Ira Levin is best known for his horror fiction - The Boys From Brazil, The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby. I’m not calling them anything else, but books like these are mysteries in that the main character has to find out what’s going on, in order to stop the villain. Think about it. In The Boys From Brazil, the pursuit is of Nazi Josef Mengele, who used to experiment on twins and now has used this knowledge to create 94 Hitler clones and is making their lives resemble that of Adolf Hitler, for example, by killing their fathers at the right age. He does get his comeuppance, but the novel is a mystery anyway, as Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann(based on real life Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal) tries to work out why these older men are being killed and attempting to stop it when he works it out.
The Stepford Wives starts off with the common trope that has a young couple moving to a small town where mysterious things are happening. The mystery in this one is, why are all the women turning into perfect housewives, after going on a romantic weekend trip with their husbands?
Joanna Eberhart, the heroine, needs to know, because her two friends, who started as strong, independent women turn into housewives with no interest in anything else, and her husband is spending a lot of time with the local men. She might be next. Will she work it out in time to save herself or is it too late? This novel and the films based on it are well known enough that most people know the answer to that question, but when it first came out, it was very new, and the term “Stepford wife” was not yet a thing.
The script for the first film version(1975) was written by William Goldman, who also wrote The Princess Bride! It was the most faithful to the novel.
Rosemary’s Baby features a woman, Rosemary Woodhouse, who moves with her husband, Guy, into an apartment in New York City. If you think about it, it’s pretty much the same trope as “young couple moves to a small town where strange things are happening”, though as an introduction to my copy says, it may have been the first horror story set in the big city, close to home, instead of far-off Transylvania or wherever.
Guy is an actor who hasn’t had much work. He gets on very well with their older neighbours, the Castavets. When Rosemary becomes pregnant after a weird sexual encounter(Guy claims that was him and sorry about the long nails) suddenly Guy starts getting work - lots of it. Mrs Castavet seems to be looking after Rosemary and gives her a necklace with a herb in it that she claims will help with the pregnancy. When Rosemary finds out it’s nothing of the kind, she starts to investigate. What she finds out is horrifying.
This novel was the closest to actual horror fiction of the three, but it’s still a mystery, which the heroine has to solve.
There was a film with Mia Farrow as Rosemary. I think it’s nearly as much of a classic as the book. Either will do to start with if you are interested.
So, who knew horror fiction can also be mystery and thriller?
2 comments:
I've only seen the movie adaptations of all three of these books, although now that I think of it, I believe I did read "Rosemary's Baby" after seeing the movie.
The movie adaptations of all of them are very good. I read all of them, though, before seeing the films.
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