TAKE ME FOR A RIDE IN YOUR MAN‑EATER: THE CONSTRAINTS 
	OF GYNOPHOBIA IN STEPHEN KING’S CHRISTINE. 

	For the twelve years between 1995 and its publication in 1983, Stephen King’s Christine has had the same cover illustration. At the top, a steel-blue, oversize “KING” signals a popularity independent of semiotic genre signifiers; this inveterate user of brand-names is becoming a brand-name himself.  At the bottom, the product is distinguished by a modest white Christine. Between, on a cover blood-red as its paint, the car squats before its garage-den. In a victim’s-eye perspective that spreads the book’s width, the windscreen and cab, all the human spaces of the car, dwindle behind the curve of bonnet that widens to double lights and from the lights to monstrous chrome expanses of ‘50s bumper-bar. Centring the illustration, a V focuses the eye on the radiator that will become the novel’s recurring nightmare: “”Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth” (King, Christine 76).
	The longevity of this cover is remarkable among King’s novels, where equally  popular texts like The Dark Half (1989) can go through three cover-changes in as many years. It is tempting to deploy academic characterisations of horror fiction as having a “comprehensive” appeal (Carroll 194), without national or indeed historical limit (196‑7), supplied by a “highly controlled brush with the attractive/terrifying forbidden within the self” (Heller 193‑4). On the other hand, James Twitchell finds this appeal limited to a juvenile audience (67‑70), while Joseph Grixti locates such fiction firmly within the social process of producing meaning. It shares its particular society’s cognitive maps. Further, such fiction is “an expression ... of an undesirable or unsatisfactorily patched‑up state of society” (147).
	King himself also considers horror fiction probes “national phobic pressure points” (Danse 19).  Such points, then, do have national, contemporary causes, even if they are located through a language that deploys common cognitive maps and a common cultural legacy. King’s work often touches such American pressure points. His first novel Carrie (1974), was a response to what “Women’s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex” (Danse 198). The Stand (1978) expressed the malaise felt by Americans near the end of the ‘70s (447-8).  The same sense of betrayal is the historical pressure point of Christine. But where The Stand looks forward to Apocalypse, Christine, as Linda Badley notes, is like Grease, a “recapitulatory rock musical,”  built for and about ‘70s teenagers whose identity is grounded by “icons of the late fifties” (90). 
	Put simply, Christine is a story of “ownership that [becomes] Possession” (covernote) when an adolescent loser falls in love with a demonic old car that first wrecks and then takes his life. Yet behind the wreck’s wheel, the novel’s teenage narrator enters a time capsule where
	The little swatch of LeBay’s lawn that I could see was not yellowed, balding, and crabgrassy but a dark, rich, newly cut green. The sidewalk beyond was newly cemented, not a crack in sight. I saw (or thought I did, or dreamed I did) a ‘57 Cadillac motor by out front. That GM high-stepper was a dark minty green, not a speck of rust on her, big gangster whitewall tyres, and hubcaps as deeply reflective as mirrors. (King, Christine, 40)
The novel’s nostalgia for this time when petrol was cheap, speed king, and the American economy world dominant, inevitably finds its symbol of that “myth and ... era” (Magistrale 46) in the All‑American car.
	Beyond this sense of “technological betrayal” felt in the ‘70s in many Western countries (Fitting; Magistrale), the novel probes a pressure point about the enormous role of cars in Western society, especially for young men. It speaks the automobile discourse of Sapphire Motor Oil (King, Christine 39), Hurst gearboxes, Feuilly headers (75), and “words of power. If the car won’t start, curse it ... and be sure you curse it female” (44). Its epigraphs, from Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen and so on, invoke the nexus of initiation, sex and death that still coheres about men’s cars. A first car has replaced the key of the door in signifying independence, adulthood, power. It adds the macho lure of speed and skill, the possible access to sex. “’Come on, big guy’,” King’s car tempts his teenage narrator. “’Let’s go for a ride. Let’s cruise’” (40; 45; 75). It also holds the terror of male rivalry, sexual initiation, and a very real possibility of death. Adolescent males are the likeliest to get caught in the speed mystique, and teenage drivers have the highest accident and death rate. You too, Christine says to teenagers, could die like this, and to parents: Your son too could become obsessed.  
	Christine is most often read, however, in a well-established strand of King criticism that deals with the “technohorror” of a different betrayal. The texts usually cited are “The Mangler” (1972), “Trucks” (1973), “Word Processor of the Gods” (1983), and, as the sequence’s culmination, Christine. Like Badley (85), Tony Magistrale, Jonathon Davis and James Egan see these texts  expressing “one of the darkest fears of a technological age, that machines can fall under the control of an evil, transcendent will” (Egan 142) that eventually makes humanity “servants of machines” (143). “Trucks” ends with this precise scenario. Davis also sees American society in these stories as “victimized by its technology” (73). To Egan, Christine is King’s most detailed treatment of the “machine-human relationship” (144), while to Magistrale, the car is “the ultimate in technological mastery” since it can fix itself. Humans are “no longer in control of it” (47). 
	While all four discuss the human-machine relationship between car and owner, Davis and Badley pick up a gender perspective. Davis notes that “American society is ... married to its mechanisms” (73), and traces this theme through the novel, culminating in Arnie’s nightmare of a marriage ceremony with the car (King, Christine 379). Badley too sees the car in feminine terms. To her “Christine limps and vamps like an aging drag queen” (85), but she is also a seductive Other and Older woman (85-6), a “womb on wheels” (88), a female Mephistopheles whose price is literally “marriage until death” (86). If American men have traditionally had “an implicit heterosexual relationship”1 with their cars, the novel’s project may well be to portray the horror and abnormality of men thus married to cars rather than wives.
	In the process, however, the novel foregrounds cars’ and women’s alarming interchangeability as objects of both terror and desire. This equivalence becomes a brisure, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida2: a point of “undecidability”  that “float[s] between its two senses” (Kamuf, 33), like the double meaning of “pharmakon” in Derrida’s well-known “Plato’s Pharmacy,” to simultaneously construct and deconstruct King’s monitory project. This is partly because Christine frames its national and historical “phobic pressure points” within generic horror conventions that rely heavily on stereotypic and enduring roles of women as victims and monsters. In consequence, rather than constructing a demonized machine, King’s attempt to critique the monstrous heterosexual relationship feminizes the car instead. Its monstrosity can then be made intelligible only through an accretion of traditional gynophobic3 images.  
	Such images abound in King’s work. His penchant for a familiar element of horror fiction (Carroll 163; King, Danse 39‑40), the “gross-out” (40) of realised revulsion over imagined terrors, often makes such images signifiers of what Julia Kristeva terms the abject: that which is without the symbolic network of language or desire, a position occupied, in her Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, by the impure and the ejected: faecal waste, menstrual blood, the corpse, the archaic, devouring mother (1‑90). Many of King’s signifiers descend from the Gothic tradition, which draws on what Kristeva calls the Mosaic “taxonomy of impurity” (112). Thus Christine repeatedly presents the corpse, complete with maggots and rotting flesh, an inheritance from texts like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). But such signifiers are also drawn from “impure” or terrifying female processes such as menstruation or giving birth. A classic example of the latter is the notorious ‘birth scene’ in Alien (1979). King’s  Carrie, however, first electrified New York female publishing staff with a transgression of menstrual taboos (Ellison, 335), while the climax of It (1986) discloses an extra-terrestrial female monster, and The Tommyknockers (1988) turns a woman into a sexual monstrosity. King’s own most frightening image (Beahm, 90) comes from The Shining (1976): a female corpse in a bath, whose bloated belly signifies simultaneously death and pregnancy. Rats, identified as “slum” signifiers of the abject (Stallybrass and White, 145), also abound in King novels, and “Nona” (1985) blends slum and female signifiers in a temptress whose belly opens to reveal teeming rats. 
	Using Kristeva’s work, Barbara Creed follows these images of what she calls the monstrous-feminine through several horror films. That female images of abjection may be as readily mapped against a psychoanalytic discourse in Stephen King as in Alien, The Exorcist (1973), or The Brood (1979) suggests that  horror and hegemonic discourses share the same “overarching reality definitions” (Grixti 78). So Grixti finds in The Shining metaphors shared by popular and academic discourse, handed down from the Victorians (58-107). These include the images of a mechanistic universe and of the “beast within”, the subconscious or primitive or repressed, the “alligators [under] the... forebrain” (King, Danse 205) of human beings. 
	This succession argues that discourses themselves are cultural legacies; Kristeva’s and Creed’s examples may in fact be traced back from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Freud, in such loci classici as the link of Medusa and castration fear, while the fear of female sexuality implied in Freud is anticipated by Victorian medical discourse that denied “the existence of a sexual drive in the majority of women” (Stone 676). This reversed the early eighteenth-century view that women were sexually insatiable (Poovey 4‑5), with an implied fear and loathing inherited from medieval Christian teaching that “women were evil and sex was evil” (Hamilton 50‑51), which in turn derived from the blame laid on women in the Judaic Genesis myth. 
	The gynophobia of horror fiction is thus implicated in the bases of Western epistemology, which, as de Beauvoir and Cixous first demonstrated, relies on a phallocentric Othering of woman, making them the binary inferior of the normal, the right, the strong. Stephen Neale sees the horror film as concerned with order and disorder, as articulated across “categories and definitions of the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’” (8). When the “normal” and the “natural” are phallocentrically biased, that feminine images should be used to indicate the abnormal, the inhuman, the monster, is indeed quite natural. 
	Such images as the female vampire, the witch, the castrating mother, the vagina dentata and devouring womb, are among Creed’s catalogue of the monstrous-feminine. King’s lexicon adds the Belle Dame Sans Merci, the murderous Other Woman, a carnivorous female predator and the archaic or devouring mother. From these staples he constructs the red Plymouth Fury with the grille that snarls like “steel teeth” (77), the quintessential vagina dentata whose colour insists on the menstruating vagina that may have given the image its real taboo power (Shuttle and Redgrove 246). 
	Such images are not, however, wholly amenable to foregrounding the monstrosity of a man-car marriage. The brisure of woman-car equivalence continually draws Christine into the fatal female tradition, an “undecidability” that emerges in the use of pronouns. Named for a woman, the car is called “she” by both owners and narrator, although there are repeated assertions that “this was... not a she but an it” (King, Christine 186; 456; 568). When Arnie first sees the derelict car, he exclaims, “’Go back, I want to look at her again!’” The teenage narrator retorts, “’you mean that ... thing we just passed?’” (7). Here “thing” refers firstly to the car’s wrecked state, and “she” is meant to point up the abnormality of feminizing a car. What also emerges is the brisure, the dehumanizing equivalence of cars and women. The car is a “thing” because it is a wreck, just as old and therefore presumed ugly women are called “old things.” 	This scene sets up the longest-running gynophobic image for Christine, as a  fatal sexual possession, a motorized Belle Dame Sans Merci. “Arnie had fallen in love” (7; 8).  Chapter 4, describing the purchase, is called “Arnie Gets Married” and the move is seen as catastrophic. “[I]t’s the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch” (83). The car is identified as a “real slut”, and, blatantly invoking the vagina dentata: “I tell you now that some cunts have teeth” (132). The reader experiences its deadly lure first hand when the teenage narrator slides behind the wheel, back into the ‘50s, to that seductive whisper of “Come on, big guy ... Let’s cruise.” When he “got out of that car as fast as I could” (40) the lure, and its ensuing menace, become a nightmare. Here, when he refuses, the car lunges at him “grille snarling like an open mouth ... headlights glaring” and he “scream[s himself] awake” (76).
	To Linda Badley, Christine’s bitch-role follows from the “alienation” of King’s real monster, the previous owner, Roland LeBay, who haunts it in the guise of a rotting corpse. The car is only the vehicle for this “partly domesticated male, the territorial Id or embryonic anti-hero” (87), who once let his wife suicide and his daughter choke to death on a hamburger, and the text’s real horror is his  narcissistic withdrawal, “the self one-to-one on itself” (88). Such a reading adds double power to the car/man/monster’s death-cry: “’LEAVE ME ALONE!” (King, Christine 579). If one considers the Belle Dame Sans Merci tradition, however, Christine could as easily have created LeBay. It is his “marriage” to her that alienates him, and her malice, on one side, and her spell, on the other, that lets his family die; the pattern is very nearly repeated with the novel’s heroine. Like Keats’ enchantress, too, Christine keeps the ghosts of her victims. LeBay’s constitutive role in the novel, then, is not simply as a prequel to Arnie’s story, but to image the fate that awaits Arnie. Without LeBay’s horrendous appearances, this threat would go largely unrealised. 
	Christine adds the role of jealous Other Woman when Arnie falls for the heroine. In an earlier unpublished King novel, Sword in the Darkness, a hero named Arnie loses a relationship with a “good” girl through his fatal attraction for a “sexy saucy blonde” called Kit (Beahm 451). Again, the analogue names foreground the brisure. As a mechanized Bad Girl, Christine manifests displeasure with the rival by locking its doors while the heroine chokes. The supernatural forms of this jealousy blend into the car’s role as devouring female monster, whose most memorable recent appearance was in the Alien films (1979) (1985) (1992). 
	As a monster Christine “fixes itself” (Magistrale 47) not only when first bought but after being vandalized or damaged in destroying victims. There is a strong implication that the power for this is drained from the enthralled “husbands.” Thus the car begins to renew itself like a snake soon after Arnie buys it (King, Christine 57-8). The odometer runs backward, symbolizing this unhuman monstrosity of returned youth, which is paralleled by Keats’ enchantress. It also undercuts the nostalgia, implying that the time capsule the car embodies ‑ the radio only plays ‘50s and ‘60s songs ‑ is unhealthy, a preservation of the living dead. This vampire propensity is underlined in a notable scene when Arnie nearly kills himself during a winter night spent pushing the vandalized car bodily backward round a junk‑yard to restore its “youth.” 
	Extending this monsterhood, Christine operates without a driver in its hunts for revenge. Here, although the car has killed women in the past, and women are the normal horror victims, in the novel’s present its victims are spectacularly and entirely male. The vandal gang are picked off singly or together, on foot or on wheels. The detective who investigates their deaths is run off the road. The garage owner is killed inside his house, and Arnie’s father in his own drive. The killings of vandals and garage owner are presented from the victim’s view, setting the reader in a classic horror situation, an everyday event that becomes a common nightmare. In the first case it is a pedestrian who sees a car with headlights on in the street, the driver invisible, only to find the driverless car “chasing” him. In the second a carload of people find a car really is hunting rather than merely following them. In the third, the driverless car reaches the victim by wilfully demolishing his house, a nightmare exaggeration of a not uncommon motor accident. 
	In each incident, the text brings out the car’s monstrous femininity. When Christine confronts the first vandal, the vagina dentata is implicit in the grille that  “looked to him like a grinning idiot mouth” (King, Christine 285). The car “sat” (285‑6) at the curb - vehicles “stand” - and the victim addresses it like an erring husband: “’You ain’t mad, are you?’” (285) It attacks like “a she‑wolf” (286) and the tyres, engine and undercarriage “scream” (285), make an “unearthly shrieking”, “shriek” and finally are “still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world” (287). When, having tailgated the other vandals’ car at high speed and crashed it into a concrete gate island, Christine confronts the last survivor, “She stood forty yards away, facing him” (346). Attacking, the engine again “screams” and the “crimped hood was like a mouth in a frozen snarl” (347). As the attack continues the victim addresses it as “’you crazy WHORE!’”(349) The brisure emerges with a slippage from car to woman and thence to animal, as the incident closes with a distant hearer reminded by the car’s engine of “something prehistoric: a great wolf, or perhaps a sabre‑toothed tiger” (351). 
	Furthering this carnivorous implication, the novel consistently presents Christine through eating images: “old cars ... suck [money] the way a vampire is supposed to suck blood”(20). “It was, in a way, as if the car had swallowed him” (42). “[A] Venus Fly-trap at the edge of a swamp, its green jaws wide open, waiting for an insect to land” (124). “Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth” (76). These “steel teeth” (77) persist into the final scene (572) in both novel and film. Coupled with the sexual imagery of Belle Dame and jealous lover, they make the association with the vagina dentata unmistakable. 
	Other imagery links this sexual pattern to the female monster that Julia Kristeva calls the archaic mother: the mother from whom the Lacanian subject must separate at the point of pre-speech primal repression, behind whose toothed vagina, threatening castration, waits the devouring non-being of the womb. Kristeva briefly discusses the concept of this “archaic mother” (12‑15; 54‑55) as perhaps the most fundamental form of the abject.  As an archaic mother, Christine  “swallows” (King, Christine 42) Arnie; the heroine feels “swallowed in Christine”, whom she sees as indubitably female, as if “making love inside the body of her rival” (235). These images invoke the Oedipal blurring of mother and lover, forwarded because a driver is actually inside his car, where it was “safe ... dry and warm” (238); where, in a womb fantasy “[y]ou could enter her any time and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth” (381). He loses track of time and memory except to recall “sitting behind the wheel ... stupefied with happiness” (241). Like the knight in Keats’ poem, he is the living double of the enthralled ghosts. In terms of the novel’s project, he has lost his humanity. In Kristeva’s terms, his subjectivity has been, as yet only temporarily, re-absorbed.  The terror of this re-absorption is signalled by the text as “a sick rotten smell of death and decay” noticed inside the car by the heroine (235), Arnie’s father (226) stray passengers (322), the teenage narrator (493), and Arnie himself (373). 
	As the novel moves towards its close these images are augmented by non-human elements in the similes of she-wolf and sabre tooth. The implication of age-old evil is again expanded until the car has acquired a “terrible female force that animated her” (507), an “old and infinitely clever she-monster” (521). It is this motorized monstrous-feminine that the teenage narrator traps in the deserted garage, and with the help/bait of the heroine, uses a sewage collection truck to batter, eventually, to death. 
	These escalating images of gynophobia illustrate King’s reliance on horror tradition, whether it be the original Gothic (Indick) the “American romance” of Poe and Hawthorne (Magistrale 16-21), or Dracula and recent horror work (Herron, 138-140). In this case, however, tradition works against his possible project. If the novel is trying to foreground the monstrosity of a car-man marriage, the abnormality of a car as wife is lost in the deluge of images that make it monstrously feminine. If, as has also been argued, LeBay may actually control Christine4, then the novel follows the same trajectory as King’s story “The Library Policeman”. Here the protagonist’s trauma is found to spring from childhood molestation by a man outside a library; but the story then devotes its second half to tracking down another ET monster in the shape of a female librarian. So in Christine it is the car that carries the weight of power and menace, the car that exerts the fatal attraction, the car that is seen doing murder, the car that is hunted down and killed. 
	One might argue, in fact, that the basic terror of the novel is the image of a machine out of control, overlaid, by the traditional gynophobic images, with the far more deep-seated terror of a woman out of control. A similar nightmare emerges in recent films like Basic Instinct (1993) and Single White Female (1994), that deny statistical reality to emphasise the terror of female killers. Hence assertions of LeBay’s overriding “fury” may be read as attempts to mitigate this second, far worse nightmare. It is noticeable, too, that these assertions only become coherent after the car itself has been destroyed.  On the one hand this may be read as a conventional thriller revelation of the “real villain.” On the other, two of three readers, like three of the four critics, found the novel’s central horror in Christine. The car-woman brisure has then destabilised the depiction of a human-machine marriage, which in turn unsettles the man/car hierarchy and opens the novel to alternate readings. That the text has in fact given most of its literary mileage to the car as monstrous-feminine argues a project and a cultural tradition that have eluded the writer’s control. 
	In constructing Christine, then, King contends not only with the conventions of the horror genre but with the discourses, the cultural legacy and inherited cognitive maps he must use to make his horror comphrehensible. Gail Burns and Melinda Kanner have already sketched the danger here for a writer who leans on generic tradition. Picking up King’s own admission of a problem in constructing believable women characters and his inability to rectify it (Beahm 58-9), they derive this, not from his ability to write, but from “the deeply unconscious, culturally shared understandings of what constitutes Woman that emerge from ... these novels” (159). Thus, even though Christine actually gestures toward feminism once or twice, having the teenage narrator admit he is a sexist or male chauvinist pig (71; 566), King cannot take this resistance beyond lip service. Christine as demon car may be topical; but as the unchanged cover implies, Christine as female monster is culturally timeless. The brisure of car-woman equivalence, and the weight of gynophobic tradition, ensure that the novel’s strongest intelligible abject remains a feminized monster, rather than a demonized machine.
END-NOTES
1. I am indebted for this phrase to a Para.Doxa referee.
2. On p.65 in Of Grammatology, Derrida quotes a letter from a friend offering as “a single word for designating difference and articulation”, brisure, whose meaning is both “broken, cracked part”, and “hinge or folding-joint.” See Kamuf, 55.
3. “Gynophobia,” formed by analogy with “homophobia,” “arachnophobia,” would mean an irrational fear of women.
4. This possibility is argued by a Para.Doxa referee.

WORKS CITED

Badley, Linda C. “Love and Death in the American Car: Stephen King’s Auto-Erotic Horror.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Horror. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 84-94.
Beahm, George, ed. The Stephen King Companion. London: Futura, 1991.
Burns, Gail E. and Melinda Kanner. “Women, Danger and Death: The Perversion of the Female Principle in Stephen King’s Fiction”. Sexual Politics and Popular Culture. Ed. Diane Raymond. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1990. 158-172.
Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. 
Davis, Jonathon P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. 1972. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 1981. 61-156.
Egan, James. “Technohorror: The Dystopian Vision of Stephen King.” Extrapolation 29.2 (1988): 140-152.
Ellison, Harlan. “Harlan Ellison’s Watching.” The Stephen King Companion. Ed. George Beahm. London: Futura, 1991.
Fitting, Peter. “The Second Alien.” “Symposium on Alien.” Ed. Charles Elkin. Science-Fiction Studies  7.3 (1980): 285‑293.
Grixti, Joseph. The Terrors of Uncertainty: the Cultural Context of Horror Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989.
Hamilton, Roberta. The  Liberation  of Women: A  Study of  Patriarchy and Capitalism. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. 
Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.
Herron, Don. “Stephen King: The Good, the Bad and the Academic.” Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. Ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. New York: Plume, 1986. 129-157.
Indick, Ben. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.”Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King 1976-192. 1982.  Ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. London: Pan, 1990. 153-167.
Kamuf, Peggy. “Headnote to Of Grammatology.” A Derrida Reader: Between The Blinds. Ed. and Introduction Peggy Kamuf. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 31-33.
King, Stephen. Christine. 1983. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1990. 
---. Danse Macabre. 1981. London: Futura, 1991. 
---. The Dark Half. 1989. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1990.
---. It. 1986. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1989.
---. “The Library Policeman.” Four Past Midnight. 1990. New York: New American Library, 1991.
---. “The Mangler.” 1972. Night Shift. 1978. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1982.
---. “Nona.” 1985. Skeleton Crew. 1985. London: Futura, 1991. 389‑426.
---. The Shining. 1977. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1991.
---. The Stand. 1978. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1980.
---. “Trucks.” 1973. Night Shift. 1978. London: New English Library. Hodder and Stoughton, 1982. 138-152.
---. “Word Processor of the Gods.” 1983. Skeleton Crew. 1985. London: Futura, 1991.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1988.
Neale, Stephen.  “Genre and Cinema.” Popular Television and  Film. Ed. Tony Bennett et al. London: BFI, 1981. 6‑25.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Shuttle, Penelope, and Peter Redgrove. The Wise Wound: the Myths, Realities and Meanings of Menstruation. 1978. New York: Grove, 1988.
Stallybrass, Peter,  and  Allon White. The Poetics  and Politics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.
Twitchell, James. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.