Danse Macabre

CHAPTER IV

An Annoying Autobiographical Pause

EARLY ON, I mentioned that trying to deal successfully with the phenomenon of terror and horror as a media/cultural event during the last thirty years would be impossible without a slice of autobiography. It seems to me that the time to make good on that threat has now arrived.

What a drag. But you're stuck with it, if only because I cannot divorce myself from a field in which I am mortally involved.

Readers who find themselves inclining toward some genre on a regular basis-western, private-eye stories, drawing-room mysteries, science fiction, or flat-out adventure yarns-seem rarely to feel the same desire to psychoanalyze their favorite writers' interests (and their own) as do the readers of horror fiction. Secretly or otherwise, there is the feeling that the taste for horror fiction is an abnormal one. I wrote a fairly long essay at the beginning of a book of mine (Night Shift), trying to analyze some of the reasons why people read horror fiction and why I write it. I don't have any interest in reheating that hash here; if you're interested in pursuing that subject, I recommend the introduction to you; all my relatives loved it.

The question here is a more esoteric one: Why do people have such an interest in my interest-and in their own? I believe that, more than anything else, it's because we all have a postulate buried deep in our minds: that an interest in horror is unhealthy and aberrant. So when people say, "Why do you write that stuff?" they are really inviting me to lie down on the couch and explain about the time I was locked in the cellar for three weeks, or my toilet training, or possibly some abnormal sibling rivalry. Nobody wants to know if Arthur Hailey or Harold Robbins took an unusually long time learning to use the potty, because writing about banks and airports and How I Made My First Million are subjects which seem perfectly normal.

There is something totally American in wanting to know how things work (which goes a long way toward explaining the phenomenal success of the Penthouse Forum, I think; what all those letters are really discussing is the rocketry of intercourse, the possible trajectories of oral sex and the how-to of various exotic positions-all as American as apple pie; Forum is simply a sexual plumbing manual for the enthusiastic do-it-yourselfer), but something unsettlingly alien about a taste for monsters, haunted houses, and the Thing that Crawled Out of the Crypt at Midnight. Questioners automatically turn into reasonable facsimiles of that amusing comic-strip psychiatrist Victor De Groot, ignoring the fact that making things up for money-which is what any writer of fiction does-is a pretty bizarre way to earn a living.

In March of 1979, I was invited to be one of three speakers on a panel discussing horror at an event known as the Ides of Mohonk (a onceyearly gathering of mystery writers and fans sponsored by Murder Ink, a nifty mystery-and-detection bookshop in Manhattan). During the course of the panel discussion I told a story that my mother had told me about myself-the event occurred when I was barely four, so perhaps I can be excused for remembering her story of it but not the actual event.

According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor's house-a house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back (she said), as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day; I would not tell her why I'd not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum's mom hadn't walked me back but had allowed me to come alone.

It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket). My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, if it had occurred before I even arrived, or if I had wandered away after it happened. Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I've said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact.

I told this story in response to a question from the floor. The questioner had asked, "Can you recall anything in your childhood that was particularly terrible?"-in other words, step right in, Mr. King, the doctor will see you now.

Robert Marasco, author of Burnt Offerings and Parlor Games, said he could not. I offered my train story mostly so the questioner wouldn't be totally disappointed, finishing just as I have here, by saying that I could not actually remember the incident. To which the third panel member, Janet Jeppson (who is a psychiatrist as well as a novelist), said: "But you've been writing about it ever since.” There was an approving murmur from the audience. Here was a pigeonhole where I could be filed . . . here was a by-God motive. I wrote 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and destroyed the world by plague in The Stand because I saw this kid run over by a slow freight in the days of my impressionable youth. I believe this is a totally specious ideasuch shoot-from-the-hip psychological judgments are little more than jumped-up astrology.

Not that the past doesn't supply grist for the writer's mill; of course it does. One example: the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. Rooks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling with clouds. This corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my facerotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that that dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel 'Salem' Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten. In another dream-this is one which has recurred at times of stress over the last ten years-I am writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. I'm working in a third-floor room that's very hot. A door on the far side of the room communicates with the attic, and I know-I know-she's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me (perhaps she's a critic for the Times Book Review). At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack from a child's box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, raving and wielding a meat-ax. And when I run, I discover that somehow the house has exploded outward-it's gotten ever so much bigger-and I'm totally lost. On awakening from this dream, I promptly scoot over to my wife's side of the bed.

But we all have our bad dreams, and we all use them as best we can. Yet it is one thing to use the dream and quite another to suggest the dream is the cause in and of itself. That is to suggest the ridiculous about an interesting subfunction of the human brain that has little or no practical application to the real world. Dreams are only mindmovies, the scraps and remnants of waking life woven into curious little subconscious quilts by the thrifty human mind, which is loath to throw anything out. Some of these mind-movies are of the X-rated variety; some are comedies; some are horror movies.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma-that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force-a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself . . . which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor-no artist-is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is "genius"), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

I'm suggesting that, to be successful, the artist in any field has to be in the right place at the right time. The right time is in the lap of the gods, but any mother's son or daughter can work his/her way to the right place and wait. *

But what is the right place? That is one of the great, amiable mysteries of human experience.

I can remember going dowsing as a kid with my Uncle Clayton, a real old Mainer if one ever lived. We walked out, my Uncle Clayt and I, he in his red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and his old green cap, me in my blue parka. I was about twelve; he might have been in his late forties or his late sixties. He had his dowsing rod under one arm, a wishboneshaped piece of applewood. Applewood was the best, he said, although birch would do in a pinch. There was also maple, but Uncle Clayt's scripture was that maple was the worst of the dowsing woods, because the grain wasn't true and it would lie if you let it.

At twelve, I was old enough not to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or dowsing. One of the odd things about our culture is that many parents seem honor-bound to lay all such lovely stories to rest in their children's minds as soon as possible-Dad and Mom may not be able to find time enough to help their little ones with their homework or to read them a story in the evening (let them watch TV instead, TV's a great sitter, lotsa good stories, let 'em watch TV), but they go to great pains to discredit poor old Santa and such wonders as dowsing and stumpwater-witchcraft. There's enough time for that. Somehow such parents find the fairy tales told on Gilligan's Island, The Odd Couple, and The Love Boat more acceptable. God knows why so many adults have confused enlightenment with emotional and imaginational bank robbery, but they have; they cannot seem to rest content until the wonder has flickered and died out of their children's eyes.

*The thought is not original with me, but I'll be damned if I can remember who said it-so let me just credit that most prolific of writers, Mr. Author Unknown.

(He doesn't mean me, you're whispering to yourself right now-but sir or madam, I just might.) Most parents quite rightly recognize the fact that children are mad, in the classic sense of that word. But I'm not altogether sure that killing Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is the same thing as "rationality." For children, the rationality of madness seems to work remarkably well. For one thing, it keeps the thing in the closet at bay.

Uncle Clayt had lost very little of that sense of wonder. Among his other amazing talents (amazing to me, at least) was the ability to line bees-that is, to spot a honeybee bumbling at a flower and then follow it back to its hive, tramping through woods, splashing through bogs, scrambling over deadfalls-his ability to roll his own cigarettes with one hand (always giving them that final eccentric twirl before sticking them into his mouth and lighting them with Diamond matches kept in a small waterproof cannister), and his seemingly endless fund of lore and tales . . . Indian stories, ghost stories, family stories, legends, you name it.

On this day my mother had been complaining to Clayt and his wife, Ella, over dinner about how slowly the water was drawing in the sinks and the toilet tank. She was afraid the well was going dry again. In those days, along about 1959 or 1960, we had a shallow dug well, and it went dry every summer for a month or so. Then my brother and I and our cousin hauled water in a big old tank that another uncle (Uncle Oren, that one was-for many years the best damn carpenter and contractor in southern Maine) had welded together in his workshop. We would perch the tank on the tailgate of an old station wagon and then lug it down to the well in a relay, using big galvanized-steel milk cans. During that dry month or six weeks we drew our drinking water from the town pump.

So Uncle Clayt grabbed me while the women were washing up and told me we were going to dowse my mother a new well. At twelve, it was an interesting enough way to spend some time, but I was skeptical; Uncle Clayt might as well have told me he was going to show me where a flying saucer had landed behind the Methodist meeting hall.

He walked around, green cap tilted back on his head, one of his Bugler cigarettes jutting from the corner of his mouth, applewood stick held in both hands. He held it by the wishbone, wrists rotated outward, his big thumbs pressed firmly against the wood. We walked aimlessly around the back yard, the driveway, the hill,where the apple tree stood (and still stands today, although new people live in that little five-room house). And Clayt talked . . . stories about baseball, about an attempt to form a copper-mining concern once upon a time in Kittery, of all places, about how Paul Bunyan was supposed to have turned the course of the Prestile Stream once upon a time to provide water for the logging camps.

And every now and then he would pause, and the rod of that applewood dowser would tremble just a little. He would pause in his story and wait. The trembling might increase to a steady vibration, and then fade out. "You got somethin there, Stevie," he'd say. "Somethin. Not too much." And I would nod wisely, convinced he was doing it all himself. Like the way it's parents, not Santa Claus, who put the presents under the tree, don't you know, or the way they take away the tooth under your pillow after you're asleep and replace it with a dime. But I went along with him. I came from an age of children who wanted to be good, remember; we were taught to "speak when spoken to," and to humor their elders no matter how nutty their ideas might be. This is not a bad way of initiating children into the more exotic realms of human behavior and human belief, by the way; the quiet child (and I was one) is often given walking tours through some extremely bizarre tracts of mental countryside. I did not believe it possible to dowse water with an applewood stick, but I was quite interested in seeing how the trick would be performed.

We walked around onto the front lawn, and the stick began to tremble again. Uncle Clayt brightened. "We got the real thing here," he said. "Look at this, Stevie! She's gonna dive, be damned if she ain't!” Three steps further along, the applewood rod dove-it simply revolved in Uncle Clayt's hands and pointed straight down. It was a good trick, all right; I could actually hear the tendons in his wrists creak, and there was some strain on his face as he forced the straight part of the wishbone-shaped stick skyward again. As soon as he released the pressure, the stick whipped down at the ground again.

"Got plenty of water here," he said. "You could drink it until judgment Day and it'd still run.

It's close, too.” "Let me try it," I said.

"Well, you got to back off a little first," he said, and we did. We went back to the edge of the driveway.

He gave me the stick, showed me how to hold it with my thumbs cocked just so (wrists outward, thumbs pointing down-"Otherwise, that son of a whore is gonna break your wrists tryin to point when you get over that water," Clayt said), and then he gave me a little push on the ass.

"It don't feel like nothin' but a piece of wood right now, does it?" he asked.

I agreed that this was so.

"But when you start gettin' close to that water, you're gonna feel her come alive," he said. "I mean really alive, like it was still on the tree. Oh, applewood's good for dousing. Nothing beats applewood when you're huntin' wellwater.” So some of what happened could well have been suggestion, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, although I've read enough since then to believe that dowsing really does work, at least at some times and for some people and for some crazy reason of its own. * I will say that Uncle Clayt had lulled me into that same state that I have tried again and again to lull the readers of my stories into-that state of believability where the ossified shield of "rationality" has been temporarily laid aside, the suspension of disbelief is at hand, and the sense of wonder is again within reach. And if that's the power of suggestion, it seems okay to me; better than cocaine for the brain.

I started walking toward the spot where Uncle Clayt had been when the rod dove, and I'll be damned if that applewood stick didn't seem to come alive in my hands. It got warm, and it began to move. At first it was a vibration that I could feel but not see, and then the tip of the rod began to jiggle around.

"It's working!" I screamed at Uncle Clayt. "I can feel it!” Clayt got laughing. I got laughing, too-not a hysterical sort of laughter, but one of pure and utter delight. When I got over the spot where the dowsing rod dove for Uncle Clayt, it dove for me; at one moment it was upright, and at the next it was pointing straight down. I can remember two things very clearly about that moment. One was a sensation of weight-how heavy that wooden wishbone had become. It seemed I could barely hold it up. It was as if the water was inside the stick instead of in the ground; as if it were fairly bloated with water. Clayt had brought the stick up to its original position after it dove. I could not. He took it out of my hands, and as he did I felt the sensation of weight and magnetism break. It did not pass from me to him; it broke. It was there at one moment and at the next it was gone.

*One of the more plausible explanations of the phenomenon is that the stick doesn't dowse the water; the person holding the stick does, and then imputes the ability to the stick. Horses can smell water twelve miles away if the wind is right; why should not a person be able to sense water fifty or a hundred feet underground?

The other thing I remember is a combined feeling of certainty and mystery. The water was there. Uncle Clayt knew it and I knew it, too. It was down there in the earth, a river caught in rock, for all we knew. It was that feeling of having come to the right place. There are lines of power in the world, you know-invisible but thrumming with a tremendous, scary load of energy. Every now and then someone will stumble over one and get fried, or grasp one in the right way and set it to work. But you have to find one.

Clayt drove a stake into the ground where we had felt the pull of the water. The well did indeed go dry-in July instead of August, as a matter of fact-and as there was no money for a new well that year, the water tank made its yearly summer appearance on the tailgate of the station wagon, and my brother, my cousin, and I made our round trips down to the old well with the milk cans of water again. We did the same the following summer. But around 1963 or '64, we had the artesian well drilled.

By then the stake Clayt had driven was long gone, but I remembered its location well enough. The well-drillers located their rig, that big red gadget that looked so much like some child's Erector Set vision of a praying mantis, within three feet of where the stake had been (and in my mind now I can still hear Mom moaning about the wet clay that was spewed all over our front lawn). They had to go down less than a hundred feet-and as Clayt had said on that Sunday when he and I walked out with the applewood rod, there was plenty of water. We could have drunk it until judgment Day and it still would have kept running.

2

I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all along- except, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refined-or honed, to return to an earlier image-and it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the setting-to-work are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer. *

But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readout-and the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H20 is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all.

There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all-"Leave it to the poets!" he cried.

"The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here. There's also a certain fascination in the actual drilling of the well, refining the ore, honing the knife (also a difficult thing to write well about; one saga of the Heroic Struggle of the Young and Virile Writer that has always struck me well is Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke), but what I really want to spend a couple of minutes talking about is another kind of dousing-not the actual discovery of talent, but that lightning stroke which occurs when you discover not talent itself, but the particular direction in which that talent will incline. It is the moment, if you will, when a Little Leaguer discovers, not that he or she can pitch (which he/she may have know for some time), but that she or he has a particular ability to throw the good live fastball or to pop a curve that rises or dips outrageously. This is also a particularly fine moment. And all of this, I hope, will justify the bit of autobiography that follows. It doesn't try to explain my own interest in the danse macabre, or justify it, or psychoanalyze it; it only tries to set the stage for an interest that has proved to be lifelong, profitable, and pleasant . . . except, of course, when the madwoman pops out of her attic in that unpleasant dreamhouse in which my subconscious places me every four months or so.

*But, I hasten to add, only if you have the talent there to begin with. You can spend ten years refining common earth and come out at the end with nothing but common earth, sifted fine. I have been playing guitar since the age of fourteen, and at the age of thirty-three I've not progressed much beyond where I was at sixteen, playing "Louie, Louie" and "Little Deuce Coupe" on rhythm guitar with a group called the MoonSpinners. I can play a little, and it sure cheers me up when I've got the blues, but I think Eric Clapton is still safe.

3

My mother's people were named Pillsbury, and came originally (or so she said) from the same family that produced the Pillsburys who now make cake mixes and flour. The difference between the two branches of the family, Mom said, was that the flour-Pillsburys moved west to make their fortune, while our people stayed shirttail but honest on the coast of Maine. My grandmother, Nellie Pillsbury (nee Fogg), was one of the first women ever to graduate from Gorham Normal School-the class of 'oz, I think. She died at age eighty-five, blind and bedridden, but still able to decline Latin verbs and name all of the Presidents up to Truman. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter and, for a brief time, Winslow Homer's handyman.

My father's people came from Peru, Indiana, and much further back, from Ireland. The Pillsburys, of good Anglo-Saxon stock, were levelheaded and practical. My father apparently came from a long line of eccentrics; his sister, my Aunt Betty, had mental fugues (my mother believed her to be a manic-depressive, but then, Mom never would have run for president of the Aunt Betty Fan Club), my paternal grandmother enjoyed frying half a loaf of bread in bacon fat for breakfast, and my paternal grandfather, who stood six feet six and weighed a cool three hundred and fifty pounds, dropped dead at the age of thirty-two while running to catch a train.

Or so the story goes.

I've been saying that it's impossible to tell why one particular area strikes the mind with all the peculiar force of obsession, but that it's very possible to pinpoint that moment when the interest was discovered-the moment, if you will, when the dowsing rod turns suddenly and emphatically down toward hidden water. Put another way, talent is only a compass, and we'll not discuss why it points toward magnetic north; instead we'll treat briefly of that moment when the needle actually swings toward that great point of attraction.

It has always seemed peculiar to me that I owe that moment in my own life to my father, who left my mother when I was two and my brother, David, four. I don't remember him at all, but in the few pictures of him I've seen, he is a man of average height, handsome in a 1940s sort of way, a bit podgy, bespectacled. He was a merchant mariner during World War II, crossing the North Atlantic and playing German roulette with the U-boats. His worst fear, my mother said, was not of the submarines but of having his master's license revoked because of his poor eyesight-while on land, he had a habit of driving over curbs and through stoplights.

My own eyesight is similar; they look like glasses, but sometimes I think they're a couple of Coke-bottle bottoms up there on my face.

Don King was a man with an itchy foot. My brother was born in 1945, I was born in 1947, and in 1949 my father was seen no more . . . although in 1964, during the troubles in the Congo, my mother insisted that she had seen him in a newsclip of white mercenaries fighting for one side or the other. I suppose it is just barely possible. By then he would have been in his late forties or early fifties. If it was so, I sure hope he had his lenses corrected in the interim.

After my father took off, my mother landed on her feet, scrambling. My brother and I didn't see a great deal of her over the next nine years. She worked at a succession of low-paying jobs: presser in a laundry, doughnut-maker on the night shift at a bakery, store clerk, housekeeper. She was a talented pianist and a woman with a great and sometimes eccentric sense of humor, and somehow she kept things together, as women before her have done and as other women are doing even now as we speak. We never had a car (nor a TV set until 1956), but we never missed any meals.

We hopscotched our way across the country during those nine years, always returning to New England. In 1958 we returned to Maine for good. My grandfather and grandmother were into their eighties, and the family hired my mother to care for them in their declining years.

This was in Durham, Maine, and while all these family ramblings may seem far from the point, we're getting near to it now. About a quarter of a mile away from the small house in Durham where my brother and I finished our growing up, there was a lovely brick house where my mother's sister, Ethelyn Pillsbury Flaws, and her husband, Oren, lived. Over the Flaws's garage was a lovely, long attic room with loose, rumbling boards and that entrancing attic smell.

At that time the attic connected with a whole complex of outbuildings, which in turn finally led to a great old barn-all of these buildings smelling intoxicatingly of sweet hay long departed.

But there was a reminder of the days when animals had been kept in the barn. If one climbed to the third loft, one could observe the skeletons of several chickens that had apparently died of some strange disease up there. It was a pilgrimage I made often; there was something fascinating about those chicken skeletons, lying in a drift of feathers as ephemeral as moondust, some secret in the black sockets where their eyes had once been . . . . But the attic over the garage was a kind of family museum. Everyone on the Pillsbury side of the family had stored things up there from time to time, from furniture to photographs, and there was just room for a small boy to twist and turn his way along narrow aisles, ducking under the arm of a standing lamp or stepping over a crate of old wallpaper samples that someone had wanted saved for some forgotten reason.

My brother and I were not actually forbidden the attic, but my Aunt Ethelyn frowned on our visits up there because the floorboards had only been laid, not nailed, and some were missing.

It would have been easy enough, I suppose, to trip and go headfirst through a hole and down to the concrete floor below-or into the bed of my Uncle Oren's green Chevy pickup truck.

For me, on a cold fall day in 1959 or 1960, the attic over my aunt and uncle's garage was the place where that interior dowsing rod suddenly turned over, where the compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north. That was the day I happened to come on a box of my father's books . . . paperbacks from the mid-forties.

There was a lot of my mother and father's married life in the attic, and I can understand how, in the wake of his sudden disappearance from her life, she would want to take as many of his things as possible and put them away in a dark place. It was there, a year or two earlier, that my brother found a reel of movie film 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.

The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection. I am no longer sure of the title, but I remember the picture on the cover very well: a cemetery (somewhere near Providence, one assumes!) at night, and coming out from beneath a tombstone, a loathsome green thing with long fangs and burning red eyes. Behind it, suggested but not graphically drawn, was a tunnel leading down into the bowels of the earth. Since then I've seen literally hundreds of editions of Lovecraft, yet that remains the one which best sums up H.P.L.'s work for me . . . and I've no idea who the artist might have been.

That box of books wasn't my first encounter with horror, of course. I think that in America you would have to be blind and deaf not to have come in contact with at least one creature or boogey by the age of ten or twelve. But it was my first encounter with serious fantasy-horror fiction. Lovecraft has been called a hack, a description I would dispute vigorously, but whether he was or wasn't, and whether he was a writer of popular fiction or a writer of so-called "literary fiction" (depending on your critical bent), really doesn't matter very much in this context, because either way, the man himself took his work seriously. And it showed. So that book, courtesy of my departed father, was my first taste of a world that went deeper than the B-pictures which played at the movies on Saturday afternoon or the boys' fiction of Carl Carmer and Roy Rockwell. When Lovecraft wrote "The Rats in the Walls" and "Pickman's Model," he wasn't simply kidding around or trying to pick up a few extra bucks; he meant it, and it was his seriousness as much as anything else which that interior dowsing rod responded to, I think.

I took the books out of the attic with me. My aunt, who was a grammar school teacher and the soul of practicality down to her shoes, disapproved of them strenuously, but I held onto them. That day and the next, I visited the Plains of Leng for the first time; made my first acquaintance with that quaint pre-OPEC Arab, Abdul Alhazred (author of The Necronomicon, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been offered to members of the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Literary Guild, although a copy was reputed to have been kept for years under lock and key in the Special Collections vault at Miskatonic University); visited the towns of Dunwich and Arkham, Massachusetts; and was, most of all, transported by the bleak and creeping terror of "The Colour Out of Space.” A week or two later all of those books disappeared, and I never saw them again. I've always suspected that my Aunt Ethelyn might have been an unindicted co-conspirator in that case . . . not that it mattered in 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. There was Norville, who smoked Luckies and kept three fans going in his two-room apartment during the summer; and there was Milt, who drove a Buick and wore gigantic blue shorts in the summertime; and another fellow, very small, who was, I believe, a cook in a French restaurant. So far as I know, my mother came close to marrying none of them. She'd gone that route once. Also, that was a time when a woman, once married, became a shadow figure in the process of decision-making and bread-winning. I think my mom, who could be stubborn, intractable, grimly persevering and nearly impossible to discourage, had gotten a taste for captaining her own life. And so she went out with guys, but none of them became permanent fixtures.

It was Milt we were out with that night, he of the Buick and the large blue shorts. He seemed to genuinely like my brother and me, and to genuinely not mind having us along in the back seat from time to time (it may be that when you have reached the calmer waters of your early forties, the idea of necking at the drive-in no longer appeals so strongly . . . even if you have a Buick as large as a cabin cruiser to do it in). By the time the Creature made his appearance, my brother had slithered down onto the floor of the back and had fallen asleep. My mother and Milt were talking, perhaps passing a Kool back and forth. They don't matter, at least not in this context; nothing matters except the big black-and-white images up on the screen, where the unspeakable Thing is walling the handsome hero and the sexy heroine into . . . into . . . the Black Lagoon!

I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit . . . just as I knew that, later on that night, lie would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy. Seven isn't old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for.

You own it, you bought it, it's yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water.

My reaction to the Creature on that night was perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of horror fiction or director who has worked in the field hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement, pretty much undiluted by any real thinking process-and you understand, don't you, that when it comes to horror movies, the only thought process really necessary to break the mood is for a friend to lean over and whisper, "See the zipper running down his back?” I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of "the suspension of disbelief" in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn't light; it's heavy. The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night. And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, "I don't read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it's real," I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

In this sense, kids are the perfect audience for horror. The paradox is this: children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible world-a perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from. Children deftly manipulate the logistics of Santa Claus's entry on Christmas Eve (lie can get down small chimneys by making himself small, and if there's no chimney there's the letter slot, and if there's no letter slot there's always the crack under the door), the Easter Bunny, God (big guy, sorta old, white beard, throne), Jesus ("How do you think lie turned the water into wine?" I asked my son Joe when he-Joe, not Jesus-was five; Joe's idea was that he lead something "kinda like magic Kool-Aid, you get what I mean?"), the devil (big guy, red skin, horse feet, tail with an arrow on the end of it, Snidely Whiplash moustache), Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, the Keebler Elves, Dorothy and Toto, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a thousand more.

Most parents think they understand this openness better than, in many cases, they actually do, and try to keep their children away from anything that smacks too much of horror and terror-"Rated PG (or G in the case of The Andromeda Strain), but may be too intense for younger children," the ads for Jaws read-believing, I suppose, that to allow their kids to go to a real horror movie would be tantamount to rolling a live hand grenade into a nursery school.

But one of the odd Doppler effects that seems to occur during the selective forgetting that is so much a part of "growing up" is the fact that almost everything has a scare potential. for the child under eight. Children are literally afraid of their own shadows at the right time and place.

There is the story of the four-year-old who refused to go to bed at night without a light on in his closet. His parents at last discovered he was frightened of a creature he had heard his father speak of often; this creature, which had grown large and dreadful in the child's imagination, was the "twi-night double-header.” Seen in this light, even Disney movies are minefields of terror, and the animated caroons, which will apparently be released and rereleased even unto the end of the world, * are usually the worst offenders. There are adults today, who, when questioned, will tell you that the most frightening thing they saw at the movies as children was Bambi's father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire. Other Disney memories which are right up there with the batrachian horror inhabiting the Black Lagoon include the marching brooms that have gone totally out of control in Fantasia (and for the small child, the real horror inherent in the situation is probably buried in the implied father-son relationship between Mickey Mouse and the old sorcerer; those brooms are making a terrible mess, and when the sorcerer/ father gets home, there may be PUNISHMENT . . . . This sequence might well send the child of strict parents into an ecstasy of terror) ; the night on Bald Mountain from the same film; the witches in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, one with her enticingly red poisoned apple (and what small child is not taught early to fear the idea of POISON?), the other with her deadly spinning wheel; this holds all the way up to the relatively innocuous One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which features the logical granddaughter of those Disney witches from the thirties and forties-the evil Cruella DeVille, with her scrawny, nasty face, her loud voice (grownups sometimes forget how terrified young children are of loud voices, which come from the giants of their world, the adults), and her plan to kill all the dalmatian puppies (read "children," if you're a little person) and turn them into dogskin coats.

Yet it is the parents, of course, who continue to underwrite the Disney procedure of release and rerelease, often discovering goosebumps on their own arms as they rediscover what terrified them as children . . . because what the good horror film (or horror sequence in what may be billed a "comedy" or an "animated cartoon") does above all else is to knock the adult props out from under us and tumble us back down the slide info childhood. And there our own shadow may once again become that of a mean dog, a gaping mouth, or a beckoning dark figure.

*In one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke stories, this actually happens. In this vignette, aliens from space land on earth after the Big One has finally gone down. As the story closes, the best brains of this alien culture are trying to figure out the meaning of a film they have found and learned how to play back. The film ends with the words A Walt Disney Production. I have moments when I really believe that there would be no better epitaph for the human race, or for a world where the only sentient being absolutely guaranteed of immortality is not Hitler, Charlemagne, Albert Schweitzer, or even Jesus Christ-but is, instead, Richard M. Nixon, whose name is engraved on a plaque placed on the airless surface of the moon.

Perhaps the supreme realization of this return to childhood comes in David Cronenberg's marvelous horror film The Brood, where a disturbed woman is literally producing "children of rage" who go out and murder the members of her family, one by one. About halfway through the film, her father sits dispiritedly on the bed in an upstairs room, drinking and mourning his wife, who has been the first to feel the wrath of the brood. We cut to the bed itself . . . and clawed hands suddenly reach out from beneath it and dig into the carpeting near the doomed father's shoes. And so Cronenberg pushes us down the slide; we are four again, and all of our worst surmises about what might be lurking under the bed have turned out to be true.

The irony of all this is that children are better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are. You'll note I've italicized the phrase "on its own terms." An adult is able to deal with the cataclysmic terror of something like The Texa Chainsaw Massacre because he or she understands that it is all make-believe, and that when the take is done the dead people will simply get up and wash off the stage blood. The child is not so able to make this distinction, and Chainsaw Massacre is quite rightly rated R. Little kids do not need this scene, any more than they need the one at the end of The Fury where John Cassavetes quite literally blows apart. But the point is, if you put a little kid of six in the front row at a screening of The Texa Chainsaw Massacre along with an adult who was temporarily unable to distinguish between make-believe and "real things" (as Danny Torrance, the little boy in The Shining puts it)-if, for instance, you had given the adult a hit of Yellow Sunshine LSD about two hours before the movie started-my guess is that the kid would have maybe a week's worth of bad dreams. The adult might spend a year or so in a rubber room, writing home with Crayolas.

A certain amount of fantasy and horror in a child's life seems to me a perfectly okay, useful sort of thing. Because of the size of their imaginative capacity, children are able to handle it, and because of their unique position in life, they are able to put such feelings to work. They understand their position very well, too. Even in such a relatively ordered society as our own, they understand that their survival is a matter almost totally out of their hands. Children are "dependents" up until the age of eight or so in every sense of the word; dependent on mother and father (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but dependent on them not to crash the car into a bridge abutment, to meet the school bus on time, to walk them home from Cub Scouts or Brownies, to buy medicines with childproof caps, dependent on them to make sure they don't electrocute themselves while screwing around with the toaster or while trying to play with Barbie's Beauty Salon in the bathtub.

Running directly counter to this necessary dependence is the survival directive built into all of us. The child realizes his or her essential lack of control, and I suspect it is this very realization which makes the child uneasy. It is the same sort of free-floating anxiety that many air travelers feel. They are not afraid because they believe air travel to be unsafe; they are afraid because they have surrendered control, and if something goes wrong all they can do is sit there clutching air-sick bags or the inflight magazine. To surrender control runs counter to the survival directive. Conversely, while a thinking, informed person may understand intellectually that travel by car is much more dangerous than flying, he or she is still apt to feel much more comfortable behind the wheel, because she/he has control . . . or at least an illusion of it.

This hidden hostility and anxiety toward the airline pilots of their lives may be one explanation why, like the Disney pictures which are released during school vacations in perpetuity, the old fairy tales also seem to go on forever. A parent who would raise his or her hands in horror at the thought of taking his/her child to see Dracula or The Changeling (with its pervasive imagery of the drowning child) would be unlikely to object to the baby sitter reading "Hansel and Gretel" to the child before bedtime. But consider: the tale of Hansel and Gretel begins with deliberate abandonment (oh yes, the stepmother masterminds that one, but she is the symbolic mother all the same, and the father is a spaghetti-brained nurd who goes along with everything she suggests even though he know it's wrong-thus we can see her as amoral, him as actively evil in the Biblical and Miltonian sense), it progresses to kidnapping (the witch in the candy house), enslavement, illegal detention, and finally justifiable homicide and cremation. Most mothers and fathers would never take their children to see Survive, that quickly Mexican exploitation flick about the rugby players who survived the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes by eating their dead teammates, but these same parents find little to object to in "Hansel and Gretel," where the witch is fattening the children up so she can eat them. We give this stuff to the kids almost instinctively, understanding on a deeper level, perhaps, that such fairy stories are the perfect points of crystallization for those fears and hostilities.

Even anxiety-ridden air travelers have their own fairy tales-all those Airport movies, which, like "Hansel and Gretel" and all those Disney cartoons, show every sign of going on forever . . . but which should only be viewed on Thanksgivings, since all of them feature a large cast of turkeys.

My gut reaction to Creature from the Black Lagoon on that long-ago night was a kind of terrible, waking swoon. The nightmare was happening right in front of me; every hideous possibility that human flesh is heir to was being played out on that drive-in screen.

Approximately twenty-two years later, I had a chance to see Creature from the Black Lagoon again-not on TV, with any kind of dramatic build and mood broken up by adverts for used cars, K-Tel disco anthologies, and Underalls pantyhose, thank God, but intact, uncut . . . and even in 3-D. Guys like me who wear glasses have a hell of a time with 3-D, you know; ask anyone who wears specs how they like those nifty little cardboard glasses they give you when you walk in the door. If 3-D ever comes back in a big way, I'm going to take myself down to the local Pearle Vision Center and invest seventy bucks in a special pair of prescription lenses: one red, one blue. Annoying glasses aside, I should add that I took my son Joe with me-he was then five, about the age I had been myself, that night at the drive-in (and imagine my surprise-my rueful surprise-to discover that the movie which had so terrified me on that long-ago night had been rated G by the MPAA . . . just like the Disney pictures).

As a result, I had a chance to experience that weird doubling back in time that I believe most parents only experience at the Disney films with their children, or when reading them the Pooh books or perhaps taking them to the Shrine or the Barnum & Bailey circus. A popular record is apt to create a particular "set" in a listener's mind, precisely because of its brief life of six weeks to three months, and "golden oldies" continue to be played because they are the emotional equivalent of freeze-dried coffee. When the Beach Boys come on the radio singing "Help Me, Rhonda," there is always that wonderful second or two when I can reexperience the wonderful, guilty joy of copping my first feel (and if you do the mental subtraction from my present age of thirty-three, you'll see that I was a little backward in that respect). Movies and books do the same thing, although I would argue that the mental set, its depth and texture, tends to be a little richer, a little more complex, when reexperiencing films, and a lot more complex when dealing with books.

With Joe that day I experienced Creature from the Black Lagoon from the other end of the telescope, but this particular theory of set identification still applied; in fact, it prevailed. Time and age and experience have all left their marks on me, just as they have on you; time is not a river, as Einstein theorized-it's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearing-aid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg. Twenty-two years later I knew that the Creature was really good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, and the suspension of disbelief, that mental clean-and-jerk, had become a lot harder to accomplish. But I did it, which may mean nothing, or which may mean (I hope!) that the buffalo haven't got me yet. But when that weight of disbelief was finally up there, the old feelings came flooding in, as they flooded in some five years ago when I took Joe and my daughter Naomi to their first movie, a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There is a scene in that film where, after Snow White has taken a bite from the poisoned apple, the dwarves take her into the forest, weeping copiously. Half the audience of little kids was also in tears; the lower lips of the other half were trembling. The set identification in that case was strong enough so that I was also surprised into tears. I hated myself for being so blatantly manipulated, but manipulated I was, and there I sat, blubbering into my beard over a bunch of cartoon characters. But it wasn't Disney that manipulated me; I did it myself. It was the kid inside who wept, surprised out of dormancy and into schmaltzy tears . . . but at least awake for awhile.

During the final two reels of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the weight of disbelief is nicely balanced somewhere above my head, and once again director Jack Arnold places the symbols in front of me and produces the old equation of the fairy tales, each symbol as big and as easy to handle as a child's alphabet block. Watching, the child awakes again and knows that this is what dying is like. Dying is when the Creature from the Black Lagoon dams up the exit. Dying is when the monster gets you.

In the end, of course, the hero and heroine, very much alive, not only survive but triumph- as Hansel and Gretel do. As the drive-in floodlights over the screen came on and the projector flashed its GOOD NIGHT, DRIVE SAFELY slide on that big white space (along with the virtuous suggestion that you ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE), there was a brief feeling of relief, almost of resurrection. But the feeling that stuck longest was the swooning sensation that good old Richard Carlson and good old Julia Adams were surely going down for the third time, and the image that remains forever after is of the creature slowly and patiently walling its victims into the Black Lagoon; even now I can see it peering over that growing wall of mud and sticks.

Its eyes. Its ancient eyes.