JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 308 из 359In Chris Kelly I believe the face we see is that of our old friend the Vampire . . . as we see it in a movie which resembles Campbell's novel by turns, the brilliant Canadian director David Cronenberg's They Came from Within .
Clare, Edmund Hall, and George Pugh, a cinema owner whose elderly mother has also been victimized by Kelly, join together in a strange and reluctant three-way partnership to track this supernatural cannibal down. Here again we feel echoes of the classic tale of the Vampire, Stoker's Dracula . And perhaps we never feel the changes of the nearly eighty years which lie between the two books so strongly as we do in the contrast between the group of six which forms to track down Count Dracula and the group of three which forms to track down "Chris Kelly." There is no sense of self-righteousness in Clare, Edmund, and George-they are truly little people, afraid, confused, often depressed; they turn inward to themselves rather than outward toward each other, and while we sense their fright very strongly, there is no feeling about the book that Clare, Edmund, and George must prevail because their cause is just. They somehow symbolize the glum and rather drab place England has become in the second half of the twentieth century, and we feel that if some or all of them do muddle through, it will be due more to impersonal luck than to any action of their own.
And the three of them do track Kelly down . . . after a fashion. The climax of the hunt takes place in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition, and here Campbell has created one of the dreamiest and effective sequences in all of modern horror fiction. In its surreal and nightmarish evocation of ancient evil, in the glimpses it gives us of "absolute power," it is finally a voice from the latter part of the twentieth century which speaks powerfully in the language which Lovecraft can be said to have invented. Here is nothing so pallid or so imitative as a Lovecraft "pastiche," but a viable, believable version of those Lovecraftian Elder Gods that so haunted Dunwich, Arkham, Providence, Central Falls . . . and the pages of Weird Tales magazine.
*Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I think-witness the strong public reactions to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . Something rather more important than a harmless roller-coaster ride is going on here, I think; here's a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex and throttle them.
Clare, Edmund Hall, and George Pugh, a cinema owner whose elderly mother has also been victimized by Kelly, join together in a strange and reluctant three-way partnership to track this supernatural cannibal down. Here again we feel echoes of the classic tale of the Vampire, Stoker's Dracula . And perhaps we never feel the changes of the nearly eighty years which lie between the two books so strongly as we do in the contrast between the group of six which forms to track down Count Dracula and the group of three which forms to track down "Chris Kelly." There is no sense of self-righteousness in Clare, Edmund, and George-they are truly little people, afraid, confused, often depressed; they turn inward to themselves rather than outward toward each other, and while we sense their fright very strongly, there is no feeling about the book that Clare, Edmund, and George must prevail because their cause is just. They somehow symbolize the glum and rather drab place England has become in the second half of the twentieth century, and we feel that if some or all of them do muddle through, it will be due more to impersonal luck than to any action of their own.
And the three of them do track Kelly down . . . after a fashion. The climax of the hunt takes place in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition, and here Campbell has created one of the dreamiest and effective sequences in all of modern horror fiction. In its surreal and nightmarish evocation of ancient evil, in the glimpses it gives us of "absolute power," it is finally a voice from the latter part of the twentieth century which speaks powerfully in the language which Lovecraft can be said to have invented. Here is nothing so pallid or so imitative as a Lovecraft "pastiche," but a viable, believable version of those Lovecraftian Elder Gods that so haunted Dunwich, Arkham, Providence, Central Falls . . . and the pages of Weird Tales magazine.
*Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I think-witness the strong public reactions to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . Something rather more important than a harmless roller-coaster ride is going on here, I think; here's a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex and throttle them.