She looked at them watching her and knifeinhand screamed at them, " What have you done to his eyes? " They stirred and looked to Roman. "He has His Father's eyes," he said. We have lived and suffered with Rosemary Woodhouse for two hundred and nine pages up to this point, and Roman Castevet's response to her question seems almost like the punchline of a long, involved shaggydog storyone of the ones that ends with something like, "My, that's a long way to tip a Rari," or "Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear." Besides yellow eyes, Rosemary's baby turns out to have claws ("They're very nice," Roman tells Rosemary, ". . . very tiny and pearly. The mitts are only so He doesn't scratch Himself . . ."), and a tail, and the buds of horns. While I was teaching the book at the University of Maine to an undergraduate class entitled Themes in Horror and the Supernatural, one of my students mused that ten years later Rosemary's baby would be the only kid on his Little League team who needed a customtailored baseball cap. Basically, Rosemary has given birth to the comicbook version of Satan, the L'il Imp we were all familiar with as children and who sometimes put in an appearance in the motion picture cartoons, arguing with a L'il Angel over the main character's head. Levin broadens the satire by giving us a Satanist coven comprised almost entirely of old people; they argue constantly in their waspy voices about how the baby should be cared for. The fact that LauraLouise and Minnie Castevet are much too old to care for a baby somehow adds the final macabre touch, and Rosemary's first tentative bonding to her baby comes when she tells LauraLouise that she is rocking "Andy" much too fast, and that the wheels of his bassinette need to be oiled. Levin's accomplishment is that such satire does not deflate the horror of his story but actually enhances it. Rosemary's Baby is a splendid confirmation of the idea that humor and horror lie side by side, and that to deny one is to deny the other. It is a fact Joseph Heller makes splendid use of in Catch22 and which Stanley Elkin used in The Living End (which might have been subtitled "Job in the Afterlife"). Besides satire, Levin laces his novel with veins of irony ("It's good for your blood, dearie," the Old Witch in the E.C. comics used to say). Early on, the Castevets invite Guy and Rosemary over for dinner; Rosemary accepts, on the condition that it won't be too much trouble. "Honey, if it was trouble I wouldn't ask you," Mrs. Castevet said. "Believe me, I'm as selfish as the day is long." Rosemary smiled. "That isn't what Terry told me," she said. "Well," Mrs. Castevet said with a pleased smile, "Terry didn't know what she was talking about." The irony is that everything Minnie Castevet says here is the literal truth; she really is as selfish as the day is long, and Terrywho ends up either being murdered or committing suicide when she discovers that she is to be or has been used as an incubator for Satan's childreally didn't know what she was talking about. But she found out. Oh yes. Hehhehheh. My wife, raised in the Catholic church, claims that the book is also a religious comedy with its own shaggydog punchline. Rosemary's Baby, she claims, only proves what the Catholic church has said about mixed marriages all alongthey just don't work. This particular bit of comedy grows richer, perhaps, when we add the fact of Levin's own Jewishness against the Christian backdrop of custom used by the Satanist coven. Seen in this light, the book becomes a kind of youdon'thavetobeJewishtoloveLevy's view of the battle of good and evil. Before leaving the idea of religion and talking a bit about the feelings of paranoia which really seem to lie central to the book, let me suggest that while Levin's tongue is in his cheek part of the time, that is no reason for us to expect it to be there all of the time. Rosemary's Baby was written and published at the time the Godisdead tempest was whirling around in the teapot of the sixties, and the book deals with questions of faith in an unpretentious but thoughtful and intriguing way. We might say that the major theme of Rosemary's Baby deals with urban paranoia (as opposed to the smalltown or rural paranoia we will see in Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers), but that an important minor theme could be stated along these lines The weakening of religious conviction is an opening wedge for the devil, both in the macrocosm (questions of world faith) and in the microcosm (the cycle of Rosemary's faith as she goes from belief as Rosemary Reilly, to unbelief as Rosemary Woodhouse, to belief again as the mother of her infernal Child). I'm not suggesting that Ira Levin believes this Puritanical thesisalthough he may, for all I know. I am suggesting, however, that it makes a nice fulcrum on which to turn his plot, and that he plays fair with the idea and explores most of its implications. In the religious pilgrim's progress that Rosemary goes through, Levin gives us a seriocomic allegory of faith. Rosemary and Guy begin as typical young marrieds; Rosemary is practicing birth control as a matter of course in spite of her rigid Catholic upbringing, and both of them have decided they will have children only when theynot Goddecide they are ready. After Terry's suicide (or was it murder?), Rosemary has a dream in which she is being scolded by an old parochial school teacher, Sister Agnes, for bricking up the school windows and getting them disqualified from a beautifulschool contest. But mingling with the dream are real voices from the Castevet apartment next door, and it is Minnie Castevet, speaking through the mouth of Sister Agnes in Rosemary's dream, that we are listening to "Anybody! Anybody!" Sister Agnes said. "All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn't have to be a nogood drugaddict whore out of the gutter. Didn't I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she's young and healthy and not a virgin." This dream sequence does several useful things. It amuses us in a nervous, edgy sort of way; it lets us in on the fact that the Castevets were in some way involved in the death of Terry; it allows us to see shoaling waters ahead for Rosemary. Perhaps this is stuff that only interests another writerit's more like two mechanics inspecting a nifty fourbarrel carburetor than it is like classical analysisbut Levin does his job so unobtrusively that maybe it doesn't hurt for me to take the pointer and say, "Here! This is where he's starting to get close to you; this is the point of entry, and now he will begin working inward toward your heart." Yet the most significant thing about the passage is that Rosemary has woven a dream of Catholic intent around the words her lightly sleeping mind has overheard. She casts Minnie Castevet as a nun . . . and so she is, although she is a nun of a rather blacker persuasion than that longago Sister Agnes. My wife also says that one of the basic tenets of the Catholic church she grew up with was, "Give us your children and they will be ours forever." The shoe fits here, and Rosemary wears it. And ironically enough, it is the superficial weakening of her faith which allows the devil a doorway into her life . . . but it is the immutable bedrock of that same faith that allows her to accept "Andy," horns and all. This is Levin's handling of religious views in the microcosmon the surface, Rosemary is a typical young modern who could have stepped whole and breathing from Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning"the churchbells mean nothing to her as she sits peeling her oranges. But beneath, that parochial schoolgirl Rosemary Reilly is very much there. His handling of the macrocosm is similarjust bigger. At the dinner party the Castevets have for the Woodhouses, conversation turns to the impending visit of the Pope to New York. "I tried to keep [the book's] unbelievabilities believable," Levin remarks, "by incorporating bits of real life' happenings along the way. I kept stacks of newspapers, and writing about a month or two after the fact, worked in events such as the transit strike and Lindsay's election as mayor. When, having decided for obvious reasons that the baby should be born on June 25th, I checked back to see what had been happening on the night Rosemary would have to conceive, you know what I found the Pope's visit, and the Mass on television. Talk about serendipity! From then on I felt the book was Meant To Be." The conversation between Guy Woodhouse and the Castevets concerning the Pope seems predictable, even banal, but it expresses the very view which Levin gently suggests is responsible for the whole thing "I heard on TV that he's going to postpone and wait until (the newspaper strike) is over," Mrs. Castevet said. Guy smiled. "Well," he said, "that's show biz." Mr. and Mrs. Castevet laughed, and Guy along with them. Rosemary smiled and cut her steak . . . . Still laughing, Mr. Castevet said, "It is, you know That's just what it is show biz!" "You can say that again," Guy said. "The costumes, the rituals," Mr. Castevet said; "every religion, not only Catholicism. Pageants for the ignorant." Mrs. Castevet said, "I think we're offending Rosemary." "No, not at all," Rosemary said. "You aren't religious, my dear, are you?" Mr. Castevet asked. "I was brought up to be," Rosemary said, "but now I'm an agnostic. I wasn't offended. Really I wasn't." We don't doubt the truth of Rosemary Woodhouse's statement, but underneath that surface there is a little parochial schoolgirl named Rosemary Reilly who is very offended, and who probably regards such talk as blasphemy. The Castevets are conducting a bizarre sort of job interview here, testing Rosemary and Guy for the depth and direction of their commitments and beliefs; they are revealing their own contempt for the church and things sacred; but, Levin suggests, they are also expressing views which are commonly held . . . and not just by Satanists. Yet faith must exist beneath, he suggests; it is the surface weakening that allows the devil in, but beneath, even the Castevets are in vital need of Christianity, because without the sacred there is no profane. The Castevets seem to sense Rosemary Reilly existing beneath Rosemary Woodhouse, and it is her husband, Guy, an authentic pagan, that they use as a gobetween. And Guy lowers himself admirably to the occasion. We are not allowed to doubt that it is the softening of Rosemary's faith that has given the devil a door into her life. Her sister Margaret, a good Catholic, calls Rosemary long distance not long after the Castevets' plot has begun to move. "I've had the funniest feeling all day long, Rosemary. That something happened to you. Like an accident or something." Rosemary isn't favored with such a premonition (the closest she gets is her dream of Sister Agnes speaking in Minnie Castevet's voice) because she isn't worthy of it. Good Catholics, Levin saysand we may not sense his tongue creeping back into his cheekget the good premonitions. The religious motif stretches through the book, and Levin does some clever things with it, but perhaps we could close off our discussion of it with some thoughts about Rosemary's remarkable "conception dream." First, it is significant that the time chosen for the devil to impregnate Rosemary coincides with the Pope's visit. Rosemary's mousse is drugged, but she eats only a little of it. As a result, she has a dreamlike memory of her sexual encounter with the devil, but it is one her subconscious couches in symbolic terms. Reality flickers in and out as Guy prepares her for her confrontation with Satan. In her dream, Rosemary finds herself on a yacht with the assassinated President Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy, Pat Lawford, and Sarah Churchill are also in attendance. Rosemary asks JFK if her good friend Hutch (who becomes Rosemary's protector until he is struck down by the coven; he is the one who warns Rosemary and Guy early on that the Bramford is a Bad Place) is coming; Kennedy smiles and tells her the cruise is "for Catholics only." This is one qualification Minnie has not mentioned earlier, but it helps confirm the idea that the person the coven is really interested in is Rosemary Reilly. Again, it seems to be the blasphemy that they are mostly concerned with; the spiritual lineage of Christ must be perverted to allow them to accomplish a successful birth. Guy removes Rosemary's wedding ring, symbolically ending their marriage, but also becoming a kind of bestmaninreverse; Rosemary's friend Hutch comes with weather warnings (and what is a hutch anyway but a safe place for rabbits?). During intercourse, Guy actually becomes the devil, and closing the dream out we see Terry again, this time not as a failed bride of Satan but as a sacrificial opener of the way. In less expert hands such a dream scene might have become tiresome and didactic, but Levin carries it off lightly and quickly, compressing the entire sequence into just five pages. But the strongest watchspring of Rosemary's Baby isn't the religious subtheme but the book's use of urban paranoia. The conflict between Rosemary Reilly and Rosemary Woodhouse enriches the story, but if the book achieves horrorand I think it doesit does so because Levin is able to play upon these innate feelings of paranoia so skillfully. Horror is a groping for pressure points, and where are we any more vulnerable than in our feelings of paranoia? In many ways, Rosemary's Baby is like a sinister Woody Allen film, and the Woodhouse Reilly dichotomy is useful here, too. Besides being a Catholic forever beneath her agnostic veneer, Rosemary is, beneath her carefully acquired cosmopolitan varnish, a smalltown girl . . . and you can take the girl out of the country, but et cetera, et cetera. There is a sayingand I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it tothat perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In a crazy sort of way, Rosemary's story is of a coming to that sort of awareness. We become paranoid before she does (Minnie, for instance, being purposely slow with the dishes so Roman can talk to Guyor make him a pitchin the other room), but following her dreamlike encounter with the devil and her subsequent pregnancy, her own paranoia follows along. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds scratchesas if from clawsall over her body. "Don't yell," Guy says, showing her his fingernails; "I already filed them down." Before long, Minnie and Roman have begun a campaign to get Rosemary to use their obstetricianthe famous Abe Sapirsteininstead of the young guy she had been going to. Don't do that, Rosemary, we want to tell her; he's one of them. Modern psychiatry teaches that there is no difference between us and the paranoidschizophrenic in Bedlam except that we somehow manage to keep our crazier suspicions under control while theirs have slipped their tethers; a story like Rosemary's Baby or Finney's The Body Snatchers seems to confirm the idea. We have discussed the horror story as a tale which derives its effect from our terror of things which depart the norm; we have looked at it as a taboo land which we enter with fear and trembling, and also as a Dionysian force which may invade our comfy Apollonian status quo without warning. Maybe all horror stories are really about disorder and the fear of change, and in Rosemary's Baby we have the feeling that everything is beginning to bulge at oncewe can't see all the changes, but we sense them. Our dread for Rosemary springs from the fact that she seems the only normal person in a whole city of dangerous maniacs. Before we have reached the midpoint of Levin's tale, we suspect everybodyand in nine cases out of ten we have been right to do so. We are allowed to indulge our paranoia on Rosemary's behalf to the utmost, and all our nightmares come true. On my first reading of the book, I remember even suspecting Dr. Hill, the nice young obstetrician Rosemary has given up in favor of Dr. Sapirstein. Of course, Hill is not a Satanist . . . he just gives Rosemary back to them when she comes to him for protection. If horror novels do serve as catharsis for more mundane fears, then Levin's Rosemary's Baby seems to reflect back and effectively use the city dweller's very real feelings of urban paranoia. In this book there really are no nice people next door, and the worst things you ever imagined about that dotty old lady down in 9B turn out to be true. The real victory of the book is that it allows us to be crazy for a while. 5 From urban paranoia to smalltown paranoia Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers.  Finney himself has the following things to say about his book which was originally published as a Dell paperback original in 1955 "The book . . . was written in the early 1950s, and I don't really remember a lot about it. I do recall that I simply felt in the mood to write something about a strange event or a series of them in a small town; something inexplicable. And that my first thought was that a dog would be injured or killed by a car, and it would be discovered that a part of the animal's skeleton was of stainless steel; bone and steel intermingled, that is, a thread of steel running into bone and bone into steel so that it was clear the two had grown together. But this idea led to nothing in my mind . . . . I remember that I wrote the first chapterpretty much as it appeared, if I am recalling correctlyin which people complained that someone close to them was in actuality an imposter. But I didn't know where this was to lead, either. However, during the As previously noted, the lateseventies remake of the Finney novel resets the story in San Francisco, opting for an urban paranoia which results in a number of sequences strikingly like those which open Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby. But Philip Kaufman lost more than he gained, I think, by taking Finney's story out of its natural smalltownwithabandstandinthepark setting. course of fooling around with this, trying to make it work out, I came across a reputable scientific theory that objects might in fact be pushed through space by the pressure of light, and that dormant life of some sort might conceivably drift through space . . . and [this] eventually worked the book out. "I was never satisfied with my own explanation of how these dry leaflike objects came to resemble the people they imitated; it seemed, and seems, weak, but it was the best I could do. "I have read explanations of the 'meaning' of this story, which amuse me, because there is no meaning at all; it was just a story meant to entertain, and with no more meaning than that. The first movie version of the book followed the book with great faithfulness, except for the foolish ending; and I've always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. If so, it's a lot more than I ever did, and since they followed my story very closely, it's hard to see how this message crept in. And when the message has been defined, it has always sounded a little simpleminded to me. The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh." Nevertheless, Jack Finney has written a great deal of fiction about the idea that individuality is a good thing and that conformity can start to get pretty scary after it passes a certain point. His comments (in a letter to me dated December 24, 1979) about the first film version of The Body Snatchers raised a grin on my own face as well. As Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliatt, and all of those sobersided film critics so often prove, no one is so humorless as a bigtime film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings ("In The Fury," Pauline Kael intoned, apparently in all seriousness, "Brian De Palma has found the junk heart of America.")it is as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and reprove their own literary; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho . . . perhaps most of all to themselves. This may be because they are working on the fringes of a field which deals entirely with pictures and the spoken word; they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a highschool education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers, any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America. Movies are merely picture books that talk, and this seems to have left many literate movie critics with acute feelings of inferiority. Filmmakers themselves are often happy to participate in this grotesque critical overkill, and I applauded Sam Peckinpah in my heart when he made this laconic reply to a critic who asked him why he had really made such a violent picture as The Wild Bunch "I like shootemups." Or so he was reputed to have said, and if it ain't true, gang, it oughtta be. The Don Siegel version of The Body Snatchers is an amusing case where the film critics tried to have it both ways. They began by saying that both Finney's novel and Siegel's film were allegories about the witchhunt atmosphere that accompanied the McCarthy hearings. Then Siegel himself spoke up and said that his film was really about the Red Menace. He did not go so far as to say that there was a Commie under every American's bed, but there can be little doubt that Siegel at least believed he was making a movie about a creeping fifth column. It is the ultimate in paranoia, we might say they're out there and they look just like us! In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right; The Body Snatchers is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quartercentury since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in Collier's, one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as Hustler, Screw, and Big Butts), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics. It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has reissued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy booksnovels, collections, and anthologiesoriginally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W. Currey) have chosen wisely and well, and in the library of any reader who cares honestly about science fictionand about books themselves as lovely artifactsyou're apt to find one or more of these distinctive green volumes with the redgold stamping on the spines. Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent. Well, never mind; I believe that what I started to say was simply that I think Finney's contention that The Body Snatchers is just a story is both right and wrong. My own belief about fiction, long and deeply held, is that story must be paramount over all other considerations in fiction; that story defines fiction, and that all other considerationstheme, mood, tone, symbol, style, even characterizationare expendable. There are critics who take the strongest possible exception to this view of fiction, and I really believe that they are the critics who would feel vastly more comfortable if MobyDick were a doctoral thesis on cetology rather than an account of what happened on the Pequod's final voyage. A doctoral thesis is what a million student papers have reduced this tale to, but the story still remains"This is what happened to Ishmael." As story still remains in Macbeth, The Faerie Queen, Pride and Prejudice, Jude the Obscure, The Great Gatsby . . . and Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers. And story, thank God, after a certain point becomes irreducible, mysterious, impervious to analysis. You will find no English master's thesis in any college library titled "The StoryElements of Melville's Moby Dick." And if you do find such a thesis, send it to me. I'll eat it. With A1 Steak Sauce. All very fine. And yet I don't think Finney would argue with the idea that story values are determined by the mind through which they are filtered, and that the mind of any writer is a product of his outer world and inner temper. It is just the fact of this filter that has set the table for all those wouldbe English M.A.'s, and I certainly would not want you to think that I begrudge them their degreesGod knows that as an English major I slung enough bullshit to fertilize most of east Texasbut a great number of the people who are sitting at the long and groaning table of Graduate Studies in English are cutting a lot of invisible steaks and roasts . . . not to mention trading the Emperor's new clothes briskly back and forth in what may be the largest academic yard sale the world has ever seen. Still, what we have here is a Jack Finney novel, and we can say certain things about it simply because it is a Jack Finney novel. First, we can say that it will be grounded in absolute realitya prosy reality that is almost humdrum, at least to begin with. When we first meet the book's hero (and here I think Finney probably would object if I used the more formal word protagonist . . . so I won't), Dr. Miles Bennell, he is letting his last patient of the day out; a sprained thumb. Becky Driscoll entersand how is that for the perfect allAmerican name?with the first offkey note her cousin Wilma has somehow gotten the idea that her Uncle Ira really isn't her uncle anymore. But this note is faint and barely audible under the simple melodies of smalltown life that Finney plays so well in the book's opening chapters . . . and Finney's rendering of the smalltown archetype in this book may be the best to come out of the 1950s. The keynote that Finney sounds again and again in these first few chapters is so lowkey pleasant that in less sure hands it would become insipid nice. Again and again Finney returns to that word; things in Santa Mira, he tells us, are not great, not wild and crazy, not terrible, not boring. Things in Santa Mira are nice. No one here is laboring under that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." "For the first time I really saw her face again. I saw it was the same nice face . . ." This from page nine. A few pages later "It was nice out, temperature around sixtyfive, and the light was good; . . . still plenty of sun." Cousin Wilma is also nice, if rather plain. Miles thinks she would have made a good wife and mother, but she just never married. "That's how it goes," Miles philosophizes, innocently unaware of any banality. 'He tells us he wouldn't have believed her the type of woman to have mental problems, "but still, you never know." This stuff shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does; we feel that Miles has somehow stepped through the firstperson convention and is actually talking to us, just as it seems that Tom Sawyer is actually talking to us in the Twain novel . . . and Santa Mira, California, as Finney presents it to us, is exactly the sort of town where we would almost expect to see Tom whitewashing a fence (there would be no Huck around, sleeping in a hogshead, though; not in Santa Mira). The Body Snatchers is the only Finney book which can rightly be called a horror novel, but Santa Mirawhich is a typical "nice" Finney settingis the perfect locale for such a tale. Perhaps one horror novel is all that Finney had to write; certainly it was enough to set the mold for what we now call "the modern horror novel." If there is such a thing, there can be no doubt at all that Finney had a large hand in inventing it. I have used the phrase "offkey note" earlier on, and that is Finney's actual method in The Body Snatchers, I think; one offkey note, then two, then a ripple, then a run of them. Finally the jagged, discordant music of horror overwhelms the melody entirely. But Finney understands that there is no horror without beauty; no discord without a prior sense of melody; no nasty without nice. There are no Plains of Leng here; no Cyclopean ruins under the earth; no shambling monsters in the subway tunnels under New York. At about the same time Jack Finney was writing The Body Snatchers, Richard Matheson was writing his classic short story "Born of Man and Woman," the story that begins "today my mother called me retch. you retch she said." Between the two of them, they made the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more. Matheson's short story was published well before Weird Tales went broke; Finney's novel was published by Dell a year after. Although Matheson published two early short stories in Weird Tales, neither writer is associated with this icon of American fantasy horror magazines; they represent the birth of an almost entirely new breed of American fantasist, just as, in the years 19771980, the emergence of Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman in England may represent another significant turn of the wheel.  I have mentioned that Finney's short story "The Third Level" predates Rod Serling's Twilight Zone series; in exactly the same fashion, Finney's little town of Santa Mira predates and points the way toward Peter Straub's fictional town of Milburn, New York; Thomas Tryon's Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut; and my own little town of 'Salem's Lot, Maine. It is even possible to see Finney's influence in Blatty's The Exorcist, where foul doings become fouler when set against the backdrop of Georgetown, a suburb which is quite, graciously rich . . . and nice. Finney concentrates on sewing a seam between the prosaic reality of his little youcanseeitbeforeyoureyes town and the outright fantasy of the pods which will follow. He sews the seam with such fine stitchwork that when we cross over from the world that really is and into a world of utter makebelieve, we are hardly aware of any change. This is a major feat, and like the magician who can make the cards walk effortlessly over the tips of his fingers in apparent defiance of gravity, it looks so easy that you'd be tempted to believe anyone could do it. You see the trick, but not the long hours of practice that went into creating the effect. We have spoken briefly of paranoia in Rosemary's Baby; in The Body Snatchers, the paranoia becomes full, rounded, and complete. If we are all incipient paranoidsif we all take a quick glance down at ourselves when laughter erupts at the cocktail party, just to make sure we're zipped up and it isn't us they're laughing atthen I'd suggest that Finney uses this incipient paranoia quite deliberately to manipulate our emotions in favor of Miles, Becky, and Miles's friends, the Belicecs. At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination. Ray Bradbury began to be noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury's name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold. Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, freefloating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache.


Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the uncanny Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. "I've been waiting for today," she whispered. "Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, todayI've been waiting for this!today he got a haircut" I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's gone? You mean" "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's therethe scarexactly like Uncle Ira's!" So Finney serves notice that we are working here in a world of utter subjectivity . . . and utter paranoia. Of course we believe Wilma at once, even though we have no real proof; if for no other reason, we know from the title of the book that the "body snatchers" are out there somewhere. By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Finney has turned us into equivalents of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It is easy enough to see why the book was eagerly seized upon by those who felt, in the early fifties, that there was either a Communist conspiracy afoot, or perhaps a fascist conspiracy that was operating in the name of antiCommunism. Because, either way or neither way, this is a book about conspiracy with strong paranoid overtones . . . in other words, exactly the sort of story to be claimed as political allegory by political loonies of every stripe. Earlier on, I mentioned the idea that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. To that we could add that paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind. Much of the literature of the twentieth century, from such diverse sources as Bertolt Brecht, JeanPaul Sartre, Edward Albee, Thomas Hardy, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, has suggested that we live in an existential sort of world, a planless insane asylum where things just happen. IS GOD DEAD? asks the Time magazine cover in the waiting room of Rosemary Woodhouse's Satanic obstetrician. In such a world it is perfectly credible that a mental defective should sit on the upper floor of a littleused building, wearing a Hanes tshirt, eating takeout chicken, and waiting to use his mailorder rifle to blow out the brains of an American president; perfectly possible that another mental defective should be able to stand around in a hotel kitchen a few years later waiting to do exactly the same thing to that defunct president's younger brother; perfectly understandable that nice American boys from Iowa and California and Delaware should have spent their tours in Vietnam collecting ears, many of them extremely tiny; that the world should begin to move once more toward the brink of an apocalyptic war because of the preachings of an eightyyearold Moslem holy man who is probably foggy on what he had for breakfast by the time sunset rolls around. All of these things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God has abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for orderthese powerful elements of our human makeupall rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsiblethings just got a little out of control here, haha, so sorrythen the mind begins to totter. I saw this happen at firsthand in the sixties, at the height of the generational shudder that began with our involvement in Vietnam and went on to encompass everything from parietal hours on college campuses and the voting franchise at eighteen to corporate responsibility for environmental pollution. I was in college at the time, attending the University of Maine, and while I began college with political leanings too far to the right to actually become radicalized, by 1968 my mind had been changed forever about a number of fundamental questions. The hero of Jack Finney's later novel, Time and Again, says it better than I could I was . . . an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than most of the rest of us." For me, it was a nearly overwhelming discoveryone that really began to happen, perhaps, on that day in the Stratford Theater when the announcement that the Russians had orbited a space satellite was made to me and my contemporaries by a theater manager who looked like he had been gutshot at close range. But for all of that, I found it impossible to embrace the mushrooming paranoia of the last four years of the sixties completely. In 1968, during my junior year at college, three Black Panthers from Boston came to my school and talked ( under the auspices of the Public Lecture Series) about how the American business establishment, mostly under the guidance of the Rockefellers and ATT, was responsible for creating the neofascist political state of Amerika, encouraging the war in Vietnam because it was good for business, and also encouraging an ever more virulent climate of racism, stateism, and sexism. Johnson was their puppet; Humphrey and Nixon were also their puppets; it was a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," as the Who would say a year or two later; the only solution was to take it into the streets. They finished with the Panther slogan, "all power comes out of the barrel of a gun," and adjured us to remember Fred Hampton. Now, I did not and do not believe that the hands of the Rockefellers were utterly clean during that period, nor those of ATT; I did and do believe that companies like Sikorsky and Douglas Aircraft and Dow Chemical and even the Bank of America subscribed more or less to the idea that war is good business (but never invest your son as long as you can slug the draft board in favor of the right kind of people; when at all possible, feed the war machine the spies and the niggers and the poor white trash from Appalachia, but not our boys, oh no, never our boys!); I did and do believe that the death of Fred Hampton was a case of police manslaughter at the very least. But these Black Panthers were suggesting a huge umbrella of conscious conspiracy that was laughable . . . except the audience wasn't laughing. During the QandA period, they were asking sober, concerned questions about just how the conspiracy was working, who was in charge, how they got their orders out, et cetera. Finally I got up and said something like, "Are you really suggesting that there is an actual Board of Fascist Conspiracy in this country? That the conspiratorsthe president of GM and Exxon, plus David and Nelson Rockefellerare maybe meeting in a big underground chamber beneath the Bonneville Salt Flats with agendas containing items on how more blacks can be drafted and the war in Southeast Asia prolonged?" I was finishing with the suggestion that perhaps these executives were arriving at their underground fortress in flying saucersthus handily accounting for the upswing in UFO sightings as well as for the war in Vietnamwhen the audience began to shout angrily for me to sit down and shut up. Which I did posthaste, blushing furiously, knowing how those eccentrics who mount their soapboxes in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons must feel. I did not much relish the feeling. The Panther who spoke did not respond to my question (which, to be fair, wasn't a question at all, really) ; he merely said softly, " You got a surprise, didn't you, man?" This was greeted with a burst of applause and laughter from the audience. I did get a surpriseand a pretty unpleasant one, at that. But some thought has convinced me that it was impossible for those of my generation, propelled harumscarum through the sixties, hair flying back from our foreheads, eyes bugging out with a mixture of delight and terror, from the Kingsmen doing "Louie Louie" to the blasting fuzztones of the Jefferson Airplane, to get from point A to point Z without a belief that someoneeven Nelson Rockefellerwas pulling the strings. In various ways throughout this book I've tried to suggest that the horror story is in many ways an optimistic, upbeat experience; that it is often the tough mind's way of coping with terrible problems which may not be supernatural at all but perfectly real. Paranoia may be the last and strongest bastion of such an optimistic viewit is the mind crying out, " Something rational and understandable is going on here! These things do not just happen! " So we look at a shadow and say there was a man on the grassy knoll at Dallas; we say that James Earl Ray was in the pay of certain big Southern business interests, or maybe the CIA; we ignore the fact that American business interests exist in complex circles of power, often revolving in direct opposition to one another, and suggest that our stupid but mostly wellmeant involvement in Vietnam was a conspiracy hatched by the militaryindustrial complex; or that, as a recent rash of badly spelled and printed posters in New York suggested, that the Ayatollah Khomeini is a puppet ofyeah, you guessed itDavid Rockefeller. We suggest, in our endless inventiveness, that Captain Mantell did not die of oxygen starvation back there in 1947 while chasing that odd daytime reflection of Venus which veteran pilots call a sundog; no, he was chasing a ship from another world which exploded his plane with a death ray when he got too close. It would be wrong of me to leave you with any impression that I am inviting the two of us to have a good laugh at these things together; I am not. These things are not the beliefs of madmen but the beliefs of sane men and women trying desperately, not to preserve the status quo, but just to find the fucking thing. And when Becky Driscoll's cousin Wilma says her Uncle Ira isn't her Uncle Ira, we believe her instinctively and immediately. If we don't believe her, all we've got is a spinster going quietly dotty in a small California town. The idea does not appeal; in a sane world, nice middleaged ladies like Wilma aren't s'posed to go bookers. It isn't right. There's a whisper of chaos in it that's somehow more scary than believing she might be right about Uncle Ira. We believe because belief affirms the lady's sanity. We believe her because . . . because . . . because something is going on! All those paranoid fantasies are really not fantasies at all. Weand Cousin Wilmaare right; it's the world that's gone haywire. The idea that the world has gone haywire is pretty bad, but as we can cope with Bill Nolan's fiftyfoot bug once we see what it really is, so we can cope with a haywire world if we just know where our feet are planted. Bob Dylan speaks to the existentialist in us when he tells us that "Something is going on hereBut you don't know what it isDo you, Mr. Jones?" Finneyin the guise of Miles Bennelltakes us firmly by the arm and tells us that he knows exactly what's going on here it's those goddamn pods from space! They're responsible! It's fun to trace the classic threads of paranoia Finney weaves into his story. While Miles and Becky are at a movie, Miles's writer friend Jack Belicec asks Miles to come and take a look at something he's found in his basement. The something turns out to be the body of a naked man on a pool table, a body which seems to Miles, Becky, Jack, and Jack's wife, Theodora, somehow unformednot yet quite shaped. It's a pod, of course, and the shape it is taking is Jack's own. Shortly we have concrete proof that something is terribly wrong Becky actually moaned when we saw the [finger] prints, and I think we all felt sick. Because it's one thing to speculate about a body that's never been alive, a blank. But it's something very different, something that touches whatever is primitive deep in your brain, to have that speculation proved. There were no prints; there were five absolutely smooth, solidly black circles. These fournow aware of the pod conspiracyagree not to call the police immediately but to see how the pods develop. Miles takes Becky home and then goes home himself, leaving the Belicecs to stand watch over the thing on the pool table. But in the middle of the night Theodora Belicec freaks out and the two of them show up on Miles's doorstep. Miles calls a psychiatrist friend, Mannie Kaufman (a shrink? we are immediately suspicious; we don't need a shrink here, we want to shout at Miles; call out the Army!), to come and sit with the Belicecs while he goes after Becky . . . who earlier has confessed to feeling that her father is no longer her father. On the bottom shelf of a cupboard in the Driscoll basement, Miles finds a blank which is developing into a pseudoBecky. Finney does a brilliant job of describing what this comingtobeing would look like. He compares it to finestamping medallions; to developing a photograph; and later to those eerie, lifelike South American dolls. But in our current state of high nervousness, what really impresses us is how neatly the thing has been tucked away, hidden behind a closed door in a dusty basement, biding its time. Becky has been drugged by her "father," and in a scene simply charged with romance, Miles spirits her out of the house and carries her through the sleeping streets of Santa Mira in his arms; it is no trick to imagine the gauzy stuff of her nightgown nearly glowing in the moonlight. And the fallout of all this? When Mannie Kaufman arrives, the men return to the Belicec house to investigate the basement There was no body on the table. Under the bright, shadowless light from the overhead lay the brilliant green felt, and on the felt, except at the corners and along the sides, lay a sort of thick gray fluff that might have fallen, or been jarred loose, I supposed, from the open rafters. For an instant, his mouth hanging open, Jack stared at the table. Then he swung to Mannie, and his voice protesting, asking for belief, he said, "It was there on the table! Mannie, it was! " Mannie smiled, nodding quickly. "I believe you, Jack . . . But we know that's what all of these shrinks say . . . just before they call for the men in the white coats. We know that fluff isn't just fluff from the overhead rafters; the damned thing has gone to seed. But nobody else knows it, and Jack is quickly reduced to the final plea of the helpless paranoiac You gotta believe me, doc! Mannie Kaufman's rationalization for the increasing number of people in Santa Mira who no longer believe their relatives are their relatives is that Santa Mirans are undergoing a case of lowkey mass hysteria, the sort of thing that may have been behind the Salem witch trials, the mass suicides in Guyana, even the dancing sickness of the middle ages. But below this rationalistic approach, existentialism lurks unpleasantly. These things happen, he seems to suggest, just because they happen. Sooner or later they will work themselves out. They do, too. Mrs. Seeley, who believed her husband wasn't her husband, comes in to tell Miles that everything is fine now. Ditto the girls who were scared of their English instructor for awhile. And ditto Cousin Wilma, who calls up Miles to tell him how embarrassed she is at having caused such a fuss; of course Uncle Ira is Uncle Ira. And in every case, one other facta namestands out Mannie Kaufman was there, helping them all. Something is wrong here, all right, but we know very well what it is, thank you, Mr. Jones. We have noticed the way Kaufman's name keeps cropping up. We're not stupid, right? Damn right we're not! And it's pretty obvious that Mannie Kaufman is now playing for the visiting team. And one more thing. At Jack Belicec's insistence, Miles finally decides to call a friend in the Pentagon and spill the whole incredible story. About his long distance call to Washington, Miles tells us It isn't easy explaining a long, complicated story over the telephone .... And we had bad luck with the connection. At first I heard Ben and he heard me, as clearly as though we were next door to each other. But when I began telling him what had been happening here, the connection faded. Ben had to keep asking me to repeat, and I almost had to shout to make him understand me. You can't talk well, you can't even think properly, when you have to repeat every other phrase, and I signaled the operator and asked for a better connection . . . I'd hardly resumed when a sort of buzzing sound started in the receiver in my ear, and then I had to try to talk over that . . . "They," of course, are now in charge of communications coming into and going out of Santa Mira ( "We are controlling transmission," that somehow frightening voice which introduced The Outer Limits each week used to say; " We will control the horizontal . . . we will control the vertical . . . we can roll the image, make it flutter . . . we can change the focus . . ." ) . Such a passage will also strike a responsive chord in any old antiwar protester, SDS member, or activist who ever believed his or her phone was tapped or that the guy with the Nikon on the edge of the demonstration was taking his or her picture for a dossier someplace. They are everywhere; they are watching; they are listening. Surely it is no wonder that Siegel believed that Finney's novel was about aRedundereverybed or that others believed it was about the creeping fascist menace. As we descend deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of this nightmare it might even become possible to believe it was the pod people who were on the grassy knoll in Dallas, or that it was the podpeople who obediently swallowed their poisoned KoolAid at Jonestown and then spritzed it down the throats of their squalling infants. It would be such a relief to be able to believe that. Miles's conversation with his Army friend is the book's clearest delineation of the paranoid mind at work. Even when you know the whole story, you aren't allowed to communicate it to those in authority . . . and it's hard to think with that buzzing in your head! Linked to this is the strong sense of xenophobia Finney's major characters feel. The pods really are "a threat to our way of life," as Joe McCarthy used to say. "They'll have to declare martial law," Jack tells Miles, "a state of siege, or somethinganything! And then do whatever has to be done. Root this thing out, smash it, crush it, kill it." Later, during their brief flight from Santa Mira, Miles and Jack discover two pods in the trunk of the car. This is how Miles describes what happens next And there they lay, in the advancing, retreating waves of flickering red light two enormous pods already burst open in one or two places, and I reached in with both hands, and tumbled them out onto the dirt. They were weightless as children's balloons, harsh and dry on my palms and fingers. At the feel of them on my skin, I lost my mind completely, and then I was trampling them, smashing and crushing them under my plunging feet and legs, not even knowing that I was uttering a sort of hoarse, meaningless cry"Unhh! Unhh! Unhh!"of fright and animal disgust. No friendly, stonedout hippies holding up signs reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY here; here we have Miles and Jack, mostly out of their minds, doing the funky chicken over these weird and insensate invaders from space. There is no discussion (visvis The Thing) of what we could learn from these things to the benefit of modern science. There is no white flag here, no parley; Finney's aliens are as strange and as ugly as those bloated leeches you sometimes find clinging to your skin after swimming in still ponds. There is no reasoning here, nor any effort to reason; only Miles's blind and primitive reaction to the alien outsider. The book which most closely resembles Finney's is Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; like Finney's novel, it is perhaps nominally sf but is in fact a horror novel. In this one, invaders from Saturn's largest moon, Titan, arrive on Earth, ready, willing, and able to do business. Heinlein's creatures are not pods; they are the leeches in actuality. They are sluglike creatures that ride on the backs of their hosts' necks the way that you or I might ride a horse. The two books are similarstrikingly soin many ways. Heinlein's narrator begins by wondering aloud if "they" were truly intelligent. He ends after the menace has been defeated. The narrator is one of those building and manning rocketships aimed at Titan; now that the tree has been chopped down, they will burn the roots. "Death and destruction!" the narrator exults, thus ending the book. But what exactly is the threat which the pods in Finney's novel pose? For Finney, the fact that they will mean the end of the human race seems almost secondary (pod people have no interest in what an old acquaintance of mine likes to refer to as "doing the trick"). The real horror, for Jack Finney, seems to be that they threaten all that "nice"and I think this is where we came in. On his way to his office not too long after the pod invasion is well launched, Miles describes the scenery this way . . . the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead streetlight was broken, and a few doors down . . . a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted For Rent sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn't say where to apply, though, and I had a feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed wine bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the gray stone of the building was mottled and unpolished. From Jack Finney's fiercely individualistic point of view, the worst thing about the Body Snatchers is that they will allow the nice little town of Santa Mira to turn into something resembling a subway station on Fortysecond Street in New York. Humans, Finney asserts, have a natural drive to create order out of chaos (which fits well enough with the book's paranoid themes). Humans want to improve the universe. These are oldfashioned ideas, perhaps, but Finney is a traditionalist, as Richard Gid Powers points out in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of the novel. From where Finney stands, the scariest thing about the pod people is that chaos doesn't bother them a bit and they have absolutely no sense of aesthetics this is not an invasion of roses from outer space but rather an infestation of ragweed. The pod people are going to mow their lawns for awhile and then give it up. They don't give a shit about the crabgrass. They aren't going to be making any trips down to the Santa Mira True Value Hardware so they can turn that musty old basement annex into a rec room in the best doityourself tradition. A salesman who blows into town complains about the state of the roads. If they aren't patched soon, he says, Santa Mira will be cut off from the world. But do you think the pod people are going to lose any sleep over a little thing like that? Here's what Richard Gid Powers says in his introduction about Finney's outlook With the hindsight afforded by Finney's later books, it is easy to see what the critics overlooked [when they] interpreted both the book and the movie . . . simply as products of the antiCommunist hysteria of the McCarthyite fifties, a knownothing outburst against "alien ways of life" . . . that threatened the American way. Miles Bennell is a precursor of all the other traditionalist heroes of Jack Finney's later books, but in The Body Snatchers, Miles's town of Santa Mira, Marin County, California still is the unspoiled mythical gemeinschaft community that later heroes have had to travel through time to recapture. When Miles begins to suspect that his neighbors are no longer real human beings and are no longer capable of sincere human feelings, he is encountering the beginning of the insidious modernization and dehumanization that faces later Finney heroes as an accomplished fact. Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is fully consistent with the adventures of subsequent Finney characters his resistance to depersonalization is so fierce that the pods finally give up on their plans for planetary colonization and mosey off to another planet where the inhabitants' hold on their selfintegrity is not so strong. Further on, Powers has this to say about the archetypical Finney hero in general and the purposes of this book in particular Finney's heroes, particularly Miles Bennell, are all innerdirected individualists in an increasingly otherdirected world. Their adventures could be used as classroom illustrations of Tocqueville's theory about the plight of a free individual in a mass democracy . . . . The Body Snatchers is a raw and direct massmarket version of the despair over cultural dehumanization that fills T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Finney adroitly uses the classic science fiction situation of an invasion from outer space to symbolize the annihilation of the free personality in contemporary society . . . he succeeded in creating the most memorable of all pop cultural images of what jean Sheperd was describing on latenight radio as "creeping meatballism"  fields of pods that hatch into identical, spiritless, emotional vacuous zombieswho look so damned much just like you and me! Finally, when we examine The Body Snatchers in light of the Tarot hand we have dealt ourselves, we find in Finney's novel almost every damned card. There is the Vampire, for surely those whom the pods have attacked and drained of life have become a modern, cultural version of the undead, as Richard Gid Powers points out; there is the Werewolf, for certainly these people are not really people at all, and have undergone a terrible sea change; the pods from space, a totally alien invasion of creatures who need no spaceships, can certainly also fit under the heading of the Thing Without a Name . . . and you might even say (if you wanted to stretch a point, and why the hell not?) that citizens of Santa Mira are no more than Ghosts of their former selves these days. Not bad legs for a book which is "just a story." 6 Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes defies any neat and easy categorization or analysis . . . and so far, at least, it has also defied the moviemakers, in spite of any number of options and scenarios, including Bradbury's own. This novel, originally published in 1962 and promptly given a critical pasting by critics in both the science fiction and fantasy genres, has gone on through two dozen printings since its original publication. For all of that, it has not been Bradbury's most successful book, or his bestknown one; The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine have probably all outsold it, and are certainly better known to the general reading public. But I believe that Something Wicked This Way Comes, a darkly poetic tall tale set in the halfreal, halfmythical community of Green Town, Illinois, is probably Bradbury's best worka shadowy descendant from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett. It is not a perfect book; at times Bradbury lapses into the purple overwriting that has characterized too much of his work in the seventies. Some passages are selfimitative and embarrassingly fulsome. But that is a small part of the total work; in most cases Bradbury carries his story off with guts and beauty and panache. And it might be worth remembering that Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, was, like Bradbury, sometimes his own worst enemy . . . mostly because Dreiser never knew when to stop. "When you open your mouth, Stevie," my grandfather once said to me in despair, "all your guts fall out." I had no reply to that then, but I suppose if he were alive today, I would reply That's 'cause I want to be Theodore Dreiser when I grow up. Well, Dreiser was a great writer, and Bradbury seems to be the fantasy genre's version of Dreiser, although Bradbury's linebyline writing is better and his touch is lighter. Still, the two of them share a remarkable commonality. On the minus side, both show a tendency to not so much write about a subject as to bulldoze it into the ground . . . and once so bulldozed, Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream criticssometimes with justification, sometimes withoutbut the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual corks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting novels which are too large for the genres from which they've come; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting. both have a tendency to bludgeon the subject until all signs of movement have ceased. On the plus side, both Dreiser and Bradbury are American naturalists of a dark persuasion, and in a crazy sort of way they seem to bookend Sherwood Anderson, the American champ of naturalism. Both of them wrote of American people living in the heartland ( although Dreiser's heartland people come to the city while Bradbury's stay to home), of innocence coming heartbreakingly to experience ( although Dreiser's people usually break, while Bradbury's people remain, although changed, whole), and both speak in voices which are uniquely, even startlingly American. Both narrate in a clear English which remains informal while mostly eschewing idiomwhen Bradbury lapses occasionally into slang it startles us so much that he seems almost vulgar. Their voices are unmistakably American voices. The easiest difference to point out, and maybe the most unimportant, is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist. Even worse, Bradbury's paperback publisher insists tiresomely on calling him "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer" (making him sound like one of the freaks in the shows he writes about so often) , when Bradbury has never written anything but the most nominal science fiction. Even in his space stories, he is not interested in negativeion drives or relativity converters. There are rockets, he says in the connected stories which form The Martian Chronicler, R Is for Rocket, and S Is for Space. That is all you need to know and is, therefore, all I am going to tell you. To this I would add that if you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein; if you want literature stories, to use Jack Finney's wordabout what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut. What powers the rockets is Popular Mechanics stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people. All that said, it is impossible to talk of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is most certainly not science fiction, without putting Bradbury's lifework in some sort of perspective. His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in tile marvelous Arkham House collection Dark Carnival. No easily obtainable edition of this work, the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction, is available.


Many of the stories originally published in Dark Carnival can be found in a later collection, The October Country, which is available in paper. Included are such short Bradbury classics of gutchilling horror as "The Jar," "The Crowd," and the unforgettable "Small Assassin." Other Bradbury stories published in the forties were so horrible that the author now repudiates them (some were adapted as comics stories and published, with a younger Bradbury's permission, in E.C.'s The Crypt of Terror). One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients"for instance, when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear and ear to mouth, so they can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity. Of how his own life influenced the writing of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury says "[ Something Wicked This Way Comes] sums up my entire life of loving Lon Chaney and the magicians and grotesques he played in the twenties films. My mom took me to see Hunchback in 1923 when I was three. It marked me forever. Phantom [ of the Opera] when I was six. Same thing. East of Zanzibar when I was about eight. Magician turns himself into a skeleton in front of black natives! Incredible! The Unholy Three ditto! Chaney took over my life. I was a raving film maniac long before I hit my eighth year. I became a fulltime magician after seeing Blackstone on stage in Waukegan, my home town in upper Illinois, when I was nine. When I was twelve, MR. ELECTRICO arid 1115 traveling Electric Chair arrived with the Dill Brothers Sideshows and Carnival. That was his real' name. I got to know him. Sat by the lakeshore and talked grand philosophies . . . he his small ones, me my grandiose supersized ones about futures and magic. We corresponded several times. He lived in Cairo, Illinois, and was, he said, a defrocked Presbyterian minister. I wish I could remember his Christian name. But his letters have long since been lost in the years, though small magic tricks he gave me I still have. Anyway, magic and magicians and Chaney and libraries have filled my life. Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me. I lived in my hometown library more than I did at home. I loved it at night, prowling the stacks on my fat panther feet. All of that went into Something Wicked, which began as a short story in Weird Tales called "Black Ferris" in May, 1948, and just grew like Topsy . . . Bradbury has continued to publish fantasy throughout his career, and although the Christian Science Monitor called Something Wicked This Way Comes a "nightmarish allegory," Bradbury really settles for allegory only in his science fiction. In his fantasy, his preoccupation has been with theme, character, symbol . . . and that fantastic rush that comes to the writer of fantasy when he puts the pedal to the metal, yanks back on the steering wheel, and drives his jalopy straight up into the black night of unreality. Bradbury relates it this way "[Black Ferris' became] a screenplay in 1958 the night I saw Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance and so much wanted to work for and with him [that] I rushed home, finished up an outline of Dark Carnival ( its then title) and ran it over to his house. Kelly flipped, said he would direct it, went off to Europe to find money, never found any, came back discouraged, gave me back my screen treatment, some eighty pages or more, and told me Good Luck. I said to hell with it and sat down and spent two years, off and on, finishing Something Wicked. Along the way, I said all and everything, just about, that I would ever want to say about my younger self and how I felt about that terrifying thing Life, and that other terror Death, and the exhilaration of both. "But, above all, I did a loving thing without knowing it. I wrote a paean to my father. I didn't realize it until one night in 1965, a few years after the novel had been published. Sleepless, I got up and prowled my library, found the novel, reread certain portions, burst into tears. My father was locked into the novel, forever, as the father in the book! I wish he had lived to read himself there and be proud of his bravery in behalf of his loving son. "Even writing this, I am touched again to remember with what a burst of joy and agony I found that my Dad was there, forever, forever for me anyway, locked on paper, kept in print, and beautiful to behold. "I don't know what else to say. I loved every minutes of writing it. I took six months off between drafts. I never tire myself. I just let my subconscious throw up when it feels like it. "I love the book best of all the things I have ever written. I will love it, and the people in it, Dad and Mr. Electrico, and Will and Jim, the two halves of myself sorely tired and tempted, until the end of my days." Maybe the first thing we notice in Something Wicked This Way Comes is Bradbury's splitting of those two halves of himself. Will Halloway, the "good" boy (well, both of them are good, but Will's friend Jim goes astray for awhile), is born on October 30, a minute before midnight. Jim Nightshade is born two minutes later . . . a minute past midnight on Halloween morning. Will is Apollonian, a creature of reason and plan, a believer (mostly) in the status quo and the norm. Jim Nightshade, as his name implies, is the Dionysian half, a creature of emotion, something of a nihilist, hellbent for destruction, ready to spit in the devil's face just to see if the spittle will steam and sizzle running down the Dark Lord's cheek. When the lightning rod salesman comes to town at the beginning of Bradbury's fabulous tale ( "running just ahead of the storm") and tells the boys that lightning will strike Jim's house, Will has to persuade Jim to put the lightning rod up. Jim's initial reaction is "Why spoil the fun?" The symbolism of the times of birth is large, crude, and apparent; so is the symbolism of the lightning rod salesman, who arrives as a harbinger of bad times. Bradbury pulls it off nonetheless, mostly out of sheer fearlessness. He deals his archetypes large, like those bridgesized cards. In Bradbury's story an ancient carnival, marvelously named Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, arrives in Green Town, bringing misery and horror under the guise of pleasure and wonder. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshadeand later, Will's father, Charles, as wellwise up to exactly what this particular carnival is all about. The tale eventually narrows down to the struggle for a single soul, that of Jim Nightshade. To call it an allegory would be wrong, but to call it a moral horror talemuch in the manner of those E.C. horror tales which foreran itwould be exactly right. In effect, what happens to Jim and Will is not so much different from Pinocchio's scary encounter on Pleasure Island, where boys who indulge their baser desires ( smoking cigars and shooting snooker, for instance) are turned into donkeys. Bradbury in writing here of carnal enticementsnot just sexual carnality, but carnality in its broadest forms and manifestationsthe pleasures of the flesh run as wild as the tattooed illustrations which cover Mr. Dark's body. The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book's most tantalizing episodes. Jim and Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a house "while they were monkeyclimbing for the sourest apples." Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduateschool analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the appleandEden metaphor here is too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this secondor thirdfloor room, this "Theater" that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they "let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animalcrazy, naked, like shivering horses . . ." If so, it is the book's most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence. What saves Bradbury's novel from being merely a "nightmarish allegory" or a simplistic fairy story is its grasp of story and style. Bradbury's style, so attractive to me as an adolescent, now seems a bit oversweet. But it still wields a considerable power. Here is one of the passages which seems oversweet to me And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dimestore pencilsharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? and one that seems just right The wails of a lifetime were gathered in [that trainwhistle] from other nights in other slumbering years; the howls of moondreamed dogs, the sleep of rivercold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand firesirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighing, burst over the earth! Man, that's a train whistle! I want to tell you! More clearly than any other book discussed here, Something Wicked This Way Comes reflects the differences between the Apollonian life and the Dionysian. Bradbury's carnival, which creeps inside the town limits and sets up shop in a meadow at three o'clock in the morning ( Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, if you like), is a symbol of everything that is abnormal, mutated, monstrous . . . Dionysian. I've always wondered if the appeal of the vampire myth for children doesn't lie partly in the simple fact that vampires get to sleep all day and stay up all night ( vampires never have to miss Creature Features at midnight because of school the next day). Similarly, we know that part of this carnival's attraction for Jim and Will (sure, Will feels its pull too, although not as strongly as his friend Jim feels it; even Will's father is not entirely immune from its deadly siren song) is that there will be no set bedtimes, no rules and regulations, no dull and boring small town day after day, no "eat your broccoli, think of the people starving in China," no school. The carnival is chaos, it is the taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions. The boys (sure, Jim too) represent just the opposite. They are normal, not mutated, not monstrous. They live their lives by the rules of the sunlit world, Will willingly, Jim impatiently. Which is exactly why the carnival wants them. The essence of evil, Bradbury suggests, is its need to compromise and corrupt that delicate passage from innocence to experience that all children must make. In the rigid moral world of Bradbury's fiction, the freaks who populate the carnival have taken on the outward shapes of their inward vices. Mr. Cooger, who has lived for thousands of years, pays for his life of dark degeneracy by becoming a Thing even more ancient, ancient almost beyond our ability to comprehend, kept alive by a steady flow of electricity. The Human Skeleton is paying for miserliness of feeling; the fat lady for physical or emotional gluttony; the dust witch for her gossipy meddling in the lives of others. The carnival has done to them what the undertaker in that old Bradbury horror story did to his victims after they had died. On its Apollonian side, the book asks us to recall and reexamine the facts and myths of our own childhoods, most specifically our smalltown American childhoods. Written in a semipoetic style that seems to suit such concerns perfectly, Bradbury examines these childhood concerns and comes to the conclusion that only children are equipped to deal with childhood's myths and terrors and exhalations. In his midfifties story "The Playground," a man who returns magically to childhood is propelled into a world of lunatic horror which is only, after all, the corner playground with its sandboxes and its slippery slide. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury interconnects this smalltown American boyhood motif with most of the ideas of the new American gothic which we have already discussed to some extent. Will and Jim are essentially okay, essentially Apollonian, riding easy in their childhoods and used to looking at the world from their shorter height. But when their teacher, Miss Foley, returns .to childhoodthe first of the carnival's Green Town victimsshe enters a world of monotonous, unending horror which is not much different from that experienced by the protagonist of "The Playground." The boys discover Miss Foleyor what remains of herunder a tree . . . . and there was the little girl, crouched, face buried in her hands, weeping as if the town were gone and the people in it and herself lost in a terrible woods. And at last Jim came edging up and stood at the edge of the shadow and said, "Who is it?" "I don't know." But Will felt tears start to his eyes, as if some part of him guessed. "It's not jenny Holdridge, is it?" "No." "Jane Franklin?" "No." His mouth felt full of novocaine, his tongue merely stirred in his numb lips. ". . . no . . ." The little girl wept feeling them near, but not looking up yet. . . . me . . . help me . . . nobody'll help me . . . me . . . me . . . I don't like this . . . somebody must help me . . . someone must help her . . ." she mourned as for one dead, ". . . someone must help her . . . nobody will . . . nobody has . . . terrible . . . terrible . . . The carnival "attraction" which has accomplished this malign trick is one that both Narcissus and Eleanor Vance could relate to Miss Foley has been trapped in the carnival's mirror maze, imprisoned by her own reflection. Forty or fifty years have been jerked out from under her and she has been tumbled back into her own childhood . . . just what she thought she wanted. She had not considered the possibility of the nameless little girl weeping under the tree. Jim and Will avoid this fatebarelyand even manage to rescue Miss Foley on her first foray into the mirror maze. One supposes it is not the maze itself but the carousel that has actually accomplished her doubling back in time; the mirrors in the maze show you a time of life you think you'd like to have again, and the carousel actually accomplishes it. The carousel can add a year to your age each time you go around forward or make you a year younger for every circle you make on it going backward. The carousel is Bradbury's interesting and workable metaphor for all of life's passages, and the fact that he darkens this ride, which is often associated with the sunniest pleasure we know as children, to fit the motif of this particular black carnival, causes other uneasy associations to come to mind. When we see the innocent merrygoround with its prancing horses in this nether light, it may suggest to us that if time's passages are to be compared to a merrygoround ride, then we see that each year's revolution is essentially the same as the last; it perhaps causes us to remember how fleeting and ephemeral such a ride is; and most of all it reminds us that the brass ring, which we have all tried so hard and fruitlessly to catch, is kept deliberately, tauntingly, out of reach. In terms of the new American gothic, we can see that the mirror maze is the catchtrap, the place where too much selfexamination and morbid introspection persuades Miss Foley to step over the line into abnormality. In Bradbury's worldthe world of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Showthere are no options first caught in the glass of Narcissus, you then find yourself riding a dangerous carousel charger backwards into an untenable past or forward into an untenable future. Shirley Jackson uses the conventions of the new American gothic to examine character under extreme psychologicalor perhaps occultpressure; Peter Straub uses them to examine the effects of an evil past upon the present; Anne Rivers Siddons uses them to examine social codes and social pressures; Bradbury uses these selfsame conventions in order to offer us a moral judgment. In describing Miss Foley's terror and grief in attaining the childhood she so desired, Bradbury goes far toward defusing the potential flood of stickysweet romanticism that might have destroyed his tale . . . and I think this defusing reinforces the moral judgments he makes. In spite of imagery that sometimes swamps us instead of uplifting us, he manages to retain his own clear point of view. This isn't to say Bradbury doesn't make a romantic myth of childhood, because he sure does. Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happened to us when we were kids, but we don't. The reason is simple we were crazy then. Looking back into this well of insanity as adults who are, if not totally insane, then at least neurotic instead of outandout psychotic, we attempt to make sense of things which made no sense, read importance into things which had no importance, and remember motivations which simply didn't exist. This is where the process of myth making begins. Rather than trying to row against this strong current (as Golding and Hughes do), Bradbury uses it in Something Wicked This Way Comes; blending the myth of childhood with the myth of the dreamfather, whose part is played here by Will's dad, Charles Halloway . . . and, if Bradbury himself is to be believed, who is also played by that Illinois powerlinesman who was Ray Bradbury's Dad. Halloway is a librarian who lives his own life of dreams, who is enough boy to understand Will and Jim, but who is also enough adult to provide, in the end, what the boys cannot provide for themselves, that final ingredient in our perception of Apollonian morality, normality, and rectitude simple accountability. The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding's Lord of the Flier and A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden or Beryl Bainbridge's Harriet Said, but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly as Bradbury ever did. Childhood is the time, Bradbury insists, when you are still able to believe in things you know cannot be true "It's not true anyway," Will gasped. "Carnivals don't come this late in the year. Silly darnsounding thing. Who'd go to it?" "Me." Jim stood quiet in the dark. Me, thought Will, seeing the guillotine flash, the Egyptian mirrors unfold accordions of light, and the sulphurskinned devilman sipping lava, like gunpowder tea. They simply believe; their hearts are still capable of overruling their heads. They are still sure that they will be able to sell enough boxes of greeting cards or tins of Cloverine Salve to get a bike or a stereo, that the toy will really do all the things you saw it do on TV and that "you can put it together in just a matter of minutes with a few simple tools," or that the monster picture going on inside the theater will be as scary and wonderful as the posters and stills outside. That's okay; in Bradbury's world the myth is ultimately stronger than the reality, and the heart stronger than the head. Will and Jim stand revealed, not as the sordid, dirty, frightened boys of Lord of the Flies, but as creatures built almost entirely of myth, a dream of childhood which becomes more believable than reality in Bradbury's hand. Through noon after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk bottles, smashed kewpiedollwinning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust . . . Where did they come by the wherewithal for their day at the fair? Most kids in a similar situation have to count their finances and then go through an agonizing process of picking and choosing; Jim and Will apparently do everything. But once again, it's okay. They are our representatives in the forgotten land of childhood, and their apparently endless supply of cash (plus their deadeye aim at the china plates and pyramids of milk bottles) are accepted with delight and little or no rational hesitation. We believe as we once believed that Pecos Bill dug the Grand Canyon one day when he came home tired, thus dragging his pick and shovel behind him instead of carrying them over his shoulder. They are in terror, but it is the unique ability of these mythchildren to enjoy their terror. "They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other's heart," Bradbury relates. Cooger and Dark become Bradbury's myth of evil, threatening these children not as gangsters or kidnappers or any realistic bad guys; Cooger is more like Old Pew returned from Treasure Island, his blindness exchanged for a hideous fall of years that has been dropped upon him when the carousel goes wild. When he hisses at Will and Jim, "A . . . sssshort . . . sad life . . . for you both!" we feel the sort of comfortable chill we felt when the Black Spot was first passed at the Admiral Benbow. Their hiding from the emissaries of the carnival, who come into town looking for them under the pretense of a free parade, becomes Bradbury's best summation of this childhood remembered in myth; the childhood that might really have existed in short bursts between long stretches of boredom and such cheesy chores as carrying wood, doing dishes, putting out the trash, or sitting baby brother or sister ( and it's probably significant to this idea of the dreamchild that both Jim and Will are only children). They . . . hid in old garages, they . . . hid in old barns . . . in the highest trees they could climb and got bored and boredom was worse than fear so they came down and reported in to the Police Chief and had a fine chat which gave them twenty safe minutes right in the station and Will got the idea of touring churches and they climbed all the steeples in town and scared pigeons off the belfries . . . . But there again they began to get starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness, and were almost on the point of giving themselves up to the carnival in order to have something to do, when quite fortunately the sun went down. The only effective foil for Bradbury's dreamchildren is Charles Halloway, the dreamfather. In the character of Charles Halloway we find attractions which only fantasy, with its strong mythmaking abilities, can give us. Three points about him are worth mentioning, I think. First, Charles Halloway understands the myth of childhood the two boys are living; for all of us who grew up and parted with some bitterness from our parents because we felt they didn't understand our youth, Bradbury gives us a portrait of the sort of parent we felt we deserved. His reactions are those which few real parents can ever afford to have. His parenting instincts are apparently supernaturally alert. Early on, he sees the boys running home from watching the carnival set up, and calls their names softly under his breath . . . but does no more. Nor does he mention it to Will later, although the two boys have been out at three o'clock in the morning. He's not worried that they've been out scoring dope or mugging old ladies or shtupping their girl friends. He knows they have been out on boys' business, walking the night as boys sometimes will . . . and he lets it go. Second, Charles Halloway comes by his understanding legitimately; he is still living the myth himself. Your father cannot be your pal very successfully, the psychology texts tell us, but there are few fathers, I think, who have not longed to be buddies with their sons, and few sons who have not wished for a buddy in their fathers. When Charles Halloway discovers that Jim and Will have nailed rungs under the climbing ivy on their respective houses so they can escape and reenter their bedrooms after bedtime, he does not demand that the rungs be torn down; his response is admiring laughter and an admonition that the boys not use the rungs unless they really have to. When Will tells his father in agony that no one will believe them if they try to explain what really happened in Miss Foley's house, where the evil nephew Robert (who is really Mr. Cooger, looking much younger since he has been reissued) framed them for a robbery, Halloway says simply, "I'll believe." He will believe because he is really just one of the boys and the sense of wonder has not died within him. Much later, while rummaging through his pockets, Charles Halloway almost seems like the world's oldest Tom Sawyer And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write great thoughts down on but had never got around to . . . . Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on. Third, Charles Halloway is the dreamfather because he is, in the end, accountable. He can switch hats, in the blink of an eye, from that of the child to that of the adult. He proves his accountability and responsibility by a simple symbolic act when Mr. Dark asks, Halloway gives him his name. "A fine day to you, sir!" No, Dad ! thought Will. The Illustrated Man came back. "Your name, sir?" he asked directly. Don't tell him! thought Will. Will's father debated a moment, took the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash and said quietly "Halloway. Work in the library. Drop by sometime." "You can be sure, Mr. Halloway. I will." . . . [Halloway] was also gazing with surprise at himself, accepting the surprise, the new purpose, which was half despair, half serenity, now that the incredible deed was done. Let no one ask why he had given his true name; even he could not assay and give its real weight . . . . But isn't it most likely that he has given his true name because the boys cannot? He must front for themwhich he does admirably. And when Jim's dark wishes finally lead him into what seems utter ruin, it is Halloway who emerges, first destroying the fearsome Dust Witch, then Mr. Dark himself, and finally leading the fight for Jim's life and soul. Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably not Bradbury's best work overallI believe he has always found the novel a difficult form to work inbut its mythic interests are so well suited to Bradbury's dreamy, semipoetic prose that it succeeds wonderfully and becomes one of those books about childhood (like Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Stevenson's Treasure Island, Cormier's The Chocolate War, and Thomas Williams's Tsuga's Children, to name just a few) that adults should take down once in awhile . . . not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams. Bradbury has introduced his novel with a quotation from Yeats "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." He adds others, but we will perhaps agree that the line from Yeats is text enough . . . but let Bradbury himself have the final word, concerning one of Green Town's fascinations for the two dreamchildren of whom he has written; "As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barberpole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barberpole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts." An apple . . . or maybe a dead rat and a string to swing it on. 7 Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in realityand this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of oneseventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction. Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbojumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a midtwentiethcentury version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism. It's worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us. It is impossible to see The Shrinking Man separated from its background of Abomb tests, ICBMs, the "missile gap," and strontiumgo in the milk. If we look at it this way, Matheson's novel (his second published book, according to John Brosnan and John Clute, who collaborated on Matheson's entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, citing Matheson's I Am Legend as the first; I believe they may have overlooked an earlier Richard Matheson novel, a war story titled The Beardless Warriors) is no more science fiction than such Big Bug movies as The Deadly Mantis or Beginning of the End. But Matheson is doing more in The Shrinking Man than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson's novel alone suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning The Body Snatchers, we'll remember Richard Gid Powers saying that Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is a direct result of Miles's resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional American values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel,  with one important variation. It seems to me that Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written timetravel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past Finney's Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turnofthecentury times on America's east coast, and Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turnofthe century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the ideaand different outcomescannot be imagined.