If there is a unified theme in the stories, it is that. Continued from the work I have done in the previous two books, Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975) , it tries to provide a kind of superimposed precontinuum by the use and understanding of which the reader who leads even a lightly examined existence can grasp hold of hisher life and transcend hisher fate by understanding it. "That's all pretty highflown stuff; but what I mean, simply put, is that the workaday events that command our attention are so big, so fantastic, so improbable that no one who isn't walking the parapet of madness can cope with what's coming down. Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question "Why do people read this horror stuff?" My reply was essentially Harlan's; you try to catch the madness in a belljar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don't have a few warps in your record, you're going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspapers coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; Insert foot; Close mouth. "The Tehran hostages, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Howard Hughes fake biography and subsequent death, the Entebbe raid, the murder of Kitty Genovese, the Jonestown massacre, the Hbomb alert in Los Angeles several years ago, Watergate, the Hillside Strangler, the Manson Family, the oil conspiracy all of them are melodramatic and excessive beyond the ability of a writer of mimetic fiction to capture in fiction without being ridiculous. Yet all of them happened. If you or I were to attempt writing a novel about such things, before the fact, we'd be laughed out of the critical esteem of even the lowliest reviewer. "I'm not paraphrasing the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, because I don't see any of these events as mirroring truth' or reality.' Twenty years ago the very idea of international terrorism would have been inconceivable. Today it's a given. So commonplace that we're unmanned and helpless in the face of Khomeini's audacity. In one fell swoop the man has become the most important public figure of our time. In short, he has manipulated reality simply by being bold. How precise a paradigm he has become for the copelessness of our times. In this madman we have an example of one who understandseven if subcutaneouslythat the real world is infinitely manipulable. He has dreamed, and forced the rest of the world to live in that dream. That it is a nightmare for the rest of us is of no concern to the dreamer. Cane man's Utopia . . . "But his example, I suppose, in cathexian terms, is endlessly replicable. And what he has done is what I try to do in my stories. To alter everyday existence in a stretch of fiction . . . . And by the altering, by an insertion of a paradigmatic fantasy element, to permit the reader to perceive what shehe takes for granted in the surrounding precept in a slightly altered way. My hope is that the frisson the tiny shock of new awareness, the little spark of seeing the accepted from an uncomfortable angle, will convince them that there is room enough and time enough, if one only has courage enough, to alter one's existence. "My message is always the same we are the finest, most ingenious, potentially the most godlike construct the Universe has ever created. And every man or woman has the ability within him or her to reorder the perceived universe to his or her own design. My stories all speak of courage and ethic and friendship and toughness. Sometimes they do it with love, sometimes with violence sometimes with pain or sorrow or joy. But they all present the same message the more you know, the more you can do. Or as Pasteur put it, Chance favors the prepared mind.' "I am antientropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, He only wrote that to shock.' "I smile and nod. Precisely." So we find that Ellison's effort to "see" the world through a glass of fantasy is not really much different from Kurt Vonnegut's efforts to "see" it through a glass of satire, semisciencefiction, and a kind of existential vapidity ( "Hiho . . . so it goes . . . how about that"); or Heller's efforts to "see" it as an endless tragicomedy played out in an openair madhouse; or Pynchon's effort to "see" it as the longestrunning Absurdist play in creation (the epigram heading the second section of Gravity's Rainbow is from The Wizard of Oz I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto . . ."; and I think that Harlan Ellison would agree that this sums up postwar life in America as well as anything else). The essential similarity of these writers is that they are all writing fables. In spite of varying styles and points of view, the point in all cases is that these are moral tales. In the late fifties Richard Matheson wrote a terrifying and utterly convincing tale of a modernday succubus ( a female sexual vampire). In terms of shock and effect, it is one of the best tales I've ever read. There is also a succubus tale in Strange Wine, but in "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time," the succubus is more than a sexual vampire; she is an agent of moral forces, come to set things back in balance by stealing the selfconfidence of a wretched man who likes to pick up lonely women in singles bars because they're easy lays. She exchanges her own loneliness for Mitch's potency and when the sexual encounter is done, she tells him "Get up and get dressed and get out of here." The story cannot even be described as sociological, although it has a patina of sociology; it is a moral tale, pure and simple. In "Emissary from Hamelin," a child piper returns on the booth anniversary of the abduction of the children from that medieval town and pipes finis for all of mankind. Here Ellison's basic idea, that progress is progressing in an immoral way, seems a bit shrill and tiresome, an unsurprising mating of the Twilight Zone moral stance with that of the Woodstock Nation (we can almost hear PA systems blaring, "And don't forget to pick up the garbage."). The child's explanation for his return is simple and direct "We want everyone to stop what they are doing to make this a bad place, or we mill take this place away from you." But the words Ellison puts into his newspapermannarrator's mouth to amplify the thought smacks a little bit too much of Woodsy Owl for me "Stop paving over the green lands with plastic, stop fighting, stop killing friendship, have courage, don't lie, stop brutalizing each other . . ." These are Ellison's own thoughts, and fine thoughts they are, but I like my stories without billboards. I suppose this sort of misstepa story with a commercial embedded in its centeris the risk that all "fable fiction" runs. And perhaps the writer of short stories runs a higher risk of falling into the pit than the novelist (although when a novel falls into this pit, the results are even more awful; go down to your local library sometime, get a stack permit, and look up some of the reporter Tom Wicker's novels from the fifties and sixtiesyour hair will turn white). In most cases Ellison goes around the pit, jumps over it . . . or jumps right into it, on purpose, avoiding major injury either by his own talent, the grace of God, or a combination of the two. Some of the stories in Strange Wine don't fit so comfortably into the fable category, and Ellison is perhaps at his best when he is simply goofing with the language, not playing whole songs but simply producing runs of melody and feeling. "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" is such a story (except it is not really a story at all; it is a series of fragments, some narrative, some not, that reads more like beat poetry). It was written in the window of the Change of Hobbit bookstore in Los Angeles, under circumstances so confusing that Ellison's introduction to the piece does not even really do it justice. The individual pieces produce individual little ripples of feeling, as good short poems do, and reveal an inspired playfulness with the language that is as good a place to conclude all of this as anywhere else, I suppose. Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play. Stories are fun, the equivalent of a child's tugmepushme car that makes such an entrancing sound when you roll it across the floor. So, to close, "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet," Harlan Ellison's version of the sound of one hand clapping . . . a sound which only the best fantasy horror fiction can provide. And set against it, a little something from the work of Clark Ashton Smith, contemporary of Lovecraft and something much closer to a true poet than Lovecraft could ever hope to be; although Lovecraft desperately wanted to be a poet, I think the best we can say about his poetry is that he was a competent enough versifier, and no one would ever mistake one of his moody staves for the work of Rod McKuen. George F. Haas, Smith's biographer, suggests that Smith's finest work may have been Ebony and Crystal, and this general reader is inclined to agree, although few readers of modern poetry will find much to like in Smith's conventional treatment of his unconventional subject matter. I suspect, though, that Clark Ashton Smith would have liked what Ellison is doing in "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet." Here, preceding two selections from the Ellison piece, is a selection from Smith's idea notebook, published by Arkham House two years ago as The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith The Face from Infinity A man who fears the sky for some indefinable reason, and tries to avoid the open as much as possible. Dying at last in a room with short, curtained windows, he finds himself suddenly on a vast, bare plain beneath . . . a void heaven. Into this heaven, slowly, there arises a dreadful, infinite face, from which he can find no refuge, since all his senses have apparently been merged in the one sense of sight. Death, for him, is the eternal moment in which he confronts the face, and knows why he has always feared the sky. Now, the ominous jocularity of Harlan Ellison E is for ELEVATOR PEOPLE They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the basement button and reached the bottom, you must press the basement button twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend. Into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been . . . treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams. London is a city filled with narrow, secure stairways. And, finally H is for HAMADRYAD The Oxford English Dictionary has three definitions of hamadryad. The first is a wood nymph that lives and dies in her tree. The second is a venemous, hooded serpent of India. The third definition is improbable. None of them mentions the mythic origins of the word. The tree in which the Serpent lived was the hamadryad. Eve was poisoned. The wood of which the cross was made was the hamadryad. Jesus did not rise, he never died. The ark was composed of cubits of lumber cut from the hamadryad. You will find no sign of the vessel on top of Mt. Ararat. It sank. Toothpicks in Chinese restaurants should be avoided at all costs. So now . . . tell me. Did you hear it? The sound of one hand clapping in thin air? 10 I began this chapterone hundred and twentyfour manuscript pages and two months agoby saying that it would be impossible to effect an overview of horror fiction during the last thirty years without writing a whole book on the subject, and that is as true now as it was two months and all those pages ago. All I've been able to do here is to mention some books in the genre that I like, and hopefully draw short arrows in the direction these novels and stories seem to point. I haven't discussed I Am Legend, but if you should be intrigued enough to read The Shrinking Man as a result of what I've said here, you'll probably get to it, and find Matheson's unmistakable trademarks on that book as well his interest in restricting character to a single person under pressure so that character can be fully examined, his emphasis on courage in adversity, his mastery of terror against what appears to be a normal, everyday backdrop. I haven't discussed the work of Roald Dahl or John Collier or Jorge Luis Borges, but if you exhaust Harlan Ellison's current stock of offbeat, jivey fantasy, you will find these others, and in them you will find many of Ellison's interests repeated, particularly his examination of man at his worst, most venal . . . and his best, most courageous and true. To read Anne Rivers Siddons's novel of domicile possession may lead you to my novel on the same subject, The Shining, or Robert Marasco's brilliant Burnt Offerings. But a few short arrows is all I can possibly draw. To enter the world of horror fiction is to venture, small as a hobbit, through certain mountain passes ( where the only trees which will grow are undoubtedly hamadryads ) and into the equivalent of the Land of Mordor. This is the fuming, volcanic country of the Dark Lord, and if the critics who have seen it firsthand are few, the cartographers are fewer. This Land is mostly white space on the map . . . which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown ( and possibly dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through itand listen to me, you people every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks. I'll leave the longer arrows to those pharmacists of creativity who cannot feel totally at ease until each tale, created to hold some reader spellbound as each of us was at one time held spellbound by the story of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Hook, has been neatly dehydrated and poured into a gel capsule to be swallowed. That is their jobthe job of dissectors, engineers, and pharmacistsand I leave it to them, along with the fervent wish that Shelob may catch them and eat them as they enter the Dark Lord's land, or that the faces in the Marsh of the Dead will first hypnotize them and then drive them mad by quoting Cleanth Brooks to them eternally in mudchoked voices, or that the Dark Lord himself will take them up to his Tower forever or cast them into the Cracks of Doom, where crocodiles of living obsidian wait to crunch up their bodies and silence their quacking, droning voices forever. And if they avoid all that, I hope they catch poison oak. My job is done, I think. My grandfather told me once that the best map is one that points to which way is north and shows you how much water is in your way. That's the sort of map I've tried to provide here. Literary criticism and rhetoric aren't forms I'm comfortable with, but I'd just as soon talk books for . . . well, for two months at a time is the way it looks. Somewhere in the middle of "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie tells his audience, "I could play all night. I'm not proud . . . or tired . . ." I could say much the same thing. I haven't talked about Charles Grant's Oxrun Station books, or Manley Wade Wellman's Appalachian bard John, he of the silverstringed guitar. I've had only a chance to touch briefly on Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness (but gentle reader, there is a pale brown thing in that book that will haunt your dreams). There are dozens of others. No, I take that back. There are hundreds. If you need a slightly longer arrowor if you're just not tired of talking about books yetglance at Appendix II, where there is a list of roughly one hundred books issued during the thirty years we've been jawing over here, all of them horror, all of them excellent in one way or another. If you're new to the field, you'll find enough stuff to keep you quaking in your boots for the next year and a half. If you're not, you'll find you've read many of them already . . . but they'll give you my own hazy conception of where north lies, at least. CHAPTER X The Last WaltzHorror and Morality, Horror and Magic 1 "YES, BUT HOW do you justify earning a living by feeding off people's worst fears?" 2 The police have been summoned by a neighbor who has heard a commotion of some kind. What they find is a bloodbathand something worse. The young man admits, quite calmly, that he has murdered his grandmother with a pipe, and then cut her throat. "I needed her blood," the young man tells the police calmly. "I'm a vampire. Without her blood, I would have died." In his room the police find magazine articles about vampires, vampire comic books, stories, novels. 3 We'd been having a pretty nice lunch, this reporter from the Washington Post and I, something I was grateful for. I'd just started a twelvecity tour for my novel The Dead Zone the day before in New York with a kickoff party thrown by the Viking Press at Tavern on the Green, a huge, rococo eating and drinking establishment on the edge of Central Park. I had tried to take it easy at the party, but I still managed to put away about eight beers there, and another six or so at a smaller, more relaxed party with some friends from Maine later on. Nevertheless I was up the next morning at quarter of five to make the six o'clock Eastern shuttle to Washington so I could, in turn, make a seven o'clock TV appearance to plug my novel. Welcome to touring, friends and neighbors. I made the shuttle handily, telling invisible beads as it took off in a pouring rainstorm (sitting next to an, overweight businessman who read the Wall Street Journal through the entire flight and ate Turns one after another, deliberately and reflectively, as if enjoying them) and made A.M. Washington with at least ten minutes to spare. The television lights intensified the mild hangover I'd gotten up with, and I was grateful for what had been a fairly laidback lunch with the Post reporter, whose questions had been interesting and relatively unthreatening. Then this spitball about feeding off people's fears comes out of nowhere. The reporter, a young, lanky guy, was looking at me over his sandwich, eyes bright. 4 It's 1960, and a lonely Ohio youth has left the movie theater where he has just seen Psycho for the fifth time. This young man goes home and stabs his grandmother to death. The pathologist would later count over forty separate stab wounds. Why? the police asked. Voices, the young man replies. Voices told me to do it. 5 "Look," I said, putting my own sandwich down. "You take any bigcity psychiatrist. He's got a marvelous home in the suburbs, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of house at the very least. He drives a MercedesBenz, either tobaccobrown or silvergray. His wife has got a Country Squire wagon. His kids go to private schools during the academic year and to good summer camps in New England or in the northwest every summer. Sonny has got Harvard if he can make the gradesmoney is certainly no problemand his daughter can go to some reet and compleet girls' school where the sorority motto is We don't conjugate, we decline.' And how is he making the money that produces all of these wonders? He is listening to women weep over their frigidity, he is listening to men with suicidal impulses, he is dealing with paranoia both high and low, he's maybe striking on the occasional true schizophrenic. He's dealing with people who most of all are scared shitless that their lives have somehow gotten out of control and that things are falling apart . . . and if that isn't earning a living by feeding off people's fears, I don't know what is." I picked up my sandwich again and bit into it, convinced that if I hadn't hit the spitter he had thrown me, I'd at least managed to foul it back and stay alive at the plate. When I looked up from my Reuben, the little halfsmile on the reporter's face was gone. "I," he said softly, "happen to be in analysis." 6 January of 1980. The woman and her mother are having a worried conference over the woman's threemonthold baby. The baby won't .stop crying. It always crier. They agree on the source of the problem the baby ha been possessed by a demon, like that little girl in The Exorcist. They pour gasoline on the baby as it lies crying in its crib and then light the child on fire to drive the demon out. The baby lingers in a burn ward for three days. Then it dies. 7 The reporter's article was clean and fair for all of that; he was unkind about my physical appearance and I suppose he had some causeI was in the slobbiest shape I've been in for ten years during that late summer of 1979but other than that, I felt I got a pretty square shake. But even in the piece he wrote, you can feel the place where his path and mine diverged; there is that quiet snap which is the sound of ideas suddenly going off in two completely different directions. "You get the impression that King likes this sort of sparring," he wrote. 8 Boston, 1977. A woman is killed by a young man who uses a number of kitchen implements to affect the murder. Police speculate that he might have gotten the idea from a movieBrian De Palma's Carrie, from the novel by Stephen King. In the film version, Carrie kills her mother by causing all sorts of kitchen implementsincluding a corkscrew and a potatopeelerto fly across the room and literally nail the woman to the wall. 9 Primetime television survived the call by pressure groups to end the excessive, graphic depiction of violence on the tube for over ten years and House and Senate subcommittees almost without number which were convened to discuss the subject. Private eyes went on shooting bad guys and getting clopped over the head after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King; you could order up a dose of carnage at the twist of the channel selector on any night of the week, including Sundays. The undeclared war in Vietnam was heating up quite nicely, thank you; body counts were spiralling into the stratosphere. Child psychologists testified that after watching two hours of violent primetime TV, groups of children in the test group showed a marked increase in play aggressivenessbeating the toy truck against the floor rather than rolling it back and forth, for instance. 10 Los Angeles, 1969. Janis Joplin, who will later die of a drug overdose, it belting out "Ball and Chain." Jim Morrison, who will die of a heart attack in a bathtub, is chanting "Kill, kill, kill, kill" at the end of song titled "The End"Francis Ford Coppola will use the song ten years later to fade in the prologue of Apocalypse Now. Newsweek publishes a picture of a shylysmiling U.S. soldier holding up a revered human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three Stooges twofingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt. 11 Television's makebelieve violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ("There was a rumorabout a tumor," Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, "nestled at the base of his braiyyyyn . . .") , and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury. She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and thenlike the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the babylit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixtyfourdollar question Where did you get such a horrible idea? From TV, came the response. From The ABC Movie of the Week. Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of his finest 87th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fuzz, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion Movies on TV as a "scatterbrained comedy," starring Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gutbuster. McBain's novel isn't a gutbuster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between MASH and Naked City in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . . . except that one of Stallard's fastballs went out of Fenway Park to become Roger Maris's recordbreaking sixtyfirst home run. And Fuzz, a poorly executed comedydrama, effectively ended TV violence. The message? You are responsible. And network TV accepted the message. 12 "How do you justify the violence of the shower scene in Psycho?" A critic once asked Sir Alfred Hitchcock. "How do you Justify the opening scene in Hiroshima, Mon Amour?" Hitchcock is reputed to have replied. In that opening scene, which was certainly scandalous by American standards in 1959, we see Emmanuele Riva and Eliji Okada in a naked embrace. "The opening scene was necessary to the integrity of the film," the critic answered. "So was the shower scene in Psycho," Hitchcock said. 13 What sort of burden does the writerparticularly the writer of horror fictionhave to bear in all of this? Certainly there has never been a writer in the field (with the possible exception of Shirley Jackson) who has not been regarded with more than a degree of critical caution. The morality of horror fiction has been called into question for a hundred years. One of the bloodspattered forerunners of Dracula, Varney the Vampyre, was referred to as a "penny dreadful." Later on, inflation turned the penny dreadfuls into dime dreadfuls. In the 1930s there were cries that pulps such as Weird Tales and Spicy Stories (which regularly served up lipsmacking S  M covers on which lovely ladies were tied down, always in their "small clothes," and menaced by some beastlybut identifiably malecreature of the night) were ruining the morals of the youth of America. Similarly in the fifties, the comics industry choked off such outlaw growths as E.C.'s Tales from the Crypt and instituted a Comics Code when it became clear that Congress intended to clean their house for them if they would not clean it for themselves. There would be no more tales of dismemberment, corpses come back from the dead, and premature burialsor at least not for the next ten years. The return was signalled by the unpretentious birth of Creepy, a Warren Group magazine which was a complete throwback to the salad days of Bill Gaines's E.C. horror comics. Uncle Creepy, and his buddy Cousin Eerie, who came along two years or so later, were really interchangeable with the Old Witch and the CryptKeeper. Even some of the old artists were backJoe Orlando, who made his debut as an E.C. artist, was also represented in the premiere issue of Creepy, if memory serves. I would suggest that there has always been a great tendency, particularly when it comes to such popular forms as movies, television, and mainstream fiction, to kill the messenger for the message. I do not now and never have doubted that the youths who burned the lady in Roxbury got the idea from the telecast of Fuzz one Sunday night on ABC; if it had not been shown, stupidity and lack of imagination might well have reduced them to murdering her in some more mundane way. The same holds true with many of the other cases mentioned here. The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep doublelocked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the nighta partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbowlength gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Who, you ask me, would be so mad? Well . . . ? "You will not want to open this door," Bluebeard tells his wife in that most horrible of all horror stories, "because your husband has forbidden it." But this, of course, only makes her all the more curious . . . . and at last, her curiosity is satisfied. "You may go anywhere you wish in the castle," Count Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, "except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go." But Harker goes soon enough. And so do we all. Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not . . . and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever. 14 Baltimore, 1980. The woman is reading a book and waiting for her bus to arrive. The demobbed soldier who approaches her is a Vietnam vet, a sometime dope addict. He has a history of mental problems which seem to date from his period of service. The woman has noticed him on the bus before, sometimes weaving, sometimes staggering, sometimes calling loudly and wildly to people who are not there. "That's right, Captain!" she has heard him say. "That's right, that's right!" He attacks the woman as she waits for her bus; later, the police will theorize he was after drug money. No matter. He will be just as dead, no matter what he was after. The neighborhood is a tough one. The woman has a knife secreted upon her person. In the struggle, she uses it. When the bus comer, the black exsoldier lies dying in the gutter. What were you reading? a reporter asks her later; she shows him The Stand , by Stephen King.


15 With its disguise of semantics carefully removed and laid aside, what those who criticize the tale of horror (or who simply feel uneasy about it and their liking for it) seem to be saying is this you are selling death and disfigurement and monstrosity; you are trading upon hate and violence, morbidity and loathing; you are just another representative of those forces of chaos which so endanger the world today. You are, in short, immoral. A critic asked George Romero, following the release of Dawn of the Dead, if he felt such a movie, with its scenes of gore, cannibalism, and gaudy pop violence, was a sign of a healthy society. Romero's reply, worthy of the Hitchcock anecdote related earlier, was to ask the critic if he felt the DC10 enginemount assembly was a healthy thing for society. His response was dismissed as a quibble ("You get the impression Romero likes this kind of sparring," I can almost hear the critic thinking). Well, lets see if the quibble really is a quibbleand lets go one layer deeper than we have yet gone. The hour has grown late, the last waltz is playing, and if we don't say certain things now, I suppose we never will. I've tried to suggest throughout this book that the horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a threepiece pinstriped suit; that its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile. In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival.  Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure. Further, I've used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again. Excluding a powerful if puzzling prologue set in Iraq, William Friedkin's film The Exorcist actually begins in Georgetown, an Apollonian suburb if ever there was one. In the first scene, Ellen Burstyn is awakened by a crashing, roaring sound in the atticit sounds like maybe someone let a lion loose up there. It is the first crack in the Apollonian world; soon everything else will pour through in a night My alltime favorite (he said affectionately) A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a boobytrap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eyeforaneye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. mare torrent. But this disturbing crack between our normal world and a chaos where demons are allowed to prey on innocent children is finally closed again at the end of the film. When Burstyn leads the pallid but obviously okay Linda Blair to the car in the film's final scene, we understand that the nightmare is over. Steady state has been restored. We have watched for the mutant and repulsed it. Equilibrium never felt so good. Those are some of the things we've talked about in this book . . . but suppose all of that is only a sham and a false front? I don't say that it is, but perhaps (since this is the last dance) we ought to discuss the possibility, at least. In our discussion of archetypes, we've had occasion to discuss the Werewolf, that fellow who is sometimes hairy and who is sometimes deceptively smooth. Suppose there was a double werewolf? Suppose that the creator of the horror story was, under hisher fright wig and plastic fangs, a Republican in a threebutton suit, as we have said . . . ah, but suppose below that there is a real monster, with real fangs and a squirming Medusatangle of snakes for hair? Suppose it's all a selfserving lie and that when the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a frienda capering, gleeful, redeyed agent of chaos? What about that possibility, friends and neighbors? 16 About five years ago I finished The Shining, took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was The House on Value Street. It was going to be a roman  clef about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing (or her sociopolitical awakening, depending on your point of view, I guess), her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angelesin my book, the hideout was on Value Street, natchthe fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax. It seemed to me to be a highly potent subject, and while I was aware that lots of nonfiction books were sure to be written on the subject, it seemed to me that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions. The novelist is, after all, God's liar, and if he does his job well, keeps his head and his courage, he can sometimes find the truth that lives at the center of the lie. Well, I never wrote that book. I gathered my research materials, such as they were, to hand (Patty was still at large then, which was another attraction the idea had for me; I could make up my own ending), and then I attacked the novel. I attacked it from one side and nothing happened. I tried it from another side and felt it was going pretty well until I discovered all my characters sounded as if they had just stepped whole and sweaty from the dance marathon in Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I tried it in medias res. I tried to imagine it as a stage play, a trick that sometimes works for me when I'm badly stuck. It didn't work this time. In his marvelous novel The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams tells us that writing a long work of fiction is like gathering characters together on a great black plain. They stand around the small fire of the writer's invention, warming their hands at the blaze, hoping the fire will grow into a blaze which will provide light as well as heat. But often it goes out, all light is extinguished, and the characters are smothered in black. It's a lovely metaphor for the fictionmaking process, but it's not mine . . . maybe it's too gentle to be mine. I've always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about this castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn't look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there's really only one safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source. With my Patty Hearst book, I never found the right way in . . . and during that entire sixweek period, something else was nagging very quietly at the back of my mind. It was a news story I had read about an accidental CBW spill in Utah. All the bad nasty bugs got out of their cannister and killed a bunch of sheep. But, the news article stated, if the wind had been blowing the other way, the good people of Salt Lake City might have gotten a very nasty surprise. This article called up memories of a novel called Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. In Stewart's book, a plague wipes out most of mankind, and the protagonist, who has been made immune by virtue of a welltimed snakebite, witnesses the ecological changes which the passing of man causes. The first half of Stewart's long book is riveting; the second half is more of an uphill pushtoo much ecology, not enough story. We were living in Boulder, Colorado, at the time, and I used to listen to the Biblethumping station which broadcast out of Arvada quite regularly. One day I heard a preacher dilating upon the text "Once in every generation the plague will fall among them." I liked the sound of the phrasewhich sounds like a Biblical quotation but is notso well that I wrote it down and tacked it over my typewriter Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. This phrase and the story about the CBW spill in Utah and my memories of Stewart's fine book all became entwined in my thoughts about Patty Hearst and the SLA, and one day while sitting at my typewriter, my eyes traveling back and forth between that creepy homily on the wall to the maddeningly blank sheet of paper in the machine, I wrotejust to write something The world comes to an end but everybody in the SLA is somehow immune. Snake bit them. I looked at that for a while and then typed No more gas shortages. That was sort of cheerful, in a horrible sort of way. No more people, no more gas lines. Below No more gas shortages I wrote in rapid order No more cold war. No more pollution. No more alligator handbags. No more crime. A season of rest. I liked that last; it sounded like something that should be written down. I underlined it. I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze's face. He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote A dark man with no face and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that. I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand. It got to the point where I began describing it to friends as my own little Vietnam, because I kept telling myself that in another hundred pages or so I would begin to see light at the end of the tunnel. The finished manuscript was over twelve hundred pages long and weighed twelve pounds, the same weight as the sort of bowling ball I favor. I carried it thirty blocks from the U.N. Plaza Hotel to my editor's apartment one warm night in July. My wife had wrapped the entire block of pages in Saran Wrap for some reason known only to her, and after I'd switched it from one arm to the other for the third or fourth time, I had a sudden premonition I was going to die, right there on Third Avenue. The Rescue Unit would find me sprawled in the gutter, dead of a heart attack, my monster manuscript, triumphantly encased in Saran Wrap, resting by my outstretched hands, the victor. There were times when I actively hated The Stand, but there was never a time when I did not feel compelled to go on with it. Even when things were going bad with my guys in Boulder, there was a crazy, joyful feeling about the book. I couldn't wait to sit down in front of the typewriter every morning and slip back into that world where Randy Flagg could sometimes become a crow, sometimes a wolf, and where the big battle was not for gasoline allocations but for human souls. There was a feelingI must admit itthat I was doing a fast, happy tapdance on the grave of the whole world. Its writing came during a troubled period for the world in general and America in particular; we were suffering from our first gas pains in history, we had just witnessed the sorry end of the Nixon administration and the first presidential resignation in history, we had been resoundingly defeated in Southeast Asia, and we were grappling with a host of domestic problems, from the troubling question of abortionondemand to an inflation rate that was beginning to spiral upward in a positively scary way. Me? I was suffering from a really good case of career jet lag. Four years before, I had been running sheets in an industrial laundry for 1.60 an hour and writing Carrie in the furnaceroom of a trailer. My daughter, who was then almost a year old, was dressed mostly in scrounged clothes. The year before that, I had married my wife Tabitha in a borrowed suit that was too big for me. I left the laundry when a teaching position opened up at a nearby school, Hampden Academy, and my wife Tabby and I were dismayed to learn that my firstyear salary of 6400 was not going to take us much further than my laundry salaryand pretty soon I'd secured my laundry job back for the following summer. Then Carrie sold to Doubleday, and Doubleday sold the reprint rights for a staggering sum of money which was, in those days, nearly a recordbreaker. Life began to move at Concorde speed. Carrie was bought for films;  Salem's Lot was bought for a huge sum of money and then also bought for films; The Shining likewise. Suddenly all of my friends thought I was rich. That was bad enough, scary enough; what was worse was the fact that maybe I was. People began to talk to me about investments, about tax shelters, about moving to California. These were changes enough to try and cope with, but on top of them, the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet . . . it began to seem like an elaborate castle of sand unfortunately built well below the hightide line. The first wave to touch that castle (or the first one that I perceived) was that longago announcement that the Russians had beaten us into space . . . but now the tide was coming in for fair. And so here, I think, is the face of the double werewolf, revealed at last. On the surface, The Stand pretty much conforms to those conventions we have already discussed an Apollonian society is disrupted by a Dionysian force (in this case a deadly strain of superflu that kills almost everybody). Further, the survivors of this plague discover themselves in two camps one, located in Boulder, Colorado, mimics the Apollonian society just destroyed (with a few significant changes) ; the other, located in Las Vegas, Nevada, is violently Dionysian. The first Dionysian incursion in The Exorcist comes when Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears that lionlike roar in the attic. In The Stand, Dionysus announces himself with the crash of an old Chevy into the pumps of an outoftheway gas station in Texas. In The Exorcist, the Apollonian steady state is restored when we see a pallid Regan MacNeil being led to her mother's MercedesBenz; in The Stand I believe that this moment comes when the book's two main characters, Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith, look through a plateglass window in the Boulder hospital at Frannie's obviously normal baby. As with The Exorcist, the return of equilibrium never felt so good. But below all of this, hidden by the moral conventions of the horror tale (but perhaps not all that hidden), the face of the real Werewolf can be dimly seen. Much of the compulsion I felt while writing The Stand obviously came from envisioning an entire entrenched societal process destroyed at a stroke. I felt a bit like Alexander, lifting his sword over the Gordian knot and growling, " Fuck untying it; I've got a better way." And I felt a bit the way Johnny Rotten sounds at the beginning of that classic and electrifying Sex Pistols song, "Anarchy for the U.K." He utters a low, throaty chuckle that might have come from Randall Flagg's own throat and then intones, "Right . . . NOW!" we hear that voice, and our reaction is one of intense relief. The worst is now known; we are in the hands of an authentic madman. In this frame of mind, the destruction of THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT became an actual relief. No more Ronald McDonald! No more Gong Show or Soap on TVjust soothing snow! No more terrorists! No more bullshit.' Only the Gordian knot unwinding there in the dust. I am suggesting that below the writer of the moral horror tale (whose feet, like those of Henry Jekyll, are "always treading the upward path") there lies another creature altogether. He lives, let us say, down there on Jack Finney's third level, arid he is a capering nihilist who, to extend the JekyllHyde metaphor, is not content to tread over the tender bones of one screaming little girl but in this case feels it necessary to do the funky chicken over the whole world. Yes, folks, in The Stand I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and it was fun! So where is morality now? Well, I'll give you my idea. I think it lies where it has always lain in the hearts and minds of men and women of good will. In the case of the writer, this may mean beginning with a nihilistic premise and gradually relearning old lessons of human values and human conduct. In the case of The Stand, this meant beginning with the glum premise that the human race carries a kind of germ with itI began by seeing this germ symbolically visualized in the SLA, and ended by seeing it visualized in the superflu germwhich grows more and more virulent as technology grows in power. The superflu is unleashed by a single technological misstep (not such a farfetched presumption, either, when you consider what happened at Three Mile Island last year or the fact that Loring AFB in my own state scrambled bombers and fighters ready to head over the pole toward Russia as the result of an amusing little computer foulup which suggested that the Russians had launched their missiles and the Big Hot One was on). By simple agreement with myself to allow a few survivorsno survivors, no story, am I right?I was able to envision a world in which all the nuclear stockpiles would simply rust away and some kind of normal moral, political, and ecological balance would return to the mad universe we call home. But I don't think anyone knows what they really thinkor perhaps even what they really knowuntil it's written down, and I came to realize that the survivors would be very likely to first take up all the old quarrels and then all the old weapons. Worse, all those deadly toys would be available to them, and things might well become a sprint to see which group of loonies could figure out how to launch them first. My own lesson in writing The Stand was that cutting the Gordian Knot simply destroys the riddle instead of solving it, and the book's last line is an admission that the riddle still remains. The book also tries to celebrate brighter aspects of our lives simple human courage, friendship, and love in a world which so often seems mostly loveless. In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus's remark that "happiness, too, is inevitable." More prosaically, my mother used to tell my brother David and I to "hope for the best and expect the worst," and that expresses the book I remember writing as well as anything. So, in short, we hope for a fourth level (a triple Werewolf?), one that will bring us full circle again to the horror writer not just as writer but as human being, mortal man or woman, just another passenger in the boat, another pilgrim on the way to whatever there is. And we hope that if he sees another pilgrim fall down that he will write about itbut not before he or she has helped the fallen one of his or her feet, brushed off his or her clothes, and seen if he or she is all right, and able to go on. If such behavior is to be, it cannot be as a result of an intellectual moral stance; it is because there is such a thing as love, merely a practical fact, a practical force in human affairs. Morality is, after all, a codification of those things which the heart understands to be true and those things which the heart understands to be the demands of a life lived among others . . . civilization, in a word. And if we remove the label "horror story" or "fantasy genre" or whatever, and replace it with "literature" or more simply still, "fiction," we may realize more easily that no such blanket accusations of immorality can be made. If we say that morality proceeds simply from a good heartwhich has little to do with ridiculous posturings and happilyeverafteringsand immorality proceeds from a lack of care, from shoddy observation, and from the prostitution of drama or melodrama for some sort of gain, monetary or otherwise, then we may realize that we have arrived at a critical stance which is both workable and humane. Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and in the tale of horror as in any other tale, the same rule applies now as when Aristophanes told his horror tale of the frogs morality is telling the truth as your heart knows it. When asked if he was not ashamed of the rawness and sordidness of his turnofthecentury novel McTeague, Frank Norris replied "Why should I be? I did not lie. I did not truckle. I told them the truth." Seen in that light, I think the horror tale may more often be adjudged innocent than guilty. 17 My, look at this . . . I do believe the sun is coming up. We have danced the night away, like lovers in some old MGM musical. But now the band has packed their melodies back inside their cases and has quitted the stage. The dancers have left, all but you and I, and I suppose we must go, as well. I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed the evening, and if you sometimes found me a clumsy partner (or if I occasionally stepped on your toes), I do apologize. I feel as I suppose all lovers feel when the dance has finally ended, tired . . . but still gay. As I walk you to the door, may I tell you one more thing? We'll stand here in the vestibule as they unroll the rug again and douse the lights. Let me help you with your coat; I'll not keep you long. Questions of morality in the pursuit of horror may be begging the actual question. The Russians have a phrase, "the scream of the woodcock." The phrase is derisory because the woodcock is nature's ventriloquist, and if you fire your shotgun at tile place where the sound came from, you'll go hungry. Shoot the woodcock, not the scream, the Russians say. So let's see if we can't find a woodcockjust onein all these screaming thickets. It might just be hiding in this item, truth rather than fiction, from The Book of Lists, the WallaceWallechinsky clan's attic full of fascinating rickrack and useful junk. As you get ready to leave, think about this . . . or brood upon it THE MYSTERY OF LITTLE MISS NOBODY On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum  Bailey circus was giving a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, before 7,000 paid customers. A fire broke out; 168 persons died in the blaze and 487 were injured. One of the dead, a small girl thought to be six years old, was unidentified. Since no one cattle to claim her, and since her face was unmarred, a photograph was taken of her and distributed locally and then throughout the U.S. Days passed, weeks and months passed, but no relative, no playmate, no one in the nation came forward to identify her. She remains unknown to this day. My idea of growing up is that the process consists mainly of developing a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty (what about Little Miss Nobody, you ask mewell, hang on; we'll get there). Children see everything, consider everything; the typical expression of the baby which is full, dry, and awake is a videeyed goggle at everything. Hello, pleased to meet you, freaked to be here. A child has not yet developed the obsessional behavior patterns which we approvingly call "good work habits." He or she has not yet internalized the idea that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. All of that comes later. Children believe in Santa Claus. It's no big deal; just a piece of stored information. They likewise believe in the boogeyman, the Trix Rabbit, McDonaldland (where hamburgers grow on trees and moderate thievery is approved behaviorwitness the lovable Hamburglar), the Tooth Fairy who takes ivory and leaves silver . . . all of these things are taken as a matter of course. These are some of the popular myths; there are others which, while more specialized, seem just as outr. Grampa leas gone to live with the angels. The stuff in the middle of the golf ball is the worst poison in the world. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. If you walk through holly bushes, your shadow can get caught and it will be left there forever, flapping on the sharp leaves. The changes come gradually, as logic and rationalism assert themselves. The child begins to wonder how Santa can be at the Value House, on a downtown corner ringing a bell over a Salvation Army pot, and up at the North Pole generaling his troop of elves all at the same time. The child maybe realizes that although lie's stepped on a hell of a lot of cracks, his or her mother's back is yet all right. Age begins to settle into that child's face. "Don't be a baby!" lie or she is told impatiently. "Your head is always in the clouds!" And the kicker, of course "Aren't you ever going to grow up?" After awhile, tile song says, Puff the magic dragon stopped trundling his way up the Cherry Lane to see his old goodbuddy Jackie Paper. Wendy and her brothers finally left Peter Pan and the Wild Boys to their fate. No more Magic Dust and only an occasional Happy Thought . . . but there was always something a little dangerous about Peter Pan, wasn't there? Something just a little too woodsyv,ild? Something in his eyes that was . . . well, downright Dionysian. Oh, the gods of childhood are immortal; tile big kids don't really sacrifice them; they just pass them on to their bratty kid brothers and kid sisters. It's childhood itself that's mortal man is in love, and loves what passes. And it's not just Puff and Tink and Peter Pan that are left behind in that rush for the driver's license, the high school and college diploma, in that mostly eager training to achieve "good work habits." We have each exiled the Tooth Fairy (or perhaps he exiles us when we are no longer able to provide the product he requires), murdered Santa Claus (only to reanimate the corpse for our own children), killed the giant that chased Jack down the beanstalk. And the poor old boogeyman! Laughed to death again and again, like Mr. Dark at the conclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Listen to me now At eighteen or twenty or twentyone, whatever the legal drinking age may be in your state, "getting carded" is something of an embarrassment. You have to fumble around for a driver's license or your State Liquor Card or maybe even a photostat of your birth certificate so you can get a simple fa' Chrissakes glass of beer. But you let ten years go past, get so you are looking the big threeo right in the eye, and there is something absurdly flattering about getting carded. It means you still look like you might not be old enough to buy a drink over the bar. You still look a little wet behind the ears. You still look young. This got into my head a few years ago when I was in a bar called Benjaman's in Bangor, getting pleasantly loaded. I began to study the faces of entering patrons. The guy standing unobtrusively by the door let this one pass . . . and that one . . . and the next one. Then, bang! He stopped a guy in a U of M jacket and carded him. And I'll be damned if that guy didn't do a quick fade. The drinking age in Maine was then eighteen (boozerelated accidents on the highways have since caused the lawmakers to move the age up to twenty), and all of those people had looked about eighteen to me. So I got up and asked the bouncer how he knew that last guy was underage. He shrugged. "You just know," he said. "It's mostly in their eyes." For weeks after, my hobby was looking at the faces of adults and trying to decide exactly what it was that made them "adult faces." The face of a thirty yearold is healthy, unwrinkled, and no bigger than the face of a seventeenyearold. Yet you know that's no kid; you know. There seems to be some hidden yet overriding characteristic that makes what we all agree is the Adult Face. It isn't just the clothes or the stance, it isn't the fact that the thirty yearold is toting a briefcase and the seventeenyearold is toting a knapsack; if you put the head of each in one of those carnival cutouts which show the body of a capering sailor or a prizefighter, you could still pick out the adult ten tries out of ten. I came to believe that the bouncer was right. It's in the eyes. Not something that's there; something, rather, that has left. Kids are bent. They think around corners. But starting at roughly age eight, when childhood's second great era begins, the kinks begin to straighten out, one by one. The boundaries of thought and vision begin to close down to a tunnel as we gear up to get along. At last, unable to grapple to any profit with NeverNever Land anymore, we may settle for the minorleague version available at the local disco . . . or for a trip to Disney World one February or March. The imagination is an eye, a marvelous third eye that floats free. As children, that eye sees with 2020 clarity. As we grow older, its vision begins to dim . . . and one day the guy at the door lets you into the bar without asking to see any ID and that's it for you, Cholly; your hat is over the windmill. It's in your eyes. Something in your eyes. Check them out in the mirror and tell me if I'm wrong. The job of the fantasy writer, or the horror writer, is to bust the walls of that tunnel vision wide for a little while; to provide a single powerful spectacle for that third eye. The job of the fantasyhorror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again. And the horror writer himself herself? Someone else looks at that item about Little Miss Nobody (toldja we'd get back to her, and here she is, still unidentified, as mysterious as the Wolf Boy of Paris) and says, "Jeez, you never can tell, can you?" and goes on to something else. But the fantasist begins to play with it as a child would, speculating about children from other dimensions, about dopplegangers, about God knows what. It's a child's toy, something bright and shiny and strange. Let us pull a lever and see what it does, let us push it across the floor and see if it goes RumRumRum or wackawackawacka. Let us turn it over and see if it will magically right itself again. In short, let us have our Fortian rains of frogs and people who have mysteriously burned to death while sitting at home in their easy chairs; let us have our vampires and our werewolves. Let us have Little Nobody, who perhaps slipped sideways through a crack in reality, only to be trampled to death in the rush from a burning circus tent. And something of this is reflected in the eyes of those who write horror stories. Ray Bradbury has the dreamy eyes of a child. So, behind his thick glasses, does Jack Finney. The same look is in Lovecraft's eyesthey startle with their simple dark directness, especially in that narrow, pinched, and somehow eternal New England face. Harlan Ellison, in spite of his rapid jivetalking shootfromthehip NervousNorvus mode of conversation (talking with Harlan can sometimes be like talking with an apocalyptic Saladmaster salesman who has just taken three large bennies), has those eyes. Every now and then he'll pause, looking away, looking at something else, and you know that it's true Harlan is bent, and he just thought his way around a corner. Peter Straub, who dresses impeccably and who always seems to project the aura of some big company success, also has that look in his eyes. It is an indefinable look, but it's there.


"It's the best set of electric trains a boy ever had," Orson Welles once said of making movies; the same can be said of making books and stories. Here is a chance to bust that tunnel vision wide open, bricks flying everywhere so that, for a moment at least, a dreamscape of wonders and horrors stands forth as clearly and with all the magic reality of the first Ferris wheel you ever saw as a kid, turning and turning against the sky. Someone's dead son is on the late movie. Somewhere a foul manboogeyman!is slouching through the snowy night with shining yellow eyes. Boys are thundering through autumn leaves on their way home past the library at four in the morning, and somewhere else, in some other world, even as I write this, Frodo and Sam are making their way toward Mordor, where the shadows lie. I am quite sure of it. Ready to go? Fine. I'll just grab my coat. It's not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third level here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imaginationjust one more pipeline to the infinite. In his epic poem of a stewardess falling to her death from high above the fields of Kansas, James Dickey suggests a metaphor for the life of the rational being, who must grapple as best heshe can with the fact of hisher own mortality. We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other . . . except through faith. That we retain our sanity in the face of these simple yet blinding mysteries is nearly divine. That we may turn the powerful intuition of our imaginations upon them and regard them in this glass of dreamsthat we may, however timidly, place our hands within the hole which opens at the center of the column of truththat is . . . . . . well, it's magic, isn't it? Yeah. I think maybe that's,what I want to leave you,with, in lieu of a goodnight kiss, that Nvord which children respect instinctively, that word whose truth we only rediscover as adults in our stories . . . and in our dreams Magic. Afterword IN JULY OF 1977, my wife and I hosted a gathering of my wife's entire familya giant collection of sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and millions of kids. My wife spent most of that week cooking and of course what always happens at family gatherings happened at this one everybody brought a casserole. Much food was eaten on the shores of Long Lake that sunny summer day; many cans of beer were consumed. And when the crowd of Spruces and Atwoods and LaBrees and Graveses and everyone else had departed, we were left with enough food to feed an army regiment. So we ate leftovers. Day in, day out, we ate leftovers. And when Tabby brought out the remains of the turkey for the fifth or sixth time (we had eaten turkey soup, turkey surprise, and turkey with noodles; this day it was something simpler, nice, nourishing turkey sandwiches), my son Joe, who was then five, looked at it and screamed "Do we have to eat this shit again?" I didn't know whether to laugh or clout him upside the head. As I recall, I did both. I told you that story because people who have read a lot of my work will realize that they have eaten a few leftovers here. I have used material from my introduction to Night Shift, from my introduction to the New American Library's omnibus edition of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, from an article entitled "The Fright Report," originally published in Oui magazine, from an article called "The Third Eye" in The Writer; much of the material on Ramsey Campbell originally appeared in Stuart Schiff's Whispers magagine. Now before you decide to clout me upside the lead or to scream "Do we have to eat this shit again?" let me point out to you what my wife pointed out to my son on the day of the turkey sandwiches there are hundreds of different recipes for turkey, but they all taste like turkey. And coupled with that, she said, it is a shame to waste good things. This is not to say that my article in Oui was so paralyzingly great or that my thoughts on Ramsey Campbell were so deathless that they deserved to be preserved in a book; it is only to say that, while my thoughts and feelings on the genre I've spent most of my life working in may have evolved or shifted somewhat in perspective, they haven't really changed. That change may come, but since there has only been a passage of four years since I originally stated many of my feelings about horror and terror in the Night Shift introduction, it would be surprisingeven suspectif I were to suddenly deny everything I had written previous to this book. In my own defense, I'll add that Danse Macabre gave me the space to develop some of these ideas in more detail than I had ever been given before, and for that I must thank Bill Thompson and Everest House. In no case did I simply reheat something I had written before; I tried as hard as I could to develop each idea as fully as possible without beating it into the ground. In some cases, I may have done just that, though, and all I can do in such cases is to beg your indulgence. And I think that really is the end. Thank you again for coming with me, and rest you well. But, being who I am and what I am, I cannot find it in my heart to wish you pleasant dreams . . . APPENDICES AND INDEX APPENDIX I THE FILMS Below is a list of roughly one hundred fantasyhorror films tied together by their time and their excellence. All were released during the period 19501980, and all of them seem to me to be particularly interesting in one way or another; if I may say so without sounding like an Academy Awards presenter, all of them have contributed something of value to the genre. You will find my own personal favorites marked with an asterisk (  ). Special thanks are due to Kirby McCauley, who provided invaluable help with the list. TITLE DIRECTOR YEAR The Abominable Dr. Phibes Robert Fuest 1971  Alien Ridley Scott 1979 Asylum Roy Ward Baker 1972 The Bad Seed Mervyn LeRoy 1956 The Birds Alfred Hitchcock 1963 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Dario Argento 1969  Black Sunday Mario Bava 1961  The Brood David Cronentberg 1979 Burnt Offerings Dan Curtis 1976 Burn Witch Burn Sidney Hayers 1962  The Cage Walter Graumann 1961  Carrie Brian De Palma 1976 The Conqueror Worm Michael Reeves 1968  Creature from the Black Lagoon Jack Arnold 1954  The Creeping Unknown Val Guest 1955  Curse of the Demon Jacques Tourneur 1957 The Day of the Triiffids Steve Sekely 1963  Dawn of the Dead George A. Romero 1979 The Deadly Beer Freddie Francis 1967 Deep Red Dario Argento ?  Deliverance John Boorman 1972  dementia13 Francis Coppola 1963 Diabolique HenriGeorges Clouzot1955 Doctor Terror's House of Horrors Freddie Francis 1965 Don't Look Now Nicholas Roeg 1973  Duel Steven Spielberg 1971  Enemy from Space Val Guest 1957 Eraserhead David Lynch 1978  The Exorcist William Friedkin 1973 The Exterminating Angel Luis Bunuel 1963 Eye of the Cat David Lowell Rich 1969 The Fly Kurt Neumann 1958  Frenzy Alfred Hitchcock 1972 The Fury Brian De Palma 1978 Gorgo Eugene Lourie 1961  Halloween John Carpenter 1978  The Haunting Robert Wise 1963 The HMan Inoshiro Honda 1958 Horrors of the Black Museum Arthur Crabtree 1959 Hour of the Wolf Ingmar Bergman 1967 The House that Dripped Blood Peter Duffell 1970 Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte Robert Aldrich 1965  I Bury the Living Albert Band 1958 The Incredible Shrinking Man Jack Arnold 1957  Invasion of the Body Snatchers Don Siegel 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers Philip Kaufman 1978 I Saw What You Did William Castle 1965  It Came from Outer Space Jack Arnold 1953 It! The Terror from Beyond Space Edward L. Cahn 1958  Jaws Steven Spielberg 1975 The Killer Shrews Ken Curtis 1959 Last Summer Frank Perry 1969  Let's Scare Jessica to Death John Hancock 1971 Macabre William Castle 1958  Martin George A. Romero 1977 The Masque of the Red Death Roger Corman 1964 Night Must Fall Karel Reisz 1964  The Night of the Hunter Charles Laughton 1955  Night of the Living Dead George A. Romero 1968 Not of This Earth Roger Corman 1956 No Way to Treat a Lady Jack Smight 1968 Panic in the Year Zero Ray Milland 1962  Picnic at Hanging Rock Peter Weir 1978 The Pit and the Pendulum Roger Corman 1961  Psycho Alfred Hitchcock 1960  Rabid David Cronenberg 1976 Race with the Devil Jack Starrett 1975  Repulsion Roman Polanski 1965  Rituals ? 1978  Rosemary's Baby Roman Polanski 1968 Salem's Lot Tobe Hooper 1979 Seance on a Wet Afternoon Bryan Forties 1964 Seizure Oliver Stone 1975  The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman 1956  Sisters Brian De Palma 1973  The Shining Stanley Kubrick 1980 The Shout Jerzy Skolimowski 1979 Someone's Watching Me John Carpenter 1978 The Stepford Wives Bryan Forties 1975 StraitJacket William Castle 1964 Suddenly Last Summer Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1960  Suspiria Dario Argento 1977  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper 1974  Them! Gordon Douglas 1954 They Came from Within David Cronenberg 1975  The Thing Christian Nyby 1951 The Tomb of Ligeia Roger Corman 1965 Trilogy of Terror Dan Curtis 1975 Village of the Damned Wolf Rilla 1960  Wait Until Dark Terence Young 1967  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich 1961 When Michael Calls Philip Leacock 1971 The Wicker Man Robin Hardy 1973 Willard Daniel Mann 1971  Xthe Man with the XRay Eyes Roger Corman 1963 X the Unknown Leslie Norman 1956 APPENDIX 2 THE BOOKS Below is a list of roughly one hundred booksnovels and collectionswhich span the period we have been discussing. They are listed alphabetically according to author. As with my list of films, you may not find all of these to your taste, but all seemto me, at leastimportant to the genre we have been discussing. Thanks again to Kirby McCauley, who helped with the list, and a special tip of the hat to "Fast Eddie" Melder, who owns a pub in North Lovell and who put up with our wild talk until well past closing time. Once again, I've marked with an asterisk (  ) books which I felt were particularly important. Richard Adams. The Plague Dogs; Watership Down Robert Aickman. Cold Hand in Mine; Painted Devils Marcel Ayme. The Walker through Walls Beryl Bainbridge. Harriet Said J. G. Ballard. Concrete Island; High Rise Charles Beaumont. Hunger; The Magic Man Robert Bloch. Pleasant Dreams; Psycho Ray Bradbury. Dandelion Wine; Something Wicked This Way Comes; The October Country Joseph Payne Brennan. The Shapes of Midnight Frederic Brown. Nightmares and Geezenstacks Edward Bryant. Among the Dead Janet Caird. The Loch Ramsey Campbell. Demons By Daylight; The Doll Who Ate His Mother; The Parasite Suzy McKee Charnas. The Vampire Tapestry Julio Cortazar. The End of the Game and Other Stories Harry Crews. A Feast of Snakes Roald Dahl. Kiss Kiss; Someone Like You Les Daniels. The Black Castle Stephen R. Donaldson. The Thomas Covenant Trilogy (3 vols.) Daphne Du Maurier. Don't Look Now Harlan Ellison . Deathbird Stories; Strange Wine John Farris . All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By Charles G. Finney. The Ghosts of Manacle Jack Finney. The Body Snatchers; I Love Galesburg in the Springtime; The Third Level; Time and Again William Golding. Lord of the Flies Edward Gorey. Amphigorey; Amphigorey Too Charles L. Grant. The Hour of the Oxrun Dead; The Sound of Midnight Davis Grubb. Twelve Tales of Horror William H. Hallahan. The Keeper of the Children; The Search for Joseph Tully James Herbert. The Fog; The Spear; The Survivor William Hjortsberg. Falling Angel Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House; The Lottery and Others; The Sundial Gerald Kersh. Men Without Bones Russell Kirk. The Princess of All Lands Nigel Kneale. Tomato Caine William Kotzwinkle. Dr. Rat Jerry Kozinski. The Painted Bird Fritz Leiber. Our Lady of Darkness Ursula LeGuin. The Lathe of Heaven; Orsinian Tales Ira Levin. Rosemary's Baby; The Stepford Wives John D. MacDonald. The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything Bernard Malamud. The Magic Barrel; The Natural Robert Marasco. Burnt Offerings Gabriel Maria Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude Richard Matheson. Hell House; I Am Legend; Shock II; The Shrinking Man; A Stir of Echoes Michael McDowell. The Amulet; Cold Moon Over Babylon Ian McEwen. The Cement Garden John Metcalf. The Feasting Dead Iris Murdoch. The Unicorn Joyce Carol Oates. Nightside Flannery O'Connor. A Good Man Is Hard to Find Mervyn Peake. The Gormenghast Trilogy (3 volumes) Thomas Pynchon. V. Edogawa Rampo. Tales of Mystery and Imagination Jean Ray. Ghouls in My Grave Anne Rice. Interview with the Vampire Philip Roth. The Breast Ray Russell. Sardonicus Joan Samson. The Auctioneer William Sansom. The Collected Stories of William Sansom Sarban. Ringstones; The Sound of His Horn Anne Rivers Siddons. The House Next Door Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Seance and Other Stories Martin Cruz Smith. Nightwing Peter Straub. Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; Julia; Shadowland Theodore Sturgeon. Caviar; The Dreaming jewels; Some of Your Blood Thomas Tessier. The Nightwalker Paul Theroux. The Black House Thomas Tryon. The Other Les Whitten. Progeny of the Adder Thomas Williams. Tsuga's Children Gahan Wilson. I Paint What I See T. M. Wright. Strange Seed John Wyndham. The Chrysalids; The Day of the Triffids Table of Contents Cover DANSE MACABRE Dedication CONTENTS Forenote Epigraph CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X THE MYSTERY OF LITTLE MISS NOBODY APPENDICES AND INDEX