Danse Macabre by King Stephen

1 I wasn’t able to have any fun with Friedkin’s more recent film, Cruising, although it fascinated me because I suspect it indicates the wave of the future for the bad film
which has a big budget; it has a sparkly look that is still somehow cheesy—it’s like a dead rat in a Lucite block.

2 Home Box Office, in its endless quest for prime-time filler, is now making many of these “little” films available in a way that such spotty distributors as New World
Pictures have never been able to do. Of course, there’s no shortage of dreck on HBO either, as any subscriber will tell you; still, there is an occasional prize in the pay-
TV box, which is usually full of such mouldy cinematic Cracker Jacks as Guyana: Cult of the Damned and Moment by Moment. In the last year or so HBO has offered
Cronenberg’s The Brood and an interesting AIP picture called The Evictors (starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks), which got no American theatrical distribution . . .
and Tourist Trap.

3 Compare, for instance, the single and unified vision which powers Spielberg’s Jaws to the sequel, which was produced by committee and directed by the unfortunate
Jeannot Szwarc, who was brought in from the bullpen in the late innings to mop up, and who deserved better.

4 The one exception is Judith Crist, who seems to genuinely like horror movies and who is often able to look past a poverty-row budget to whatever is working there—
I’ve always wondered what she made of Night of the Living Dead.

5 If you are interested in my own determination of the best horror movies of the last thirty years, see Appendix I.

1 I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch
and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

2 From The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946–Present, edited by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), p. 586.

3 And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV. I would disagree with that. My own nominee for that honor would be the final episode of a
little-remembered program called Bus Stop (adapted from the William Inge play and film). The series, a straight drama show, was canceled following the furor over an
episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist—the episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel. The final episode, however, deviated wildly into
the supernatural, and for me. Robert Bloch’s adaptation of his own short story “I Kiss Your Shadow” has never been beaten on TV—and rarely anywhere else—for
eerie, mounting horror.

4 For much of this material I am indebted to the entry on The Outer Limits in The Science Fiction Handbook, published by Doubleday (New York: 1979). The entry (p.
441 of this huge volume) was written by John Brosnan and Peter Nicholls.

In addition, there is a magazine-type publication devoted to reviewing The Outer Limits. Each issue is $2.50, and it is available from Ted Rypel, 11100 Governor
Ave., Cleveland, Ohio 44111.

5 The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called The Outsider. Probably
only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks—if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with
McGavin’s performance as a private eye.

6 For much of the material on The Night Stalker, I am indebted to Berthe Roeger’s comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria
magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series’ run.

7 For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone, I’m indebted to “Rod Serling’s Dream,” by Ed Naha, published in Starlog #15 (August 1978),
and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.

8 Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling’s death and published under the title, “Rod Serling’s Last Interview” (a rather ghoulish title,
I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer’s Yearbook.

9 Meredith became perhaps the most familiar face of all to Twilight Zone fans, save for Serling’s own. Probably his best-remembered role came in “Printer’s Devil,”
where he plays a newspaper owner who is really Satan . . . complete with a jutting, crooked cigar that was somehow diabolical.

10 In 1972 CBS discovered another “prestige program”—The Waltons, created by Earl Hamner, Jr., who wrote a good many Twilight Zones . . . including,
coincidentally, “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” the last original Twilight Zone episode to be telecast on the network. Placed against brutal competition—NBC’s The Flip Wilson
Show and ABC’s own version of The Church of What’s Happening Now, The Mod Squad—CBS stuck with Hamner’s creation in spite of the low ratings because of the
prestige factor. The Waltons went on to outlive its competition and at this writing has run seven seasons.

1 A word about Arkham House. There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn’t have at least one of those distinctive black-bound volumes upon his
or her shelf . . . and probably in a high place of honor. August Derleth, the founder of this small Wisconsin-based publishing house, was a rather uninspired novelist of
the Sinclair Lewis school and an editor of pure genius: Arkham was first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book
form . . . and these are only a few of Derleth’s legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to four thousand copies, and some of them
—Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Bradbury’s Dark Carnival, for instance—are now highly sought-after collectors’ items.

2 At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes
The Red Badge of Courage as “a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears.” Considering the book’s moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it
is an oddly apt description of that novel.

3 The best of these occurs when Lewis Benedikt goes to his death. He sees a bedroom door formed by an interlocking spray of pine needles while hunting in the woods.
He goes through the door and into a deadly fantasyland.

4 But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old EC-comics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, are miserable failures,
Robert Bloch did two “frame-story” films for the British Amicus production company, The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum. The stories in both of these were
adapted from Bloch’s own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night, the 1946 British film staring Michael Redgrave and directed
by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden.

5 The article “Waiting for the End: Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial” by John G. Park, Critique, Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978.

6 Or in The Shining, which was written with The Sundial very much in mind. In The Shining, the characters are snowbound and isolated in an old hotel miles from any
help. Their world has shrunk and turned inward; the Overlook Hotel becomes the microcosm where universal forces collide, and the inner weather mimics the outer
weather. Critics of Stanley Kubrick’s film version would do well to remember that it was these elements, consciously or unconsciously, which Kubrick chose to
accentuate.

7 From Shirley Jackson, by Lenemaja Friedman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 121. Ms. Friedman quotes directly from Shirley Jackson’s account of how the
book came to be; Miss Jackson’s account was published in an article entitled “Experience and Fiction.”

8 Friedman, Shirley Jackson, p. 133.

9 In case you’re one of the five or six readers of popular fiction in America who has missed them, they are A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary’s Baby, This Perfect Day, The
Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. He has written two Broadway plays, Veronica’s Room and the immensely successful Deathtrap. Less known is a modest but
chillingly effective made-for-TV movie called Dr. Cook’s Garden, starring Bing Crosby in a wonderfully adroit performance.

10 I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a
satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO
THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT.

11 As previously noted, the late-seventies remake of the Finney novel resets the story in San Francisco, opting for an urban paranoia which results in a number of
sequences strikingly like those which open Polanski’s film version of Rosemary’s Baby. But Philip Kaufman lost more than he gained, I think, by taking Finney’s story
out of its natural small-town-with-a-bandstand-in-the-park setting.

12 At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination, Ray Bradbury began to be
noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury’s name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the
general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated.
Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold.

13 Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream critics—sometimes with
justification, sometimes without—but the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual dorks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting
novels which are too large for the genres from which they’ve come; Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting.

14 The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he
would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book’s most tantalizing episodes. Jim and Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a
house “while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples.” Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and
while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduate-school analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the apple-and-Eden metaphor here is
too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this second- or third-floor room, this “Theater” that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the
dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any
given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they “let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animal-
crazy, naked, like shivering horses . . . ” If so, it is the book’s most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim
Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence.

15 The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
and A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes. Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden or
Beryl Bainbridge’s Harriet Said, but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly
as Bradbury ever did.

16 Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written time-travel stories of men who are driven to escape a
terrible present for a friendlier past: Finney’s Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the-century times on America’s east coast, and Matheson’s
Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the century times on America’s west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls “cultural
depersonalization” is a factor, but more different treatments of the idea—and different outcomes—cannot be imagined.

17 In The Shrinking Man, Scott Carey’s life becomes an ever-louder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his
inability to support his family as he always has. I won’t say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I
will suggest that perhaps Matheson’s own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey’s character that much more convincingly.

18 Matheson’s hero, Scott Carey, also goes down into the cellar every day with his pad and pencil; he too is writing a book (these days, isn’t everybody?). Scott’s book is
about his experiences as the world’s only shrinking man, and it provides for his family quite adequately . . . as Matheson’s own book and the subsequent film made from
it did for Matheson’s own family, one supposes.

19 As a matter of fact, I do. My first novel, Carrie, was written under difficult personal circumstances, and the book dealt with characters to unpleasant and so alien to
my own outlook at to seem almost like Martians. When I pick up the book now—which it seldom—it does not seem as if someone else had written it, but I do get a
peculiar sort of feeling from it . . . as if I had written it while suffering from a bad case of mental and emotional flu.

20 One reason for the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man when he burst on the comics scene in the early sixties may have been his vulnerability; he was and is an engaging
exception to the standard comic-book formula. There is something winning in his vulnerability as Peter Parker and in his frequent klutziness as Spider-Man. After being
bitten by that radioactive spider, Peter originally felt no holy desire to fight crime; he decided instead to make a bundle in showbiz. Before long, however, he discovers a
truth which is bitter to him and amusing to the reader: no matter how great you looked on the Sullivan show, Marine Midland Bank still won’t cash a check made out
to The Amazing Spider-Man. Such touches of realism laced with rue can be traced to Stan Lee, Spider-Man’s creator and the man probably most responsible for
keeping the comic book from going the way of the pulps and the dime novels in the sixties and seventies.

21 This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a
malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist
who is at pitiable as he it frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my
view would be prejudiced. So I’ll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.

22 Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I think—witness the strong public reactions to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and
Dawn of the Dead. Something rather more important than a harmless roller-coaster ride is going on here, I think; here’s a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex
and throttle them. I wrote a story four years ago called “Survivor Type,” which I still have not been able to sell (gee, and people told me that when I got successful I’d be
able to sell my laundry list if I wanted to!). It deals with a surgeon who is washed up on an uninhabited island—little more than a scratch of coral above the surface of
the Pacific—and eats himself, a piece at a time, to stay alive. “I did everything according to Hoyle,” he writes in his diary after amputating his foot. “I washed it before I
ate it.” Not even the men’s magazines would consider that one, and it sits in my file cabinet to this day, waiting for a good home. It will probably never find one,
though.

23 And there’s a wonderful story about Erle Stanley Gardner’s days in what Frank Gruber used to call the pulp jungle. At that time the Depression was in full swing and
Gardner was writing westerns for a penny a word, selling to such publications as Western Round-Up, West Weekly, and Western Tales (whose slogan was “Fifteen Stories,
Fifteen Cents”). Gardner admitted that he made a habit of stretching the final shoot-out as far as it would go. Of course the bad guy finally bit the dust and the good
guy strode into the saloon, .44s smoking and spurs jingling, for a cold sarsaparilla before moving on, but in the meantime, each time Gardner wrote “Bang!” he made
another penny . . . and in those days, two bangs would buy you the daily newspaper.

24 All quoted in the Ellison entry by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. To point out the obvious, “Nalrah Nosille” is Harlan Ellison
spelled backwards. Other names Ellison used—E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, and Clyde Mitchell—were so-called house names. In pulp terminology, a “house name” was
the name of a totally fictional writer who was, nevertheless, extremely prolific . . . mostly because several (sometimes dozens) of writers published works under that name
when they had another story in the same magazine. Thus, “Ivar Jorgensen” wrote Ellison-style fantasy when he was Ellison and sexy, pulp-style horror, as in the
Jorgensen novel Rest in Agony, when he was someone else (in this case, Paul Fairman). To this should be added that Ellison has since acknowledged all of his
pseudonomous work, and has published only under his own name since 1965. He has, he says, a “lemminglike urge to be up front.”

25 This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan’s version of the same incident.
The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions: It was told that Paramount

Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on Star Trek: The Movie. The purpose of the conference was to toss
around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in
charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about
three months later). The Paramount exec didn’t think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Spock, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a
living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent,
doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. “The Enterprise,” he said, “goes through an interstellar warp, the
great-granddaddy of all interstellar warps. It’s transported over a googol of light-years in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge
of the entire universe. Scotty rigs full-charge ion blasters which breach the wall so they can see what’s beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in
an incredible while light, is the face of God Himself.”

A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, “It’s not big enough. Didn’t I just tell you guys to think really BIG?”
In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out.
Here is Harlan Ellison’s recitation of the True Facts:
“Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits
somehow. . . . The trouble is, he can’t write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the
Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I’d been called in twice, prior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other
writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn’t make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the
palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an ex-set designer . . .
named Mark Trabulus.
“Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the know-nothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome
project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn’t big enough. I
devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for 11 December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15
December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene’s office on the Paramount lot.
“I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a
parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a
far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out,
and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right,
finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to ensure its own
territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.
“Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that
the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’
“I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, ‘There weren’t any Mayans at the dawn of time.’ And he said, ‘Well, who’s to
know the difference?’ And I said, ‘I’m to know the difference. It’s a dumb suggestion.’ So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn’t I do
it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, ‘I’m a writer. I don’t know what the fuck you are!’ And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association
with the Star Trek movie.”
Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but “Right on, Harlan!”

26 Ellison Anecdote #2: My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished
“Croatoan,” the skin-freezer which leads off Strange Wine, and he’d had a vasectomy two days before. “I’m still bleeding,” he told the audience, “and my lady can attest
that I’m telling the truth.” The lady did to attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery
goodbye to them from the podium. “Night, folks,” he called. “Sorry it wasn’t what you wanted.”

27 Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Conversation. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question: “Why do people read this
horror stuff?” My reply was essentially Harlan’s; you try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are
warped, I told the reporter; but if you don’t have a few warps in your record, you’re going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth
century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspaper coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for
presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman: KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; insert foot; close mouth.

1 My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife’s throat and blows her up like a balloon until
she bursts. “Fat at last,” he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has
set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely
funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

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