SOURCE: Cassuto, Leonard. “Repulsive Attractions: ‘The Raft,’ the Vagina Dentata, and the Slasher Formula.” In Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, pp. 61-78. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Cassuto finds parallels between “The Raft” and the slasher-film genre, and views the mysterious monster in the story as an embodiment of the vagina dentata.

“Twice-told tales” occupy a time-honored place in American literature, but Stephen King's “The Raft” deserves attention as a twice-written one. King himself was so haunted by his own creation that he rewrote the story from memory in 1981, thirteen years after first devising it. (He had published it in an obscure skin magazine in 1968 as “The Float,” but he never located a copy and later discovered that he had lost the original typescript.) From his brief account of the story's composition...