Disability, Literature, Genre

Front matter

HEALTH, DISABILITY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

REPRESENTATIONS —

Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction

Contents

Acknowledgements

Affect and the Disability Encounter Disability Studies, Emotion, and Exploitation Genre Fiction and Reflexive Representations Overview

Why Disability Studies is Afraid of Horror Why Horror Scholars are Afraid of Disability Stephen King’s Duma Key

Chapter One

E his nonfiction study, Danse Macabre, Stephen King presents a paradigmatic horror narrative.’ In it, a young couple hears a radio broadcast about ‘The Hook’, a ‘homicidal maniac’ who has escaped from a nearby insane asylum (location 407). The killer has a hook for a right hand, and uses it to decapitate his victims, couples he targets at local make-out spots. The protagonists drive to Lover’s Lane nonetheless, but while they are there the girl hears a noise and thinks she sees someone hiding outside the car. Her boyfriend dismisses her fears at first, but she eventually persuades him to leave; he speeds away, aggrieved. At their destination he gets out to open her car door, then falls down in a faint: ‘She gets out to see what’s wrong, and when she slams the car door she hears this funny clinking sound [...] there, hanging from the doorhandle, is this razor-sharp hook’ (location 426).

In this vignette—the full version is less than 600 words—nondisabled teenagers (we can safely assume) are threatened by a doubly deviant disabled monster. The Hook’s disability functions as a narrative hook, catching the reader’s interest and attention and generating ominous affects. The character’s physiological and psychological abnormality is inseparable from his murderous acts and works alongside them to generate a sense of fearful anticipation, a dis-ease only partially dissipated when disaster is averted. In this miniature horror narrative the genre is stripped down to its essentials, and the central role of disability is indicative of larger generic trends. In horror, disabled characters are frequently monstrous perpetrators of evil acts or

1 This story is King’s version of an urban legend with a number of variants.

vulnerable victims or potential victims.* Both types of representation work to evoke fearful affects, whether fear of a disabled monster, fear for a vulnerable disabled character,’ or a cluster of related sensations including uneasiness, vulnerability, anxiety, repulsion, and revulsion.*

The generation of such affects is horror’s raison d’étre: the ‘cross-art, cross-media genre of horror takes its title from the emotion it characteristically or rather ideally promotes; this emotion constitutes the identifying mark of horror’ (Carroll 14).* Readers expect that a horror text will arouse, or attempt to arouse, feelings of fear and discomfort, and horror differs from the other genres examined in this book in that this affective imperative has been widely recognised and acknowledged. For example, Carroll identifies the response evoked by horror texts as ‘a combination of fear and repulsion’ (53), while King puts forward a three-part schemata of the feelings horror evokes, distinguishing between feelings of terror, horror, and revulsion (see Danse Macabre). King’s tripartite model privileges texts that work on the mind over those that work on the body, but the feelings horror generates

2 There are also a number of variants which similarly associate disability with evil and use it to generate fear or repulsion. In Masterton’s Blind Panic (2009) a Native American man takes revenge for the acts of white settlers by rendering much of the population of the USA blind as a prelude to completely destroying the country, while in the same author’s Fire Spirit (2010) characters have a chromosomal disorder which allows them to hear voices from Hell. In James Herbert’s Shrine (1983) characters with illnesses and disabilities, including a child who is deaf and mute, are cured by an evil force.

3 While these affects may seem to be contradictory, this only reflects the variety of (often conflicting) associations that disability has. For a horror text which capitalises upon disability’s simultaneous associations with threat and vulnerability, see Nevill’s House of Small Shadows (2013).

4 Fora discussion of horror affects, see Reyes, ‘Gothic Affect’. Reyes writes that under an affect-focused approach ‘there is little distinction between horror and gothic fiction, as both are seen to share the same affective goals and discourse’ (19).

5 There is little critical consensus on the definition of horror. Bloom lists the emotions provoked by horror, but also provides a list of ‘technical conventions’ largely drawn from Gothic fiction (155). Gelder sees horror as a site of collision between the archaic and the modern, a genre ‘routinely linked to excess, to a lack of restraint’ (2). Mendlesohn notes that much modern horror takes the form of intrusion fantasy, in which a fantastic intrusion ‘disrupts normality and has to be negotiated with or defeated’, but that the two are not identical (115). Bloom concludes that the answer to the question ‘What is horror fiction?’ is ‘as complex and problematic theoretically as it seems simple and uncomplicated practically’ (155). The authors of several recent scholarly works refuse to put forward definitions at all (e.g. Morgan).

6 For King, terror is ‘the finest emotion’, while horror ‘is slightly less fine, are best understood as affects, encompassing the emotional, the cognitive, and the physiological. Influenced in particular by the work of Linda Williams and Carol Clover on horror film, horror is frequently understood as a ‘body genre’: a type of fiction that works on the body, aiming to produce a physiological response in readers or viewers. In the dominant critical discourse horror ‘means bodily exertion: to shudder, to sweat, to squirm in our seats’ (Hantke 2).”? However, these corporeal reactions cannot be separated out from cognitive responses, or from emotional ones. A corporeal reaction is not merely compatible with but imbricated in emotional and intellectual responses.’

Horror, then, is not just a body genre but a genre that works in and on the bodymind.’ It aims to produce a range of discomforting affects, the experience of which is paradoxically pleasurable. Horror also engages the bodymind in that these affects are often produced by an intense focus on the body and/or mind within the horror text, which frequently centres upon either a frightening or dangerous body/mind or a vulnerable body/mind at risk of harm.” Disability’s entrenched associations with both fear and vulnerability have attained it a central, though rarely acknowledged, position in the horror tradition: horror’s disability icons include the deformed monster, the vulnerable blind or deaf character, the psychotic villain, and the protagonist (often female)

because it is not entirely of the mind’; below these is ‘the gag reflex of revulsion’ (Danse Macabre location 444, 451, 506).

7 Skal’s comments on the work of Stephen King exemplify this: ‘King’s books may more passionately and viscerally involve their readers than literary fiction. King readers groan, gasp, experience knots in their stomach and tingles on the back of their necks. [...] Fiction like King’s is sensual, pulse-pounding, immediate’ (364-65).

8 For Carroll, it is the ‘cognitive states’ evoked by art-horror which generate the physiological response (53). See also Hantke, who writes that ‘even the most spontaneous gut-level response to a text is mediated by acts of critical reflection’ (3).

9 The term ‘body horror’ is used loosely by some critics to denote horror’s general focus on the body (e.g. Wisker in Horror Fiction), but it is also used to denote a specific subset of texts in which ‘the human body is radically figured and disfigured’ (Darryl Jones 175). This version of body horror tends to be associated with a particular set of authors who came to prominence in the 1980s. For detailed discussion of body horror see chapter 2 of Reyes, Body Gothic.

10 Horror’s fearful affects are often understood in terms of fear for one’s own bodily integrity, or fears about the vulnerability of the body. Morgan writes that that ‘Tales of terror turn upon threats to the body’s coherence’, and the same could be said about the mind (‘Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic’ 63).

teetering on the brink of madness. Deployed individually or in combination, these images of disability work to elicit feelings of anxiety, disturbance, or perturbation.

Though horror embraces disability, scholars of the genre have generally avoided it.!! This might be viewed as just another instantiation of what Bolt terms the ‘critical avoidance’ of disability in the humanities: the dominant practice whereby scholars avoid discussing disability, despite its prevalence in the texts they examine, or engage with disability in ways not informed by disability studies (‘Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance’).!2 However, this habit does not fully explain horror scholars’ evasiveness, and there are additional contributing factors particular to the genre’s critical and cultural history. Bolt claims that scholars in disability studies are ‘generally open to research and scholarship on literary and other cultural factors’, in contrast to a lack of openness in the wider humanities (‘Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance’ 295). However, a focus on horror makes it clear that disability studies scholars are no strangers to avoidance.’* Both horror scholars and disability studies scholars have been reluctant to engage critically with disability in horror, and the aversion felt by scholars in disability studies is bound up with both genre and disability affects.

Why Disability Studies is Afraid of Horror

The avoidance of horror within disability studies arises partly from the same factors that have limited the field’s engagement with other popular genres: perceptions of genre fiction as escapist, socially disengaged, poorly written, formulaic, reactionary, or inferior to canonical, literary, or mainstream fiction.’ Also relevant is the critical and

11 The most notable exception is Smith, whose Hideous Progeny is the most significant critical work on disability and horror to date. Olney examines disability in horror film, while Carr discusses disability and horror in digital games. Reyes includes some discussion of disability in Body Gothic, but deliberately brackets his work off from disability studies.

12 Such critical avoidance is itself at least partly a result of ‘the unsettling disease occasioned by the non-normative body’ (Shildrick 72).

13 It is rare for disability studies scholars to discuss horror. For exceptions see Melinda Hall (literature), chapter 5 of Snyder and Mitchell (film), chapter 7 of Longmore (film and television), and page 154 of Waltz (autism in film and literature).

14 This becomes particularly important given the historically marginal position popular understanding of horror as a sensational genre, which discourages scholarly engagement for the reasons set out in the Introduction. However, there are further, genre-specific factors that contribute to the avoidance of horror.'* The first of these is the sheer frequency with which problematic images of disability have appeared in the horror tradition. As Ian Olney writes, horror ‘has initiated and perpetuated many of the most insidious and enduring stereotypes about physical disability’ (294). In particular, horror has frequently depicted disabled people as villains and as the instruments of evil forces, or framed its monstrous characters in terms of disability. This is true both of classic works in the wider gothic and horror traditions, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and of contemporary horror fictions such as Stephen King’s Misery (1987) and Joe Hill’s Horns (2010). Such depictions are perceived as reinforcing a link between disability and criminality or evil.”

Depictions of disabled people as victims likewise resonate with and reinforce conceptualisations of disabled people as helpless or vulnerable, already victims of circumstance or chance. In Graham Masterton’s Unspeakable (2005), for example, hearing-impaired Holly Summers is repeatedly threatened and attacked both physically and verbally, and is described as ‘vulnerable’ (18).!8 In Dean Koontz’s 77 of disability-informed approaches within literary studies. Even today many literary disability studies works devote significant space to explicitly making the case for a disability-informed approach. Thus, it is a strategic choice to apply this critical approach to canonical (i.e., thoroughly legitimate) texts: ‘there is more mileage to be had from demonstrating the new insights a disability-informed perspective can offer into Shakespeare than into science fiction’ (Cheyne, ‘Introduction’, 119).

15 Melinda Hall writes that ‘it has become commonplace to consider horror fiction (perhaps inescapably) ableist’.

16 For a disability-informed reading of Stevenson’s novel, see Schalk and Powell. For a discussion of madness in Dracula see chapter 5 of Pedlar. In King’s Misery the protagonist is imprisoned and mutilated by a character who is mentally ill. Hill’s Horns offers a metafictional commentary on the convention of the physically deviant villain through the horns the protagonist grows, but also a more conventional depiction in Lee, the novel’s real villain, who is blind in one eye.

17 Longmore notes the prevalence of ‘handicapped horror “monsters”’ on film and television, arguing that the physical impairments of such characters ‘express disfigurement of personality and deformity of soul [...] disability may be represented as the cause of evildoing, punishment for it, or both’ (131, 135).

18 Holly is rescued from gang rape near the end of the novel, only to be shot, and presumably killed, in the book’s final chapter. With this, the role of

Shadow Street (2011), Iris, an autistic girl, is positioned as a vulnerable potential victim requiring the protection of a younger, nondisabled character, and her life is consistently portrayed as tragic.

Much of the critical work published on representations of disability in the last two decades has sought to move beyond reductive discussions of disability representation in terms of negative imagery or stereotypes,!° or has aimed to recuperate texts or specific representations previously dismissed as problematic.”° Horror’s representational habits, however, have largely barred the genre from this recuperative programme, reflecting ‘the assumption that works of horror fiction and film dealing with corporeal difference almost inevitably reflect and reinforce’ the ‘prevailing “hegemony of normalcy”’ (Olney 294, citing Davis, Enforcing Normalcy).*! Yet other sites or types of representation which have narrativised disability in ways perceived as problematic have been recuperated. Horror is far from the only genre to harbour a preponderance of problematic images, and certainly canonical literature has no shortage.

The problem that horror has posed and continues to pose for disability studies is fundamentally a problem of affect. It is not simply that horror is widely understood as a genre that attempts to create a fearful response. Rather, the issue is the resonance between the affects disability is used to generate in horror and the affects involved in interpersonal disability encounters. In horror, people with non-normative bodyminds have frequently been framed in particular ways in order to evoke feelings of fear, horror, and revulsion.*? Carolyn D. Williams suggests that in contemporary popular culture ‘an ominous ambience is often intensified by the display of a grotesque human body’, and the use of disability to generate or enhance ominous affects is particularly vulnerable victim that she embodies throughout is taken to its logical conclusion.

19 This is particularly the case since the publication of three key works around which the field of cultural disability studies crystallised: Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy, Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis. Mitchell and Snyder’s book specifically argues for a move away from negative image approaches. See the Conclusion for more detailed discussion.

20 Such recuperative readings are firmly within the evaluative paradigm based on identifying ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ images of disability, rather than representing a break with it.

21 See Smith 27-28 for further discussion of this point; her own work is a notable exception.

22 Hughes argues that fear, disgust, and pity are the major ‘building blocks of the emotional infrastructure of ableism’ (68).

common in horror (119). At the same time, many disability studies scholars have noted a cultural association between disability and fear: the notion of the disabled person as a frightening or sinister figure, or of disability itself as fearful, recurs in critical work.** As Siebers writes, ‘The ideology of ability makes us fear disability’ (Disability Theory 9). This association between disability and fear is one of the key reasons for disability’s frequent appearance in horror texts. The same quality that makes disability attractive to horror authors renders the genre anathema to disability studies scholars.

Horror texts are perceived as exploiting the negative associations of disability by using disability as a tool for generating fearful affects— and, crucially, as doing so regardless of the ways in which such narrative deployments shore up these associations. Texts in the genre are therefore understood as perpetuating an ongoing cycle of prejudice and discrimination. Snyder and Mitchell write that, in horror, ‘emotions are encouraged that serve to cement longstanding associations of stigma with bodily difference’ (168). The dominant poles of disability representation in horror work to evoke fear, anxiety, and discomfort. In contemporary horror fiction, a generic pressure towards generating a particular affective response combines with pre-existing cultural associations of disability in ways that make horror seem unproductive territory for any disability studies engagement beyond the identification and critique of negative imagery.

Why Horror Scholars are Afraid of Disability

Disability studies scholars have avoided horror, but horror scholars have also neglected disability, and the critical avoidance identified by Bolt offers only a partial explanation. Horror scholars have not hesitated to read the genre’s monsters as emblematic of a variety of minority groups, or horror texts as commentaries on a range of

23 See, for example, Grey’s The Ward (2012), in which the frequent appearance of figures with mutilated or altered bodies is central to the fearful affects the novel evokes.

24 Longmore notes that disabled people frequently encounter ‘fear, revulsion, hostility’ (123), while Hubbard writes that ‘People shun persons who have disabilities [...] They fear them as though the disability were contagious’ (93). For further discussion of disability and fear see Fiedler, Coleman, Shildrick, and Barnes.

25 See also Longmore, who observes that ‘The subtext of many horror films is fear and loathing of people with disabilities’ (134).

identity issues.2° However, disability has been notably neglected in this critical tradition. Just as there are specific reasons for disability studies scholars’ neglect of horror, there are particular factors at the root of horror scholars’ lack of engagement with disability.

As Matt Hills’s metacritical study of horror theory demonstrates, much horror scholarship is concerned with repositioning horror as a legitimate subject for academic investigation.” In critical attempts to reclaim horror it is a requirement that ‘the genre’s excessively, problematically corporeal forms’ be translated into ‘gender, racial, or class terms’—repressed elements of society or of ‘individual psyches’ (Smith 26, 25). Horror’s excessive corporeality is contained by understanding it in terms of something else. This process of translation enables horror to be positioned as a genre that is ‘not just trivially about rampaging monsters’ but which ‘returns to the centres of social/ cultural power’ (Hills 51). Because of horror’s denigrated cultural position, the drive to reclaim the genre as suitable for intellectual interpretation and engagement has been, and continues to be, pressing for horror in a way that it is not for mainstream literature or film. As Angela M. Smith sums up, classic horror films ‘can only be salvaged for intellectual and subversive interpretations by “reading” impairment as a placeholder for multiple (nondisabled) social identities and abstract “otherness”’ (25). Thus, for horror scholars, the critical avoidance of disability is closely tied to the process of validating the genre as worthy of intellectual investigation. Disability must be understood as representing something else, and therefore erased or rendered invisible, for the genre to be legitimised. Metaphorising the monster— refusing the more obvious reading of ‘deviant’ bodies and minds in terms of disability—is a means of positioning the genre as having hidden levels of complexity or significance and thus increasing its worth within the value system of the academic—critical establishment.

The relationship between horror studies and disability, and disability studies and horror, is therefore one of mutual avoidance, arising from prejudices, misconceptions, and anxieties around affect and legitimation.” Horror’s embrace of disability has resulted in a

26 See, for example, Wisker, Horror Fiction, 170.

27 Hills’s book was published in 2005, but the same state of affairs holds today. For example, Reyes’s Body Gothic (2014) aims to demonstrate the complexity of horror texts which produce a visceral response.

28 See also Church, who writes that the focus on social realist film in disability studies analyses (and the neglect of fantastic film, including horror) leaves a ‘conspicuous gap’ in critical discourses. By legitimating one body of work genre tradition that has invoked and shored up problematic images of disability, as well as exploiting and reinforcing the association of disability with fearful affects. My project is neither to disavow nor to attempt to recuperate the uses to which disability has been put in the larger gothic and horror tradition. Instead, this chapter examines how recent horror fictions function in relation to those larger traditions, since contemporary horror’s engagement with disability is far from monolithic. The meshing of convention and variation, and the metafictional tendencies that characterise genre fiction, create a space in which authors can facilitate and encourage readerly reflection on disability and its representation. As Smith writes of classic horror film, revelations of disability ‘work to excite shock and horror in viewers’ (121). However, they may also ‘bring to light the spectacular, manipulated and performative—that is, the culturally and textually generated—elements of disability’ (Smith 121). Works in the genre encourage readerly reflection on disability in a number of ways, from foregrounding disability-related prejudice to disrupting reductive images of disability.

Stephen King’s Duma Key

King’s life-threatening 1999 car accident and subsequent rehabilitation have triggered a renewed focus on the body in his work, but disabled characters have always populated King’s fiction.” In Duma Key (2008), King invokes disability as part of the novel’s strategy for generating ominous affects, but also challenges the assumption that disability is fearful. In a long novel with a notably small cast, disability adheres to most of the central characters. The protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, lost his arm in a near-fatal accident that left him brain-injured and mobility-impaired. Elizabeth Eastlake has Alzheimer’s disease, uses a wheelchair, and sustained a traumatic brain injury as a child, while and dismissing the other, disability studies ‘appears to inadvertently serve the same naturalizing and normalizing functions that it condemns’ (Church, ‘Fantastic Films, Fantastic Bodies’).

29 Works such as The Stand (1978), Needful Things (1991), and the Dark Tower series (1982-2012), feature disabled characters in central roles, while novels from The Shining (1977) onwards feature disabled characters in secondary or minor roles. King’s publishing career began in 1974 with Carrie and a string of bestsellers followed; Mendlesohn and James attribute the 1980s horror boom largely to the success of King’s work. For a brief discussion of disability in King’s work see Melinda Hall.

her carer Wireman suffers the physiological aftereffects of a suicide attempt that left a bullet in his brain. Duma Key depicts multiple disabled characters and multiply-disabled characters. It is also a novel centrally concerned with the power of representation and specifically with disability narratives, affects, and effects.

At the beginning of the novel Edgar, the middle-aged owner of a construction empire, is recovering from the accident in which he was injured. His marriage fails, and at his therapist’s suggestion he leaves his Minnesota home to make a fresh start on Duma Key, an island off the Florida coast. Inspired by his new home, Edgar discovers a talent for painting, but his paintings have increasingly disturbing supernatural effects. In its depiction of Edgar, the novel invokes images and narratives of disability familiar not only from the horror genre but from culture more broadly. At the novel’s opening, the newly disabled Edgar is a figure of tragic loss, in constant pain and living ‘in hell’ (4). Despite making progress with his physiological rehabilitation, Edgar is suicidal. He plans to kill himself and make it look like an accident, an act postponed only because his therapist warns that his family will guess the truth. At the same time, one consequence of Edgar’s brain injury is that he feels constant and sometimes overwhelming anger. He has bouts of uncontrollable rage where he is verbally and physically abusive, at one point stabbing his wife Pam with a plastic knife badly enough that she needs stitches. Thus, as well as being a tragic figure of loss, Edgar is depicted as violently out of control, ‘the disabled avenger of horror’, whose disability causes them to seek revenge on others (Snyder and Mitchell 162).

Later, Edgar is framed in terms that evoke another familiar figure: the plucky cripple determined to overcome, as best he can, the restrictions imposed by his condition. Initially barely able to walk without crutches, Edgar walks along the beach from his house every day, pushing himself to go further each time with a mental game in which he continually resets his tally of steps. Reaching the house where Elizabeth and Wireman live and being able to walk home again becomes the goal of his ‘Great Beach Walks’ (94). The destination is less important than what it represents: the overcoming of his physical limitations.

Overcoming narratives are often linked with the figure of the supercrip or ‘disabled hero’ (Wendell 251). The combination of Edgar’s extraordinary talent for painting and the detailed narrative of his rehabilitation positions Edgar as a supercrip in an additional sense: the disabled person whose extraordinary abilities or powers ‘operate in direct relationship with [...] their disability’ (Schalk, ‘Reevaluating the Supercrip’, 81).*° Edgar’s extraordinary talent is consistently linked to his injury. He discovers his artistic abilities only after the accident and his desire to paint is almost always accompanied by phantom limb sensations in his missing arm. His story thus appears a straightforward variant of the myth of compensation: lose an arm, gain a talent. Edgar himself understands it in those terms, searching the internet for stories that show that he isn’t ‘the first person to lose a body-part only to gain something else’ (96).

The novel thus presents a series of highly conventional disability narratives, flipping between them in a veritable kaleidoscope of reductive images. Yet the mobilisation of these tropes ultimately serves to undermine them. Edgar is framed as a pitiful cripple, a rage-driven monster, a plucky striver, and a compensatory genius, but in positioning him as all of these things, Duma Key actually conveys that he is none of them—or, at least, that none of them are the sum of him. The very invocation of these reductive images of disability calls into question their accuracy as representations of disability experience, highlighting their inability to encompass the complexities of disabled lives. As the novel progresses, the misfit between Edgar’s feelings and experiences and these conventional disability tropes becomes increasingly obvious. The framing of Edgar as rage-driven disabled avenger is undermined by his physical therapist’s sarcastic dismissal of what Edgar perceives as his most abhorrent act, his attempt to choke Pam: ‘being choked by a one-armed invalid must have been a pants-wetting experience’ (10). Later, Edgar finds that he can actually walk further when he stops playing mental games and just walks for pleasure, and the idea that he acquired his artistic talent at the same time as he acquired disability is problematised by Pam’s recollection of the wonderful picture books he drew for their daughter years before.

The conventional disability images and narratives invoked in the novel each carry a corresponding affective charge, evoking a series of emotional responses in the reader, such as empathy for Edgar’s pain, revulsion at his attack on his wife, admiration at his persistence, and wonder at his talent. The specific feelings at each point—the reader might feel pity rather than empathy at Edgar’s pain, or be more sympathetic to his violent outbursts—are less important than the shifting series of emotional responses evoked. These affective shifts serve to

30 In terms of Schalk’s typology, Edgar’s story is both a ‘regular supercrip’ narrative (his achievement of the ordinary act of walking along the beach is framed as extraordinary) and a ‘superpowered supercrip’ narrative (‘Reevaluating the Supercrip’ 79, 81). For in-depth discussion of the supercrip, see Chapter 2.

undermine any perception of disability as simple, singular, or easily reducible: the novel enacts the idea that there is no one way to feel about disability.

This foregrounding of the feelings evoked by conventional disability images and narratives is just one element of a larger exploration of the relationship between disability and narrative in the novel. Duma Key repeatedly draws attention to how disability is represented, reported, and narrated.*! Two pages of the novel are devoted to the results of Edgar’s online searches for other amputees with extraordinary abilities. Duma Key undoubtedly uses disability for emotional impact: the narrative of Edgar’s struggle to recover control of his bodymind and adjust to his newly disabled body is both involving and affecting. However, the novel also draws attention to the ways in which narratives habitually exploit disability for emotional impact. Edgar reflects on the narratives others construct around him, and the ways in which disability makes a story worth telling or limits the stories that might be told. Initially, he fears that a local gallery’s interest in his work is a result of his disability rather than the quality of his paintings. After he is interviewed for the local paper Edgar becomes a ‘local celebrity’, but, as he reflects, it is not his artistic talent but the combination of his artistic talent and his disability that makes the story newsworthy: ‘Artist was good [...]. Artist Who Used to Build Banks and Then Turned His Back on Mammon was better. One-Armed Artist of Blazing Talent was the absolute Golden Motherfucker’ (330). Wireman mocks the media tendency to make story from disability, telling Edgar that his missing arm is ‘gonna be golden’, and imagining the newspaper headline ‘Edgar Freemantle Bursts Upon the Suncoast Art Scene Like a Phoenix from the Smoking Ashes of Tragedy!’ (245). King’s novel uses disability to generate affect, but it also foregrounds the ways in which narratives routinely use disability to generate affect.

Duma Key is a novel about the power of representation, refuting the idea that representations are ‘just’ representations, without wider significance. In the novel, ‘Art is magic’ and, after suffering a brain injury as an infant (the same sort of injury later experienced by Edgar), the young Elizabeth Eastlake ‘literally drew herself back into