Breaking The Audience

Breaking The Audience: Methods of Fear Elicitation in Stephen King’s The Shining

By Brittany Nunez

Abstract:

This article analyzes Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977) using a psychological and formalistic approach. Focus is placed on King’s methods of elicitation of fear in readers, which are argued to be (1) use of narrative elements such as setting, point of view, character, plot, and style in combination with prior successful writing styles by King to make readers feel empathy for the characters and their relatable problems; (2) exploitation of the vulnerable emotional state of the empathetic reader to induce a feeling of dread through specific phobias; (3) grasping at the insecurities of readers and implanting the fear of judgment by those whose opinions have significant meaning to them; and (4) capturing of multiple subgenres of horror to ensure fear is evoked from all readers based on their preferred form of horror. Several examples of narrative elements are provided with relevance to highly relatable themes. Stephen King’s On Writing is used to emphasize how his previously successful writing techniques are used in The Shining. Conclusions from an experiment on induced fear from “Relating Experimentally-Induced Fear to Pre-Existing Phobic Fear in the Human Brain” (Levine et al.) are used to prove the ability to create new forms of fear during heightened vulnerability with an explanation of specific phobias from the text. “From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks” (Davenport) is cited for its analysis of Jack Torrance with relevance to how King wrote this character to tear into the readers’ self-image. Horror is broken down into subcategories as defined in “The Genre of Horror” (Prohaszkova) and these are proven to each be present in The Shining, ensuring a scare from all horror enthusiasts.

Few horror novels manage to leave such a profound affect on its readers as Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). The scares have aged incredibly well, stemming off it a major motion picture, a miniseries, and a sequel. Having been written 45 years ago, what is it that makes the terrors within its pages feel so contemporary in its ability to relate to new and returning readers? It is a novel that makes you feel not only fear, but everything associated with fear, such as anxiety, disgust, insecurity, vulnerability, self-doubt, and helplessness. King’s writing is methodical and calculated in such a way that he intended for this work to make readers question themselves and everyone they love, birthing the perfect horror novel. From a psychological and formalistic approach, the precise techniques behind King’s writing can be deconstructed to better understand how he elicits fear in his readers. Stephen King’s The Shining takes the empathy of the reader gained from relatable narrative elements and uses this vulnerability to elicit fear by grasping at the audience’s insecurities, introducing every recognized category of specific phobia, and capturing all subgenres of horror.

Stephen King gains empathy from his readers using uncomfortably relatable narrative elements such as setting, point of view, characters, plot, conflict, and style. The setting of The Shining is one of the most recognizable of all horror novels. In his memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King has the following to say about creating his settings:

Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It’s far from easy. As I’ve said, we’ve all heard someone say, “Man, it was so great (or so horrible/strange/funny) . . . I just can’t describe it!” If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. (King 173-174)

This is accomplished in two ways through setting. First, King uses the familiar tactic of using rural towns that makes the reader consider their own hometown. Could this happen there? If it can happen in towns near desolate Sidewinder, surely it could. In fact, Sidewinder and The Overlook were made so easily recognizable that he was able to mention them both briefly in Misery without needing to explain where the audience had heard of them before (King 12). King takes the comfortability readers are meant to experience when thinking of where they are from and uses it in a way to remind them that even small towns can be dangerous. In The Shining he mentions how dangerous it was getting to The Overlook with signs about falling rocks and vivid imagery of steep mountains. He establishes the theme of isolation with Wendy mentioning, “I don’t think we’ve seen five cars since we came through Sidewinder, and one of them was the hotel limousine” (King 86-87). The second way setting is executed is by creating a foreboding mood during Jack’s first tour of The Overlook:

Jack Torrance looked back over his shoulder once into the impenetrable, musty-smelling darkness and thought that if there ever was a place that should have ghosts, this was it. (King 35)

Through the element of setting, King creates a world where supernatural danger is hidden in the hotel, but natural danger openly tells the Torrances that there is no escape once the snow starts to fall. Point of view is accomplished through a third-person omniscient telling that is broken down by characters one chapter at a time. Readers are taken into the minds of all main characters, and a morbid relatability through this element is the reminder that everyone has a past. Jack Torrance and his alcohol addiction are mentioned numerous times through the novel, but one consequence of his drinking stands out. While riding with his equally drunk friend Al, the pair hit a bicycle on the road. Jack mentions feeling the force of hitting a person, but no body is ever found. They call in friends to help clean up the scene of the accident and they are never caught (King 56-58). Though this is a major factor in both Al and Jack deciding to stop drinking so heavily, there is a dread felt by readers as they are remined of their own mistakes. Someone reading this will have done something they are afraid will come to light, and this serves as a reminder of that event. A darker and perhaps more relatable point of view from the antagonist is when Jack admits to breaking Danny’s arm. He breaks down as he admits what he has done, telling the doctor it was the final realization that he had to stop drinking (King 213). Parents in the audience are reluctantly sympathetic while judging Jack’s actions but being reminded of times when they have not been proud of their own parenting. Switching to the side of the protagonist, the reader gains empathy for Wendy through her pain as a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage for the sake of her child. “He loved his mother but he was his father’s boy” (King 78). This line breaks every mother reading who has felt an unfair second place spot in their parenting role. Jack lost his temper and broke Danny’s arm. Wendy is a loving mother who stays in her marriage so that Danny will still have his father around and so Jack will not turn back to alcoholism to cope with his life problems. Mothers often get no credit for the love and effort put into raising their children, and the audience feels for Wendy in this way. Danny is a helpless child, and readers struggle to see the terrible things that happen to him because he can’t understand. There has never been a horror novel character rooted for as hard as Danny Torrance as he struggles with what is happening to him. One of the most memorable scenes in the novel is when Danny cries out, “I’m just five! Doesn’t it make any difference that I’m just five?” (King 448). King places a multitude of characters throughout the novel to help us understand the background and thought process of the main characters. To emphasize this point, King writes in his memoir:

“…When readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk… When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story. I argue it impossible to make this sort of connection in a premeditated way, gauging the market like a racetrack tout with a hot top. (King 160)

Jack Torrance’s character traits are most relatable in his childhood through the time before he moves to The Overlook. He is seen as a monster until the reader is given a glimpse into his past. Jack grew up in an abusive home. His father beat all his family with a cane, which caused trauma to all of them, yet Jack had a unique experience. For some reason, Jack had a small amount of favoritism bestowed upon him.

Jack didn’t think the old man had ever taken his brothers to the park. Jack had been his favorite, and even so Jack had taken his lumps when the old man was drunk, which was a lot of the time. But Jack had loved him for as long as he was able, long after the rest of the family could only hate and fear him. (King 302-303)

This confusion of growing up both as the abused and yet the favorite shaped Jack’s later relationship with his own son, and he was not sure how to balance love with discipline when it came to Danny. In “From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks”, Stephen Davenport speaks about Jack’s struggles to be a good person while his past weighs so heavily on him:

Jack is burdened by history, and no amount of mythologizing about the magic powers of artistic seclusion is going to make everything better. The familiar figures of an abusive father, a complicit mother, and a nagging wife; the loss of an older brother in Vietnam; the burden of a family of his own; his lowly job as a caretaker; a fear that he might be perceived as a hack—these are the pressure he feels weighing in on him, emasculating or castrating him. (Davenport 315)

Davenport addresses here that Jack’s idea to move away and start over was doomed before it began. Jack is flawed as a person, and there is no hope to make him better. The audience is brought to their deepest regrets and life decisions and reminded that they themselves may not be capable of change. Ullman is a character meant to portray the reader’s dislike in a particular authority figure, be that a boss, police officer, judge, or anyone in power. The book opens with Jack referring to Ullman as an “officious little prick” (King 3) and continues with an interview in which Ullman brings up Jack’s past (King 10). Similarly, George is a personified representation of taking justice into the readers’ own hands and overreacting. Jack was right to cut George from the team, as readers have all had a justified reason to make a decision in their own lives, but he takes it too far. Jack attacks George, loses his job, and ruins his reputation (King 160-165). In addition to supplying essential information on the boiler, Umphrey provides vital information regarding what has happened to the former caretaker, which in turn proves Jack’s arrogance. Jack asks if Grady, the previous caretaker whose family died in a murder-suicide, was an educated man (King 12). After Jack learns Grady was uneducated, he explains the uneducated rely on electronic sources of entertainment and why he is too smart to let that happen to him. “My wife and I both like to read. I have a play to work on, as Al Shockley probably told you” (King 13). A major part of the plot is escaping to a safe place away from the dangers of their former lives where Jack was tempted by alcohol. Jack, beginning to lose his mind, compares danger to comfort in The Wasps’ Nest:

Now, looking down into the nest, it seemed to him that it could serve as both a workable symbol for what he had been through (and what he had dragged his hostages to fortune through) and an omen for a better future. (King 155)

In this scene, Jack is looking at a wasps’ nest where he cleared the inhabitants and plans to give it as a gift to Danny. This is one of the earliest and most subtle forms of Jack’s mental decline as he refers to his family as “hostages” and sarcastically infers they will benefit from their time at The Overlook even though they do not feel this way. Later, the wasps’ nest comes back to life and Danny is stung eleven times. This part of the plot turns to symbolism. The wasps’ nest is representative for the evil hiding in the dark, planning to attack when they feel the safest. This piece of the plot is symbolic of a comfort zone becoming a danger zone. Conflict is best portrayed in Jack’s struggles between mental health, the influence of outside forces, his lust for power, and his human will to change who he was in the past. Jack wants to stop drinking, get past the incident where he broke Danny’s arm, and become a better person. He wants to get away from the image of himself that hides accidents like hitting bicycles and covering it up. In “Desistance and the “Feared Self”; Toward an Identity Theory of Criminal Desistance”, Ray Paternoster and Shawn Bushway discuss the human need to get away from past struggles to become a better person:

In understanding desistance as literally a “break with the past,” something changes about the person, such as his or her identity and preferences, so that the causal processes moving behavior are different across different time periods. (1106)

This means changing yourself (and any criminal or objectively unethical behavior) can only happen when there is a major life change involved, which in this case is the Torrance’s move to The Overlook. King reminds his audience that even if you want to change and make steps towards it, you can still fail. Failure is one of the most relatable of the negative human emotions as everyone experiences it in some form or another. More terrifying than the inability to change is the fact that outside forces cause Jack to go from a person trying to better himself to a full-fledged antagonist. The audience loses their sympathy for Jack as he tries to kill his family but gains it back towards the very end of the novel.

The face in front of him changed. It was hard to say how; there was no melting or merging of the features. The body trembled slightly, and then the bloody hands opened like broken claws. The mallet fell from them and thumped to the rug. That was all. But suddenly his daddy was there, looking at him in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that Danny’s heart flamed within his chest. The mouth drew down in a quickening bow.

“Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.” (King 632)

Immediately after realizing who he is and what he has done, Jack destroys himself with a mallet. The audience is left shocked and confused between feelings of sympathy at his very real last words and horrified relief as the monster dies. King describes this in his memoir as, “the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people” (King 207). King’s writing style is reflected in the dialogue of The Shining. The most terrifying lines were not wordy, nor pretentiously written. King relied on simple sentences used multiple times throughout his work that make the readers’ hearts quicken. King explains the vulgarity in his work as how he makes it more realistic in his memoir:

If you substitute “Oh sugar!” for “Oh shit!” because you’re thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader—your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story. (King 187)

What he means is his books feel raw and real because he makes his characters and what they say raw and real. Some of the things in his books, especially The Shining, are offensive and vulgar. He was not writing for the audience’s approval. He was shaping real characters. Jack isn’t thinking to himself, “I want to hurt my family.” Jack’s inner monologue is dark and disturbing. “I’ll find you, you goddam little whoremastering RUNT. . . Come here, you little shit!” (King 450). Grady speaks with Jack in the ballroom and uses offensive language that is relevant to a time when he would have been alive, referring to Hallorann as a “nigger cook” (King 519). “Come out here and take your medicine. What then? REDRUM” (King 291). Here King uses two lines seen several times throughout his work. In this instance, these were the words Danny was thinking. He does not expand on what these means because King wants us to know Danny himself does not understand what they mean. “UNMASK! UNMASK!” (King 524). This line is also used in dialogue in multiple places. It represents the faceless ghosts of the hotel and terrorizes the readers with what they might see when the masks come off. Through narrative elements, King successfully gains the empathy of the reader as they find one or more of the many ways to relate to the story.

After gaining empathy through relatable narrative elements, Stephen King uses the vulnerability of his audience to induce fear by use of specific phobias. Specific phobia is an irrational fear of one distinguishable thing. Irving Lee establishes the factors necessary to cause fear in “On Being Afraid of Being Afraid.”

The Dangerous Object… The Assumption of Damage… The Assumption of Incapacity… Bodily Changes… The Feeling of Fear… This is a picture of fear in a human being… Everything seems to happen at once, together. (4)

The “Dangerous Object” is the cause of fear. This could be either real or imagined, such as ghosts, bees, or heights. The “Assumption of Damage” is knowing the “Dangerous Object” will harm its subject. The “Assumption of Incapacity” is knowing the feeler of fear cannot do anything to influence the “Dangerous Object” which would make it go away. “Bodily Changes” can be categorized by quickened heartbeat or nausea. “The Feeling of Fear” is the dread experienced from the “Dangerous Object” (Lee 3). All these factors are necessary to cause specific phobia, and King bets on the reader having at least one of the phobias mentioned in his novel. Granted if they do not, they will. It is possible to induce new fears in humans when they already feel fear from another situation or object. Grasping at his readers’ insecurities as the first form of fear, King uses a psychological tactic to incite this new fear. This concept is explained in “Relating experimentally-induced fear to pre-existing phobic fear in the human brain” (Levine, Seth M, et al.). In their experiment, they tested human specific phobia by exposing participants in their study to a pre-existing phobia and introducing them to something they were not afraid of. After using an extinction method to try to take the second phobia away and then re-introducing it, they found their participants developed a new phobia to the object they were not initially afraid of. “Fear conditioning moves a previously neutral stimulus through the representational space towards a phobic stimulus” (171). With this study, we can conclude that the specific phobias introduced in The Shining may cause fear in readers where there was none before. King also often combines two specific phobias, which is another way of inducing new phobia through pre-existing phobia. The specific phobias introduced by King are entomophobia/trypophobia, ecophobia/zoophobia, cryophobia/chionophobia, sociophobia, and phasmophobia. Entomopobia is a fear of insects, and trypophobia is a fear of holes. “Something on one hand. Crawling. Wasps. Three of them” (King 190). Wasps are among the most feared of all insects, and King uses this to his advantage. First, Jack is stung on the hand. This is hard for someone with this phobia to read, but then he clears the nest and gives it to Danny as a kind of trophy. While this may cause uneasiness to someone with trypophobia, the scene in which Danny is stung brings out trypophobia and entomophobia in the least fearful of readers. A gift given to a child is never expected to be threatening, and this one breaks that rule. The entomophobe is now exposed to the idea that dead insects can come back to life and the trypophobe now questions every hole they’ve deemed safe. Ecophobia is a fear of plants and zoophobia is a fear of animals. This is combined in a unique way to create the predatory hedge animals in The Shining. Simon C. Estok explains in “Sweet-and-Sour Soup for the Psyche: Horror’s Ecophobic Leanings”:

Ecohorror is a subset of horror, and nature is the villain proper. Such demonizing of the natural is, to be blunt, ecophobic. The source of alterity (and the subsequent horror it produces) is in nature. Within ecohorror, Dawn Keetley has identified a subset that she has termed “plant horror.” She describes it as follows: “Plant horrormarks humans’ dread of the ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth. Plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness, which human culture has, from the beginning, set out to tame. Not an easy task, perhaps, since vegetation constitutes over ninety-nine percent of the earth’s biomass.” She speaks of fear of “vegetation [that] weaves violently in and out of the body” and offers six useful theses explaining why plants can evoke horror. Each of these touches and intersects with matters that are deeply relevant to theorizing about ecophobia: matters such as control, agency, and predictability. (83-84)

With this explanation we can see that fear of plants stems from their unpredictability, which is similar in nature to a fear of animals. Hedge animals mix plant with predatory animal in King’s work, as they are both unpredictable and harmful. Hedge animals are shaped by humans and meant to stay in those shapes, but this is not true for hedge animals in horror literature. In the scene entitled “The Hedges”, the hedge animals are described moving closer and closer to Danny, stopping and posing each time he’d turn around. “When he looked back, the point lion was only five feet behind. It was grinning. Its mouth was open, its haunches tensed down like a clockspring” (King 428). In true King style, this was not the only time the hedge animals moved, meaning readers with this phobia were set to be traumatized another two times until the hedge animals died in a fiery blaze. Criophobia and Chionophobia are a fear of the cold and a fear of snow, respectively. In “Weathering the Storm: Revisiting Severe-Weather Phobia” the author explains how common this phobia is:

Based on our broad definition of severe weather, nearly all participants (99%) had experienced some form of severe weather during their lifetime. . .The most commonly experienced severe weather events were thunderstorms (90.9%) and high winds (90.3%), followed by heavy snow and freezing rain (at approximately 80% each). As anticipated, the severe weather events described corresponded well to the regional climates and weather terminology of the participants (e.g., more heavy snow responses from those living in northern or mountainous states). (Coleman, Jill S. M, et al. 1180)

Many readers will be afraid of severe weather based on these statistics. Though isolation due to snow is mentioned many times through the novel, it is most realistically representative of phobia level at the very end. Wendy finally made it out of The Overlook alive with Danny, but she is so worried about the cold that she considers if she should leave on the snowmobile. She mentions not being properly dressed, then gets upset that Danny will have to leave without boots when she has her own clothes brought to her sans Danny’s boots (King 637-638). This level of fear shows Wendy is almost willing to risk staying at the exploding, ghost-filled hotel rather than face the cold. Sociophobia is a fear of failure, being embarrassed in social situations, and judgment. This is mainly seen in Jack. He becomes obsessed with the hotel’s criminal past, but then obsesses over the ultimate form of power at the hotel, which is becoming the manager. Jack is mortified when he learns the hotel wants his son instead of him after all he sacrificed.

It’s me they must want . . . isn’t it? I am the one. Not Danny, not Wendy. I’m the one who loves it here. They wanted to leave. I’m the one who took care of the snowmobile. . . went through the old records . . . dumped the press on the boiler . . . lied . . . practically sold my soul . . . What can they want with him? (King 507)

Sufferers of sociophobia relate to Jack in that they may make sacrifices they deem necessary for a reward they will never receive. Phasmophobia is a fear of ghosts. This is a difficult novel for readers with phasmophobia, which is most strongly emphasized by the Woman in Room 217.

The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning. Her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her public hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub . . . The woman was sitting up. (King 319-320)

Those with phasmophobia would have an incredibly challenging time reading this scene. Just before drawing the curtain, Danny contemplates what he will find, even thinking it could be something “nice” (319). The description of the rotted corpse has stayed in readers minds for generations, and she is one of the first ghosts mentioned when one is asked about the deceased residents of The Overlook. Through all these phobias, King uses an opportunity to induce specific phobias or to create new ones.

In addition to grasping at the readers’ phobias, King ensures a fear response from his audience by incorporating all subgenres of horror in The Shining. The subgenres of horror are best summarized by Victoria Prohaszkova in “The Genre of Horror”, which she deems to be “Rural Horror, Cosmic Horror, Apocalyptic Horror, Crime Horror, Erotic Horror, Occult Horror, Psychological Horror, Surreal Horror, and Visceral Horror” (133-134). Rural horror takes place in settings far from civilization, which Steffen Hantke explains as a pattern of King’s in his article, “Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Johnathan Carroll and Kathe Koja”.

King’s social allegory is obviously derived from an ideological abstraction, which implies that the “shock of recognition” with which it undeniably provides the reader is not grounded in machinery of conventional “realism” but in a carefully contrived and culturally inscribed sense of nostalgia. . . To read King is to see the world we live in. (43)

Rural horror by Stephen King reflects the reader’s hometown, the coziness of their house, and places where evil is not supposed to lurk. King creates two such places in The Shining: Sidewinder and The Overlook. Sidewinder is a place where the locals all know each other. It is reflective of the working class and small-town America. The Overlook is characterized by its haunting past, yet it is the place in which The Torrances seek refuge from the woes of their lives. Darkness from hazardous weather and evil forces place this novel in the Rural Horror category. Cosmic Horror deals with fate and inevitability, which also includes the acceptance of something otherworldly. Cosmic Horror is seen in the confirmation of the existence of ‘the shining’, as well as when Jack speaks to Grady. Grady tells Jack, “You’ve always been the caretaker” (King 517). This brings the question of what dimension they may have been in at that time. Apocalyptic Horror is symbolized by the end of the season, which alludes to this being the end of the world for the Torrance family.

“They watched until the car was out of sight, headed down the eastern slope. When it was gone, the three of them looked at each other for a silent, almost frightened moment. They were alone.” (King 145)

Similar to how traditional apocalyptic movies deal with a small part of the remaining human population and their experiences, the Torrances are the only people left at The Overlook, cut off from the rest of the world. Crime Horror is most prevalent with The Overlook’s past. In his troubling call to Ullman, Jack brings up the entire history of the hotel, including one point in time where it became a “playground for mafia” (King 263). Erotic Horror is seen between Derwent and Roger. In the beginning of the novel, after making love to Jack, Wendy is reminded of a seemingly irrelevant few lines from a song.

Lovin’ you baby, is like rollin’ off a log,

But if I can’t be your woman, I sure ain’t goin’ to be your dog. (King 65)

Later in the novel, we are introduced to Derwent and Roger. Harry Derwent, a bisexual socialite, had a romantic getaway with a man named Roger. It is explained that Derwent never goes back to the same man, though Roger does not seem to understand this. Roger humiliates himself by showing up to a party wearing a dog suit to entertain Derwent and following commands like a pet (King 518). They are later seen in a hotel room together, where Roger threatens to eat Danny. Occult Horror is obvious from the hotel’s ghost and undead army, but there is one part of the novel where it is a little more subtle. Jack tries to explain the claw marks on Danny’s neck from the Woman in 217 as stigmata (King 389-390). Psychological Horror is seen in Jack trying to kill his family and in the line, “this inhuman place makes human monsters” (p. 208). This quote describes the hotel’s ability to control Jack and torture his family psychologically. He is a monster, but also still a human. Surreal Horror is experienced in the dream-like trances Danny sinks into when he sees Tony. Danny goes through out-of-body experiences where he is shown the future (King 46-47, 81-82, 620). Visceral Horror is heavily displayed in The Shining as the novel often describes gory scenes. The first instance is the bloody mallet in the car (King 49), then the jump scare with brain matter smeared on the walls of the Presidential Suite (King 134), the hedge animals that slice into Hallorann (King 599-600), and Jack destroying his face with a mallet (King 634). Another example of subtle Visceral Horror is the multiple mentions of “The Red Death held sway over all” (King 524). Jeffrey S. Sartin, MD breaks down the meaning of this line in “Contagious Horror: Infectious Themes in Fiction and Film”:

One of the most influential modern works in this realm was Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 tale The Masque of the Red Death: The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal the redness and the horror of blood…. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow men…And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.16 (Sartin 44)

Sartin points out that this line references a work by Edgar Allen Poe, which entails a bloody plague. Throughout the novel, the ghosts of The Shining wear masks in the ballroom, which alludes to something terrible (and bloody) happening at the masquerade. In these ways, King covers each subgenre of horror.

Stephen King’s The Shining guarantees a scare for all audiences. With narrative elements, he establishes relatability through uncomfortable situations. He then uses the empathy of the reader and introduces multiple types of phobias that may be pre-existing or induced through fear created writing. Finally, King meticulously includes each subgenre of horror. These factors have caused the novel to age well, breaking audiences who are first-time or return readers.

Works Cited

Coleman, Jill S. M, et al. "Weathering the Storm: Revisiting Severe-Weather Phobia." 95.8 (2014): 1179-1183. Web. 25 March 2022.

Davenport, Stephen. "From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks." Men and Masculinities 2.3 (2000): 308-329. Web. 23 March 2022.

Estok, Simon C. "Sweet-and-Sour Soup for the Psyche: Horror's Ecophobic Leanings." English Language Notes 59.2 (2021): 81-90. Web. 25 March 2022.

Hantke, Steffen. "Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Jonathan Carroll and Kathe Koja." Journal of American Culture 18.3 (1995): 41-57. Web. 3 April 2022.

Jacobsen, Jenni. What is a Phobia? Ed. Abby Doty. 15 March 2022. Web. 9 April 2022. <https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/phobias/related/list-of-phobias/>.

King, Stephen. Misery. NYC: Scribner, 2016. Print.

—. On Writing. New York City: Scribner, 2000. Print.

—. The Shining. New York: Anchor Books, 2013. Print.

Lee, Irving J. "On Being Afraid of Being Afraid." Childhood Education 28.5 (2013): 197-200. Web. 2 April 2022.

Levine, Seth M, et al. "Relating experimentally-induced fear to pre-existing phobic fear in the human brain." Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 13.2 (2018): 164-172. Web. 24 March 2022.

Paternoster, Ray and Shawn Bushway. "DESISTANCE AND THE "FEARED SELF": TOWARD AN IDENTITY THEORY OF CRIMINAL DESISTANCE." The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 99.4 (2009): 1103-1156. Web. 22 March 2022.

Prohaszkova, Viktoria. "The Genre of Horror." American International Journal of Contemporary Research 2.4 (2012): 132-136. Web. 23 March 2022. <https://fdocuments.in/reader/full/prohaszkova-viktoria-the-genre-of-horror>.

Sartin, Jeffrey S. "Contagious Horror: Infectious Themes in Fiction and Film." Clinical Medicine & Resarch 17.2 (2019): 41-46. Web. 29 March 2022.