JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 217 из 359But that first heady rush is over, and editors in New York no longer automatically scramble for the Standard Contract Form and fill in a meaty advance as soon as something in the story comes out of thewoodwork . . . . Aspiring writers please take note.
Against this background, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan published Peter Straub's Julia in 1975. It was not his first novel; he had published a novel called Marriages -a nonsupernatural "this-is-the-way-we-live-now" sort of story-two years previous. Although Straub is an American, he and his wife lived in England and Ireland for ten years, and in both execution and intent, Julia is an English ghost story. The setting is English, most of the characters are English, and most importantly, the novel's diction is English-cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base. There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book's most vital situation certainly suggests it: Kate, the daughter of Julia and Magnus, has choked on a piece of meat and Julia kills her daughter while trying to perform a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife. The girl, it would appear, then returns as a malevolent spirit.
We aren't given the tracheotomy in any detail-the blood splashing the walls and the mother's hand, the terror and the cries. This is the past; we see it in reflected light. Much later, Julia sees the girl who may or may not be Kate's ghost burying something in the sand. When the girl leaves, Julia digs up the hole, discovering first a knife and then the mutilated corpse of a turtle. This reflection back upon the botched tracheotomy is elegant, but it has little heat.
Two years later Straub published a second supernatural novel, If You Could See Me Now .
Like Julia , If You Could See Me Now is a novel occupied with the idea of the revenant, that vengeful spirit from an undead past. All of Straub's supernatural novels work effectively when dealing with these old ghosts; they are stories of the past continuing to work on the present in a malevolent way. It has been suggested that Ross McDonald is writing gothics rather than private eye novels; it could be said that Peter Straub is writing gothics rather than horror novels. What distinguishes his work in Julia, If You Could See Me Now , and, most splendidly, in Ghost Story is his refusal to view the gothic conventions as static ones. All three of these books have much in common with the classic gothics of the genre- The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer , even Frankenstein (although in terms of its telling, Frankenstein is actually less a gothic and more a modern novel than Ghost Story )-they are all books where the past eventually becomes more important than the present.
Against this background, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan published Peter Straub's Julia in 1975. It was not his first novel; he had published a novel called Marriages -a nonsupernatural "this-is-the-way-we-live-now" sort of story-two years previous. Although Straub is an American, he and his wife lived in England and Ireland for ten years, and in both execution and intent, Julia is an English ghost story. The setting is English, most of the characters are English, and most importantly, the novel's diction is English-cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base. There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book's most vital situation certainly suggests it: Kate, the daughter of Julia and Magnus, has choked on a piece of meat and Julia kills her daughter while trying to perform a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife. The girl, it would appear, then returns as a malevolent spirit.
We aren't given the tracheotomy in any detail-the blood splashing the walls and the mother's hand, the terror and the cries. This is the past; we see it in reflected light. Much later, Julia sees the girl who may or may not be Kate's ghost burying something in the sand. When the girl leaves, Julia digs up the hole, discovering first a knife and then the mutilated corpse of a turtle. This reflection back upon the botched tracheotomy is elegant, but it has little heat.
Two years later Straub published a second supernatural novel, If You Could See Me Now .
Like Julia , If You Could See Me Now is a novel occupied with the idea of the revenant, that vengeful spirit from an undead past. All of Straub's supernatural novels work effectively when dealing with these old ghosts; they are stories of the past continuing to work on the present in a malevolent way. It has been suggested that Ross McDonald is writing gothics rather than private eye novels; it could be said that Peter Straub is writing gothics rather than horror novels. What distinguishes his work in Julia, If You Could See Me Now , and, most splendidly, in Ghost Story is his refusal to view the gothic conventions as static ones. All three of these books have much in common with the classic gothics of the genre- The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer , even Frankenstein (although in terms of its telling, Frankenstein is actually less a gothic and more a modern novel than Ghost Story )-they are all books where the past eventually becomes more important than the present.