JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 233 из 359If all cats are gray in the dark, so, basically, are all people afraid of it.
"The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her . . . to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bonedeep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and . . . violating, like a sly, terrible burglar.
A house askew is one of the not-rightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant ....
"I came to write of a new house that was . . . let's say malignant . . . for the very simple reason that I wanted to see if I could write a good ghost story . . . . I was tired and rather simple-minded from a two-year stint of heavy, serious, 'writery' writing, yet I wanted to be at work, and thought the ghost story would be fun . . . and as I was casting about in my mind for a good hook, or handle, a young architect bought the lovely, wooded lot next to our house and began to build a contemporary house on it. My writing room, upstairs under the eaves of our old house, looks right into the lot next door, and I would sit and stare dreamily out my window and watch the wild woods and hills go down and the house go up, and one day the inevitable 'What if' that starts all writers writing bloomed in my mind, and we were off. 'What if,' I thought, 'instead of an ancient haunted priory on the coast of Cornwall or a pre-Revolutionary farmhouse in Bucks County with a visitant or two, or even the ruins of an antebellum plantation house with a hoopskirted spectre wailing around the desecrated chimney for her lost world, you had a brand-new contemporary going up in an affluent suburb of a large city? You'd expect the priory and the farmhouse and the plantation to be haunted. But the contemporary?
Wouldn't that give it an even meaner, nastier, little fillip? Serve to emphasize by contrast and horror? I thought it would . . . . "I'm still not sure how I arrived at the idea that the house would use its sheer loveliness to attract people, and then begin to turn their own deepest weaknesses, their soft spots, against them.
"The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her . . . to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bonedeep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and . . . violating, like a sly, terrible burglar.
A house askew is one of the not-rightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant ....
"I came to write of a new house that was . . . let's say malignant . . . for the very simple reason that I wanted to see if I could write a good ghost story . . . . I was tired and rather simple-minded from a two-year stint of heavy, serious, 'writery' writing, yet I wanted to be at work, and thought the ghost story would be fun . . . and as I was casting about in my mind for a good hook, or handle, a young architect bought the lovely, wooded lot next to our house and began to build a contemporary house on it. My writing room, upstairs under the eaves of our old house, looks right into the lot next door, and I would sit and stare dreamily out my window and watch the wild woods and hills go down and the house go up, and one day the inevitable 'What if' that starts all writers writing bloomed in my mind, and we were off. 'What if,' I thought, 'instead of an ancient haunted priory on the coast of Cornwall or a pre-Revolutionary farmhouse in Bucks County with a visitant or two, or even the ruins of an antebellum plantation house with a hoopskirted spectre wailing around the desecrated chimney for her lost world, you had a brand-new contemporary going up in an affluent suburb of a large city? You'd expect the priory and the farmhouse and the plantation to be haunted. But the contemporary?
Wouldn't that give it an even meaner, nastier, little fillip? Serve to emphasize by contrast and horror? I thought it would . . . . "I'm still not sure how I arrived at the idea that the house would use its sheer loveliness to attract people, and then begin to turn their own deepest weaknesses, their soft spots, against them.