JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 306 из 359A story you will not find in that book, unfortunately, is "The Companion," in which a lonely roan who tours "funfairs" on his holidays encounters a horror beyond my ability to describe while riding a GhostTrain into its tunnel.
"The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now. Campbell is literate in a field which has attracted too many comic-book intellects, cool in a field where too many writers-myself included-tend toward panting melodrama, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners often fall prey to cant and stupid "rules" of fantasy composition.
But not all good short-story writers in this field are able to make the jump to the novel (Poe tried with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and made a conditional success of the job; Lovecraft failed ambitiously twice, with The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the rather more interesting At the Mountains of Madness , whose plot is remarkably Pym -like ) .
Campbell made the jump almost effortlessly, with a novel as good as its title was off-putting: The Doll Who Ate His Mother . The book was published with absolutely no fanfare in 1977 in hardcover, and then with an even greater lack of fanfare a year later in paperback . . . one of those cases that make a writer wonder if publishers don't practice their own sort of voodoo, singling certain books out to be ritually slaughtered in the marketplace.
Well, never mind that. Concerning the jump from the short story to the novel-writing the latter is much like long-distance running, and you can almost feel some would-be novelists getting tired. You sense they're starting to breathe a trifle hard by page one hundred, to puff and blow by page two hundred, and to finally limp over the finish line with little to recommend them beyond the bare fact that they have finished. But Campbell runs well.
He is personally an amusing, even a jolly man (at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention he presented Stephen R. Donaldson with the British Fantasy Award, a modernistic little statuette, for his Thomas Covenant trilogy; Campbell, in that marvelously broad and calm Liverpool accent, referred to it as "the skeletal dildo." The audience broke up, and someone at my table marveled, "He sounds just like one of the Beatles."). As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out.
"The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now. Campbell is literate in a field which has attracted too many comic-book intellects, cool in a field where too many writers-myself included-tend toward panting melodrama, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners often fall prey to cant and stupid "rules" of fantasy composition.
But not all good short-story writers in this field are able to make the jump to the novel (Poe tried with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and made a conditional success of the job; Lovecraft failed ambitiously twice, with The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the rather more interesting At the Mountains of Madness , whose plot is remarkably Pym -like ) .
Campbell made the jump almost effortlessly, with a novel as good as its title was off-putting: The Doll Who Ate His Mother . The book was published with absolutely no fanfare in 1977 in hardcover, and then with an even greater lack of fanfare a year later in paperback . . . one of those cases that make a writer wonder if publishers don't practice their own sort of voodoo, singling certain books out to be ritually slaughtered in the marketplace.
Well, never mind that. Concerning the jump from the short story to the novel-writing the latter is much like long-distance running, and you can almost feel some would-be novelists getting tired. You sense they're starting to breathe a trifle hard by page one hundred, to puff and blow by page two hundred, and to finally limp over the finish line with little to recommend them beyond the bare fact that they have finished. But Campbell runs well.
He is personally an amusing, even a jolly man (at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention he presented Stephen R. Donaldson with the British Fantasy Award, a modernistic little statuette, for his Thomas Covenant trilogy; Campbell, in that marvelously broad and calm Liverpool accent, referred to it as "the skeletal dildo." The audience broke up, and someone at my table marveled, "He sounds just like one of the Beatles."). As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out.