Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

I'm going to try to go over the top; to see how much I can get away with.' “ In its construction, The Fog shows the effect of those apocalyptic Big Bug movies of the late fifties and early sixties. All the ingredients are there: we have a mad scientist who was screwing around with something he didn't understand and was killed by the mycoplasma he invented; the military testing secret weapons and unleashing the horror; the "young scientist” hero, John Holman, who we first meet bravely rescuing a little girl from the fissure that has Unleashed the Fog on an Unsuspecting World; the beautiful girlfriend, Casey; the obligatory gathering of scientists, who natter about "the F100 method of fog dispersion" and lament the fact that carbon dioxide can't be used to disperse the fog because "the organism thrives on it” and who inform us that the fog is really "a pleuro-pneumonia-like organism.” We will recognize these obligatory trappings of science fiction from such movies as Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis, Them! , and a dozen others; yet we will also recognize that trappings are all they are, and the heart of Herbert's novel lies not in the fog's origin or composition but in its decidedly Dionysian effects-murder, suicide, sexual aberrations, and all manner of deviant behavior. Holman, the hero, is our representative from a saner Apollonian world, and to do Herbert full justice, he manages to make Holman a good deal more interesting than the zeroheroes played by William Hopper, Craig Stevens, and Peter Graves in various of the Big Bug films . . . or consider, if you will, poor old Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , whose entire set of lines during the last third of the movie seems to consist of, "Keep firing at saucer!" and "Fire at saucer until it crashes!” Nonetheless, our interest in Holman's adventures and whether or not his girlfriend Casey will recover from the effects of her own bout with the fog ( and what will be her reaction to the information that she plunged a scissors into her father's stomach while under the influence?) seems pallid when compared to our morbid let's-slow-down-and-look-atthe-accident interest in the old lady who is eaten alive by her pet cats or the crazed pilot who crashes his loaded jumbo jet into the London skyscraper where his wife's lover works.

I suppose that popular fiction divides itself quite naturally into two halves: what we call "mainstream fiction" and that which I would call "pulp fiction.