Speech of Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, December 22, 1898, at the banquet of the New England Society, of Charleston, South Carolina

I am not suggesting that Ira Levin is either Jackie Vernon or George Orwell masquerading in a fright wig-nothing so simple or simplistic. I am suggesting that the books he has written achieve suspense without turning into humorless thudding tracts (two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty-Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky). Levin is one of the few writers who has returned more than once to the field of horror and the supernatural and who seems unafraid of the fact that much of the material the genre deals with is utterly foolish-and at that, he has done better than many critics, who visit the genre the way rich white ladies once visited the children of New England factory slaves on Thanksgiving with food baskets and on Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies. These slumming critics, unaware both of their own infuriating elitism and their total ignorance of what popular fiction does and what it is about, are able to see the foolishness spawned as a by-product of the bubbling potions, the pointy black hats, and all the other clanking huggermugger trappings of the supernatural tale, but are unable to see-or refuse to see-the strong and universal archetypes that underlie the best of them ...»