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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 84 из 359It was there, a year or two earlier, that my brother found a reel of moviefilm my father had taken on shipboard. Dave and I pooled some money we had saved (without my mother's knowledge) , rented a movie projector, and watched it over and over again in fascinated silence. My father turned the camera over to someone else at one point and there he is, Donald King of Peru, Indiana, standing against the rail. He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now.
In another box there were piles of his merchant marine manuals; in another, scrapbooks of stuff from foreign countries. My mother told me that while he would go around with a paperback western stuffed into his back pocket, his real interest was in science fiction and horror stories. He tried his own band at a number of tales of this type, submitting them to the popular men's magazines of the day, Bluebook and Argosy among them. He ultimately published nothing ("Your father didn't have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature," my mother once told me dryly, and that was about as close as she ever came to ranking him out) , but he did get several personal rejection notes; "This-won't-do-but-send-us-more" notes I used to call them in my teens and early twenties, when I collected a good many of my own (during periods of depression I would sometimes wonder what it would be like to blow your nose on a rejection slip).
The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks. Avon, in those days, was the one paperback publisher committed to fantasy and weird fiction. I remember those books with great affection-particularly the shiny overcoating which all Avons bore, a material that was a cross between isinglass and Saran Wrap. When and if the story lagged, you could peel this shiny stuff off the cover in long strips. It made a perfectly wonderful noise. And although it wanders from the subject, I also remember the forties Dell paperbacks with love- they were all mysteries back then, and on the back of each was a luxurious map showing the scene of the crime.
One of those books was an Avon "sampler"-the word anthology was apparently considered too esoteric for readers of this sort of material to grasp. It contained stories by Frank Belknap Long ("The Hounds of Tindalos"), Zelia Bishop ("The Curse of Yig"), and a host of other tales culled from the early days of Weird Tales magazine. Two of the others were novels by A. Merritt- Burn, Witch, Burn (not to be confused with the later Fritz Leiber novel, Conjure Wife ) and The Metal Monster .
In another box there were piles of his merchant marine manuals; in another, scrapbooks of stuff from foreign countries. My mother told me that while he would go around with a paperback western stuffed into his back pocket, his real interest was in science fiction and horror stories. He tried his own band at a number of tales of this type, submitting them to the popular men's magazines of the day, Bluebook and Argosy among them. He ultimately published nothing ("Your father didn't have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature," my mother once told me dryly, and that was about as close as she ever came to ranking him out) , but he did get several personal rejection notes; "This-won't-do-but-send-us-more" notes I used to call them in my teens and early twenties, when I collected a good many of my own (during periods of depression I would sometimes wonder what it would be like to blow your nose on a rejection slip).
The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks. Avon, in those days, was the one paperback publisher committed to fantasy and weird fiction. I remember those books with great affection-particularly the shiny overcoating which all Avons bore, a material that was a cross between isinglass and Saran Wrap. When and if the story lagged, you could peel this shiny stuff off the cover in long strips. It made a perfectly wonderful noise. And although it wanders from the subject, I also remember the forties Dell paperbacks with love- they were all mysteries back then, and on the back of each was a luxurious map showing the scene of the crime.
One of those books was an Avon "sampler"-the word anthology was apparently considered too esoteric for readers of this sort of material to grasp. It contained stories by Frank Belknap Long ("The Hounds of Tindalos"), Zelia Bishop ("The Curse of Yig"), and a host of other tales culled from the early days of Weird Tales magazine. Two of the others were novels by A. Merritt- Burn, Witch, Burn (not to be confused with the later Fritz Leiber novel, Conjure Wife ) and The Metal Monster .