ABSTRACT
I Probably one of the most useful social functions of bestselling fiction is to make collective anxieties manageable by embedding them in heavily stereotyped, and therefore comfortably familiar, narrative forms. Coma is an illuminating case in point. This ‘shock packed chiller’ by Robin Cook did well as a paperback, selling 2 m. copies in 1979, and even better as a ‘terrifying’ film from MGM. (Screenplay and direction were by ‘movelist’ Michael Crichton.) Pan’s synopsis indicates the kinds of thrill Coma offers, the blurb writer half opening the door on the horrors within:
A commentator in American Bookseller, noting the sales success of Coma in its two carefully tied-in forms, advanced a shrewd market analysis:
At a very basic level, then, Coma seems to conform to the familiar cultural practice by which anxiety-rousing objects bifurcate into starkly opposed images-what might be called the fairy godmother/wicked stepmother dualism. Coma’s ‘nightmare’ coexists with popular soap operas of the Dr Kildare or Emergency Ward 10 kind, which deal with ‘deep seated hostilities’ by cosy reassurance. Coma, and works like it, deal with these hostilities in an opposite way, by playing them out in heavily conventionalized and stereotyped horror fiction designed to terrorize the reader (potential patient).
