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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 29 из 359and Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival , a marvelous and terrifying collection of a darker world justbeyond the threshold of this one.
But Lovecraft was dead before Pearl Harbor; Bradbury would turn his hand more and more often to his own lyric blend of science fiction and fantasy (and it was only after he did so that his work began to be accepted by such mainstream magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post ) ; Robert Bloch had begun to write his suspense stories, using what he had learned in his first two decades as a writer to create a powerful series of offbeat novels, which are only surpassed by the novels of Cornell Woolrich.
During and after the war years, horror fiction was in decline. The age did not like it. It was a period of rapid scientific development and rationalism-they grow very well in a war atmosphere, thanks- and it became a period which is now thought of by fans and writers alike as "the golden age of science fiction." While Weird Tales plugged grimly along, holding its own but hardly reaping millions (it would fold in the mid-fifties after a down-sizing from its original gaudy pulp size to a digest form failed to effect a cure for its ailing circulation), the sf market boomed, spawning a dozen well-remembered pulps and making names such as Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell, and del Rey, if not household words, at least familiar and exciting to an ever-growing community of fans dedicated to the proposition of the rocket ship, the space station, and the ever-popular death ray.
So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir. It was around that time that two men named Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unnoticed in that particular dungeon. Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of B-pictures in the early fifties, they would make their own.
Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs. They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV. The insiders had seen the future and it belonged to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The consensus among those who cared at all ( and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nichols-on would lose their shirts very quickly.
But during the twenty-five years that the company they formed, American-International Pictures, has been around (it's now Arkoff alone; James Nicholson died several years ago), it has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out.
But Lovecraft was dead before Pearl Harbor; Bradbury would turn his hand more and more often to his own lyric blend of science fiction and fantasy (and it was only after he did so that his work began to be accepted by such mainstream magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post ) ; Robert Bloch had begun to write his suspense stories, using what he had learned in his first two decades as a writer to create a powerful series of offbeat novels, which are only surpassed by the novels of Cornell Woolrich.
During and after the war years, horror fiction was in decline. The age did not like it. It was a period of rapid scientific development and rationalism-they grow very well in a war atmosphere, thanks- and it became a period which is now thought of by fans and writers alike as "the golden age of science fiction." While Weird Tales plugged grimly along, holding its own but hardly reaping millions (it would fold in the mid-fifties after a down-sizing from its original gaudy pulp size to a digest form failed to effect a cure for its ailing circulation), the sf market boomed, spawning a dozen well-remembered pulps and making names such as Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell, and del Rey, if not household words, at least familiar and exciting to an ever-growing community of fans dedicated to the proposition of the rocket ship, the space station, and the ever-popular death ray.
So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir. It was around that time that two men named Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unnoticed in that particular dungeon. Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of B-pictures in the early fifties, they would make their own.
Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs. They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV. The insiders had seen the future and it belonged to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The consensus among those who cared at all ( and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nichols-on would lose their shirts very quickly.
But during the twenty-five years that the company they formed, American-International Pictures, has been around (it's now Arkoff alone; James Nicholson died several years ago), it has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out.