DEEP FEARS: THE CREATION OF HORROR IN "THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT", BY STEPHEN KING

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34630/polissema.v1i22.4574

Keywords:

Creative Writing, short story, horror, The Man in the Black Suit, Stephen King

Abstract

Stephen King is one of the most popular writers in the genres of terror, supernatural and fantasy. In this article, we intend to enumerate, exemplify, and analyze the mechanisms used by King, in the short story “The Man in the Black Suit”. We will focus on aspects like the first-person narrator, the isolated place, the antagonistic characters of the child and the archetypical devil, and to the structure of the plot. To our study, we resort to several specialists in the oeuvre of the author and, naturally, to our critical opinion. The results prove that, in the analyzed short story, King sucessfuly combined several creative writing techniques, related to the use of setting, symbolic meaning of characters and growing suspense, to offer the reader a realistic and frightening experience. In conclusion, this is a small masterpiece in the genre of terror, likely to keep magnetizing the interest of the reading and critical community in the future.

Author Biography

João de Mancelos, Universidade da Beira Interior/Centro de Línguas Literaturas e Culturas

João de Mancelos nasceu em Coimbra, em 1968. É licenciado em Ensino de Português e Inglês (UA, 1992), mestre em Estudos Anglo-Americanos (UC, 1996), doutorado em Literatura Norte-americana (UCP, 2001), pós-doutorado em Estudos Literários (UA, 2006-2012) e agregado em Estudos Culturais (UA, 2015). É docente na Universidade da Beira Interior e escritor. Publicou vários livros de ensaio, poesia e ficção. Os seus interesses incluem Literatura e Cinema.

References

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Published

2022-12-31

How to Cite

de Mancelos, J. (2022). DEEP FEARS: THE CREATION OF HORROR IN "THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT", BY STEPHEN KING. POLISSEMA – ISCAP Journal of Letters, 1(22), 202–221. https://doi.org/10.34630/polissema.v1i22.4574

Issue

Section

Studies