JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 304 из 359*
*This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.
8
It wouldn't be right to wind up even so brief a discussion of the modern horror novel as this one without mentioning two young British writers, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert. They are a part of a whole new generation of British fantasy writers who seem to be revitalizing the genre by cross-fertilization much as British poets helped to revitalize American poetry during the early sixties. Besides Campbell and Herbert, the two who are perhaps best known over here, there is Robert Aickman (who could hardly be called a young Turk-but since such books as Cold Hand in Mine have brought him to a wider American audience, it seems fair enough to classify him as part of the British new wave), Nick Sharman, Thomas Tessier, an American living in London, who has recently published a novel called The Nightwalker , perhaps the finest werewolf novel of the last twenty years, and a score of others.
As Paul Theroux-another expatriate American living in London-has pointed out, there is something uniquely British about the tale of horror ( perhaps particularly those which deal with the archetype of the Ghost). Theroux, who has written his own low-key horror tale, The Black House , favors the mannered but grisly tales of M. R. James, and they do seem to summarize everything that is best in the classic British horror story. Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert are both modernists, and while this family is really too small to avoid a certain resemblance even in cousins twice removed, it seems to me that both of these men, who are worlds apart in terms of style, point of view, and method of attack, are doing things that are exciting and worthy of mention.
Campbell, a Liverpudlian ( "You talk just like one of the Beatles," a woman marvels to a writer from Liverpool in Campbell's new novel, The Parasite ), writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning.
*This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.
8
It wouldn't be right to wind up even so brief a discussion of the modern horror novel as this one without mentioning two young British writers, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert. They are a part of a whole new generation of British fantasy writers who seem to be revitalizing the genre by cross-fertilization much as British poets helped to revitalize American poetry during the early sixties. Besides Campbell and Herbert, the two who are perhaps best known over here, there is Robert Aickman (who could hardly be called a young Turk-but since such books as Cold Hand in Mine have brought him to a wider American audience, it seems fair enough to classify him as part of the British new wave), Nick Sharman, Thomas Tessier, an American living in London, who has recently published a novel called The Nightwalker , perhaps the finest werewolf novel of the last twenty years, and a score of others.
As Paul Theroux-another expatriate American living in London-has pointed out, there is something uniquely British about the tale of horror ( perhaps particularly those which deal with the archetype of the Ghost). Theroux, who has written his own low-key horror tale, The Black House , favors the mannered but grisly tales of M. R. James, and they do seem to summarize everything that is best in the classic British horror story. Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert are both modernists, and while this family is really too small to avoid a certain resemblance even in cousins twice removed, it seems to me that both of these men, who are worlds apart in terms of style, point of view, and method of attack, are doing things that are exciting and worthy of mention.
Campbell, a Liverpudlian ( "You talk just like one of the Beatles," a woman marvels to a writer from Liverpool in Campbell's new novel, The Parasite ), writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning.