Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

We know that ghosts aren't inherently evil-in fact, most of us have heard or read of a case or cases where ghosts have been rather helpful; the shade who told Auntie Clarissa not to take that plane or who warned Grampy Vic to go home fastbecause the house was catching on fire. My mother told me that after suffering a near -fatal heart attack, a close friend of hers had a visit from Jesus Christ in his hospital room. Jesus just opened the door of Emil's I.C. room and asked him how he was doing. Emil allowed as how he was afraid he was a goner, and asked Jesus if He had come to take him. "Not yet,” Jesus said, leaning casually against the door. "You've got another six years in you. Relax." He then left. Emil recovered. That was in 1953; I heard the story from my mother around 1957.

*At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel.

Emil died in 1959-six years after his heart attack.

I have even had some truckle with "good ghosts" in my own work; near the end of The Stand , Nick Andros, a character who has been killed earlier in an explosion, returns to tell half-witted but good-hearted Tom Cullen how to care for the novel's hero, Stu Redman, after Stu has fallen gravely ill with pneumonia. But for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil, and as a result we find ourselves back in a familiar place: examining the Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict and watching for the mutant.

In Ghost Story , Don Wanderley is summoned by four old men who call themselves the Chowder Society. Don's uncle, the fifth member, died of an apparent heart attack the year before while attending a party thrown for the mysterious actress Ann-Veronica Moore. As with all good gothics, a summary of the plot beyond this basic situation would be unfair-not because the veteran reader of this material will find much that is new in the plot (it would be surprising if he, she, or we did, in light of Straub's intention to fuse as many of the classic ghost story elements as possible), but because a bare summary of any gothic makes the book look absurdly complex and labored. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic- it's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!). The writing itself is beautifully tuned and balanced.