JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 278 из 359The Body Snatchers is a raw and directmass-market version of the despair over cultural dehumanization that fills T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury . Finney adroitly uses the classic science fiction situation of an invasion from outer space to symbolize the annihilation of the free personality in contemporary society . . . he succeeded in creating the most memorable of all pop cultural images of what jean Sheperd was describing on late-night radio as "creeping meatballism" : fields of pods that hatch into identical, spiritless, emotional vacuous zombies-who look so damned much just like you and me!
Finally, when we examine The Body Snatchers in light of the Tarot hand we have dealt ourselves, we find in Finney's novel almost every damned card. There is the Vampire, for surely those whom the pods have attacked and drained of life have become a modern, cultural version of the undead, as Richard Gid Powers points out; there is the Werewolf, for certainly these people are not really people at all, and have undergone a terrible sea change; the pods from space, a totally alien invasion of creatures who need no spaceships, can certainly also fit under the heading of the Thing Without a Name . . . and you might even say (if you wanted to stretch a point, and why the hell not?) that citizens of Santa Mira are no more than Ghosts of their former selves these days.
Not bad legs for a book which is "just a story.”
6
Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes defies any neat and easy categorization or analysis . . . and so far, at least, it has also defied the moviemakers, in spite of any number of options and scenarios, including Bradbury's own. This novel, originally published in 1962 and promptly given a critical pasting by critics in both the science fiction and fantasy genres,* has gone on through two dozen printings since its original publication. For all of that, it has not been Bradbury's most successful book, or his best-known one; The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine have probably all outsold it, and are certainly better known to the general reading public. But I believe that Something Wicked This Way Comes , a darkly poetic tall tale set in the half-real, half-mythical community of Green Town, Illinois, is probably Bradbury's best work-a shadowy descendant from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett. It is not a perfect book; at times Bradbury lapses into the purple overwriting that has characterized too much of his work in the seventies. Some passages are self-imitative and embarrassingly fulsome.
Finally, when we examine The Body Snatchers in light of the Tarot hand we have dealt ourselves, we find in Finney's novel almost every damned card. There is the Vampire, for surely those whom the pods have attacked and drained of life have become a modern, cultural version of the undead, as Richard Gid Powers points out; there is the Werewolf, for certainly these people are not really people at all, and have undergone a terrible sea change; the pods from space, a totally alien invasion of creatures who need no spaceships, can certainly also fit under the heading of the Thing Without a Name . . . and you might even say (if you wanted to stretch a point, and why the hell not?) that citizens of Santa Mira are no more than Ghosts of their former selves these days.
Not bad legs for a book which is "just a story.”
6
Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes defies any neat and easy categorization or analysis . . . and so far, at least, it has also defied the moviemakers, in spite of any number of options and scenarios, including Bradbury's own. This novel, originally published in 1962 and promptly given a critical pasting by critics in both the science fiction and fantasy genres,* has gone on through two dozen printings since its original publication. For all of that, it has not been Bradbury's most successful book, or his best-known one; The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine have probably all outsold it, and are certainly better known to the general reading public. But I believe that Something Wicked This Way Comes , a darkly poetic tall tale set in the half-real, half-mythical community of Green Town, Illinois, is probably Bradbury's best work-a shadowy descendant from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett. It is not a perfect book; at times Bradbury lapses into the purple overwriting that has characterized too much of his work in the seventies. Some passages are self-imitative and embarrassingly fulsome.