“The (Closest) Cry from E.A. Poe Imaginable”: The Influence of Poe on Stephen King’s The Shining

Poe’s influence on North American literature has been widely recognized. “Who has not been influenced by Poe?” claimed Joyce Carol Oates. Stephen King, the bestseller-favorite, is not an exception. Although the majority of critical works devoted to analyzing The Shining argue that the most obvious influence on this work by Poe’s “The Masque of the Read Death”, I have deviated from this general consensus and will compare it with two other short stories instead, also by Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat”. Therefore, the present paper aims to put forward the similarities between the most popular US writers of the horror genre: Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. More precisely, it focuses on the influence of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” on Stephen King’s novel The Shining as far as themes and motifs of the Gothic in the United States are concerned