“You guys wanna see a dead body?”: Quando o horror tradicional se transfigura em horror cotidiano em “The Body”, de Stephen King

Abstract

Literature opens an infinite realm of possibilities, allowing readers to explore cities, countries, and scenarios where anything is possible. Literary criticism is the means by which we use knowledge gained from these possibilities to critically analyze works, seeking to understand beyond the written text through lenses such as feminist, postcolonial, queer studies, among others. Gothic fiction, which gained popularity around 1760, inspired English literary classics like Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The genre evokes feelings of fear, anxiety, discomfort, and horror, focusing on characters confronting the supernatural—real or imagined—often set in specific environments like castles or monasteries. It laid the foundation for modern horror and terror literature. In contemporary literature, one of the foremost authors of horror is Stephen King, whose works often explore the supernatural and the inexplicable. However, in The Body, a novella published in the collection Different Seasons, King departs from supernatural elements to focus on the everyday lives of four children who embark on a quest to find the body of a missing child. This study seeks to answer the following question: How does traditional horror transfigures into everyday horror in Stephen King's The Body? To answer this, the study has the following objectives: (I) to discuss the theoretical foundations of Gothic studies, with emphasis on the concept of horror, and (II) to relate everyday horror to the experiences of the characters Gordon Lachance, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio in the novella. Using bibliographic research with a qualitative, exploratory approach, this study references scholars such as França (2016) and Botting (1996) on Gothic studies, and Cuddon (2013) and Carroll (1999) on horror genre discussions. The findings show that traditional horror is deconstructed in The Body through the experiences of the child protagonists: the fear of ghosts gives way to the fear of domestic violence, the fear of the dark becomes the fear of death, and so on. Stephen King creates a horror atmosphere grounded in the horrors of everyday life, which can be more terrifying than any supernatural element.