Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and the American Detective

Most critics assume that it is a specifically Gothic/supernatural influence that King inherited from Poe’s work. Most frequently referenced are the Poe chestnuts: “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and of course “The Raven.” However, neither King himself nor any critic discussing King’s fiction in this context has ever mentioned—much less deconstructed in detail—Poe’s importance to, and influence on, detective fiction. By revisiting Poe’s influence upon King not simply through Poe’s more obvious contributions to the American Gothic, but through the complexity of his ratiocination tales, the authors propose a radical paradigm shift in King scholarship. Like Poe, King remains obsessed with detectives—not just in his more recent crime fiction, but throughout his career. Laying crucial groundwork for exploring the intertextual connections that exist between King and Edgar Allan Poe with special attention to individual texts where both writers rely mutually on reason and rationality as a means for confronting and containing the horrors that their characters encounter. Just as Poe sutured together elements of horror and rationality not only in his detective tales but also in those stories that are not typically categorized as tales of ratiocination, King has also created multiple occasions where horror and detection form an uneven admixture. King’s literary universe, despite his popular genre association, is no more exclusively contained within the horror genre than was Poe’s.