Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

When we first meet the book's hero (and here I think Finney probably would object if I used the more formal word protagonist . . . so I won't), Dr. Miles Bennell, he is letting his last patient of the day out; a sprained thumb. Becky Driscoll enters-and how is that for the perfect all-American name?- with the first off-key note: her cousin Wilma has somehow gotten the idea that her Uncle Ira really isn't her uncle anymore. But this note is faint and barely audible under the simple melodies of small-town life that Finney plays so well in the book's opening chapters . . . and Finney's rendering of the small-town archetype in this book may be the best to come out of the 1950s The keynote that Finney sounds again and again in these first few chapters is so low-key pleasant that in less sure hands it would become insipid: nice. Again and again Finney returns to that word; things in Santa Mira, he tells us, are not great, not wild and crazy, not terrible, not boring. Things in Santa Mira are nice. No one here is laboring under that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times.” "For the first time I really saw her face again. I saw it was the same nice face . . ." This from page nine. A few pages later: "It was nice out, temperature around sixty-five, and the light was good; . . . still plenty of sun.” Cousin Wilma is also nice, if rather plain. Miles thinks she would have made a good wife and mother, but she just never married. "That's how it goes," Miles philosophizes, innocently unaware of any banality. 'He tells us he wouldn't have believed her the type of woman to have mental problems, "but still, you never know.” This stuff shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does; we feel that Miles has somehow stepped through the first-person convention and is actually talking to us, just as it seems that Tom Sawyer is actually talking to us in the Twain novel . . . and Santa Mira, California, as Finney presents it to us, is exactly the sort of town where we would almost expect to see Tom whitewashing a fence (there would be no Huck around, sleeping in a hogshead, though; not in Santa Mira).

The Body Snatchers is the only Finney book which can rightly be called a horror novel, but Santa Mira-which is a typical "nice" Finney setting-is the perfect locale for such a tale.

Perhaps one horror novel is all that Finney had to write; certainly it was enough to set the mold for what we now call "the modern horror novel." If there is such a thing, there can be no doubt at all that Finney had a large hand in inventing it.