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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 342 из 359Excluding a powerful if puzzling prologue set inIraq, William Friedkin's film The Exorcist actually begins in Georgetown, an Apollonian suburb if ever there was one. In the first scene, Ellen Burstyn is awakened by a crashing, roaring sound in the attic-it sounds like maybe someone let a lion loose up there. It is the first crack in the Apollonian world; soon everything else will pour through in a nightmare torrent. But this disturbing crack between our normal world and a chaos where demons are allowed to prey on innocent children is finally closed again at the end of the film. When Burstyn leads the pallid but obviously okay Linda Blair to the car in the film's final scene, we understand that the nightmare is over. Steady state has been restored. We have watched for the mutant and repulsed it. Equilibrium never felt so good.
*My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
Those are some of the things we've talked about in this book . . . but suppose all of that is only a sham and a false front? I don't say that it is, but perhaps (since this is the last dance) we ought to discuss the possibility, at least.
In our discussion of archetypes, we've had occasion to discuss the Werewolf, that fellow who is sometimes hairy and who is sometimes deceptively smooth. Suppose there was a double werewolf? Suppose that the creator of the horror story was, under his/her fright wig and plastic fangs, a Republican in a three-button suit, as we have said . . . ah, but suppose below that there is a real monster, with real fangs and a squirming Medusa-tangle of snakes for hair?
Suppose it's all a selfserving lie and that when the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a friend-a capering, gleeful, red-eyed agent of chaos?
What about that possibility, friends and neighbors?
16
About five years ago I finished The Shining , took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was The House on Value Street .
*My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
Those are some of the things we've talked about in this book . . . but suppose all of that is only a sham and a false front? I don't say that it is, but perhaps (since this is the last dance) we ought to discuss the possibility, at least.
In our discussion of archetypes, we've had occasion to discuss the Werewolf, that fellow who is sometimes hairy and who is sometimes deceptively smooth. Suppose there was a double werewolf? Suppose that the creator of the horror story was, under his/her fright wig and plastic fangs, a Republican in a three-button suit, as we have said . . . ah, but suppose below that there is a real monster, with real fangs and a squirming Medusa-tangle of snakes for hair?
Suppose it's all a selfserving lie and that when the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a friend-a capering, gleeful, red-eyed agent of chaos?
What about that possibility, friends and neighbors?
16
About five years ago I finished The Shining , took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was The House on Value Street .