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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 5 из 359Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just makeyou mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer.
For me, writing this book has been both an exasperation and a deep pleasure, a duty on some days and a labor of .love on others. As a result, I suppose you will find the course you are about to follow bumpy and uneven. I can only hope that you will also find, as I have, that the trip has not been without its compensations.
STEPHEN KING Center Lovell, Maine "What was the worst thing you've ever done?” "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . . PETER STRAUB, Ghost Story "Well we'll really have a party but we gotta post a guard outside . . . EDDIE COCHRAN, "Come On Everybody”
CHAPTER I
October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance
FOR ME, the terror-the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have been living in my own mind-began on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theater: the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.
The movie that day was and is one of my all-time favorites, and the fact that it-rather than a Randolph Scott western or a John Wayne war movie-was playing was also only fitting. The Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , starring Hugh Marlowe, who at the time was perhaps best known for his role as Patricia Neal's jilted and rabidly xenophobic boyfriend in The Day the Earth Stood Still -a slightly older and altogether more rational science fiction movie.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still , an alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie in a bright white intergalactic leisure suit) lands on The Mall in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer (which, when under power, glows like one of those plastic Jesuses they used to give out at Vacation Bible School for memorizing Bible verses). Klaatu strides down the gangway and pauses there at the foot, the focus of every horrified eye and the muzzles of several hundred Army guns. It is a moment of memorable tension, a moment that is sweet in retrospect-the sort of moment that makes people like me simple movie fans for life. Klaatu begins fooling with some sort of gadget-it looked kind of like a Weed-Eater, as I recall-and a trigger-happy soldier-boy promptly shoots him in the arm. It turns out, of course, that the gadget was a gift for the President. No death ray here; just a simple star-to-star communicator.
That was in 1951.
For me, writing this book has been both an exasperation and a deep pleasure, a duty on some days and a labor of .love on others. As a result, I suppose you will find the course you are about to follow bumpy and uneven. I can only hope that you will also find, as I have, that the trip has not been without its compensations.
STEPHEN KING Center Lovell, Maine "What was the worst thing you've ever done?” "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . . PETER STRAUB, Ghost Story "Well we'll really have a party but we gotta post a guard outside . . . EDDIE COCHRAN, "Come On Everybody”
CHAPTER I
October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance
FOR ME, the terror-the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have been living in my own mind-began on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theater: the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.
The movie that day was and is one of my all-time favorites, and the fact that it-rather than a Randolph Scott western or a John Wayne war movie-was playing was also only fitting. The Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , starring Hugh Marlowe, who at the time was perhaps best known for his role as Patricia Neal's jilted and rabidly xenophobic boyfriend in The Day the Earth Stood Still -a slightly older and altogether more rational science fiction movie.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still , an alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie in a bright white intergalactic leisure suit) lands on The Mall in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer (which, when under power, glows like one of those plastic Jesuses they used to give out at Vacation Bible School for memorizing Bible verses). Klaatu strides down the gangway and pauses there at the foot, the focus of every horrified eye and the muzzles of several hundred Army guns. It is a moment of memorable tension, a moment that is sweet in retrospect-the sort of moment that makes people like me simple movie fans for life. Klaatu begins fooling with some sort of gadget-it looked kind of like a Weed-Eater, as I recall-and a trigger-happy soldier-boy promptly shoots him in the arm. It turns out, of course, that the gadget was a gift for the President. No death ray here; just a simple star-to-star communicator.
That was in 1951.