by Стивен Кинг
Further along, the secret is revealed. Like the alligators of the myth, the fetuses have not died. The sin is not so easily gotten rid of. Used to swimming in placental waters, in their own way as primitive and reptilian as alligators themselves, the fetuses have survived the flush and live here in the dark, symbolically existing in the filth and the shit dropped down on them from the society of our overworld. They are the embodiment of such Old Testament maxims as "Sin never dies" and "Be sure your sin will find you out.” Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder.
I am the only adult here.
They have been waiting for me.
They call me father.
At its simplest, "Croatoan" is a tale of the just Revenge. The protagonist is a rotter who has casually impregnated a number of women; the abortion on Carol is not the first one his friends Denise and Joanna have performed for this irresponsible Don Juan ( although they swear it will be the last). The Just Revenge is that he finds his dodged responsibilities have been waiting for him all along, as implacable as the rotting corpse which so often returned from the dead to hunt down its killer in the archetypical Haunt of Fear story ( the Graham Ingles classic "Horror We? How's Bayou?" for instance) .
But Ellison's prose style is arresting, his grasp of this myth-image of the lost alligators seems solid and complete, and his evocation of this unsuspected underworld is marvelous. Most of all, we sense outrage and anger-as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic. Accompanying these feelings is the feeling that Ellison is preaching to us . . . not in any lackluster, ho-hum way, but in a large, bellowing voice that may make us think of Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His best stories seem strong enough to contain morals as well as themes, and the most surprising and gratifying thing about his short fiction is that he gets away with the moralizing; we find he rarely sells his birthright for a plot of message. It should not be so, but in his fury, Ellison manages to carry everything, not at a stagger but at a sprint.
In "Hitler Painted Roses," we have Margaret Thrushwood, whose sufferings make job's look like a bad case of athlete's foot. In this fantasy, Ellison supposes-much as Stanley Elkin does in The Living End-that the reality we experience in the afterlife depends on politics: namely, on what people back here think of us. Further, it posits a universe where God (a multiple God here, referred to as They) is an imageconscious poseur with no real interest in right or wrong.
Margaret's lover, a Mr. Milquetoast veterinarian named Doc Thomas, murders the entire Ramsdell family in 1935 when he discovers that the hypocritical Ramsdell ( "I'll have no whores in my house," Ramsdell says when he catches Margaret in the kip with Doc) has been helping himself to a bit of Margaret every now and then; Ramsdell's definition of "whore” apparently begins when Margaret's sex partner stops being him.
Only Margaret survives Doc's berserk rage, and when she is discovered alive by the townspeople, she is immediately assumed guilty, carried to the Ramsdell well naked, and pitched in. Margaret is sent to hell for the crime she is presumed to have committed, while Doc Thomas, who dies peacefully in bed twenty-six years later, goes to heaven. Ellison's vision of heaven also resembles Stanley Elkin's in The Living End. "Paradise," Elkin tells us, resembles "a small themepark." Ellison sees it as a place where moderate beauty balances off-but just barely-moderate tackiness. There are other similarities; in both cases good-nay, saintly!- people are sent to hell because of what amounts to a clerical error, and in this desperate view of the modern condition, even the gods are existential. The only horror we are spared is a vision of the Almighty in Adidas sneakers with a Head tennis racket over His shoulder and a golden coke-spoon around His neck. All of this comes next year, no doubt.
Before we leave the comparison entirely, let me point out that while Elkin's novel was heavily and for the most part favorably reviewed, Ellison's story, originally published in Penthouse (a magazine not regularly purchased by seekers after literary excellence), is almost unknown. Strange Wine itself is almost unknown, in fact. Most critics ignore fantasy fiction because they don't know what to do with it unless it is out-and-out allegory. "I do not choose to review fantasy," a sometime-critic for no less an organ that the New York Times Book Review once told me. "I have no interest in the hallucinations of the mad." It's always good to be in contact with such an open mind. It broadens one.
Margaret Thrushwood escapes hell through a fluke, and in his heroically overblown description of the auguries which foreshadow this supernatural belch, Ellison has an amusing whack at rewriting Act I of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Humor and horror are the original Chang and Eng of literature, and Ellison knows it. We laugh . . . but there is still that undercurrent of unease.
As the smoldering sun passed the celestial equator going north to south, numberless portents revealed themselves: a two-headed calf was born in Dorset near the little town of Blandford; wrecked ships rose from the depths of the Marianas Trench; everywhere, children's eyes grew old and very wise; over the Indian state of Maharashtra clouds assumed the shapes of warring armies; leprous moss quickly grew on the south side of Celtic megaliths and then died away in minutes; in Greece the pretty little gillyflowers began to bleed and the earth around their clusters gave off a putrescent smell; all sixteen of the ominous dirae designated by Julius Caesar in the first century B.C., including the spilling of salt and wine, stumbling, sneezing, and the creaking of chairs, made themselves apparent; the aurora australis appeared to the Maori; a horned horse was seen by Basques as it ran through the streets of Vizcaya. Numberless other auguries.
And the doorway to Hell opened.
The best thing about the passage quoted above is that we can feel Ellison taking off, pleased with the effect and balance of the language and the particulars described, pushing it, having fun with it. Among those who escape hell during the brief period that the door stands open are Jack the Ripper, Caligula, Charlotte Corday, Edward Teach ( "beard still bristling but with the ribbons therein charred and colorless . . . laughing hideously"), Burke and Hare, and George Armstrong Custer.
All are sucked back except for Ellison's Lizzie Borden look-alike, Margaret Thrushwood. She makes her way to heaven, confronts Doc . . . and is sent back by God when her realization of the hypocrisy at work causes heaven to begin cracking and peeling around the edges. The pool of water Doc is soaking leis feet in when Margaret drags her blackened, blistered body over to him begins to fill up with lava.
Margaret returns to hell, realizing that she can take it, while poor Doc, who she still manages somehow to love, could not. "There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to fool around with love," she tells God in the story's best line. Hitler, meanwhile, is still painting his roses just inside the portal to hell (he has been too absorbed to even think about escape when the door opened). God takes one look, Ellison tells us, and "could not wait to get back to find Michelangelo, to tell him about the grandeur They had beheld, there in that most unlikely of places.” The grandeur Ellison wants us to see, of course, is not Hitler's roses but Margaret's ability to love and to go on believing ( if only in herself) in a world where the innocent are punished and the guilty rewarded. As in most of Ellison's fiction, the horror revolves around some smelly injustice; its antidote lies most frequently in the human ability of his protagonists to surmount the unfair situation, or, lacking that, at least to reach a modus vivendi with it.
Most of these stories are fables-an uneasy word in a period of literature when the concept of literature
is seen to be a simplistic one-and Ellison uses the word frankly in several of his introductions to individual stories. In a letter to me, dated December 28, 1979, lie discusses the use of the fable in fantasy fiction that has been deliberately laid against the backdrop of the modern world: "Strange Wine continues-as I see it in retrospect-my perception that reality and fantasy have exchanged positions in contemporary society. 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 his/her life and transcend his/her fate by understanding it.
"That's all pretty high-flown 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 bell-jar 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 H-bomb 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 understands-even if subcutaneously-that 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 she/he 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, semi-science-fiction, and a kind of existential vapidity ( "Hi-ho . . . so it goes . . . how about that"); or Heller's efforts to "see" it as an endless tragicomedy played out in an open-air madhouse; or Pynchon's effort to "see" it as the longest-running 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 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 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 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 sometime, 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 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 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.