Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Perhaps the best example of all is Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, although in all deference tothe master, the idea was there for the taking in Robert Bloch's novel. Bloch, in fact, had been honing this particular vision of human nature in a number of previous books, including The Scarf (which begins with those wonderful, eerie lines: "Fetish? You name it. All I know is that I've always had to have it with me . . ." ) and The Deadbeat. These books are not, at least technically, horror novels; there is nary a monster or supernatural occurrence on view. They are labeled "suspense novels." But if we look at them with that Apollonian/Dionysian conflict in mind, we see that they are very much horror novels; each of them deals with the Dionysian psychopath locked up behind the Apollonian facade of normality . . . but slowly, dreadfully emerging. In short, Bloch has written a number of Werewolf novels in which he has dispensed with the hugger-mugger of the potion or the wolfsbane. What happened with Bloch when lie ceased writing his Lovecraftian stories of the supernatural (and he never has, completely; see the recent Strange Eons) was not that he ceased being a horror writer; lie simply shifted his perspective from the outside (beyond the stars, under the sea, on the Plains of Leng, or in the deserted belfry of a Providence, Rhode Island, church) to the inside . . . to the place where the Werewolf is. It may be that someday these three novels, The Scarf, The Deadbeat, and Psycho, will be anthologized as a kind of unified triptych, as were James M. Cam's The Postman Alway Ring Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce-for in their own way, the novels that Robert Bloch wrote in the 1950s had every bit as much influence on the course of American fiction as did the Cain "heel-with-a-heart" novels of the 1930s. And although the method of attack is radically different in each case, both the novels of Cain and Bloch are great crime novels; the novels of both adopt a naturalistic view of American life; the novels of both explore the idea of protagonist as antihero; and the novels of both point up the central Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict and thus become Werewolf novels.

Psycho, the best known of the three, deals with Norman Bates-and as played by Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film, Norman is about as tight-assed and hemorrhoidal as they come.

To the observing world (or that small part of it that would care to observe the proprietor of a gone-to-seed backwater motel), Norman is as normal as they come. Charles Whitman, the Apollonian Eagle Scout who went on a Dionysian rampage from the top of the Texas Tower, comes immediately to mind; Norman seems like such a nice fellow.