Stephen King and the Corrective Role of Fiction

(spoilers involved)

I spent some time thinking what my new blog post should address. I thought of keeping with The Odyssey and explaining why, in my view, the new Nolan movie was a massive fail and utter disappointment, but I decided against it. I thought keeping to interesting ideas from literature would make a proper topic, so … I picked Stephen King and his meditations on the corrective role of fiction.

I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a bit with this one.

Why Stephen King and not one of my favorites, Saramago, Houellebecq or Márquez? Well, that in itself is an interesting story. One lesson in lawyering – and one I obstinately repeat to my students – is to never assume. Yet this is exactly what I did with Stephen King for a long time. I was familiar with movies and TV shows based on his books and came to assume he was an author of consumption, writing (good) horror novels. Thus, I kept myself away from the books and stuck to the movies.

Then, in 2024, while looking for an ‘easy’ listen on my Romanian audiobook provider, I stumbled upon 11.22.63. I absolutely loved it (to be fair, besides the quality of the content, the narrator’s voice played a large part), and since then I have listened to almost everything available on that platform, almost 15 books. I became a fan.

And I owe Stephen King some apologies for my assumptions. Better late than never, I guess.

11.22.63 also became the first example of a certain theme I came to identify in other King writings, such as Misery, Billy Summers, Pet Sematary, The Shining and The Answer Man. There are more, but the thoughts and conclusions below are based on these ones.

The theme is the alteration of reality. But, increasingly, I came to think that underneath it lies something else: a meditation on our inability to accept reality and our very human desire to correct it.

King’s characters repeatedly try to change what happened, escape what will happen, bring back what was lost, or somehow regain control over a reality they cannot accept. Usually, this goes badly. Reality is remarkably stubborn in his novels. Writing, however, is different.

11.22.63

For those unfamiliar with it, 11.22.63 is about a time portal and the mission of one man to save JFK. He succeeds, but the cost of this alteration is so high that he decides to travel back and restore the original timeline.

The most interesting idea I got from this was not the time portal or the time-travel paradox (which appears in countless sci-fi novels and movies), but the idea that the past actively resists modification, making significant alterations increasingly dangerous. The resistance seems to hint at predestination and our inability to escape fate. The disasters ensuing from the alteration point towards the same idea.

But there is something more.

Despite being successful, the character learns that things could be worse and, therefore, that reality should simply be left to be. In other words, he learns the hard way to let go of stuff that has already happened and not mess with time. It is a lesson in humanity, acceptance and moving on. It also communicates something that becomes important in the other books: reality cannot be corrected by reality. We need something else.

Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary approaches the same problem from a much more intimate direction. The novel is deeply relatable without needing to live through the experiences described there: loss of a beloved pet, loss of a child or loss of a spouse. This relatability is what makes it so powerful and scary.

The inability to let go and accept reality – which King reused in 11.22.63 – is already present here, for the main character cannot deal with loss, whether personal or not. He resurrects his daughter’s cat and, when tragedy strikes and he loses his son in a road accident, he resurrects him too, even though he knows that what returns is deeply altered.

Forced to kill what he brought back after his son kills his friend and wife, he nevertheless slips onto exactly the same path of non-acceptance and rationalization and resurrects his wife. These altering events take a toll on his mind and appearance and, most likely, by the end he is completely mad.

Just as in 11.22.63, reality – the past, whether recent or not – finds a way to fight back. The changes made to reality have catastrophic consequences. Order needs to be restored by itself and humans should not play with powers they cannot comprehend. There is something almost cruel in this. The terrible thing happened. You want it not to have happened. You might give almost anything to undo it. You can’t.

And this is where the other King novels become particularly interesting.

Misery

The entirety of Misery is a large meditation on writing, but, to me, and to the argument I am building here, the most important moment comes at the end.

The mutilated author has escaped his demented jailor and managed to get home. However, one night, he returns to his flat only to be attacked and murdered by her. It is a terrifying POV, ending with the decisive blow – only for the narrator to tell us that it happened entirely in his head. We are also told this could have been the reality. But it wasn’t.

And here King does something very different from what happens in 11.22.63 or Pet Sematary. The past has not changed. The mutilation happened. The captivity happened. The trauma remains. Reality stays the same, for what is done is done. But the perception of it, the thought of it, can be altered.

Writing allows one to rewrite painful realities and deal with traumatic experiences. Writing can function as therapy. And, perhaps, it can do even more than that.

Billy Summers

This idea reappears, even more clearly, in Billy Summers.

Billy is a professional hitman who poses as a writer for his last job. Although successful, he is betrayed by those he worked for and decides to take vengeance while actively writing his memoir. In his quest for vengeance, Billy is shot and mortally wounded. Yet he uses the last pages of his memoir to grant himself a happy ending, in which he survives the wound, becomes an author and lives happily ever after with his newfound love.

We only know this not to be true because of a postscript from his girlfriend revealing that he actually died, leaving behind a manuscript in which he altered reality – and his legacy. This is where the corrective role of fiction becomes much clearer. Writing is not just therapy and a way of coping, but both a fortress against a cruel universe and an escape from it.. By writing things not as they are, but as you want them to be, you master your own fate, your own story, and ensure that the bad, the evil, is defeated. Reality has won. Billy is dead. But reality does not get the last word. Despite the grim reality, writing can still turn it into a fairy tale.

There is an important distinction here. Billy does not alter reality in the way the characters in 11.22.63 and Pet Sematary try to do. Instead, he alters its narrative. He cannot control what happens to him, but he can still exercise some control over the story of his life. Perhaps this is one of the strange forms of sovereignty fiction leaves us with when reality takes everything else away.

The Shining

Since we spoke of madness, The Shining shows how evil forces take control of a writer and recreate a scripted scenario in which he goes mad and kills his family. Once again, there seems to be little room for alteration. Yet here the character manages to change not reality, but his own ending. In the final confrontation, where he is supposed to kill his own son, the character awakens for a brief moment and allows his son to escape.

This seems to indicate that while reality might be inexorable, and while the past might be unchangeable, one’s own fate might still lie, at least partly, in his or her own hands. We might not be able to save everyone, or the universe, but we can still save something. We might not be able to rewrite world history, but we can rewrite and reinvent our own.

Which brings me to:

The Answer Man

This one might seem only loosely related to everything above. It is not about writing, nor about attempts to alter the past. But the idea of alteration stems from a very human need for control. And control is deeply connected to knowing. If only we knew what awaits us, we could, perhaps, change it. Again, we encounter the inability to accept reality, whether past, present or upcoming. The character eventually does accept it and even manages to find his life’s meaning. But that is not why the novella got my attention and made it onto this list.

In the story, the character gets five minutes of answers to questions. He can obtain accurate knowledge of the future. Obviously, you might think that once the future is revealed it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one could discuss the conflict between free will and predestination as it transpires from the story. But King does something else. His character is simply unable to deal with the pressure of such revelations. He struggles to find the right questions. And he struggles to understand the true meaning of the answers.

His human nature limits the benefits he could obtain from knowing the future. Lacking context and having access only to bits and pieces, the information he gets is mostly useless. It gives him only an illusion of control, leads him towards the wrong conclusions, and leaves him unable to outsmart or change fate. In the end, he needs to do what the character in 11.22.63 learns to do and the one in Pet Sematary should have done: Accept things as they are.

I think this completes the picture. King seems deeply skeptical of the human desire to control reality. We cannot necessarily repair the past. Knowing the future would not necessarily allow us to control it. Sometimes we cannot even prevent the terrible thing from happening in the present. What we can do is tell stories.

And perhaps this is where fiction acquires its corrective role. It does not correct reality by pretending that reality is different. The dead remain dead. Trauma remains part of the past. History remains history. Rather, fiction creates a space in which reality can be communicated, rearranged, interpreted, redeemed, punished, forgiven or simply given an ending it refused to provide.

The writer cannot master reality. But the writer can master the story.

I think it is fair to say that novels which raise these kinds of themes, in a manner far more profound than what I could do in a blog post and in such a relatable and deeply touching way, deserve a careful read – and fewer assumptions. Hence my initial apologies, and my persistence with his novels. And hence my recommendation that you read them and drop whatever assumptions you may have. I’m glad I did.

There is, however, one last thing. Since my initial thought was to address a movie, I would mention here the movie which, to me, reflects best this writing philosophy: Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Besides the masterful acting, I think I enjoyed that movie because of the grim story behind it. We know what happened to Sharon Tate and the others murdered by members of the Manson Family. We know that history. Tarantino cannot alter it, but fiction could.

In his movie, Tarantino was able to change the ending of the Manson murders and give evil the fate it deserved. History is not changed, of course. Instead, he created an alternate reality that we might have wished for. One that is deeply satisfying and cathartic. A fairy tale – as the title foreshadows: once upon a time – that corrects reality, even if only for a few hours.

And perhaps that is the paradox I found most interesting in all these books. King repeatedly tells stories about the danger, futility or impossibility of correcting reality. His characters discover that the past cannot safely be rewritten, that death cannot be reversed, that knowledge does not necessarily confer control, and that fate has an unpleasant habit of refusing our instructions. His characters discover they have limits.

And yet King himself is a writer. He does with fiction what his characters cannot do with reality. He changes endings. He creates meaning. He lets evil be defeated. He allows people who cannot control what happened to them to regain some control of their stories. And he does so masterfully.

Reality cannot always give us justice, redemption, meaning or a happy ending. Fiction can. And that’s what makes fiction great.