America's Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King by Douglas E. Cowan (review)

When Stephen King received the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution for American Letters in 2003, Harold Bloom wrote a jeremiad in the Boston Globe bemoaning "the dumbing down of our cultural life." But Douglas Cowan takes issue with the assumption that because King's writing is popular it must be vacuous. Cowan also dissents from scholars like Bryan Stone when he wrote in the Journal of Religion and Film that horror is "the genre least amenable to religious sensibilities" (177). On the contrary, Cowan suggests that when thousands of Americans read King's stories, they are confronted with questions about ultimate meaning—questions that are generally deemed "religious."

Cowan is clear that he is not proposing "horror as religion." While there are people who have formed religious movements around Star Wars, The Matrix, and other fictional media, this is not Cowan's interest. Nor is this a book about horror in place of religion. Cowan generally dismisses the secularization narrative. Rather, Cowan suggests that King's writing continually challenges the answers we have been given about such topics as the existence of unseen order and theodicy, not to mention death and the afterlife. Indeed, raising these existential questions is part of what makes King's stories so frightening. It is King's challenges to what we think we know that make him "America's dark theologian."

Because this is a book about horror, it examines only a portion of King's oeuvre, ignoring his forays into other genres such as mystery and fantasy. Fans of King's mammoth Dark Tower series (recently made into a middling film starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey) may be disappointed. However, Cowan is already at work on a separate book examining religious themes in fantasy.

America's Dark Theologian builds on an analytical framework already established in Cowan's previous work Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (2008). Both works invoke William James' idea of religion as the belief in an "unseen order" to arrive at the idea of "the metataxis of horror," that is, the fear of a change in the sacred order. What truly terrifies, Cowan suggests, is not the threat of a monster or killer, but the hideous realization that the world does not work as we thought it does—at least not anymore. Cowan quotes Danse Macabre, King's 1981 nonfiction book on horror, "It is not the physical or mental aberration itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order these things imply" (157), and suggests that King understood the principal of the metataxis of horror before Cowan coined a neologism and fleshed out its sociological significance.

Cowan's first chapter, "America's Dark Theologian," sets up a framework for reading King "seriously." Cowan first dissents from the assumption, common in scholarly critiques of horror, that "Whatever looks like religion, or could be interpreted religiously, must mean something else" (13). Next, he suggests that King is a theologian not because he provides answers to religious questions, but rather because he poses questions to religious answers. His stories "explore the gap" between what we think we understand and our hopes and fears of what might be.

Chapter 2, "Thin Spots," fully investigates the idea of an "unseen order" across King's stories. This order is "unseen" in the sense of being largely unknowable and ineffable, but different storyworlds interact with it in different ways: some offer a hint of its "quintessence"; others raise it as a problem of perception (e.g., is this real or madness?); some as a function of difference (e.g., the alien-ness of entities such as those in King's The Tommyknockers); and still others present it as a source of communications such as King's novel about automatic writing, The Dark Half. This chapter also traces the idea of an unseen order through King's influences, especially Arthur Machen...