Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Of The Doll Who Ate His Mother he has this to say-some of it bearing directly on the difference in the amount of endurance needed to do a novel: "What I wanted to do with The Doll was to invent a new monster, if that is possible, but perhaps the big thing was to actually write the novel, since previously I'd been doing short stories. In 1961 or '6i I made notes for a story about a black magician who was going to take revenge on his town or village for some real or imagined wrong it had done him. He was going to do this by using voodoo dolls to deform the babies-you'd have the standard pulp-magazine scene of the white-faced doctor coming out of the delivery room saying, 'My God, it's not human . . . !' And the twist was going to be that, after all these deformed infants had died, the black magician would use the voodoo dolls to bring them back to life. An amazingly tasteless idea. At about the same time the Thalidomide tragedy occurred, making the story idea a little too `topically tasteless' for me, and I dropped it.

"It resurfaced, I suppose, in The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which eats its way out of its mother's womb.

"How does writing novels differ from writing short stories? I think a novel gathers its own impetus. I have to creep up on it unawares, thinking to myself, `Maybe I'll start it next week, maybe I'll start it next month.' Then one day I sat down, began to write, and looked up at noon, thinking: `My God! I've started a novel! I don't believe it!

"Kirby [McCauley] said, when I asked him how long the novel should be, that 70,000 words or so would be about right, and I took him almost literally. When I got up around the 63,000 word mark, I thought: `Only 7000 words left-time to wrap this up.' That's why many of the later chapters seems terse.” Campbell's novel begins with Clare Frayn's brother Rob losing an arm and his life in a Liverpool car accident. The arm, torn off in the accident, is important because somebody makes off with it . . . and eats it. This muncher of arms, we are led to suppose, is a shadowy young man named Chris Kelly. Clare-who embodies many of the ideas already labeled as "new American gothic" (sure, Campbell is British, but many of his influences-both literary and cinematic-are American)-meets a crime reporter named Edmund Hall who believes that the man who caused Rob Frayn's death was the grown-up version of a boy he knew in school, a boy fascinated with death and cannibalism. In dealing with archetypes, I've not suggested that we deal out a Tarot card for the Ghoul, one of the more grisly creatures in monsterdom, believing that the eating of dead flesh and the drinking of blood are really parts of the same archetype. * Is there really such a thing as a "new monster"? In light of the genre's strictness, I think not, and Campbell must be content instead with a fresh perspective . . . no mean feat in itself.