Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Posthuman Vegetality: Plant Agency and Ecological Entanglements in Stephen King's Horror
Authored By — Sridheepika V S

Abstract

The ecological crises of the Anthropocene have intensified literary and critical attention to nonhuman agency, compelling a fundamental reassessment of long-held assumptions about human dominance over the natural world. This article argues that vegetation in Stephen King's fiction functions not merely as atmospheric backdrop but as an autonomous ecological force that actively shapes narrative space, human perception, and the conditions of survival. Reading three of King's works, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), In the Tall Grass (2012, co-written with Joe Hill), and The Stand (1978; expanded 1990), through the intersecting frameworks of posthuman ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and vegetal horror, this study identifies a distinctive and formally coherent narrative mode in King's work: vegetal horror achieved through spatial disorientation and environmental engulfment rather than through monstrous aggression. King's forests, fields, and post-apocalyptic botanical reclamation do not predatorially attack their human characters; they disorient, ensnare, and transform them, staging the profound entanglement of human and nonhuman life. By positioning vegetation as a narrative protagonist rather than a passive setting, King's horror subverts anthropocentric hierarchies and articulates urgent posthuman ecological concerns. Situating King within both the American Gothic tradition and the emerging scholarship on vegetal horror, the article demonstrates that his ecological imagination constitutes a sustained and underexamined contribution to the posthuman literary imagination of the Anthropocene.

Keywords

Posthumanism, Vegetal horror, Plant agency, Ecocriticism, Anthropocene, American Gothic.

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