From The Long Walk to The Outsider, Stephen King's output reflects the major political concerns of the previous fifty years. This book is the first sustained study of the complex ways in which King's texts speak to their unique political moments. By exploring this aspect of the author's popular works, readers might better understand the numerous crises that Americans currently face - the book surveys King's corpus to address a wide range of issues, including the spread of neoliberalism, the Bush-Cheney doctrine, and the chaos of the populist present. Although the fiction outwardly declares itself to be anti-political (thus reflecting a widespread shift away from democracy in the aftermath of the 1960s), political energies persist just beneath the surface. Given the possibility of a political resurgence that haunts so many of his page-turners, Stephen King produces horror and hope in equal measure.

This book will be of particular interest for students at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as for scholars of popular culture and politics.

1. Prelude: The (Im)possible Politics of Stephen King's Fiction
2. The Bachman Books and America's Death Drive
3. King's Cars and the Grinding Gears of Post-Fordism
4. Firestarter; Or, the Smelting of a Neoliberal Subject
5. IT, Individualism, and the Idea of Community
6. Interlude: The Langoliers and the Political Event
7. Human Capital in Rose Madder
8. Under the Dome and the Deteriorating Demos
9. The Outsider and the Shifting Shapes of Trumpism
10. Postlude: Revolutions of The Stand