Night Music (50 page)

But, in my midforties, I have new terrors to confront: the ageing of my body, concerns for my children, the reality of my own death. I was immortal when I first read King; I feel absurdly vulnerable now. With all that in mind, I find myself affected anew by King's later works. They are the writings of a man who has suffered grievously himself. In 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking in Lovell, Maine. He endured life-threatening injuries that left him with an addiction to pain medication, which he has since overcome, and caused him to consider giving up writing entirely. (As for the driver of the minivan, one Bryan Edwin Smith, he died one year after the incident, on September 21, 2000, the date of Stephen King's fifty-third birthday, which is the kind of thing that usually only happens to people in Stephen King novels.)

I was careful to use the term “horror fiction” earlier in order to distinguish it from general supernatural fiction. There is a lazy tendency to assume that horror, ghost, and supernatural stories are all one and the same, but a tale of ghosts or the supernatural may not necessarily be horrific. The horror genre is the only one to be named after an intense feeling with largely negative connotations: to be horrified is to be disgusted, even repelled. This is why supermarkets avoided stocking horror fiction on their shelves for many years, and booksellers hid their horror sections away at the back of stores, there to be discovered by largely amiable young men and women with only mildly concerned parents. The horror genre had a hint of the illicit and the shameful about it, but that was the whole point. As Woody Allen once said about sex, it's only dirty when it's done right. The clean, glittering vampires of the Twilight novels are the stuff of romance, but Stoker's Dracula—a child-killer, a pollutant, a thing of dirt and rats—is a true creature of horror.

The effectiveness of a piece of horror, though, is dependent on revelation, on what is seen and felt. As King admits in
Danse Macabre
, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion . . . and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

I was once asked to offer a definition of a tasteful horror story. The only answer I could come up with is that a tasteful horror story is one nobody would want to read. Taste really has no part to play in horror. Rather, like physical pain, it's a question of what one is capable of enduring, and it's no coincidence that horror fiction frequently explores John Donne's assertion that “The concavities of my body are like another Hell for their capacity,” a quotation I used at the start of
Every Dead Thing
. At its most effective, horror fiction is tied up with the fragility of the human form, with injury, pain, and, ultimately, death. In that sense, all great horror is body horror; it's why Thomas Harris's
The Silence of the Lambs
, with its details of mutilation and cannibalism, is not a thriller but a horror story. The body, horror fiction warns us, is a frail construct, and will betray us all in the end.

Since I've admitted to unforgivable gaps in my reading of King's output, I should also confess that I actually read very few modern supernatural novelists, King and a handful of others apart, so I can't
but
have been influenced by him. I even write about Maine, just as King does, although that's because I worked in the state when I was younger and now have a house there. I also still think of myself primarily as a writer of mysteries, while King is at heart a horror writer, although I know that the question of genre hasn't really troubled him in a long time. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not some kind of insane stalker of King who has moved to Maine to be closer to my idol. I've simply read most of his books and have therefore contributed something to his mortgage payments. (See the piece of guttering on the right of his house? I
own
that.)

So why don't I read many longer works of supernatural fiction? Well, I suspect it's because I feel that the short story is the ideal form for explorations of the supernatural. A short horror story can give us a glimpse behind the curtain, a brief hint of whatever lurks in the shadows, but it's under no particular obligation to provide an explanation, which renders the aftereffect of the sighting all the more unsettling. On the other hand, if someone writes a novel that clocks in around the thousand-page mark, then some kind of explanation or conclusion is pretty much obligatory. The problem is that the explanation is generally going to be less interesting than the initial mystery. To put it simply, the question is more intriguing than the answer.

King's massive 2009 novel
Under the Dome
(1,074 pages, since you ask), the tale of a small Maine town sealed off from the rest of the world by a massive force field of unknown origin, is a master class in tension, a gripping depiction of an enclosed community gradually succumbing to violence and anarchy. King doesn't put a foot wrong until the very end, when he decides that some kind of revelation about the origin of the titular dome is required. Oddly enough, in this case it isn't: the dome is merely a catalyst for an investigation of the society trapped beneath it, and the variety of responses provoked by the town's containment. It doesn't really matter how the dome came to be there: it is the people scurrying around under it—fighting, fleeing, and killing—who are interesting. The explanation for the dome's presence, when it comes, smacks of an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. It's too flimsy to support the massive edifice above, and the novel almost collapses as a consequence.
¹⁵

The fault, I would argue, isn't entirely King's, but lies with the genre. If I were a more vain man, I might formulate a rule entitled Connolly's Law: the effectiveness of a piece of supernatural fiction is inversely proportional to its length.

This is not to say that there are no great horror novels—King's output alone disproves this—but there are far fewer than one might expect, and many are relatively slight, to the extent that some might more correctly be termed novellas:
The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson (200 pages, in my edition);
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley (221 pages);
I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson (170 pages);
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James (128 pages); and
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson (65 pages). On the other hand, freed from the constrictions of copyright—which, to be fair, bedeviled the efforts of our old friend Herbert van Thal—one could create many volumes of fine short supernatural fiction, and it is interesting just how many lists of great horror novels have to be plumped up with anthologies of stories.
¹⁶

I wonder, too, how much of my affection for short fiction in the genre is tied up with my exposure to compact installments of supernaturally themed television shows, which formed much of my youthful viewing, even more than old horror movies on the BBC. I grew up with
Tales of the Unexpected
and
Hammer House of Horror
, episodes of which lasted thirty minutes and an hour respectively. Even adaptations of longer novels were frequently doled out in small doses: I can still remember being terrified by the 1978
Armchair Thriller
dramatization of Antonia Fraser's
Quiet as a Nun
which, although a thriller rather than a supernatural novel, owed a strong debt to the gothic tradition, and might have drawn an approving nod from Matthew Lewis, author of
The Monk
(1796), another work infused with a deep awareness of the potential eeriness of nuns.

Then there was ITV's
Sapphire & Steel
(1979–1982), a science fiction/fantasy hybrid so strange that it's almost impossible to conceive of how it came to be green-lit in the first place. To be fair, the show itself is almost impossible to understand, so at least a degree of consistency runs through the whole process. It featured Joanna Lumley, late of
The New Avengers
, and David McCallum, star of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
, as—well, this is where it all gets a bit difficult, as it's not entirely apparent
what
they are. They seem to be trans-dimensional agents of some sort, possibly in the employ of Time itself, but—and stay with me here—they're also elements, as in the periodic table of the elements. We know this because, at the start of each show, a male voice informs us that “Transuranic elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned . . .”

Which doesn't clear things up at all, but never mind.

The cases investigated by Sapphire & Steel contained elements of the ghost story—creepy old houses, or an abandoned railway station apparently haunted by the specter of a dead World War I soldier—and rarely ended up providing anything approaching a satisfactory explanation. I have never been one for drugs, but I suspect that the experience of watching
Sapphire & Steel
may be akin to smoking large quantities of pot before trying to read a science textbook.

Only later did I encounter anthology shows such as
Dead of Night
, a BBC series first broadcast in 1972 and then largely forgotten. Just three episodes survive, of which “The Exorcism” is probably the best. In a similar vein was
Supernatural
(1977), in which aspiring members of the Club of the Damned were invited to tell a horror story as part of their membership application. If they failed sufficiently to frighten their peers, they were killed, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. (I think this principle should be applied across the board, starting with comedies that fail to provoke even a minor titter. Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider might as well just buy their own nooses and have done with it.)

Even children's television appeared to operate on the basis that the best way to deal with troublesome kids was to terrify them into catatonic silence. For
The Changes
(1975), the BBC adapted a trilogy of Peter Dickinson novels in which Britain reverts to a preindustrial society following a signal emitted by all machinery and technology, and merrily included episodes featuring accusations of Satanism and witchcraft for pre-teatime consumption. ITV gave us
Shadows
(1975–78), to which a number of heavyweight writers contributed, including J. B. Priestley and Fay Weldon. I don't recall much about it, to be perfectly honest, although I have a vague memory of an episode featuring a mobster and a pair of haunted shoes which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I now know to be “Dutch Schlitz's Shoes.”
¹⁷

Best of all was the same network's
Children of the Stones
, subsequently described as “the scariest program ever made for children,” involving stone circles, Druids, black holes, people apparently being turned into standing stones, and theme music—composed by Sidney Sager—virtually guaranteed to cause anyone who had been exposed to the original show in their youth to revert to traumatized childhood upon hearing it again.

But I now realize that some of my earliest encounters with short-form horror on TV came in the guise of the BBC science fiction series
Doctor Who
. I was seven years old when season thirteen was first broadcast (starring Tom Baker as the doctor) and a complete
Doctor Who
devotee. Seasons thirteen and fourteen of the show are regarded as “Gothic Who,” mostly due to the efforts of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, who was a fan of “the old sort of Hollywood horror,” according to Hinchcliffe. But “Pyramids of Mars” offered robots disguised as mummies, and an Egyptologist possessed by the ancient Egyptian deity Sutekh. “The Brain of Morbius” rewrote
Frankenstein
, replacing the limbs of the dead with alien body parts. “The Hand of Fear” tackled the horror subgenre of tales of possessed limbs, exemplified by W. F. Harvey's short story “The Beast with Five Fingers,” while “The Masque of Mandragora” harked back to Poe. This gothic era climaxed with “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (the final story of season fourteen, and the last before the original series began a steady decline), which combined Sherlock Holmes with
The Phantom of the Opera
, the “Yellow Peril” tradition of Asian villains, a murderous toy with the cerebral cortex of a pig, and a giant rat.

Doctor Who
had dabbled with horror prior to Hinchcliffe, although before my time. My introduction to the series came in the form of “The Sea Devils,” an episode that I saw at my aunt's house in Dunblane in 1972, when I was just four, and which, with its famous sequence of the titular amphibians emerging from the sea, may have scarred me for life.

But one year earlier, the show had featured an adventure entitled “The Daemons,” in which an archaeological dig at the village of Devil's End unearths a horned beast known as Azal. Despite the title, and wary of offending religious sensibilities, the BBC backed away from describing Azal as a demon or, indeed, the Devil himself, although he couldn't have been more Satanic in appearance if he'd arrived clutching a big fork and wearing a pentagram-shaped hat on his head. Instead Azal is described as an alien, and only with the 2006 David Tennant–era episode entitled “The Satan Pit” would the show explicitly attempt to engage with the subject again. Yet for all its perhaps understandable shuffling around Satanism, “The Daemons” was fairly prescient, appearing months before the release of the famous British folk horror film
The Blood on Satan's Claw,
and two years before the high point of the genre, Robin Hardy's
The Wicker Man.
¹⁸