"Dan Simmons - Vexed To Nightmare BY A Rocking Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle
by Dan Simmons
Introduction
This is another story about televangelists.
Wait! Before you close the book or decide that my only form of recreation is
harpooning this particular brand of helpless sea slug, let me explain.
Some time back, the award-winning writer Edward Bryant approached me about a
project. It seems that a Colorado-based publication wanted four short-shorts for
their Christmas edition. The publication was ... you see it was a ... well, it was a
comic book catalogue. But a good comic book catalogue. Actually, it was much
more than that, since it carried a book review column by Ed and a fine film-review
section by the discerning critic Leanne C. Harper.
Anyway, four of us would do these Christmas short-shorts and Ed would write the
framing tale. (A difficult task at the best of times.) There were no
restrictionsтАФexcept for lengthтАФand the fact that the story had to be about
Christmas and had to include an "overlooked present." The other writers were all
members of the Colorado MafiaтАФSteve Rasnic Tern, Connie Willis, and Cynthia
Felice. Cynthia had already suggested that her tale would be "upbeat," so the rest of
us were allowed to return to our crypts and release whatever demons waited there.
The results, as one would expect, included a typically brilliant, subtle, and haunting
piece by Willis, a powerful and seriously disturbing story in Steve Tern's inimitable
style, my own offering reprinted here, and a clever framing tale by Ed Bryant that
somehow managed to tie these disparate efforts together. But Cynthia Felice had to
bow out due to other pressing demands, and the result was a trio of tales so
unrelievably dark that the reader would probably ask Santa for a razor blade or
cyanide capsule that year.
The distant publisher of this comic book catalogue was said to have suffered instant
seizure upon reading the first fiction to grace his pages, began spinning and
bouncing off walls like a Linda Blair doll, and reportedly didn't re-spond to
Thorazine until well after New Year's.
The truth is, I'd indulged myself in the story to the point of including a few in-jokes,
one at the expense of my book publisher and another gently poking an editor I
actually thought very highly of. What the heck, I thought, who's gonna read a comic
catalogue?
It seems everybody did. And if that wasn't enough, the trio of tales was soon sold
to Asimov's SF Magazine where it served to darken the next Christmas for a host of
people. And if that wasn't enough, Bryant had sent copies out as Christmas gifts to
everyone he knewтАФwhich just happens to be everyone in the publishing industry
and probably everyone in Known Space.
It wasn't long before I had the reputation as The Man Who Sacrificed Christmas
with a Survival Knife. Com-pared to Simmons, the Grinch and Scrooge were Santa's
helpful elves.
It doesn't help that I assure everyone who will listen that Christmas is my
second-favorite holiday (after Hal-loween, of course), or that every Christmas Eve
my wife Karen and I accompany our small daughter up to a nearby snow-covered
hillside to watch for Santa's sleigh, or that I once played Billy the Orphan who was
really the dis-guised Christ Child in our fifth-grade operetta, or that...
No, I didn't think it would help.
Meanwhile, ponder this: when the Big Mistake finally happens and some computer
pushes its own button, un-corking the Ultimate Detergent and putting us all through