Regan Flieg: Reading to Know We’re Not Alone and the Case of Horror

In my research on the horror novels of Stephen King for another class,  one of the ideas I came across interacted interestingly with the one we’ve looked at together in this course that we read to know we’re not alone.  One of the essays that I read argued that one of the appeals of reading these often uncomfortable stories is that “the overwhelming impression to be gained from reading King’s books is that the kinks and the sadists are the exception, not the rule” (Notkin 152).  I thought this idea had relevance to our class since it provides an almost paradoxical version of the claim that we read to know we’re not alone.  

Readers of horror, rather than merely reading to know they’re not alone, are simultaneously reading to know they have a profound and fundamental separation from a certain category of people, which Notkin describes as “the kinks and the sadists” (152).  Her idea expands upon reading to know we aren’t alone because it implies that, by  reading accounts of fictional horror, which she also sees as “practically comic relief from the grim reality of the 11:00 o’clock news,” we are both seeking a sense of communion with others and disunion with another group  (Notkin 151).  Likewise, this adds to Tolkien’s claim that we use fiction to fulfil the “primordial human desire[...] to hold communion with other living things” (44).  Notkin’s essay implies that while we do have this desire to feel connected with others, it does not extend to all others.  In fact, we can see that there may be a somewhat opposing desire that we turn to fiction to fulfill: a desire to feel separated from those people we regard as evil.  What Notkin’s essay adds to our discussion of the appeal of story is that perhaps just as much as we need to find union with the people we see as good, we desire to feel that we are separated from those who, at least in our minds, embody evil.  It may not be just that we read to know we are not alone but that we read to know we are not alone in our opposition to the evil we see in the world.


Notkin, Deborah L. “Stephen King: Horror and Humanity for Our Time.” Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Signet, 1985, pp. 151-62.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1947, pp. 38-89.

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