Wed 6 Jan 2010
LAIRD KOENIG – Rockabye. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1981. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1983. Made-for-TV movie: CBS, 12 January 1986. Valerie Bertinelli (mother), Rachel Ticotin (tabloid reporter), Jason Alexander (NYPD lieutenant).
Novels of the occult and the supernatural are tremendously popular today, and part of the reason has to be the excuses they give people for avoiding the real world, the one they have to live in.
Considering the unspeakable things that can happen to a kidnapped two-year-old boy in New York City at Christmas time, here’s a book that will scare the heck out of just about everyone, and get them back to reading about witches and demons and the like.
In part, the police are also the villains in this one, giving up too easily on what they think is just another unsolvable crime. The boy’s mother, a traveler alone in the city, nevertheless refuses to concede defeat. Her only assistance comes from a sympathetic female newspaper reporter and an aging psychic-for-hire whom she really believes to be a fraud.
Screenwriter Laird Koenig has an unerring eye for situations easily translatable into cinematic magic. You can expect to see it on a screen near you very soon. The mayor of New York City won’t like it, nor will police departments anywhere in the country. I can’t say that I’d blame them in the slightest.
UPDATE [01-06-10]. I seem to have violated my own personal rule against reading children-in-jeopardy novels with this one, but without rules, how can there be exceptions?
I’m glad to say that I recognized the cinematic potential of this book, however. The film took a few years before it was made, and it showed up only on TV, but made it was.
Koenig also wrote the novel and screenplay for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), a Jodie Foster movie, and his paperback original The Neighbor (Avon, 1978) was the basis for a movie called Killing ’em Softly (1982).
While Little Girl is cited in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, neither of the other two are. I’ll drop him an email about them later today…
January 6th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
I suppose that an interest in the supernatural can be seen as an escape from the perplexing dilemmas of the “real” world, but I prefer to think of it as being open to the possibility of alternate realities. The world of the supernatural is certainly very real to some people, although I must confess that in spite of my decades-long reading of supernatural fiction, I’ve never experienced any event in my daily life that I felt to be an encounter with some force that defied any explanation based on reason.
However, if I ever stumble up against something that shakes my reasonable self to its foundations, Mystery*File will be the first to know about it, if I survive the encounter.
January 6th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
What’s remarkable, at least to me, is that this was review was written almost 30 years ago, when horror fiction was so popular that it often had its own section in bookstores.
And here it is now the year 2010, and we’ve returned full circle. There is next to no Science Fiction in the SF-Fantasy sections of Borders and Barnes & Noble any more, and 80% of the Fantasy consists of vampire fiction, werewolf fiction and (ugh) Zombie fiction.
I have no interest in the stuff, although I sample it every so often. As I was in 1982, I’m fascinated by the simple question of why it’s so popular.
My point with Rockabye was that horror fiction is Scary but Safe, since the horrors don’t really exist, but real life horror is real, and when it occurs, there isn’t any escape.
January 6th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Steve
Must be a regional thing. The B&N and Borders here both have separate horror sections and fairly decent SF/Fantasy, though yes, vampires, zombies, and werewolves have made inroads. The surprising thing is how small the western section is — you’d think in Oklahoma …
Walter
While I do read supernatural fiction for escape, I think you are dead on about the mind expanding properties. For me the best supernatural fiction makes me think and feel. Though I’ll admit I prefer the kind that leaves you with a feeling of unease and a frisson of real terror to the more popular kind that leaves you with a touch of nausea.
That said I have had a few encounters with the uncanny, or at least the unexplained (if not inexplicable), though I make no claims for any of them being more than coincidence, tricks of the mind, and natural phenomena.
The Marfa lights in West Texas are an interesting one since almost everyone in that region or passing though has seen them. None of the explanations, scientific or not, have satisfactorily explained what they are exactly, and the Jordanna del Muerte near El Paso and New Mexico exercises a peculiar influence on people that can be hard to explain.
I’ve also encountered at least two ghosts (wide awake and sober at the time too). I make no claim for supernatural cause, but other than the power of the mind (which is considerable) to make us see what we want or expect to see I don’t have a rational explanation either. Still, neither “ghost” was the least scary, nor were there any cold spots, or other phenomena. They could not have been much more mundane and still have been a “ghost.”
I’ve also know one genuine “psychic” — who neither charged for her ability or made her predictions after the event — and frankly it freaked her out when she was right.
On the other hand a palm reader taught me how to read the Tarot and Gypsy Cards and do a cold reading, and it is all psychology and can be done by almost anyone. Yet I’ve known people who can make the planchette fly off the Ouija board while I can’t move it a millimeter.
But the fact that we can’t explain something doesn’t mean is is inexplicable. I guess to that extent I’m a Fortean. Things happen that science doesn’t fully explain — yet, our primate brain with that still active crocodile base is programed to see wonders — that doesn’t mean we have to embrace them though without trying to explain them, save in novels and films where we can give full reign to that sense of wonder without risking our rational minds.