This week, the excellent CrimeReads published James’ piece on Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil, among others. In Levin, Reich finds a kind of kindred spirit, as different as their prose style are, in a shared concern for a Freudian gothic fiction. Here is a brief extract from the essay which can be read in full at CrimeReads. Reich also discusses the uncanny echoes of the Manson murders, and an often overlooked aspect of Dracula that influenced Ira Levin.
“On the eve of Hallowe’en, 1980, Dick Cavett’s television guests included Stephen King, George Romero, and Peter Straub. Watching it now, King is the most voluble, playing the open-shirted raconteur, stage right, closer to the audience than the others in several senses. He is alert to the chance to promote Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, released in May, and to tag team with Romero to tease their forthcoming horror movie anthology Creepshow (1982). Straub, in something like an accountant’s uniform, looks like the straight man, but he is also quick and generous. These masters of their genre were born during, or in King’s case, shortly after World War II. They have Atomic Age anxieties, but an ease with television.
Yet, there is a fourth guest, one that Cavett has to draw out. It is as if he has shrugged himself from the spotlights, is somewhat camera-shy. Perhaps it is because he is not a horror writer in anything like the sense that the others are. This interloper is Ira Levin, born in 1927, twenty years before the youngest, Stephen King. And of the four, it is Levin who claims to have had the most orthodox, the least neurotic and least uncanny childhood. But is this so?”
James Reich’s latest novel The Moth for the Star is available now.
