Just a decade ago, a reasonable case could be made that, in “some important ways,” famous and best-selling author Stephen King “provides the last bastion of biblical morality in popular fiction.”
Today, having finished reading his newest novel, titled Never Flinch, it appears that King has not only lost whatever faith in God he may once have had, but he has channeled his disillusionment into a book that relentlessly ridicules those of us who believe.
The anticipated novel has a bitter tone and is filled with passages and pages mocking Christians and their core convictions regarding the sanctity of life, the hope of salvation, and the ultimate victory of good over evil. In many ways, King appears to have made politics his new religion. Sadly, when politics replace religion in King‘s narrative, the art loses its soul, diluting the depth and nuance that once captivated those of us who have long enjoyed his books.
Abandoning any attempt to explore universal truths, King has penned a rigid polemic that feels more like a woke manifesto than a journey through the human experience. And, in elevating ideological purity over a compelling narrative, King creates caricatures instead of characters.
Readers are first introduced to “Trig,” a deranged serial killer on a quest to kill “13 innocent individuals and one guilty” to avenge the death of a man who was framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Trig shows no remorse about the deaths of the innocent, but readers are reminded of the depravity of the serial murderer who keeps a photo of himself with Vice-President JD Vance prominently displayed on his office wall, and listens to “right-wing” radio commentator Glenn Beck each day when he eats his lunch.
In his public life, King has always been quite open about his progressive politics. But it is not until this latest novel that his deep disdain for those who do not share his politics has bled so deeply into the narrative. King’s politics have adopted the characteristics of dogma—rigid and unyielding beliefs that demand unquestioning loyalty. His notable ability to construct strong narratives is undermined by a narrowing of perspectives and the elevation of ideological purity over what was once compelling storytelling. Even his characters’ dialogue has been stifled as the pursuit of truth and justice is overshadowed by the need to maintain ideological conformity.
Not content to have a single deranged right-wing serial murderer, the novel introduces a second, deranged fundamentalist psycho named Christopher Stewart, who is an anti-abortion zealot from a Church called Real Christ Holy Church. Christopher, who sometimes calls himself Chrissy, is being controlled by an evil Pastor Jim (who carries a sign that celebrates the murder of an abortion provider and claims that the hero who killed the abortionist was “sent to do God’s work”), and the equally murderous Deacon Andy, who is encouraging Chris to assassinate Kate McKay, an attractive and charismatic women’s rights activist.
Not surprisingly, in King’s world, McKay, who is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour to protest the Dobbs decision and advocate for abortion, is the most attractive character in the book. McKay draws packed venues of fans, as well as some small groups of obnoxious, loud-mouthed, unattractive pro-life protestors and hecklers. King provides McKay with a barrage of tiresome pro-choice cliches and long sermons throughout, focused on the importance of protecting a woman’s right to choose abortion.
In portraying the pro-abortion McKay as someone beautiful, competent, and captivating, King apparently intends to present her as someone readers will want to emulate. King writes, “When Kate walks onstage—no, struts—most of the audience rises to its feet cheering and applauding.” She then smiles and asks:
“Who makes the laws here in Nebraska? I’m thinking of that question as regards the Dobbs decision, which kicked abortion legislation back to the states. In Nebraska, the cut-off is twelve weeks. Seventy-two percent of the legislators who made that law are men, who have never had to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy.
And when a loathsome pro-lifer in the audience shouts “God’s law!”, she responds: “I didn’t know God had been elected to the Nebraska Legislature.”
In King’s world, the progressives are all perfect, attractive, and engaging, while those whose politics King disagrees with are all ugly losers. Like caricatures from the 1950s, the female pro-life protestors have heavily hair-sprayed bouffant hairdos and hateful rhetoric.
The hunger for horror novels has helped King remain at the top of the best-seller lists for decades. Although the demons may have won a few of the battles in his books, King used to offer reassurance that the demons will never win the war because they don’t pose a real threat to the power of God Himself. Such reassurances are missing in Never Flinch. And his most recent posts on X seem to reject the presence of evil even in the most malevolent of men. Describing the murderous rampage in Minnesota last week by the wicked Vance Boelter, King refused to call the act evil and instead, blamed mental illness and access to guns for the nightmare that this demonic man perpetrated on lawmakers:
Vance Boelter is clearly as nutty as a fruitcake. The real culprit is the gun he used. They’re everywhere, and it’s years too late to put that genie back in the bottle. Nuts are gonna’ do nutty, violent things, and guns are easily obtainable.
In Danse Macabre, King’s 1981 non-fiction analysis of the role that the horror story plays in our everyday lives, he suggests that “horror is innately conservative, even reactionary.” He believed that we are attracted to horror because we need to reestablish our feelings of essential normality. It is likely that readers—including many Christian readers like myself—have been drawn to King’s tales of horror because he was among the last popular fiction writers willing to acknowledge that evil exists. And that even in our therapeutic society, which has redefined badness into “illness”, evil results from an act of the free and conscious will. This is a truth long understood by Christians, though Stephen King now appears to flinch at the very thought of it.
Never Flinch: A Novel
By Stephen King
Scribner, May 2025
Hardcover, 448 pages
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I can’t wait to not read this or not see the movie or television adaptation.
Ditto.
King is a drug-damaged man, whose gift for nightmarish scribblings have given him a pedestal. However, trying to find any value in his polemics is the equivalent of attempting to retrieve a pearl from a septic tank.
… only to find the “pearl” is made of plastic.
His politics per se may not have been on obvious display before, but there have always been lots of problems with his writing. For one, there is an uncomfortable amount of sexual perversion, something perhaps related to the previously-mentioned drug problems. For another, he lacks the religious and philosophical depth to write a good ghost story. Give me M.R. James and Robert Hugh Benson instead. I have not read his novels, but I have read a collection of some of his short stories, and I was disappointed to see a very poor rip-off of “The Mezzotint”. His lack of creativity is no doubt due to his having the wrong background — it’s like me trying to write a first-hand story about what it’s like to play in the NBA.
I will admit that he knows how to set up a spooky scene. He should have stuck with that and written only vignettes. No horror author should engage in world-building — that is for science fiction and fantasy authors. No cosmic clown-spiders vs cosmic turtles, thank you very much. On the contrary, the best horror should have the appearance of quite possibly being real, fitting into the world of our experiences and our ancestors’ beliefs, only not into the comfortable, humdrum, workaday world. The Clementine Recognitions are a real ancient document (though not actually from St. Clement, as was even acknowledged in “Lost Hearts”), and the Tractate Middoth is a real part of the Talmud.
PR – good one.
Stephen King has moved so far to the left that he now resides on the floor of Lake Michigan.
Many years ago a movie was made of ‘Pet Sematary’. My girlfriend at the time and I went to see it and it was really just plain bad. About mid-way through there was a scene in which Steven King, who seems to have a Alfred Hitchcock thing about cameo appearances in his movies, portrayed a preacher at a burial. If memory serves he uttered the immortal words “may the Lord take a liking to you” or some such nonsense. At this Amy and I looked at each other and without a word just got up and left, leaving a half full bag of popcorn.
I love ‘The Stand’ and a few of his earlier ones, but I long ago stopped reading King’s books, as in taking them seriously, when he started being political (and predictable).
Now that I’ve mentioned Alfred Hitchcock, permit me to tell this story:
When ‘Psycho’ was released in 1960 the ‘shower scene’ was an instant sensation – everyone who saw the movie remembers that. As the story goes a woman wrote a letter to Hitchcock in which she stated that her daughter had been so traumatized by the ‘shower scene’ that she refused to take a shower.
Hitchcock’s response – “Send her to the dry-cleaner.”
At least that’s how I heard the story – Hitchcock was famous for his dry humor.
Pet Sematary (1989) was a pretty decent movie. I don’t remember anything in particular about the preacher (the scene being stolen by an angry confrontation in which the casket is overturned), but the sad truth is that it’s not hard to find clergy (Catholic as well as Protestant) with exactly that combination of irreverence and bad theology.
As for “The Stand”, if he had written himself into a corner where he needed the literal hand of God to materialize and destroy the baddies, that would have been an overt case of Deus ex machina. If he had written himself into a corner where he needed a crazy side character to drive up with a nuke in the back of a truck to destroy the baddies, that would have been an overt case of Deus ex machina. In this case, he had written himself into a corner and chose to have the literal hand of God materialize and detonate the nuke brought in the back of a truck by a crazy side character. That goes beyond Deus ex machina; it goes beyond bad writing. It is a rude gesture to everyone who had stuck with the story that far.
I should probably give a better reason for why I think Pet Sematary was a decent movie than that I simply liked it. The main reason is that it affirmed that there are some means that must be rejected no matter how innocent the end might be. In this case the means are paranormal, even demonic, and we live in a society that embracing such means at an ever-increasing rate. We also live in win-at-all-costs society that embraces evil but merely natural means to desired ends.
I also like the grateful ghost who tries to prevent the bad decisions. Gratitude is too rare in society today, and it is almost never the motive of fictional characters — let alone fictional ghosts.
I am a devout Catholic who prays each morning, worships at Mass and attends weekly adoration, and recites the Divine Mercy 3 o’clock prayers daily to establish my credentials to the foregoing critics. I have read “Never Flinch”. It forces readers who think like extremists of any stripe to look in the mirror.
King has quite the imagination. That often being quite horrific. I wonder if something happened to him during his childhood to account for this?
I must admit to a modicum of pity for Ms. Hendershott who must read books like this in order to be able to review them – this review gives me the impression that she wishes she could forget this book asap, and I understand this.
Let me recommend 2 books by Michael O’Brien – 1) The Lighthouse and 2) Letter to the Future, his latest – she should feel much better after having read them.
Progressivists are neophiliacs because dreams of imposing utopia on the human race is a better alternative than confronting inner demons, mainly their personal weaknesses. So sins, without consequences, become a necessary part of their vision. What’s wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t going to talk about Francis anymore.
Let’s see…. King has become a “dogmatist” for depicting a bad guy as liking JD Vance and Glenn Beck. Um, you must be unfamiliar with the tone in which Vance and Beck express their views and characterize their opponents.
And you can’t have read the same book I did, if you see King’s portrayal of Kate McKay as uncritically “attractive.” If there’s one common thread running through his treatment of her from beginning to end, it’s her ego and narcissism, and refusal to listen to Holly.