Foreward Read online

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

  near lovers' lane. In the first reel, the warty horror kills an old man in a

  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