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Wrote an essay for the NYT on watching and reading Golding’s Lord of the Flies in our savage age.
Not everyone has read “Lord of the Flies,” but thanks to the novel’s million descendants, everyone has encountered the novel’s core conceits and feral mythology, generic monuments that loom titanic over the psycho-oceanography of the zeitgeist.
At the cultural level, Golding’s island has become, in effect, a repeating island par excellence, our culture’s dark Brigadoon with fragments scattered across a dizzying variety of media: graphic novels (“Plutona”), video games (“DayZ,” “Rule of Rose”), television (“The 100,” “From,” “Yellowjackets”) and of course novels(Sarah Goodwin’s “Stranded,” Pierce Brown’s “Red Rising”). There’s so much “Lord of the Flies” in Stephen King’s gothics that I could write a dissertation on it. There are his obvious tributes like “The Long Walk” or the recurring fictional town Castle Rock, named after the fortified outcrop that one of the novel’s tribes inhabited. A reader need only squint at “The Stand” to discern a version of “Lord of the Flies.” Same with “Under the Dome.” Same with “The Mist.” Same with “The Shining.”
Golding’s novel might feel somewhat dated, but his delirious beast-haunted island, in shattered refracted form, sure as hell does not. And many of these newly risen Hispaniolas of depravity have kept up with our rising incivility, our deepening tribalism, our social media derangements.”
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