Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

My plan is to discuss ten books that seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine: the horror story asboth literature and entertainment, a living part of twentieth-century literature, and worthy successors to such books as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmers's The King in Yellow . They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature-to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed.

Some of the books discussed here have been "best sellers"; some have been written by members of the so-called "fantasy community"; some have been written by people with no interest in fantasy or the supernatural for its own sake, but who have seen it as a particularly useful tool to be used once and then perhaps put aside forever (although many have also found that the use of this tool is apt to become habit-forming). Most of them-even those which cannot be neatly pigeonholed as "best sellers"-have been steady sellers across the years, probably because the horror tale, which is regarded by most serious critics in about the same light that Dr. Johnson regarded women preachers and dancing dogs, manages to consistently satisfy as entertainment even when it's only good. When it's great, it can deliver a megaton wallop (as it does in Lord of the Flies ) that other forms of literature can rarely equal. Story has always been the abiding virtue of the horror tale, from "The Monkey's Paw" to T. E. D. Klein's utterly flabbergasting novella of monsters (from Costa Rica, yet!) under the streets of New York, "Children of the Kingdom." That being so, one only wishes that those great writers among us who have also succeeded in becoming our greatest bores in recent years would attempt something in the genre and stop poking around in their navels for intellectual fluff.

I hope that by discussing these ten books, I can dilate upon those virtues of story and entertainment and perhaps even indicate some of the themes which seems to run through most good horror stories. I should be able to do this if I'm doing my job, because there just aren't that many thematic trails to go down. For all of their mythic hold over us, the field of the supernatural is a narrow one in the greater spread of general literature. We can depend on the reappearance of the Vampire, and our furry friend (who sometimes wears its fur on the inside) the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. But the time has also come to bring on that fourth archetype: the Ghost.