MacDonald write about: hate, alienation, growing lovelessly old, tottering out
into a hostile world on the unsteady legs of adolescence. We are, in our real
everyday worlds, often like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, grinning on the
outside, grimacing on the inside. There's a central switching point somewhere
inside, a transformer, maybe, where the wires leading from those two masks
connect. And that is the place where the horror story so often hits home.
The horror-story writer is not so different from the Welsh sin-eater, who was
supposed to take upon himself the sins of the dear departed by partaking of the
dear departed's food. The tale of monstrosity and terror is a basket loosely
packed with phobias; when the writer passes by, you take one of his imaginary
horrors out of the basket and put one of your real ones in - at least for a
time.
Back in the 1950s there was a tremendous surge of giant bug movies - Them!. The
Beginning of the End, The Deadly -Mantis, and so on. Almost without fail, as the
movie progressed, we found out that these gigantic, ugly mutants were the
results of A-bomb tests in New Mexico or on deserted Pacific atolls (and in the
more recent Horror of Party Beach, which might have been subtitled Beach Blanket
Armageddon, the culprit was nuclear-reactor waste). Taken together, the big-bug
movies form an undeniable pattern, an uneasy gestalt of a whole country's terror
of the new age that the Manhattan Project had rung in. Later in the fifties
there was a cycle of 'teen-age' horror movies, beginning with such epics as
Teen-Agers from Outer Space and The Blob, in which a beardless Steve McQueen
battled a sort of Jell-Omutant with the help of his teen-aged friends. In an age
when every weekly magazine contained at least one article on the rising tide of
juvenile delinquency, the teenager fright films expressed a whole country's
uneasiness with the youth revolution even then brewing; when you saw Michael
Landon turn into a werewolf in a high-school leather jacket, a connection
happened between the fantasy on the screen and your own floating anxieties about
the nerd in the hot rod that your daughter was dating. To the teen-agers
themselves (I was one of them and speak from experience), the monsters spawned
in the leased American-International studios gave them a chance to see someone
even uglier than they felt themselves to be; what were a few pimples compared to
the shambling thing that used to be a high-school kid in I Was a Teen-Age
Frankenstein? This same cycle also expressed the teen-agers' own feeling that
they were being unfairly put upon and put down by their elders, that their
parents just 'did not understand'. The movies are formulaic (as so much of
horror fiction is, written or filmed), and what the formula expresses most
clearly is a whole generation's paranoia - a paranoia no doubt caused in part by
all the articles their parents were reading. In the films, some terrible, warty
horror is menacing Elmville. The kids know, because the flying saucer landed
pickup truck (the old man was unfailingly played by Elisha Cook, Jr.). In the
next three reels, the kids try to convince their elders that the warty horror is
indeed slinking around. 'Get here before I lock you all up for violating the
curfew!' Elmesville's police chief growls just before the monster slithers down
Main Street, laying waste in all directions. In the end it is the quick-thinking
kids who put an end to the warty horror, and then go off to the local hangout to
suck up chocolate malteds and jitterbug to some forgettable tune as the end
credits run.
That's three separate opportunities for catharsis in one cycle of movies - not
bad for a bunch of low-budget epics that were usually done in under ten days. It
didn't happen because the writers and producers and directors of those films
wanted it to happen; it happened because the horror tale lives most naturally at
that connection point between the conscious and the sub-conscious, the place
where both image and allegory occur most naturally and with the most devastating
effect. There is a direct line of evolution between I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf
and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and between Teen-Age Monster and Brian
De Palma's film Carrie.
Great horror fiction is almost always allegorical; sometimes the allegory is
intended, as in Animal Farm and 1984, and sometimes it just happens - J. R. R.
Tolkien swore and down that the Dark Lord of Mordor was not Hitler in fantasy
dress, but the theses and term papers to just that effect go on and on. . .
maybe because, as Bob Dylan says, when you got a lot of knives and forks, you
gotta cut something.
The works of Edward Albee, of Steinbeck, Camus, Faulkner - they deal with fear
and death, sometimes with horror, but usually these mainstream writers deal with
it in a more normal, real-life way. Their work is set in the frame of a rational
world; they are stories that 'could happen'. They are on that subway line that
runs through the external world. There are other writers - James Joyce, Faulkner
again, poets such as T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton - whose work
is set in the land of the symbolic unconsciousness. They are on the subway line
running into the internal landscape. But the horror writer is almost always at
the terminal joining the two, at least if he is on the mark. When he is at his
best we often have that weird sensation of being not quite asleep or awake, when
time stretches and skews, when we can hear voices but cannot make out the words
or the intent, when the dream seems real and the reality dreamlike.
That is a strange and wonderful terminal. Hill House is there, in that place
where the trains run both ways, with its doors that swing sensibly shut; the
woman in the room with the yellow wallpaper is there, crawling along the floor
with her head pressed against that faint grease mark; the barrowwights that
menaced Frodo and Sam are there; and Pickman's model; the wendigo; Norman Bates
and his terrible mother. No waking or dreaming in this terminal, but only the
voice of the writer, low and rational, talking about the way the good fabric of
things sometimes has a way of unravelling with shocking suddenness. He's telling
you that you want to see the car accident, and yes, he's right - you do. There's
a dead voice on the phone . something behind the walls of the old house that
sounds bigger than a rat. . movement at the foot of the cellar stairs. He wants
you to see all of those things, and more; he wants you to put your hands on the
shape under the sheet. And you want to put your hands there. Yes.
These are some of the things I feel that the horror story does, but I am firmly
convinced that it must do one more thing, this above all others: It must tell a
tale that holds the reader or the listener spellbound for a little while, lost
in a world that never was, never could be. It must be like the wedding guest
that stoppeth one of three. All my life as a writer I have been committed to the
idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance Over every other facet of
the writer'
s craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is
anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be
forgiven. My favourite line to that effect came from the pen of Edgar Rice
Burroughs, no one's candidate for Great World Writer, but a man who understood
story values completely. On page one of The Land That Time Forgot, the narrator
finds a manuscript in a bottle; the rest of the novel is the presentation of
that manuscript. The narrator says, 'Read one page, and I will be forgotten.'
It's a pledge that Burroughs makes good on -many writers with talents greater
than his have not.
In fine, gentle reader, here is a truth that makes the strongest writer gnash
his teeth: with the exception of three small groups of people, no one reads a
writer's preface. The exceptions are: one, the writer's close family (usually
his wife and his mother); two, the writer's accredited representative (and the
editorial people and assorted munchkins), whose chief interest is to find out if
anyone has been libelled in the course of the writer's wanderings; and three,
those people who have had a hand in helping the writer on his way. These are the
people who want to know whether or not the writer's head has gotten so big that
he has managed to forget that he didn't do it by himself.
Other readers are apt to feel, with perfect justification, that the author's
preface is a gross imposition, a multi-page commercial for himself, even more
offensive than the cigarette ads that have proliferated in the centre section of
the paperback books. Most readers come to see the show, not to watch the stage
manager take bows in front of the footlights. Again, with perfect justification.
I'm leaving now. The show is going to start soon. We're going to go into that
room and touch the shape under the sheet. But before I leave, I want to take
just two or three more minutes of your time to thank some people from each of
the three groups above - and from a fourth. Bear with me as I say a few
thank-you's:
To my wife, Tabitha, my best and most trenchant critic. When she feels the work
is good, she says so; when she feels I've put my foot in it, she sets me on my
ass as kindly and lovingly as possible. To my kids, Naomi, Joe, and Owen, who
have been very understanding about their father's peculiar doings in the
downstairs room. And to my mother, who died in 1973, and to whom this book is
dedicated. Her encouragement was steady and unwavering, she always seemed able
to find forty or fifty cents for the obligatory stamped, self-addressed return
envelope, and no one -including myself- was more pleased than she when I 'broke
through'.
In that second group, particular thanks are due my editor, William G. Thompson
of Doubleday & Company, who has worked with me patiently, who has suffered my
daily phone calls with constant good cheer, and who showed kindness to a young
writer with no credentials some years ago, and who has stuck with that writer
since then.
In the third group are the people who first bought my work: Mr Robert A. W.
Lowndes, who purchased the first two stories I ever sold; Mr Douglas Allen and
Mr Nye Willden of the Dugent Publishing Corporation, who bought so many of the
ones that followed for Cavalier and Gent, back in the scuffling days when the
cheques sometimes came just in time to avoid what the power companies
euphemistically call 'an interruption in service'; to Elaine Geiger and Herbert
Schnall and Carolyn Stromberg of the New American Library; to Gerard Van der
Leun of Pent-house and Harris Deinstfrey of Cosmopolitan. Thanks to all of you.
There's one final group that I'd like to thank, and that is each and every
reader who ever unlimbered his or her wallet to buy something that I wrote. In a
great many ways, this is your book because it sure never would have happened
without you. So thanks.
Where I am, it's still dark and raining. We've got a fine night for it. There's
something I want to show you, some-thing I want you to touch. It's in a room not
far from here-in fact, it's almost as close as the next page.
Shall we go?
Bridgton, Maine 27 February 1977