gullyfoyle

I know it's perilous to try to draw links between an artist's work and their politics, if the artist isn't especially trying to be political in their art. But....

I read a couple of Dan Simmons' horror novels recently, "Summer of Night" and "Children of the Night," and years ago read "Carrion Comfort" and "Song of Kali." The latter two are well-deserved classics. I greatly enjoyed "Summer of Night" although I guess some criticized it for being too similar to Stephen King's "It." (That didn't bother me.) "Children of the Night" overall felt too much like a potboiler, but it too has moments of brilliance.

One thing all four novels have in common is that the protagonists are struggling against a shadowy, evil group that's orchestrating events from the dark but sometimes are hidden in plain sight: Kali worshippers, a race of psychic vampires, acolytes and minions of whatever the hell is up in the old belfry, or a race of literal bloodsucking vampires. All plural, all "them."

Contrast this with the horrors in many of Stephen King's works: bad places (the Overlook, the Pet Sematary, the ship in "Tommyknockers"), singular bad entities (It, Cujo, Randall Flagg, Greg Stillson, Barlow, various ghosts and other creepy crawlies), bad situations, and sometimes the other side of the figurative mirror (e.g. "The Dark Half"). Now there's a lot of King's work I haven't gotten around to reading yet, but in general it sure seems like his horrors are much more specific and personal than those of Simmons' novels. In a couple of words, "it" vs "them."

And that is what makes me wonder if King's liberal bent and Simmons' sad slide into wingnuttery after 9/11 are connected to the artistic impulses that produce those two different kinds of horrors in their works? Fear of "them" is for damn sure big in conservative thinking these days.

I don't know, maybe I'm just blowing smoke. I was just wondering. Anybody care to comment? Be polite.