Danse Macabre (50 page)

In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right;
The Body Snatchers
is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quarter-century since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in
Collier's
, one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as
Hustler, Screw
, and
Big Butts
), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics.

It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has re-issued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy books—novels, collections, and anthologies—originally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W. Currey) have chosen wisely and well, and in the library of any reader who cares honestly about science fiction—and about books themselves as lovely artifacts—you're apt to find one or more of these distinctive green volumes with the red-gold stamping on the spines.

Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent. Well, never mind; I believe that what I started to say was simply that I think Finney's contention that
The Body Snatchers
is just a story is both right and wrong. My own belief about fiction, long and deeply held, is that story
must
be paramount over all other considerations in fiction; that story
defines
fiction, and that all other considerations—theme, mood, tone, symbol, style, even characterization—are expendable. There are critics who take the strongest possible exception to this view of fiction, and I really believe that they are the critics who would feel vastly more comfortable if
Moby-Dick
were a doctoral thesis on cetology rather than an account of what happened on the
Pequod
's final voyage. A doctoral thesis is what a million student papers have reduced this tale to, but the story still remains—"This is what happened to Ishmael." As story still remains in
Macbeth, The
Faerie Queen, Pride and Prejudice, Jude the Obscure, The Great Gatsby
. . . and Jack Finney's
The Body Snatchers
. And story, thank God, after a certain point becomes irreducible, mysterious, impervious to analysis. You will find no English master's thesis in any college library titled "The Story-Elements of Melville's
Moby Dick
." And if you do find such a thesis, send it to me. I'll eat it. With A-1 Steak Sauce.

All very fine. And yet I don't think Finney would argue with the idea that story values are determined by the mind through which they are filtered, and that the mind of any writer is a product of his outer world and inner temper. It is just the fact of this filter that has set the table for all those would-be English M.A.'s, and I certainly would not want you to think that I begrudge them their degrees—God knows that as an English major I slung enough bullshit to fertilize most of east Texas—but a great number of the people who are sitting at the long and groaning table of Graduate Studies in English are cutting a lot of invisible steaks and roasts . . . not to mention trading the Emperor's new clothes briskly back and forth in what may be the largest academic yard sale the world has ever seen.

Still, what we have here is a Jack Finney novel, and we can say certain things about it simply because it is a Jack Finney novel. First, we can say that it will be grounded in absolute reality—a prosy reality that is almost humdrum, at least to begin with. When we first meet the book's hero (and here I think Finney probably would object if I used the more formal word
protagonist
. . . so I won't), Dr. Miles Bennell, he is letting his last patient of the day out; a sprained thumb. Becky Driscoll enters-and how is that for the perfect all-American name?—with the first off-key note: her cousin Wilma has somehow gotten the idea that her Uncle Ira really isn't her uncle anymore. But this note is faint and barely audible under the simple melodies of small-town life that Finney plays so well in the book's opening chapters . . . and Finney's rendering of the small-town archetype in this book may be the best to come out of the 1950s.

The keynote that Finney sounds again and again in these first few chapters is so low-key pleasant that in less sure hands it would become insipid: nice. Again and again Finney returns to that word; things in Santa Mira, he tells us, are not great, not wild and crazy, not terrible, not boring. Things in Santa Mira are nice. No one here is laboring under that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."

"For the first time I really saw her face again. I saw it was the same nice face . . ." This from page nine. A few pages later: "It was nice out, temperature around sixty-five, and the light was good; . . . still plenty of sun."

Cousin Wilma is also nice, if rather plain. Miles thinks she would have made a good wife and mother, but she just never married. "That's how it goes," Miles philosophizes, innocently unaware of any banality. 'He tells us he wouldn't have believed her the type of woman to have mental problems, "but still, you never know."

This stuff shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does; we feel that Miles has somehow stepped through the first-person convention and is actually talking to us, just as it seems that Tom Sawyer is actually talking to us in the Twain novel . . . and Santa Mira, California, as Finney presents it to us, is exactly the sort of town where we would almost expect to see Tom whitewashing a fence (there would be no Huck around, sleeping in a hogshead, though; not in Santa Mira).

The Body Snatchers
is the only Finney book which can rightly be called a horror novel, but Santa Mira—which is a typical "nice" Finney setting—is the perfect locale for such a tale. Perhaps one horror novel is all that Finney had to write; certainly it was enough to set the mold for what we now call "the modern horror novel." If there is such a thing, there can be no doubt at all that Finney had a large hand in inventing it. I have used the phrase "off-key note" earlier on, and that is Finney's actual method in
The Body Snatchers
, I think; one off-key note, then two, then a ripple, then a run of them. Finally the jagged, discordant music of horror overwhelms the melody entirely. But Finney understands that there is no horror without beauty; no discord without a prior sense of melody; no nasty without nice.

There are no Plains of Leng here; no Cyclopean ruins under the earth; no shambling monsters in the subway tunnels under New York. At about the same time Jack Finney was writing
The Body Snatchers
, Richard Matheson was writing his classic short story "Born of Man and Woman," the story that begins: "today my mother called me retch. you retch she said." Between the two of them, they made the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more. Matheson's short story was published well before
Weird Tales
went broke; Finney's novel was published by Dell a year after. Although Matheson published two early short stories in
Weird Tales
, neither writer is associated with this icon of American fantasy -horror magazines; they represent the birth of an almost entirely new breed of American fantasist, just as, in the years 1977-1980, the emergence of Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman in England may represent another significant turn of the wheel. *

I have mentioned that Finney's short story "The Third Level" predates Rod Serling's
Twilight
Zone
series; in exactly the same fashion, Finney's little town of Santa Mira predates and points the way toward Peter Straub's fictional town of Milburn, New York; Thomas Tryon's Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut; and my own little town of 'Salem's Lot, Maine. It is even possible to see Finney's influence in Blatty's
The Exorcist
, where foul doings become fouler when set against the backdrop of Georgetown, a suburb which is quite, graciously rich . . . and nice. Finney concentrates on sewing a seam between the prosaic reality of his little you-can-see-it-before-your-eyes town and the outright fantasy of the pods which will follow. He sews the seam with such fine stitchwork that when we cross over from the world that really is and into a world of utter make-believe, we are hardly aware of any change. This is a major feat, and like the magician who can make the cards walk effortlessly over the tips of his fingers in apparent defiance of gravity, it looks so easy that you'd be tempted to believe anyone could do it. You see the trick, but not the long hours of practice that went into creating the effect. We have spoken briefly of paranoia in
Rosemary's Baby
; in
The Body Snatchers
, the paranoia becomes full, rounded, and complete. If we are all incipient paranoids—if we all take a quick glance down at ourselves when laughter erupts at the cocktail party, just to make sure we're zipped up and it isn't
us
they're laughing at—then I'd suggest that Finney uses this incipient paranoia quite deliberately to manipulate our emotions in favor of Miles, Becky, and Miles's friends, the Belicecs.

*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. Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, free-floating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache. Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the uncanny Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.

"Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today-I've been waiting for this!—today he got a haircut—"

I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's
gone
? You mean—"

"No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's
there
—the scar—exactly like Uncle Ira's!"

So Finney serves notice that we are working here in a world of utter subjectivity . . . and utter paranoia. Of course
we
believe Wilma at once, even though we have no real proof; if for no other reason, we know from the title of the book that the "body snatchers" are out there somewhere.

By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Finney has turned us into equivalents of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It is easy enough to see why the book was eagerly seized upon by those who felt, in the early fifties, that there was either a Communist conspiracy afoot, or perhaps a fascist conspiracy that was operating in the name of antiCommunism. Because, either way or neither way, this is a book about conspiracy with strong paranoid overtones . . . in other words, exactly the sort of story to be claimed as political allegory by political loonies of every stripe.

Earlier on, I mentioned the idea that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. To that we could add that paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind. Much of the literature of the twentieth century, from such diverse sources as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Albee, Thomas Hardy, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, has suggested that we live in an existential sort of world, a planless insane asylum where things just happen. IS GOD DEAD? asks the
Time
magazine cover in the waiting room of Rosemary Woodhouse's Satanic obstetrician. In such a world it is perfectly credible that a mental defective should sit on the upper floor of a little-used building, wearing a Hanes t-shirt, eating take-out chicken, and waiting to use his mail-order rifle to blow out the brains of an American president; perfectly possible that another mental defective should be able to stand around in a hotel kitchen a few years later waiting to do exactly the same thing to that defunct president's younger brother; perfectly understandable that nice American boys from Iowa and California and Delaware should have spent their tours in Vietnam collecting ears, many of them extremely tiny; that the world should begin to move once more toward the brink of an apocalyptic war because of the preachings of an eighty-year-old Moslem holy man who is probably foggy on what he had for breakfast by the time sunset rolls around.

All of these things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God has abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for order—these powerful elements of our human makeup—all rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsible—things just got a little out of control here, ha-ha, so sorry—then the mind begins to totter. I saw this happen at first-hand in the sixties, at the height of the generational shudder that began with our involvement in Vietnam and went on to encompass everything from parietal hours on college campuses and the voting franchise at eighteen to corporate responsibility for environmental pollution.

I was in college at the time, attending the University of Maine, and while I began college with political leanings too far to the right to actually become radicalized, by 1968 my mind had been changed forever about a number of fundamental questions. The hero of Jack Finney's later novel,
Time and Again
, says it better than I could: