Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  I'm not suggesting that the news of Sputnik's launching had anywhere near the same sort of effect on the American psyche (although it was not without effect; see, for instance, Tom Wolfe's amusing narrative of events following the successful Russian launch in his superlative book about our space program, The Right Stuff,) but I am guessing that a great many kids--the war babies, we were called--remember the event as well as I do.

  We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw down on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the West was (as in Pat Frank's illuminating novel of the period, Alas, Babylon), but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in our milk from nuclear testing.

  We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call "the big one," and when the dust cleared, America was on top. We had replaced England as the colossus that stood astride the world. When the folks got together again to make me and millions of kids like me, London had been bombed almost flat, the sun was setting every twelve hours or so on the British Empire, and Russia had been bled nearly white in its war against the Nazis; during the siege of Stalingrad, Russian soldiers had been reduced to dining on their dead comrades. But not a single bomb had fallen on New York, and America had the lightest casualty rate of any major power involved in the war.

  Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation. Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: PIONEER SPIRIT. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America's PIONEER SPIRIT--a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with PIONEER SPIRIT. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fastest and bestest with the mostest.

  And what a world stretched ahead! It was all outlined in the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, Alfred Bester, Stanley Weinbaum, and dozens of others! These dreams came in the last of the science fiction pulp magazines, which were shrinking and dying by that October in 1957 . . . but science fiction itself had never been in better shape. Space would be more than conquered, these writers told us; it would . . . it would be . . . why, it would be PIONEERED! Silver needles piercing the void, followed by flaming rockets lowering huge ships onto alien worlds, followed by hardy colonies full of men and women (American men and women, need one add) with PIONEER SPIRIT bursting from every pore. Mars would become our backyard, the new gold rush (or possibly the new rhodium rush) might well be in the asteroid belt . . . and ultimately, of course, the stars themselves would be ours--a glorious future awaited with tourists snapping Kodak prints of the six moons of Procyon IV and a Chevrolet JetCar assembly line on Sirius III. Earth itself would be transformed into a utopia that you could see on the cover of any '50s issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, or Astounding Science Fiction.

  A future filled with the PIONEER SPIRIT; even better, a future filled with the AMERICAN PIONEER SPIRIT. See, for example, the cover of the original Bantam paperback edition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. In this artistic vision--a figment of the artist's imagination and not of Bradbury's; there is nothing so ethnocentric or downright silly in this classic melding of science fiction and fantasy--the landing space travelers look a great deal like gyrenes storming up the beach at Saipan or Tarawa. It's a rocket instead of an LST in the background, true, but their jut-jawed, automatic-brandishing commander might have stepped right out of a John Wayne movie: "Come on, you suckers, do you want to live forever? Where's your PIONEER SPIRIT?"

  This was the cradle of elementary political theory and technological dreamwork in which I and a great many other war babies were rocked until that day in October, when the cradle was rudely upended and all of us fell out. For me, it was the end of the sweet dream . . . and the beginning of the nightmare.

  The children grasped the implication of what the Russians had done as well and as quickly as anyone else--certainly as fast as the politicians who were falling all over themselves to cut the good lumber out of this nasty deadfall. The big bombers that had smashed Berlin and Hamburg in World War II were even then, in 1957, becoming obsolete. A new and ominous abbreviation had come into the working vocabulary of terror: ICBM. The ICBMS, we understood, were only the German V-rockets grown up. They would carry enormous payloads of nuclear death and destruction, and if the Russkies tried anything funny, we would simply blow them right off the face of the earth. Watch out, Moscow! Here comes a big, hot dose of the PIONEER SPIRIT for you, you turkeys!

  Except that somehow, incredibly, the Russians were looking pretty good in the old ICBM department themselves. After all, ICBMS were only big rockets, and the Commies certainly hadn't lofted Sputnik I into orbit with a potato masher.

  And in that context, the movie began again in Stratford, with the ominous, warbling voices of the saucerians echoing everywhere: "Look to your skies . . . a warning will come from your skies . . . look to your skies . . ."

  5

  This book is intended to be an informal overview of where the horror genre has been over the last thirty years, and not an autobiography of yours truly. The autobiography of a father, writer, and ex-high school teacher would make dull reading indeed. I am a writer by trade, which means that the most interesting things that have happened to me have happened in my dreams.

  But because I am a horror novelist and also a child of my times, and because I believe that horror does not horrify unless the reader or viewer has been personally touched, you will find the autobiographical element constantly creeping in. Horror in real life is an emotion that one grapples with--as I grappled with the realization that the Russians had beaten us into space--all alone. It is a combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart.

  I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep and lasting human contact is nothing more nor less than a necessary illusion--but at least the feelings which we think of as "positive" and "constructive" are a reaching-out, an effort to make contact and establish some sort of communication. Feelings of love and kindness, the ability to care and empathize, are all we know of the light. They are efforts to link and integrate; they are the emotions which bring us together, if not in fact then at least in a comforting illusion that makes the burden of mortality a little easier to bear.

  Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the "mob instinct" should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we're told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration . . . but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again. Ask any psychiatrist what his patient is doing when he lies there on the couch and talks about what keeps him awake and what he sees in his dreams. What do you see when you turn out the light? the Beatles asked; their answer: I can't tell you, but I know that it's mine.

  The genre we're talking about, whether it be in terms of books, film, or TV, is really all one: make-believe horrors. And one of the questions that frequently comes up, asked
by people who have grasped the paradox (but perhaps not fully articulated it in their own minds) is: Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world?

  The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools--to dismantle themselves. The term catharsis is as old as Greek drama, and it has been used rather too glibly by some practitioners in my field to justify what they do, but it still has its limited uses here. The dream of horror is in itself an outletting and a lancing . . . and it may well be that the mass-media dream of horror can sometimes become a nationwide analyst's couch.

  So, for the final time before we push on, October of 1957; now, absurd as it looks on the face of it, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers has become a symbolic political statement. Below its pulpy invaders-from-space storyline, it becomes a preview of the ultimate war. Those greedy, twisted old monsters piloting the saucers are really the Russians; the destruction of the Washington Monument, the Capitol dome, and the Supreme Court--all rendered with graphic, eerie believability by Harryhausen's stop-motion effects--becomes nothing less than the destruction one would logically expect when the A-bombs finally fly.

  And then the end of the movie comes. The last saucer has been shot down by Hugh Marlowe's secret weapon, an ultrasonic gun that interrupts the electromagnetic drive of the flying saucers, or some sort of similar agreeable foolishness. Loudspeakers blare from every Washington street corner, seemingly: "The present danger . . . is over. The present danger . . . is over. The present danger is over." The camera shows us clear skies. The evil old monsters with their frozen snarls and their twisted-root faces have been vanquished. We cut to a California beach, magically deserted except for Hugh Marlowe and his new wife (who is, of course, the daughter of the Crusty Old Military Man Who Died For His Country); they are on their honeymoon.

  "Russ," she asks him, "will they ever come back?"

  Marlowe looks sagely up at the sky, then back at his wife. "Not on such a pretty day," he says comfortingly. "And not to such a nice world."

  They run hand in hand into the surf, and the end credits roll.

  For a moment--just for a moment--the paradoxical trick has worked. We have taken horror in hand and used it to destroy itself, a trick akin to pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps. For a little while the deeper fear--the reality of the Russian Sputnik and what it means--has been excised. It will grow back again, but that is for later. For now, the worst has been faced and it wasn't so bad after all. There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end, that same feeling that comes when the roller coaster stops at the end of its run and you get off with your best girl, both of you whole and unhurt.

  I believe it's this feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear, and monstrosity, that makes the danse macabre so rewarding and magical . . . that, and the boundless ability of the human imagination to create endless dreamworlds and then put them to work. It is a world which a fine poet such as Anne Sexton was able to use to "write herself sane." From her poems expressing and delineating her descent into the maelstrom of insanity, her own ability to cope with the world eventually returned, at least for awhile . . . and perhaps others have been able to use her poems in their turn. This is not to suggest that writing must be justified on the basis of its usefulness; to simply delight the reader is enough, isn't it?

  This is a world I've lived in of my own choosing since I was a kid, since long before the Stratford Theater and Sputnik I. I am certainly not trying to tell you that the Russians traumatized me into an interest in horror fiction, but am simply pointing out that instant when I began to sense a useful connection between the world of fantasy and that of what My Weekly Reader used to call Current Events. This book is only my ramble through that world, through all the worlds of fantasy and horror that have delighted and terrified me. It comes with very little plan or order, and if you are sometimes reminded of a hunting dog with a substandard nose casting back and forth and following any trace of interesting scent it happens to come across, that is fine with me.

  But it's not a hunt. It's a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom.

  But we'll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.

  May I have the pleasure?

  CHAPTER II

  Tales of the Hook

  The dividing line between fantasy and science fiction (for properly speaking, fantasy is what it is; the horror genre is only a subset of the larger genre) is a subject that comes up at some point at almost every fantasy or science fiction convention held (and for those of you unaware of the subculture, there are literally hundreds each year). If I had a nickel for every letter printed on the fantasy/sf dichotomy in the columns of the amateur magazines and the prozines of both fields, I could buy the island of Bermuda.

  It's a trap, this matter of definition, and I can't think of a more boring academic subject. Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students--two states of roughly similar incompetence. I'll content myself with stating the obvious inarguables: both are works of the imagination, and both try to create worlds which do not exist, cannot exist, or do not exist yet. There is a difference, of course, but you can draw your own borderline, if you want--and if you try, you may find that it's a very squiggly border indeed. Alien, for instance, is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars. Star Wars is a science fiction film, although we must recognize the fact that it's sf of the E. E. "Doc" Smith/Murray Leinster whack-and-slash school: an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT.

  Somewhere in between these two, in a buffer zone that has been little used by the movies, are works that seem to combine science fiction and fantasy in a nonthreatening way--Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance.

  With such a number of divisions (and any dedicated science fiction or fantasy fan could offer a dozen more, ranging from Utopian Fiction, Negative Utopian Fiction, Sword and Sorcery, Heroic Fantasy, Future History, and on into the sunset), you can see why I don't want to open this particular door any wider than I have to.

  Let me, instead of defining, offer a couple of examples, and then we'll move along--and what better example than Donovan's Brain?

  Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be nonscientific. Curt Siodmak's novel Donovan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien). It was adapted three times for the screen, and all versions enjoyed fair popular success. Both the novel and the films focus on a scientist who, if not quite mad, is certainly operating at the far borders of rationality. Thus we can place him in a direct line of descent from the original Mad Labs proprietor, Victor Frankenstein.1 This scientist has been experimenting with a technique designed to keep the brain alive after the body has died--specifically, in a tank filled with an electrically charged saline solution.

  In the course of the novel, the private plane of W. D. Donovan, a rich and domineering millionaire, crashes near the scientist's desert lab. Recognizing the knock of opportunity, the scientist removes the dying millionaire's skull and pops Donovan's brain into his tank.

  So far, so good. This story has elements of both horror and science fiction; at this point it could go either way, depending on Siodmak's handling of the subject. One of the earlier versions of the film tips its hand almost at once: the removal operation takes place in a howling thunderstorm and the scientist's Arizona laboratory looks more like Baskerville Hall. And none of the films is up to the tale of mounting terror Siodmak tells in his careful, rational prose. The operation is a success. The brain is alive and possibly even t
hinking in its tank of cloudy liquid. The problem now becomes one of communication. The scientist begins trying to contact the brain by means of telepathy . . . and finally succeeds. In a half-trance, he writes the name W. D. Donovan three or four times on a scrap of paper, and comparison shows that his signature is interchangeable with that of the millionaire.

  In its tank, Donovan's brain begins to change and mutate. It grows stronger, more able to dominate our young hero. He begins to do Donovan's bidding, said bidding all revolving around Donovan's psychopathic determination to make sure the right person inherits his fortune. The scientist begins to experience the frailties of Donovan's physical body (now moldering in an unmarked grave): low back pain, a decided limp. As the story builds to its climax, Donovan tries to use the scientist to run down a little girl who stands in the way of his implacable, monstrous will.

  In one of its film incarnations, the Beautiful Young Wife (no comparable creature exists in Siodmak's novel) rigs up lightning rods, which zap the brain in its tank. At the end of the book, the scientist attacks the tank with an ax, resisting the endless undertow of Donovan's will by reciting a simple yet haunting mnemonic phrase--He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. The glass shatters, the saline solution pours out, and the loathsome, pulsing brain is left to die like a slug on the laboratory floor.