Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!dann
From: dann@wxlvax.UUCP (Dan Neiman)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Christine, Legion, *slight spoilers*
Message-ID: <199@wxlvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Dec-83 19:14:29 EST
Article-I.D.: wxlvax.199
Posted: Tue Dec 20 19:14:29 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Dec-83 01:07:56 EST
Lines: 52

Normally my tastes don't run to horror, but I ran across the following
in the stacks of the town library, so...

Christine : Stephen King

      You don't really have to read more than one Stephen King book.  After
the first, you have a good idea what's going to happen.  It starts with 
minor supernatural manifestations which build in intensity until finally 
people are dying right and left in picturesque and sanguinary ways.
Usually the forces of good triumph in the end, which means that at least
one of the protagonists is left standing. 
      I don't really care for King as a horror story writer because most 
of what he writes doesn't convince/scare me.  In Christine, there just 
doesn't seem to be enough motivation a) for the existence of Christine in 
the first place and b) for the sheer malignity of the supernatural
influence.  King seems to have the impression borrowed, no doubt from 
1950 horror movies, that anything supernatural will as a matter of course
delight in carnage.  Anyways, Christine is a good, semi-suspenseful read
of the mental popcorn variety worth keeping around for the first blizzard
of the season.  After reading, you can use it for kindling.


Legion : William Peter Blatty

     William Peter Blatty is another type of author entirely.  I suppose
you know he wrote The Exorcist, in fact Legion is kind of a sequel to
Exorcist.  Blatty takes a more philosophical look at the question of 
evil than King does and manages in the process to create a more 
fundamentally terrifying sort of evil.   The viewpoint is that of a 
detective trying to solve a series of murders which strongly resemble 
those committed ten years previously by a psychopath who was 
supposed to have died in a fusilade of bullets but whose body was 
never found.  Good suspense and some reasonable plot turns.  

     Blatty's works usually contain a substantial amount of black 
humor, Legion is no exception.   Two of his earlier works also are
worth looking into, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, and Twinkle, Twinkle,
Killer Kane.  Goldfarb concerns the misadventures of an aviator, labeled
"Wrongway Goldfarb" after he leads his squadron to an enemy airbase during
the war.  After the war, he is on a spy mission and gets lost *again*.
Twinkle,Twinkle, Killer Kane is the story of a mentally troubled, 
highly trained soldier who gets assigned, by accident, to the position of
head psychiatrist at a lunatic asylum for prospective astronauts.  
Kane is an extremely funny ultimately tragic book and is the best of 
Blatty's that I've read.


dann