Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

It is one of the great fusions of love and horror,innocence and terror, the emotional reality which Mary Shelley only suggests in her novel. Even so, I suspect she would have understood and agreed with Dino De Laurentiis's remark on the great attraction of that dichotomy. De Laurentiis was speaking of his own forgettable remake of King Kong, but he could have been speaking about the hapless monster itself when he said, "Nobody cry when jaws die." Well, we don't exactly cry when Frankenstein's monster dies-not the way audiences weep when Kong, that shanghaied hostage of a simpler, more romantic world, topples from his perch atop the Empire State-but we are, perhaps, disgusted at our own sense of relief.

4

Although the gathering which ultimately resulted in Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, miles from British soil, it must still qualify as one of the maddest British tea parties of all time. And in a funny way, the gathering may have been responsible not only for Frankenstein, published that same year, but for Dracula as well, a novel written by a man who would not be born for another thirty-one years.

It was June of 1816, and the band of travelers-Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori-had been confined to quarters by two weeks of torrential rains. They began a joint reading of German ghost stories from a book called Fantasmagoria, and the gathering began to get decidedly weird. Things really culminated when Percy Shelley threw a kind of fit.

Dr. Polidori noted in his diary: "After tea, 12 o'clock, really began to talk ghosts. Lord Byron read some verses of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' (the part about) the witch's breast; when silence ensued, Shelley, suddenly shrieking, and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. [I] Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs.

Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples; which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.” Leave it to the English.

An agreement was made that each member of the party would try his or her hand at creating a new ghost story. It was Mary Shelley, whose work as a result of the gathering would alone endure, who had the most trouble in setting to work. She had no ideas at all, and several nights passed before her imagination was fired by a nightmare in which "a pale student of unhallowed arts created the awful phantom of a man." It is the creation scene presented in chapers four and five of her novel (quoted from earlier).

Percy Bysshe Shelly produced a fragment entitled "The Assassins.