Caroline Bicks on Stephen King, Marie Adelmann on Adjunct Labor

This episode of Writer's Voice features two compelling conversations that explore the emotional and societal undercurrents of storytelling. First, scholar Caroline Bix discusses her book 'Monsters in the Archives,' which chronicles her year spent in Stephen King's private Maine archive. Bix reveals how King's enduring power lies not in supernatural monsters, but in his ability to channel universal human fears—grief, loneliness, trauma, and the inevitability of isolation—through deeply crafted characters and language. Her personal journey of confronting childhood fears, particularly the terror of the closet, parallels King’s narrative techniques, showing how horror becomes a vessel for processing deeply personal and collective anxieties. The second half turns to Marie Adelman’s novel 'Adjunct,' a darkly comic yet harrowing portrayal of the precarity faced by contingent academic laborers. Adelman exposes the systemic exploitation within higher education, where highly educated adjuncts earn poverty-level wages, face crushing debt, and lack basic benefits, all while universities rely on their labor. The novel critiques the myth of academia as a meritocratic haven, revealing how class, gender, and capitalism have hollowed out the promise of higher education. Both segments underscore how stories—whether horror or satire—serve as vital tools for confronting uncomfortable truths about fear, labor, and societal failure.