JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 291 из 359not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams. Bradbury has introduced his novel with a quotation from Yeats: "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." He adds others, but we will perhaps agree that the line from Yeats is text enough . . . but let Bradbury himself have the final word, concerning one of Green Town's fascinations for the two dream-children of whom he has written "As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barberpole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts.” An apple . . . or maybe a dead rat and a string to swing it on.
7
Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality-and this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of one-seventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction.
Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbo-jumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a mid-twentieth-century version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism.
It's worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us.
7
Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality-and this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of one-seventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction.
Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbo-jumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a mid-twentieth-century version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism.
It's worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us.