When horror novels stray from fiction

Stephen King’s reign of terror continues with racism

For the past forty-five years, no writer has dominated a single genre of writing quite like Stephen King. His books have sold more that 350 million copies, he has published more than 60 novels, and has written roughly  200 short stories. In 1980, only six years after publishing his first novel, Carrie, King would become the world’s best-selling author. It’s clear that horror is King’s calling. King’s cultural legacy transcends literature as many of his books have been adapted into television and film; the 2017 feature film adaptation of It even became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, making more than $300 million.  

With a net worth of roughly $400 million, King is one of the richest authors in the world. King’s talent for writing and ability to continually remain relevant in an industry that is constantly gaining new voices is undeniable.  With books about killer cellphones, murderous cars, a rabid St. Bernard, and even a possessed industrial laundry press, King’s covered nearly every pitch possible. He’s even gone as far as appropriating Indigenous and Asian cultures in his novels to further his horrific plot points. 

Spanning more than 1000 pages dedicated to a killer clown who steals the souls of children, and with three film adaptations, It is one of King’s most notable pieces of literature. Portraying abusive parents, a bully who goes  so far as to kill a kid’s dog, an emotionally manipulative mother, and even the murder of a gay man, the novel explores a variety of dark features that are unfortunate realities for many. While the book is no stranger to controversy as it vividly describes a child orgy, a problematic  narrative that goes unnoticed is the Ritual of Chüd.  

Within the novel, the ritual is described as originating from Himalayan beliefs. The Himalayans viewed It as a type of tallus—a shapeshifter. In the novel, King claims that within Himalayan culture, a tallus is a part of evil magic and it can read your mind, assuming the shape of the thing you are most afraid of. The Ritual of Chüd is a multidimensional and metaphysical test of will, as it takes place in a mental combat. The ritual requires a shaman, a person who has access to and influence over the world of spirits, to meet the tallus face-to-face before the ritual can be performed. This ritual is performed twice in the novel and ultimately defeats It during the second execution when the Losers Club, the ensemble of main characters in the novel, channel their inner spiritual recourses to weaken It before they can physically kill It.  

If you’re unfamiliar with Himalayan culture this tradition may sound somewhat authentic to you, however, King simply made up the Ritual of  Chüd and tied it to an Eastern culture. No Ritual of Chüd exists outside of King’s world of make-believe. King appears to have ripped off the spiritual practice of Chöd, which is found primarily in Tibetan Buddhism. A Chöd  practitioner seeks to tap into the power of fear through activities such as rituals, and works to cut through attachments to achieve enlightenment. In the case of the Losers Club, they perform the Ritual of Chüd to not only kill It, but to sever the ties of their childhood trauma, which had been preventing them from living their life to the fullest. 

Given King’s work and clear love for fantasy, he has the capacity to have made the Ritual of Chüd much more unique and distant from the practice of Chöd. Writing fiction is supposed to require creativity, after all. While a single instance of cultural appropriation is always a call for concern, this is not the first instance of King’s cultural appropritation.  

King’s Pet Sematary follows Dr. Louis Creed and his family who move to rural Maine. They soon find a mysterious burial ground, which has been used by children of the town to bury their pets, hidden in the woods near their home. After the death of their family cat, Louis soon finds out that the pet cemetery has the power of resurrecting anything that is buried there.  We soon find out that this burial ground was once used by, and belonged to, the Mi’kmaq community. In King’s tale, the ground that the burial site is on turned sour after some of the Mi’kmaq community dug up the remains of their elders to eat during an incredibly long winter with a lack of resources. They were then touched and cursed by the Wendigo spirit, a man-eating creature or spirit found in the folklore of Indigenous Algonquian communities, cursing the ground and giving it a will of its own. The use of such a cultural landmark as a plot device paints Indigenous practices as “evil” and destructive to white culture, which is not unlike how early colonizers viewed Indigenous communities when stealing their land.  The Wendigo is a common antagonist for King, showing up again in his 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. King uses Indigenous cultures  to make an interesting plot centered around white characters, but continually fails to provide an accurate representation of said cultures.  When white authors write white stories that center around tokenizing a community, it only furthers historical and contemporary colonial views of Indigenous communities and their cultures.  

As a white author, King simply grabs bits and pieces of other cultures––notably, marginalized cultures––that he does not belong to. King isn’t just appropriating culture, he’s using other cultures for his own financial gain and for the mobility of his cultural capital. King’s entire premise of Pet  Sematary relies on the use of Mi’kmaq culture; without it, he wouldn’t have his novel or the millions he made from it; without it, his novel wouldn’t have been nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1986.  

By using varying aspects of different cultures to further his own stories, King is actively working to vilify marginalized identities. In the case of It and Pet  Sematary, the cultures that he uses––which just so happen to not be rooted in European (read, white) culture or location––are the cultures of the villains trying to harm his white central characters. King is a white author who writes about almost exclusively white protagonists, so his audience is going to be largely white. People consume media that is familiar to them, that they can relate to, and that they can see themselves in. When he does include people of colour in his work, they’re often the antagonist. His 1980 novel, Firestarter, follows Charlie, a young girl who has telekinetic powers and is being hunted by John Rainbird, a Cherokee hitman who is obsessed with her. He ultimately is killed while Charlie ends up telling her story to Rolling Stone magazine. King perpetuates the colonial ideology that Indigenous men are dangers and threats to white femininity, thus enforcing harmful ideologies while cherry-picking the aspects of Indigenous culture that he likes, and failing to recognize the violent colonial history that has given him such power to be able to do so as a part of the dominant culture.  

By using the cultures of others in his own work, King fails to give people credit for their own culture. Given that he is a fiction writer, most readers will likely  assume that the entirety of his novels are based in fiction, giving him the credit for creating the Wendigo. In the case of the Ritual of Chüd, it is in fact fiction and not an actual aspect of Himalayan culture, but since his readership is largely white, they will take it at face value; believing it to have validity and thus perpetuating stereotypes and spreading misinformation.