One of the bands that I discovered when I was at Camp Pendleton was a
fun group called Metallica. This was back in the days of cassette
players, and while the hand held ones were common, a lot of folks
carried 'boom boxes' of various sizes. The main difference between
the two was while the smaller ones had a speaker, unless you wanted
your music to sound like a handful of marbles in a clothes dryer, you
used headphones. The boom boxes were designed with better speakers.
So I was wandering around the squad bay one Sunday afternoon, on
firewatch. This meant I was in uniform, I couldn't sit down and
read, and if something awful happened, I was supposed to be the one
who dealt with it. What it meant to me was that I was walking around
an open room the size of a small airport lounge and bored out my
skull. So of course, when I heard some guy's boom box vibrating with
sound that made me think of a mob hit squad bludgeoning some poor
fool to death with guitars and drums, I asked, “Hey, what is that?”
“Master of Puppets.”
The next time I went to the PX, I looked in the music section. There
was a tape with cover art showing rows and rows of white crosses used
as gravestones. The dead grass that grew among them was thick and
neglected, and puppet strings connected the stones to hands that were
way up in heaven. I forked over some of my hard-earned money, and
listened to the whole tape that night. That's how I got hooked.
While I was, and remain, a fan I wasn't a devoted fan. I didn't join
the fan club and I wasn't in a position to take leave whenever I
wanted so I could go to a concert. This also took place in the days
before the web, and so it was a while later before I found out that
one of the guitar-bludgeoners, Cliff Burton, had died. When I got
back from the nine-month deployment that was my share of Desert
Storm, I was hanging around in a friend's room, and he had one of the
popular music magazines sitting out. Inside was a tribute to Burton,
and the writer had summed up his feelings in a simple phrase: Death
sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The other day Fear.net had an article about Richard Matheson dying.
To me that doesn't just suck. It means the circle of people I would
enjoy spending time with, sharing ideas with, and getting inspired by
is now smaller. It means no more books, or stories period, by a man
who could write tales that would stick in your head and pop back up
just as you were trying to sleep. It means I can never shake hands
with the man who scared the holy **** out of me.
My favorite horror movies and shows are a diverse bunch. The Legend
of Hell House is up near the top of the list, and goodies like the
old Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner scares everyone on
the plane by trying to get them to look out the window will never get
old. Stir of Echoes was just creepy, and Last Man on Earth scared
and saddened me. I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man when I was a
kid, and it really bugged me because it touched on real-life themes
and problems that even today you don't see in horror movies. (and it
still didn't do the book justice, as I later found out) Most of
these were movies or episodes that I encountered when I was young,
and it really never occurred to me to notice who wrote them. I can
look back and say maybe I thought it would be like looking up a
magician's sleeve. Once you know the trick, the magic is gone.
Once I did connect all the dots, the hunt was on. Every time I went
browsing at Barnes and Noble or Borders, I made sure to check the M
section of either the horror or general fiction. I went back to the
video store and rented Trilogy of Terror and watched it with fresh
eyes. When I heard that someone had once asked George Romero where
he got the idea of people being trapped in a house and surrounded by
the undead, and he (supposedly) said, 'I stole it from Richard
Matheson,' I must have split my own face, grinning.
Well, the magic may not be gone, but the magician sure as hell is.
There will be no more tricks from one of the greatest of conjurers,
someone who not only made us shudder but made us think. Forgive me
if I stand up one more time to applaud.
Then I'm going to get back to writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment