Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of us-and I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the house-ten, eight, and four-who are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upper-upper-upper-middle-class materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do.

Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in” things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resulted-not to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii Five-O . The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up.

The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a descriptive term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit: "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors.