Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [219]
Her lips pursed in a thin line.
'Runner-up was a horror novel about incest and infanticide called Flowers in the Attic. That one was the champ for five years running. Several of them even mentioned Peyton Place!'
She looked at him sternly.
'I myself have never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I have never heard an Ozzy Osbourne record and have no desire to do so, nor to read a novel by Robert McCammon, Stephen King, or V. C. Andrews. Do you see what I'm getting at, Sam?'
'I suppose. You're saying it wouldn't be fair to . He needed a word, groped for it, and found it. ' . . . to usurp the children's tastes.'
She smiled radiantly - everything but the eyes, which seemed to have nickels in them again.
'That's part of it, but that's not all of it. The posters in the Children's Library -both the nice, uncontroversial ones and the ones which put you off - came to us from the Iowa Library Association. The ILA is a member of the Midwest Library Association, and that is, in turn, a member of The National Library Association, which gets the majority of its funding from tax money. From John Q. Public -which is to say from me. And you.'
Sam shifted from one foot to the other. He didn't want to spend the afternoon listening to a lecture on How Your Library Works for You, but hadn't he invited it? He supposed so. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was liking Ardelia Lortz less and less all the time.
'The Iowa Library Association sends us a sheet every other month, with reproductions of about forty posters,' Ms Lortz continued relentlessly. 'We can pick any five free; extras cost three dollars each. I see you're getting restless, Sam, but you do deserve an explanation, and we are finally reaching the nub of the matter.'
'Me? I'm not restless,' Sam said restlessly.
She smiled at him, revealing teeth too even to be anything but dentures. 'We have a Children's Library Committee,' she said. 'Who is on it? Why, children, of course! Nine of them. Four high-school students, three middleschool students, and two grammar-school students. Each child has to have an overall B average in his schoolwork to qualify. They pick some of the new books we order, they picked the new drapes and tables when we redecorated last fall ... and, of course, they pick the posters. That is, as one of our younger Committeemen once put it, "the funnest part." Now do you understand?'
'Yes,' Sam said. 'The kids picked out Little Red Riding Hood, and Simple Simon, and the Library Policeman. They like them because they're scary.'
'Correct!' she beamed.
Suddenly he'd had enough. It was something about the Library. Not the posters, not the librarian, exactly, but the Library itself. Suddenly the Library was like an aggravating, infuriating splinter jammed deep in one buttock. Whatever it was, it was ... enough.
'Ms Lortz, do you keep a videotape of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 in the Children's Library? Or a selection of albums by Guns n Roses and Ozzy Osbourne?'
'Sam, you miss the point,' she began patiently.
'What about Peyton Place? Do you keep a copy of that in the Children's Library just because some of the kids have read it?'
Even as he was speaking, he thought, Does ANYBODY still read that old thing?
'No,' she said, and he saw that an ill-tempered flush was rising in her cheeks. This was not a woman who was used to having her judgments called into question. 'But we do keep stories about housebreaking, parental abuse, and burglary. I am speaking, of course, of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears,"
"Hansel and Gretel", and "Jack and the Beanstalk." I expected