Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  In the late fifties Richard Matheson wrote a terrifying and utterly convincing tale of a modern-day 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 self-confidence 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 700th 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 will take this place away from you." But the words Ellison puts into his newspaperman-narrator'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 misstep--a story with a commercial embedded in its center--is 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 sometimes, get a stack permit, and look up some of the reporter Tom Wicker's novels from the fifties and sixties--your 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 this as anywhere else, I suppose.

  Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play. Stories are fun, the equivalent of a child's tug-me-push-me 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 chapter--one hundred and twenty-four manuscript pages and two months ago--by 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 wont, 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, thro
ugh 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 it--and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out of 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 job--the job of dissectors, engineers, and pharmacists--and 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 mud-choked 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 silver-stringed 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 dung 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 arrow--or if you're just not tired of talking about books yet--glance 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 Waltz--Horror 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 bloodbath--and 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 twelve-city tour for my novel The Dead Zone the day before in New York with a kick-off 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 Tums 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 intensifed the mild hangover I'd gotten up with, and I was grateful for what had been a fairly laid-back 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 big-city psychiatrist. He's got a marvelous home in the suburbs, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of house at the very least. He drives a Mercedes-Benz, either tobacco-brown or silver-gray. 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 grades--money is certainly no problem--and 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 half-smile 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 three-month-old baby. The baby won't stop crying. It always cries. They agree on the source of the problem: the baby has 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 cause--I was in the slobbiest shape I've been in for ten years during that late summer of 1979--but 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 effect the murder. Police speculate that he might have gotten the idea from a movie--Brian De Palma's Carrie, from the novel by Stephen King. In the film version, Carrie kills her mother by causing all sorts of kitchen implements--including a corkscrew and a potato peeler--to fly across the room and literally nail the woman to the wall.

  9

  Prime-time 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 prime-time TV, groups of children in the test group showed a marked increase in play aggressiveness--beating the toy truck against the floor rather than rolling it back and forth, for instance.

  10

  Los Angeles, 1969. Janis Joplin, who will latter die of a drug overdose, is 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 a 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 shyly smiling U.S. soldier holding up a severed 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 two-fingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt.