Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Horror went through a boom period in the 1930s, When people hardpressed by the Depression weren't ponying up at the box office to see a hundred Busby Berkeley girls dancing to the tune of "We're in the Money," they were perhaps releasing their anxieties in another way-by watching Boris Karloff shamble across the moors in Frankenstein or Bela Lugosi creep through the dark with his capeup over his mouth in Dracula . The '30s also marked the rise of the so-called "Shudder Pulps," which encompassed everything from Weird Tales to Black Mark .

We find few horror movies or novels of note in the 1940s, and the one great magazine of fantasy which debuted in that decade, Unknown, did not survive for long. The great Universal Studios monsters of the Depression days-Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Count-were dying in that particularly messy and embarrassing way that the movies seem to reserve for the terminally ill; instead of being retired with honors and decently interred in the mouldy soil of their European churchyards, Hollywood decided to play them for laughs, squeezing every last quarter and dime admission possible out of the poor old things before letting them go. Hence, Abbott &

Costello met the monsters, as did the Bowery Boys, not to mention those lovable eyeboinkers and head-knockers, the Three Stooges. In the '40s, the monsters themselves became stooges. Years later, in another postwar period, Mel Brooks would give us his version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein -starring Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman instead of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

The eclipse of horror in fiction that began in 1940 lasted for twenty-five years. Oh, an occasional novel such as Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man or William Sloane's Edge of Running Water would pop up, reminding us that the genre was still there (although even Matheson's grim man-against-giant-spider tale, a horror story if there ever was one, was touted as science fiction), but the idea of a best-selling horror novel would have been laughed out of court along Publisher's Row.

As with the movies, the golden age of weird fiction had passed in the '30s, when Weird Tales was at the peak of its influence and quality ( not to mention its circulation), publishing the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, the young Robert Block, Dr. David H. Keller, and, of course, the twentieth-century horror story's dark and baroque prince, H. P. Lovecraft. I will not offend those who have followed weird fiction over a span of fifty years by suggesting that horror disappeared in the 1940s; indeed it did not. Arkham House had then been founded by the late August Derleth, and Arkham published what I regard as its most important works in the period 1939-1950-works including Lovecraft's The Outrider and Beyond the Wall of Sleep , Henry S. Whitehead's Jumbee, The Opener of the Way and Pleasant Dreams , by Robert Bloch . . .