JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 293 из 359My brother had a business there and I knew I could get some work for us to live on if I couldn't sell any writing. ** So we went. We were renting a house at Sound Beach on Long Island when I wrote the book. I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. It was a silly comedy with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman and Aldo Ray and, in this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, `What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came.
"The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all.
*Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written time-travel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past: Finney's Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the-century times on America's east coast, and Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the idea-and different outcomes-cannot be imagined.
** In The Shrinking Man , Scott Carey's life becomes an ever-louder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly.
There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I -would imagine what my hero was up to that day. * I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it ail there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of déjà vu .
"It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately.
"The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all.
*Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written time-travel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past: Finney's Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the-century times on America's east coast, and Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the idea-and different outcomes-cannot be imagined.
** In The Shrinking Man , Scott Carey's life becomes an ever-louder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly.
There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I -would imagine what my hero was up to that day. * I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it ail there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of déjà vu .
"It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately.