JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 248 из 359Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself.
No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair . . . . The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.
And even more chilling, more to the point: Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep , Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners-what breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really , she told herself, really , Eleanor.
We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of nonEuclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180º. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.
Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seems-it runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead , one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff.
But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I think-certainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stained-glass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet.
No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair . . . . The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.
And even more chilling, more to the point: Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep , Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners-what breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really , she told herself, really , Eleanor.
We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of nonEuclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180º. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.
Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seems-it runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead , one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff.
But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I think-certainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stained-glass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet.