"Charles L. Grant - Gallery Of Horror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

GALLERY OF HORROR
by
CHARLES L. GRANT

INTRODUCTION

More years ago than I care to remember, I used to spend every Saturday
afternoon at the Lincoln Theater in Kearny, New Jersey, joining my
friends in an escape from school, the weather, parents, homework, and
anything (or anyone) else that tended to smack of childhood's worst
Monster-being responsible (otherwise known as acting your age, or
growing up). It was, at the time, quite natural to substitute for this
Monster a delightful clutch of others-the werewolf, the vampire, the
ghost, the banshee, the thing in the cellar, the thing in the attic.
More often than not my friends and I would leave the theater laughing,
walking stiff-legged or pretending we were wearing long black capes and
fanging the girls walking by.

But as sure as cartoon follows first feature, there was also ."Qaturday
night. In bed. Alone. Sleeping the sleep of the innocent until
something woke me up. Woke me up so hard, in fact, that I had a hard
time going back to sleep; and often I would require the soothing
services of my parents to assure me that I would, indeed, see the next
dawn.

You would think that years of this would have cured me of Karloff

and Lugosi and Zucco and all the others, but it didn't. And it didn't
nny n either, though no one would admit to the

nightmares that followed the Saturday matinee. The only thing we did
know was: they were fun. Not in the dreaming, but in the retelling.

After all, that's why we went to those films in the first place-to get
scared then, and to get scared again later.

Since then the Monster has gotten me, for the most part. I have grown
up, I have accepted some measure of responsibility here and there, and I
do, on occasion, act my age (whatever the hell that means).

On the other hand, I also write'and edit books like this, ones that if
all goes well will give their readers a good dose of the chills, the
shudders, and the outright shrieks now and then. After all, if the
truth be known, we haven't grown up all that much; the fears we have now
aren't the same as they were when we were children, but they're fears
just the same. They make our palms sweat, they give us nightmares, and
they're sometimes powerful enough to alter our characters.

They are now, as they were then, real.