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| photo: Leah Ramuglia | |
Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She writes academic and popular books about Shakespeare's plays and world, and cohosts the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. Her humorous pieces have appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, April 21, 2026) chronicles what she discovered when Stephen King granted her access to his private archive and talked to her about how he crafted his most iconic stories.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
An English professor walks into the King of Horror's archive, faces her childhood fears, and gets to know the man whose stories first unleashed them.
On your nightstand now:
James Ijames's hilarious Hamlet adaptation, Fat Ham; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist utopia, Herland; and Stephen King's It. I like to be prepared for whatever mood strikes me at the end of the day.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was a city kid, so I was fascinated by books about girls surviving in the wilderness (or what seemed like the wilderness from my limited perspective). Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins was one of my favorites, but I also couldn't stop reading the Little House on the Prairie series. I used to put on this flannel nightgown I had and pretend I was Laura Ingalls crawling across the floor with scarlet fever to get a ladle of water. Melodrama was my love language back then.
Your top five authors:
Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare, and Jeanette Winterson. All of these authors turn narrative convention on its head; and they all mobilize the sensory effects of language to take me to unexpected emotional places.
Book you've faked reading:
I was supposed to read James Joyce's Ulysses for my PhD oral exam but never made it through. Every time I try to untangle his (brilliant, I know) intertextual references, I lose the story and abandon it. Elevator Repair Service just premiered a production of Ulysses at the Public Theater in New York City that I hear is fabulous, with lots of beer guzzling and debauchery. If I ever get to see it, maybe I'll become a convert.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Jeanette Winterson's novel Written on the Body was unlike anything I'd ever read before when I picked it up in 1992. It's a gorgeous meditation on love, desire, and embodiment that keeps the narrator's gender unspecified for 190 pages. Twenty years later, she wrote her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, about searching for her origins (and so much more). It tries to answer the question that haunts Written on the Body: Why is the measure of love loss? Now I'm obsessed with both of these books and teach them whenever I can.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Bette Greene's Summer of My German Soldier. I bought it at the Scholastic book fair in the seventh grade because it had a picture of Kristy McNichol on the cover from the television film.
Book you hid from your parents:
Judy Blume's Forever. Actually, I first tried to hide it from the school librarian by checking it out tucked in with a pile of books (like she'd never seen that move before). Forever was the closest thing to porn that a 1970s kid was going to find in their middle-school library. Until Scott Spencer's Endless Love came along.
Book that changed your life:
I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale when I was 20 and living in the same city where the book takes place. I'll never forget when June tries to use her credit card at a local store and it's declined. Atwood's dystopia crystallized everything I was scared of as a young woman and everything I was figuring out at the time about what I needed to fight for.
Book that made you laugh and cry:
Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, based on her web comic/blog. She uses stick-figure drawings and hilarious vignettes about her life to get at some very unfunny truths about living with depression.
Favorite line from a book:
I could write a whole book about Shakespeare lines that have rocked my world (I talk about some of them in Monsters in the Archives), but I'm going to go with a non-Shakespearean favorite here. Although Ulysses leaves me cold, I love the last line of Joyce's short story "The Dead" from Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." The poetry of the first half--all those soft sounds and faintly falling snowflakes--lulls you into this sense of peace; and then, with one simile, Joyce slides you toward the bleakest universal truth about humanity. It guts me every time.
Five books you'll never part with:
My childhood editions of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, my eighth-grade copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and my 1979 paperback of Stephen King's The Shining (with photo inserts from the Stanley Kubrick film). I love to save original copies of books that take me back to significant memories (like learning to read) and to emotions that shook me--often with fear or sadness, but sometimes with wonder.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Daniel Mason's North Woods. It has one of the best surprise endings since Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.