Our 3-week class is underway! One of the things I have found challenging in bringing King into this compressed format in past offerings is how to get students engaging with his work on Day 1. We have a ton of great stuff to discuss and not much time together, so making the most of that first day is really important, both for getting in as much content as possible and helping students hit the ground running, to build excitement and engagement as we move forward. 

Our class meets for an hour and half in the morning and again in the afternoon and while that Day 1 morning session is pretty reliably structured (syllabus, schedule of readings, course expectations, King background, etc.), the afternoon session can be more of a challenge. The goal for that first afternoon is to introduce students to the literary terminology that will be foundational as we move forward and give them the opportunity to try their hand at its application on a specific King text, but that’s where things get tricky: some students come to the class having read King before, while others are reading him for the first time. Giving students a short story to silently read on their own in class and then discuss has multiple pitfalls, including different student reading speeds and just not being a very exciting way to spend our first afternoon together. I have tried different approach in the past, like reading an excerpt of a longer piece together (okay, but lacks the cohesiveness a whole narrative and limits literary analysis on some fronts) and having students engage with the pop-up book version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) (fun, but difficult for students to see the finer details of the book). 

This time around, I chose King’s “N.” (featured in the 2008 collection Just After Sunset) as our introductory text and hit the jackpot. “N.” has been adapted in a range of formats, including the 2011 Marvel comic version and a series of CBS Mobile webseries of micro-episodes adapted from the comic. We watched the webseries together as a class, which allowed us to engage with the narrative in its entirety in a relatively short amount of time (just under 30 minutes total), and analyze all of the core literary elements that lay the foundation for our critical discussions moving forward, which include plot, setting, characterization, point of view, style, and theme. 

After watching the webseries, we worked our way through the literary terminology and its application as a class, providing students the opportunity to get some hands-on practice and become comfortable with these key concepts, which are essential in their own reading and our other discussions moving forward. We break down the plot in terms of stages (exposition, rising action, climax/turning point, falling action, and resolution) as well as impact (consideration of time, causal relationships, and dramatic tension). We consider setting in terms of both time and place (with “N.”’s Motton a great opportunity to talk a bit about King’s literary geography and fictional Maine), engage with the core characters, and think through the complexities of the shifting point of view throughout the story. (Bonus: in considering point of view and style, the story is a perfect in for a brief discussion of epistolary style, which comes up again when we read “Jerusalem’s Lot” from the 1978 Night Shift collection). For our analysis of style, I posted a brief excerpt from King’s short story and from the Marvel comic on our course page, which gives students the chance to do some brief comparative reading and lets us talk through the ways that different mediums present the same story to us in different ways, from the pure text of the story, to the text and images of the comic, and the text, images, cinematography, and sound of the webseries. Finally, when we turned our attention to theme, I was excited to discover that “N.” exists at the intersection of all three of our key course themes: connections between classic and contemporary horror (through its Lovecraftian influence), monsters, and the central importance of perspective. 

I change things up every time I teach this class, but I think “N.” is going to become a Day 1 afternoon staple: it allowed us to really get into the nuts and bolts of King’s work and literary analysis from the very first day; the multiple formats highlight the complexity of King’s writing, both in his connection with classic literary traditions and his influence on popular culture; it sets the stage beautifully for the themes we’ll engage with moving forward (and their intersection); and it’s a whole lot of fun.