JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 310 из 359He carries us inexorably past levels of abnormal psychology into something that is much, much worse.
Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary roots-he mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares The Doll 's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of Psycho , where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness (winner of the Best Novel award at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention). In Our Lady of Darkness , Leiber adopts as his thesis the idea that when a city becomes complex enough, it may take on a tenebrous life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the people who live and work there-an evil sentience linked, in some unstated way, to the Elder Ones of Lovecraft and, more importantly in terms of the Leiber novel, Clark Ashton Smith. Amusingly, one of the characters in Our Lady of Darkness suggests that San Francisco did not become truly sentient until the Transamerica Pyramid was finished and occupied.
While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that might awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in The Doll Who Ate His Mother .
James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older tradition-the same sort of pulp horror-fiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, the early Sturgeon, the early Henry Kuttner, and, on the English side of the Atlantic, Guy N. Smith.
Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the all-time pulp horror classic: The Sucking Pit .
This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbert-and the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E.
Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary roots-he mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares The Doll 's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of Psycho , where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness (winner of the Best Novel award at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention). In Our Lady of Darkness , Leiber adopts as his thesis the idea that when a city becomes complex enough, it may take on a tenebrous life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the people who live and work there-an evil sentience linked, in some unstated way, to the Elder Ones of Lovecraft and, more importantly in terms of the Leiber novel, Clark Ashton Smith. Amusingly, one of the characters in Our Lady of Darkness suggests that San Francisco did not become truly sentient until the Transamerica Pyramid was finished and occupied.
While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that might awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in The Doll Who Ate His Mother .
James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older tradition-the same sort of pulp horror-fiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, the early Sturgeon, the early Henry Kuttner, and, on the English side of the Atlantic, Guy N. Smith.
Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the all-time pulp horror classic: The Sucking Pit .
This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbert-and the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E.