Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Guy removes Rosemary's wedding ring, symbolically ending their marriage, but also becoming a kind of best-man-in-reverse; Rosemary's friend Hutch comes with weather warnings (and what is a hutch anyway but a safe place for rabbits?). During intercourse, Guy actually becomes the devil, and closing the dream out we see Terry again, this time not as a failed bride of Satan but as a sacrificial opener of the way.

In less expert hands such a dream scene might have become tiresome and didactic, but Levin carries it off lightly and quickly, compressing the entire sequence into just five pages.

But the strongest watchspring of Rosemary's Baby isn't the religious subtheme but the book's use of urban paranoia. The conflict between Rosemary Reilly and Rosemary Woodhouse enriches the story, but if the book achieves horror-and I think it does-it does so because Levin is able to play upon these innate feelings of paranoia so skillfully.

Horror is a groping for pressure points, and where are we any more vulnerable than in our feelings of paranoia? In many ways, Rosemary's Baby is like a sinister Woody Allen film, and the Woodhouse/ Reilly dichotomy is useful here, too. Besides being a Catholic forever beneath her agnostic veneer, Rosemary is, beneath her carefully acquired cosmopolitan varnish, a small-town girl . . . and you can take the girl out of the country, but et cetera, et cetera.

There is a saying-and I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it to-that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In a crazy sort of way, Rosemary's story is of a coming to that sort of awareness. We become paranoid before she does (Minnie, for instance, being purposely slow with the dishes so Roman can talk to Guy-or make him a pitch-in the other room), but following her dreamlike encounter with the devil and her subsequent pregnancy, her own paranoia follows along. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds scratches-as if from claws-all over her body. "Don't yell," Guy says, showing her his fingernails; "I already filed them down.” Before long, Minnie and Roman have begun a campaign to get Rosemary to use their obstetrician-the famous Abe Sapirstein-instead of the young guy she had been going to.

Don't do that, Rosemary , we want to tell her; he's one of them.