Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  Different languages seem particularly suited to different purposes; the French may have gotten a reputation for being great lovers because the French language seems particularly well suited to the expression of emotion (there is no nicer way to say it than Je t'aime . . . and no better language in which to sound really jacked off at someone). German is the language of explanation and clarification (but it is a cold language for all that; the sound of many people speaking German is the sound of large machines running in a factory). English serves very well to express thought and moderately well to express image, but there is nothing inherently lovely about it (although as someone has pointed out, it has its queerly perverse moments; think of the lovely and euphonious sound of the words "proctological examination"). It has always seemed to me ill suited to the expression of feeling, though. Neither "Why don't we go to bed together" or the cheerful but undeniably crude "Baby, let's fuck" can touch "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" But we must do the best we can with what we have . . . and as readers of Shakespeare and Faulkner will attest, the best we can do is often remarkably good.

  American writers are more apt to mangle the language than our British cousins (although I'd argue with anyone that English English is much more bloodless than American English--many British writers have the unhappy habit of droning; droning in perfectly grammatical English, but a drone is still a drone for a' that and a' that), often because they were subjected to poor or erratic teaching methods as children, but the best American work is striking in a way that British prose and poetry rarely is anymore: see, for instance, such disparate writers as James Dickey, Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, John Irving.

  Both Campbell and Herbert write that unmistakable, impeccable English line; their stories go out into the world with their pants buttoned, their zippers zipped, and their braces in their places--but to what a different ultimate effect!

  James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces. It is not a tremendously artistic method of attack, and no one is ever going to compare him to Doris Letting or V. S. Naipaul . . . but it works.

  The Fog (no relation to the film of the same name by John Carpenter) is a multiple-viewpoint story about what happens when an underground explosion breaches a steel cannister that has been buried by the British Ministry of Defense. The cannister contains a living organism called a mycoplasma (an ominous protoplasm that may remind readers of an obscure Japanese horror film from the fifties titled The H-Man) which resembles a smoggy yellow-green mist. Like rabies, it attacks the brains of the humans and animals it envelops, turning them into raving maniacs. Some of the incidents involving animals are particularly grisly; a farmer is trampled to death by his own cows in a foggy pasture, and a drunken shopkeeper who seems to loathe everything but his racing pigeons (and one battered old campaigner in particular, a pigeon named Claude) has his eyes pecked out by his birds, who have flown back to their London coop through the fog. The shopkeeper, clutching the remains of his face, staggers off the rooftop where the birds are quartered and falls to his death.

  Herbert rarely finesses and never pulls back from the crunch; instead he seems to race eagerly, zestfully, toward each new horror. In one scene a crazed bus driver castrates the teacher who has been his nemesis with a pair of garden shears; in another, an elderly poacher who has been previously caught and "thrashed" by the local large landowner suffers the effects of the fog, goes after the landowner, and nails him to his own dining room table before finishing him off with an ax. A snotty bank manager is locked in his own vault, a gym teacher is beaten to death by his phys ed students, and in the book's most effective scene, almost a hundred and fifty thousand residents and holiday-makers at Bournemouth walk into the ocean in a massive, lemminglike group suicide.

  The Fog was published in 1975, three years before the gruesome events at Jonestown, Guyana, and in many of the book's episodes--particularly in the Bournemouth episode--Herbert seems to have forecast it. We see the event through the eyes of a young woman named Mavis Evers. Her lesbian lover has just left her, having discovered the joys of going hetero, and Mavis has gone to Bournemouth to commit suicide . . . a little irony worthy of E.C. comics at their best. She wades breast-deep into the water, becomes frightened, and decides she will try living a little longer. The undertow nearly gets her, but following a short, tense struggle, she is able to get to shallow water again. Turning to face the shore, Mavis is greeted by this nightmare:

  There were hundreds--could it be thousands--of people climbing down the steps to the beach and walking toward her, toward the sea!

  Was she dreaming? . . . The people of the town were marching in a solid wall out to the sea, making no sound, staring toward the horizon as though something was beckoning to them. Their faces were white, trancelike, barely human. And there were children among them; some walked along on their own, seeming to belong to no one; those that couldn't walk were being carried. Most of the people were in their nightclothes, some were naked, having risen from their beds as though answering a call that Mavis neither heard nor saw. . . .

  This was written before the Jonestown tragedy, remember.

  In the aftermath of that, I recall one commentator intoning with dark and solemn sonorousness, "It was an event that not even the most darkly fertile imagination could have envisioned." I flashed on the Bournemouth scene from The Fog and thought, "You're wrong. James Herbert envisioned it."

  . . . still they came on, oblivious to her cries, unseeing. She realized her danger and ran toward them in a vain attempt to break through, but they forced her back, heedless of her pleas as she strained against them. She managed to push a short path through them, but the great numbers before her were unconquerable, pushing her back, back into the waiting sea. . . .

  Well, as you've probably guessed, poor old Mavis gets her suicide whether she wants it or not. And in point of fact, it is explicit scenes of horror and violence like the one just described which have made Herbert the focus of a great deal of criticism in his native England. He told me that he finally got sick enough of the "Do you write violence for the sake of violence?" question to finally blow up at a reporter. "That's right," he said. "I write violence for the sake of violence, just as Harold Robbins writes sex for the sake of sex, and Robert Heinlein writes science fiction for the sake of science fiction, and Margaret Drabble writes literature for the sake of literature. Except no one ever asks them, do they?"

  As to how Herbert came to write The Fog, he replies: "It's about impossible to remember where any idea comes from--I mean a single idea may come from many sources. But as clearly as I can recall, the kernel came during a business meeting. I was with an advertising firm then, and sitting in the office of my creative director, who was a rather dull man. And all of a sudden it occurred to me: 'What would happen if this man just turned, walked to the window, opened it, and stepped out?' "

  Herbert turned the idea over in his mind for some time and finally sat down to do the novel, spending about eight months' worth of weekends and late nights getting it together. "The thing I like best about it," he says, "is that it had no limits of structure or place. It could simply go on and on until the thing resolved itself. I liked working with my main characters, but I also liked the vignettes because when I got tired of what my heroes were up to, I could go off on just about any tangent I liked. My feeling throughout the writing was, 'I'm just going to enjoy myself. I'm going to try to go over the top; to see how much I can get away with.' "

  In its construction, The Fog shows the effect of those apocalyptic Big Bug movies of the late fifties and early sixties. All the ingredients are there: we have a mad scientist who was screwing around with something he didn't understand and was killed by the mycoplasma he invented; the military testing secret weapons and unleashing the horror, the "young scientist" hero, John Holman, who we first meet bravely rescuing a little girl from the fissure that has Unleashed the Fog on an Unsus
pecting World; the beautiful girlfriend, Casey; the obligatory gathering of scientists, who natter about "the F100 method of fog dispersion" and lament the fact that carbon dioxide can't be used to disperse the fog because "the organism thrives on it" and who inform us that the fog is really "a pleuro-pneumonia-like organism."

  We will recognize these obligatory trappings of science fiction from such movies as Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis, Them!, and a dozen others; yet we will also recognize that trappings are all they are, and the heart of Herbert's novel lies not in the fog's origin or composition but in its decidedly Dionysian effects--murder, suicide, sexual aberrations, and all manner of deviant behavior. Holman, the hero, is our representative from a saner Apollonian world, and to do Herbert full justice, he manages to make Holman a good deal more interesting than the zero-heroes played by William Hopper, Craig Stevens, and Peter Graves in various of the Big Bug films . . . or consider, if you will, poor old Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, whose entire set of lines during the last third of the movie seems to consist of, "Keep firing at saucer!" and "Fire at saucer until it crashes!"

  Nonetheless, our interest in Holman's adventures and whether or not his girlfriend Casey will recover from the effects of her own bout with the fog (and what will be her reaction to the information that she plunged a scissors into her father's stomach while under the influence?) seems pallid when compared to our morbid let's-slow-down-and-look-at-the-accident interest in the old lady who is eaten alive by her pet cats or the crazed pilot who crashes his loaded jumbo jet into the London skyscraper where his wife's lover works.

  I suppose that popular fiction divides itself quite naturally into two halves: what we call "mainstream fiction" and that which I would call "pulp fiction." The pulps, including the so-called "shudder-pulps," of which Weird Tales was the finest exponent, have been long gone from the scene, but they live on in the novel and do a brisk business on paperback racks everywhere. Many of these modern pulps would have been printed as multipart serials in the pulp magazines that existed roughly from 1910 until about 1950, had they been written during that period. But I wouldn't restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western; Arthur Hailey, for instance, seems to me to be writing modern-day pulp. The ingredients are all there, from the inevitable violence to the inevitable maiden in distress. The critics who have regularly toasted Hailey over the coals are the same critics who--infuriatingly enough--see the novel as divisible only into two categories: "literature," which may either succeed or fail upon its merits, and "popular fiction," which always fails, no matter how good it may be (every now and then a writer such as John D. MacDonald may be elevated in the critical mind from a writer of "popular fiction" to a writer of "literature," at which point his body of work may be safely reevaluated).

  My own idea is that fiction actually falls into three main categories: literature, mainstream fiction, and pulp fiction--and that to categorize does not end the critic's job but only gives him or her a place to set his or her feet. To label a novel "pulp" is not the same as saying it's a bad novel, or will give the reader no pleasure. Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton's "Seven Heads of Bushongo" or "Satan's Virgin," by Ray Cummings.23 On the other hand, though, Dashiell Hammett published extensively in the pulps (most notably in the highly regarded Black Mask, where contemporaries Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich also published); Tennessee Williams's first published wok, a vaguely Lovecraftian tale titled "The Vengeance of Nitocris," appeared in an early issue of Weird Tales; Bradbury broke in by way of the same market; so did MacKinlay Kantor, who would go on to write Andersonville.

  To condemn pulp writing out of hand is like condemning a girl as loose simply because she comes from unpleasant family circumstances. The fact that supposedly reputable critics both in the genre and outside it continue to do so makes me both sad and angry. James Herbert is not a nascent Tennessee Williams only waiting for the right time to spin a cocoon and emerge as a great figure of modern literature; he is what he is and that's all that he is, as Popeye would say. My point is simply that what he is, is good enough. I loved John Jakes's comment on his Bicentennial/Kent Family saga some years back. He said that Gore Vidal was the Rolls-Royce of historical novelists; that he himself was more in the Chevrolet Vega class. What Jakes so modestly left unstated was that both vehicles will get you where you want to go quite adequately; how you feel about style is between you and you.

  James Herbert is the only writer discussed in these pages who is squarely in the pulp tradition. He specializes in violent death, bloody confrontation, explicit and in some cases kinky sex, strong and virile young heroes possessed of beautiful girlfriends. The problem which needs to be solved is in most cases apparent, and the story's emphasis is put squarely on solving that problem. But Herbert works effectively within his chosen genre. He has consistently refused, from the very first, to be satisfied with characters who are nothing more than cardboard cutouts which he moves around the playing-field of his novel; in most cases we are given motivations we can identify with and believe in, as in the case of poor, suicide-bound Mavis. Mavis reflects with a kind of pitiful, deranged defiance that "She wanted them to know she had taken her own life; her death, unlike her life, had to have some meaning. Even if it was only Ronnie who fully understood that reason." This is hardly stunning character insight, but it is fully adequate to Herbert's purposes, and if the ironic outcome is similar to the ironic outcome of the tales in E.C.'s series of horror comics, we are able to see more and thus believe more, a victory for Herbert which the reader can share. Further, Herbert has continued to improve. The Fog is his second novel; those that follow show a gratifying development in the writer, culminating perhaps in The Spear, which shows us a writer who has stepped out of the pulp arena altogether and has entered the wider field of the mainstream novel.

  9

  Which brings us to Harlan Ellison . . . and all kinds of problems. Because here it is impossible to separate the man from the work. I've decided to close this brief review of some of the elements in modern horror fiction by discussing Ellison's work because, although he repudiates the label "horror writer," he sums up, for me, the finest elements of the term. Closing with Ellison is perhaps almost mandatory because in his short stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things which horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison is haunted by the death of Kitty Genovese--a murder that comes up in his "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and in several of his essays--the mass suicides in Jonestown; and he is convinced that Iran's Ayatollah has created a senile dream of power in which we are now all living (like men and women in a fantasy tale who ultimately come to realize they are living in a psychotic's hallucinations). Most of all, it seems to me that Ellison's work is the proper place to conclude because he never looks back; he has been the field's point-man for fifteen years now, and if there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980s (always assuming there are a 1980s, ha-ha), then Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer. He has quite deliberately provoked a storm of controversy over his own work--one writer in the field whom I know considers him to be a modern incarnation of Jonathan Swift, and another regularly refers to him as "that no-talent son of a bitch." It is a storm that Ellison lives in quite contentedly.

  "You're not a writer at all," an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. "You're a goddamn industry. How do you ever expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?" Well, in point of fact, I'm not "a goddamn industry" (unless it's a cottage industry); I work steadily, that's all. Any writer who only produces a book every seven years is not thinking Deep Thoughts; even a long book takes at most three years to think and write. No, a writer who only produces one book every seven years is simply dicking off. But my own fecundity-
-however fecund that may be--pales before Ellison's, who has written at a ferocious clip; at this point he has published just over one thousand short stories. In addition to all the stories published under his own name, Ellison has written as Nalrah Nosille, Sley Harson, Landon Ellis, Deny Tiger, Price Curtis, Paul Merchant, Lee Archer, E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo, Jay Charby, Wallace Edmondson--and Cordwainer Bird.24

  The Cordwainer Bird name is a good example of Ellison's restless wit and his anger at work he feels to be substandard dreck. Since the early sixties he has done many TV scripts, including produced scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Young Lawyers, The Outer Limits, and what many fans reel may have been the best Star Trek episode of them all, "The City on the Edge of Forever."25 At the same time he was writing these scripts for television--and winning an unprecedented three Writers Guild of America awards for best dramatic television scripts in the process--Ellison was engaging in a bitter running battle, a kind of creative guerilla warfare, with other TV producers over what he regarded as a deliberate effort to degrade his work and to degrade the medium itself ("to Cuisinart it," in Ellison's own words). In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Bird--a name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine, a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's."