Counter-Currents
American Nightmares: The Auto-Ethnophobia of Stephen King
Tobias Langdon
1,962 words
The New England schlockmeister Stephen King is a bad but interesting writer. Success is an interesting phenomenon, after all, and King is one of the most successful writers who have ever lived. Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, he has sold millions of books in dozens of languages and won even wider exposure through film adaptations of novels like Carrie (1974) and The Shining (1977). His American nightmares have been hugely popular both at home and abroad.
But what are those nightmares? For Stephen King, the answer often seems to be this: America’s nightmares are the bad behavior of its whites and of its white men in particular. King’s life has coincided with the rise and triumph of anti-white Leftism in America. Could he have been successful if he had opposed Leftism and celebrated America’s whites rather than denigrating them? More narrowly, could he have been successful without pandering to America’s hostile Jewish elite?
Give Grease a Chance
There are many examples of this pandering in his short-story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993), but the book is old enough to contain things that would now be regarded as blasphemous by enlightened opinion. For example, there’s a highly unpleasant homosexual villain in “Sneakers,” which is about a ghost haunting a lavatory, and an even more unpleasant Turkish villain in “Popsy,” which is about a white child abductor:
Sheridan paused for a moment, feeling the familiar soft wave of self-disgust. . . though every time he took a child, the feeling grew a little less. The first time he hadn’t been able to sleep for a week. He kept thinking about that big greasy Turk who called himself Mr Wizard, kept wondering what he did with the children.
“They go on a boat-ride, Mr Sheridan,” the Turk told him, only it came out as Day goo on a bot-rahd, Messtair Shurdunn. The Turk smiled. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t ask any more about it, that smile said, and it said it loud and clear, without an accent.
That is a good example of the updated clichés King often deals in. In the 1930s, a popular writer would very likely have represented Mr. Wizard as Jewish, not Turkish. [1]
By the 1990s, that was no longer possible, but you can still see an anti-Semitic stereotype lurking beneath King’s description. He may not have been conscious of this himself, and elsewhere he is anxious to reinforce the idea that only bad people — white people — are anti-Semitic. In the story “Dedication,” two saintly and oppressed black women discuss a famous white writer who has unknowingly fathered a child by one of them. With a “bitter derisive smile on her lips,” the black mother describes working as a cleaner at a hotel the writer often uses. She has heard how he “hated the blacks and the Jews” and is “full of ignorance and high-toned filth.”
Rock-star revenants
The story also has a wise black witch-woman with a “smile like sunshine.” King is trying to pander to Leftist ideas about the saintliness and numinosity of black women, but many Leftists would now object to a white male daring to create black female characters. And most Leftists would strongly condemn other parts of the story: the mother calls her black husband a “worthless piece of shit” and she falls pregnant to the white writer by (believe it or not) eating the dried semen that he regularly leaves on the sheets of his hotel bed. He’s a wanker in more senses than one.
Another imperfect white male turns up in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” where a white couple called Clark and Mary are trapped in a demonic town by Clark’s stubbornness and machismo. The town is called Rock’n’Roll Heaven and its initial “resemblance to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to Mary, at least, inescapable.” But if the town looks like a Whitopia, you can be sure that evil lurks beneath the façade. Sure enough, it turns out that Rock’n’Roll Heaven is actually Rock’n’Roll Hell. The town is controlled by rock-star revenants, including a malevolent Buddy Holly, whose eyes weep blood, and a sadistic Elvis Presley, whose “pale hands dangl[e] like dead spiders.”
You can buy It’s Okay to Be White: The Best of Greg Johnson here.
In the Teeth of the Facts
As you can see from his treatment of Holly and Elvis, there are undoubtedly irony and humor in King’s writing, but those qualities don’t contradict his anti-white agenda. Indeed, they often reinforce it. Sadistic humor is certainly used to attack whites in “Chattery Teeth,” which has the theme of violent crime and the harm it does to ordinary hardworking white Americans. In the real America, violent criminals who harm whites are typically black, even though blacks are far outnumbered by whites. But in “Chattery Teeth,” the criminal is a “pallid young man” with “long blonde hair,” “gray-green eyes” and the “face of an intelligent lab-rat.”
He’s a hitchhiker kindly given a lift in a Nevada sandstorm by the story’s protagonist, a salesman called Bill Hogan. But Hogan has misgivings, having once been robbed at gunpoint by a white female hitchhiker. His misgivings are entirely justified. The blond kid first gives him a false name, Bryan Adams, then pulls a knife on him and orders him to stop, intending to steal his customized Dodge camper-van. Hogan refuses to obey, angered by the kid’s ingratitude and by memories of his encounter with the female hitch-hiker. Instead, he does the opposite of what the kid wants: he drives faster and threatens to crash the van, because the kid isn’t wearing a seatbelt.
Shortly afterward, the van does indeed crash and Hogan is trapped in his seat by his jammed seatbelt. Unfortunately, the kid has been only slightly injured and is about to stab Hogan to death when a deus ex machina intervenes. Except it’s more machina than deus, being the jumbo-sized Chattery Teeth of the story’s title. Hogan bought them for his young son at the roadside shop where he met the feral blond kid. The kid picks them up to mock Hogan, not realizing that they have supernatural powers:
One of the orange feet took a sudden step forward on the grimy palm of the kid’s hand. The jaws opened at the same time, and before Hogan was fully aware of what was happening, the Chattery Teeth had closed on the kid’s nose.
This time Bryan Adams’s scream was real — a thing of agony and ultimate surprise. He flailed at the teeth with his right hand, trying to bat them away, but they were locked on his nose as tightly as Hogan’s seatbelt was locked around his middle. Blood and filaments of torn gristle burst out between the canines in red strings. The kid jackknifed backward and for a moment Hogan could see only his flailing body, lashing elbows, and kicking feet.
The story seems to be in part a wish-fulfillment fantasy written for ordinary Americans who have been the victims of violent crime. After all, when Bernhard Goetz shot and wounded four would-be black muggers on the New York subway in 1984, he was acquitted of “attempted murder and first-degree assault charges” by a “mainly white Manhattan jury,” who obviously sympathized with what he’d done. [2] In Goetz’s real New York, the justly punished criminals were black; in King’s fictional Nevada, the justly punished criminal is not merely white but blond and green-eyed with it.
Sterilize Whitey
Nor do the Chattery Teeth confine themselves to biting the blond kid’s nose. King obviously wrote the following scene with the cinema in mind and you can imagine the hilarity it would provoke on the big screen. Leftists in 2021 would object to the reference to an “Al Jolson imitator,” but they would otherwise be delighted to laugh at the suffering of a white:
The kid reached for the teeth again and this time they ran forward, under his snatching hand, between his spread legs, and there was a meaty chump! sound as they closed on the bulge of faded blue denim just below the place where the zipper of the kid’s jeans ended.
Bryan Adams’s eyes flew wide open. So did his mouth. His hands rose to the level of his shoulders, springing wide open, and for a moment he looked like some strange Al Jolson imitator preparing to sing “Mammy.” The switchknife flew over his shoulder to the back of the van.
“Jesus! Jesus! Jeeeeeee–”
The orange feet were pumping rapidly, as if doing a Highland Fling. The pink jaws of the Jumbo Chattery Teeth nodded rapidly up and down, as if saying yes! yes! yes! and then shook back and forth, just as rapidly, as if saying no! no! no!
“–eeeeeeEEEEEEEE–”
As the cloth of the kid’s jeans began to rip — and that was not all that was ripping, by the sound — Bill Hogan passed out.
It’s easy to understand the symbolism of an attack on a criminal’s genitals. A cinema audience would laugh because the kid is suffering pain and humiliation, but they would also recognize that he is being castrated. Stopping criminals having children makes good eugenic sense, but in real rather than fictional America the criminals in question would be overwhelmingly black, not white.
In other words, King’s story takes a genuine problem and offers a genuine solution, but deliberately misidentifies the racial group causing the problem and requiring the solution. Was King protesting too much when he set the story in Nevada and made his criminal a “pallid,” green-eyed blond? Perhaps, but I don’t think the story was a coded piece of race realism, designed to be understood by inversion. If ethnophobia is hatred of a particular ethnic group, then King is clearly an auto-ethnophobe — he expresses hostility to his own ethnic group in book after book and story after story.
Rewarded by the Hostile Elite
His novel The Green Mile (1996) is another good example of his auto-ethnophobia. It contains an almost parodic Numinous Negro, a child-like gentle giant with supernatural powers who is wrongly executed for murdering two white girls. It also contains an evil Southern white, who is both cruel and sexually perverted. Like The Shining and its Numinous Negro, The Green Mile has been made into a film by Hollywood.
If King had drawn a realistic picture of America in his books, celebrating white achievements and identifying blacks as the source of many of America’s problems, it’s certain that he would not have become a best-seller or seen any of his books made into films. Like so many successful writers in the modern West, King has genuflected to anti-white Leftism throughout his career. But what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
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Notes
[1] As the Jewish anti-racist Liz Fekete puts it: “Jews [were] associated with paedophilia in the 1930s.” The late Jeffrey Epstein is good evidence that the association was based more on reality than on gentile malice.
[2] Interestingly, Goetz is described by Wikipedia as having a Lutheran father and Jewish mother. It makes no difference to me: I merely wish that more people with Jewish mothers had the same attitude to black criminality, rather than finding excuses for it.
23 comments
Stephen King–an overrated hack!
King does have his moments sometimes. Unfortunately, he caught a case of limousine leftist syndrome when he made it big. The politically correct stuff has been detracting from the quality of his work.
I’m not a reflexive King hater on literary grounds. I think he’s contributed a lot to the culture and has come up with some good stuff. You might also have talked about Apt pupil or summer of corruption. It has the American metaphysical evil Nazi myth writ large.
But often king is shockingly derivative and bad. For example that most recent thing IT, (a reference to the IT of the usual suspects?) with the clown, is such an obvious takeoff of nightmare on Elm Street, something recently in the pop culture and done so much better in that case. I watched it on the airplane as a captive audience, lol.
One can’t really blame King himself. The culture and publishing, and especially the film industry, are so controlled at this point that one cannot be successful without including these woke elements in their stories. If I as a proud adherent of these websites were going to write a book, I would include all the standard woke elements in order to get published, as a strategy. But then some point I would write a big book with dissident elements and sell all my credibility at once. I would put it online if I had to!
Actually, I do blame King. He made his break in the 1970s, back when publishing was two dozen major corporations (not six) and before it got all pozzed out. As a legacy author, he could get away with putting almost any damn thing on paper. (For evidence, I present his “masterpieces” IT and Tommyknockers, written under the influence of dumb dust.) He could’ve gone on writing quality stuff, but it was his choice to lard up his writing with preachy PC propaganda.
If you are tempted to write for MSM publishers, it’s a lot harder to break in these days. You’ll need to use an ethnic-sounding pseudonym and otherwise check off as many intersectionality boxes as possible on your bio. As for the PC elements, I would recommend overdoing them to the point of comedy, which will likely go over the heads of the gatekeepers and they’ll eat it up like candy.
Paul Theroux is also a New England leftist popular writer who shares King’s White hatred as evidenced in his book on the American South. Like King he is an excellent writer, curious & imaginative but a stand alone individual who insists on traveling solo Anyone else feel this way about old PT? Strange phenomena this ethnomasochism disorder LOL crazy White people
I doubt King hates Whites. He is just an old hippie that turned into a limousine liberal as Beau Albrecht said.
King’s own world view is pretty narrow as he grew up in small town Maine and stayed there even after hitting it big. Local hoodlums in those all White logging towns and mill towns are obviously going to be White. It is true that King writes Black characters like a guy who has not had much experience with them, but it doesn’t matter with corny horror he puts out.
I’m not a big fan of most of his stuff but many of his short stories — and some novels — describe a kind of White imagination and White environment that is fun as escapism.
True horror is not “super”-natural but man’s inhumanity to man, like the Red Terror and Jewish stories of their collective ordeal in Europe during the Second World War.
Yes, the real-life horror that all of us sometimes encounter trumps all Hollywood nonsense about spooks and sprites.
Mr King appears to be a talented prose stylist let down by his horrible taste in subject material. His pandemic novel might have been gripping if he had trimmed it down and omitted the supernatural elements.
There is a certain class of compulsive writer, afflicted with what might be termed the opposite of writers’ block, who flourishes in genre fiction and cannot help but produce uneven material. Michael Moorcock is certainly one such and Stephen King another.
King was someone I read as a teenager. Looking back today, I suspect a lot of of the horror book market is squarely aimed at teenage boys. You feel really edgy and adult reading them but it’s a phase you grow out of, and one quickly grows out of King and this kind of content in general.
As others have said here, success has probably contributed to his anti-whiteness. And we see this a lot with successful authors and successful people in general. I’ve even heard JK Rowling try to retcon-describe her Harry Potter books as a ‘symbolic anti-racist narrative’. I’ve never read them, but I doubt that’s what was really something going through her mind at the time, but something she felt would endear her to power later on. And she’s made various proclamations against racism over time. Of course in her case she found herself on the heretical side of the trans question and now there are attempts to deplatform her from the left and to frame her as a bigoted proto-fascist.
So her anti whiteness didn’t help her.
I don’t know about all of King’s actual writing apart from the examples cited here, but anti-whiteness among successful whites appears to be a sort of pretend game to maintain good favor and prestige with elites and the media, and provides that person with a fictitious but heavily sanctioned position to grandstand on and get worked up about that just happens to be completely safe and risk free.
To us it’s just draining and annoying to watch this bs, and yes these whites are gutless turds and deserve a dire fate and yet I’m not sure all of them are fully in control.
They are responding to power themselves, mouthing the words that are expected of them, and in some cases probably just accept the narrative at face value, which allows them this kind of white supremacism by the back door that Greg has talked about- that all the world’s ills are the fault of whites.
“But if the town looks like a Whitopia, you can be sure that evil lurks beneath the façade. ”
Side note, but this is a problem I have with David Lynch, who’s well liked on CC as a director. I find his ‘evil lurking beneath whitopia’ very unconvincing and Lynch is not thought to be leftist but more rightward leaning.
Could be wrong but I sense creators reaching for an easy soft target with this.
In DL’s case I believe some of it is due simply to old-age. I watched ‘Twin Peaks’ 3’rd season (yes, I sat through every awful second) and was shocked at how bad it was. Lynch was about 75 when it was made. Also, ‘Inland Empire’, released when he was still south of seventy, is awful. Seems he went downhill fast after ‘Mulholland Drive’.
I agree about Lynch. Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return are products of self-indulgent old age.
I enjoy Stephen King. I just started “Bag of Bones.” “It” is my all time favorite. In both he portrays blacks as victims as a group. It seemed somewhat contrived and forced to include this in “Bag of bones.” He makes an aside about how the whites didn’t want blacks to move into the lake resort community in the book. Of course, King and most white liberals don’t live near blacks either. I think in “It” there was at least some relevance to the plotline. It still had that, “we have to remind whitey of his being bad” vibe to it.
Stephen King is a crypto-Jew. If you assume this from the start, everything from his dysgenic appearance, trumped-up success (both in terms of critic’s reviews, and his publishing/Hollywood contracts), and the antiwhite crap makes a lot more sense.
Stephen King is a New England WASP through and through. Nothing about him is even remotely Jewish.
Well done you for reading this crap. There are only two authors whose books – three apiece – I have started but not finished, King and Norman Mailer. King’s books are really pop-up film scripts.
The problem I see for all these whites that try to win over the leftist anti whites is that they will not be spared if the time comes when blacks kill all whiteness like the black panthers were stating just the other day. Do they really think the panthers will cut them slack for their previous depictions of whites as evil? Not likely. It’s not like they check on a victims political or race beliefs before they slit their throats. They simply do it and move on to the next victim. They can kill or rape leftists as easily as race realists. Though the leftists might be easier targets since they are less likely to be armed.
I’ve never read a book by King. I have seen a few of the movie versions and they were mildly entertaining. But that could have been due to the movie makers rather than source material. The one with little vignettes about revenge was particularly good though I don’t recall the name. I remember Ted Danson drowning in the surf. It was a good one.
The movie is Creepshow. I thought it was a pretty good one.
Creep show was pretty good. I like the one with the meteor and the Forrest Gump guy.
Lol – the actor in that vignette was Stephen King himself.
King gives Maine a bad name.
King also had a magic negro woman in The Stand.
For another nauseatingly auto-ethnophobic fiction writer see John Grisham.
If I remember correctly, he once responded to critics of his ghoulish themes with: “Once you decide to write honestly, your days in polite society are numbered.” Ironic, since when it comes to race once has to write with total dishonesty to stay in the good graces of “polite society.”
Have you ever read (uncut) The Stand?
The ethnic politics of the first half during the pandemic are quite interesting (and skipped in the recent Amazon miniseries) actually the politics of the book as a whole are fascinating when juxtaposed with the how the Amazon show deals with them and the experience of the past year (plague in the book is the fault of the government which is covering things up, under pressure from a pandemic a race war develops where you have mutineering black soldiers wearing loincloths on TV while they play gameshows with the lives of White prisoners – which King lampshades by having a character comment that “it looked like something from Klan propaganda” except of course it was what King decided was a plausible result of a plague) although the big villain of the second half was at one point a Klansman he was also a Black Panther or some other violent far left group later on too. King can be kind of revealing when he isn’t being careful (as you note in how that Turkish character was portrayed)
In terms of Nightmares and Dreamscapes I thought that story “Ten O’Clock People” was interesting in its politics, smoking, increasingly treated as evil and lower class, is actually a super power, there’s an invisible enemy taking over the country etc. and so of course King in his notes at the end dismisses the story as meaningless fluff, since he cannot bear to think deeply on something like that.
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