Moderns Love Metaphysical Fiction
Influenced by the Enlightenment to believe only the material world exists later endorsing shtick like ‘it’s either science or the supernatural you cannot have both’ reveals moderns and the supernatural just do not go together.
Yet the supernatural is alive and well as good fiction just ask best-selling author Stephen King with his books firmly grounded in the mystic and that is a fact.
King is a prolific author hailed as the best contemporary fiction writer and king of the metaphysical genre.
He understands readers’ love a well-crafted yarn rooted in otherworldly mystery, but there is more to his tales because they full of illuminating reminders as well.
In many of his books, there is the presence of some sort of preternatural or supernatural evil force that plagues the protagonist(s)
What’s interesting is how King’s work challenges the modernist secular conception of reality with spiritual and theological resonances throughout, helping us see how the neutered, empiricist picture provided by modernity is insufficient to deal with the world we actually inhabit.
King even brings Christ himself into the equation with a character’s thoughts. Christ’s walking on the water is the polar opposite of the darkness of demonic entities, real or fictional. Yet for a boy like Stan Uris (and for King’s readers), inculcated as he is by the modernist ethos (and who among is not?), even the light of Christ walking on the water, subduing chaotic storms is “offense.”
King himself, while believing in God, is no orthodox Christian and actively thinks organized religion is harmful.
His book ‘Revival’ is a likely swipe at American Mega Church preachers in the revivalist mold, labelled as a showman (men) on stage ‘creating dazzling portraits of lightening’, in this story’s case literally, with revival having many meanings.
We may believe in “spiritual forces” theoretically, but we don’t think they’ll ever impinge on our lives so often we ascribe it to mythological language or something that only crazy, snake-handling fundamentalists believe.
An excerpt from King’s latest novel ‘The Outsider’ describes the dilemma of many of his modernist characters:
“A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones [that had been toppled over by hateful people] or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.”
What Stephen King’s supernatural and horror fiction does so well is to unsettle us, it upsets the tidy little world modernity has given us with no supernatural (let alone divine) feet allowed in the metaphorical door of our lived experiences.
If we can convince ourselves that there is nothing beyond natural laws and matter in motion then we can also convince ourselves that we are ultimately in control of the world and our existence in it.
There are so many King novels and everyone has their preferences but his Dark Tower series is his Magnum Opus, a veritable portal to the spiritual realm.
Writer H P Lovecraft, thought to be a loose type of forerunner to King with their main difference being the former’s dreams drove him crazy while King is made of stronger stuff so his novels offer hope (mostly) instead of despair.
