JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 268 из 359If we are all incipient paranoids-if we all take a quick glance down at ourselves when laughter erupts at the cocktail party, just to make sure we're zipped up and it isn't us they're laughing at-then I'd suggest that Finney uses this incipient paranoia quite deliberately to manipulate our emotions in favor of Miles, Becky, and Miles's friends, the Belicecs.
*At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination. Ray Bradbury began to be noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury's name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold.
Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, free-floating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache. Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the uncanny Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.
"Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today-I've been waiting for this!-today he got a haircut-” I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's gone ? You mean-” "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's there -the scar-exactly like Uncle Ira's!” So Finney serves notice that we are working here in a world of utter subjectivity . . . and utter paranoia. Of course we believe Wilma at once, even though we have no real proof; if for no other reason, we know from the title of the book that the "body snatchers" are out there somewhere.
By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Finney has turned us into equivalents of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It is easy enough to see why the book was eagerly seized upon by those who felt, in the early fifties, that there was either a Communist conspiracy afoot, or perhaps a fascist conspiracy that was operating in the name of antiCommunism. Because, either way or neither way, this is a book about conspiracy with strong paranoid overtones . . .
*At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination. Ray Bradbury began to be noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury's name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold.
Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, free-floating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache. Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the uncanny Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.
"Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today-I've been waiting for this!-today he got a haircut-” I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's gone ? You mean-” "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's there -the scar-exactly like Uncle Ira's!” So Finney serves notice that we are working here in a world of utter subjectivity . . . and utter paranoia. Of course we believe Wilma at once, even though we have no real proof; if for no other reason, we know from the title of the book that the "body snatchers" are out there somewhere.
By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Finney has turned us into equivalents of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It is easy enough to see why the book was eagerly seized upon by those who felt, in the early fifties, that there was either a Communist conspiracy afoot, or perhaps a fascist conspiracy that was operating in the name of antiCommunism. Because, either way or neither way, this is a book about conspiracy with strong paranoid overtones . . .