Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

We may also find ourselves returning to the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, since this tension exists in all horror fiction, the bad as well as the good, leading back to that endlessly fascinating question of who's okay andwho isn't. That's really the taproot, isn't it?

And we may also find that narcissism is the major difference between the old horror fiction and the new; that the monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors-at any time.

2

Probably Ghost Story by Peter Straub is the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror "wave" in the seventies-those three, of course, being Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist , and The Other . The fact that these three books, all published within five years of each other, enjoyed such wide popularity, helped to convince (or reconvince) publishers that horror fiction had a commercial potential much wider than the readership of such defunct magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown or the paperback reissues of Arkham House books.*

*A word about Arkham House. There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn't have at least one of those distinctive black-bound volumes upon his or her shelf . . . and probably in a high place of honor.

August Derleth, the founder of this small Wisconsin-based publishing house, was a rather uninspired novelist of the Sinclair Lewis school and an editor of pure genius: Arkham was first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book form . . . and these are only a few of Derleth's legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to twenty-five hundred copies, and some of them- Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Bradbury's Dark Carnival , for instance-are now highly soughtafter collectors' items.

The resulting scrambling to get the next "big" shiver-and-shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid-seventies, and more traditional best-sellers began to reappear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.

That isn't to say that publishers stopped looking for occult/horror novels or stopped publishing them; the mills of the publishing world grind slowly but exceedingly fine (which is one reason that such an amazing river of gruel streams forth every spring and fall from the larger New York publishing houses), and the so-called "mainstream horror novel" will probably be with us yet awhile.