"personal demons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowler Christopher)

Phoenix 41

Unforgotten 65

The man who wound a thousand clocks 87

Inner fire 99

Wage slaves 118

Armies of the heart 145

Five star 162

Scratch 177

Still life 188

The cages 197

The Grand Finale Hotel 202

Midas touch 219

Permanent fixture 245

Looking for Bolivar 252

Learning to let go 281







PREFACE

'Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.'
W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Short stories of the fantastic are cowards' deaths, explorations of what might yet be. They are premonitions written to disturb and ultimately comfort, because they present us with the results of our darkest dreams. They help us to deal with our fears and realise our fantasies.
Kenneth Tynan said 'when the writer cares more about the audience's reaction than the truth of the character or situation, they are writing for effect, they are writing melodrama.' The problem is, many novels and short stories seem to exist for the sole purpose of producing a series of melodramatic effects. Editors often ask for a showy set-piece to be situated at the start of a novel. Anthologies look for shock-pieces. The 'new lad' school of writing precipitated by Irvine Welsh has nearly kicked everything else off the shelves. Writers of great power and subtlety are treated as creators of specialist literature because they choose to explore strange territory. Television has become the new home of a specialised form of
SF, horror and fantasy, dumbed-down, safe, value-reaffirming.
Not long ago I was told that my material was 'too quirky' for mainstream America. Why didn't I develop a single theme and stick to it in order to build reader loyalty? Stephen King is the most successful author in the world. Didn't all horror and fantasy authors aspire to be like him?
Well, no.
True, some of his books have made terrific films because his stories are admirably rooted in character, and his ideas are simple, clear and strong, even if his prose is as elegant as
an orthopaedic boot, but ultimately it's a parochial style peculiar to one area of the USA, and I wanted to write specifically to my own English environment. In the eighties, American concepts of dumbing down horror provided grim new benchmarks, reaching even lower. They constituted a sacrifice of all that disturbed, discomforted or encouraged thought, and the British followed suit. Virginia Woolf said that 'the steps from brain to brain must be cut very shallow if thought is to mount them'. Some writers began providing wheelchair slopes. The genre has still not recovered, although I'm convinced that it will.