Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Different languages seem particularly suited to different purposes; the French may have gotten a reputation for being great lovers because the French language seems particularly well suited to theexpression of emotion (there is no nicer way to say it than Je t'aime . . . and no better language in which to sound really lacked off at someone). German is the language of explanation and clarification ( but it is a cold language for all that; the sound of many people speaking German is the sound of large machines running in a factory). English serves very well to express thought and moderately well to express image, but there is nothing inherently lovely about it (although as someone has pointed out, it has its queerly perverse moments; think of the lovely and euphonious sound of the words "proctological examination" ) . It has always seemed to me ill suited to the expression of feeling, though. Neither "Why don't we go to bed together" or the cheerful but undeniably crude "Baby, let's fuck" can touch " Voulez-vous coucher avec moi c'est soir ?" But we must do the best we can with what we have . . . and as readers of Shakespeare and Faulkner will attest, the best we can do is often remarkably good.

American writers are more apt to mangle the language than our British cousins (although I'd argue with anyone that English English is much more bloodless than American English-many British writers have the unhappy habit of droning; droning in perfectly grammatical English, but a drone is still a drone for a' that and a' that), often because they were subjected to poor or erratic teaching methods as children, but the best American work is striking in a way that British prose and poetry rarely is anymore: see, for instance, such disparate writers as James Dickey, Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, John Irving.

Both Campbell and Herbert write that unmistakable, impeccable English line; their stories go out into the world with their pants buttoned, their zippers zipped, and their braces in their places-but to what a different ultimate effect!

James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces. It is not a tremendously artistic method of attack, and no one is ever going to compare him to Doris Lessing or V. S. Naipaul . . . but it works.

The Fog (no relation to the film of the same name by John Carpenter) is a multiple-viewpoint story about what happens when an underground explosion breaches a steel cannister that has been buried by the British Ministry of Defense. The cannister contains a living organism called a mycoplasma ( an ominous protoplasm that may remind readers of an obscure Japanese horror film from the fifties titled The H-Men ) which resembles a smoggy yellow-green mist.