while Powers is right in suggesting that The Body Snatchers is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society, The Shrinking Man is a story about the free personality's loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an "acceptable kill ratio." In Scott Carey we see one of the most inspired and original symbols of this modern devaluation of human currency ever created. Carey muses at one point that he is not shrinking at all; that instead, the world is growing larger. But seen either waydevaluation of the individual or inflation of the environmentthe result is the same as Scott shrinks, he retains his essential individuality but gradually loses more and more control over his world anyway. Also like Finney, Matheson sees his work as "just a story," and one he is not even particularly in touch with anymore. His comments "I started working on the book in 1955. It was the only book I ever wrote back eastif you exclude a novel I wrote when I was sixteen and living in Brooklyn. Things had been going badly out here [in California] and I though it might be a good idea to be back east and close to editors for the sake of my career; I had given up on the idea of getting into movies. Actually, there was nothing rational in the move. I was just fed up out here on the coast and talked myself into going back east. My family was there. My brother had a business there and I knew I could get some work for us to live on if I couldn't sell any writing.  So we went. We were renting a house at Sound Beach on Long Island when I wrote the book. I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. It was a silly comedy with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman and Aldo Ray and, in this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came. "The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all.  In The Shrinking Man, Scott Carey's life becomes an everlouder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly. There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I would imagine what my hero was up to that day.  I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it ail there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of dj vu. "It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately. Recently, when I thought they were going to do a remake of the film and I thought they wanted me to do it, I decided I would revert to the original structure because, in [the film], as in my original manuscript, 'the good stuff' took awhile to get to. But it turned out they were going to make it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin and I wasn't going to write it anyway. John Landis was going to direct it at the time and he wanted all the sciencefantasy people out here to play minor parts in the film. He wanted me to play a pharmacist who . . . won't give a prescription to Lily Tomlin who is so small at the time that she is sitting on the shoulder of an intelligent gorilla (shows you how they changed the original idea). I demurred. As a matter of fact, the opening of the script is almost like my original one to the point of actual dialogue. Later, it deviates wildly . . . . "I don't think the book means anything to me at this time. None of my work does from this distant past. I think I prefer I Am Legend if I had to choose but they are both too far from me to have any significance in particular . . . . Accordingly, I wouldn't change anything about The Shrinking Man. It is a part of my history. I have no reason to change it, only to look at it without much interest and be pleased at whatever stir it made. I just read the first story I ever sold the other day'Born of Man and Woman'[and] I cannot relate to the story at all. I remember writing certain phrases but it was someone else who wrote them. I'm sure you feel that way about the early stuff you wrote.  Matheson's hero, Scott Carey, also goes down into the cellar every day with his pad and pencil; he too is writing a book (these days, isn't everybody?). Scott's book is about his experiences as the world's only shrinking man, and it provides for his family quite adequately . . . as Matheson's own book and the subsequent film made from it did for Matheson's own family, one supposes. As a matter of fact, I do. My first novel, Carrie, was written under difficult personal circumstances, and the book dealt with characters so unpleasant and so alien to my own outlook as to seem almost like Martians. When I pick up the book nowwhich is seldomit does not seem as if someone else had written it, but I do get a peculiar sort of feeling from it . . . as if I had written it while suffering from a bad case of mental and emotional flu. " The Shrinking Man only recently had a hardcover edition. Now it is being printed by the Science Fiction Book Club too. Up to then it was strictly softcover . . . . Actually, I Am Legend is much more science fiction than The Shrinking Man. It has a lot of research in it. The science in The Shrinking Man is strictly gobbledegook. Well, I did .come asking around and reading but I hardly had a great rationale for Scott Carey's shrinking. And I wince daily . . . that I made him shrink 17" a day instead of geometrically and that I had him worry about falling from heights when it wouldn't have hurt him. Well, to hell with it. I wouldn't have written Born of Man and Woman' a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really? "As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty goodthe man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship." A summary of The Shrinking Man is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Carey begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the technicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inchperweek pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey. We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as his shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow. There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that. Perhaps above all else, Matheson excels at the depiction of one man alone, locked in a desperate struggle against a force or forces bigger than himself. Here is the conclusion of Scott's battle with the bird that knocks him into his cellar prison He stood up, flinging more snow at the bird, seeing the snow splatter off its dark, flaring beak. The bird flapped back. Scott turned and struggled a few more strides, then the bird was on him again, wet wings pounding at his head. He slapped wildly at it and felt his hands strike the bony sides of its beak. It flew off again . . . . Until, finally, cold and dripping, he stood with his back to the cellar window, hurling snow at the bird in the desperate hope that it would give up and he wouldn't have to jump into the imprisoning cellar. But the bird kept coming, diving at him, hovering before him, the sound of its wings like wet sheets flapping in a heavy wind. Suddenly the jabbing beak was hammering at his skull, slashing skin, knocking him back against the house . . . . He picked up snow and threw it, missing. The wings were still beating at his face; the beak gashed his face again. With a stricken cry, Scott whirled and leaped for the open square. He crawled across it dizzily. The leaping bird knocked him through. When the bird knocks Scott into the cellar, the man is seven inches tall. Matheson has made it clear that the novel is, to a large extent, a simple comparison of the macrocosm and the microcosm, and his hero's seven weeks in this lower world are a tiny capsule of experience which exactly mimes what he has already been through in a larger world. When he falls into the cellar, he is its king; he is able to exert his own human power over the environment with no real trouble. But as he continues to shrink, his power begins to wane once again . . . and the Nemesis appears. The spider rushed at him across the shadowed sands, scrabbling wildly on its stalklike legs. Its body was a giant, glossy egg that trembled blackly as it charged across the windless mounds, its wake a score of sandtrickling scratches . . . the spider was gaining on him, its pulsing egg of a body perched on running legsan egg whose yolk swam with killing poisons. He raced on, breathless, terror in his veins. In Matheson's view, macrocosm and microcosm are terms which are ultimately interchangeable, and all of Scott's problems throughout the shrinking process become symbolized in the black widow spider which also shares Scott's cellar world. When Scott discovers the one thing in his life which has not shrunk, his ability to think and plan, he also discovers a source of power which is immutable no matter which cosm it happens to exist in. His escape from a cellar, which Matheson succeeds in making as strange and frightening as any alien world, follows . . . and his final heartening discovery "that to nature there was no zero," and that there is a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm eventually meet. The Shrinking Man can be read simply enough as a great adventure storyit is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading ( others would include Bloch's The Scarf, Tolkien's The Hobbit, Berton Rouch's Feral). But there's more going on in Matheson's novel than just adventure, a kind of surreal Outward Bound program for little people. On a more thoughtful level, it is a short novel which deals in a thoughtprovoking way with concepts of powerpower lost and power found. Let me pull back from the Matheson book brieflylike Douglas MacArthur, I shall returnand make the following wild statement all fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it. Mediocre fantasy fiction generally appeals to people who feel a decided shortage of power in their own lives and obtain a vicarious shot of it by reading stories of strongthewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking; in these stories we are apt to encounter a sevenfoottall hero fighting his way up the alabaster stairs of some ruined temple, a flashing sword in one hand and a scantily clad beauty lolling over his free arm. This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years. The only writer who really got away with this sort of stuff was Robert E. Howard, a peculiar genius who lived and died in rural Texas ( Howard committed suicide as his mother lay comatose and terminally ill, apparently unable to face life without her). Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination, which was powerful beyond his hero Conan's wildest dreams of power. In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as "The People of the Black Circle" glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal . . . . The word will hurt and anger his legion of fans, but I don't believe any other word fits. Robert Bloch, one of Howard's contemporaries, suggested in his first letter to Weird Tales that even Conan wasn't that much shakes. Bloch's idea was that Conan should be banished to the outer darkness where he could use his sword to cut out paper dolls. Needless to say, this suggestion did not go over well with the marching hordes of Conan fans; they probably would have lynched poor Bob Bloch on the spot, had they caught up with him back there in Milwaukee. Even below the sword and sorcery stories are the superheroes who populate the comic magazines of the only two remaining giants in the fieldalthough "giants" is almost too strong a word; according to a survey published in a 1978 issue of Warren's Creepy magazine, comic readership has gone into what may be an irrecoverable skid. These characters ( traditionally called "longunderwear heroes" by the bullpen artists who draw them) are invincible. Blood never flows from their magical bodies; they are somehow able to bring such colorful villains as Lex Luthor and the Sandman to justice without ever having to remove their masks and testify against them in open court; they are sometimes down but never out. One reason for the success of Marvel's Spiderman when he burst on the comics scene in the late fifties may have been his vulnerability; he was and is an engaging exception to the standard comicbook formula. There is something winning in his vulnerability as Peter Parker and in his frequent klutziness as Spiderman. After being bitten by that radioactive spider, Peter originally felt no holy desire to fight crime; he decided instead to make a bundle in showbiz. Before long, however, he discovers a truth which is bitter to him and amusing to the reader no matter how great you looked on the Sullivan show, Marine Midland Bank still won't cash a check made out to The Amazing Spiderman. Such touches of realism laced with rue can be traced to Stan Lee, Spiderman's creator and the man probably most responsible for keeping the comic book from going the way of the pulps and the dime novels in the sixties and seventies. At the other end of the spectrum are the characters of fantasy who are either powerless and discover power within themselves ( as Thomas Covenant discovers it in Stephen Donaldson's remarkable Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever trilogy, or as Frodo discovers it in Tolkien's epic tale of the Rings), or characters who lose power and then find it again, as Scott Carey does in The Shrinking Man. Horror fiction, as we've said before, is one small circular area in the larger circle of fantasy, and what is fantasy fiction but tales of magic? And what are tales of magic but stories of power? One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence, and impotence is the loss of the magic. There is no impotence in the stories of the sword and sorcery genre, nor in those stories of Batman and Superman and Captain Marvel which we read as children and thenhopefullygave up as we moved on to more challenging literature and wider views of what the life experience really is. The great theme of fantasy fiction is not holding the magic and wielding it ( if so, Sauron, not Frodo, would have been the hero of Tolkien's Rings cycle); it isor so it seems to mefinding the magic and discovering how it works. And getting back to the Matheson novel, shrinking itself is an oddly arresting concept, isn't it? Tons of symbolism come immediately to mind, most of it revolving around the potencyimpotency thing . . . sexual and otherwise. In Matheson's book, shrinking is most important because Scott Carey begins by perceiving size as power, size as potency . . . size as magic. When he begins to shrink, he begins to lose all threeor so he believes until his perceptions change. His reaction to his loss of power, potency, and magic is most commonly a blind, bellowing rage "What do you think I'm going to do?" he burst out. "Go on letting them play with me? Oh, you haven't been there, you haven't seen. They're like kids with a new toy. A shrinking man. Godawmighty, a shrinking man! It makes their damn eyes light up . . . Like Thomas Covenant's constant cries of "By hell!" in the Donaldson trilogy, Scott's rage does not hide his impotency but highlights it, and it is Scott's fury which in a large part makes him such an interesting, believable character. He is not Conan or Superman ( Scott bleeds plenty before escaping his cellar prison, and as we watch him go ever more frantically about the task of trying to escape, we suspect at times that he is more than halfmad) or Doc Savage. Scott doesn't always know what to do. He fumbles the ball frequently, and when he does, he goes on to do what most of us would probably do under the circumstances he has the adult equivalent of a tantrum. In fact, if we regard Scott's shrinking as a symbol for any incurable disease (and the progress of any incurable disease entails a kind of power loss which is analogous to shrinking), we see a pattern which psychologists would outline pretty much as Matheson wrote it . . . only the outline came years later. Scott follows this course, from disbelief to rage to depression to final acceptance, almost exactly. As with cancer patients, the final trick seems to be to accept the inevitable, perhaps to find fresh lines of power leading back into the magic. In Scott's case, in the case of many terminal patients, the final outward sign of this is an admission of the inevitable, followed by a kind of euphoria. We can understand Matheson's decision to use flashbacks in order to get to "the good stuff" early on, but one wonders what might have happened if he had given us the story in a straight line. We see Scott's loss of power in several widely spaced episodes he is chased by teenagers at one pointthey think, and why not, that he is just a little kidand at another he hitches a ride with a man who turns out to be a homosexual. He begins to feel an increasing disrespect from his daughter Beth, partly because of the "might makes right" idea that works unobtrusively but powerfully in even the most enlightened parentchild relationships ( or, we could say, might makes power . . . or might makes magic), but perhaps mostly because his steady shrinking causes Beth to have to constantly restructure her feelings about her father, who ends up living in a dollhouse before his fall into the cellar. We can even blackly visualize Beth, who doesn't really understand what's happening, inviting her friends in on a rainy day to play with her daddy. But Scott's most painful problems are with Lou, his wife. They are both personal and sexual, and I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find he cannot. Bad news. And when Scott is 4'1" tall, he comes home from the medical center where he has been undergoing tests and walks straight into a situation where the loss of sexual magic becomes painfully evident Louise looked up, smiling. "You look so nice and clean," she said. It was not the words or the look on her face; but suddenly he was terribly conscious of his size. Lips twitching into the semblance of a smile, he walked over to the couch and sat down beside her, instantly sorry that he had. She sniffed. "Mmmmm, you smell nice," she said . . . "You look nice," he said. "Beautiful." "Beautiful!" She scoffed. "Not me." He leaned over abruptly and kissed her warm throat. She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek slowly. "So nice and smooth," she murmured. He swallowed . . . was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy? And a few minutes later He let breath trickle slowly from his nostrils. "I guess it . . . would be rather grotesque anyway . . . . It'd be like . . ." "Honey, please." She wouldn't let him finish. "You're making it worse than it is." "Look at me," he said. "How much worse can it get?" Later on, in another flashback, we see Scott as voyeur, spying on the babysitter Louise has hired to care for Beth. In a series of comichorrible scenes, Scott turns the pimply, overweight babysitter into a kind of masterbatory dream goddess. In his doubling back to powerless early adolescence, Matheson is able to show us just how much of the sexual magic Scott has lost. But at a carnival some weeks laterScott is a foot and a half tall at this pointhe meets Clarice, a sideshow midget. And in his encounter with Clarice, we have our clearest indication of Matheson's belief that the lost magic can be found again; that the magic exists on many levels and thus becomes the unifying force that makes macrocosm and microcosm one and the same. When he first meets Clarice, Scott is a bit taller than she, and in her trailer he finds a world which is once more in perspective. It is an environment where he can reassert his own power Breath stopped. It was his world, his very own worldchairs and a couch he could sit on without being engulfed; tables he could stand beside and reach across instead of walk under; lamps he could switch on and off, not stand futilely beneath as if they were trees. Andalmost needless to relatehe also rediscovers the sexual magic with Clarice in an episode which is both pathetic and touching. We understand he will lose this magic as well, sinking away from Clarice's level until she is also a giant to him, and while these episodes are somewhat softened by the flashback form, the point is nevertheless made what can be found once can be found again, and the incident of Clarice most clearly justifies the novel's odd but strangely powerful ending  . . . he thought If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence . . . Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching." Not, we devoutly hope, to be eaten by the first garden slug or amoeba to cross his path. In the movie version, which Matheson also wrote, Scott's final line is a triumphant "I still exist!" accompanied by shots of nebulae and exploding galaxies. I asked him if this had religious connotations, or perhaps reflected an early interest in life after death (a subject which has become more and more important in Matheson's later work; see Hell House and What Dreams May Come). Matheson comments "Scott Carey's 'I still exist,' I think, only implied a continuum between macroscopic and microscopic, not between life and life after death. Interestingly, I was on the verge of doing a rewrite on The Fantastic Voyage, which Columbia is supposed to be making. I couldn't get involved in it because it was so technical and I would rather be involved with character now, but it was like a small continuation of the end of The Shrinking Maninto the microscopic world with rod and gun." Overall, we can say that The Shrinking Man is a classic survival story; there is really only one character, and the questions here are elemental food, shelter, survival, destruction of the Nemesis (the Dionysian force in Scott's mostly Apollonian cellar world). It is by no means a tremendously sexy book, but sex is at least dealt with on a level more thoughtful than the Shell Scott whambamthankyouma'am level that was the common one for paperback originals in the fifties. Matheson was an important figure in pioneering the right of science fiction and fantasy writers to deal with sexual problems in a realistic and sensitive way; others involved in the same struggle ( and it was a struggle) would have included Philip Jos Farmer, Harlan Ellison, and, perhaps most importantly of all, Theodore Sturgeon. It is hard to believe now what a furor was caused by the concluding pages of Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood, when it is revealed exactly how the vampire has been obtaining his supply ( "The moon is full," he writes both wistfully and chillingly to his girl friend in the book's final paragraph, "and I wish I had some of your blood."), but the furor happened. We may wish that Matheson had dealt with the sexual angle a little less solemnly, but in light of the times, I think we can applaud the fact that he dealt with the sexual angle at all. And as a fable of losing power and finding it, The Shrinking Man ranks as one of the finest fantasies of the period we've been discussing. And I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm only talking here about sexual power and sexual potency. There are tiresome criticsthe halfbaked Freudians, mostlywho want to relate all of fantasy and horror fiction back to sex; one explanation for the conclusion of The Shrinking Man which I heard at a party in the fall of 1978I'll not mention the name of the woman whose theory this was, but if you read science fiction, you'd know the namemaybe bears repeating, since we're on this. In symbolic terms, this woman said, spiders represent the vagina. Scott finally kills his Nemesis, the black widow ( the most vaginal of all spiders) by impaling it on a pin ( the phallic symbol, get it, get it?). Thus, this critic went on, after failing at sex with his wife, succeeding at first with the carnival midget Clarice and then losing her, Scott symbolically kills his own sex drive by impaling the spider. This is his last sexual act before escaping the cellar and achieving a wider freedom. All of this was wellmeaning bullshit, but bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's Secret Sauce. I bring it up only to point out that it is the sort of bullshit that a lot of fantasy and horror writers have had to labor under . . . most of it spread by people who believe either secretly or openly that the horror writer must be suffering from madness to a greater or a lesser degree. The further view of such folks is that the writer's books are Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author's anal, oral, or genital fixation. In writing about the largely scoffing reaction that Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel received when it was published in 1960, Wilfrid Sheed adds, "Freudian interpretations [are] always greeted by guffaws." Not much bad news at that, when you remember that even the most staid novelists are regarded as a bit peculiar by their neighbors . . . but the horror novelist is always going to have to face what I think of as the couch questions, I guess. And most of us are perfectly normal. Hehhehheh. Freudian huggermugger set aside, The Shrinking Man can be seen as just a pretty good story which happens to deal with the interior politics of power . . . or, if you like (and I do), the interior politics of magic. And Scott's killing of the spider is meant to show us that the magic is not dependent on size but upon mind and heart. If it stands considerably taller than other books in the genre ( small pun much intended), and far above other books where tiny people battle beetles and praying mantises and such ( Lindsay Gutteridge's Cold War in a Country Garden comes to mind), it is because Matheson couches his story in such intimate and riveting termsand because he is ultimately so persuasive.  This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HOscale subgenre. 8 It wouldn't be right to wind up even so brief a discussion of the modern horror novel as this one without mentioning two young British writers, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert. They are a part of a whole new generation of British fantasy writers who seem to be revitalizing the genre by crossfertilization much as British poets helped to revitalize American poetry during the early sixties. Besides Campbell and Herbert, the two who are perhaps best known over here, there is Robert Aickman (who could hardly be called a young Turkbut since such books as Cold Hand in Mine have brought him to a wider American audience, it seems fair enough to classify him as part of the British new wave), Nick Sharman, Thomas Tessier, an American living in London, who has recently published a novel called The Nightwalker, perhaps the finest werewolf novel of the last twenty years, and a score of others. As Paul Therouxanother expatriate American living in Londonhas pointed out, there is something uniquely British about the tale of horror ( perhaps particularly those which deal with the archetype of the Ghost). Theroux, who has written his own lowkey horror tale, The Black House, favors the mannered but grisly tales of M. R. James, and they do seem to summarize everything that is best in the classic British horror story.


Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert are both modernists, and while this family is really too small to avoid a certain resemblance even in cousins twice removed, it seems to me that both of these men, who are worlds apart in terms of style, point of view, and method of attack, are doing things that are exciting and worthy of mention. Campbell, a Liverpudlian ( "You talk just like one of the Beatles," a woman marvels to a writer from Liverpool in Campbell's new novel, The Parasite), writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning. The polish of his writing and his mannered turns of phrase and image make him seem something like the genre's Joyce Carol Oates (and like Oates, he is prolific, turning out good short stories, novels, and essays at an amazing clip), and there is also something Oatesian in the way his characters view the worldas when one is journeying on mild LSD, there is something chilly and faintly schizophrenic in the way his characters see things . . . and in the things they see. These are the perceptions of Rose as she shops in a Liverpool department store in The Parasite A group of toddlers watched her pass, their eyes painted into their sockets. On the ground floor, red and pink and yellow hands on stalks reached for her from the glove counter. Blind mauve faces craned on necks as long as arms; wigs roosted on their heads . . . . The bald man was still staring at her. His head, which looked perched on top of a bookcase, shone like plastic beneath the fluorescent lights. His eyes were bright, flat, expressionless as glass; she thought of a display head stripped of its wig. When a fat pink tongue squeezed out between his lips, it was as if a plastic head had come to life. Good stuff. But strange; so uniquely Campbell that it might as well be trademarked. Good horror novels are not a dime a dozenby no meansbut there never seems to be any serious shortage of good ones, either. And by that I mean that you seem to be able to count on a really good novel of horror andor the supernatural ( or at least a really interesting one) every year or soand much the same could be said for the horror films. A vintage year may produce as many as three amid the paperbackoriginal dreck about hateful, paranormal children and presidential candidates from hell and the toolarge collection of hardcover boners, such as the recent Virgin, by James Petersen. But, maybe paradoxically, maybe not, good horror writers are quite rare . . . and Campbell is better than just good. That's one reason fans of the genre will greet The Parasite with such pleasure and relief; it is even better than his first novel, of which I want to treat briefly here. Campbell has been turning out his own patented brand of short horror tale for some years now ( like Bradbury and Robert Bloch, Arkham House published Ramsey Campbell's first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake, which was a Lovecraft clone). Several collections of his stories are available, the best of them probably being The Height of the Scream. A story you will not find in that book, unfortunately, is "The Companion," in which a lonely roan who tours "funfairs" on his holidays encounters a horror beyond my ability to describe while riding a Ghost Train into its tunnel. "The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now. Campbell is literate in a field which has attracted too many comicbook intellects, cool in a field where too many writersmyself includedtend toward panting melodrama, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners often fall prey to cant and stupid "rules" of fantasy composition. But not all good shortstory writers in this field are able to make the jump to the novel (Poe tried with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and made a conditional success of the job; Lovecraft failed ambitiously twice, with The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the rather more interesting At the Mountains of Madness, whose plot is remarkably Pymlike ) . Campbell made the jump almost effortlessly, with a novel as good as its title was offputting The Doll Who Ate His Mother. The book was published with absolutely no fanfare in 1977 in hardcover, and then with an even greater lack of fanfare a year later in paperback . . . one of those cases that make a writer wonder if publishers don't practice their own sort of voodoo, singling certain books out to be ritually slaughtered in the marketplace. Well, never mind that. Concerning the jump from the short story to the novelwriting the latter is much like longdistance running, and you can almost feel some wouldbe novelists getting tired. You sense they're starting to breathe a trifle hard by page one hundred, to puff and blow by page two hundred, and to finally limp over the finish line with little to recommend them beyond the bare fact that they have finished. But Campbell runs well. He is personally an amusing, even a jolly man (at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention he presented Stephen R. Donaldson with the British Fantasy Award, a modernistic little statuette, for his Thomas Covenant trilogy; Campbell, in that marvelously broad and calm Liverpool accent, referred to it as "the skeletal dildo." The audience broke up, and someone at my table marveled, "He sounds just like one of the Beatles."). As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out. Of The Doll Who Ate His Mother he has this to saysome of it bearing directly on the difference in the amount of endurance needed to do a novel "What I wanted to do with The Doll was to invent a new monster, if that is possible, but perhaps the big thing was to actually write the novel, since previously I'd been doing short stories. In 1961 or '6i I made notes for a story about a black magician who was going to take revenge on his town or village for some real or imagined wrong it had done him. He was going to do this by using voodoo dolls to deform the babiesyou'd have the standard pulpmagazine scene of the whitefaced doctor coming out of the delivery room saying, 'My God, it's not human . . . !' And the twist was going to be that, after all these deformed infants had died, the black magician would use the voodoo dolls to bring them back to life. An amazingly tasteless idea. At about the same time the Thalidomide tragedy occurred, making the story idea a little too topically tasteless' for me, and I dropped it. "It resurfaced, I suppose, in The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which eats its way out of its mother's womb. "How does writing novels differ from writing short stories? I think a novel gathers its own impetus. I have to creep up on it unawares, thinking to myself, Maybe I'll start it next week, maybe I'll start it next month.' Then one day I sat down, began to write, and looked up at noon, thinking My God! I've started a novel! I don't believe it! "Kirby [McCauley] said, when I asked him how long the novel should be, that 70,000 words or so would be about right, and I took him almost literally. When I got up around the 63,000 word mark, I thought nly 7000 words lefttime to wrap this up.' That's why many of the later chapters seems terse." Campbell's novel begins with Clare Frayn's brother Rob losing an arm and his life in a Liverpool car accident. The arm, torn off in the accident, is important because somebody makes off with it . . . and eats it. This muncher of arms, we are led to suppose, is a shadowy young man named Chris Kelly. Clarewho embodies many of the ideas already labeled as "new American gothic" (sure, Campbell is British, but many of his influencesboth literary and cinematicare American)meets a crime reporter named Edmund Hall who believes that the man who caused Rob Frayn's death was the grownup version of a boy he knew in school, a boy fascinated with death and cannibalism. In dealing with archetypes, I've not suggested that we deal out a Tarot card for the Ghoul, one of the more grisly creatures in monsterdom, believing that the eating of dead flesh and the drinking of blood are really parts of the same archetype.  Is there really such a thing as a "new monster"? In light of the genre's strictness, I think not, and Campbell must be content instead with a fresh perspective . . . no mean feat in itself. In Chris Kelly I believe the face we see is that of our old friend the Vampire . . . as we see it in a movie which resembles Campbell's novel by turns, the brilliant Canadian director David Cronenberg's They Came from Within. Clare, Edmund Hall, and George Pugh, a cinema owner whose elderly mother has also been victimized by Kelly, join together in a strange and reluctant threeway partnership to track this supernatural cannibal down. Here again we feel echoes of the classic tale of the Vampire, Stoker's Dracula. And perhaps we never feel the changes of the nearly eighty years which lie between the two books so strongly as we do in the contrast between the group of six which forms to track down Count Dracula and the group of three which forms to track down "Chris Kelly." There is no sense of selfrighteousness in Clare, Edmund, and Georgethey are truly little people, afraid, confused, often depressed; they turn inward to themselves rather than outward toward each other, and while we sense their fright very strongly, there is no feeling about the book that Clare, Edmund, and George must prevail because their cause is just. They somehow symbolize the glum and rather drab place England has become in the second half of the twentieth century, and we feel that if some or all of them do muddle through, it will be due more to impersonal luck than to any action of their own. And the three of them do track Kelly down . . . after a fashion. The climax of the hunt takes place in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition, and here Campbell has created one of the dreamiest and effective sequences in all of modern horror fiction. In Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I thinkwitness the strong public reactions to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Something rather more important than a harmless rollercoaster ride is going on here, I think; here's a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex and throttle them. I wrote a story four years ago called "Survivor Type," which I still have not been able to sell (gee, and people told me that when I got successful I'd be able to sell my laundry list if I wanted to!). It deals with a surgeon who is washed up on an uninhabited islandlittle more than a scratch of coral above the surface of the Pacificand eats himself, a piece at a time, to stay alive. "I did everything according to Hoyle," he writes in his diary after amputating his foot. "I washed it before I ate it." Not even the men's magazines would consider that one, and it sits in my file cabinet to this day, waiting for a good home. It will probably never find one, though. its surreal and nightmarish evocation of ancient evil, in the glimpses it gives us of "absolute power," it is finally a voice from the latter part of the twentieth century which speaks powerfully in the language which Lovecraft can be said to have invented. Here is nothing so pallid or so imitative as a Lovecraft "pastiche," but a viable, believable version of those Lovecraftian Elder Gods that so haunted Dunwich, Arkham, Providence, Central Falls . . . and the pages of Weird Tales magazine. Campbell is good, if rather unsympathetic, with character (his lack of emotion has the effect of chilling his prose even further, and some readers will be put off by the tone of this novel; they may feel that Campbell has not so much written a novel as grown one in a Petrie dish) Clare Frayn with her stumpy legs and her dreams of grace, Edmund with his baleful thoughts of glory yet to come, and best of all, because here Campbell does seem to kindle real feelings of emotion and kindliness, George Pugh holding on to the last of his cinemas and scolding two teenage girls who walk out before the playing of the National Anthem has finished. But perhaps the central character here is Liverpool itself, with its orange sodium lights, its slums and docks, its cinemas converted into HALF A MILE OF FURNITURE. Campbell's short stories live and breathe Liverpool in what seems to be equal amounts of attraction and repulsion, and that sense of place is one of the most remarkable things about The Doll as well. This locale is as richly textured as Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles of the forties and fifties or Larry McMurtry's Houston of the sixties. "Children were playing ball against the church," Campbell writes. "Christ held up His arms for a catch." It is a small line, understated and almost thrown away ( like all those creepy, reaching gloves in The Parasite), but this sort of thing is cumulative, and at least suggests Campbell's commitment to the idea that horror exists in point of view as well as in incident. The Doll Who Ate His Mother is not the greatest of the novels discussed hereI suppose that would have to be either The Haunting of Hill House or Straub's Ghost Storyand it is not as good as Campbell's The Parasite . . . but it is remarkably good. Campbell keeps a tight rein on his potentially tabloidstyle material, even playing off it occasionally ( a dull and almost viciously insensitive teacher sits in the faculty room of his school reading a paper with a headline which blares HE CUT UP YOUNG VIRGINS AND LAUGHEDthe story's blackly hilarious subhead informs us that His Potency Came From Not Having Orgasms). He carries us inexorably past levels of abnormal psychology into something that is much, much worse. Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary rootshe mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares The Doll's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of Psycho, where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness (winner of the Best Novel award at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention). In Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber adopts as his thesis the idea that when a city becomes complex enough, it may take on a tenebrous life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the people who live and work therean evil sentience linked, in some unstated way, to the Elder Ones of Lovecraft and, more importantly in terms of the Leiber novel, Clark Ashton Smith. Amusingly, one of the characters in Our Lady of Darkness suggests that San Francisco did not become truly sentient until the Transamerica Pyramid was finished and occupied. While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that might awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in The Doll Who Ate His Mother. James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older traditionthe same sort of pulp horrorfiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, the early Sturgeon, the early Henry Kuttner, and, on the English side of the Atlantic, Guy N. Smith. Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the alltime pulp horror classic The Sucking Pit. This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbertand the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard, and I believe that Conan's creator would have responded to Herbert's work with immediate enthusiasm, although the two men were opposites in many ways. Howard was big and broad shouldered; the face in those pictures which remain to us is expressionless with, we might think, undertones of either shyness or suspicion. James Herbert is of medium height, slim, quick to smile or frown, open and frank. Of course the biggest difference may be that Howard is dead and Herbert ain't, haha. Howard's best workhis stories of Conan the Barbarianare in the mythic country of Cimmeria, far in a similarly mythic past inhabited by monsters and beautiful, sexy maidens in need of rescue. And Conan will be happy to effect said rescue . . . if the price is right. Herbert's work is set firmly in England's present, most commonly against the backdrop of London or the southern counties which surround it. Howard was brought up in rural circumstances ( he lived and died in a small sagebrush town called Cross Plains, Texas); Herbert was born in London's East End, the son of street traders, and his work reflects a checkered career as a rock and roll singer, artist, and ad executive. It is in the elusive matter of stylea confusing word that may be most accurately defined as "plan or method of attack"that Herbert strongly recalls the Howard that was. In his novels of horror The Rats, The Fog, The Survivor, The Spear, The Lair, and The DarkHerbert does not just write; as Robert E. Howard did, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror. Let me also take a moment to point out one similarity that James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell do share, simply by virtue of their Englishness they both write that clear, lucid, grammatical prose that only those educated in England seem able to produce. You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so. If you don't believe me, go check out the paperback originals rack at your local bookstore. I promise you such a carnival of dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, and even lack of agreement between subject and verb that your hair may turn white. You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out. Worse than the mechanical errors, many writers of fiction seem totally unable to explain simple operations or actions clearly enough for the reader to be able to see them in his or her mind's eye. Some of this is a failure on the writer's part to visualize well and completely; his or her own mind's eye seems bleared halfshut. More of it is a simple failure of that most basic writer's tool, the working vocabulary. If you're writing a hauntedhouse story and you don't know the difference between a gable and a gambrel, a cupola and a turret, paneling and wainscotting, you, sir or madam, are in trouble. Now don't get me wrong here; I thought Edwin Newman's book on the degeneration of the English language was moderately entertaining but also often tiresome and amazingly prissy, the book of a man who would like to put language inside a hermetically sealed belljar (like a carefully groomed corpse inside a glass coffin) instead of sending it out into the streets to jive with the people. But language has its own point and reason for being. Parapsychologists may argue over extrasensory perception; psychologists and neurologists may claim there is no such thing; but those who love books and love the language know that the printed word really is a kind of telepathy. In most cases the writer does her or his work silently, couching thoughts in symbols composed of letters in groups set off one from the next by white space, and in most cases the reader does her or his work silently, reading the symbols and reintegrating them as thoughts and images. Louis Zukofsky, the poet (A, among other books), claimed that even the look of words on the pagethe indents, the punctuation, the place on the line where the paragraph endshas its own story to tell. "Prose," Zukofsky said, "is poetry." It's probably true that the writer's thoughts and the reader's thoughts never tally exactly, that the image the writer sees and the image the reader sees are never 100 percent the same. We are, after all, not angels but were made a little less than the angels, and our language is maddeningly hobbled, a fact to which any poet or novelist will attest. There is no creative writer, I think, who has not suffered that frustrating crash off the walls which stand at the limits of language, who has not cursed the word that just doesn't exist. Emotions such as grief and romantic love are particularly hard to deal with, but even such a simple operation as starting up a car with a manual transmission and driving it to the end of the block can present nearly insurmountable problems if you try to write the process down instead of simply doing it. And if you don't believe this is so, write down such instructions and try them on a nondriving friend . . . but check your auto insurance policy first. Different languages seem particularly suited to different purposes; the French may have gotten a reputation for being great lovers because the French language seems particularly well suited to the expression of emotion (there is no nicer way to say it than Je t'aime . . . and no better language in which to sound really lacked off at someone). German is the language of explanation and clarification ( but it is a cold language for all that; the sound of many people speaking German is the sound of large machines running in a factory). English serves very well to express thought and moderately well to express image, but there is nothing inherently lovely about it (although as someone has pointed out, it has its queerly perverse moments; think of the lovely and euphonious sound of the words "proctological examination" ) . It has always seemed to me ill suited to the expression of feeling, though. Neither "Why don't we go to bed together" or the cheerful but undeniably crude "Baby, let's fuck" can touch " Voulezvous coucher avec moi c'est soir?" But we must do the best we can with what we have . . . and as readers of Shakespeare and Faulkner will attest, the best we can do is often remarkably good. American writers are more apt to mangle the language than our British cousins (although I'd argue with anyone that English English is much more bloodless than American Englishmany British writers have the unhappy habit of droning; droning in perfectly grammatical English, but a drone is still a drone for a' that and a' that), often because they were subjected to poor or erratic teaching methods as children, but the best American work is striking in a way that British prose and poetry rarely is anymore see, for instance, such disparate writers as James Dickey, Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, John Irving. Both Campbell and Herbert write that unmistakable, impeccable English line; their stories go out into the world with their pants buttoned, their zippers zipped, and their braces in their placesbut to what a different ultimate effect! James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces. It is not a tremendously artistic method of attack, and no one is ever going to compare him to Doris Lessing or V. S. Naipaul . . . but it works. The Fog (no relation to the film of the same name by John Carpenter) is a multipleviewpoint story about what happens when an underground explosion breaches a steel cannister that has been buried by the British Ministry of Defense. The cannister contains a living organism called a mycoplasma ( an ominous protoplasm that may remind readers of an obscure Japanese horror film from the fifties titled The HMen) which resembles a smoggy yellowgreen mist. Like rabies, it attacks the brains of the humans and animals it envelops, turning them into raving maniacs. Some of the incidents involving animals are particularly grisly; a farmer is trampled to death by his own cows in a foggy pasture, and a drunken shopkeeper who seems to loathe everything but his racing pigeons ( and one battered old campaigner in particular, a pigeon named Claude) has his eyes pecked out by his birds, who have flown back to their London coop through the fog. The shopkeeper, clutching the remains of his face, staggers off the rooftop where the birds are quartered and falls to his death. Herbert rarely finesses and never pulls back from the crunch; instead he seems to race eagerly, zestfully, toward each new horror. In one scene a crazed bus driver castrates the teacher who has been his nemesis with a pair of garden shears; in another, an elderly poacher who has been previously caught and "thrashed" by the local large landowner suffers the effects of the fog, goes after the landowner, and nails him to his own dining room table before finishing him off with an ax. A snotty bank manager is locked in his own vault, a gym teacher is beaten to death by his phys ed students, and in the book's most effective scene, almost a hundred and fifty thousand residents and holidaymakers at Bournemouth walk into the ocean in a massive, lemminglike group suicide. The Fog was published in 1975, three years before the gruesome events at Jonestown, Guyana, and in many of the book's episodesparticularly in the Bournemouth episodeHerbert seems to have forecast it. We see the event through the eyes of a young woman named Mavis Evers. Her lesbian lover has just left her, having discovered the joys of going hetero, and Mavis has gone to Bournemouth to commit suicide . . . a little irony worthy of E.C. comics at their best. She wades breastdeep into the water, becomes frightened, and decides she will try living a little longer. The undertow nearly gets her, but following a short, tense struggle, she is able to get to shallow water again. Turning to face the shore, Mavis is greeted by this nightmare There were hundredscould it be thousandsof people climbing down the steps to the beach and walking toward her, toward the sea! Was she dreaming? . . . The people of the town were marching in a solid wall out to the sea, making no sound, staring toward the horizon as though something was beckoning to them. Their faces were white, trancelike, barely human. And there were children among them; some walked along on their own, seeming to belong to no one; those that couldn't walk were being carried. Most of the people were in their nightclothes, some were naked, having risen from their beds as though answering a call that Mavis neither heard nor saw . . . . This was written before the Jonestown tragedy, remember. In the aftermath of that, I recall one commentator intoning with dark and solemn sonorousness, "It was an event that not even the most darkly fertile imagination could have envisioned." I flashed on the Bournemouth scene from The Fog and thought, "You're wrong. James Herbert envisioned it." . . . still they came on, oblivious to her cries, unseeing. She realized her danger and ran toward them in a vain attempt to break through, but they forced her back, heedless of her pleas as she strained against them. She managed to push a short path through them, but the great numbers before her were unconquerable, pushing her back, back into the waiting sea . . . . Well, as you've probably guessed, poor old Mavis gets her suicide whether she wants it or not. And in point of fact, it is explicit scenes of horror and violence like the one just described which have made Herbert the focus of a great deal of criticism in his native England. He told me that he finally got sick enough of the "Do you write violence for the sake of violence?" question to finally blow up at a reporter. "That's right," he said. "I write violence for the sake of violence, just as Harold Robbins writes sex for the sake of sex, and Robert Heinlein writes science fiction for the sake of science fiction, and Margaret Drabble writes literature for the sake of literature. Except no one ever asks them, do they?" As to how Herbert came to write The Fog, he replies "It's about impossible to remember where any idea comes fromI mean a single idea may come from many sources. But as clearly as I can recall, the kernel came during a business meeting. I was with an advertising firm then, and sitting in the office of my creative director, who was a rather dull man. And all of a sudden it occurred to me What would happen if this man just turned, walked to the window, opened it, and stepped out?' " Herbert turned the idea over in his mind for some time and finally sat down to do the novel, spending about eight months' worth of weekends and late nights getting it together. "The thing I like best about it," he says, "is that it had no limits of structure or place. It could simply go on and on until the thing resolved itself. I liked working with my main characters, but I also liked the vignettes because when I got tired of what my heroes were up to, I could go off on just about any tangent I liked. My feeling throughout the writing was, 'm just going to enjoy myself. I'm going to try to go over the top; to see how much I can get away with.' " In its construction, The Fog shows the effect of those apocalyptic Big Bug movies of the late fifties and early sixties. All the ingredients are there we have a mad scientist who was screwing around with something he didn't understand and was killed by the mycoplasma he invented; the military testing secret weapons and unleashing the horror; the "young scientist" hero, John Holman, who we first meet bravely rescuing a little girl from the fissure that has Unleashed the Fog on an Unsuspecting World; the beautiful girlfriend, Casey; the obligatory gathering of scientists, who natter about "the F100 method of fog dispersion" and lament the fact that carbon dioxide can't be used to disperse the fog because "the organism thrives on it" and who inform us that the fog is really "a pleuropneumonialike organism." We will recognize these obligatory trappings of science fiction from such movies as Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis, Them! , and a dozen others; yet we will also recognize that trappings are all they are, and the heart of Herbert's novel lies not in the fog's origin or composition but in its decidedly Dionysian effectsmurder, suicide, sexual aberrations, and all manner of deviant behavior. Holman, the hero, is our representative from a saner Apollonian world, and to do Herbert full justice, he manages to make Holman a good deal more interesting than the zeroheroes played by William Hopper, Craig Stevens, and Peter Graves in various of the Big Bug films . . . or consider, if you will, poor old Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs.


the Flying Saucers, whose entire set of lines during the last third of the movie seems to consist of, "Keep firing at saucer!" and "Fire at saucer until it crashes!" Nonetheless, our interest in Holman's adventures and whether or not his girlfriend Casey will recover from the effects of her own bout with the fog ( and what will be her reaction to the information that she plunged a scissors into her father's stomach while under the influence?) seems pallid when compared to our morbid let'sslowdownandlookattheaccident interest in the old lady who is eaten alive by her pet cats or the crazed pilot who crashes his loaded jumbo jet into the London skyscraper where his wife's lover works. I suppose that popular fiction divides itself quite naturally into two halves what we call "mainstream fiction" and that which I would call "pulp fiction." The pulps, including the socalled "shudderpulps," of which Weird Tales was the finest exponent, have been long gone from the scene, but they live on in the novel and do a brisk business on paperback racks everywhere. Many of these modern pulps would have been printed as multipart serials in the pulp magazines that existed roughly from 1910 until about 1950, had they been written during that period. But I wouldn't restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western; Arthur Hailey, for instance, seems to me to be writing modernday pulp. The ingredients are all there, from the inevitable violence to the inevitable maiden in distress. The critics who have regularly toasted Hailey over the coals are the same critics whoinfuriatingly enoughsee the novel as divisible only into two categories "literature," which may either succeed or fail upon its merits, and "popular fiction," which always fails, no matter how good it may be ( every now and then a writer such as John D. MacDonald may be elevated in the critical mind from a writer of "popular fiction" to a writer of "literature," at which point his body of work may be safely reevaluated). My own idea is that fiction actually falls into three main categories literature, mainstream fiction, and pulp fictionand that to categorize does not end the critic's job but only gives him or her a place to set his or her feet. To label a novel "pulp" is not the same as saying it's a bad novel, or will give the reader no pleasure. Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton's "Seven Heads of Bushongo" or "Satan's Virgin," by Ray Cummings. On the other hand, though, Dashiell Hammett published extensively in the pulps (most notably in the highly regarded Black Mask, where contemporaries Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich also published); Tennessee Williams's first published work, a vaguely Lovecraftian tale titled "The Vengeance of Nitocris," appeared in an early issue of Weird Tales; Bradbury broke in by way of the same market; so did MacKinlay Kantor, who would go on to write Andersonville. To condemn pulp writing out of hand is like condemning a girl as loose simply because she comes from unpleasant family circumstances. The fact that supposedly reputable critics both in the genre and outside it continue to do so makes me both sad and angry. James Herbert is not a nascent Tennessee Williams only waiting for the right time to spin a cocoon and emerge as a great figure of modern literature; he is what he is and that's all that he is, as Popeye would say. My point is simply that what he is, is good enough. I loved John Jakes's comment on his And there's a wonderful story about Erle Stanley Gardner's days in what Frank Gruber used to call the pulp jungle. At that time the Depression was in full swing and Gardner was writing westerns for a penny a word, selling to such publications as Western RoundUp, West Weekly, and Western Tales (whose slogan was "Fifteen Stories, Fifteen Cents"). Gardner admitted that he made a habit of stretching the final shootout as far as it would go. Of course the bad guy finally bit the dust and the good guy strode into the saloon, .44s smoking and spurs jingling, for a cold sarsaparilla before moving on, but in the meantime, each time Gardner wrote "Bang!" he made another penny . . . and in those days, two bangs would buy you the daily newspaper. Bicentennial Kent Family saga some years back. He said that Gore Vidal was the RollsRoyce of historical novelists; that he himself was more in the Chevrolet Vega class. What Jakes so modestly left unstated was that both vehicles will get you where you want to go quite adequately; how you feel about style is between you and you. James Herbert is the only writer discussed in these pages who is squarely in the pulp tradition. He specializes in violent death, bloody confrontation, explicit and in some cases kinky sex, strong and virile young heroes possessed of beautiful girlfriends. The problem which needs to be solved is in most cases apparent, and the story's emphasis is put squarely on solving that problem. But Herbert works effectively within his chosen genre. He has consistently refused, from the very first, to be satisfied with characters who are nothing more than cardboard cutouts which he moves around the playingfield of his novel; in most cases we are given motivations we can identify with and believe in, as in the case of poor, suicidebound Mavis. Mavis reflects with a kind of pitiful, deranged defiance that "She wanted them to know she had taken her own life; her death, unlike her life, had to have some meaning. Even if it was only Ronnie who fully understood that reason." This is hardly stunning character insight, but it is fully adequate to Herbert's purposes, and if the ironic outcome is similar to the ironic outcome of the tales in E.C.'s series of horror comics, we are able to see more and thus believe more, a victory for Herbert which the reader can share. Further, Herbert has continued to improve. The Fog is his second novel; those that follow show a gratifying development in the writer, culminating perhaps in The Spear, which shows us a writer who has stepped out of the pulp arena altogether and has entered the wider field of the mainstream novel. 9 Which brings us to Harlan Ellison . . . and all kinds of problems. Because here it is impossible to separate the man from the work. I've decided to close this brief review of some of the elements in modern horror fiction by discussing Ellison's work because, although he repudiates the label "horror writer," he sums up, for me, the finest elements of the term. Closing with Ellison is perhaps almost mandatory because in his short stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things which horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison is haunted by the death of Kitty Genovesea murder that comes up in his "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and in several of his essaysthe mass suicides in Jonestown; and he is convinced that Iran's Ayatollah has created a senile dream of power in which we are now all living (like men and women in a fantasy tale who ultimately come to realize they are living in a psychotic's hallucinations). Most of all, it seems to me that Ellison's work is the proper place to conclude because he never looks back; he has been the field's pointman for fifteen years now, and if there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980s (always assuming there are a 1980s, haha), then Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer. He has quite deliberately provoked a storm of controversy over his own workone writer in the field whom I know considers him to be a modern incarnation of Jonathan Swift, and another regularly refers to him as "that notalent son of a bitch." It is a storm that Ellison lives in quite contentedly. "You're not a writer at all," an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. "You're a goddam industry. How do you ever expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?" Well, in point of fact, I'm not "a goddam industry" ( unless it's a cottage industry); I work steadily, that's all. Any writer who only produces a book every seven years is not thinking Deep Thoughts; even a long book takes at most three years to think and write. No, a writer who only produces one book every seven years is simply clicking off. But my own fecundityhowever fecund that may bepales before Ellison's, who has written at a ferocious clip; at this point he has published just over one thousand short stories. In addition to all the stories published under his own name, Ellison has written as Nalrah Nosille, Sley Harson, Landon Ellis, Derry Tiger, Price Curtis, Paul Merchant, Lee Archer, E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo, Jay Charby, Wallace Edmondsonand Cordwainer Bird. The Cordwainer Bird name is a good example of Ellison's restless wit and his anger at work he feels to be substandard dreck. Since the All quoted in the Ellison entry by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. To point out the obvious, "Nalrah Nosille" is Harlan Ellison spelled backwards. Other names Ellison usedE. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, and Clyde Mitchellwere socalled house names. In pulp terminology, a "house name" was the name of a totally fictional writer who was, nevertheless, extremely prolific . . . mostly because several (sometimes dozens) of writers published works under that name when they had another story in the same magazine. Thus. "Ivar Jorgensen" wrote Ellisonstyle fantasy when he was Ellison and sexy, pulpstyle horror, as in the Jorgensen novel Rest in Agony, when he was someone else (in this case, Paul Fairman). To this should be added that Ellison has since acknowledged all of his pseudonomous work, and has published only under his own name since 1965. He has, he says, a "lemminglike urge to be up front." early sixties he has done many TV scripts, including produced scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , The Young Lawyers, The Outer Limits, and what many fans feel may have been the best Star Trek episode of them all, "The City on the Edge of Forever."  At the same time he was writing these scripts for television This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan's version of the same incident. The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions It was told that Paramount Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on StarTrek The Movie. The purpose of the conference was to toss around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about three months later). The Paramount exec didn't think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Speck, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent, doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. "The Enterprise," he said, "goes through an interstellar warp, the greatgranddaddy of all interstellar warps. It's transported over a googol of lightyears in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge of the entire universe. Scotty rigs fullcharge ion Masters which breach the wall so they can see what's beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in an incredible white light, is the face of God Himself." A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, "It's not big enough. Didn't I just tell you guys to think really BIG?" In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out. Here is Harlan Ellison's recitation of the True Facts "Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow . . . . The trouble is, he can't write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I'd been called in twice, prior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn't make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an exset designer . . . named APark Trabulus. "Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the knownothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn't big enough. I devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for ii December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15 December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene's office on the Paramount lot. "I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snakecreature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the timeflow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snakealien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem. "Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?' "I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, " I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie." Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!" and winning an unprecedented three Writers Guild of America awards for best dramatic television scripts in the processEllison was engaging in a bitter running battle, a kind of creative guerilla warfare, with other TV producers over what he regarded as a deliberate effort to degrade his work and to degrade the medium itself ( "to Cuisinart it," in Ellison's own words). In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Birda name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine, a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's." Cordwainer is an archaic English word for "shoemaker"; so the literal meaning of Ellison's pen name for scripts which he feels have been perverted beyond any kind of useful life is "one who makes shoes for birds." It is, I think, as good an explanation as any for the work that television is engaged in, and suggests quite well the nature of its usefulness. It is not the purpose of this book to talk about people per se, nor is it the purpose of this chapter on horror fiction to fulfill a "personal glimpse of the writer" sort of function; that is the job of the Out of the Pages section in People magazine (which my youngest son, with unknowing critical acuity, insists on calling Pimple). But in the case of Harlan Ellison, the man and his work have become so entwined that it is impossible to pull them completely apart. The book I want to talk about here is Ellison's collection of short fiction, Strange Wine (1978). But each Ellison collection seems built on the collections which have preceded iteach seems to be Ellison's report to the outside world on the subject This Is Where Harlan Is Now. And so it becomes necessary to discuss this book in a more personal way. He demands it of himself, and while that doesn't specially matter, his work also demands it . . . and that does matter. Ellison's fiction is and always has been a nervous bundle of contradictions. He's not a novelist, he says, but he has written at least two novels, and one of them, Rockabilly (later retitled Spider Kiss), remains one of the two or three best novels ever to be published about the cannibalistic world of rock and roll music. He says he's not a fantasist, but nearly all of his stories are fantasies. In the course of Strange Wine, for instance, we meet a writer whose work is done for him by gremlins after the writer himself has gone dry; we also meet a nice Jewish boy who is haunted by his mother after she dies ( "Mom, why don't you get off my case?" Lance, the nice Jewish boy in question, asks the ghost desperately at one point; "I saw you playing with yourself last night," the shade of Mom returns sadly). In the introduction to the book's most frightening story, "Croatoan," Ellison says he is prochoice when it comes to abortion, just as he has said in both his fiction and in his essays over the last twenty years that he is an affirmed liberal and freethinker, but "Croatoan"and most of Ellison's short storiesare as sternly moralistic as the words of an Old Ellison Anecdote 2 My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished "Croatoan," the skinfreezer which leads off Strange Wine, and he'd had a vasectomy two days before. "I'm still bleeding," he told the audience, "and my lady can attest that I'm telling the truth." The lady did so attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery goodbye to them from the podium. "Night, folks," he called. "Sorry it wasn't what you wanted." Testament prophet. In many of the outandout horror tales there is more than a whiff of those Tales from the CryptVault of Horror ghastlies where the climax so often involves the evildoer having his crimes revisited upon himself . . . only raised to the tenth power. But the irony cuts with a keener blade in Ellison's work, and we have less feeling that rough justice has been meted out and the balance restored. In Ell' son's stories, we have little sense of winners and losers. Sometimes there are survivors. Sometimes there are no survivors. "Croatoan" uses that myth of alligators under the streets of New York as its starting pointsee also Thomas Pynchon's U. and a funnyhorrible novel called Death Tour by David J. Michael; this is an oddly pervasive urban nightmare. But Ellison's story is really about abortion. He may not be antiabortion (nowhere in his intro to this story does he say he's proabortion, however), but the story is certainly more sharply honed and unsettling than that tattered piece of yellow journalism which all righttolifers apparently keep in their wallets or purses so they can wave it under your nose at the drop of an opinionthis is the one which purports to have been written by a baby while in utero. "I can't wait to see the sun and the flowers," the fetus gushes. "I can't wait to see my mother's face, smiling down at me . . ." It ends, of course, with the fetus saying, "Last night my mother killed me." "Croatoan" begins with the protagonist flushing the aborted fetus down the toilet. The ladies who have done the deed to the protagonist's girl friend have packed their d  c tools and left. Carol, the woman who has had the abortion, flips out and demands that the protagonist go and find the fetus. Trying to placate her, he goes out into the street with a crowbar, levers up a manhole cover . . . and descends into a different world. The alligator story began, of course, as a result of the giveakidababyalligatoraren'ttheyjustthe cutestlittlethings craze of the midfifties. The kid who got the Bator would keep it for a few weeks, then the tiny alligator would all of a sudden not be so tiny anymore. It would nip, perhaps draw blood, and down the toilet it went. It was not so farfetched to believe that they might all be down there on the black underside of our society, feeding, growing bigger, waiting to gobble up the first unwary sewer repairman to come sloshing along in his hipwaders. As David Michael points out in Death Tour, the problem is that most sewers are much too cold to sustain life in fully grown alligators, let alone in those still small enough to flush away. Such a dull fact, however, is hardly enough to kill such a powerful image . . . and I understand that a movie which takes this image as its text is on the way. Ellison has always been a sociological sort of writer, and we can almost feel him seizing upon the symbolic possibilities of such an idea, and when the protagonist descends deep enough into this purgatorial world, he discovers a mystery of cryptic, Lovecraftian proportions At the entrance to their land someonenot the children, they couldn't have done itlong ago built a road sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherrywood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN. Further along, the secret is revealed. Like the alligators of the myth, the fetuses have not died. The sin is not so easily gotten rid of. Used to swimming in placental waters, in their own way as primitive and reptilian as alligators themselves, the fetuses have survived the flush and live here in the dark, symbolically existing in the filth and the shit dropped down on them from the society of our overworld. They are the embodiment of such Old Testament maxims as "Sin never dies" and "Be sure your sin will find you out." Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder. I am the only adult here. They have been waiting for me. They call me father. At its simplest, "Croatoan" is a tale of the just Revenge. The protagonist is a rotter who has casually impregnated a number of women; the abortion on Carol is not the first one his friends Denise and Joanna have performed for this irresponsible Don Juan ( although they swear it will be the last). The Just Revenge is that he finds his dodged responsibilities have been waiting for him all along, as implacable as the rotting corpse which so often returned from the dead to hunt down its killer in the archetypical Haunt of Fear story ( the Graham Ingles classic "Horror We? How's Bayou?" for instance) . But Ellison's prose style is arresting, his grasp of this mythimage of the lost alligators seems solid and complete, and his evocation of this unsuspected underworld is marvelous. Most of all, we sense outrage and angeras with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic. Accompanying these feelings is the feeling that Ellison is preaching to us . . . not in any lackluster, hohum way, but in a large, bellowing voice that may make us think of Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His best stories seem strong enough to contain morals as well as themes, and the most surprising and gratifying thing about his short fiction is that he gets away with the moralizing; we find he rarely sells his birthright for a plot of message. It should not be so, but in his fury, Ellison manages to carry everything, not at a stagger but at a sprint. In "Hitler Painted Roses," we have Margaret Thrushwood, whose sufferings make job's look like a bad case of athlete's foot. In this fantasy, Ellison supposesmuch as Stanley Elkin does in The Living Endthat the reality we experience in the afterlife depends on politics namely, on what people back here think of us. Further, it posits a universe where God (a multiple God here, referred to as They) is an imageconscious poseur with no real interest in right or wrong. Margaret's lover, a Mr. Milquetoast veterinarian named Doc Thomas, murders the entire Ramsdell family in 1935 when he discovers that the hypocritical Ramsdell ( "I'll have no whores in my house," Ramsdell says when he catches Margaret in the kip with Doc) has been helping himself to a bit of Margaret every now and then; Ramsdell's definition of "whore" apparently begins when Margaret's sex partner stops being him. Only Margaret survives Doc's berserk rage, and when she is discovered alive by the townspeople, she is immediately assumed guilty, carried to the Ramsdell well naked, and pitched in. Margaret is sent to hell for the crime she is presumed to have committed, while Doc Thomas, who dies peacefully in bed twentysix years later, goes to heaven. Ellison's vision of heaven also resembles Stanley Elkin's in The Living End. "Paradise," Elkin tells us, resembles "a small themepark." Ellison sees it as a place where moderate beauty balances offbut just barelymoderate tackiness. There are other similarities; in both cases goodnay, saintly! people are sent to hell because of what amounts to a clerical error, and in this desperate view of the modern condition, even the gods are existential. The only horror we are spared is a vision of the Almighty in Adidas sneakers with a Head tennis racket over His shoulder and a golden cokespoon around His neck. All of this comes next year, no doubt. Before we leave the comparison entirely, let me point out that while Elkin's novel was heavily and for the most part favorably reviewed, Ellison's story, originally published in Penthouse (a magazine not regularly purchased by seekers after literary excellence), is almost unknown. Strange Wine itself is almost unknown, in fact. Most critics ignore fantasy fiction because they don't know what to do with it unless it is outandout allegory. "I do not choose to review fantasy," a sometimecritic for no less an organ that the New York Times Book Review once told me. "I have no interest in the hallucinations of the mad." It's always good to be in contact with such an open mind. It broadens one. Margaret Thrushwood escapes hell through a fluke, and in his heroically overblown description of the auguries which foreshadow this supernatural belch, Ellison has an amusing whack at rewriting Act I of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Humor and horror are the original Chang and Eng of literature, and Ellison knows it. We laugh . . . but there is still that undercurrent of unease. As the smoldering sun passed the celestial equator going north to south, numberless portents revealed themselves a twoheaded calf was born in Dorset near the little town of Blandford; wrecked ships rose from the depths of the Marianas Trench; everywhere, children's eyes grew old and very wise; over the Indian state of Maharashtra clouds assumed the shapes of warring armies; leprous moss quickly grew on the south side of Celtic megaliths and then died away in minutes; in Greece the pretty little gillyflowers began to bleed and the earth around their clusters gave off a putrescent smell; all sixteen of the ominous dirae designated by Julius Caesar in the first century B.C., including the spilling of salt and wine, stumbling, sneezing, and the creaking of chairs, made themselves apparent; the aurora australis appeared to the Maori; a horned horse was seen by Basques as it ran through the streets of Vizcaya. Numberless other auguries. And the doorway to Hell opened. The best thing about the passage quoted above is that we can feel Ellison taking off, pleased with the effect and balance of the language and the particulars described, pushing it, having fun with it. Among those who escape hell during the brief period that the door stands open are Jack the Ripper, Caligula, Charlotte Corday, Edward Teach ( "beard still bristling but with the ribbons therein charred and colorless . . . laughing hideously"), Burke and Hare, and George Armstrong Custer. All are sucked back except for Ellison's Lizzie Borden lookalike, Margaret Thrushwood. She makes her way to heaven, confronts Doc . . . and is sent back by God when her realization of the hypocrisy at work causes heaven to begin cracking and peeling around the edges. The pool of water Doc is soaking leis feet in when Margaret drags her blackened, blistered body over to him begins to fill up with lava. Margaret returns to hell, realizing that she can take it, while poor Doc, who she still manages somehow to love, could not. "There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to fool around with love," she tells God in the story's best line. Hitler, meanwhile, is still painting his roses just inside the portal to hell (he has been too absorbed to even think about escape when the door opened). God takes one look, Ellison tells us, and "could not wait to get back to find Michelangelo, to tell him about the grandeur They had beheld, there in that most unlikely of places." The grandeur Ellison wants us to see, of course, is not Hitler's roses but Margaret's ability to love and to go on believing ( if only in herself) in a world where the innocent are punished and the guilty rewarded. As in most of Ellison's fiction, the horror revolves around some smelly injustice; its antidote lies most frequently in the human ability of his protagonists to surmount the unfair situation, or, lacking that, at least to reach a modus vivendi with it. Most of these stories are fablesan uneasy word in a period of literature when the concept of literature is seen to be a simplistic oneand Ellison uses the word frankly in several of his introductions to individual stories. In a letter to me, dated December 28, 1979, lie discusses the use of the fable in fantasy fiction that has been deliberately laid against the backdrop of the modern world " Strange Wine continuesas I see it in retrospectmy perception that reality and fantasy have exchanged positions in contemporary society.