Post by Pickle on Dec 20, 2008 23:40:07 GMT
Imogen Russell Williams
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 December 2008 16.33 GMT
Stephen Stephen King's appearance in George A Rance in George A Romero's Creepshowomero's Creepshow
Oh, please ... Stephen King's appearance in George A Romero's Creepshow. Photograph: Kobal
As a hungover student reaches for the bacon butty, stomach a churning mix of craving and revulsion, so I grabbed compulsively for Stephen King's new collection of short stories, Just After Sunset. I felt (and relished) the breath of hot grease as I opened the book.
King really is, in literary terms, what one of his own characters describes as "eatin' nasty" – a fat-laced feast with no nutritional value. I have no issue with this and will defend my towering piles of foil-lettered horror-bricks ("words are his power", as the cover designers have it) against any snooty eyebrow-raiser. Still, something occurred to me as I shovelled in the latest. King doesn't actually satisfy the appetite for long because he isn't, at the crisis point, very scary.
MR James, the Cambridge medievalist, can be insanely frightening because of what he is willing to leave to the reader's imagination. Whether it's a vengeful spectre glimpsed at second hand in the inarticulate words of a schoolboy ("I can tell you one thing - he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and ... I'm not at all sure that he was alive") – or a vague, dreadful creature with "a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen", James leads his readers down a dark avenue and leaves them at the end of it to face the terrors their own minds conjure from the rustling leaves. It's perfect for the Christmas season: eggnog cosiness tastes so much better laced with a few drops of sharp unease.
Not so Mr King, who shoots himself in the foot by laying the detail on too thick. In Just After Sunset's central story, in which a psychiatrist is gradually convinced by the "delusions" of an OCD patient, the source of fear is a patch of ground called Ackerman's Field. What a splendidly creepy name, I thought. No good could come to anyone nosing around in a place called Ackerman's Field. As I settled in, expecting a good jolt of terror, however, the fatal tendrils of Mr Lovecraft all too soon intruded, in the shape of horrors too alien for the human psyche to bear ("I saw the 3-lobed eye N. spoke of. It belongs to nothing from this world or this universe"), sinister words suffering vowel starvation ("CTHUN! CTHUN!") and mutated vegetation. There's the wellspring of the horror, described in loving detail down to its the Biggles-style goggles. There is no ambiguity. If fear is engendered less by the vision met head-on than by the scuttlings on the periphery which vanish as you whip round to face them, you are no longer scared by this story. Unimaginable terror shouldn't be imaginable.
When MR James does an evil field, it's distinguished by "a sort of clump" to mark the no-go area – an understated phrase that nevertheless makes my heart pound considerably harder than King's ill-behaved plants. And James' malevolent creatures, when they come, are more frightening than King's because they are simultaneously closer to and farther from human reality: "He looked at the field, and there he saw a terrible figure - something in ragged black - with whitish patches breaking out of it: the head, perched on a long thin neck, half hidden by a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet."
It's the sun-bonnet, the last vestige of humanity clinging to the blood-draining, creeping, victorious ghoul, that makes me wander about at bedtime jumping at shadows and putting on lights. King's big mistake is to believe that the further you go from the mundane, the scarier you get. It's the perversion of the everyday which, usually more believable and less melodramatically described, can frighten your Constant Reader into 50 fits.
Other fright-writers who pack a punch all the meaner for being understated include Chris Priestly, whose 2007 book Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is much too scary for children, particularly the tersely titled Climb Not, and Susan Hill, creator par excellence of wicked ghost-women, who gave us The Woman in Black and The Man in the Picture. I'm going on a diet this Christmas. No more bacon butties, please. Give me lean red meat.
www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/dec/05/stephenking-sciencefictionfantasyandhorror
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 December 2008 16.33 GMT
Stephen Stephen King's appearance in George A Rance in George A Romero's Creepshowomero's Creepshow
Oh, please ... Stephen King's appearance in George A Romero's Creepshow. Photograph: Kobal
As a hungover student reaches for the bacon butty, stomach a churning mix of craving and revulsion, so I grabbed compulsively for Stephen King's new collection of short stories, Just After Sunset. I felt (and relished) the breath of hot grease as I opened the book.
King really is, in literary terms, what one of his own characters describes as "eatin' nasty" – a fat-laced feast with no nutritional value. I have no issue with this and will defend my towering piles of foil-lettered horror-bricks ("words are his power", as the cover designers have it) against any snooty eyebrow-raiser. Still, something occurred to me as I shovelled in the latest. King doesn't actually satisfy the appetite for long because he isn't, at the crisis point, very scary.
MR James, the Cambridge medievalist, can be insanely frightening because of what he is willing to leave to the reader's imagination. Whether it's a vengeful spectre glimpsed at second hand in the inarticulate words of a schoolboy ("I can tell you one thing - he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and ... I'm not at all sure that he was alive") – or a vague, dreadful creature with "a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen", James leads his readers down a dark avenue and leaves them at the end of it to face the terrors their own minds conjure from the rustling leaves. It's perfect for the Christmas season: eggnog cosiness tastes so much better laced with a few drops of sharp unease.
Not so Mr King, who shoots himself in the foot by laying the detail on too thick. In Just After Sunset's central story, in which a psychiatrist is gradually convinced by the "delusions" of an OCD patient, the source of fear is a patch of ground called Ackerman's Field. What a splendidly creepy name, I thought. No good could come to anyone nosing around in a place called Ackerman's Field. As I settled in, expecting a good jolt of terror, however, the fatal tendrils of Mr Lovecraft all too soon intruded, in the shape of horrors too alien for the human psyche to bear ("I saw the 3-lobed eye N. spoke of. It belongs to nothing from this world or this universe"), sinister words suffering vowel starvation ("CTHUN! CTHUN!") and mutated vegetation. There's the wellspring of the horror, described in loving detail down to its the Biggles-style goggles. There is no ambiguity. If fear is engendered less by the vision met head-on than by the scuttlings on the periphery which vanish as you whip round to face them, you are no longer scared by this story. Unimaginable terror shouldn't be imaginable.
When MR James does an evil field, it's distinguished by "a sort of clump" to mark the no-go area – an understated phrase that nevertheless makes my heart pound considerably harder than King's ill-behaved plants. And James' malevolent creatures, when they come, are more frightening than King's because they are simultaneously closer to and farther from human reality: "He looked at the field, and there he saw a terrible figure - something in ragged black - with whitish patches breaking out of it: the head, perched on a long thin neck, half hidden by a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet."
It's the sun-bonnet, the last vestige of humanity clinging to the blood-draining, creeping, victorious ghoul, that makes me wander about at bedtime jumping at shadows and putting on lights. King's big mistake is to believe that the further you go from the mundane, the scarier you get. It's the perversion of the everyday which, usually more believable and less melodramatically described, can frighten your Constant Reader into 50 fits.
Other fright-writers who pack a punch all the meaner for being understated include Chris Priestly, whose 2007 book Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is much too scary for children, particularly the tersely titled Climb Not, and Susan Hill, creator par excellence of wicked ghost-women, who gave us The Woman in Black and The Man in the Picture. I'm going on a diet this Christmas. No more bacon butties, please. Give me lean red meat.
www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/dec/05/stephenking-sciencefictionfantasyandhorror