Roll on two: Ambiguous energies in Stephen King’s The Shining, The Green Mile and Revival

Abstract

This article positions King as both heir to the literary romantics and arbiter of contemporary issues as located specifically within his representation of energy, and electricity in particular. Writing both within and beyond horror, King both characterizes and creates energic structures that reflect both romantic aesthetic conceptualizations of electricity and modern concerns regarding its generation and fuel consumption more generally. By examining how The Shining (1977), The Green Mile (1996) and Revival (2014) present energy and also formally generate it, I will explore a little attended to element of King’s work and identify how energy functions ambiguously within these texts, materializing both horror and hope, bringing about both the conclusion and continuation of human life. I will also explore how the particular spaces this power is located within both channel and amplify it, King’s work here a surprising textual conduit for our fascination with, reliance on and fear of energy and the ongoing problems and potentialities alive within it.