Last week I finished reading the grandfather of the small-town horror novel, The Body Snatchers. Enough has been written about Jack Finney’s seminal tale to make additional commentary largely superfluous, so I’ll keep it brief. Few novels before or since have developed such a sense of creeping dread and paranoia, which makes it doubly disappointing that the scientific concept behind the horror is such nonsense and that its ending wouldn’t look out of place in the lamest, most clichéd sci-fi film ever burped out of Hollywood.
Aside from being impressed with Finney’s writing and the masterful way he manages mood, what struck me on a personal level was how much my own novel, Invasion at Bald Eagle, owed to a book I had never read. Certainly I knew a few story elements from reading Stephen King’s analysis of it in Danse Macabre, but Finney’s book and mine are kissing cousins in storyline and tone* purely by coincidence.
Only it’s not a coincidence, is it? What I realised was that writers really are a family, and that the family resemblance is passed down through generations. Finney, who wrote The Body Snatchers in 1955, was shaped by the horror/sci-fi writers whose work he read, such as H.G. Wells. Stephen King was shaped by Finney; countless horror writers of my generation were shaped by King, and on it goes.
The Body Snatchers was on track to become one of my favourite books of all time until that sub-par ending, but I loved it nevertheless – and perhaps it was predestined that I would. Finney is blood, after all.
* For a while, anyway; Bald Eagle changes gear in its second half and becomes more of an action-thriller.