the antiquarianism of both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft.
But by 1939 an extremely significant transition is apparent,
particularly in the U.S. Weird Tales and the Lovecraft circle
of writers, as well as the popular films, had made horror a
vigorous part of popular culture, had built a large audience
among the generally nonliterary readership for pulp fiction,
a “ lower-class” audience. And in 1939 John W. Campbell,
14
The Dark Descent
the famous science fiction editor, founded the revolutionary
pulp fantasy magazine, Unknown. From 1923 to 1939, the
leading source of horror and supernatural fiction in the English language was Weird Tales, publishing all traditional styles but tending toward the florid and antiquarian. Unknown
was an aesthetic break with traditional horror fiction. Campbell demanded stories with contemporary, particularly urban, settings, told in clear, unomamented prose style. Unknown
featured stories by all the young science fiction writers whose
work was changing that genre in Campbell’s Astounding. Alfred Bester, Eric Frank Russell, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E.
Van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard and others, particularly such fantasists as Theodore Sturgeon, Jane Rice, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown and Fritz Leiber.
The stories tended to focus equally on the supernatural and
the psychological. Psychology was often quite overtly the underpinning for horror, as in, for example, Hubbard’s “ He Didn’t Like Cats,’’ in which there is an extended discussion
between the two supporting characters as to whether the central character’s problem is supernatural or psychological . . .
and we never know, for either way he’s doomed. Unknown
broke the dominance of Weird Tales and influenced such significant young talents as Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson.
The magazine encouraged the genrification of certain types
of psychological fiction and, at the same time, crossbred a
good bit of horror into the growing science fiction field. This
reinforced a cultural trend apparent in the monster and mad
scientist films of the 1930s, giving us the enormous spawn of
SF/horror films of the 1950s and beyond.
It is interesting to note that as our perceptions of horror
fiction and what the term includes change over the decades,
differing works seem to fall naturally into or out of the category. The possibilities of psychological horror seem in the end to blur distinctions, and there is no question that horror
is becoming ever more inclusive.
Stories of the third stream have at their center ambiguity
as to the nature of reality, and it is this very ambiguity that
Introduction
IS
generates the horrific effects. Often there is an overtly supernatural (or certainly abnormal) occurrence, but we know of it only by allusion. Often, essential elements are left undescribed so that, for instance, we do not know whether there was really a ghost or not. But the difference is not merely
supernatural versus psychological explanation: third stream
stories lack any explanation that makes sense in everyday
reality—we don’t know, and that doubt disturbs us, horrifies
us. Iliis is the fiction to which Sartre’s analysis alludes, the
fantastic. At its extreme, from Kafka to the present, it blends
indistinguishably with magic realism, the surreal, the absurd,
all the fictions that confront reality through paradoxical distance. It is the fiction of radical doubt. Thomas M. Disch once remarked that Poe can profitably be considered as a
contemporary of Kierkegaard, and it is evident that this
stream develops from the beginnings of horror fiction in the
short story. In the contemporary field it is a major current.
Third stream stories tend to cross all category lines but
usually they do not use the conventional supernatural as a
distancing device. While most horror fiction declares itself at
some point as violating the laws of nature, the fantastic worlds
of third stream fiction use as a principal device what Sartre
has called the language of the fantastic.
At the end of a horror story, the reader is left with a new
perception of the nature of reality. In the moral allegory
strain, the point seems to be that this is what reality was and
has been all along (i.e., literally a world in which supernatural forces are at work) only you couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize it. Psychological metaphor stories basically use the intrusion of abnormality to release repressed or unarticulated
psychological states. In her book, Powers o f Horror, critic
Julia Kristeva says that horror deals with material just on the
edge of repression but not entirely repressed and inaccessible. Stories from our second stream use the heightening effect of the monstrously abnormal to achieve this release. Third
stream stories maintain the pretense of everyday reality only
to annihilate it, leaving us with another world entirely, one
16
The Dark Descent
in which we are disturbingly imprisoned. It is in perceiving
the changed reality and its nature that the pleasure and illumination of third stream stories lies, that raises this part of horror fiction above the literary level of most of its generic
relations. So the transaction between the reader and the text
that identifies all horror fiction is to an extent modified in
third stream stories (there is rarely, if ever, any terror), making them more difficult to classify and identify than even the borderline cases in the psychological category. Gene Wolfe’s
“ Seven American Nights’’ is, in my opinion, a story on the
borderline of third stream, deeply disturbing but not conventionally horrifying. The mass horror audience is not much taken with third stream stories, regardless of craft or literary
merit, because they modify the emotional jolt.
Although the manifest images of horror fiction are legion, their latent meanings are few. Readers and writers of horror fiction, like those of all the popular genres,
seem under a compulsion to repeat. Certainly the needs
satisfied by horror fiction are recurrent and ineradicable.
—George Stade, The New York Times,
Oct. 27, 1985
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will
try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot
terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot
horrify, I ’ll go for the gross-out.
—Stephen King, Danse Macabre
VI The Dark Descent
The descent of horror fiction from its origins in the nineteenth century to the many and sophisticated forms of the contemporary field has taken place in shorter stories. Now
Introduction
17
that the novel has taken over, the major writers are unlikely
to devote their principal efforts to short fiction. So we have
reached a point in the evolution of this literary mode at which
we can take stock of its achievements in short fiction and
assess its qualities and contributions to all of literature. The
stories assembled in this book are divided according to the
three streams we have identified, both to provide extended
examples and to provoke further discussion. The short story
is vigorously alive in horror today, in magazines, anthologies, and collections. Let it, for a moment, occupy the center of your attention. The best short fiction in modem horror is
>
the equal of the best of all times and places.
Stephen King
The Reach
Stephen King is the single most popular writer of horror
fiction since Charles Dickens; one of the most popular
writers of fiction in the English language today. He is a
pop culture phenomenon, the king of horror just as Elvis
Presley was the king of rock and roll. He has millions of
fans. He has written the best book on contemporary horror, Danse Macabre, full of enthusiasm for the horrific effects of radio, film, television, comics, and stories, and
best of all sympathetic and illuminating comments on the
works of living writers, with extensive comments from
the writers themselves often provided. King's eclectic
taste and willingness to respond to a variety of styles
and approaches points out rich pathways for broadening
our conceptions of the nature of horror stories and their
virtues. And then there are the stories and novels: Salem 's Lot and Carrie, The Shining and The Stand, Night
Shift and Skeleton Crew and more each year. King by
precept and example is the greatest force for change in
horror literature in our time, unfettered by category
boundaries. Whatever he writes is mainstream fiction.
His example has drawn nearly every short fiction writer
of the past decade into attempting the novel form, creating a publishing boom and a fertile chaos of creativity that has outlasted the boom. “The Reach,” originally
published as "D o the Dead Sing," is often considered
his best short story. It is a work of unusual subtlety and
sentiment, a ghost story of love and death, a virtuoso
performance in which the horror is distanced but underpins the whole. It represents the theme of the first sec18
The Reach
19
tion of this book, embodying King's feeling that horror
fiction "may be the most important and useful form of
fiction which the moral writer may command."
*
he Reach was wider in those days, ’ ’ Stella Flanders
M. told her great-grandchildren in the last summer o f
her life, the summer before she began to see ghosts. The
children looked at her with wide, silent eyes, and her son,
Alden, turned from his seat on the porch where he was whittling. It was Sunday, and Alden wouldn’t take his boat out on Sundays no matter how high the price o f lobster was.
“What do you mean. Gram?’’ Tommy asked, but the old
woman did not answer. She only sat in her rocker by the cold
stove, her slippers bumping placidly on the floor.
Tommy asked his mother: “What does she mean?"
Lois only shook her head, smiled, and sent them out with
pots to pick berries.
Stella thought: She’s forgot. Or did she ever know?
The Reach had been wider in those days. I f anyone knew
it was so, that person was Stella Flanders. She had been bom
in 1884, she was the oldest resident o f Goat Island, and she
had never once in her life been to the mainland.
Do you love? This question had begun to plague her, and
she did not even know what it meant.
Fall set in, a cold fall without the necessary rain to bring
a really fine color to the trees, either on Goat or on Raccoon
Head across the Reach. The wind blew long, cold notes that
fall, and Stella felt each note resonate in her heart.
On November 19, when the first flurries came swirling
down out of a sky the color of white chrome, Stella celebrated her birthday. Most of the village turned out. Hattie
20
Stephen King
Stoddard came, whose mother had died of pleurisy in 1954
and whose father had been lost with the Dancer in 1941.
Richard and Mary Dodge came, Richard moving slowly up
the path on his cane, his arthritis riding him like an invisible
passenger. Sarah Havelock came, of course; Sarah’s mother
Annabelle had been Stella’s best friend. They had gone to
the island school together, grades one to eight, and Annabelle had married Tommy Frane, who had pulled her hair in the fifth grade and made her cry, just as Stella had married
Bill Flanders, who had once knocked all of her schoolbooks
out of her arms and into the mud (but she had managed not
to cry). Now both Annabelle and Tommy were gone and
Sarah was the only one of their seven children still on the
island. Her husband, George Havelock, who had been known
to everyone as Big George, had died a nasty death over on
the mainland in 1967, the year there was no fishing. An ax
had slipped in Big George’s hand, there had been blood—too
much of it!—and an island funeral three days later. And when
Sarah came in to Stella’s party and cried, “ Happy birthday,
Gram!” Stella hugged her tight and closed her eyes
(do you do you love?)
but she did not cry.
There was a tremendous birthday cake. Hattie had made it
with her best friend, Vera Spruce. The assembled company
bellowed out “ Happy Birthday to You” in a combined voice
that was loud enough to drown out the wind . . . for a little
while, anyway. Even Alden sang, who in the normal course
of events would sing only “ Onward, Christian Soldiers” and
the doxology in church and would mouth the words of all the
rest with his head hunched and his big old jug ears just as
red as tomatoes. There were ninety-five candles on Stella’s
cake, and even over the singing she heard the wind, although
her hearing was not what it once had been.
She thought the wind was calling her name.
“I was not the only one, ” she would have told L o is’s children if she could. “In my day there were many that lived and
The Reach
21
died on the island. There was no mail boat in those days;
Bull Symes used to bring the mail when there was mail. There
was no ferry, either. I f you had business on the Head, your
man took you in the lobster boat. So far as I know, there
wasn’t a flushing toilet on the island until 1946. ’Twas Bull’s
boy Harold that put in the first one the year after the heart
attack carried Bull o ff while he was out dragging traps. I
remember seeing them bring Bull home. / remember that they
brought him up wrapped in a tarpaulin, and how one o f his
green boots poked out. I remember . . . ”
And they would say: “What, Gram? What do you remember?”
How would she answer them? Was there more?
On the first day of winter, a month or so after the birthday
party, Stella opened the back door to get stovewood and discovered a dead sparrow on the back stoop. She bent down carefully, picked it up by one foot, and looked at it.
“ Frozen,” she announced, and something inside her spoke
another word. It had been forty years since she had seen a
frozen bird—1938. The year the Reach had frozen.
Shuddering, pulling her coat closer, she threw the dead
sparrow in the old rusty incinerator as she went by it. The
day was cold. The sky was a clear, deep blue. On the night
of her birthday four inches of snow had fallen, had melted,
and no more had come since then. “ Got to come soon,”
&nbs
p; Larry McKeen down at the Goat Island Store said sagely, as
if daring winter to stay away.
Stella got to the woodpile, picked herself an armload and
carried it back to the house. Her shadow, crisp and clean,
followed her.
As she reached the back door, where the sparrow had
fallen, Bill spoke to her—but the cancer had taken Bill twelve
years before. “ Stella,” Bill said, and she saw his shadow fall
beside her, longer but just as clear-cut, the shadow-bill of his
shadow-cap twisted jauntily off to one side just as he had
. 22
Stephen King
always worn it. Stella felt a scream lodged in her throat. It
was too large to touch her lips.
“ Stella,” he said again, “ when you comin across to the
mainland? We’ll get Norm Jolley’s old Ford and go down
to Bean’s in Freeport just for a lark. What do you say?”
She wheeled, almost dropping her wood, and there was no
one there. Just the dooryard sloping down to the hill, then
the wild white grass, and beyond all, at the edge of everything, clear-cut and somehow magnified, the Reach . . .
and the mainland beyond it.
“Gram, w hat’s the Reach?" Lona might have asked . . .
although she never had. And she would have given them the
answer any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach, is a body o f
water between two bodies o f land, a body o f water which is
open at either end. The old lobsterman’s joke went like this:
know how to read y'compass when the fog comes, boys;
between Jonesport and London there’s a mighty long Reach.
“Reach is the water between the island and the mainland, ’’ she might have amplified, giving them molasses cookies and hot tea laced with sugar. ‘ 7 know that much. I know it as well as my husband’s name . . . and how he used to
wear his hat. ”
“Gram ?" Lona would say. “How come you never been
across the Reach?”
' ‘Honey, ’ ’ she would say, ' 7 never saw any reason to go. ’ ’
In January, two mohths after the birthday party, the Reach
froze for the first time since 1938. The radio warned islanders
and mainlanders alike not to trust the ice, but Stewie Mc
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 3
