Elena V. Savello

This article analyzes the creative heritage of the American writer Stephen King who has become famous for his works in the genres of horror literature and dark fantasy. In the course of the study, the authors study semantic, functional, structural metaphors, their stylistic and linguocultural features using the example of Stephen King’s stories “The Apt Pupil” and “Rainy Season”. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of the original works and translations by Russian linguists S.E. Task, M.V. Opaleva, V.V. Antonov, I.G. Pochitalin, B.G. Lyubartsev, V.A. Weber. The chronological framework of the study covers the period of the conceptualization of Stephen King’s work (translations by S.E. Task and I.G. Pochitalin) from 1991 to the latest experiments in the linguocultural rethinking of the comparative method (translation by V.V. Antonov) in 2012–2013. The main course of the study directed at analyzing the characteristic features of original metaphors and their translation forms, which lose and gain unique cultural features in comparison with the context in English. This approach clearly demonstrates not only the diversity of the author’s idiostyle, which touches on both the mystical-religious and personal feelings of the modern man, but also the acute social problems of modern society. It allows us to trace the emergence of new meanings in translated forms of metaphors. The results of the study show that quite often translators of Stephen King, trying to adapt the text, lose flexibility.