Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Levin's wit is probably a better place to start with Rosemary's Baby than his ability to plot a story. His output of novels has been relatively small-it averages out to one every five years or so-but it's interesting to note that one of the five, The Stepford Wives , works best as outright satire (William Goldman, the novelist-screenwriter who adapted that book for the screen, knew it; you will remember that earlier on we mentioned "Oh Frank, you're the best, you're the champ"), almost as farce, and Rosemary's Baby is a kind of socioreligious satire. We might also mention The Boys from Brazil , Levin's most recent novel, when we speak of his wit. The title itself is a pun, and although the book deals (even if only peripherally) with subjects such as the German death camps and the so-called "scientific experiments" that were carried out there (some of the "scientific experiments," we will recall, included trying to impregnate women with the sperm of dogs and administering lethal doses of poison to identical twins in order to see if they would expire in a similar span of time), it vibrates with its own nervous wit and seems to parody those Martin-Bormann-is-alive-and-well-and-livingin-Paraguay books that are apparently going to be with us even unto the end of the world.

*I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT.

I am not suggesting that Ira Levin is either Jackie Vernon or George Orwell masquerading in a fright wig-nothing so simple or simplistic. I am suggesting that the books he has written achieve suspense without turning into humorless thudding tracts (two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon , by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist , by William Peter Blatty-Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky).

Levin is one of the few writers who has returned more than once to the field of horror and the supernatural and who seems unafraid of the fact that much of the material the genre deals with is utterly foolish-and at that, he has done better than many critics, who visit the genre the way rich white ladies once visited the children of New England factory slaves on Thanksgiving with food baskets and on Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies.