and the original, now pale and exuding the stench
of death, poised over his bed. He escapes, of
course, and lives to tell the story, revealing at the
end that the woman committed suicide after a dis-
solute life and that repeated efforts to bury her
have failed. Benson’s ghostly image and under-
stated horror might seem quaint by contemporary
standards, but the story was considered quite un-
settling when it first appeared. The theme of pre-
cognition, advance knowledge of events to come,
has rarely been handled as effectively.
Rosemary’s BabyIra Levin (1967)
Until the 1970s horror fiction had always been
much less popular in the United States than in Eu-
rope, and what did appear in book form was either
lumped with science fiction or with mystery fiction.
Two novels began to change the perception of the
genre and paved the way for Stephen KING, Anne
RICE, Peter STRAUB, and others. The first of these
was this suspenseful novel by an author whose pre-
vious book had been a murder mystery. The second
was William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST(1971).
Both novels were best-sellers, and both were
quickly made into major motion pictures.
Rosemary’s Babyis the story of a young married
woman whose husband falls under the influence of
a group of seemingly pleasant people living in the
apartment house where the couple has just moved.
Rosemary is occasionally jealous of her husband’s
new friendships, but she is soon preoccupied by her
pregnancy, which becomes evident shortly after
she experiences a horrifying nightmare in which
she is sexually assaulted by a demonic creature.
Her husband becomes very attentive, and even the
neighbors seem unusually concerned about the
child’s welfare. It is only gradually that she begins
to suspect that something is wrong.
Eventually, she discovers the truth, that the
dream was real and that she was impregnated by
the devil so that his son could be born on Earth to
work great evil. Even though she apparently grasps
the implications, she is still devoted to the child,
although reluctant to accept the assistance of the
cultists. Levin even leaves open the possibility that
the dream was not real and that she has imagined
everything, although that alternative is less obvi-
ous in the film version. The novel ends almost qui-
etly, and the realization that evil has triumphed
leaves the reader to speculate about the future.
Perhaps unwisely, Levin wrote a sequel 30
years later. In Son of Rosemary(1997) she wakens
from a magically induced coma to find that her son
has grown to maturity and is now a charismatic fig-
ure with an enormous following. Although she is
initially relieved to find that he is apparently fight-
ing on the side of righteousness rather than evil,
she quickly begins to detect flaws in his character
that indicate he is unable to completely escape his
father’s imprint. Standing on its own, the novel is
an interesting thriller, but retrospectively, it dulls
the impact of the original novel.Rosenberg, Joel(1954– )
Joel Rosenberg, a steady source of enjoyable light
fantasy adventure, made his debut with the first
volume of the Guardians of the Flame series, The
Sleeping Dragon(1983), which uses a common plot
device of the time, game players caught within the
artificial reality of the game they are playing. In
this case seven friends have constructed an elabo-
rate fantasy role-playing game whose conflicts
often mirror the rough spots in their relationships
in the real world. That distinction vanishes when
they find themselves trapped in the reality of the
game. In The Sword and the Chain(1984) they dis-
cover that they feel more at home in the imaginary
world, and begin to create new lives for themselves
and the game-related subplots disappear during
the books that followed. In The Silver Crown
(1985) they create a free state but are hard pressed
by the repressive forces of evil, which prefer things
to remain as they have been.
The story continues with The Heir Apparent
(1987) and The Warrior Lives(1988), which consoli-
date and to some extent reprise earlier parts of the
series while setting the stage for the next generation
to appear. The events in The Road to Ehvenor(1991)
have moved so far from the original concept that it
almost seems to belong in another series. A gap of
several years followed before Rosenberg returned to
that setting for The Road Home(1995), in which a
young man’s hatred of slavers becomes so fierce that
it clouds his judgment. That was followed by aRosenberg, Joel 295