My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, if it had occurred before I even arrived, or if I had wandered away after it happened. Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I've said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact. I told this story in response to a question from the floor. The questioner had asked, "Can you recall anything in your childhood that was particularly terrible?"in other words, step right in, Mr. King, the doctor will see you now. Robert Marasco, author of Burnt Offerings and Parlor Games, said he could not. I offered my train story mostly so the questioner wouldn't be totally disappointed, finishing just as I have here, by saying that I could not actually remember the incident. To which the third panel member, Janet Jeppson (who is a psychiatrist as well as a novelist), said "But you've been writing about it ever since." There was an approving murmur from the audience. Here was a pigeonhole where I could be filed . . . here was a byGod motive. I wrote 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and destroyed the world by plague in The Stand because I saw this kid run over by a slow freight in the days of my impressionable youth. I believe this is a totally specious ideasuch shootfromthehip psychological judgments are little more than jumpedup astrology. Not that the past doesn't supply grist for the writer's mill; of course it does. One example the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. Rooks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling with clouds. This corpse bore a sign ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my facerotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that that dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel 'Salem' Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten. In another dreamthis is one which has recurred at times of stress over the last ten yearsI am writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. I'm working in a thirdfloor room that's very hot. A door on the far side of the room communicates with the attic, and I knowI knowshe's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me (perhaps she's a critic for the Times Book Review). At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack from a child's box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, raving and wielding a meatax. And when I run, I discover that somehow the house has exploded outwardit's gotten ever so much biggerand I'm totally lost. On awakening from this dream, I promptly scoot over to my wife's side of the bed. But we all have our bad dreams, and we all use them as best we can. Yet it is one thing to use the dream and quite another to suggest the dream is the cause in and of itself. That is to suggest the ridiculous about an interesting subfunction of the human brain that has little or no practical application to the real world. Dreams are only mindmovies, the scraps and remnants of waking life woven into curious little subconscious quilts by the thrifty human mind, which is loath to throw anything out. Some of these mindmovies are of the Xrated variety; some are comedies; some are horror movies. I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood traumathat becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great forcea force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself . . . which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actorno artistis ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is "genius"), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude. I'm suggesting that, to be successful, the artist in any field has to be in the right place at the right time. The right time is in the lap of the gods, but any mother's son or daughter can work hisher way to the right place and wait.  But what is the right place? That is one of the great, amiable mysteries of human experience. I can remember going dowsing as a kid with my Uncle Clayton, a real old Mainer if one ever lived. We walked out, my Uncle Clayt and I, he in his redandblackchecked flannel shirt and his old green cap, me in my blue parka. I was about twelve; he might have been in his late forties or his late sixties. He had his dowsing rod under one arm, a wishboneshaped piece of applewood. Applewood was the best, he said, although birch would do in a pinch. There was also maple, but Uncle Clayt's scripture was that maple was the worst of the dowsing woods, because the grain wasn't true and it would lie if you let it. At twelve, I was old enough not to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or dowsing. One of the odd things about our culture is that many parents seem honorbound to lay all such lovely stories to rest in their The thought is not original with me, but I'll be damned if I can remember who said itso let me just credit that most prolific of writers, Mr. Author Unknown. children's minds as soon as possibleDad and Mom may not be able to find time enough to help their little ones with their homework or to read them a story in the evening (let them watch TV instead, TV's a great sitter, lotsa good stories, let 'em watch TV), but they go to great pains to discredit poor old Santa and such wonders as dowsing and stumpwaterwitchcraft. There's enough time for that. Somehow such parents find the fairy tales told on Gilligan's Island, The Odd Couple, and The Love Boa t more acceptable. God knows why so many adults have confused enlightenment with emotional and imaginational bank robbery, but they have; they cannot seem to rest content until the wonder has flickered and died out of their children's eyes. (He doesn't mean me, you're whispering to yourself right nowbut sir or madam, I just might.) Most parents quite rightly recognize the fact that children are mad, in the classic sense of that word. But I'm not altogether sure that killing Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is the same thing as "rationality." For children, the rationality of madness seems to work remarkably well. For one thing, it keeps the thing in the closet at bay. Uncle Clayt had lost very little of that sense of wonder. Among his other amazing talents (amazing to me, at least) was the ability to line beesthat is, to spot a honeybee bumbling at a flower and then follow it back to its hive, tramping through woods, splashing through bogs, scrambling over deadfallshis ability to roll his own cigarettes with one hand (always giving them that final eccentric twirl before sticking them into his mouth and lighting them with Diamond matches kept in a small waterproof cannister), and his seemingly endless fund of lore and tales . . . Indian stories, ghost stories, family stories, legends, you name it. On this day my mother had been complaining to Clayt and his wife, Ella, over dinner about how slowly the water was drawing in the sinks and the toilet tank. She was afraid the well was going dry again. In those days, along about 1959 or 1960, we had a shallow dug well, and it went dry every summer for a month or so. Then my brother and I and our cousin hauled water in a big old tank that another uncle (Uncle Oren, that one wasfor many years the best damn carpenter and contractor in southern Maine) had welded together in his workshop. We would perch the tank on the tailgate of an old station wagon and then lug it down to the well in a relay, using big galvanizedsteel milk cans. During that dry month or six weeks we drew our drinking water from the town pump. So Uncle Clayt grabbed me while the women were washing up and told me we were going to dowse my mother a new well. At twelve, it was an interesting enough way to spend some time, but I was skeptical; Uncle Clayt might as well have told me he was going to show me where a flying saucer had landed behind the Methodist meeting hall. He walked around, green cap tilted back on his head, one of his Bugler cigarettes jutting from the corner of his mouth, applewood stick held in both hands. He held it by the wishbone, wrists rotated outward, his big thumbs pressed firmly against the wood. We walked aimlessly around the back yard, the driveway, the hill,where the apple tree stood (and still stands today, although new people live in that little fiveroom house). And Clayt talked . . . stories about baseball, about an attempt to form a coppermining concern once upon a time in Kittery, of all places, about how Paul Bunyan was supposed to have turned the course of the Prestile Stream once upon a time to provide water for the logging camps. And every now and then he would pause, and the rod of that applewood dowser would tremble just a little. He would pause in his story and wait. The trembling might increase to a steady vibration, and then fade out. "You got somethin there, Stevie," he'd say. "Somethin. Not too much." And I would nod wisely, convinced he was doing it all himself. Like the way it's parents, not Santa Claus, who put the presents under the tree, don't you know, or the way they take away the tooth under your pillow after you're asleep and replace it with a dime. But I went along with him. I came from an age of children who wanted to be good, remember; we were taught to "speak when spoken to," and to humor their elders no matter how nutty their ideas might be. This is not a bad way of initiating children into the more exotic realms of human behavior and human belief, by the way; the quiet child (and I was one) is often given walking tours through some extremely bizarre tracts of mental countryside. I did not believe it possible to dowse water with an applewood stick, but I was quite interested in seeing how the trick would be performed. We walked around onto the front lawn, and the stick began to tremble again. Uncle Clayt brightened. "We got the real thing here," he said. "Look at this, Stevie! She's gonna dive, be damned if she ain't!" Three steps further along, the applewood rod doveit simply revolved in Uncle Clayt's hands and pointed straight down. It was a good trick, all right; I could actually hear the tendons in his wrists creak, and there was some strain on his face as he forced the straight part of the wishboneshaped stick skyward again. As soon as he released the pressure, the stick whipped down at the ground again. "Got plenty of water here," he said. "You could drink it until judgment Day and it'd still run. It's close, too." "Let me try it," I said. "Well, you got to back off a little first," he said, and we did. We went back to the edge of the driveway. He gave me the stick, showed me how to hold it with my thumbs cocked just so (wrists outward, thumbs pointing down"Otherwise, that son of a whore is gonna break your wrists tryin to point when you get over that water," Clayt said), and then he gave me a little push on the ass. "It don't feel like nothin' but a piece of wood right now, does it?" he asked. I agreed that this was so. "But when you start gettin' close to that water, you're gonna feel her come alive," he said. "I mean really alive, like it was still on the tree. Oh, applewood's good for dousing. Nothing beats applewood when you're huntin' wellwater." So some of what happened could well have been suggestion, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, although I've read enough since then to believe that dowsing really does work, at least at some times and for some people and for some crazy reason of its own.  I will say that Uncle Clayt had lulled me into that same state that I have tried again and again to lull the readers of my stories intothat state of believability where the ossified shield of "rationality" has been temporarily laid aside, the suspension of disbelief is at hand, and the sense of wonder is again within reach. And if that's the power of suggestion, it seems okay to me; better than cocaine for the brain. I started walking toward the spot where Uncle Clayt had been when the rod dove, and I'll be damned if that applewood stick didn't seem to come alive in my hands. It got warm, and it began to move. At first it was a vibration that I could feel but not see, and then the tip of the rod began to jiggle around. "It's working!" I screamed at Uncle Clayt. "I can feel it!" Clayt got laughing. I got laughing, toonot a hysterical sort of laughter, but one of pure and utter delight. When I got over the spot One of the more plausible explanations of the phenomenon is that the stick doesn't dowse the water; the person holding the stick does, and then imputes the ability to the stick. Horses can smell water twelve miles away if the wind is right; why should not a person be able to sense water fifty or a hundred feet underground? where the dowsing rod dove for Uncle Clayt, it dove for me; at one moment it was upright, and at the next it was pointing straight down. I can remember two things very clearly about that moment. One was a sensation of weighthow heavy that wooden wishbone had become. It seemed I could barely hold it up. It was as if the water was inside the stick instead of in the ground; as if it were fairly bloated with water. Clayt had brought the stick up to its original position after it dove. I could not. He took it out of my hands, and as he did I felt the sensation of weight and magnetism break. It did not pass from me to him; it broke. It was there at one moment and at the next it was gone. The other thing I remember is a combined feeling of certainty and mystery. The water was there. Uncle Clayt knew it and I knew it, too. It was down there in the earth, a river caught in rock, for all we knew. It was that feeling of having come to the right place. There are lines of power in the world, you knowinvisible but thrumming with a tremendous, scary load of energy. Every now and then someone will stumble over one and get fried, or grasp one in the right way and set it to work. But you have to find one. Clayt drove a stake into the ground where we had felt the pull of the water. The well did indeed go dryin July instead of August, as a matter of factand as there was no money for a new well that year, the water tank made its yearly summer appearance on the tailgate of the station wagon, and my brother, my cousin, and I made our round trips down to the old well with the milk cans of water again. We did the same the following summer. But around 1963 or '64, we had the artesian well drilled. By then the stake Clayt had driven was long gone, but I remembered its location well enough. The welldrillers located their rig, that big red gadget that looked so much like some child's Erector Set vision of a praying mantis, within three feet of where the stake had been (and in my mind now I can still hear Mom moaning about the wet clay that was spewed all over our front lawn). They had to go down less than a hundred feetand as Clayt had said on that Sunday when he and I walked out with the applewood rod, there was plenty of water. We could have drunk it until judgment Day and it still would have kept running. 2 I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all alongexcept, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refinedor honed, to return to an earlier imageand it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the settingtowork are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer.  But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readoutand the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H20 is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all. There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all"Leave it to the poets!" he cried. "The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here. There's also a certain fascination in the actual drilling of the well, refining the ore, honing the knife (also a difficult thing to write well about; one saga of the Heroic Struggle of the Young and Virile Writer that has always struck me well is Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke), but what I really want to spend a couple of minutes talking about is another kind of dousingnot the actual discovery of talent, but that lightning stroke which occurs when you discover not talent itself, but the particular direction in which that talent will incline. It is the moment, if you will, when a Little Leaguer discovers, not that he or she can pitch (which heshe may have know for some time), but that she or he has a particular ability to throw the good live fastball or to pop a curve that rises But, I hasten to add, only if you have the talent there to begin with. You can spend ten years refining common earth and come out at the end with nothing but common earth, sifted fine. I have been playing guitar since the age of fourteen, and at the age of thirtythree I've not progressed much beyond where I was at sixteen, playing "Louie, Louie" and "Little Deuce Coupe" on rhythm guitar with a group called the MoonSpinners. I can play a little, and it sure cheers me up when I've got the blues, but I think Eric Clapton is still safe. or dips outrageously. This is also a particularly fine moment. And all of this, I hope, will justify the bit of autobiography that follows. It doesn't try to explain my own interest in the danse macabre, or justify it, or psychoanalyze it; it only tries to set the stage for an interest that has proved to be lifelong, profitable, and pleasant . . . except, of course, when the madwoman pops out of her attic in that unpleasant dreamhouse in which my subconscious places me every four months or so. 3 My mother's people were named Pillsbury, and came originally (or so she said) from the same family that produced the Pillsburys who now make cake mixes and flour. The difference between the two branches of the family, Mom said, was that the flourPillsburys moved west to make their fortune, while our people stayed shirttail but honest on the coast of Maine. My grandmother, Nellie Pillsbury (nee Fogg), was one of the first women ever to graduate from Gorham Normal Schoolthe class of 'oz, I think. She died at age eightyfive, blind and bedridden, but still able to decline Latin verbs and name all of the Presidents up to Truman. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter and, for a brief time, Winslow Homer's handyman. My father's people came from Peru, Indiana, and much further back, from Ireland. The Pillsburys, of good AngloSaxon stock, were levelheaded and practical. My father apparently came from a long line of eccentrics; his sister, my Aunt Betty, had mental fugues (my mother believed her to be a manicdepressive, but then, Mom never would have run for president of the Aunt Betty Fan Club), my paternal grandmother enjoyed frying half a loaf of bread in bacon fat for breakfast, and my paternal grandfather, who stood six feet six and weighed a cool three hundred and fifty pounds, dropped dead at the age of thirtytwo while running to catch a train. Or so the story goes. I've been saying that it's impossible to tell why one particular area strikes the mind with all the peculiar force of obsession, but that it's very possible to pinpoint that moment when the interest was discoveredthe moment, if you will, when the dowsing rod turns suddenly and emphatically down toward hidden water. Put another way, talent is only a compass, and we'll not discuss why it points toward magnetic north; instead we'll treat briefly of that moment when the needle actually swings toward that great point of attraction. It has always seemed peculiar to me that I owe that moment in my own life to my father, who left my mother when I was two and my brother, David, four. I don't remember him at all, but in the few pictures of him I've seen, he is a man of average height, handsome in a 1940s sort of way, a bit podgy, bespectacled. He was a merchant mariner during World War II, crossing the North Atlantic and playing German roulette with the Uboats. His worst fear, my mother said, was not of the submarines but of having his master's license revoked because of his poor eyesightwhile on land, he had a habit of driving over curbs and through stoplights. My own eyesight is similar; they look like glasses, but sometimes I think they're a couple of Cokebottle bottoms up there on my face. Don King was a man with an itchy foot. My brother was born in 1945, I was born in 1947, and in 1949 my father was seen no more . . . although in 1964, during the troubles in the Congo, my mother insisted that she had seen him in a newsclip of white mercenaries fighting for one side or the other. I suppose it is just barely possible. By then he would have been in his late forties or early fifties. If it was so, I sure hope he had his lenses corrected in the interim. After my father took off, my mother landed on her feet, scrambling. My brother and I didn't see a great deal of her over the next nine years. She worked at a succession of lowpaying jobs presser in a laundry, doughnutmaker on the night shift at a bakery, store clerk, housekeeper. She was a talented pianist and a woman with a great and sometimes eccentric sense of humor, and somehow she kept things together, as women before her have done and as other women are doing even now as we speak. We never had a car (nor a TV set until 1956), but we never missed any meals. We hopscotched our way across the country during those nine years, always returning to New England. In 1958 we returned to Maine for good. My grandfather and grandmother were into their eighties, and the family hired my mother to care for them in their declining years. This was in Durham, Maine, and while all these family ramblings may seem far from the point, we're getting near to it now. About a quarter of a mile away from the small house in Durham where my brother and I finished our growing up, there was a lovely brick house where my mother's sister, Ethelyn Pillsbury Flaws, and her husband, Oren, lived. Over the Flaws's garage was a lovely, long attic room with loose, rumbling boards and that entrancing attic smell. At that time the attic connected with a whole complex of outbuildings, which in turn finally led to a great old barnall of these buildings smelling intoxicatingly of sweet hay long departed. But there was a reminder of the days when animals had been kept in the barn. If one climbed to the third loft, one could observe the skeletons of several chickens that had apparently died of some strange disease up there. It was a pilgrimage I made often; there was something fascinating about those chicken skeletons, lying in a drift of feathers as ephemeral as moondust, some secret in the black sockets where their eyes had once been . . . . But the attic over the garage was a kind of family museum. Everyone on the Pillsbury side of the family had stored things up there from time to time, from furniture to photographs, and there was just room for a small boy to twist and turn his way along narrow aisles, ducking under the arm of a standing lamp or stepping over a crate of old wallpaper samples that someone had wanted saved for some forgotten reason. My brother and I were not actually forbidden the attic, but my Aunt Ethelyn frowned on our visits up there because the floorboards had only been laid, not nailed, and some were missing. It would have been easy enough, I suppose, to trip and go headfirst through a hole and down to the concrete floor belowor into the bed of my Uncle Oren's green Chevy pickup truck. For me, on a cold fall day in 1959 or 1960, the attic over my aunt and uncle's garage was the place where that interior dowsing rod suddenly turned over, where the compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north. That was the day I happened to come on a box of my father's books . . . paperbacks from the midforties. There was a lot of my mother and father's married life in the attic, and I can understand how, in the wake of his sudden disappearance from her life, she would want to take as many of his things as possible and put them away in a dark place. It was there, a year or two earlier, that my brother found a reel of movie film my father had taken on shipboard. Dave and I pooled some money we had saved (without my mother's knowledge) , rented a movie projector, and watched it over and over again in fascinated silence. My father turned the camera over to someone else at one point and there he is, Donald King of Peru, Indiana, standing against the rail. He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now. In another box there were piles of his merchant marine manuals; in another, scrapbooks of stuff from foreign countries. My mother told me that while he would go around with a paperback western stuffed into his back pocket, his real interest was in science fiction and horror stories. He tried his own band at a number of tales of this type, submitting them to the popular men's magazines of the day, Bluebook and Argosy among them. He ultimately published nothing ("Your father didn't have a great deal of sticktoit in his nature," my mother once told me dryly, and that was about as close as she ever came to ranking him out) , but he did get several personal rejection notes; "Thiswon'tdobutsendusmore" notes I used to call them in my teens and early twenties, when I collected a good many of my own (during periods of depression I would sometimes wonder what it would be like to blow your nose on a rejection slip). The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks. Avon, in those days, was the one paperback publisher committed to fantasy and weird fiction. I remember those books with great affectionparticularly the shiny overcoating which all Avons bore, a material that was a cross between isinglass and Saran Wrap. When and if the story lagged, you could peel this shiny stuff off the cover in long strips. It made a perfectly wonderful noise. And although it wanders from the subject, I also remember the forties Dell paperbacks with lovethey were all mysteries back then, and on the back of each was a luxurious map showing the scene of the crime. One of those books was an Avon "sampler"the word anthology was apparently considered too esoteric for readers of this sort of material to grasp. It contained stories by Frank Belknap Long ("The Hounds of Tindalos"), Zelia Bishop ("The Curse of Yig"), and a host of other tales culled from the early days of Weird Tales magazine. Two of the others were novels by A. Merritt Burn, Witch, Burn (not to be confused with the later Fritz Leiber novel, Conjure Wife) and The Metal Monster. The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection. I am no longer sure of the title, but I remember the picture on the cover very well a cemetery (somewhere near Providence, one assumes!) at night, and coming out from beneath a tombstone, a loathsome green thing with long fangs and burning red eyes. Behind it, suggested but not graphically drawn, was a tunnel leading down into the bowels of the earth. Since then I've seen literally hundreds of editions of Lovecraft, yet that remains the one which best sums up H.P.L.'s work for me . . . and I've no idea who the artist might have been. That box of books wasn't my first encounter with horror, of course. I think that in America you would have to be blind and deaf not to have come in contact with at least one creature or boogey by the age of ten or twelve. But it was my first encounter with serious fantasyhorror fiction. Lovecraft has been called a hack, a description I would dispute vigorously, but whether he was or wasn't, and whether he was a writer of popular fiction or a writer of socalled "literary fiction" (depending on your critical bent), really doesn't matter very much in this context, because either way, the man himself took his work seriously. And it showed. So that book, courtesy of my departed father, was my first taste of a world that went deeper than the Bpictures which played at the movies on Saturday afternoon or the boys' fiction of Carl Carmer and Roy Rockwell. When Lovecraft wrote "The Rats in the Walls" and "Pickman's Model," he wasn't simply kidding around or trying to pick up a few extra bucks; he meant it, and it was his seriousness as much as anything else which that interior dowsing rod responded to, I think. I took the books out of the attic with me. My aunt, who was a grammar school teacher and the soul of practicality down to her shoes, disapproved of them strenuously, but I held onto them. That day and the next, I visited the Plains of Leng for the first time; made my first acquaintance with that quaint preOPEC Arab, Abdul Alhazred (author of The Necronomicon, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been offered to members of the BookoftheMonth Club or the Literary Guild, although a copy was reputed to have been kept for years under lock and key in the Special Collections vault at Miskatonic University); visited the towns of Dunwich and Arkham, Massachusetts; and was, most of all, transported by the bleak and creeping terror of "The Colour Out of Space." A week or two later all of those books disappeared, and I never saw them again. I've always suspected that my Aunt Ethelyn might have been an unindicted coconspirator in that case . . . not that it mattered in the long run. I was on my way. Lovecraftcourtesy of my fatheropened the way for me, as he had done for others before me Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them.


And while Lovecraft, who died before the Second World War could fulfill many of his visions of unimaginable horror, does not figure largely in this book, the reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since. It is his eyes I remember best from the first photograph of him I ever saw . . . eyes like those in the old portraits which still hang in many New England houses, black eyes which seem to look inward as well as outward. Eyes that seem to follow you. 4 The first movie I can remember seeing as a kid was Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was at the drivein, and unless it was a secondrun job I must have been about seven, because the film, which starred Richard Carlson and Richard Denning, was released in 1954. It was also originally released in 3D, but I cannot remember wearing the glasses, so perhaps I did see a rerelease. I remember only one scene clearly from the movie, but it left a lasting impression. The hero (Carlson) and the heroine (Julia Adams, who looked absolutely spectacular in a onepiece white bathing suit) are on an expedition somewhere in the Amazon basin. They make their way up a swampy, narrow waterway and into a wide pond that seems an idyllic South American version of the Garden of Eden. But the creature is lurkingnaturally. It's a scaly, batrachian monster that is remarkably like Lovecraft's halfbreed, degenerate aberrationsthe crazed and blasphemous results of liaisons between gods and human women (I told you it's difficult to get away from Lovecraft). This monster is slowly and patiently barricading the mouth of the stream with sticks and branches, irrevocably sealing the party of anthropologists in. I was barely old enough to read at that time, the discovery of my father's box of weird fiction still years away. I have a vague memory of boyfriends in my mom's life during that periodfrom 1952 until 1958 or so; enough of a memory to be sure she had a social life, not enough to even guess if she had a sex life. There was Norville, who smoked Luckies and kept three fans going in his tworoom apartment during the summer; and there was Milt, who drove a Buick and wore gigantic blue shorts in the summertime; and another fellow, very small, who was, I believe, a cook in a French restaurant. So far as I know, my mother came close to marrying none of them. She'd gone that route once. Also, that was a time when a woman, once married, became a shadow figure in the process of decisionmaking and breadwinning. I think my mom, who could be stubborn, intractable, grimly persevering and nearly impossible to discourage, had gotten a taste for captaining her own life. And so she went out with guys, but none of them became permanent fixtures. It was Milt we were out with that night, he of the Buick and the large blue shorts. He seemed to genuinely like my brother and me, and to genuinely not mind having us along in the back seat from time to time (it may be that when you have reached the calmer waters of your early forties, the idea of necking at the drivein no longer appeals so strongly . . . even if you have a Buick as large as a cabin cruiser to do it in). By the time the Creature made his appearance, my brother had slithered down onto the floor of the back and had fallen asleep. My mother and Milt were talking, perhaps passing a Kool back and forth. They don't matter, at least not in this context; nothing matters except the big blackandwhite images up on the screen, where the unspeakable Thing is walling the handsome hero and the sexy heroine into . . . into . . . the Black Lagoon! I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a sevenyearold, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit . . . just as I knew that, later on that night, lie would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a postmidnight snack of small boy. Seven isn't old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it's yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water. My reaction to the Creature on that night was perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of horror fiction or director who has worked in the field hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens total emotional involvement, pretty much undiluted by any real thinking processand you understand, don't you, that when it comes to horror movies, the only thought process really necessary to break the mood is for a friend to lean over and whisper, "See the zipper running down his back?" I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of "the suspension of disbelief" in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn't light; it's heavy. The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night. And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, "I don't read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it's real," I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak. In this sense, kids are the perfect audience for horror. The paradox is this children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible worlda perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from. Children deftly manipulate the logistics of Santa Claus's entry on Christmas Eve (lie can get down small chimneys by making himself small, and if there's no chimney there's the letter slot, and if there's no letter slot there's always the crack under the door), the Easter Bunny, God (big guy, sorta old, white beard, throne), Jesus ("How do you think lie turned the water into wine?" I asked my son Joe when heJoe, not Jesuswas five; Joe's idea was that he lead something "kinda like magic KoolAid, you get what I mean?"), the devil (big guy, red skin, horse feet, tail with an arrow on the end of it, Snidely Whiplash moustache), Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, the Keebler Elves, Dorothy and Toto, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a thousand more. Most parents think they understand this openness better than, in many cases, they actually do, and try to keep their children away from anything that smacks too much of horror and terror"Rated PG (or G in the case of The Andromeda Strain), but may be too intense for younger children," the ads for Jaws readbelieving, I suppose, that to allow their kids to go to a real horror movie would be tantamount to rolling a live hand grenade into a nursery school. But one of the odd Doppler effects that seems to occur during the selective forgetting that is so much a part of "growing up" is the fact that almost everything has a scare potential. for the child under eight. Children are literally afraid of their own shadows at the right time and place. There is the story of the fouryearold who refused to go to bed at night without a light on in his closet. His parents at last discovered he was frightened of a creature he had heard his father speak of often; this creature, which had grown large and dreadful in the child's imagination, was the "twinight doubleheader." Seen in this light, even Disney movies are minefields of terror, and the animated caroons, which will apparently be released and rereleased even unto the end of the world,  are usually the worst offenders. There are adults today, who, when questioned, will tell you that the most frightening thing they saw at the movies as children was Bambi's father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire. Other Disney memories which are right up there with the batrachian horror inhabiting the Black Lagoon include the marching brooms that have gone totally out of control in Fantasia (and for the small child, the real horror inherent in the situation is probably buried in the implied fatherson relationship between Mickey Mouse and the old sorcerer; those brooms are making a terrible mess, and when the sorcerer father gets home, there may be PUNISHMENT . . . . This sequence might well send the child of strict parents into an ecstasy of terror) ; the night on Bald Mountain from the same film; the witches in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, one with her enticingly red poisoned apple (and what small child is not taught early to fear the idea of POISON?), the other with her deadly spinning wheel; this holds all the way up to the relatively innocuous One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which features the logical granddaughter of those Disney witches from the thirties and fortiesthe evil Cruella DeVille, with her scrawny, nasty face, her loud voice (grownups sometimes forget how terrified young children are of loud voices, which come from the giants of their world, the adults), and her plan to kill all the dalmatian puppies (read "children," if you're a little person) and turn them into dogskin coats. Yet it is the parents, of course, who continue to underwrite the Disney procedure of release and rerelease, often discovering goosebumps on their own arms as they rediscover what terrified them as children . . . because what the good horror film (or horror sequence in what may be billed a "comedy" or an "animated cartoon") does above all else is to knock the adult props out from under us and tumble us back down the slide info childhood. And there our own shadow may once again become that of a mean dog, a gaping mouth, or a beckoning dark figure. In one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke stories, this actually happens. In this vignette, aliens from space land on earth after the Big One has finally gone down. As the story closes, the best brains of this alien culture are trying to figure out the meaning of a film they have found and learned how to play back. The film ends with the words A Walt Disney Production. I have moments when I really believe that there would be no better epitaph for the human race, or for a world where the only sentient being absolutely guaranteed of immortality is not Hitler, Charlemagne, Albert Schweitzer, or even Jesus Christbut is, instead, Richard M. Nixon, whose name is engraved on a plaque placed on the airless surface of the moon. Perhaps the supreme realization of this return to childhood comes in David Cronenberg's marvelous horror film The Brood, where a disturbed woman is literally producing "children of rage" who go out and murder the members of her family, one by one. About halfway through the film, her father sits dispiritedly on the bed in an upstairs room, drinking and mourning his wife, who has been the first to feel the wrath of the brood. We cut to the bed itself . . . and clawed hands suddenly reach out from beneath it and dig into the carpeting near the doomed father's shoes. And so Cronenberg pushes us down the slide; we are four again, and all of our worst surmises about what might be lurking under the bed have turned out to be true. The irony of all this is that children are better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are. You'll note I've italicized the phrase " on its own terms." An adult is able to deal with the cataclysmic terror of something like The Texa Chainsaw Massacre because he or she understands that it is all makebelieve, and that when the take is done the dead people will simply get up and wash off the stage blood. The child is not so able to make this distinction, and Chainsaw Massacre is quite rightly rated R. Little kids do not need this scene, any more than they need the one at the end of The Fury where John Cassavetes quite literally blows apart. But the point is, if you put a little kid of six in the front row at a screening of The Texa Chainsaw Massacre along with an adult who was temporarily unable to distinguish between makebelieve and "real things" (as Danny Torrance, the little boy in The Shining puts it)if, for instance, you had given the adult a hit of Yellow Sunshine LSD about two hours before the movie startedmy guess is that the kid would have maybe a week's worth of bad dreams. The adult might spend a year or so in a rubber room, writing home with Crayolas. A certain amount of fantasy and horror in a child's life seems to me a perfectly okay, useful sort of thing. Because of the size of their imaginative capacity, children are able to handle it, and because of their unique position in life, they are able to put such feelings to work. They understand their position very well, too. Even in such a relatively ordered society as our own, they understand that their survival is a matter almost totally out of their hands. Children are "dependents" up until the age of eight or so in every sense of the word; dependent on mother and father (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but dependent on them not to crash the car into a bridge abutment, to meet the school bus on time, to walk them home from Cub Scouts or Brownies, to buy medicines with childproof caps, dependent on them to make sure they don't electrocute themselves while screwing around with the toaster or while trying to play with Barbie's Beauty Salon in the bathtub. Running directly counter to this necessary dependence is the survival directive built into all of us. The child realizes his or her essential lack of control, and I suspect it is this very realization which makes the child uneasy. It is the same sort of freefloating anxiety that many air travelers feel. They are not afraid because they believe air travel to be unsafe; they are afraid because they have surrendered control, and if something goes wrong all they can do is sit there clutching airsick bags or the inflight magazine. To surrender control runs counter to the survival directive. Conversely, while a thinking, informed person may understand intellectually that travel by car is much more dangerous than flying, he or she is still apt to feel much more comfortable behind the wheel, because shehe has control . . . or at least an illusion of it. This hidden hostility and anxiety toward the airline pilots of their lives may be one explanation why, like the Disney pictures which are released during school vacations in perpetuity, the old fairy tales also seem to go on forever. A parent who would raise his or her hands in horror at the thought of taking hisher child to see Dracula or The Changeling (with its pervasive imagery of the drowning child) would be unlikely to object to the baby sitter reading "Hansel and Gretel" to the child before bedtime. But consider the tale of Hansel and Gretel begins with deliberate abandonment (oh yes, the stepmother masterminds that one, but she is the symbolic mother all the same, and the father is a spaghettibrained nurd who goes along with everything she suggests even though he know it's wrongthus we can see her as amoral, him as actively evil in the Biblical and Miltonian sense), it progresses to kidnapping (the witch in the candy house), enslavement, illegal detention, and finally justifiable homicide and cremation. Most mothers and fathers would never take their children to see Survive, that quickly Mexican exploitation flick about the rugby players who survived the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes by eating their dead teammates, but these same parents find little to object to in "Hansel and Gretel," where the witch is fattening the children up so she can eat them. We give this stuff to the kids almost instinctively, understanding on a deeper level, perhaps, that such fairy stories are the perfect points of crystallization for those fears and hostilities. Even anxietyridden air travelers have their own fairy talesall those Airport movies, which, like "Hansel and Gretel" and all those Disney cartoons, show every sign of going on forever . . . but which should only be viewed on Thanksgivings, since all of them feature a large cast of turkeys. My gut reaction to Creature from the Black Lagoon on that longago night was a kind of terrible, waking swoon. The nightmare was happening right in front of me; every hideous possibility that human flesh is heir to was being played out on that drivein screen. Approximately twentytwo years later, I had a chance to see Creature from the Black Lagoon againnot on TV, with any kind of dramatic build and mood broken up by adverts for used cars, KTel disco anthologies, and Underalls pantyhose, thank God, but intact, uncut . . . and even in 3D. Guys like me who wear glasses have a hell of a time with 3D, you know; ask anyone who wears specs how they like those nifty little cardboard glasses they give you when you walk in the door. If 3D ever comes back in a big way, I'm going to take myself down to the local Pearle Vision Center and invest seventy bucks in a special pair of prescription lenses one red, one blue. Annoying glasses aside, I should add that I took my son Joe with mehe was then five, about the age I had been myself, that night at the drivein (and imagine my surprisemy rueful surpriseto discover that the movie which had so terrified me on that longago night had been rated G by the MPAA . . . just like the Disney pictures). As a result, I had a chance to experience that weird doubling back in time that I believe most parents only experience at the Disney films with their children, or when reading them the Pooh books or perhaps taking them to the Shrine or the Barnum  Bailey circus. A popular record is apt to create a particular "set" in a listener's mind, precisely because of its brief life of six weeks to three months, and "golden oldies" continue to be played because they are the emotional equivalent of freezedried coffee. When the Beach Boys come on the radio singing "Help Me, Rhonda," there is always that wonderful second or two when I can reexperience the wonderful, guilty joy of copping my first feel (and if you do the mental subtraction from my present age of thirtythree, you'll see that I was a little backward in that respect). Movies and books do the same thing, although I would argue that the mental set, its depth and texture, tends to be a little richer, a little more complex, when reexperiencing films, and a lot more complex when dealing with books. With Joe that day I experienced Creature from the Black Lagoon from the other end of the telescope, but this particular theory of set identification still applied; in fact, it prevailed. Time and age and experience have all left their marks on me, just as they have on you; time is not a river, as Einstein theorizedit's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearingaid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg. Twentytwo years later I knew that the Creature was really good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, and the suspension of disbelief, that mental cleanandjerk, had become a lot harder to accomplish. But I did it, which may mean nothing, or which may mean (I hope!) that the buffalo haven't got me yet. But when that weight of disbelief was finally up there, the old feelings came flooding in, as they flooded in some five years ago when I took Joe and my daughter Naomi to their first movie, a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There is a scene in that film where, after Snow White has taken a bite from the poisoned apple, the dwarves take her into the forest, weeping copiously. Half the audience of little kids was also in tears; the lower lips of the other half were trembling. The set identification in that case was strong enough so that I was also surprised into tears. I hated myself for being so blatantly manipulated, but manipulated I was, and there I sat, blubbering into my beard over a bunch of cartoon characters. But it wasn't Disney that manipulated me; I did it myself. It was the kid inside who wept, surprised out of dormancy and into schmaltzy tears . . . but at least awake for awhile. During the final two reels of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the weight of disbelief is nicely balanced somewhere above my head, and once again director Jack Arnold places the symbols in front of me and produces the old equation of the fairy tales, each symbol as big and as easy to handle as a child's alphabet block. Watching, the child awakes again and knows that this is what dying is like. Dying is when the Creature from the Black Lagoon dams up the exit. Dying is when the monster gets you. In the end, of course, the hero and heroine, very much alive, not only survive but triumphas Hansel and Gretel do. As the drivein floodlights over the screen came on and the projector flashed its GOOD NIGHT, DRIVE SAFELY slide on that big white space (along with the virtuous suggestion that you ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE), there was a brief feeling of relief, almost of resurrection. But the feeling that stuck longest was the swooning sensation that good old Richard Carlson and good old Julia Adams were surely going down for the third time, and the image that remains forever after is of the creature slowly and patiently walling its victims into the Black Lagoon; even now I can see it peering over that growing wall of mud and sticks. Its eyes. Its ancient eyes. CHAPTER V Radio and the Set of Reality BOOKS AND MOVIES are all very well, and we'll come back to them before long, but before we do I'd like to talk a little about radio in the midfifties. I'll start with myself, and from me, we can hopefully progress to a more profitable general case. I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active forcea dramatic art form with its own set of reality. This is a true statement as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Radio's real golden age ended around 1950, the year at which this book's casual attempt at media history begins, the year I celebrated my third birthday and began my first full year of doing it in the potty. As a child of the media, I have been pleased to have attended the healthy birth of rock and roll, and to have seen it grow up fast and healthy . . . but I was also in attendance, during my younger years, at the deathbed of radio as a strong fictional medium. Drama is still to be found on the radio, God knows CBS Mystery Theater is a case in pointand there is even comedy, as every devoted follower of that abysmally inept superhero, Chickenman, knows. But the Mystery Theater seems oddly flat, oddly dead; a curiosity only. There is none of the heavy emotional zap that used to come out of the radio when Inner Sanctum's creaking door swung open each week, or during Dimension X, I Love a Mystery, or the early days of Suspense. Although I listen to Mystery Theater when I can (and happen to think that E. G. Marshall does a great job as host), I don't particularly recommend it; it is a fluke like a Studebaker that still runspoorlyor the last surviving auk. Even more than these, CBS Mystery Theater is like an electrical power cable through which a heavy, almost lethal, current used to run and which now lies inexplicably cold and harmless. The Adventures of Chickenman, a syndicated comedy program, works much better (but comedy, a naturally auditory as well as visual medium, often does), but the intrepid, klutzy Chickenman is still something of an acquired taste, like taking snuff or eating escargots. My own favorite moment in Chickenman's career occurs when he gets on the crosstown bus clad in boots, tights, and cape, only to discover that, since he has no pockets, he doesn't have a dime for the fare box. And still, endearing as Chickenman seems as he stumbles gamely from one abysmal situation to anotherwith his Jewish mother always close behind, bearing advice and chicken soup with matzoh ballshe is never quite in focus for me . . . except maybe for that one priceless moment as he stands slumped before the bus driver, cape between his legs. I smile at Chickenman; I have occasionally even chuckled; but there are never moments as gutbustingly funny as the moments when Fibber McGee, as unstoppable as Time itself, would approach his closet or when Chester A. Riley would engage in long and uneasy conversations with his nextdoor neighbor, a mortician named Digger O'Dell ("He sure is swell"). Of the radio programs I remember with the most clarity, the only one which properly belongs in the clause macabre was Suspense, also presented by the CBS Radio Network. My grandfather (the one who worked for Winslow Homer as a young man) and I really presided at the death rattle of radio together. He was fairly hale and fairly hearty at the age of eightytwo, but incomprehensible because he had a heavy beard and no teeth. He would talkvolubly at timesbut only my mother could really understand what he was saying. "Gizzengroppen fuzzwah grupp?" he might ask me as we sat listening to his old Philco table model. "That's right, Daddy Guy," I'd say, with not the slightest idea of what I'd agreed to. Nonetheless, we had the radio to unite us. At this timearound 1958my grandmother and grandfather lived together in a combination bedsitting room that was a converted parlor, the biggest room in a small New England house. He was ambulatory barelybut my grandmother was blind and bedridden and horribly corpulent, a victim of hypertension. Occasionally her mind would clear; mostly she would go into long, excited rants, telling us that the horse needed to be fed, the fires needed to be banked, that someone had to get her up so she could bake pies for the Elks supper. Sometimes she And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in The jerk "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!" talked to Flossie, one of my mother's sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago. So the situation in that room was this my grandfather was lucid but incomprehensible; my grandmother was comprehensible but far gone in senility. Somewhere in between was Daddy Guy's radio. On radio nights, I would bring in a chair and place it in my grandfather's corner of the room, and he would fire up one of his huge cigars. The gong would sound for Suspense, or Johnny Dollar would begin to spin that week's tale through the unique (so far as I know) device of itemizing his expense account, or the voice of Bill Conrad as Matt Dillon would come on, deep and somehow unutterably weary "It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely." For me, the smell of strong cigar smoke in a small room brings up its own set of ghost referents Sunday night radio with my grandfather. The creak of batwing doors, the jingle of spurs . . . or the scream at the end of that classic Suspense episode, "You Died Last Night." They died, all right, one by one, that last handful of radio programs. Johnny Dollar went first; he totted up his last expense account and drifted away into whatever limbo waits for retired insurance investigators. Gunsmoke went a year or two later. TV audiences had associated the face of Matt Dillon, only imagined for the previous ten years or so, with that of James Arness, Kitty's with Amanda Blake, Doc's with Milburn Stone, and Chester's, of course, with the face of Dennis Weaver. Their faces and their voices eclipsed the voices which came from the radio, and even now, twenty years later, it is the eager, slightly whining voice of Weaver that I associate with Chester Good as he comes hurrying up the Dodge City boardwalk with gimpy enthusiasm, calling, "Mr. Dillon! Mr. Dillon! There's trouble down t'the Longbranch!" It was Suspense, the last of the grisly old horrors, that held out the longest, but by then TV had demonstrated its ability to produce its own horrors; like Gunsmoke, Inner Sanctum had made the jump from radio to video, the swinging door finally visible. And visible, it certainly was horrible enoughslightly askew, festooned with cobwebsbut it was something of a relief, just the same. Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded. I'm going to avoid any long dissertation on just why radio died, or in what ways it was superior to television in terms of the imaginational requirements it imposed on the listener (although we will touch briefly on some of this when we talk about the great Arch Oboler), because radio drama has been rather overanalyzed and certainly overeulogized. A little nostalgia is good for the soul, and I think I have already indulged in mine. But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people. The idea isn't original with me; I heard it expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as shehe (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoottall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a tenfoottall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall." Consider, if you will, the most frightening sequence in The Changeling. The heroine (Trish Van Devere) has rushed off to the haunted house her new friend (George C. Scott) has rented, thinking he may need help. Scott is not there at all, but a series of small, stealthy sounds leads her to believe that he is. The audience watches, mesmerized, as Trish climbs to the second floor; the third floor; and finally she negotiates the narrow, cobwebby steps leading to the attic room where a young boy has been murdered in particularly nasty fashion some eighty years before. When she reaches the room, the dead boy's wheelchair suddenly whirls around and pursues her, chasing her screaming down all three flights of stairs, racing along after her as she runs down the hall, to finally overturn near the front door. The audience screams as the empty wheelchair chases the lady, but the real scare has already happened; it comes as the camera dwells on those long, shadowy staircases, as we try to imagine walking up those stairs toward some asyetunseen horror waiting to happen. Bill Nolan was speaking as a screenwriter when he offered the example of the big b,g behind the door, but the point applies to all media. What's behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself.


And because of this, comes the paradox the artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic nowin situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time (the classic example, as Bill Nolan also pointed out, is the Jacques Tourneur film with Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon), but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your down cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what's behind it. And if what happens to be behind it is a bug, not ten but a hundred feet tall, the audience heaves a sigh of relief (or utters a scream of relief) and thinks, "A bug a hundred feet tall is pretty horrible, but I can deal with that. I was afraid it might be a thousand feet tall." The thing isand a pretty good thing for the human race, too, with such neatokeeno things to deal with as Dachau, Hiroshima, the Children's Crusade, mass starvation in Cambodia, and what happened in Jonestown, Guyanathe human consciousness can deal with almost anything . . which leaves the writer or director of the horror tale with a problem which is the psychological equivalent of inventing a fasterthanlight space drive in the face of EMC2. There is and always has been a school of horror writers (I am not among them) who believe that the way to beat this rap is to never open the door at all. The classic example of thisit even involves a dooris the Robert Wise version of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. The film and the book do not differ greatly in terms of plot, but they differ significantly, I think, in terms of thrust, point of view, and final effect. (We were talking about radio, weren't we? Well, we'll get back to it, I guess, sooner or later.) Later on we will have some converse of Ms. Jackson's excellent novel, but for now let's deal with the film. In it, an anthropologist (Richard Johnson) whose hobby is ghost hunting invites a party of three to summer with him at the infamous Hill House, where any number of nasty things have occurred in the past and where, from time to time, ghosts may (or may not) have been seen. The party includes two ladies who have' previously experienced aspects of the invisible world (Julie Harris and Claire Bloom) and the happygolucky nephew of the present owner (played by Russ Tamblyn, that old dancing fool from the film version of West Side Story). The housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, offers each her simple, bonechilling catechism as they arrive "No one lives any closer than town; no one will come any closer than that. So no one will hear you if you scream. In the night. In the dark." Of course Mrs. Dudley is proved absolutely right, and that right early. The four of them experience a steadily escalating run of horrors, and happygolucky Luke ends by saying that the property he has so looked forward to inheriting should be burned flat . . . and the ground seeded with salt. For our purposes here, the interesting thing lies in the fact that we never actually see whatever it is that haunts Hill House. Something is there, all right. Something holds hands with the terrified Eleanor in the nightshe thinks it's Theo, but finds out the next day that Theo hasn't even been close to her. Something knocks on the wall with a sound like cannonfire. And most apropos to where we are now, this same something causes a door to bulge grotesquely inward until it looks like a great convex bubblea sight so unusual to the eye that the mind reacts with horror. In Nolan's terms, something is scratching at the door. In a very real way, in spite of fine acting, fine direction, and the marvelous black and white photography of David Boulton, what we have in the Wise film (title shortened to The Haunting) is one of the world's few radio horror movies. Something is scratching at that ornate, paneled door, something horrible . . . but it is a door Wise elects never to open. Lovecraft would open the door . . . but only a crack. Here is the final entry of Robert Blake's diary in the story "The Haunter of the Dark," which was dedicated to Robert Bloch Sense of distance gonefar is near and near is far. No lightno glasssee that steeplethat towerwindowcan hearRoderick Usheram mad or going madthe thing is stirring and fumbling in the towerI am it and it is II want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces . . . It knows where I am . . . I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odor . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way . . . I'd . . . ngai . . . ygg . . . I see itcoming herehellwindtitan blurblack wingsYogSothoth save methe threelobed burning eye . . . So the tale ends, leaving us with only the vaguest intimations of what Robert Blake's haunter may have been. "I cannot describe it," protagonist after protagonist tells us. "If I did, you would go mad with fear." But somehow I doubt that. I think both Wise and Lovecraft before him understood that to open the door, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, is to destroy the unified, dreamlike effect of the best horror. "I can deal with that," the audience says to itself, settling back, and bang! you just lost the ballgame in the bottom of the ninth. My own disapproval of this methodwe'll let the door bulge but we'll never open itcomes fromthe belief that it is playing to tie rather than to win. There is (or may be), after all, that hundredth case, and there is the whole concept of suspension of disbelief. Consequently, I'd rather yank the door open at some point during the festivities; I'd rather turn my hole cards faceup. And if the audience screams with laughter rather than terror, if they see the zipper running up the monster's back, then you just gotta go back to the drawing board and try it again. The exciting thing about radio at its best was that it bypassed the whole question of whether to open the door or leave it closed. Radio, by the very nature of the medium, was exempt. For the listeners during the years 1930 to 1950 or so, there were no visual expectations to fulfill in their set of reality. What about this set of reality, then? Another example, for purposes of comparison and contrast, from the movies. One of the classic fright films that I consistently missed as a child was Val Lewton's Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Like Freaks, it is one of those movies that comes up when the conversation among fans turns to what makes a "great horror movieothers would include Curse of the Demon, Dead of Night, and The Creeping Unknown, I suppose, but for now let's stick with the Lewton film. It's one that a great many people remember with affection and respect from their childhoodsone that scared the crap out of them. Two specific sequences from the film are always brought up; both involve Jane Randolph, the "good" girl, menaced by Simone Simon, the "bad" girl (who is, let's be fair, no more willfully evil than is poor old Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man). In one, Ms. Randolph is trapped in a deserted basement swimming pool while, somewhere nearby and getting closer all the time, a great jungle cat menaces her. In the other sequence, she is walking through Central Park and the cat is getting closer and closer . . . getting ready to spring . . . we hear a hard, coughing roar . . . which turns out only to be the airbrakes of an arriving bus. Ms. Randolph steps onto it, leaving the audience limp with relief and with the feeling that a horrible disaster has been averted by inches. In terms of what it does psychologically, I wouldn't argue the thesis that The Cat People is a good, perhaps even a great, American film. It is almost certainly the best horror film of the forties. At the base of the myth of the cat peoplewerecats, if you likeis a deep sexual fear; Irena (Ms. Simon) has been convinced as a child that any outpouring of passion will cause her to change into a cat. Nevertheless, she marries Kent Smith, who is so smitten that he takes her to the altar even though we pretty much understand he'll be spending his wedding nightand many nights thereaftersleeping on the couch. No wonder the poor guy eventually turns to Jane Randolph. But to return to those two scenes the one in the swimming pool works quite well. Lewton, like Stanley Kubrick with The Shining, is the master of context here, lighting the scene to perfection and controlling every variable. We feel the truth of that scene everywhere, from the tiled walls, the lap of the water in the pool, to that slightly flat echo when Ms. Randolph speaks (to ask that timehonored horror movie question, "Who's there?"). And I am sure the Central Park scene worked for audiences of the forties, but today it simply will not wash; even out in the sticks, audiences would hoot and laugh at it. I finally saw the movie as an adult, and puzzled for some time over what all the shouting could have been about. I think I finally figured out why that Central Park stalking scene worked then but doesn't work now. It has something to do with what film technicians call "state of the art." But this is only the technician's way of referring to that thing I have called "visual set" or "the set of reality." If you should get a chance to see The Cat People on TV or at a revival house in or near your city, pay particular attention to that sequence where Irena stalks Jane Randolph as Ms. Randolph hurries to catch her bus. Take a moment to look at it closely and you'll see it is not Central Park at all. It's a set built on a soundstage. A little thought will suggest a reason why. Tourneur, who wanted to be in control of lighting at all times,  didn't elect to shoot on set; he simply had no choice. "The state of the art" in 1942 did not allow for night shooting on location. So instead of shooting in daylight with a heavy filter, a technique that shows up as even more glaringly faked, Tourneur quite sensibly opted for the soundstageand it is interesting to me that, some forty years later, Stanley Kubrick did exactly the same thing with The Shining . . . and like Lewton and Tourneur before him, Kubrick is a director who shows an almost exquisite sensitivity to the nuances of light and shadow. To theatrical audiences of the time there was no false note in this; they were used to integrating movie sets into their imaginative processes. Sets were simply accepted, the way we might accept a single piece of scenery or two in a play that calls (as Thornton Wilder's Our Town does) for mostly "bare stage"this is an acceptance that the Victorian playgoer would simply have balked at. He or she might accept the principle of the bare stage, but emotionally the play would lose most of its effect and its charm. The Victorian playgoer would be apt to find Our Town outside her or his set of reality. For me, the scene in Central Park lost its believability for the same reason. As the camera moves with Ms. Randolph, everything surrounding her screams fake! fake! fake! to my eye. While I was supposed to be worrying about whether or not Jane Randolph was going to be attacked, I found myself worrying instead about that papiermache stone wall in the background. When the bus finally pulls up, the chuff of its air William F. Nolan, mentioning this film, said that the memory which remained with him most strongly from the Central Park sequence was the pattern of "lightshadowlightshadowlightshadow" as the camera moves with Ms. Randolphand it is indeed a fine, eerie effect. brakes miming the cat's cheated growl, I was wondering if it was hard getting that New York City bus onto a closed soundstage and if the bushes in the background were real or plastic. The set of reality changes, and the boundaries of that mental country where the imagination may be fruitfully employed (Rod Serling's apt phrase for it, now a part of the American idiom, was the Twilight Zone) are in nearconstant flux. By the 1960s, the decade when I saw more movies than I ever have since, the "state of the art" had advanced to a point where a set and soundstages had become nearly obsolete. New fast films had made availablelight shooting perfectly possible. In 1942 Val Lewton could not shoot in Central Park by night, but in Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick shot several scenes by candlelight. This is a quantum technical leap which has this paradoxical effect it robs the bank of imagination. Perhaps realizing the fact, Kubrick takes a giant step backward to the soundstage with his next film, The Shining.  All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we're really standing right next to both subjects. As movie audiences of the forties and fifties believed Lewton's Central Park set, so radio listeners believed what the announcers, the actors, and the soundmen told them. The visual set was there, but it was plastic, bound by very few hard and fast expectations. When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster. Audiences of today listening to old tapes don't accept the MakeBelieve Ballroom any more than I am able to accept Lewton's papiermache rock wall; we are simply hearing a 1940s deejay playing records in a studio. But to audiences of a different day, the MakeBelieve Ballroom was more real than makebelieve; you could imagine the men in their tuxedos, the women in their gowns and smooth elbowlength gloves, the flaring wall sconces, and Tommy Dorsey, resplendent in white dinner jacket, conducting. Or in the case of the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a Mercury Theater Halloween presentation (and that was a trickortreat millions of Americans never forgot), you could broaden that country of the imagination Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza, which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa setthe front yard, the big family roomand ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on. enough to send people screaming into the streets. On TV it wouldn't have worked, but on the radio there were no zippers running down the Martians' backs. Radio avoided the opendoorcloseddoor question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real. 2 My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradburyit was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on Dimension X. This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age." At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. My aunt was not going about it hastily; she could look out the bathroom window and had, she said later, no plans at all to make the cuts until she saw the Martian death machines looming on the horizon. I guess you could say my aunt had found the Welles broadcast too upsetting . . . and my mother's words echo down to me over the years like a voice in an uneasy dream that has never really ended "Too upsetting . . . upsetting . . . upsetting . . ." I crept down to the door to listen anyway, and she was right it was plenty upsetting. Space travelers land on Marsonly it isn't Mars at all. It's good old Greentown, Illinois, and it's inhabited by all the voyagers' dead friends and relatives. Their mothers are here, their sweethearts, good old Clancey the patrolman, Miss Henreys from the second grade. On Mars, Lou Gehrig is still pounding them over the fences for the Yankees. Mars is heaven, the space travelers decide. The locals take the crew of the spaceship into their homes, where they sleep the sleep of those perfectly at peace, full of hamburgers and hotdogs and Mom's apple pie. Only one member of the crew suspects the unspeakable obscenity, and he's right. Boy, is he right! And yet even he has awakened to the realization of this deadly illusion too late . . . because in the night, these wellloved faces begin to drip and run and change. Kind, wise eyes become black tar pits of murderous hate. The rosy apple cheeks of Grandma and Grandpa lengthen and turn yellow. Noses elongate into wrinkled trunks. Mouths become gaping maws. It is a night of creeping horror, a night of hopeless screams and belated terror, because Mars isn't heaven after all. Mars is a hell of hate and deception and murder. I didn't sleep in my bed that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face. That was the power of radio at its height. The Shadow, we were assured at the beginning of each episode, had "the power to cloud men's minds." It strikes me that, when it comes to fiction in the media, it is television and movies which so often cloud that part of our minds where the imagination moves most fruitfully; they do so by imposing the dictatorship of the visual set. If you view imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full of the moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a wereshark to a wereflea), then one of the forms is that of a rampaging gorilla, a creature that is dangerous and totally out of control. If this seems fanciful or melodramatic, think of your own children or the children of close friends (never mind your own childhood; you may remember events that took place then with some fidelity, but most of your memories of how the emotional weather was then will be utterly false), and of the times when they simply find themselves unable to turn off the secondfloor light or go down into the cellar or maybe even bring a coat from the closet because they saw or heard something that frightened themand not necessarily a movie or a TV program, either. I've mentioned the fearsome twinight doubleheader already; John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper." MacDonald and his wife finally figured it outat a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was green ripper, and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories. A child may be frightened by such a wide sweep of things that adults generally understand that to worry about this overmuch is to endanger all relations with the child; you begin to feel like a soldier in the middle of a minefield. Added to this is another complicating factor sometimes we frighten our kids on purpose. Someday, we say, a man in a black car may stop and offer you a sweet to take a ride with him. And that is a Bad Man (read the Boogeyman), and if he stops for you, you must never, never, never . . . Or Instead of giving that tooth to the Tooth Fairy, Ginny, let's put it in this glass of Coke. Tomorrow morning that tooth will be all gone. The Coke will dissolve it. So think about it the next time you have a quarter and . . . Or Little boys who play with matches wet the bed, they just can't help it, so don't you . . . Or that alltime favorite Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been. Most children deal with their fears quite well . . . most of the time, anyway. The shapechanging of their imaginations is so wide, so marvelously varied, that the gorilla pops out of the deck only infrequently. Besides worrying about what might be in the closet or under the bed, they have to imagine themselves as firefighters and policemen (imagination as the Very Gentle Perfect Knight), as mothers and nurses, as superheroes of various stripes and types, as their own parents, dressed up in attic clothes and giggling hand in hand before a mirror which shows them the future in the most unthreatening way. They need to experience a whole range of emotions from love to boredom, to try them out like new shoes. But every now and then the gorilla gets out. Children understand that this face of their imagination must be caged ("It's only a movie, that couldn't really happen, could it?" . . . Or as Judith Viorst writes in one of her fine children's books, "My mom says there are no ghosts, vampires, and zombies . . . but . . ." ) . But their cages are of necessity more flimsy than those their elders build. I do not believe there are people out there with no imagination at allalthough I have come to believe that there are a few who lack even the most rudimentary sense of humorbut it sometimes seems that way . . . perhaps because some people seem to build not just cages for the gorilla but Chase Manhattan Banktype safes. Complete with time locks. I remarked to an interviewer once that most great writers have a curious childish louk to their faces, and that this seems even more pronounced in the faces of those who write fantasy. It is perhaps most noticeable in the face of Ray Bradbury, who retains very strongly the look of the boy he was in Illinoishis face retains this indefinable look in spite of his sixtyplus years, his graying hair, his heavy glasses. Robert Bloch has the face of a sixthgrade cutup, the Klass Klown, don't you know, although he is past sixty (just how far past I would not venture to guess; he might send Norman Bates after me); it is the face of the kid who sits in the back of the classroomat least until the teacher assigns him a place up front, which usually doesn't take longand makes screeching sounds on the top of his desk with the palms of his hands. Harlan Ellison has the face of a tough innercity kid, confident enough in himself to be kind in most cases, but more than able to fuck you over royally if you give him any shit. But perhaps the look I'm trying to describe (or indicate; actual description is really impossible) is most visible on the face of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, while regarded as a "straight" writer of literature by the critical establishment, has nonetheless made the cataloguing of devils, angels, demons, and dybbuks a good part of his career. Grab a Singer book and take a good look at the author photo (you can read the book, too, when you're done looking at Singer's picture, okay?). It is the face of an old man, but that is a surface so thin you could read a newspaper through it. The boy is beneath, stamped very clearly on his features. It's in his eyes, mostly; they are young and clear. One of the reasons for these "young faces" may be that writers of fantasy rather like the gorilla. They have never taken the trouble to strengthen the cage, and as a result, part of them has never accomplished the imaginative goingaway that is so much a part of growing up, of establishing the tunnel vision so necessary for a successful career as an adult. One of the paradoxes of fantasyhorror is that the writer of this stuff is like the lazy pigs who built their houses of straw and sticksbut instead of learning their lesson and building sensible brick houses like their ohsoadult elder brother (memorialized in his engineer's cap forever in my memory by the Disney cartoon), the writer of fantasy horror simply rebuilds with sticks and straw again. Because, in a crazy kind of way, he or she likes it when the wolf comes and blows it all down, just as he or she sorta likes it when the gorilla escapes from its cage. Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind. Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all. Seen in these terms, the set of realitybecomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast suggests that it could have been so)  for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, ,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it. 3 We're almost done with our brief discussion of radio nowI think that to do much more would be to risk droning along like one of those tiresome cinema buffs who want to spend the night telling you how Charlie Chaplin was the greatest screen actor who ever lived or that the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns stand at the apex of the ExistentialAbsurdist movementbut no discussion of the phenomenon of radio terror, no matter low brief, would be complete without some mention of the genre's prime auteurnot Orson Welles, but Arch Oboler, the first playright to have his own national radio series, the chilling Lights Out. Lights Out was actually broadcast in the forties, but enough of the programs were rebroadcast in the fifties (and even in the sixties) for me to feel I can justify their inclusion here. The one I remember most vividly from its rebroadcast on Dimension X was "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World." Oboler, like so many people in the horror fieldAlfred Hitchcock is another prime exampleare extremely alert to the humor implicit in horror, and this alertness was never on better view than in the Chicken Heart story, which made you giggle at its very absurdity even as the gooseflesh raced up and down your arms. "You remember that only a few days ago you asked me my opinion on how the world would end?" the scholarly scientist who has un Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on Meet the Press or maybe one you'reonthegriddle 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler's goose quite effectively. wittingly perpetrated the horror on an unsuspecting world solemnly tells his young protg as they fly at 5,000 feet in a light plane over the evergrowing chicken heart. "You remember my answer? Oh, such a scholarly prophecy! Mightysounding theories about cessation of earth rotation . . . entropy . . . but now, this is reality, Louis! The end has come for humanity! Not in the red of atomic fusion . . . not in the glory of interstellar combustion . . . not in the peace of white, cold silence . . . but with that! That creeping, grasping flesh below us. It is a joke, eh, Louis? The joke of the cosmos! The end of mankind . . . because of a chicken heart." "No," Louis gibbers. "No, I can't die. I'll find a safe landing place" But then, perfectly on cue, the comforting drone of the plane's engine in the background becomes a coughing stutter. "We're in a spin!" Louis screams. "The end of all mankind," the doctor proclaims in stentorian tones, and the two of them fall directly into the chicken heart. We hear its steady beat . . . louder . . . louder . . . and then the sickly splash that ends the play. Part of Oboler's real genius was that when "Chicken Heart" ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time. "Cue the bombers," an old ad for radio used to run (drone of bombers in the background; the mind's eye visualizes a sky black with Flying Forts). "Drop the ice cream into Puget Sound," the voice continues (whining, hydraulic sound of bomb bays opening, a rising whistle followed by a gigantic splash). "All right . . . cue the chocolate syrup . . . the whipped cream . . . and . . . drop the maraschino cherries! " We hear a great liquid squishing sound as the chocolate syrup goes, then a huge hissing as the whipped cream follows. These sounds are followed by a heavy plop . . . plop . . . plop in the background. And, absurd as it may be, the mind responds to these cues; that interior eye actually sees a series of gigantic ice cream sundaes rising out of Puget Sound like strange volcanic coneseach with a maraschino cherry the size of Seattle's Kingdome on top of it. In fact we see those disgustingly red cocktail cherries raining down, plopping into all that whipped cream and leaving craters nearly the size of Great Tycho. Thank the genius of Stan Freberg. Arch Oboler, a restlessly intelligent man who was also involved in the movies ( Five, one of the first films to deal with the survival of mankind after World War III, was Oboler's brainchild) and the legitimate theater, utilized two of radio's great strengths the first is the mind's innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd; the second is the fact that fear and horror are blinding emotions that knock our adult pins from beneath us and leave us groping in the dark like children who cannot find the light switch. Radio is, of course, the "blind" medium, and only Oboler used it so well or so completely. Of course, our modern ears pick up the necessary conventions of the medium that have been outgrown (mostly due to our growing dependence on the visual in our set of reality), but these were standard practices which audiences of the day had no trouble accepting (like Tourneur's papiermch rock wall in Cat People). If these conventions seem jarring to listeners of the eighties, as the asides in a Shakespearean play seem jarring to a novice playgoer, then that is our problem, to work out as best we can. One of these conventions is the constant use of narration to move the story. A second is dialogueasdescription, a technique necessary to radio but one TV and the movies have rendered obsolete. Here, for instance, from "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World," is Dr. Alberts discussing the chicken heart itself with Louisread the passage and then ask yourself how true this speech rings to your TVand movietrained ears "Look at it down there . . . a great blanket of evil covering everything. See how the roads are black with men and women and their children, fleeing for their lives. See how the protoplasmic gray reaches out and engulfs' them." On TV, this would be laughed out of court as total corn; it is not hip, as they say. But heard in the darkness, coupled with the drone of the light plane's engine in the background, it works very well indeed. Willingly or unwillingly, the mind conjures up the image Oboler wants this great jellylike blob, beating rhythmically, swallowing up the refugees as they run . . . . Ironically, television and the early talkies both depended on the largely auditory conventions of radio until these new mediums found their own voicesand their own conventions.