In "Nightlight," Cadnum suggests that evil attacks those who refuse to transform, who permit obsessions with history and the dead to overwhelm their living sensibilities. Life is, in a sense, a process of transformation to different physical and psychological states, each with its potential for corruption and evil. The metaphor of transformation - death, in "Nightlight," and the shape-changing of the werewolves, in "Moon Dance" - has profoundly terrifying possibilities. Somtow, and "Nightlight," a first novel by the California poet Michael Cadnum, have moments of originality and unnerving vision, but not enough to emerge from the King Beast's shadow. Worse yet, a generation of writers believes him, admires him and thinks that horror fiction is like horror cinema: a cheap trick to be performed in great haste without seriousness or attention to craft.īoth "Moon Dance," an enormous work by the experienced fantasy novelist Somtow Sucharitkul, writing under the abbreviated pen name S.P. That King gleefully accepts his fat shelf of hastily written nightmares as the narrative equivalent of a Big Mac and fries hasn't helped the genre. The King Beast is the supposition that horror fiction is sub-literary junk food, an icky business of gross-outs, cheap characterizations, deviant sex, gothic gloom, overboiled plots and half-baked climaxes that, like most pop culture, works best when manufactured, sold and consumed in quantity.
Over the past 15 years Stephen King has created a creature far more horrible than any fiend, fury or pseudonymous foe in his books.
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