A new school year has started (and with this return to routine, I vow a return to a more regular, every Tuesday publishing pattern again) and while I’m not teaching any King-specific classes this fall, I am teaching American Literature, which we are exploring through the American Gothic literary tradition.

There is so much that makes King uniquely American: from frequent popular culture and name brand references to his small town settings and his focus on the significance of place, land, and the history that is intimately connected with it, King’s writing is not just distinctly Maine, but distinctly American, a theme that can perhaps be most impactfully explored through The Stand (1978; revised and expanded in 1990), where travel through diverse American landscapes and locations is central to the story itself. (Speaking of The Stand, I am eagerly awaiting delivery of The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, and we will almost certainly take a detour into Stand-land when that arrives!).

There are a number of central characteristics to the American Gothic tradition, including those that distinguish its unique national tenor from the more established European tradition. One of the foundational themes that my students and I are beginning to explore in this early part of the class is the danger of the wilderness, the threat of what lurks in the darkness beyond the edge of the firelight. Some of King’s explorations of this Gothic wilderness are pretty classic in their representation, like Louis Creed’s terrifying, repeated journeys to the Micmac burial ground in Pet Sematary (1983) or the horrors Gary encounters in “The Man in the Black Suit” (in Everything’s Eventual, 2002). But perhaps because The Stand has been on my mind, with its range of techno-horrors—in those that cause the end of the world, those that are seized and abused, and those which are lost as “civilization” crumbles—I also find myself thinking of the more extraterrestrial Gothic horrors that hide in the shadows of the wilderness, like those in The Tommyknockers (1987), Dreamcatcher (2001), and Under the Dome (2009). This feels like both an anachronistic combination and one that highlights the uneasy coexistence of the natural world with technologies beyond our control, further complicated by the dual threats of dangers from the extraterrestrial and the human, given our species’ propensity to be corrupted by power, even—or perhaps particularly—that which we don’t fully understand.

My students and I are beginning our time together by exploring this Gothic wilderness: we started with some Native American legends, are discussing an excerpt from Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) tomorrow, and will be settling in for an extended visit with our Gothic grandfather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, by the end of the week. As we turn our attention to the past and the mysterious wilderness, it’s interesting to consider that those deep dark woods still hold plenty of threats in King’s contemporary fiction, with dangers both timeless and technological.