebs," a description which aligns the reader's sympathies with the group of boys and underscores their status as "losers" (305). This description also emphasizes the older Lachance's callousness towards his younger son and their lack of intimacy.

In part, the four boys in "Body" are less than stereotypically masculine in that much of the narrative revolves around their fear. Gordie expresses fear after his confrontation with Chopper, the guard dog at the local dump. Vern admits that he is afraid of the dark. Gordie and Vern express their terror when they are nearly hit crossing a train trestle—Gordie in fact, is so scared that "a thin stream of urine" runs down his thigh (355). All four boys are unable to sleep because of their fears of wild animals. All four boys express fear and disgust over their encounter with leeches in a pond (Vern and Teddy, in fact, become hysterical, and Gordie faints). Vern and Teddy turn tail and run during a confrontation with a gang of older boys, while Gordie and Chris stand their ground, holding off the older boys with Chris' father's gun, after which Chris falls on the ground crying hysterically. Rather than a story of brave, empowered men, much of the narrative revolves around the boys' inability to behave bravely at all.

Gordie especially is aware of the fact that he does not necessarily measure up to standard definitions of masculinity. One of his responses is to write a story, "Stud City," about a hyper-masculine alter ego named Chico. Chico also has a dead brother and lacks a meaningful relationship with his father. However, Chico, unlike Gordie, is successful with women and emotionally self-contained. The adult Gordie looking back on this story acknowledges its "melodramatic" tone, Chico's "psuedo-toughness," and how derivative it is. [16] The adult narrator is quite explicit that he was and is not the hyper-masculine male described in "Stud City."

Despite Gordie's lack of proper masculinity, one popular reading of "Body" is that it is a coming-of age story in which the hero is able to overcome his fear and move into adulthood. [17] Specifically, Arthur Biddle reads the confrontation with Ace's gang as Gordie's passage into manhood, as an act of "masculine dominance" which de facto transforms Gordie into a man and helps to redeem his society (94-95). Such a reading glosses over Gordie's discussion of the value of male emotion and the difficulty in expressing it as well as the conclusion to his nostalgic recounting of the summer of 1960. Gordie indicates that he and his three friends are beaten by Ace's gang, and by the end of "Body" all three are dead while Ace Merrill lives. Gordie, although married with children, still lacks a rewarding relationship with another man, a fact underscored by his plaintive statement that he never had any friends like the ones he did when he was twelve.

Gordie is quite clear about what he is missing in his life. The opening paragraph of "The Body" begins with these words:

Gordie repeats the phrase "the most important things are the hardest to say," word-for-word two more times before he completes his tale (390 and 395), emphasizing the difficulty in expressing male love/desire (perhaps due to the cultural prohibitions on explicit expressions of male affection [18]) and his need for male love (the understanding ear he lacks). Such a statement reveals that what is at stake (and ultimately lost) for Gordie is intimacy with other males, not the discovery of the dead boy's body or Gordie's passage into manhood. He does not feel empowered or powerful. Although he acknowledges his economic success—he says he has gotten rich playing "let's pretend" (432). Instead, he laments the loss of his childhood friends and the lack of male friendship as an adult.

Understanding Ears and Good Male Role Models

According to proponents of the men's movement, the lack of good male role models or male affection in any given man's life can be countered through myth or literature. For instance, Robert Bly's philosopical musings on gender and society are interwoven with the folk tale of Iron John, a male role model who is in touch with his warrior side yet still loving and empathetic with other men. Bly intends this story to serve as a recounting of an initiation into male society. Boys, Bly insists, need such initiation stories from men in order to become adults; girls don't (87). He concludes by indicating that men need more such initiation stories and male mentors—relationships with women are insufficient. Similarly, Moore and Gillette argue that men need better role models. According to them, an admiration for the "mature masculine man" or generative father can be accomplished either through interpersonal relationships or literature/biography (145-150). Sam Keen indicates that stories focusing on male love and admiration help men form more loving bonds with each other, as they are able to model their own behavior on that found within the myth or story (153). According to this logic, one of the problems in contemporary society resides in the inadequacies of our collective myth-making and storytelling. If we can just start telling the right stories, men's behaviors will improve and male suffering/alienation will be alleviated. Storytelling will be the means to reflect, construct and maintain a new sensitive male subjectivity and enact intimacy with other men.

In "The Body," King presents his readers with the figure of Chris Chambers as an alternate version of masculinity to the versions portrayed by the various father figures, merchants and older men in the novella. First and foremost, Chris is characterized as the individual who makes the "best peace" and is able to get the other boys to compromise and apologize to each other (347). Gordie says, "Chris was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it" (348). Chris' ability simultaneously to be tough and tender makes him the ideal source of comfort for the other boys in the story. In fact, his toughness seems to be a precondition for his ability to be kind. [19] However, this toughness is configured primarily as silent and stoic suffering under physical abuse [20] rather than bravery or the performance of heroic exploits. Specifically, Gordie recognizes that Chris' life is perhaps the most miserable of all the boys. Regularly beaten by his father, lacking money or social status, Chris refuses to be hardened or become a criminal like his older brother, Eyeball Chambers, who terrorizes the younger boys. Instead, Chris' suffering makes him more, not less, sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of the other boys.

In the absence of acceptable adult male role models, Chris becomes a father-figure to the other boys, especially to Gordie. Chris makes an explicit critique of bad patriarchs, noting the elder Lachance's neglect of his son. Chris says, "I wish to fuck I was your father . . . kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them . . ." (377). Chris' outburst calls attention to the inadequacies of Mr. Lachance as a father and the need for proper fathering. It also serves to associate his nurturing actions towards the other boys with fathering.

The first time Chris gives solace to one of the other boys occurs after the dump worker, Milo Pressman, insults Teddy's father, calling him crazy. Teddy's initial response to Milo's taunts is anger, which is followed by hysterical weeping, crying that renders Vern and Gordie nervous and unable to comfort Teddy. Chris is able to calm Teddy down and eventually sits and rocks him, talking in "soothing cadences that were almost a lullaby" (349). Chris is, in a sense, mothering Teddy. When Vern and Gordie have a close-call on the train trestle, Chris comforts both of them, sitting with one hand on the back of Gordie's neck and the other on Teddy's. [21] Like Kristeva's "Imaginary Father," Chris is both maternal (empathetic and loving) and paternal.

According to Robert Bly, men must develop empathy for other men; he calls this process "learning to shudder" (84). Attuned to the cultural association of empathy with femininity, Bly says: "When a man posseses empathy, it does not mean that he has developed the feminine feelings only . . . he is developing a part of the masculine emotional body as well"(85). For men's movement advocates, the taking on of feminine qualities is, as evidenced by Bly's earlier statement, a potentially unsettling situation. Thus, the literature insists on the maintenance of the gender hierarchy and absolute sexual difference. In part, this insistence is the result of the perception that women have too much control over men's lives in the first place. While the absence of good male role models causes a serious void in men's lives, [22] the presence of an emasculating, overwhelming mother figure who will not allow her sons to mature is a second threat. This weakness is due, in part, to the failure of older men to mentor younger men, in part to the female tendency to engulf and control, and in part, to young men's "lack of boundaries" with women (Moore and Gillette 146). Too much femininity marks the man as too mother-bound or as potentially queer.

Engulfing Mothers and Interfering Women

At this point I would like to return to Gordie's assessment that "the most important things are the hardest things to say," and that it is not for want of telling that secrets stay locked inside but for "want of an understanding ear." Gordie points out that intimacy between men is difficult, and that "the most important things [that] lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, [are] like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away" (289). Gordie's statement illustrates the cultural prohibition on male emotion—he says that making revelations can cost a man "dearly," that people will look at him in a "funny way." Male emotion also is depicted as something that is valuable—similar to buried treasure—something that must be guarded against theft.

In an anecdote about his friend Vern, Gordie underscores this point. One of Vern's favorite pasttimes is digging for a jar of pennies that he buried under the porch of his house four years earlier. Gordie explains that Vern "was playing a pirate game of a sort, and the pennies were buried treasure," and that Vern's mother burned his treasure map along with old homework papers and candy wrappers (296-297). This story is instructive for two reasons. First, the phrasing echoes Gordie's earlier description of male emotion as buried treasure, indicating, I think, both the valuable nature of the "treasure" and the difficulty in finding and uncovering such riches. Second, the story suggests that women are, perhaps, unable to discern the difference between treasure/emotion and garbage/candy wrappers. This association of male emotion with treasure that must be located, excavated and guarded against theft, partially explains Gordie's later hesitation to cry in front of his wife. His treasure of buried emotion cannot be shared with women, who at best cannot recognize its worth and who at worst, like King's Aunt, might intentionally destroy important male correspondences and sever the literary and emotional ties between men.

Indeed, the adult Gordie does not dedicate a great deal of time to discussing his wife or children. They are not central to his concerns about masculine intimacies. Of the few references to his nameless wife, two involve recounting lies he has told her while another emphasizes how she does not understand him. Recalling an incident when his wife asked about a scar on his scrotum (acquired during his adolescent encounter with leeches), Gordie says, "I told her a lie before I was even aware I meant to do so" (423). In a similar manner, when the adult Gordie reads of his friend Chris' death at twenty-four, he cannot share his grief with his wife and lies to her in order to escape the house. The best, most important kinds of intimacies, as Bly tells us, must be shared only among other men, but such a sharing is difficult if not impossible to sustain. Gordie remarks:

Part of the difficulty in sustaining male intimacy, according to men's movement theorists, is the lack of safe spaces to express such emotion. In "Mythopoetic Men's Work as a Search for Communitas," Michael Schwalbe indicates that many men who are interested in establishing intimate bonds with other men feel "isolated, cut off from other men" and wish for supportive, non-competitive male bonds (567). Schwalbe interprets this longing as a desire for communitas, which he describes as "a shared feeling-state and a way of interacting" that entails relating to each other outside the constraints of "formally defined roles and statuses" (567). Schwalbe turns to the work of Victor Turner, an anthropologist who describes the communitas of the men's movement as "richly charged with affects" and having "something 'magical' about it" (567).

Schwalbe outlines the typical encounter in a men's movement gathering, noting that the men participating often reveal "something shameful, tragic, or emotionally disturbing about their lives." He contends that these men tell their "belly truths" in the course of their emoting (569). This assertion corresponds with Gordie's statement that personal revelations garner "funny" looks. Schwalbe indicates that in his participant observer study such personal stories evoked a great deal of anxiety in the men sharing them, anxiety which he attributes to the risk associated with male demonstrations of emotion and disclosure of personal truths. Schwalbe sees such danger as a necessary ingredient for the establishment of the all-male communitas, in separation from one's ordinary reality. [23] In addition, an all-male ritual space, ritualized story-telling and an insistence on the difference between men and women are also deemed essential. Schwalbe states: "Mythopoetic men's work may . . . help them make connections with each other, [it also] reaffirms the lesser value of women, whether this is intended or not" (576).

Schwalbe's observation that intimacy in the men's movement demands sexual difference and a gender hierarchy corresponds to Kristeva's theory, in which the temporary antidote for abjection is the invocation of Paternal law and the construction of the female (maternal) body (in the case of horror fiction, improper femininity is also abject) as the locus of the impure/unclean. These sentiments are also reflected in Bly's assertion that men need male community, not socialization by and among women. Moore and Gillette make a similar claim, arguing that sacred male space,"especially in the case of boys," must be removed from the "influence of women" (7).

In "Body," Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern's communitas takes the form of a journey into the woods, down what King call "the magic corridor" of the train trestle (399). Biddle views this passageway as important because it symbolizes the boy's separation from ordinary society and everyday life (89). Such a separation corresponds to Schwalbe's assertion that the male bonding necessary for communitas can only happen outside the constraints of society and the presence of women. In other words, painful truths are for men's ears only. Schwalbe's observations about the men's movement also explain why Gordie's relationship with his wife is so peripheral—women have "a lesser value" and cannot understand or appreciate male truths. Further, given the fact that the boys' behavior is less than masculine by traditional standards, their trip into the woods offers a space to expose their vulnerability: Gordie's sadness over his mother and father's indifference, Vern and Teddy's fear, Chris' knowledge that he is "trapped" by his social circumstances, all the boys' tears.

In response to the boys' vulnerability, Gordie uses his stories to entertain his friends and cement male bonds. On their journey to see Ray Brower's body, Gordie amuses the other three boys with a tale about another adolesecent male outcast, Lardass Hogan. Chris is the most appreciative of the three, a situation which in part explains Gordie's closer intimacy with him than with Vern and Teddy. Lardass is a social outcast, and Gordie's tale about this character emphasizes Lardass' suffering (he's always getting "beat up and ranked out") and his struggle for dignity (he enacts a bizarre form of revenge by vomiting on the people who torture him) (323). It is a tale told for the benefit of other social outcasts, although Teddy and Vern do not care for Gordie's realistic ending (Gordie suggests that Lardass continues to be harassed after his short-lived revenge. Vern and Teddy wish that Lardass had shot his father and run away to join the Texas Rangers). Chris, however, is Gordie's ideal reader/listener and appreciates the story just as it is. He says, "That's a really fine story . . . They're just a little too dumb to understand."  [24]

At the level of the narrative, "The Body" features a protagonist who is a role model for other characters. In addition, Gordie shares stories with other characters in order to establish and secure male bonds. Extra-textually, the novella also provides the reader with models for good male behavior: Chris models a version of masculinity that is at odds with the dominant culture. This masculinity is marked by empathy, generosity and literariness. Indeed, the presence of literary allusions in a number of King's works—in all four of the novellas in Different Seasons—suggests that King is not only concerned with his protagonists' literacy but also with that of the audience. [25] His ideal reader should recognize the reference to "Pope's Essay on Man" in the title of "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal"; to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale in "The Breathing Method: A Winter's Tale"; to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," and "Two Look at Two," the former in both "Shawshank" and "Body"; the latter more obliquely referenced in "Body"; and to Peter Straub's Ghost Story which is alluded to in the subject matter of "Breathing" and invoked by King's dedication of the novella to Peter and Susan Straub. [26] Given the fact that Peter Straub has called King his "ideal reader,"  [27] and King has indicated that he likes Straub's books better than "anyone else[s]," [28] at an extra-textual level, Different Seasons can be read as the uncanny stories which secure his friendship with the other writer. King and Straub's horror stories, then, contain allusions which are meaningful to the right kind of reader, a literate reader who is able to decode these references and understand how they function to cement male bonds of friendship. [29]

Gordie and Chris' relationship is characterized by a mutual telepathic understanding. While discussing a time when Chris saved Teddy from falling out of a tree, Gordie looks at Chris "and for just one moment . . . saw some of the true things that made us friends" (334). In this exchange, Gordie looks at Chris and notes his "defenseless eyes," an observation that equates emotional intimacy with vulnerability and emphasizes his empathy with the other boy. It is Chris who understands that Gordie cannot share the "gift" his brother gave him, a secret method of shuffling cards. That would be like "giving away a piece of Dennis" (302). And it is Chris who knows "just how things are" with Gordie's family, a situation that Gordie finds both exhilirating and "scary" (361). Later when the two boys attend junior high, Gordie cannot entirely explain his love for Chris or his reasons for helping the less academically prepared boy with school work. Instead Gordie focuses on his identification with Chris: "His desire . . . seemed to be my best part. . . . If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I think" (431). Indeed, Gordie helps Chris with a negotiation of language (English and writing) and a grammar handbook becomes a "queer sort of Bible" for Chris (431). Their friendship is grounded in the study of words. Nonetheless, language fails Gordie and ultimately, he and Chris drift apart, too. Gordie says:

This passage echoes Kristeva's theory of the subject in crisis, a subject who hovers between abjection (terrible affect and an undifferentiated state) and the Symbolic (language), with each term giving meaning to the other. In "Body," words cannot suture over the subject's lack and Gordie can see only wounding in love. Gordie cannot speak his love for Chris nor maintain their relationship.

The fact that Gordie and Chris' intimacy cannot be sustained is partially explained by Gordie's assessment that writing offers "control." Writing is his means to order experience and differentiate himself from the other boys. In fact, Gordie intimates that the reason he writes about the summer he was twelve is to remind himself that he is not one of the dead boys and that his decision to sever ties with Vern and Teddy was justified. In a dream, Gordie imagines Chris drowning. The two are swimming in a local lake when their teacher, Mrs. Cote, drifts by on a raft and commands Chris to recite "Mending Wall" by rote. Chris cannot remember the poem, a failure which results in his drowning. As he goes underwater, he pleads with Gordie to help him. Gordie peers at Chris through the water but opts to save himself. An older male lifeguard does not see the drowning boy. Later, reflecting on this dream and all of his friends' deaths, Gordie states: "When I think of that dream, the corpses under the water . . . it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it happens. Some people drown" (429).

Unlike Chris Chambers, who is concerned about the welfare of other men (and dies trying to "make peace" between two men who are fighting), Gordie abandons all of his friends and uses their deaths to profit through fiction. The problem of such an investment in language according to Kristeva, however, is that the Symbolic register can never fully guarantee subjectivity and psychological coherence. It is fundamentally unstable. Given this instability, subjectivity is granted meaning through the interplay of symbolization and love, not one or the other.

Kristeva tells us that loving the third term involves an introjection of that identity/image into self: the Ego Ideal becomes the Ideal Ego of the subject. Subject-formation is both identification and introjection, a situation which necessitates fluid ego boundaries. When confronted with a blurring of identity, however, Gordie is struck with terror. He feels that it is "scary" to be understood the way that Chris understands him, and he is embarrassed by a telepathic exchange of emotion across the boy's dead body. Gordie says, "We looked at each other warmly for a second, and then, maybe embarrased by what we were seeing, looked down together. A nasty thrill of fear shot through me" (413). The charged emotional exchange across the boy's body is configured in fairly sexual terms. Gordie and Chris lock eyes, are embarrassed by what they see and how they feel, and look away. Despite Gordie's longing for male love, he cannot transcend his own fear and doesn't say the things to Chris that he wants to.

The Risks of Male Love

Gordie's fear of intimacy with Chris should be read in the context of our cultural homophobia. Because King and men's movement proponents do not call only for identification with good male role models but also for intimacy/love, the situation is potentially problematic for the male subject, a phenomenon King obviously is familiar with. In the introduction to Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick indicates that the relation between desire and identification is in fact "slippery" (24). A very close identification with another male may invoke a lack of individuation and the threat of homosexuality, as does excessive homosociality which frequently is interpreted as eroticism. [30] Although the maintenance of patriarchy does not always require homophobia, contemporary Western culture does. As well, although male homosexuality has not always been associated with or denigrated for effimancy, it is in contemporary Western culture. Sedgwick indicates that only certain narrow homosocial behaviors are deemed acceptable in modern times, and "homosexual panic is . . . endemic" (201).

Sedgwick articulates two narrative strategies for containing a homosexual threat. One strategy is the subplot of heterosexual romance. "Improper" male intimacies—what Sedgwick refers to as the erotic end of the homosocial continuum—are contained through the figure of a woman and the narrative trope of heterosexual romance. A second stategy is to leave male-male eroticism unspoken. Ironically, this narrative technique also serves to render what is unspoken/unspeakable as that which is queer.

Sedgwick further argues that "heterosexual love [is] . . . chiefly a strategy of homosocial desire" (49). In other words, the relationships that matters are not those of men and women but those, as her title suggests, between men. Heterosexuality functions as a screen for homosexual desire. In King's twentieth-century Gothic, a visible heterosexual screen is missing, and the threat of homosexuality intensified. The result of this absence is two-fold. Either the homosexual threat intensifies—hence, "Body" is marked by a fairly intense disavowal of homosexual desire—or in the case of King's more overt horror, the mediation of the threat shifts to female and/or queer monstrosity. [31]

In "The Body," homosexual panic is marked by the boys' excessive concern with proper masculinity. Biddle notes this anxiety takes the form of "frequent teasing about being 'pussy' or 'queer'" (88). The various male characters insult each other with accusations that a given boy is a "cock knocker" or has "bit the bag" (a loose metaphor for performing oral sex) (407 and 291). They refer to each other as "faeries," and Teddy calls Gordie a "fuckin morphadite" (337). Such concerns, although not exclusive to the fictional characters in "Body," serve to emphasize their status as "unsubjects," as individuals who are not fully masculine who fear this lack of masculinity may associate them with homosexuality. [32] The boy's repetitive taunts to each other about effeminancy reflect a common theme in King and in the mythopoetic men's movement: the fear that male emotion or sensitivity will be construed as homosexuality. [33] Reino indicates that Gordie's "creative and sensitive nature" can easily be "cruelly misunderstood." Reino does not indicate what form this misunderstanding may take (129). For both Reino and King a cruel misunderstanding is an accusation about homosexuality.

In particular, Gordie (and by extension, King) fears that his vocation as a writer may cast him as queer. The first boy to read Gordie's writing, a kid named Richie Jenner, reassures Gordie that writing fiction is okay: "It ain't pussy. You ain't no queer. I mean, it ain't poetry" (361). Despite Richie's disclaimer, or perhaps because of it, writing (and fiction writing in particular) remains a suspect act for Gordie. Like the Romantic Poets a century and a half earlier, King feels it necessary to defend his vocation, arguing that it is a manly endeavor. [34] In this case, however, he inverts the hierarchy established by the Romantics and genders poetry feminine and prose masculine. Given the association of English Gothic literature with homosexuality, the case potentially is all the more troubling for King. [35]

Gordie's fear that writing is, perhaps, queer, follows him to adulthood. Gordie says, "Nowadays writing is my work . . . I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as hard as I can every fucking time. Doing less would, in an odd way, be like going faggot" (361). In this description Gordie reveals that in order for writing (and the writer) to be masculine, it must be "hard." Anything short of this hardness renders one a "faggot." In this way, the literate is equated with softness (effeminacy) and homosexuality. [36]

In addition, male intimacy is also a risky endeavor. Although Chris and Gordie abandon their earlier friendships with Vern and Teddy, whom Chris sees as liabilities in his quest for higher education and a way out of the town of Castle Rock, they maintain their friendship, and Gordie helps Chris stay in school and prepare for college. In place of relationships with other boys or with girls, Chris and Gordie cling to each other. Gordie indicates that both boys dated in high school, "but no girl ever came between us. Does that sound like we went faggot? . . . It was only survival" (431). Although Gordie confesses that his and Chris' friendship takes precedence over relationships with girls, he is quick to anticipate and reject any accusations of homosexuality. The softness of emotion must be countered with the hardness of writing and by a repudiation of homosexuality.

I want to end this essay by placing King within larger cultural concerns about gender and sexuality. As I indicated earlier, King and the mythopoets articulate a critique of a hegemonic masculinity that precludes meaningful male-male relationships in general and the patriarchal ideal of fatherhood specifically. They portray contemporary manhood as a crisis of subjectivity, and articulate, I would argue, a pressing cultural problem and very real emotional pain. [37] Nonetheless, King and the Mythopoets understand authentic manhood to be diametrically opposed to either female embodiment or gay male identity. Thus, what could be a progressive move—the expansion of ideal masculinity to include stereotypically feminine attributes and behaviors—is yoked to both cultural misogyny and homophobia.

Works Cited

Ancona, Frank. Father Absence: Crisis in America. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 1998.

Biddle, Arthur. "The Mythic Journey in 'The Body." Ed. Tony Magistrale. The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscape. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. 83-97.

Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book About Men. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Bruhm, Steven. "On Stephen King's Phallus; Or, The Postmodern Gothic." Narrative 4:1 (January 1996): 55-73.

Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study in Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999.

Fasteau, Marc. The Male Machine. New York: Delta Books, 1975.

Fieldler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Meridian Books, 1960.

Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More. New York: BasicBooks, 1999.

Gross, Louis. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989.

Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1991.

Keen, Sam. Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. New York: Bantam, 1991.

Keesey, Douglas. "The Face of Mr. Flip: Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King." Ed. Tony Magistrale. The Dark Descen: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscape. New York: Greenwood P, 1992. 187-201.

Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America. New York: The Free P, 1996.

Kimmel, Michael S., and Michael Kaufman. "Weekend Warriors: The New Men's Movement." Eds. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Theorizing Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. 259-288.

King, Stephen. Hearts in Atlantis. New York: Scribner, 1999.

- - - . Bag of Bones. New York: Scribner, 1998.

- - - . The Tommyknockers. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1987.

- - - . It. New York: Signet, 1986.

- - - . Interview with Stanley Wiater and Roger Anker (1984). Rpt. in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. Eds. Tim Underhill and Chuck Miller. New York: Warner Books, 1988. 161-171.

- - - . Christine. West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1983.

- - - . Pet Sematary. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983.

- - - . Playboy interview with Eric Norden (1983), Rpt. in Bare Bones. 24-56.

- - - . "The Body," "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," and "The Breathing Method," all in Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1982.

- - - . Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1981.

- - - . Cujo. New York: Viking, 1981.

- - - . Interview with Stanley Wiater and Peter Straub (1980). Rpt. in Bare Bones. 171-180.

- - - . The Dead Zone. New York: Viking, 1979.

- - - . Interview with Mel Allen. "The Man Who Writes Nightmares" (1979). Rpt. in Bare Bones. 63-68.

- - - . 'Salem's Lot. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978.

- - - . The Shining. New York: Doubleday, 1977.

- - - . Carrie. New York: Signet, 1974.

King, Stephen, and Peter Straub. The Talisman. New York: Viking, 1984.

Kintz, Linda. Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right Wing America. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

- - - . Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Magistrale, Tony, ed. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King's American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1988.

Mellor, Anne. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Moore, Robert, and Douglas Gillette. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Popenoe, David. Life Without Father. New York: The Free P, 1996.

Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Schwalbe, Michael. "Mythopoetic Men's Work as a Search for Communitas." Eds. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner. Men's Lives, 4th Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. 565-577.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New York: Meridian Books, 1990.

Straub, Peter. Mystery. New York: Signet, 1991.

- - - . Koko. New York: Signet, 1988.

- - - . Ghost Story. New York: Signet, 1979.

- - - . "Meeting Stevie." Eds. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephan Conway with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Kate Sullivan teaches in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Oregon and is finishing a dissertation focused on the construction of masculinity in the fiction of Peter Straub and Stephen King. She has a continuing and conflicted interest in horror fiction and film.

Notes

1. Joseph Reino argues that King draws on his own life for narrative events and thematic content. He suggests that "The Body" contains autobiographical elements from King's life, although these elements are fictionalized. See Stephen King: The First Decade.

2. Both Bly and Keen indicate that they are not excluding gay men from their mythopoetic mythology; however, mythopoetic discourse is redolent with anxiety about being too feminine or a sissy.

3. Carrie's father is dead, and her mother, Margaret White, is a sadistic and out-of-control religious fanatic.

4. In The Shining, Danny Torrance's father, Jack, is an angry alcoholic who abuses his son. Danny's mother, Wendy, chooses her erotic attraction to and support of Jack over Danny's safety. When Jack finally descends into madness, Danny and Wendy are saved by a good father figure, a Black man, Dick Halloran. In contrast to Jack, who cannot control his temper, gets violently drunk and takes pleasure in cruel word play, Halloran is kind, patient and gentle. He is fittingly, a cook.

5. In 'Salem's Lot, Mark Petrie's parents cannot understand the vampiric threat to their community. His father is overly rational and dismisses the boy's fears. Mark, although respectful of his parents, does not feel a huge emotional connection to them. Instead, he finds a soul mate and mentor in the figure of Ben Mears, a writer whose ability to imagine and empathize allows him to understand both Mark and the threat to the community.

6. In It, six of the seven children have absent or neglectful fathers. Indeed, Bev's father is abusive and harbors incestous desire for his daughter. Ben and Eddie's fathers are dead or missing. In the absence of meaningful relationships with adult men, the children form a close bond with each other, alternately nurturing one another. As the sole girl, Bev's function is to have sex with each of the boys, an act which is represented as one of differentiation. After having sex with Bev, the group of boys is able to find their way out of the confusing lair of the horribly fecund female monster.

7. In The Talisman, Jack Sawyer's father and uncle Tommy are dead, killed by Jack's evil and corrupt "uncle," Morgan Sloat. Jack, who lives with his mother Lily (who is dying), must find a series of male mentors to help him deal with Sloat. Among these male mentors is Speedy Parker, a Black janitor whose faith in music and magic stands in sharp contrast to Sloat's dependence on rationality and technology. Again, while Sloat is characterized as cruel and cunning, Speedy is loving and supportive.

8. In the first section of Hearts in Atlantis, Bobby Garfield meets and is befriended by a gentle elderly man, Ted Brautigan. Ted cares for Bobby in his mother's absence, introducing the boy to the joys of literature. Ted's emotional care of Bobby is configured as a literary gift, in much the same way that King's absent father bequeathed him a legacy of weird fiction.

9. According to Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman, the "lost" father is a common theme in men's movement literature. The boy/burgeoning man must seek and find, if not an actual father, a surrogate role model. "Weekend Warriors: The New Men's Movement."

10. The mythopoets also call for a reinvigorated and authentic masculinity in the face of the feminizing force of shifting gender roles. Much of the critical response to this movement critiques the attempt at remasculinization, arguing that it is essentially a misogynistic endeavor. While I concur that much mythopoetic mythology is misogynistic, I am interested in the emphasis on male-male intimacy and nurturing, on the construction of a loving father figure who is essentially a maternal male. For an example of the criticism on mythopoetic misogyny, see Chapter Nine, "Wimps, Whiners and Weekend Warriors" in Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America.

11. Given the historic moment in which Kristeva is writing, her project merits (perhaps) a Foucauldian analysis. Such metacriticism is outside the realms of this project (and quite possibly beyond the talents of this writer).

12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that the threat of male eroticism is contained by the figure of a woman and the subplot of heterosexual romance. See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.

13. Indeed, when King does supply a heterosexual subplot, it is read as forced or false. Peter Straub asserts that "Stevie [King] hasn't discovered sex yet" (46). Straub's observation highlights the fact that the primary concern in much of King's fiction is not heterosexual intimacy but adolescent male homosociality. See the Playboy interview in Bare Bones (46).

14. This is Marc Fastaeu's term from The Male Machine:

The male machine is a special kind of being, different from women, children, and men who don't measure up. He is functional, designed mainly for work. He is programed to tackle jobs, override obstacles, attack problems, overcome difficulties, and always seize the offensive. . . . His relationship with other male machines is one of respect but not intimacy; it is difficult for him to connect his internal circuits to those of others (1).

15. Tony Magistrale argues that most of King's protagonists are, in fact, unlikely heroes because they are society's "losers." See Landscape of Fear.

16. Indeed, Gordie indicates that the style is by Hemingway, and the theme by Faulkner, admissions which indicate, perhaps, that he is searching for literary father figures as well ("The Body" 322).

17. This nostalgic but happy reading is possibly reinforced by the film version which changes a couple of key pieces of information. First, the adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfus) is shown within the bosom of his family; his son is given a face and a voice. Second, the narration indicates that Vern and Teddy, rather than dying because of alcohol and drug addiction as they do in the novella, are alive and working at mundane jobs; they, too, have families.

18. See Fasteau, esp. Chapter Two, "Friendship Among Men."

19. In her analysis of Stu Weber's Tender Warriors, Linda Kintz notes that Christian men's movement literature constructs tenderness as a warrior perogarative in order to make submission to God a masculine behavior (121-124). King seems to exhibit a similar tendency.

20. When Chris' older brother beats him severely enough to send him to the hospital, Chris blames his injuries on a fall. This kind of suffering is representative of more traditional forms of masculinity, although being able to withstand physical punishment is frequently tied to the protagonist's ultimate triumph over those who injure him.

21. Pauline Kael notes this atypical emphasis on male intimacy and emotion. She argues that the boys in Stand By Me are like a "pastoral support group [who lay] gentle, firm hands on needy shoulders" (705). See 5001 Nights at the Movies.

22. Moore and Gillette call this absence "wounding" (7).

23. Schwalbe recounts how one gathering of 100 or so men took place in a rural wooded area, far removed from the trappings of city life.

24. This detail also indicates that when Gordie laments the loss of his childhood friendships, he is really speaking only of Chris ("The Body" 375).

25. Joseph Reino notes that "Body" contains a reference to two Robert Frost poems, "Mending Wall" and "Two Look at Two." Given the fact that I only recognized the first, I may not be King's ideal reader.

26. Ghost Story, which was published three years before Different Seasons, features a group of old men who gather to tell each other ghost stories just as "Breathing" does.

27. In "Meeting Stevie," the introduction to Fear Itself, Peter Straub not only calls King his ideal reader, he also indicates that reading King was like discovering a long-lost brother (9).

28. King makes this statement in an interview with Peter Straub and Stanley Wiater reprinted in Bare Bones. Throughout the interview, both authors praise each other's work and reiterate how close their friendship is (166-168).

29. Indeed, King and Straub's texts contain many cryptic allusions to one another, a phenomenon which suggests that their novels function extra-textually as a means to enact their friendship. For instance, a character in Straub's novel, Koko, reads King's The Dead Zone while sitting on an airplane; events in both Hearts in Atlantis and Koko are set in the same place: the Au Shau valley in Vietnam (both novels also feature playing cards as section divisions); ghostly magnets in Bag of Bones spell out the name of Straub's Vietnam trilogy, Blue Rose; a major character in Ghost Story shows up in King's It; The hero of "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," the narrator's metaphoric "rock," has a name that is similar to Straub's: Peter Stevens; and caretakers in both Bag of Bones and Mystery are named B. Dean.

30. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History.

31. This is the paradigm of It, 'Salem's Lot, "The Breathing Method," The Tommy-knockers, Pet Sematary, and Christine.

32. The heroes of American gothic literature are often feminized. Leslie Fieldler indicates that the heroes of Charles Brockden Brown are "almost feminine" (138). See Love and Death in the American Novel. William Patrick Day argues that the heroes of early American Gothic are feminized in that they are reactive rather than proactive in his book (145). See In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study in Gothic Fantasy. Louis Gross argues that American Gothic is informed by cultural anxieties about industrialized Western society, of which gender identity is one concern. See Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead.

33. For a discussion of homophobia and King's supposed repudiation of it, see Douglas Keesey. "'The Face of Mr. Flip': Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King."

34. For a discussion of the Romantics' obsessive need to separate themselves from the feminine writing of Gothic novelists, see Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender.

35. In Between Men, Sedgwick notes that the Gothic had "relatively visible links" to male homosexuality (91).

36. Steven Bruhm makes a related argument in his analysis of The Shining and The Dark Half in "On Stephen King's Phallus; Or, The Postmodern Gothic." For Bruhm, King's representation of the risks of writing articulates a particularly postmodern anxiety about language and subjectivity.

37. In a fascinating discussion of the Citadel, Susan Faludi indicates that the institution's resistance to co-ed education does not reflect a desire to keep the military properly masculine, but to hide the nurturing nature of male-male relationships inside the confines of the Citadel. She argues that the male recruits are acutely aware of how such caring relationships would be viewed as homoerotic by women and the public at large. Thus, keeping women out would preserve a safe enclave for male tenderness and dependence. I see King's fiction as reflecting a similar impulse—male-male intimacy and tenderness are desirable but not permissable outside of the parameters of boyhood unless necessitated by war/the military or in the case of King's fiction, by an encounter with horror. See Stiffed.