16 Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written time-travel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past: Finney's Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the-century times on America's east coast, and Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the idea--and different outcomes--cannot be imagined.
17 In The Shrinking Man, Scott Carey's life becomes an ever-louder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly.
18 Matheson's hero, Scott Carey, also goes down into the cellar every day with his pad and pencil; he too is writing a book (these days, isn't everybody?). Scott's book is about his experiences as the world's only shrinking man, and it provides for his family quite adequately . . . as Matheson's own book and the subsequent film made from it did for Matheson's own family, one supposes.
19 As a matter of fact, I do. My first novel, Carrie, was written under difficult personal circumstances, and the book dealt with characters to unpleasant and so alien to my own outlook at to seem almost like Martians. When I pick up the book now--which it seldom--it does not seem as if someone else had written it, but I do get a peculiar sort of feeling from it . . . as if I had written it while suffering from a bad case of mental and emotional flu.
20 One reason for the success of Marvel's Spider-Man when he burst on the comics scene in the early sixties may have been his vulnerability; he was and is an engaging exception to the standard comic-book formula. There is something winning in his vulnerability as Peter Parker and in his frequent klutziness as Spider-Man. After being bitten by that radioactive spider, Peter originally felt no holy desire to fight crime; he decided instead to make a bundle in showbiz. Before long, however, he discovers a truth which is bitter to him and amusing to the reader: no matter how great you looked on the Sullivan show, Marine Midland Bank still won't cash a check made out to The Amazing Spider-Man. Such touches of realism laced with rue can be traced to Stan Lee, Spider-Man's creator and the man probably most responsible for keeping the comic book from going the way of the pulps and the dime novels in the sixties and seventies.
21 This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is at pitiable as he it frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.
22 Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I think--witness the strong public reactions to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Something rather more important than a harmless roller-coaster ride is going on here, I think; here's a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex and throttle them. I wrote a story four years ago called "Survivor Type," which I still have not been able to sell (gee, and people told me that when I got successful I'd be able to sell my laundry list if I wanted to!). It deals with a surgeon who is washed up on an uninhabited island--little more than a scratch of coral above the surface of the Pacific--and eats himself, a piece at a time, to stay alive. "I did everything according to Hoyle," he writes in his diary after amputating his foot. "I washed it before I ate it." Not even the men's magazines would consider that one, and it sits in my file cabinet to this day, waiting for a good home. It will probably never find one, though.
23 And there's a wonderful story about Erle Stanley Gardner's days in what Frank Gruber used to call the pulp jungle. At that time the Depression was in full swing and Gardner was writing westerns for a penny a word, selling to such publications as Western Round-Up, West Weekly, and Western Tales (whose slogan was "Fifteen Stories, Fifteen Cents"). Gardner admitted that he made a habit of stretching the final shoot-out as far as it would go. Of course the bad guy finally bit the dust and the good guy strode into the saloon, .44s smoking and spurs jingling, for a cold sarsaparilla before moving on, but in the meantime, each time Gardner wrote "Bang!" he made another penny . . . and in those days, two bangs would buy you the daily newspaper.
24 All quoted in the Ellison entry by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. To point out the obvious, "Nalrah Nosille" is Harlan Ellison spelled backwards. Other names Ellison used--E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, and Clyde Mitchell--were so-called house names. In pulp terminology, a "house name" was the name of a totally fictional writer who was, nevertheless, extremely prolific . . . mostly because several (sometimes dozens) of writers published works under that name when they had another story in the same magazine. Thus, "Ivar Jorgensen" wrote Ellison-style fantasy when he was Ellison and sexy, pulp-style horror, as in the Jorgensen novel Rest in Agony, when he was someone else (in this case, Paul Fairman). To this should be added that Ellison has since acknowledged all of his pseudonomous work, and has published only under his own name since 1965. He has, he says, a "lemminglike urge to be up front."
25 This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan's version of the same incident.
The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions: It was told that Paramount Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on Star Trek: The Movie. The purpose of the conference was to toss around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about three months later). The Paramount exec didn't think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Spock, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent, doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. "The Enterprise," he said, "goes through an interstellar warp, the great-granddaddy of all interstellar warps. It's transported over a googol of light-years in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge of the entire universe. Scotty rigs full-charge ion blasters which breach the wall so they can see what's beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in an incredible while light, is the face of God Himself."
A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, "It's not big enough. Didn't I just tell you guys to think really BIG?"
In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out.
Here is Harlan Ellison's recitation of the True Facts: "Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow. . . . The trouble is, he can't write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I'd been called in twice, pr
ior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn't make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an ex-set designer . . . named Mark Trabulus.
"Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the know-nothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn't big enough. I devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for 11 December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15 December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene's office on the Paramount lot.
"I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to ensure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.
"Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, 'You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?'
"I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, 'There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, 'Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, 'I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, 'I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie."
Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!"
26 Ellison Anecdote #2: My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished "Croatoan," the skin-freezer which leads off Strange Wine, and he'd had a vasectomy two days before. "I'm still bleeding," he told the audience, "and my lady can attest that I'm telling the truth." The lady did to attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery goodbye to them from the podium. "Night, folks," he called. "Sorry it wasn't what you wanted."
27 Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Conversation. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question: "Why do people read this horror stuff?" My reply was essentially Harlan's; you try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don't have a few warps in your record, you're going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspaper coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman: KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; insert foot; close mouth.
1 My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
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Copyright (c) 1981 by Stephen King Portions of this book have appeared in Playboy magazine. Originally published in hardcover by Everest House.
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"What's Scary" was originally published in Fangoria magazine No. 289-290 (January-February 2010).
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ISBN 978-1-4391-7098-4
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Stephen King, Danse Macabre
(Series: # )
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