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Monday
Harold Bloom once wrote that Edgar Allan Poe dreamed America’s nightmares, and what Poe did for the 19th century Stephen King has done for the second half of the 20th. Practitioners of the horror genre articulate dark truths that cultures wish to avoid, which is why their works simultaneously fascinate and repel audiences—which is why King is both the bestselling author of the past 50 years and also (at least in America) the most banned.
I choose to highlight King and book banning today, partly because Banned Books Week began yesterday and partly because I think that the political horrors that Americans witnessed this past week help us understand why King is so targeted. The horrors I have in mind are the invasions of Chicago and Portland by armed troops, the extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan boat crews, and Trump speaking of “the enemy within” to military generals and vilifying Democrats in a speech to Norfolk Navy folk. Hang on while I explain the connection with King.
First to some general facts about book banning. PEN America, the writers organization, has just reported on the latest figures:
Between July 2024 and June 2025, the fourth school year of the book ban crisis nationwide, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts. For the third straight year, Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texaswith 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. Together, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.
Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, has declared, “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.”
King leads the list, with 87 of his works affected. Florida alone has banned 23 of his books, leading the always blunt author to tweet, “What the f***!” and later, “May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don’t always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.”
King’s advice to young people, when they see their school libraries banning books, has long been, “Run to your public library, or the nearest bookstore, and read what it is your elders don’t want you to know.”
Seeking to understand why King leads the list, reviewer and crime novelist Michael J. Seidlinger believes that the author makes a point of “facing the uncomfortable side of society and humanity.” Rather than turn away from what we fear, he delves into the fear itself.
MAGA, like all authoritarian movements, is driven by fear: fear of change, fear of appearing weak, fear of women and minorities, fear of modernity generally. Demagogues like Trump play to these fears and can incite the fearful to acts of unimaginable violence. In IT, the King novel I know best, we see murderous violence unleashed against many groups that MAGA demonizes, including gay men, assertive wives, African Americans, racially mixed couples, the environment, and children.
I include children in my list because of ICE’s treatment of kids, not only in ripping them from parents but, in the Chicago raid, using zip ties. As political commentator Jay Quo describes it, agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI
swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours.
One neighbor, Eboni Watson, said that residents had to duck for cover as they heard flash bangs and then described what he witnessed:
They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, “f*** them kids.”
IT refers to the id, which is a derivation of the German word for “it” (“es”). Freud used it to designate our primal urges, which if not checked lead to barbarism. Throughout the novel, the homicidal clown Pennywise stands in for the id, and he not only commits horrors himself but incites mobs to do so. In one historical account, a town’s citizens take the law into their own hands and unleash hell on a group of bank robbers and their mistresses. As one witness remembers the incident,
It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bold on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, hold that .45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it….There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once….When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle-fire all around Machen’s.
Trump and his supporters fantasize about such bloodletting. He recently posted that, if Hamas doesn’t agree to his peace plan, they will experience “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before.” And while Vice President Vance jeers at the boats that have been blown up off the coast of Venezuela—“I wouldn’t go fishing right now”—Trump advisor Stephen Miller takes great pleasure in promising to “unleash” the police on inner city Memphis:
The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless. They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think that they’re tough. They have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore. We are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us.”
We saw America’s id unleashed against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and, in addition to ICE brutality, we are seeing increasing instances of Americans throwing off prior restraint as they let their anger spill over. Between unaccountable law enforcement officials and easy access to guns, America is seeing civil society under assault in ways that remind southerners of the days when the KKK ran unchecked.
Stephen King shows us this ugly side of ourselves. No wonder his books get banned.
