Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

His escape from a cellar, which Matheson succeeds in making as strange and frightening as any alien world, follows . . . and his final heartening discovery "that to nature there was no zero," and that there is a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm eventually meet.

The Shrinking Man can be read simply enough as a great adventure story-it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading ( others would include Bloch's The Scarf , Tolkien's The Hobbit , Berton Rouché's Feral ). But there's more going on in Matheson's novel than just adventure, a kind of surreal Outward Bound program for little people. On a more thoughtful level, it is a short novel which deals in a thoughtprovoking way with concepts of power-power lost and power found.

Let me pull back from the Matheson book briefly-like Douglas MacArthur, I shall return- and make the following wild statement: all fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.

Mediocre fantasy fiction generally appeals to people who feel a decided shortage of power in their own lives and obtain a vicarious shot of it by reading stories of strong-thewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking; in these stories we are apt to encounter a seven-foot-tall hero fighting his way up the alabaster stairs of some ruined temple, a flashing sword in one hand and a scantily clad beauty lolling over his free arm.

This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years.

The only writer who really got away with this sort of stuff was Robert E. Howard, a peculiar genius who lived and died in rural Texas ( Howard committed suicide as his mother lay comatose and terminally ill, apparently unable to face life without her).