by Stephen King
Me? I was suffering from a really good case of career jet lag. Four years before, I had been running sheets in an industrial laundry for $1.60 an hour and writing Carrie in the furnace room of a trailer. My daughter, who was then almost a year old, was dressed mostly in scrounged clothes. The year before that, I had married my wife Tabitha in a borrowed suit that was too big for me. I left the laundry when a teaching position opened up at a nearby school, Hampden Academy, and my wife Tabby and I were dismayed to learn that my first-year salary of $6,400 was not going to take us much further than my laundry salary--and pretty soon I'd secured my laundry job back for the following summer.
Then Carrie sold to Doubleday, and Doubleday sold the reprint rights for a staggering sum of money which was, in those days, nearly a record-breaker. Life began to move at Concorde speed. Carrie was bought for films; 'Salem's Lot was bought for a huge sum of money and then also bought for films; The Shining likewise. Suddenly all of my friends thought I was rich. That was bad enough, scary enough; what was worse was the fact that maybe I was. People began to talk to me about investments, about tax shelters, about moving to California. These were changes enough to try and cope with, but on top of them, the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet . . . it began to seem like an elaborate castle of sand unfortunately built well below the high-tide line.
The first wave to touch that castle (or the first one that I perceived) was that long-ago announcement that the Russians had beaten us into space . . . but now the tide was coming in for fair.
And so here, I think, is the face of the double werewolf, revealed at last. On the surface, The Stand pretty much conforms to those conventions we have already discussed: an Apollonian society is disrupted by a Dionysian force (in this case a deadly strain of superflu that kills almost everybody). Further, the survivors of this plague discover themselves in two camps: one, located in Boulder, Colorado, mimics the Apollonian society just destroyed (with a few significant changes); the other, located in Las Vegas, Nevada, is violently Dionysian.
The first Dionysian incursion in The Exorcist comes when Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears that lionlike roar in the attic. In The Stand, Dionysus announces himself with the crash of an old Chevy into the pumps of an out-of-the-way gas station in Texas. In The Exorcist, the Apollonian steady state is restored when we see a pallid Regan MacNeil being led to her mother's Mercedes-Benz; in The Stand I believe that this moment comes when the book's two main characters, Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith, look through a plate-glass window in the Boulder hospital at Frannie's obviously normal baby. As with The Exorcist, the return of equilibrium never felt so good.
But below all of this, hidden by the moral conventions of the horror tale (but perhaps not all that hidden), the face of the real Werewolf can be dimly seen. Much of the compulsion I felt while writing The Stand obviously came from envisioning an entire entrenched societal process destroyed at a stroke. I felt a bit like Alexander, lifting his sword over the Gordian knot and growling, "Fuck untying it; I've got a better way." And I felt a bit the way Johnny Rotten sounds at the beginning of that classic and electrifying Sex Pistols song, "Anarchy for the U.K." He utters a low, throaty chuckle that might have come from Randall Flagg's own throat and then intones, "Right . . . NOW!" We hear that voice, and our reaction is one of intense relief. The worst is now known; we are in the hands of an authentic madman.
In this frame of mind, the destruction of THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT became an actual relief. No more Ronald McDonald! No more Gong Show or Soap on TV--just soothing snow! No more terrorists! No more bullshit! Only the Gordian knot unwinding there in the dust. I am suggesting that below the writer of the moral horror tale (whose feet, like those of Henry Jekyll, are "always treading the upward path") there lies another creature altogether. He lives, let us say, down there on Jack Finney's third level, and he is a capering nihilist who, to extend the Jekyll-Hyde metaphor, is not content to tread over the tender bones of one screaming little girl but in this case feels it necessary to do the funky chicken over the whole world. Yes, folks, in The Stand I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and it was fun!
So where is morality now?
Well, I'll give you my idea. I think it lies where it has always lain: in the hearts and minds of men and women of good will. In the case of the writer, this may mean beginning with a nihilistic premise and gradually relearning old lessons of human values and human conduct. In the case of The Stand, this meant beginning with the glum premise that the human race carries a kind of germ with it--I began by seeing this germ symbolically visualized in the SLA, and ended by seeing it visualized in the superflu germ--which grows more and more virulent as technology grows in power. The superflu is unleashed by a single technological misstep (not such a far-fetched presumption, either, when you consider what happened at Three Mile Island last year or the fact that Loring AFB in my own state scrambled bombers and fighters ready to head over the pole toward Russia as the result of an amusing little computer foul-up which suggested that the Russians had launched their missiles and the Big Hot One was on). By simple agreement with myself to allow a few survivors--no survivors, no story, am I right?--I was able to envision a world in which all the nuclear stockpiles would simply rust away and some kind of normal moral, political, and ecological balance would return to the mad universe we call home.
But I don't think anyone knows what they really think--or perhaps even what they really know--until it's written down, and I came to realize that the survivors would be very likely to first take up all the old quarrels and then all the old weapons. Worse, all those deadly toys would be available to them, and things might well become a sprint to see which group of loonies could figure out how to launch them first. My own lesson in writing The Stand was that cutting the Gordian Knot simply destroys the riddle instead of solving it, and the book's last line is an admission that the riddle still remains.
The book also tries to celebrate brighter aspects of our lives: simple human courage, friendship, and love in a world which so often seems mostly loveless. In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus's remark that "happiness, too, is inevitable."
More prosaically, my mother used to tell my brother David and me to "hope for the best and expect the worst," and that expresses the book I remember writing as well as anything.
So, in short, we hope for a fourth level (a triple Werewolf?), one that will bring us full circle again to the horror writer not just as writer but as human being, mortal man or woman, just another passenger in the boat, another pilgrim on the way to whatever there is. And we hope that if he sees another pilgrim fall down that he will write about it--but not before he or she has helped the fallen one off his or her feet, brushed off his or her clothes, and seen if he or she is all right, and able to go on. If such behavior is to be, it cannot be as a result of an intellectual moral stance; it is because there is such a thing as love, merely a practical fact, a practical force in human affairs.
Morality is, after all, a codification of those things which the heart understands to be true and those things which the heart understands to be the demands of a life lived among others . . . civilization, in a word. And if we remove the label "horror story" or "fantasy genre" or whatever, and replace it with "literature" or more simply still, "fiction," we may realize more easily that no such blanket accusations of immorality can be made. If we say that morality proceeds simply from a good heart--which has little to do with ridiculous posturings and happily-ever-afterings--and immorality proceeds from a lack of care, from shoddy observation, and from the prostitution of drama or melodrama for some sort of gain, monetary or otherwise, then we may realize that we have arrived at a critical stance which is both workable and humane. Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and in the tale of horror as in any other tale, the same rule applies now as when Aristophanes told his horror tale of the frogs: morality is telling the truth as your heart knows it. When asked if he wa
s not ashamed of the rawness and sordidness of his turn-of-the-century novel McTeague, Frank Norris replied: "Why should I be? I did not lie. I did not truckle. I told them the truth."
Seen in that light, I think the horror tale may more often be adjudged innocent than guilty.
17
My, look at this . . . I do believe the sun is coming up. We have danced the night away, like lovers in some old MGM musical. But now the band has packed their melodies back inside their cases and has quitted the stage. The dancers have left, all but you and I, and I suppose we must go, as well. I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed the evening, and if you sometimes found me a clumsy partner (or if I occasionally stepped on your toes), I do apologize. I feel as I suppose all lovers feel when the dance has finally ended, tired . . . but still gay.
As I walk you to the door, may I tell you one more thing? We'll stand here in the vestibule as they unroll the rug again and douse the lights. Let me help you with your coat; I'll not keep you long.
Questions of morality in the pursuit of horror may be begging the actual question. The Russians have a phrase, "the scream of the woodcock." The phrase is derisory because the woodcock is nature's ventriloquist, and if you fire your shotgun at the place where the sound came from, you'll go hungry. Shoot the woodcock, not the scream, the Russians say.
So let's see if we can't find a woodcock--just one--in all these screaming thickets. It might just be hiding in this item, truth rather than fiction, from The Book of Lists, the Wallace/Wallechinsky clan's attic full of fascinating rickrack and useful junk. As you get ready to leave, think about this . . . or brood upon it:
THE MYSTERY OF LITTLE MISS NOBODY
On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus was giving a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, before 7,000 paid customers. A fire broke out; 168 persons died in the blaze and 487 were injured. One of the dead, a small girl thought to be six years old, was unidentified. Since no one came to claim her, and since her face was unmarred, a photograph was taken of her and distributed locally and then throughout the U.S. Days passed, weeks and months passed, but no relative, no playmate, no one in the nation came forward to identify her. She remains unknown to this day.
My idea of growing up is that the process consists mainly of developing a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty (what about Little Miss Nobody, you ask me--well, hang on; we'll get there). Children see everything, consider everything; the typical expression of the baby which is full, dry, and awake is a wide-eyed goggle at everything. Hello, pleased to meet you, freaked to be here. A child has not yet developed the obsessional behavior patterns which we approvingly call "good work habits." He or she has not yet internalized the idea that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
All of that comes later. Children believe in Santa Claus. It's no big deal; just a piece of stored information. They likewise believe in the bogeyman, the Trix Rabbit, McDonaldland (where hamburgers grow on trees and moderate thievery is approved behavior--witness the lovable Hamburglar), the Tooth Fairy who takes ivory and leaves silver . . . all of these things are taken as a matter of course. These are some of the popular myths; there are others which, while more specialized, seem just as outre. Grampa has gone to live with the angels. The stuff in the middle of the golf ball is the worst poison in the world. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. If you walk through holly bushes, your shadow can get caught and it will be left there forever, flapping on the sharp leaves.
The changes come gradually, as logic and rationalism assert themselves. The child begins to wonder how Santa can be at the Value House, on a downtown corner ringing a bell over a Salvation Army pot, and up at the North Pole generaling his troop of elves all at the same time. The child maybe realizes that although he's stepped on a hell of a lot of cracks, his or her mother's back is yet all right. Age begins to settle into that child's face. "Don't be a baby!" he or she is told impatiently. "Your head is always in the clouds!" And the kicker, of course: "Aren't you ever going to grow up?"
After awhile, the song says, Puff the magic dragon stopped trundling his way up the Cherry Lane to see his old good buddy Jackie Paper. Wendy and her brothers finally left Peter Pan and the Wild Boys to their fate. No more Magic Dust and only an occasional Happy Thought . . . but there was always something a little dangerous about Peter Pan, wasn't there? Something just a little too woodsy-wild? Something in his eyes that was . . . well, downright Dionysian.
Oh, the gods of childhood are immortal; the big kids don't really sacrifice them; they just pass them on to their bratty kid brothers and kid sisters. It's childhood itself that's mortal: man is in love, and loves what passes. And it's not just Puff and Tink and Peter Pan that are left behind in that rush for the driver's license, the high school and college diploma, in that mostly eager training to achieve "good work habits." We have each exiled the Tooth Fairy (or perhaps he exiles us when we are no longer able to provide the product he requires), murdered Santa Claus (only to reanimate the corpse for our own children), killed the giant that chased Jack down the beanstalk. And the poor old bogeyman! Laughed to death again and again, like Mr. Dark at the conclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Listen to me now: At eighteen or twenty or twenty-one, whatever the legal drinking age may be in your state, "getting carded" is something of an embarrassment. You have to fumble around for a driver's license or your State Liquor Card or maybe even a photostat of your birth certificate so you can get a simple fa' Chrissakes glass of beer. But you let ten years go past, get so you are looking the big three-o right in the eye, and there is something absurdly flattering about getting carded. It means you still look like you might not be old enough to buy a drink over the bar. You still look a little wet behind the ears. You still look young.
This got into my head a few years ago when I was in a bar called Benjaman's in Bangor, getting pleasantly loaded. I began to study the faces of entering patrons. The guy standing unobtrusively by the door let this one pass . . . and that one . . . and the next one. Then, bang! He stopped a guy in a U of M jacket and carded him. And I'll be damned if that guy didn't do a quick fade. The drinking age in Maine was then eighteen (booze-related accidents on the highways have since caused the lawmakers to move the age up to twenty), and all of those people had looked about eighteen to me. So I got up and asked the bouncer how he knew that last guy was underage. He shrugged. "You just know," he said. "It's mostly in their eyes."
For weeks after, my hobby was looking at the faces of adults and trying to decide exactly what it was that made them "adult faces." The face of a thirty-year-old is healthy, unwrinkled, and no bigger than the face of a seventeen-year-old. Yet you know that's no kid; you know. There seems to be some hidden yet overriding characteristic that makes what we all agree is the Adult Face. It isn't just the clothes or the stance, it isn't the fact that the thirty-year-old is toting a briefcase and the seventeen-year-old is toting a knapsack; if you put the head of each in one of those carnival cut-outs which show the body of a capering sailor or a prize-fighter, you could still pick out the adult ten tries out of ten.
I came to believe that the bouncer was right. It's in the eyes.
Not something that's there; something, rather, that has left.
Kids are bent. They think around corners. But starting at roughly age eight, when childhood's second great era begins, the kinks begin to straighten out, one by one. The boundaries of thought and vision begin to close down to a tunnel as we gear up to get along. At last, unable to grapple to any profit with Never-Never Land anymore, we may settle for the minor-league version available at the local disco . . . or for a trip to Disney World one February or March.
The imagination is an eye, a marvelous third eye that floats free. As children, that eye sees with 20/20 clarity. As we grow older, its vision begins to dim . . . and one day the guy at the door lets you into the bar without asking to see any ID and that's it for you, Cho
lly; your hat is over the windmill. It's in your eyes. Something in your eyes. Check them out in the mirror and tell me if I'm wrong.
The job of the fantasy writer, or the horror writer, is to bust the walk of that tunnel vision wide for a little while; to provide a single powerful spectacle for the third eye. The job of the fantasy-horror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again.
And the horror writer himself/herself? Someone else looks at that item about Little Miss Nobody (toldja we'd get back to her, and here she is, still unidentified, as mysterious as the Wolf Boy of Paris) and says, "Jeez, you never can tell, can you?" and goes on to something else. But the fantasist begins to play with it as a child would, speculating about children from other dimensions, about dopplegangers, about God knows what. It's a child's toy, something bright and shiny and strange. Let us pull a lever and see what it does, let us push it across the floor and see if it goes Rum-Rum-Rum or wacka-wacka-wacka. Let us turn it over and see if it will magically right itself again. In short, let us have our Fortian rains of frogs and people who have mysteriously burned to death while sitting at home in their easy chairs; let us have our vampires and our werewolves. Let us have Little Miss Nobody, who perhaps slipped sideways through a crack in reality, only to be trampled to death in the rush from a burning circus tent.
And something of this is reflected in the eyes of those who write horror stories. Ray Bradbury has the dreamy eyes of a child. So, behind his thick glasses, does Jack Finney. The same look is in Lovecraft's eyes--they startle with their simple dark directness, especially in that narrow, pinched, and somehow eternal New England face. Harlan Ellison, in spite of his rapid jive-talking shoot-from-the-hip Nervous-Norvus mode of conversation (talking with Harlan can sometimes be like talking with an apocalyptic Saladmaster salesman who has just taken three large bennies), has those eyes. Every now and then he'll pause, looking away, looking at something else, and you know that it's true: Harlan is bent, and he just thought his way around a corner. Peter Straub, who dresses impeccably and who always seems to project the aura of some big company success, also has that look in his eyes. It is an indefinable look, but it's there.
