Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

But I don't think anyone knows what they really think-or perhaps even what they really know-until it's written down, and I came to realize that the survivors would be very likely to first take up all the old quarrels and then all the old weapons. Worse, all those deadly toys would be available to them, and things might well become a sprint to see which group of loonies could figure out how to launch them first. My own lesson in writing The Stand was that cutting the Gordian Knot simply destroys the riddle instead of solving it, and the book's last line is an admission that the riddle still remains.

The book also tries to celebrate brighter aspects of our lives: simple human courage, friendship, and love in a world which so often seems mostly loveless. In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus's remark that "happiness, too, is inevitable.” More prosaically, my mother used to tell my brother David and I to "hope for the best and expect the worst," and that expresses the book I remember writing as well as anything.

So, in short, we hope for a fourth level (a triple Werewolf?), one that will bring us full circle again to the horror writer not just as writer but as human being, mortal man or woman, just another passenger in the boat, another pilgrim on the way to whatever there is. And we hope that if he sees another pilgrim fall down that he will write about it-but not before he or she has helped the fallen one of his or her feet, brushed off his or her clothes, and seen if he or she is all right, and able to go on. If such behavior is to be, it cannot be as a result of an intellectual moral stance; it is because there is such a thing as love, merely a practical fact, a practical force in human affairs.

Morality is, after all, a codification of those things which the heart understands to be true and those things which the heart understands to be the demands of a life lived among others . . . civilization, in a word. And if we remove the label "horror story" or "fantasy genre" or whatever, and replace it with "literature" or more simply still, "fiction," we may realize more easily that no such blanket accusations of immorality can be made. If we say that morality proceeds simply from a good heart-which has little to do with ridiculous posturings and happily-ever-afterings-and immorality proceeds from a lack of care, from shoddy observation, and from the prostitution of drama or melodrama for some sort of gain, monetary or otherwise, then we may realize that we have arrived at a critical stance which is both workable and humane.