Revenant Ecology: Anthropic Echoes and Ecogothic Entanglements in Stephen King’s Rose Red and Ridley Pearson’s The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red

Abstract

The horror genre at large has been increasingly looking to issues of ecology for its materials. Haunted house stories in particular hold distinct value in our analysis of real-life environmental horrors, as their unruliness can be likened to the Earth in the Anthropocene: a familiar homespace that is quickly becoming supernatural with monstrous gigafires and suffocating algae blooms. But given humanity’s distinct geological impact on the current epoch, is it possible we can work alongside our tempestuous homespace? This project explores ecological entanglements and opportunity by investigating Stephen King’s Rose Red transmedia ecosystem with specific emphasis on the Rose Red miniseries (2002) and Ridley Pearson’s companion novel, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001). King and Pearson’s story contains familiar gothic characteristics with its living house, but their work notably departs from existing haunted house tales with Rose Red’s explicit need for human energy to pursue uninhibited, chaotic growth. As the mansion introduces a necessary human apparatus into its rickety infrastructure, even desiring intimate friendships with its female inhabitants, this evolving transmedia ecosystem begs to be read through an intersection of ecogothic and ecofeminist lenses by enacting a form of Donna J. Haraway’s sympoiesis; through its oddkin alliances across the organic-inorganic spectrum, this narrative universe emulates its themes of unrestrained growth, technology, and ecological trauma both within its story and with the media utilized to hold that story. As Rose Red compellingly amplifies its transmedial development’s parallels with the Earth in the Anthropocene—ecosystems that rely on human participation (for better or for worse) for their respective “builds”—this narrative world demonstrates that we can (re)theorize haunted ecosystems just as much as media ecosystems through stimulus-response dynamics and (super)natural human/nonhuman assemblages. Rose Red thus encourages us to examine what it means to live, die, and walk undead through the catastrophic Anthropocene while concomitantly providing an opportunity to re-envision our relationship with our planetary haunted house, the Earth.