JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 235 из 359The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw, and I thought it would make a good story.
"I still think it did . . . I think it holds up well . . . . But it is only now that I am able to read the book with any equanimity. About a third of the way through it, the writing ceased to be fun and became something as oppressive to me as it was obsessive; I realized I was into something vast and terrible and not at all funny; I was hurting and destroying people or allowing them to be hurt and destroyed, which amounts to the same thing. There is in me . . . some leftover streak of Puritan ethic, or squinty-eyed Calvinistic morality, that insists that THINGS MUST HAVE A POINT. I dislike anything gratuitous. Evil must not be allowed to get away unpunished, even though I know that it does, every day. Ultimately . . . there must be a day of reckoning for the Bad Thing, and I still have no idea if this is a strength or weakness . . . . It certainly does not lend itself to subtleties, but I do not see myself as a 'clever' writer. And so The House Next Door became very serious business indeed to me; I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . . I was glad they did not run away . . . I would hope that, faced with something as overwhelmingly vast and terrible and left with so few options, I would have the grace and courage to do as they did. I speak of them as though they were outside my control because I feel as if they are, and most of the way through the book I felt this . . . . There is an inevitability about the outcome . . . that, to me, was inherent even on the first page of the book. It happened this way because this is the way it would have happened in this time and this place to these people. That is a satisfying feeling to me, and it is not one that I have had about all my books. And so in that sense, I feel that it succeeds . . . . "On its simplest level, I think it works well as a piece of horror fiction that depends on the juxtaposition of the unimaginably terrible with the utterly ordinary . . . the wonderful Henry James `terror in sunlight' syndrome. Rosemary's Baby is the absolute master of this particular device, and it was that quality, in part, that I strove for.
"I still think it did . . . I think it holds up well . . . . But it is only now that I am able to read the book with any equanimity. About a third of the way through it, the writing ceased to be fun and became something as oppressive to me as it was obsessive; I realized I was into something vast and terrible and not at all funny; I was hurting and destroying people or allowing them to be hurt and destroyed, which amounts to the same thing. There is in me . . . some leftover streak of Puritan ethic, or squinty-eyed Calvinistic morality, that insists that THINGS MUST HAVE A POINT. I dislike anything gratuitous. Evil must not be allowed to get away unpunished, even though I know that it does, every day. Ultimately . . . there must be a day of reckoning for the Bad Thing, and I still have no idea if this is a strength or weakness . . . . It certainly does not lend itself to subtleties, but I do not see myself as a 'clever' writer. And so The House Next Door became very serious business indeed to me; I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . . I was glad they did not run away . . . I would hope that, faced with something as overwhelmingly vast and terrible and left with so few options, I would have the grace and courage to do as they did. I speak of them as though they were outside my control because I feel as if they are, and most of the way through the book I felt this . . . . There is an inevitability about the outcome . . . that, to me, was inherent even on the first page of the book. It happened this way because this is the way it would have happened in this time and this place to these people. That is a satisfying feeling to me, and it is not one that I have had about all my books. And so in that sense, I feel that it succeeds . . . . "On its simplest level, I think it works well as a piece of horror fiction that depends on the juxtaposition of the unimaginably terrible with the utterly ordinary . . . the wonderful Henry James `terror in sunlight' syndrome. Rosemary's Baby is the absolute master of this particular device, and it was that quality, in part, that I strove for.