A Lead into Trauma Horror Plots in Stephen King’s The Outsider
A look at King's The Outsider and it's use of initial trauma to propel it's story.
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The Outsider is an example of how many horror stories, if not all horror stories, start with an initial trauma that reverberates through the whole story or acts as a driver for the story. Without this initial traumatic event, a horror story wouldn’t be able to happen.
The opening to King’s novel, like most of his stories, opens in a typical horror way:
1. Severe traumatic event is one of the first scenes, either the actual event or the discovery of the event. (The Outsider is the discovery of the event.)
2. A vulnerable person or population is at the hands of violence. (The Outsider has the initial traumatic event happen to a child.)
Some horror stories hide or bury this initial traumatic event for a later reveal in the story or as a mystery that needs to be solved, like in the case of many haunted house stories, where the reader isn’t shown the traumatic event until later in the story (examples: We Are Still Here and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). King’s The Outsider is not a haunted house story—unless you consider stories related to possession haunted house stories, which arguably they are: the haunted house in those cases being a body, a soul. The Outsider is a sort of monster story about a creature that is compared to the boogieman and other children-eating monsters of other cultures who can become a person in all ways, sharing memories, vision, knowledge, and appearance. This creature survives off grief and to feed, this particular monster horrifically murders and rapes children, framing a person within a small community in order to spend time feeding off the grief and sadness caused in the aftermath. This mechanic of the monster creates a necessity, almost, to start the story at a place of severe trauma to showcase the impact of the story’s core storyline and theme of digging to the truth of trauma, no matter how messy or nonsensical the causes and moments and facts are.
The opening to the novel isn’t done in the most typical fashion for a monster novel. King uses testimony, detective notes, and eyewitness accounts to introduce his initial trauma event. King only gives glimpses, snap shots of the actual trauma and instead slowly reveals the details (over and over and over) of what happened to the child and then shows the readers all the other heinous things that the creature has done and the impact of trauma it has left behind to feast on, living near graveyards, places of deep traumatic connection to communities, and watching as the person it impersonated is ostracized from the community and punished for its crimes.
The Outsider wouldn’t have worked if say the story didn’t have that initial traumatic event. There wouldn’t be an arrest, a trail, a hunt, or a reason to go after the monster so vehemently. And while some horror genres’ initial traumatic event, like in Eldritch horrors where the traumatic event might be something otherworldly or based in the natural world like a rift opening up into another dimension of unspeakable horror (see Event Horizon). Without this initial event, the horror story has no engine, no heart.
This is a requirement of most horror stories, but only good ones are able to use that traumatic event in a way that isn’t trauma porn or shock value. And only great horror stories can use that traumatic event and the horrific moments that follow as a way to showcase a journey to healing.