2024/01/21 by Vincent Neyt, Mike Kestemont, Dorothy Henriette Modrall Sperling
#Stephen King #authorship verification #contemporary English-language fiction #pop culture #stylometry
paper · doi:10.48694/jcls.3594
Between 1977 and 1984, Stephen King published five novels under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman”. Reviewers noted similarities between King’s and Bachman’s writing styles when Thinner (1984) was published, ultimately leading to King’s unmasking. We investigate whether computational authorship analysis techniques can correctly identify King as the author of the Bachman books out of a selection of contemporary candidate authors – Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, and Thomas Harris. We also perform a post-hoc analysis of the use of pop-culture references and brand names in Bachman, King, Koontz, Straub, and Harris novels, based on comments in reviews of Bachman and King novels. The references extracted from the Bachman books occurred significantly more often in King’s texts than in the others’, showing that attentive readers could have “heard King’s voice” in the Bachman books through what a reviewer denigratingly called King’s “compulsion to list brand-name products and his affinity for pop-cult teenage junk”.