One of the very first books to take Stephen King seriously, Landscape of Fear (originally published in 1988) reveals the source of King's horror in the sociopolitical anxieties of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. In this groundbreaking study, Tony Magistrale shows how King's fiction transcends the escapism typical of its genre to tap into our deepest cultural fears: ""that the government we have installed through the democratic process is not only corrupt but actively pursuing our destruction, that our technologies have progressed to the point at which the individual has now become expendable, and that our fundamental social institutions - school, marriage, workplace, and the church - have, beneath their veneers of respectability, evolved into perverse manifestations of narcissism, greed, and violence.
Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University Of Vermont. His many books include Hollywood's Stephen King, Poe's Children, and A Dark Night's Dreaming.
A great read, insightful and intelligent.... Tony has helped me improve my reputation from ink-stained wretch popular novelist to ink-stained wretch popular novelist with occasional flashes of muddy insight. - Stephen King
