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WHAT
HORROR’S
ABOUT
I
still think of boyhood bookshops, the time I took
with
their piles of exchange mags, much thumbed, on the floor.
Cowboy,
Romance… but the stuff I sought was Horror.
I’ve
often asked myself why, and again discourse
on
just what it was that made an alarming book.
The
first thing is horror itself; i.e., the shock.
The
second’s deformity, which makes all men one.
The
third’s nobility hooked on blood and bourbon.
The
fourth is change, from a good into evil twin.
The
fifth is depravity, pert kid in the dock.
Or
the plot perhaps will show what horror’s about.
The
scientist gives birth. He hears his creature shriek,
child-man
learning the world, unable to figure
out
the world. It speaks
gibberish, becomes a freak
and
kills those who run away, until it’s wiped out.
Beneath
plot the psychology. Beneath outlined
myth
runs a humble and old tale. A
goitred god
crippled
his offspring at birth. And
hence the modern
taught
son is on his way, to penetrate the guard
of
the sex and status planet his dad defined.
But
this could all be a lie. The horror in life
could
be that our ugly twin is all sorts of shame
and
even fear, not of Grendel’s Mother’s Revenge,
but
simply of ageing, of looking old and tame,
with
no prospect except smaller talk with one’s wife.
Alan
Marshfield
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