The Boogeyman

In Stephen King’s short story ‘The Boogeyman’ we are introduced to Lester Billings, a young man, who is visiting a psychiatrist for the simple reason of telling the story of how he killed his three kids. Lester Billings explains that he didn’t kill them himself, but that he was responsible. His story begins with the marriage between his wife Rita and himself. He describes their marriage as happy, but there is many examples indicating the contrary. The relationship between Lester and Rita is very unequal and Rita is being quite repressed by Lester. He doesn’t think she has a right to decide things, because she is a woman and he describes himself as ‘brighter’ than her. He also explains how he got ‘the last word’, whenever she fought for an opinion contrary to his own.
Lester is a very old fashion, homophobic, patriotic American with a bit of hatred towards Vietnam, niggers and maybe, women. He sees himself as superior to his wife and he ought to be aggressive and violent if she provokes him in any way. This violent nature of his can also be seen in his upbringing of his children. For example he states that: “If he didn’t stop crying I’d give him a whack”. He also tells the psychiatrist how he sometimes felt like killing both his wife and his children, because they drove him crazy. Lester is a very obstinate man controlled by pride and honor. He wanted to protect the child by bringing him into their bedroom, but his honor forbade him to do it, because then he would have been wrong and Rita would have been right. When the first child died he hid his emotions behind a thick layer of stubbornness and hatred. He often explains how much he loved the children, but in the end his honor is more important. Lester’s relationship with Rita might have begun as happy as he describes it, but after each killing the relationship become progressively emotion-less and unhappier.
It is very apposite that Lester clearly enjoys the time without any children the most, while Rita is very unhappy in these times and only lightens up, when their third child is conceived. His anti-protection strategy towards the children is explains through his mother’s influence on him, when he was a child. Lester considers himself as a ‘cripple’ because of his mother and thus explains his fear of beaches and water. The maternal lack of trust in his early childhood has probably led to his psychological distortion of the world. The children most possible died of causes like crib death, brain convulsion and asphyxiation. True accidents, but in his twisted fantasy world Lester developed an illusion to suppress both the truth and his emotions. Because of the subjacent fear of water, caused by his mother, he created The Boogeyman, a rotted, black-green monster with one eye, seaweed in the hair and long claws. Originally a character from a comic book he read when he was a child, during the same time his mother traumatized him and this fear of water arose in him. The psychiatrist is illusionary created by Lester Billing for one simple purpose. Lester needed to let everything of his chest. He had to confess to all his sins, before The Boogeyman and thus himself ends his life.

Throughout the short story King sticks to his usually writing style with terror as the main literary effect, obvious whenever Lester mentions the closet. King also tends to use the horror effect, when he introduces the readers to the ‘The Boogeyman’, but he leaves the real ‘gross out’ out of this story.
The horror story “The Boogeyman” by King and the gothic short story “Thus I Refute Beelzy” by John Collier are similar in some ways, but the great difference between the horror genre and the gothic genre is that horror is written to scare and horrify the reader, while gothic stories usually are more philosophical and supernatural in order to mystify the world. The horror genre is the subsequent development of the gothic taking the evilness, which exists in both genres, to the extreme grisly kind of way.