36 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingChildren of the Corn
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King was born in Durham, Maine, in 1947. King is the youngest of two children, and he was raised by a single mother after his father abandoned the family when King was two years old. Although his mother worked hard to support her family, King’s early life was characterized by financial hardships and loneliness. As an escape from these challenges, King began reading voraciously at a young age, especially stories that might have been considered inappropriate for young readers because of their horror themes and violent content. Golding’s Lord of the Flies and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear and Other Stories were fast favorites and strongly influenced his writing. The Lurking Fear collection is a group of 12 horror stories that combine graphic violence, suspense, the supernatural, and themes of good and evil. Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of stranded boys whose makeshift society descends into anarchy and violence, with cultic overtones. When King created the fictional town of Castle Rock, a location that appears recurrently in his fiction, he took the name from the boys’ mountain fort in Lord of the Flies. The influence of both works is clearly traceable in “Children of the Corn.”
Although King grew up doodling his own stories, it wasn’t until he graduated from the University of Maine in 1969 that King began writing seriously and submitting short stories for publication in magazines like Penthouse and Playboy. In fact, “Children of the Corn” first appeared in the 1977 issue of Penthouse. As one of his earliest short stories, published before he became renowned for his successful novels, “Children of the Corn” showcases the early development of King’s voice.
King’s breakthrough came with his debut novel, Carrie, in 1974, which showcased his unique ability to blend supernatural elements with profound insights into human nature. This marked the beginning of an unparalleled career that has spanned over four decades and produced more than 60 novels, numerous short stories, and several screenplays. His works often delve into the ordinary lives of characters who find themselves thrust into extraordinary and often terrifying situations.
In a New Yorker interview, King attributed much of his writing style and his literary success to a childhood encounter with a bookmobile driver. Unsatisfied with the stories offered for children, 11-year-old King asked the librarian, “Do you have any books about how kids really are?” Unable to find any stories that satisfactorily replicated the way real people think and speak, King resolved to create his own, and this has characterized his unique and authentic voice (Crouch, Ian. “Stephen King, William Goulding, and ‘The Tree of Life.’” The New Yorker, 27 July 2011).
King’s writing has earned him a multitude of awards, including the National Medal of Arts, and a permanent place in the literary canon. While he is primarily known for his contributions to the horror genre—with notable publications including Carrie, The Shining, and It—realist novels like Shawshank Redemption illustrate his understanding of the human condition and his versatility as a writer.
Literary Context: Gothic Horror
“Children of the Corn” exemplifies King’s characteristic blend of horror and social commentary, reflecting the raw thoughts and feelings of characters whose flaws reflect the imperfect reality of the human experience. It employs elements of Gothic horror, a literary genre characterized by intense emotions, grotesque or frightening events, and the battle between humanity and unnatural forces of evil.
Gothic fiction was first recognized as a genre in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto. In Victorian England, Gothic fiction flourished with the popularization of the “penny dreadful”: Gothic short stories that were frightening, salacious, and available to the public for the very affordable price of one penny. During the 19th century, Gothic fiction was often synonymous with the horror genre, but today, Gothic fiction and horror are more commonly considered separate genres, with Gothic fiction offering more emphasis on intense emotions and elements of the uncanny, often set in the past, while horror fiction is more characterized by violence and gore.
“Children of the Corn” is significant within the Stephen King canon because—although he is primarily known for his horror novels—this short story straddles the line between Gothic fiction and horror. It is one of King’s first attempts to illustrate the specific horror of a small town in America grappling with supernatural struggles that symbolize the societal issues of the story’s place and time, a recurrent theme in his work. Many of King’s works explore the darkness lurking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary communities and, in “Children of the Corn,” he focuses on a small farming town in Nebraska whose children have become agents of a malevolent force. The story is part of King’s recurring exploration of the thin line between innocence and malevolence.
Cultural Context: Unrest in 1970s America
Written in the 1970s, “Children of the Corn” emerges from the era’s societal turbulence, where traditional values collided with countercultural movements and fears of the unknown. King taps into common cultural fears of the time to make his horror story especially resonant and unsettling to its intended audience.
The Vietnam War led to enormous civil outcry in the United States, and protest formed a vital part of massive cultural change among young people in the 1960s and ‘70s that, as well as pacifism, incorporated sexual liberation and fights for equality. Reports of atrocities, including film footage, had shocked the nation and made it near-impossible for individuals to shield themselves and their families from acknowledging the human capacity for war, violence, and internecine conflict. Increasing media freedoms raised the level of violence, sex, and dark themes that was permitted in culture such as films and literature, leading to a reactionary backlash from those who felt this spelled a moral decline.
Young people at this time increasingly resisted the traditional structure and moral order of their parents’ generation, often in ways that seemed threateningly rebellious, iconoclastic, or risky. The children of the story, who reject the authority of adults and embrace a cult-like devotion to a sinister deity through distorted rituals associated with the Christian faith, symbolize the generational conflicts and upheavals that defined the 1970s. The child-oriented cult of the story uses horror as an allegory to explore the dangers of young people cut off from meaningful adult guidance and participation by a rift in intergenerational communication and understanding. The story enacts an extreme version of generational hatred and resentment; the cult sacrifices young people as they reach adulthood and, in the deserted town, have caused the destruction of the things that constrain young people: parental and institutional authority, the structures of ordered civilization, and the established moral and social codes that define good and evil. The story’s adults are not innocent, however, and they are not good adult exemplars. Burt and Vicky’s cruelty to each other, their division, and their dubious decisions throughout suggest that they are made susceptible to destruction by their own faults.
The unrest of the 1960s and ‘70s prompted people to form extremist mindsets, contributing to the rise of cults. The idea that one’s child could be “taken” by a cult—whether forcibly or by indoctrination—was a real and widespread fear. These divergent ways of thinking and living—often based on fanatical religious or pseudo-religious beliefs—challenged the comfortable traditional idea of a coherent social order and a shared moral code that could separate people or behaviors onto a mutually-acknowledged spectrum of “good” and “bad.” One of the frightening elements of the child cult in “Children of the Corn” is their conviction that their evil actions are righteous. In the moral vacuum of the abandoned town, they present not so much as an immoral force as the proponents of an alternative behavioral code; Burt and Vicky have driven into an uncanny alternate universe. The exception to this conviction is Ruth, pregnant and isolated, whose doubt and fearful compliance at the very end of the story reinforce the oppressive nature of cultic enforcement and personify the popular fear of the child lost to mysterious forces.
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