(Levin really has it in for the Magic Kingdom. ![]() The writer is clearly getting at something, for instance, when he reveals that the villain behind The Stepford Wives’ domesticated automatons is a man nicknamed Diznot because he’s scatter-brained, but because he made his fortune creating the mechanical figures that populate Disneyland’s rides. What sets Levin apart from his horror contemporaries like William Peter Blatty and John Saul is the playful sense of humor he uses to counterpoint the darker goings-on in his novels. Aren’t these women just a little too keen on grocery shopping? Aren’t those little boys’ eyes just a little too blue? Compared with the derivative shocks in Levin’s firstand hopefully lastsequel, these dated constructions still unnerve and disturb.Īnd amuse. His horror confections besides Rosemary’s Babythe chilly, big-busted robot housewives populating The Stepford Wives, the 96 clones of Adolf Hitler in The Boys From Brazilare the ludicrous made familiar, and the familiar made uncanny. Naturally, Andy’s true motives remain murky throughout, and even when his ex-girlfriend turns up shish-kabobed in a Tiffany’s boutique, it isn’t clear who’s pulling the strings.Īs usual, Levin’s clipped prose serves him well, propelling this ridiculous mess forward zippingly, and some of his descriptions are not entirely without wit (“Imagine a conservative father whose son joined the Peace Corps, then multiply it by ten” is how Andy rates his father’s annoyance at the news that his only son has gone over to the good side), but ultimately Son of Rosemary fails in a way no previous Levin thriller has: It produces not a single frisson of fear. With his feel-good message (“Couldn’t we all lighten up just a little…”) and a top PR team, Andy has convinced everyone on the planet to take part in a global candle-lighting ceremony just as the new millennium breaks. Her half-human/half-demonic son Andy is now one of the good guys, a 33-year-old Tommyesque spiritual leader. The sequel, lamentably, has happened: Son of Rosemary, published 30 years after the original and set in the last days of 1999, finds Rosemary awakening from a 27-year coma. Imagine, then, Satanin white tie and tailsand Rosemary sharing a New Year’s Eve waltz, Satan telling the mother of his son Andrew, “Maybe I knew, or just hoped somewhere deep inside, that if you were alive when the time came for Andy to begin his work, it might turn out that we’d look into each other’s eyes again, in a nicer, more civilized situationthat there was the possibility, so to speak, of a sequel for us.” It didn’t hurt, either, that Levin kept the supernatural elements mostly on the novel’s fringes, and that the only time Satan appearedwith his “yellow furnace-eyes”was during a drug-induced nightmare. Plotted beautifully and economically, its internal logic flawless, it offered little option but to accept the unspeakable: a coven of witches and the birth of Satan’s only living son. What made Levin’s second and best novel such a success was its utter believability. An apartment building with a history of evil, an accidental death, overly friendly neighbors, a husband who perhaps shouldn’t be trusted….Troubling as these jigsaw pieces are individually, it is only when the readers snaps them togetherin much the same way that Rosemary rearranges Scrabble tiles to crack the anagram her tormentor is hiding behindthat they take on genuinely terrifying significance. The sense of creeping dread that wraps around young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouseand the reader of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Babybegins quietly, builds subtly, and ends appropriately gruesomely. ![]() ![]() Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |