And as a fable of losing power and finding it, The Shrinking Man ranks as one of the finest fantasies of the period we've been discussing. And I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm only talking here about sexual power and sexual potency. There are tiresome critics-the half-baked Freudians, mostly-who want to relate all of fantasy and horror fiction back to sex; one explanation for the conclusion of The Shrinking Man which I heard at a party in the fall of 1978-I'll not mention the name of the woman whose theory this was, but if you read science fiction, you'd know the name-maybe bears repeating, since we're on this. In symbolic terms, this woman said, spiders represent the vagina. Scott finally kills his Nemesis, the black widow ( the most vaginal of all spiders) by impaling it on a pin ( the phallic symbol, get it, get it?). Thus, this critic went on, after failing at sex with his wife, succeeding at first with the carnival midget Clarice and then losing her, Scott symbolically kills his own sex drive by impaling the spider. This is his last sexual act before escaping the cellar and achieving a wider freedom.
All of this was well-meaning bullshit, but bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's Secret Sauce. I bring it up only to point out that it is the sort of bullshit that a lot of fantasy and horror writers have had to labor under . . . most of it spread by people who believe either secretly or openly that the horror writer must be suffering from madness to a greater or a lesser degree. The further view of such folks is that the writer's books are Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author's anal, oral, or genital fixation. In writing about the largely scoffing reaction that Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel received when it was published in 1960, Wilfrid Sheed adds, "Freudian interpretations [are] always greeted by guffaws." Not much bad news at that, when you remember that even the most staid novelists are regarded as a bit peculiar by their neighbors . . . but the horror novelist is always going to have to face what I think of as the couch questions, I guess. And most of us are perfectly normal. Heh-heh-heh.
Freudian huggermugger set aside, The Shrinking Man can be seen as just a pretty good story which happens to deal with the interior politics of power . . . or, if you like (and I do), the interior politics of magic. And Scott's killing of the spider is meant to show us that the magic is not dependent on size but upon mind and heart. If it stands considerably taller than other books in the genre ( small pun much intended), and far above other books where tiny people battle beetles and praying mantises and such ( Lindsay Gutteridge's Cold War in a Country Garden comes to mind), it is because Matheson couches his story in such intimate and riveting terms-and because he is ultimately so persuasive. *
*This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.
8
It wouldn't be right to wind up even so brief a discussion of the modern horror novel as this one without mentioning two young British writers, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert. They are a part of a whole new generation of British fantasy writers who seem to be revitalizing the genre by cross-fertilization much as British poets helped to revitalize American poetry during the early sixties. Besides Campbell and Herbert, the two who are perhaps best known over here, there is Robert Aickman (who could hardly be called a young Turk-but since such books as Cold Hand in Mine have brought him to a wider American audience, it seems fair enough to classify him as part of the British new wave), Nick Sharman, Thomas Tessier, an American living in London, who has recently published a novel called The Nightwalker , perhaps the finest werewolf novel of the last twenty years, and a score of others.
As Paul Theroux-another expatriate American living in London-has pointed out, there is something uniquely British about the tale of horror ( perhaps particularly those which deal with the archetype of the Ghost). Theroux, who has written his own low-key horror tale, The Black House , favors the mannered but grisly tales of M. R. James, and they do seem to summarize everything that is best in the classic British horror story. Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert are both modernists, and while this family is really too small to avoid a certain resemblance even in cousins twice removed, it seems to me that both of these men, who are worlds apart in terms of style, point of view, and method of attack, are doing things that are exciting and worthy of mention.
Campbell, a Liverpudlian ( "You talk just like one of the Beatles," a woman marvels to a writer from Liverpool in Campbell's new novel, The Parasite ), writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning. The polish of his writing and his mannered turns of phrase and image make him seem something like the genre's Joyce Carol Oates (and like Oates, he is prolific, turning out good short stories, novels, and essays at an amazing clip), and there is also something Oatesian in the way his characters view the world- as when one is journeying on mild LSD, there is something chilly and faintly schizophrenic in the way his characters see things . . . and in the things they see. These are the perceptions of Rose as she shops in a Liverpool department store in The Parasite : A group of toddlers watched her pass, their eyes painted into their sockets. On the ground floor, red and pink and yellow hands on stalks reached for her from the glove counter. Blind mauve faces craned on necks as long as arms; wigs roosted on their heads . . . . The bald man was still staring at her. His head, which looked perched on top of a bookcase, shone like plastic beneath the fluorescent lights. His eyes were bright, flat, expressionless as glass; she thought of a display head stripped of its wig. When a fat pink tongue squeezed out between his lips, it was as if a plastic head had come to life.
Good stuff. But strange; so uniquely Campbell that it might as well be trademarked. Good horror novels are not a dime a dozen-by no means-but there never seems to be any serious shortage of good ones, either. And by that I mean that you seem to be able to count on a really good novel of horror and/or the supernatural ( or at least a really interesting one) every year or so-and much the same could be said for the horror films. A vintage year may produce as many as three amid the paperback-original dreck about hateful, paranormal children and presidential candidates from hell and the too-large collection of hardcover boners, such as the recent Virgin , by James Petersen. But, maybe paradoxically, maybe not, good horror writers are quite rare . . . and Campbell is better than just good.
That's one reason fans of the genre will greet The Parasite with such pleasure and relief; it is even better than his first novel, of which I want to treat briefly here. Campbell has been turning out his own patented brand of short horror tale for some years now ( like Bradbury and Robert Bloch, Arkham House published Ramsey Campbell's first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake , which was a Lovecraft clone). Several collections of his stories are available, the best of them probably being The Height of the Scream . A story you will not find in that book, unfortunately, is "The Companion," in which a lonely roan who tours "funfairs" on his holidays encounters a horror beyond my ability to describe while riding a Ghost Train into its tunnel.
"The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now. Campbell is literate in a field which has attracted too many comic-book intellects, cool in a field where too many writers-myself included-tend toward panting melodrama, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners often fall prey to cant and stupid "rules" of fantasy composition.
But not all good short-story writers in this field are able to make the jump to the novel (Poe tried with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and made a conditional success of the job; Lovecraft failed ambitiously twice, with The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the rather more interesting At the Mountains of Madness , whose plot is remarkably Pym -like ) .
Campbell made the jump almost effortlessly, with a novel as good as its title was off-putting: The Doll Who Ate His Mother . The book was published with absolutely no fanfare in 1977 in hardcover, and then with an even greater lack of fanfare a year later in paperback . . . one of those cases that make a writer wonder if publishers don't practice their own sort of voodoo, singling certain books out to be ritually slaughtered in the marketplace.
Well, never mind that. Concerning the jump from the short story to the novel-writing the latter is much like long-distance running, and you can almost feel some would-be novelists getting tired. You sense they're starting to breathe a trifle hard by page one hundred, to puff and blow by page two hundred, and to finally limp over the finish line with little to recommend them beyond the bare fact that they have finished. But Campbell runs well.
He is personally an amusing, even a jolly man (at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention he presented Stephen R. Donaldson with the British Fantasy Award, a modernistic little statuette, for his Thomas Covenant trilogy; Campbell, in that marvelously broad and calm Liverpool accent, referred to it as "the skeletal dildo." The audience broke up, and someone at my table marveled, "He sounds just like one of the Beatles."). As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out.