JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 236 из 359I also feel good about the fact that, to me, all the characters are still extremely sympathetic people, even this long after writing and after this many rereadings. I cared very much what happened to them as I unveiled them on the pages, and I still care about them.
"Maybe it succeeds, too, in being an utterly contemporary horror tale. Maybe this is the wave of the future. It isn't the thing that goes bump in your house in the night that is going to do you in in this brave new world; it's your house itself. In a world where the very furniture of your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange, perhaps the only thing we're going to have to fall back on is whatever innate decency we can find deep within ourselves. In a way, I do not think this is a bad thing.” A phrase that stands out in Siddon's analysis of her own work-at least it stands out to me- is this one: ". . . to me there was very real gallantry," she says, "in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . ." We might think of this as a uniquely Southern sentiment, and as ladylike as she is, Anne Rivers Siddons is squarely in a Southern tradition of gothic writers.
She tells us she has jettisoned the ruins of the antebellum plantation, and so she has, but in a wider sense, The House Next Door is very much the same spooky, tumble-down plantation home where writers as seemingly disparate but as essentially similar as William Faulkner, Harry Crews, and Flannery O'Connor-probably the greatest American shortstory writer of the postwar era-have lived before her. It is a home where even such a really gruesomely bad writer as William Bradford Huie has rented space from time to time.
If the Southern experience were to be viewed as untilled soil, then we would have to say that almost any writer, no matter how good or bad, who deeply feels that Southern experience could plant a seed and have it grow-as an example I recommend Thomas Cullinan's novel The Beguiled (made into a good Clint Eastwood film, directed by Don Siegel). Here is a novel which is "written pretty good," as a friend of mine likes to put it-meaning, of course, nuthin’ special. No Saul Bellow, no Bernard Malamud, but at least not down there in steerage with people like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, who apparently wouldn't know the difference between a balanced line of prose and a shit-and-anchovy pizza. If Cullinan had elected to write a more conventional novel, it would stick out in no one's mind. Instead, he came up with this mad gothic tale about a Union soldier who loses his legs and then his life to the deadly angels of mercy who dwell in a ruined girls' school that has been left behind in Sherman's march to the sea.
"Maybe it succeeds, too, in being an utterly contemporary horror tale. Maybe this is the wave of the future. It isn't the thing that goes bump in your house in the night that is going to do you in in this brave new world; it's your house itself. In a world where the very furniture of your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange, perhaps the only thing we're going to have to fall back on is whatever innate decency we can find deep within ourselves. In a way, I do not think this is a bad thing.” A phrase that stands out in Siddon's analysis of her own work-at least it stands out to me- is this one: ". . . to me there was very real gallantry," she says, "in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . ." We might think of this as a uniquely Southern sentiment, and as ladylike as she is, Anne Rivers Siddons is squarely in a Southern tradition of gothic writers.
She tells us she has jettisoned the ruins of the antebellum plantation, and so she has, but in a wider sense, The House Next Door is very much the same spooky, tumble-down plantation home where writers as seemingly disparate but as essentially similar as William Faulkner, Harry Crews, and Flannery O'Connor-probably the greatest American shortstory writer of the postwar era-have lived before her. It is a home where even such a really gruesomely bad writer as William Bradford Huie has rented space from time to time.
If the Southern experience were to be viewed as untilled soil, then we would have to say that almost any writer, no matter how good or bad, who deeply feels that Southern experience could plant a seed and have it grow-as an example I recommend Thomas Cullinan's novel The Beguiled (made into a good Clint Eastwood film, directed by Don Siegel). Here is a novel which is "written pretty good," as a friend of mine likes to put it-meaning, of course, nuthin’ special. No Saul Bellow, no Bernard Malamud, but at least not down there in steerage with people like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, who apparently wouldn't know the difference between a balanced line of prose and a shit-and-anchovy pizza. If Cullinan had elected to write a more conventional novel, it would stick out in no one's mind. Instead, he came up with this mad gothic tale about a Union soldier who loses his legs and then his life to the deadly angels of mercy who dwell in a ruined girls' school that has been left behind in Sherman's march to the sea.