Two titans of literature—separated by over 400 years. One a poet, one a grisly horror writer.
In the 2026 book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, renowned Shakespeare scholar Caroline Bicks ‘89 explores how William Shakespeare and Stephen King (one widely regarded as the finest writer in the English language, the other known as “the king of horror”) are connected—from their skill in characterization, to the ways they build tension and fear in their stories.
As the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, Bicks was granted access to the writer's personal papers and had the chance to correspond with the writer himself—an experience chronicled in Monsters in the Archives.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your work on William Shakespeare lead you to Stephen King and the study of horror?
I was preparing my job talk for the Stephen E. King Chair position. The English department was looking for an early modernist, and I was deep into my project, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World. On a whim, I took my 40-year-old copy of Carrie off the shelf to see if I might find some connection between King’s teenage girl character and some of Shakespeare’s. It fell open to the page where King describes the awakening of Carrie’s telekinetic powers as “mental puberty,” a phrase that perfectly captured the essence of what I was arguing about adolescent girls’ brainwork. Both authors’ writings tap into the embodied, human response to horror, and the core fears that animate it: losing the people and beliefs that we love and rely on. Once I got into King’s archives and started researching this book, I discovered that he, like Shakespeare, also intentionally mobilizes the power of word sounds—using them (as he told me) to “clang on the reader’s ear” and produce enduring effects.
Does Stephen King challenge the divide between “literary” and “popular” fiction?
Yes. Just as Shakespeare, Dickens, Shirley Jackson, and countless other popular authors did before him, although most weren’t recognized as “literary” by the elitist (usually jealous) gatekeepers of their time. In 1592, the Cambridge-educated Robert Greene called Shakespeare an “upstart crow”; in 2003, when King was honored by the National Book Foundation, Yale literary critic Harold Bloom called him an “immensely inadequate writer” with no sign of “inventive human intelligence.” [But] King is extraordinarily well-read and literary-minded. I found him citing Emerson in a response to a copyeditor, and Macbeth in an early draft of The Shining. In his novel The Long Walk—which he wrote when he was 17—he quotes Andrew Marvell. You can see (and hear) how his engagement with these literary texts affects the crafting of his prose. He told me that when he wrote ’Salem’s Lot he was immersed in James Dickey’s poetry: “Sometimes as a writer, another writer will show you the way in.”
How do you think technology is changing our relationship to writing and creativity?
I suspect that those of us who grew up writing on legal pads and typewriters still have a pretty good sense of our ability to think for ourselves. And obviously there are plenty of talented younger writers out there who have figured out how to put technology to good use. Like most educators, though, I’ve noticed a marked decline in my students’ attention spans and confidence when it comes to creating their own ideas and writing them down.
The embrace of A.I. and the glorification of “efficiency” by universities and American culture more broadly are exacerbating the problem, of course. Why shouldn’t a student game the system (and the teacher) by submitting A.I-generated writing if everyone else is doing it? That said, I haven’t given up hope. My classes are device-free (unless a student has an accommodation). We read hard copies of the books together, which makes a tremendous difference in how my students engage with the text. They also like writing in class because there are fewer distractions and temptations, so I’ve shifted more to that model—not as a way to police, but to support their creativity.
Did studying King’s revisions change how you think about the writing process?
When I started my archival work, I didn’t know what my process would be for this book, or even if I’d write one. I just wanted to explore how King had created some of the scariest moments from the books I had read when I was a teenager. Words and phrases were still sticking in my head forty years later, and—as a literary scholar—I wanted to understand why. As I got deeper into his manuscripts, and re-experienced all the sickening, heart-thumping fears I’d originally felt, I realized that this was going to be a story about how well-crafted language makes us feel something, whether that’s fear or joy or anger. I became more attuned to these connections as I studied his revisions and talked to him about his choices. When I sat down to write my book, I made a conscious decision to bring my personal story into it. As scholars, we’re taught to perform an emotional disengagement with our subjects. But, as I learned from King, the most effective writing (whether academic or fictional), connects readers to the humanity of the storyteller.
Why is fear such a powerful tool for literature? What keeps readers coming back to stories that scare them?
King’s literature has affected millions of people across cultures and generations, and a large part of that stems from his ability to write stories that meet us where we are as we age and our fears morph. As an anxious 12-year-old, I was terrified of his short story The Boogeyman, which is about a monster killing children in their bedrooms. When I asked him what inspired him to write it, he told me that, at the time, he was a father to two small children and very worried about crib death. That story endures because King was able to capture the vulnerability and fears of two different life stages as he crafted it. King describes a good horror story as a form of therapy, a filter that allows us to metabolize our traumas, real and imagined, without forcing us to look directly at them.
