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These twin terrors -- fear of the real and fear of the insubstantial -- are ! the subtexts of most stories designed to make the flesh creep. Yet it has been nearly a century since the brothers James recorded their visions. Surely horror should have become an outdated category by now. Surely science should have driven a stake through its heart. But, no, the genre is, in every sense, the home of the undead. In the '40s Critic Edmund Wilson mused about the persistence of ghost stories: "What is the reason, then -- in these days when a lonely country house is likely to be equipped with electric light, radio and telephone -- for our returning to these antiquated tales? . . . First, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion . . . Second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth . . ."
Two generations later, the longings have grown more aggravated and the real horrors have metastasized. Terrorism and the Bomb, the breakdown of the ozone layer and the rise of crime -- almost any news item will serve to drive readers to distraction. Manhattan Psychiatrist Robert E. Gould finds that horror "is extremely distracting. That is one of the main purposes of its popularity. In difficult times, in the world outside and your own world, you reach out far from yourself. Also, you can control that horror. You can stop reading any time you want." His colleague Dr. Herbert Peyser agrees. In horror, he says, "we see an ordered world. We know it really isn't real, and we can master it. It's fantasy, and we can get out." It is no wonder then that videocassettes like I Dismember Mama and Halloween are favorites on the rental circuit, that Aliens and Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives were among the top movie grossers of the summer, and that, in paperback, Stephen King now outsells James Michener and Robert Ludlum.
At his home in Bangor, Me., King recently took time away from the IBM Selectric to ponder his role as the Master of Pop Dread. In It he observes, "All writers have a pipeline which goes down into the subconscious. But the man or woman who writes horror stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe . . . into the sub-subconscious, if you like." King's sub-subconscious started working overtime when he was scarcely out of infancy. In an eerie resemblance to his spiritual ancestor Poe, King was also deserted by his father in infancy. At the age of four the lonely boy walked home pale and unspeaking. A neighborhood friend had inexplicably vanished. "It turned out," King later recalled, "that the kid had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket)." To this day the author has "no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it . . ." But at the age of eight he had a very accessible dream: "I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. When the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my face -- rotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me." Permutations of both incidents would turn up in books two decades later.