\n"}\n\nThis is at least one notch better than the usual \u201ceverything in culture is actually about Trump and his eeevil\u201d hogwash.
\n(\u201cHogwash\u201d means \u201cshit\u201d. You know, what hogs roll about in, as if to bathe?)
\nMore than that tho, it moves me to put on my kontextgoggles and look at Stephen King in relation to his period of American culture.\n
\n\nKing\u2019s work always reflected on the culture around it, if only by the print era pulp-prolific tactic of filling pages by shoehorning every stray thought you have into whatever you\u2019re writing at the time (Colin @spacetwinks reports his latter-day works are full of transparent, charmingly Maine-centric axe-grinding).\n
\n\nBut his \u201cgolden age\u201d, say, Carrie to Needful Things, was in the 70s-80s period that, if my cyclical understanding of history holds (it does) resembled the one we\u2019re currently going through, so it\u2019s particularly worth considering now.\n
\n\nOne significant thing \u2013 as the cities were emptying out, to the point of memory-holing that the US had been a predominantly urban country since the 1930s, King\u2019s work focused on rural small town life, often about outsiders moving into said. Pet Sematary, for example, it\u2019s very significant that the narrator moved out to the sticks \u2013 long driveway off a truck route, charming local historic ruins, undeveloped enough to still show traces of precolonial life \u2013 to raise a family.\n
\n\n(A thing to do would be to contrast King\u2019s use of of rural New England with Hawthorne and Lovecraft\u2019s, but tbh I don\u2019t know them that well)\n
\n\nSimilarly, I occasionally hear guffaws that Cujo has a whole subplot about cereal branding, but it just serves to remind that Vic is a yuppie who moved out of NYC to protect his young family only to confront the fact that the countryside is actually uncivilized and bestial too. There is some woo \u201creincarnated spirit of evil\u201d in there, but all the fundamental threats to his family \u2013 unreliable transportation and sparse services, unmanaged wildlife, irresponsible white trash neighbors \u2013 are real rural dangers.\n
\n\nThere\u2019s a lot of stuff about gender relations and changing expectations of marriage. In Sematary, the narrator\u2019s wife grows alienated, channeling her attentions away to others; before Gage he revives her cat. For fear of abandonment he goes further and further to hold on to a family \u2013 embittered wife, bad seed child, evil cat \u2013 the last generation\u2019s men might have abandoned themselves. In Cujo, there\u2019s lingering issues with recent infidelity.\n
\n\n(You laugh about how 50s-80s High Literature was so obsessed with adultery, but if not \u201corienting your life to duty, purpose, order vs. orienting it to animal sensation and personal satisfaction\u201d, I dunno what period art should\u2019ve been concerned with.)\n
\n\nThe Shining is very much about a guy born into the old dispensation \u2013 that men create and carouse and mount their genius to chase their passion while women tend the home fires \u2013 dealing with new expectations that he be an emotional provider to his wife and child, that he act as a supporting character in their life-plots rather than the reverse.
\n\n\nWhat else? It, and more grounded companion piece The Body (known in adaptation as Stand by Me) honestly strike me most as a exploration of the Boomer-era \u201cgeneration gap\u201d, how the culture of the previous generation may have brought about the \u201cbroad middle class\u201d \u201850s but was unsuited to address the problems encountered there.
\n\u201cTo beat this evil clown, we\u2019ve gotta gangbang our chick friend\u201d seems weird as hell, but \u201cto progress, we\u2019ve got to create a New Adulthood that doesn\u2019t define itself against childhood but instead adds sex\u201d is pretty much the Boomer story.\n
\n\n(Also, people who live in group houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones.)
\n\n\nCarrie is very much about the \u201870s reintegration of a long-isolated religious fundamentalism to a mainstream that had only grown more secularized and libertine (appreciably more so than in the \u201cfamily values\u201d, \u201cbourgeois bohemian\u201d 80s-90s, which was the synthesis of this opposition) since. Particularly, it layers the discrepancy in mores \u2013 showing your dirtypillows vs. not, say \u2013 over an even deeper gap in worldviews, between bucket-of-blood materialism and a numinous, supernatural world.
\n\n\nAnd that\u2019s just the stuff I dignify as serious. Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, and I guess The Stand all focus on psychic/telekinetic kids, which is a reminder that the 70s were full of woo, ESP was a serious topic, and the idea of the \u201cgifted child\u201d started out a lot closer to today\u2019s \u201cindigo child\u201d.\n
\n\n(I like to think that Bill Murray\u2019s researcher in the stylistically thrownback The Royal Tenenbaums was a callback to Venkman\u2019s \u201cnegative reinforcement\u201d introduction from Ghostbusters, like \u201cback in the day we went looking for psychics but instead we just discovered autism")
\nI\u2019m in kind of the opposite position, having read most of Lovecraft\u2019s works, but only a couple of King\u2019s.
Regarding Lovecraft\u2019s relationship to rural New England: while a lot has been made of Lovecraft\u2019s longing for an idealized New England aristocracy, it\u2019s worth noting that this was a specifically urban aristocracy. His scenes of comfort and remembered glory are full of gambrel roofs and collegiate libraries, not the plantations of the Southern Gothic authors. Celephais and Kadath, the chief loci of longing in Lovecraft\u2019s fiction, are both envisioned as supernatural cities.
By contrast, his treatment of rural settings and their inhabitants ranges from disdain to terror. The rural poor in Lovecraft\u2019s stories are generally nice enough people, but also a bit on the too dumb to live side. Rural elites, meanwhile, are among Lovecraft\u2019s most common villains: examples include Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror, the Marsh and Waite families of Innsmouth, and the twisted descendants of the Martense clan in The Lurking Fear. There\u2019s also some fear of the untamed corners of the natural world evident in Lovecraft\u2019s work, though it doesn\u2019t show up as clearly and strongly as in some of Lovecraft\u2019s predecessors, like Arthur Machen.
One of the central concerns in Lovecraft\u2019s writing is the pollution of blood and the degeneration of human genetic stock. Commentators have mostly noted this with regard to fears of race-mixing and exogamy, and they\u2019re right to note these things, but Lovecraft was equally concerned with excessive endogamy. The Lurking Fear, which centers around a seemingly abandoned mansion full of the man-eating, semi-simian descendants of a wealthy rural family that became so inbred over the course of centuries as to no longer be recognizably human in body or mind, is the starkest example of this. As far as I can recall, incest isn\u2019t brought up as an explicit plot point in his other fiction set in rural New England, but it\u2019s strongly implied in many of these stories, including The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Thing on the Doorstep.
In short, Lovecraft generally viewed rural New England (and probably rural areas more generally) as frightening and dangerous, and a potential corrupting influence on the virtuous urban elite that supplied most of his protagonists and sympathetic characters.