6
And as far as TV is concerned, I guess it's time for everybody to get out of the pool. I don't have enough John Simon in me to really enjoy shooting TV's creative cripples as they crawl and squirm around in the great TV Cancelation Corral. I've even tried to treat Kolchak: The Night Stalker with affection, because I certainly feel a degree of affection for it. Bad as it was, it wasn't any worse than some of the Saturday matinee creature features that enlivened my life as a kid--The Black Scorpion or The Beast of Hollow Mountain, for instance.
Individual TV programs have produced brilliant or near-brilliant excursions into the supernatural--Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for instance, gave us adaptations of several Ray Bradbury stories (the best of them was probably "The Jar"), one terrifying William Hope Hodgson story, "The Thing in the Weeds," a nonsupernatural bone-freezer from the pen of John D. MacDonald ("The Morning After"), and fans of the bizarre will remember the episode where the cops ate the murder weapon--a leg of lamb. . . . that one based on a story by Roald Dahl.
There was "They're Coming," the original hour-long pilot for The Twilight Zone, and the short French film "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which appeared on American television for the first time as a Twilight Zone episode (this adaptation of the Bierce story cannot be seen during syndication runs of The Twilight Zone). Another Bierce story, "One of the Missing," ran on PBS in the winter of 1979. And speaking of PBS, there was also an interesting adaptation of Dracula done there. Originally telecast in 1977, it featured Louis Jourdan as the legendary Count. This videotaped drama is both moody and romantic; Jourdan gives a more effective performance than Frank Langella in the John Badham film, and the scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle are marvelous. The Jourdan version also comes closer to the heart of the vampire's sexuality, presenting to us in Lucy, the three weird sisters, and in Dracula himself creatures who possess a loveless sexuality--one which kills. It is more powerful than the ho-hum romance of the Badham version, in spite of Langella's energetic job in the title role. Jack Palance has also played Dracula on television (in another Matheson screenplay and another Dan Curtis production) and did quite well by the Count . . . although I prefer Jourdan's performance.
Other one-shot TV movies and specials run from the merely forgettable (NBC's ill-advised adaptation of Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home, for instance) to some really hideous pieces of work: Cornell Wilde in Gargoyles (Bernie Casey plays the head gargoyle as a kind of five-thousand-year-old Ayatollah Khomeini) and Michael Sarrazin is the mistitled--and misbegotten--Frankenstein: The True Story. The risk rate is so high that when my own novel 'Salem's Lot was adapted for television after Warners had tried fruitlessly to get it off the ground as a theatrical film for three years, my feeling at its generally favorable reception was mostly relief. For awhile it seemed that NBC might turn it into a weekly series, and when that rather numbing prospect passed by the boards, I felt relief again.
Most television series have ranged from the ludicrous (Land of the Giants) to the utterly inane (The Monsters, Struck by Lightning). The anthology series of the last ten years have meant well, by and large, but have been emasculated by pressure groups both without and within; they have been sacrificed on the altar of television's apparent belief that both drama and melodrama are best appreciated while in a semidoze. There was Journey to the Unknown, a British import (from the Hammer studios). Some of the stories were engrossing, but ABC made it clear rather quickly that it had no real interest in frightening anyone, and the series died quickly. Tales of the Unexpected, produced by Quinn Martin (The FBI, The Fugitive, The Invaders, The New Breed, and God knows how many others), was more interesting, concentrating on psychological horrors (in one episode, reminiscent of Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, a murderer sees his victim rise from the dead on his television set), but low ratings killed the program after a short run . . . a fate that might have been The Twilight Zone's , had not the network stuck by it.
In fine, the history of horror and fantasy on television is a short and tacky one. Let's turn the magic eye off and turn to the bookshelf; I want us to talk about some stories where all the artificial boundaries are removed--both those of visual set and of network restriction--and the author is free to "get you" in any way he can. An uneasy concept, and some of these books scared the hell out of me even as they were delighting me. Maybe you've had the same experience . . . or maybe you will.
Just take my arm and step this way.
CHAPTER IX
Horror Fiction
It might not be impossible to present an overview of American horror and fantasy fiction during the last thirty years, but it wouldn't be just a chapter in this book; it would be a book in itself, and probably a dull one (maybe even a text, that apotheosis of the Dull Book species).
For our purposes, I can't imagine why we would want to deal with all the books published in the genre anyway; most of them are just downright bad, and as with TV, I have no taste for the job of beating the field's most spectacular violators with their shortcomings. If you want to read John Saul and Frank de Felitta, go right ahead. It's your three-fifty. But I'm not going to discuss them here.
My plan is to discuss ten books that seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine: the horror story as both literature and entertainment, a living part of twentieth-century literature, and worthy successors to such books as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Chambers's The King in Yellow. They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature--to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed.
Some of the books discussed here have been "best sellers"; some have been written by members of the so-called "fantasy community"; some have been written by people with no interest in fantasy or the supernatural for its own sake, but who have seen it as a particularly useful tool to be used once and then perhaps put aside forever (although many have also found that the use of this tool is apt to become habit-forming). Most of them--even those which cannot be neatly pigeonholed as "best sellers"--have been steady sellers across the years, probably because the horror tale, which is regarded by most serious critics in about the same light that Dr. Johnson regarded women preachers and dancing dogs, manages to consistently satisfy as entertainment even when it's only good. When it's great, it can deliver a megaton wallop (as it does in Lord of the Flies) that other forms of literature can rarely equal. Story has always been the abiding virtue of the horror tale, from "The Monkey's Paw" to T. E. D. Klein's utterly flabbergasting novella of monsters (from Costa Rica, yet!) under the streets of New York, "Children of the Kingdom." That being so, one only wishes that those great writers among us who have also succeeded in becoming our greatest bores in recent years would attempt something in the genre and stop poking around in their navels for intellectual fluff.
I hope that by discussing these ten books, I can dilate upon those virtues of story and entertainment and perhaps even indicate some of the themes which seem to run through most good horror stories. I should be able to do this if I'm doing my job, because there just aren't that many thematic trails to go down. For all of their mythic hold over us, the field of the supernatural is a narrow one in the greater spread of general literature. We can depend on the reappearance of the Vampire, and our furry friend (who sometimes wears its fur on the inside) the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. But the time has also come to bring on that fourth archetype: the Ghost.
We may also find ourselves returning to the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, since this tension exists in all horror fiction, the bad as well as the good, leading back to that endlessly fascinating question of who's okay and who isn't. That's really the taproot, isn't it? And we may also find that narcissism is the major difference between the old horror fiction and the new; that the monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors--at any time.
2
Probably Ghost Story by Peter Strau
b is the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror "wave" in the seventies--those three, of course, being Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other. The fact that these three books, all published within five years of each other, enjoyed such wide popularity, helped to convince (or reconvince) publishers that horror fiction had a commercial potential much wider than the readership of such defunct magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown or the paperback reissues of Arkham House books.1
The resulting scrambling to get the next "big" shiver-and-shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid-seventies, and more traditional best-sellers began to reappear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex. That isn't to say that publishers stopped looking for occult/horror novels or stopped publishing them; the mills of the publishing world grind slowly but exceedingly fine (which is one reason that such an amazing river of gruel streams forth every spring and fall from the larger New York publishing houses), and the so-called "mainstream horror novel" will probably be with us yet awhile. But that first heady rush is over, and editors in New York no longer automatically scramble for the Standard Contract Form and fill in a meaty advance as soon as something in the story comes out of the woodwork. . . . Aspiring writers please take note.
Against this background, Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan published Peter Straub's Julia in 1975. It was not his first novel; he had published a novel called Marriages--a nonsupernatural "this-is-the-way-we-live-now" sort of story--two years previous. Although Straub is an American, he and his wife lived in England and Ireland for ten years, and in both execution and intent, Julia is an English ghost story. The setting is English, most of the characters are English, and most importantly, the novel's diction is English--cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base. There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book's most vital situation certainly suggests it: Kate, the daughter of Julia and Magnus, has choked on a piece of meat and Julia kills her daughter while trying to perform a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife. The girl, it would appear, then returns as a malevolent spirit.
We aren't given the tracheotomy in any detail--the blood splashing the walls and the mother's hand, the terror and the cries. This is the past; we see it in reflected light. Much later, Julia sees the girl who may or may not be Kate's ghost burying something in the sand. When the girl leaves, Julia digs up the hole, discovering first a knife and then the mutilated corpse of a turtle. This reflection back upon the botched tracheotomy is elegant, but it has little heat.
Two years later Straub published a second supernatural novel, If You Could See Me Now. Like Julia, If You Could See Me Now is a novel occupied with the idea of the revenant, that vengeful spirit from an undead past. All of Straub's supernatural novels work effectively when dealing with these old ghosts; they are stories of the past continuing to work on the present in a malevolent way. It has been suggested that Ross McDonald is writing gothics rather than private eye novels; it could be said that Peter Straub is writing gothics rather than horror novels. What distinguishes his work in Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and, most splendidly, in Ghost Story is his refusal to view the gothic conventions as static ones. All three of these books have much in common with the classic gothics of the genre--The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, even Frankenstein (although in terms of its telling, Frankenstein is actually less a gothic and more a modern novel than Ghost Story)--they are all books where the past eventually becomes more important than the present.
This would seem a valid enough course for the novel to follow to any people who see uses in the study of history, you would think, but the gothic novel has always been considered something of a curiosity, a widget on the great machine of English-speaking fiction. Straub's first two novels seem to me to be mostly unconscious attempts to do something with this widget; what distinguishes Ghost Story and makes it such a success is that with this book, Straub seems to have grasped exactly--consciously--what the gothic romance is about, and how it relates to the rest of literature. Put another way, he has discovered what the widget was supposed to do, and Ghost Story is a vastly entertaining manual of operation.
"[Ghost Story] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find," Straub says. "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of books by his 'set'--this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field--I also read Bierce, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans. . . . The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each other--and then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novels--a lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, all the rest. And it seemed like a formal challenge. After that I thought of cannibalizing certain old classic stories, and plugging them into the Chowder Society. This idea excited me. It seemed very audacious, and I thought that was very good. So I went ahead, after I got to that point in the book, and wrote junked-up versions of "My Kinsman, Major Molyneux," The Turn of the Screw, and started on "The Fall of the House of Usher." But by then the lead-in threatened to become the whole book. So I dropped the Poe story (the Hawthorne story came out when I edited the first draft). I was thinking at the time that the Chowder Society would follow these with their own stories--Lewis's monologue about the death of his wife, Sears and Ricky splitting a monologue (trading fours, in a way) about the death of Eva Galli.
The first striking thing about Ghost Story is its resemblance to Julia. That book begins with a woman who has lost a child; Ghost Story begins with a man who has found one. But these two children are eerily similar and there is an atmosphere of evil about both of them.
From Julia:
Almost immediately, she saw the blonde girl again. The child was sitting on the ground at some distance from a group of other children, boys and girls who were carefully watching her. . . . The blonde girl was working intently at something with her hands, wholly concentrated on it. Her face was sweetly serious. . . . This was what gave the scene the aspect of a performance. . . . The girl was seated, her legs straight out before her, in the sandy overspill from one of the sandboxes. . . . She was speaking softly now to her audience, ranged on the scrubby grass before her in groups of three and four. . . . They were certainly unnaturally quiet, completely taken up by the girl's theatrics.
Is it this little girl, who is holding her audience spellbound by cutting up a turtle before their eyes, the same little girl who accompanied Don Wanderley on his strange trip south from Milburn, New York, to Panama City, Florida? This is the little girl as Don first sees her. You decide.
And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared in the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive--she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her . . . perhaps children were quicker at seeing real differences than adults. . . . Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.
Julia, in the book of the same name, speaks to a small black child about the unnamed girl who has mutilated the turtle. The black girl wanders over to Julia and begins the conversation by asking:
"What's your name?"
"Julia."
The girl's mouth opened a fraction wider.
"Doolya?"
Julia raised her hand for a moment to the child's springy ruff of hair. "What's your name?"
"Mona."
"Do you know the girl who was just playing in here? The girl with the blonde hair who was sitting and
talking?"
Mona nodded.
"Do you know her name?"
Mona nodded again. "Doolya."
"Julia?"
"Mona. Take me with you."
"Mona, what was that girl doing? Was she telling a story?"
"She does. Things." The girl blinked.
In Ghost Story, Don Wanderley similarly speaks with another child about the child who so disturbs him:
"What's the name of that girl?" He asked, pointing.
The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said "Angie."
"Angie what?"
"Don't know."
"Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?"
The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupped his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful."
Another theme which runs through both novels--a very Henry Jamesian theme--is the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us. Even in their terror, Straub's characters recognize the kinship. In their appearance, his ghosts, like the ghosts James, Wharton, and M. R. James conjure up, are Freudian. Only in their final exorcism do Straub's ghosts become truly inhuman--emissaries from the world of "outside evil." When Julia asks Mona the name of the turtle-killing little girl, Mona gives back her own name ("Doolya," she says). And when, in Ghost Story, Don Wanderley tries to ascertain who this eerie little girl is, this disquieting exchange follows: