A King's Religion

Wes Craven grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home. Stephen King grew up in the Methodist church. Who woulda’ thunk it?

Although I’ve yet to see some ripples of that upbringing in Red Eye, Scream or Nightmare on Elm Street, I have seen them in a novel by King and in his memoir On Writing.

It made me seriously consider where King’s life may lay; but only for an hour or so. I finished Desperation and then realized my delusions of spiritual grandeur. King may be been brought up in the as a Methodist but the ripples of his rearing didn’t flow into what I wanted to see in his novel.

Like countless other believers, I wanted to see some sense of spiritual truth in some celebrity to make my faith seem more real, more authentic. As if some celebrity could truly authentic anything except the shallow vacuousness of celebrity. But I read between the lines to find it anyway.

Probably not since The Stand has King written something so overtly religious as Desperation. The premise is easy: a cast of random characters is imprisoned by a devilishly supernatural cop in a small mining town where something sinister was dug up in the mines.

The leader of the survivors is a pre-adolescent boy named David Carver, who, a year or two earlier, had a conversion experience where his prayer of faith miraculously healed a friend who was deathly ill. David had then had regular meetings with a priest to dialogue about faith. That faith is what makes for some dramatic, although sometimes silly scenes in the book.

All of the survivors were locked away in prison cells when David had a vision, or heard a voice direct him to a bar of Irish Spring soap in his cell. So he stripped down, soaped up and began to slip through the steel bars. And somehow, miraculously, his head was able to squeeze through as well. He said later that God directed him to the soap which enabled to escape the prison and find keys to free everyone else.

The oddest scene was in an abandoned theatre where all the survivors had holed up to escape the cop. People were looking for food and found a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a couple of cans of sardines. Before devouring the only food everyone had had in over twelve hours, David thought of asking the blessing on the food. After quelling objections from some of the people, David prayed and asked a blessing. Then one person began passing around the bag. Somehow, everyone was able to take from the sleeve of Ritz and all received a can of sardines. Somehow, the brown paper bag never ran out of sardines and crackers.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get upset at that. Or if I should really do either.

So there were some other religious imagery scattered throughout the novel but they all seemed to be disconnected and disjointed. They didn’t flow together in some bigger picture or prove to work together to make some kind of religious point. They were merely plot devices without any meaning.

This can only be expected considering how King writes. He prefers to not plot out his stories but only try to develop his characters. This isn’t a horrible way to write but then the story can almost seem aimless.

In spite of the aimless imagery, King did have a little redeeming theology that was worked into the story. David Carver and another of the survivors, a cocky writer surely to be modeled after part of King’s own personality, came to the conclusion that God can be cruel but refining. This was the one redeeming facet to the seven hundred pages of horrific and Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like gore.

Another revealing passage on King’s religious beliefs came in the middle of On Writing. King was hired to move some furniture to make ends meet during his early writing career. He was in the trailer home of the mom of a girl that gave King the idea for writing Carrie. Inside the trailer was an ugly crucifix:

“Dominating the trailer’s living room was a nearly life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. He was naked except for a rag twisted around his hips and loins. Above this bit of breechclout were the hollowed belly and the jutting ribs of a concentration-camp inmate. It occurred to me that Sondra (the girl who inspired Carrie) had grown up beneath the agonal gaze of this dying god, and doing so had undoubtedly played a part in making her what she was when I knew her: a timid and homely outcast who went scuttling through the halls of Lisbon High like frightened mouse.

‘That’s Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior,’ Sondra’s mother said, following my gaze. ‘Have you been saved, Steve?’

I hastened to tell her I was saved as saved could be, although I didn’t think you could ever be good enough to have that version of Jesus intervene on your behalf. The pain had driven him out of is mind. You could see it in his face. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn’t be in a saving mood.”