Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Recently Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album . For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book: the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaiithe seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples.

When the horizons of human experience shrink to HO scale, perspective changes. For the war babies, secure (except for The Bomb) in a world of six-month checkups, penicillin, and eternal orthodontics, the pimple became the primary physical deformity with which you were seen on the street or in the halls of your school; most of the other deformities had been taken care of. And say, having mentioned orthodontics, I'll add that many kids who had to wear braces during dose years of heavy, almost suffocating peer pressure saw them as a kind of deformity-every now and then you would hear the cry of "Hey, metalmouth!" in the halls. But most people saw them only as a form of treatment, no more remarkable than a girl with her arm in a sling or a football player wearing an Ace bandage on his knee.

But for the pimple there was no cure.

And here comes I Was a Teenage Frankenstein . In this film, Whit Bissell assembles the creature, played by Gary Conway, from the bodies of dead hot-rodders. The leftover pieces are fed to the alligators under the house-of course we have an idea early on that Bissell himself will end up being munched by the gators, and we are not disappointed. Bissell is a total fiend in this movie, reaching existential heights of villainy: "He's crying, even the tear ducts work! . . . Answer me, you have a civil tongue in your head. I know, I sewed it there." * But it is the unfortunate Conway who catches the eye and mainsprings the film. Like the villainy of Bissell, the physical deformity of Conway is so awful it becomes almost absurd . . . and he looks like nothing so much as a high school kid whose acne has run totally wild. His face is a lumpy bas-relief map of mountainous terrain from which one shattered eye bugs madly.

*Quoted in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film , by Carlos Clarens (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967).

And yet . . . and yet . . . somehow this shambling creature still manages to dig rock and roll, so he can't be all bad, can he? We have met the monster, and, as Peter Straub points out in Ghost Story , he is us.