Danse Macabre (52 page)

And there they lay, in the advancing, retreating waves of flickering red light: two enormous pods already burst open in one or two places, and I reached in with both hands, and tumbled them out onto the dirt. They were weightless as children's balloons, harsh and dry on my palms and fingers. At the feel of them on my skin, I lost my mind completely, and then I was trampling them, smashing and crushing them under my plunging feet and legs, not even knowing that I was uttering a sort of hoarse, meaningless cry—"Unhh! Unhh!

Unhh!"—of fright and animal disgust.

No friendly, stoned-out hippies holding up signs reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY here; here we have Miles and Jack, mostly out of their minds, doing the funky chicken over these weird and insensate invaders from space. There is no discussion (vis-à-vis
The Thing
) of what we could learn from these things to the benefit of modern science. There is no white flag here, no parley; Finney's aliens are as strange and as ugly as those bloated leeches you sometimes find clinging to your skin after swimming in still ponds. There is no reasoning here, nor any effort to reason; only Miles's blind and primitive reaction to the alien outsider. The book which most closely resembles Finney's is Robert A. Heinlein's
The Puppet
Masters
; like Finney's novel, it is perhaps nominally sf but is in fact a horror novel. In this one, invaders from Saturn's largest moon, Titan, arrive on Earth, ready, willing, and able to do business. Heinlein's creatures are not pods; they are the leeches in actuality. They are sluglike creatures that ride on the backs of their hosts' necks the way that you or I might ride a horse. The two books are similar—strikingly so—in many ways. Heinlein's narrator begins by wondering aloud if "they" were truly intelligent. He ends after the menace has been defeated. The narrator is one of those building and manning rocketships aimed at Titan; now that the tree has been chopped down, they will burn the roots. "Death and destruction!" the narrator exults, thus ending the book.

But what exactly is the threat which the pods in Finney's novel pose? For Finney, the fact that they will mean the end of the human race seems almost secondary (pod people have no interest in what an old acquaintance of mine likes to refer to as "doing the trick"). The real horror, for Jack Finney, seems to be that they threaten all that "nice"and I think this is where we came in. On his way to his office not too long after the pod invasion is well launched, Miles describes the scenery this way:

. . . the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead streetlight was broken, and a few doors down . . . a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted
For Rent
sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn't say where to apply, though, and I had a feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed wine bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the gray stone of the building was mottled and unpolished.

From Jack Finney's fiercely individualistic point of view, the worst thing about the Body Snatchers is that they will allow the nice little town of Santa Mira to turn into something resembling a subway station on Forty-second Street in New York. Humans, Finney asserts, have a natural drive to create order out of chaos (which fits well enough with the book's paranoid themes). Humans want to improve the universe. These are old-fashioned ideas, perhaps, but Finney is a traditionalist, as Richard Gid Powers points out in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of the novel. From where Finney stands, the scariest thing about the pod people is that chaos doesn't bother them a bit and they have absolutely no sense of aesthetics: this is not an invasion of roses from outer space but rather an infestation of ragweed. The pod people are going to mow their lawns for awhile and then give it up. They don't give a shit about the crabgrass. They aren't going to be making any trips down to the Santa Mira True Value Hardware so they can turn that musty old basement annex into a rec room in the best do-it-yourself tradition. A salesman who blows into town complains about the state of the roads. If they aren't patched soon, he says, Santa Mira will be cut off from the world. But do you think the pod people are going to lose any sleep over a little thing like that?

Here's what Richard Gid Powers says in his introduction about Finney's outlook: With the hindsight afforded by Finney's later books, it is easy to see what the critics overlooked [when they] interpreted both the book and the movie . . . simply as products of the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthyite fifties, a know-nothing outburst against "alien ways of life" . . . that threatened the American way. Miles Bennell is a precursor of all the other traditionalist heroes of Jack Finney's later books, but in
The Body Snatchers
, Miles's town of Santa Mira, Marin County, California still is the unspoiled mythical
gemeinschaft
community that later heroes have had to travel through time to recapture. When Miles begins to suspect that his neighbors are no longer real human beings and are no longer capable of sincere human feelings, he is encountering the beginning of the insidious modernization and dehumanization that faces later Finney heroes as an accomplished fact.

Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is fully consistent with the adventures of subsequent Finney characters: his resistance to depersonalization is so fierce that the pods finally give up on their plans for planetary colonization and mosey off to another planet where the inhabitants' hold on their self-integrity is not so strong.

Further on, Powers has this to say about the archetypical Finney hero in general and the purposes of this book in particular:

Finney's heroes, particularly Miles Bennell, are all inner-directed individualists in an increasingly other-directed world. Their adventures could be used as classroom illustrations of Tocqueville's theory about the plight of a free individual in a mass democracy . . . .
The
Body Snatchers
is a raw and direct mass-market version of the despair over cultural dehumanization that fills T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and William Faulkner's
The Sound
and
the Fury
. Finney adroitly uses the classic science fiction situation of an invasion from outer space to symbolize the annihilation of the free personality in contemporary society . . . he succeeded in creating the most memorable of all pop cultural images of what jean Sheperd was describing on late-night radio as "creeping meatballism" : fields of pods that hatch into identical, spiritless, emotional vacuous zombies—who look so damned much just like you and me!

Finally, when we examine
The Body Snatchers
in light of the Tarot hand we have dealt ourselves, we find in Finney's novel almost every damned card. There is the Vampire, for surely those whom the pods have attacked and drained of life have become a modern, cultural version of the undead, as Richard Gid Powers points out; there is the Werewolf, for certainly these people are not really people at all, and have undergone a terrible sea change; the pods from space, a totally alien invasion of creatures who need no spaceships, can certainly also fit under the heading of the Thing Without a Name . . . and you might even say (if you wanted to stretch a point, and why the hell not?) that citizens of Santa Mira are no more than Ghosts of their former selves these days.

Not bad legs for a book which is "just a story."

6

Ray Bradbury's
Something Wicked This Way Comes
defies any neat and easy categorization or analysis . . . and so far, at least, it has also defied the moviemakers, in spite of any number of options and scenarios, including Bradbury's own. This novel, originally published in 1962 and promptly given a critical pasting by critics in both the science fiction and fantasy genres,* has gone on through two dozen printings since its original publication. For all of that, it has not been Bradbury's most successful book, or his best-known one;
The Martian
Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451,
and
Dandelion Wine
have probably all outsold it, and are certainly better known to the general reading public. But I believe that
Something Wicked This Way
Comes
, a darkly poetic tall tale set in the half-real, half-mythical community of Green Town, Illinois, is probably Bradbury's best work—a shadowy descendant from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett. It is not a perfect book; at times Bradbury lapses into the purple overwriting that has characterized too much of his work in the seventies. Some passages are self-imitative and embarrassingly fulsome. But that is a small part of the total work; in most cases Bradbury carries his story off with guts and beauty and
panache
.

And it might be worth remembering that Theodore Dreiser, the author of
Sister Carrie
and
An American Tragedy
, was, like Bradbury, sometimes his own worst enemy . . . mostly because Dreiser never knew when to stop. "When you open your mouth, Stevie," my grandfather once said to me in despair, "all your guts fall out." I had no reply to that then, but I suppose if he were alive today, I would reply: That's 'cause I want to be Theodore Dreiser when I grow up. Well, Dreiser was a great writer, and Bradbury seems to be the fantasy genre's version of Dreiser, although Bradbury's line-by-line writing is better and his touch is lighter. Still, the two of them share a remarkable commonality.

On the minus side, both show a tendency to not so much write about a subject as to bulldoze it into the ground . . . and once so bulldozed,

*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 corks. 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.

both have a tendency to bludgeon the subject until all signs of movement have ceased. On the plus side, both Dreiser and Bradbury are American naturalists of a dark persuasion, and in a crazy sort of way they seem to bookend Sherwood Anderson, the American champ of naturalism. Both of them wrote of American people living in the heartland ( although Dreiser's heartland people come to the city while Bradbury's stay to home), of innocence coming heartbreakingly to experience ( although Dreiser's people usually break, while Bradbury's people remain, although changed, whole), and both speak in voices which are uniquely, even startlingly American. Both narrate in a clear English which remains informal while mostly eschewing idiom—when Bradbury lapses occasionally into slang it startles us so much that he seems almost vulgar. Their voices are unmistakably American voices.

The easiest difference to point out, and maybe the most unimportant, is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist. Even worse, Bradbury's paperback publisher insists tiresomely on calling him "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer" (making him sound like one of the freaks in the shows he writes about so often) , when Bradbury has never written anything but the most nominal science fiction. Even in his space stories, he is not interested in negativeion drives or relativity converters. There are rockets, he says in the connected stories which form
The Martian Chronicler, R Is for Rocket
, and
S Is for Space
. That is all you need to know and is, therefore, all I am going to tell you.

To this I would add that if you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein; if you want literature—
stories
, to use Jack Finney's word—about what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut. What powers the rockets is
Popular Mechanics
stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people.

All that said, it is impossible to talk of
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, which is most certainly not science fiction, without putting Bradbury's lifework in some sort of perspective. His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in tile marvelous Arkham House collection
Dark Carnival
. No easily obtainable edition of this work, the
Dubliners
of American fantasy fiction, is available. Many of the stories originally published in
Dark Carnival
can be found in a later collection,
The October Country
, which is available in paper. Included are such short Bradbury classics of gut-chilling horror as "The Jar," "The Crowd," and the unforgettable "Small Assassin." Other Bradbury stories published in the forties were so horrible that the author now repudiates them (some were adapted as comics stories and published, with a younger Bradbury's permission, in E.C.'s
The Crypt of Terror
). One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients"—for instance, when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear and ear to mouth, so they can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity. Of how his own life influenced the writing of
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, Bradbury says: "[
Something Wicked This Way Comes
] sums up my entire life of loving Lon Chaney and the magicians and grotesques he played in the twenties films. My mom took me to see Hunchback in 1923 when I was three. It marked me forever.
Phantom
[
of the Opera
] when I was six. Same thing.
East of Zanzibar
when I was about eight. Magician turns himself into a skeleton in front of black natives! Incredible!
The Unholy Three
ditto! Chaney took over my life. I was a raving film maniac long before I hit my eighth year. I became a full-time magician after seeing Blackstone on stage in Waukegan, my home town in upper Illinois, when I was nine. When I was twelve, MR. ELECTRICO arid 1115 traveling Electric Chair arrived with the Dill Brothers Sideshows and Carnival. That was his `real' name. I got to know him. Sat by the lakeshore and talked grand philosophies . . . he his small ones, me my grandiose supersized ones about futures and magic. We corresponded several times. He lived in Cairo, Illinois, and was, he said, a defrocked Presbyterian minister. I wish I could remember his Christian name. But his letters have long since been lost in the years, though small magic tricks he gave me I still have. Anyway, magic and magicians and Chaney and libraries have filled my life. Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me. I lived in my home-town library more than I did at home. I loved it at night, prowling the stacks on my fat panther feet. All of that went into
Something Wicked
, which began as a short story in
Weird Tales
called "Black Ferris" in May, 1948, and just
grew
like Topsy . . .