JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 86 из 359not that it matteredin the long run. I was on my way. Lovecraft-courtesy of my father- opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them. And while Lovecraft, who died before the Second World War could fulfill many of his visions of unimaginable horror, does not figure largely in this book, the reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since. It is his eyes I remember best from the first photograph of him I ever saw . . . eyes like those in the old portraits which still hang in many New England houses, black eyes which seem to look inward as well as outward.
Eyes that seem to follow you.
4
The first movie I can remember seeing as a kid was Creature from the Black Lagoon . It was at the drive-in, and unless it was a second-run job I must have been about seven, because the film, which starred Richard Carlson and Richard Denning, was released in 1954. It was also originally released in 3-D, but I cannot remember wearing the glasses, so perhaps I did see a rerelease.
I remember only one scene clearly from the movie, but it left a lasting impression. The hero (Carlson) and the heroine (Julia Adams, who looked absolutely spectacular in a one-piece white bathing suit) are on an expedition somewhere in the Amazon basin. They make their way up a swampy, narrow waterway and into a wide pond that seems an idyllic South American version of the Garden of Eden.
But the creature is lurking-naturally. It's a scaly, batrachian monster that is remarkably like Lovecraft's half-breed, degenerate aberrations-the crazed and blasphemous results of liaisons between gods and human women (I told you it's difficult to get away from Lovecraft).
This monster is slowly and patiently barricading the mouth of the stream with sticks and branches, irrevocably sealing the party of anthropologists in.
I was barely old enough to read at that time, the discovery of my father's box of weird fiction still years away. I have a vague memory of boyfriends in my mom's life during that period- from 1952 until 1958 or so; enough of a memory to be sure she had a social life, not enough to even guess if she had a sex life.
Eyes that seem to follow you.
4
The first movie I can remember seeing as a kid was Creature from the Black Lagoon . It was at the drive-in, and unless it was a second-run job I must have been about seven, because the film, which starred Richard Carlson and Richard Denning, was released in 1954. It was also originally released in 3-D, but I cannot remember wearing the glasses, so perhaps I did see a rerelease.
I remember only one scene clearly from the movie, but it left a lasting impression. The hero (Carlson) and the heroine (Julia Adams, who looked absolutely spectacular in a one-piece white bathing suit) are on an expedition somewhere in the Amazon basin. They make their way up a swampy, narrow waterway and into a wide pond that seems an idyllic South American version of the Garden of Eden.
But the creature is lurking-naturally. It's a scaly, batrachian monster that is remarkably like Lovecraft's half-breed, degenerate aberrations-the crazed and blasphemous results of liaisons between gods and human women (I told you it's difficult to get away from Lovecraft).
This monster is slowly and patiently barricading the mouth of the stream with sticks and branches, irrevocably sealing the party of anthropologists in.
I was barely old enough to read at that time, the discovery of my father's box of weird fiction still years away. I have a vague memory of boyfriends in my mom's life during that period- from 1952 until 1958 or so; enough of a memory to be sure she had a social life, not enough to even guess if she had a sex life.