Come on, you know it’s true. If you want to say that King is not as good a writer as all sorts of people who sell fewer books and end up on more course syllabuses, I won’t argue. I will, however, point out that such judgments depend on your idea of what “good” literature is, and what it’s good for. And that no one I know has ever stayed up until 4 a.m., knuckles white and breath coming in shallow gulps, because they had to finish “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

King’s great talent is to keep you reading. His books will suck you out of your regular life and dangle you over the darkest unexplored abysses of your mind, while your flesh crawls around your skeleton as if trying to escape; they’re nobody’s idea of glittering literary style. I’ve been a fan since I read “The Shining” as a teenager, and yet there are things in every one of his books that make me wince. His sense of humor is crude at best and frequently runs to juvenile scatology. His minor characters are often clumsily rendered “colorful” types who speak in a mixture of hackneyed folk witticisms and implausibly detailed expository passages (when crucial plot points are to be divulged). And as nobly and mightily as King has wrestled with his greatest weakness — his difficulty in creating convincing female characters — he has never, to my taste, quite conquered it. (Though the predominantly female book-buying public, it should be noted, hasn’t seemed to mind.)

Comparing King to, say, Henry James is a bit like comparing a potato to a chrysanthemum. One of them is undeniably more beautiful, but which one do you want by the fire on a cold winter night? As King would be eager to point out, there is a kinship of sorts between James and himself — they inhabit different wings in the great, rambling mansion of the Gothic tradition. But King’s real literary grandfather is not Henry James but Charles Dickens, another shameless yarn spinner who captured the middlebrow popular imagination, who shares King’s sentimentality, didacticism and love of the grotesque, and against whom all the criticisms of the previous paragraph (save perhaps the scatology) could be leveled.

It’s impossible to know whether King’s work will ever acquire the aura of respectability that Dickens’ has. While Dickens was probably just as big a celebrity, in 19th century terms, as King is today, he was never stigmatized as a back-of-the-store genre novelist in quite the same way (nor was the disjunction between popular and elite taste quite so exaggerated). One thing we can be sure of is that the enormous audience for horror literature that King has helped to create and solidify ensures that his books will be read for a long time to come. He has taken the moldering tradition of supernatural literature — the tradition of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft — and brought it into the late 20th century as a vibrant, polemic social chronicle. Playing shamelessly on our fear of death, and on our half-delighted suspicion that all the rational Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years has utterly failed to comprehend the true chaos and disorder of the universe, King argues, perversely enough, for a politics of love.

Although the monsters, ghosts and madnesses that lurk beneath the bucolic landscape of King’s territory in central and western Maine — an imaginative terrain as vivid to his readers as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or William Kennedy’s Albany are to theirs — may be diabolical or extraterrestrial in origin, King’s central themes are strikingly contemporary, and all too human. His greatest concern, stated in its most positive light, is with the survival, vindication and ultimate triumph of the weak and vulnerable. The tangible results of the evil in King’s universe include bullying, racism, wife-beating, rape and, above all else, the abuse and murder of children. Few authors in any genre have ever captured the unique fragility and terror of childhood with such precision, and King’s instinctive sympathy for the plight of the nerd, the fat kid, the scapegoat, the queer, is a great source of his appeal.

But King is after all a horror novelist, and thus there is a darker side to his obsession with childhood. Again and again he suggests that every adult — or, to be specific, every man — is a potential vector for evil, that with the wrong stars overhead and the wrong demons clawing at his ankles, he will channel a primordial bloodlust and become a wife-killer, a child-killer, a monster. Whatever this may or may not say about the psychology of Stephen King (who has been married to the same woman for 27 years and has three grown children), the truly frightening thing is just how difficult — on the evidence of the society around us — this proposition is to disprove.

Selecting five of King’s 32 novels (including the ones he has written as Richard Bachman) to serve as an introductory reading list is a necessarily arbitrary exercise. I have chosen books that I think illustrate his central themes most clearly, books I think are his most terrifying and two books (“Carrie” and “The Green Mile”) that even those readers who can’t abide the roller-coaster torment of the horror novel should be able to appreciate. King fans may be outraged by my omission of “The Stand,” the immense apocalyptic saga that may be his most popular book. All I can say is that new readers have a right to know what they’re in for before undertaking that journey (which has inflated to more than 1,100 pages in King’s 1990 revised edition). I have also steered clear of King’s obsessive meditations on the relationship of the popular novelist to his public (although both “Misery” and “The Dark Half” are excellent thrillers), and his earnest fables of abused women questing for redemption (“Gerald’s Game,” “Dolores Claiborne” and “Rose Madder”). As the master himself would say in one of his self-consciously Dickensian prologues: Constant Reader, I beg your forgiveness. Now come with me into the dark.

Carrie (1974)
“Carrie” is a crucial hors d’oeuvre to King’s body of work. It was his first successful novel, and it stands apart from the others in several ways, especially its relative brevity, its intensely negative depiction of religious faith — which otherwise does not play a major role in King’s universe — and its highly compelling portrayal of a female central character. (King has said that his wife, writer Tabitha King, played a significant role in Carrie’s creation.) Yet this tale of a gawky high-school pariah — she uses her
telekinetic abilities to destroy not only her teenage tormentors but an entire
New England town — is also one of the clearest statements of King’s conception that those who are abused can often transmute their victimization into an awful and unpredictable power.

Along with William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” and Thomas Tryon’s “The Other,” “Carrie” greatly expanded the market — and the sense of narrative possibilities — for horror literature in the 1970s. Ironically, of the three books, “Carrie,” although by turns pathetic, gruesome and tragic, is perhaps the least suspenseful. King reveals what Carrie has done almost immediately, then builds toward a description of the climactic events with an air of almost Athenian gravity and inevitability. Hence, while the book remains compulsively readable and features ample mayhem and destruction, one remembers it not as a gore-drenched nightmare but as a heartbreakingly tender portrait of a girl who really just wanted to go to the prom, get kissed by a cute boy and be home by midnight.

The Shining (1977)
Although it has been somewhat overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick’s undeniably powerful (if incoherent) film version, “The Shining” remains, for me, King’s most haunting and memorable achievement. In the Overlook Hotel, the sprawling, empty Colorado resort where young Danny Torrance and his parents must spend the winter entirely alone, King has created one of the Gothic tradition’s truly unforgettable settings. Danny, who has a psychic sensibility one observer dubs “the shining,” rapidly becomes aware that the Overlook is a veritable hive of malevolent energy, and that many of its previous occupants have ended their stays unpleasantly. The Torrance family’s weak spot is, of course, Danny’s father Jack, a recovering alcoholic and struggling writer who hopes to use his stint as the Overlook’s caretaker to finish a novel. Jack’s losing battle against the Overlook’s destructive forces, whatever they are — demons? Vengeful Native American spirits? Plain old mental illness? — is a chilling depiction of the descent into bestial male madness, and taught King readers a cruel lesson we would never forget: You can’t ever really trust Dad.

“The Shining” sustains an almost unbearable level of narrative tension as Danny and his mother come to grips with the fact that Jack has made new friends (even though there’s no one else in the hotel), and that his novel has taken a disturbing turn. Like all King’s best works, this is a supernatural novel and a deeply realistic one, a masterful evocation of a diabolical genius loci and a grim meditation on the weakness and vulnerability of the human imagination.

Pet Sematary (1983)
I don’t know what visions or nightmares inspired this book, and I don’t want to know. Consider yourself warned — “Pet Sematary,” I think, is King’s darkest hour, and even inveterate horror consumers will lose a night or two of sleep with it. Once you recover from this mind-bending yarn about a sinister Indian burial ground with the power to return animals — and ultimately humans — from the dead, you may notice that once again King has crafted an insidious fable about how a dark secret, a family-destroying evil, can be passed along across the generations.

Another of King’s tricks — and I’m not sure this one is conscious — is to make his central characters so irritatingly square that you almost feel they deserve whatever horrors they stumble into. (Then, when they suffer the torments of Job, you have a reason to feel guilty as well as horrified.) But as dippy as Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, are, nobody deserves what happens to them. Lured by a “friendly” older neighbor in their rural Maine town into burying his daughter’s truck-squashed cat on sacred Micmac ground behind the pet cemetery, Louis finds himself seduced by the intoxicating power of the place. It’s bad enough that the cat who returns the next day is a bit different from its original incarnation; the Creeds’ 2-year-old son then wanders in front of a passing truck, and Louis finds his grief intolerable. If you can stand it (and many readers can’t), “Pet Sematary” brings one of the hoariest of metaphysical morality lessons — that those who try to cheat or deny death will suffer horrible consequences — into a contemporary context, to shattering effect.

It (1986)
A sweeping, multi-character drama of childhood trauma and adult transcendence, “It” contains all of King’s major themes and concerns — along with one of his most horrific portrayals of evil — in one hefty volume. The eponymous It is a demon, or alien entity, or perhaps psychological manifestation (King’s spooks can almost always be understood allegorically) that inhabits the sewer system of Derry, Maine, reappearing every 27 years to claim a succession of child victims. In 1958, a collection of preadolescent Derry outcasts, banding together as the Losers’ Club, courageously ventured into the sewers to defeat It, vowing that they would return if the monster ever resurfaced. Now, in 1985, the former Losers are scattered around the globe — most of them having repressed the memory of their childhood horror and forgotten their promise — and the one who remains in Derry must call the others to tell them that a new series of grisly child-killings has begun.

Even more than most of King’s novels, “It” reflects the tenor of its time. Child abuse, and the controversial idea that it could be forgotten or repressed for years, were fresh and painful subjects in the mid-1980s. The monster in “It” appears to children as a seductive, sadistic clown, clearly echoing real-world serial killer John Wayne Gacy. But despite its serious undertones, “It,” with its large cast and impressively messy flashback/flash-forward structure, is primarily a great adventure novel and a testament to the fact that adults who retain some connection to their childhood idealism are the only ones who really grow up.

The Green Mile (1996)
Perhaps sensing that some of the fun had drained out of his work during his dutiful, pro-feminist experimentation of the early ’90s, King published this death-row thriller in monthly paperback installments from March to August 1996. The result is an artless, old-fashioned storytelling style that’s deeply gratifying, yielding a gripping prison yarn whose grisly and supernatural elements never overwhelm its basic humanity. “The Green Mile” is narrated by a retired prison guard named Paul Edgecombe, now confined to a nursing home, who has decided that before he dies he must recount the extraordinary events he witnessed along the green-tiled corridor of a Southern death row in 1932. That was the year an incompetent and sadistic guard named Percy, a homicidal maniac named Billy the Kid, a preternaturally intelligent mouse and a gentle giant (convicted of a terrible killing) who seems to have healing powers came together just yards from the electric chair.

There’s no question that King hopes to shock readers (pun intended) into opposing capital punishment, and his almost biblical conviction that the trials of the abused will ultimately make them stronger than their abusers is once again very much in evidence. But King himself would tell you that good pulp is almost always moralistic, and “The Green Mile” unashamedly tries to create a ’90s adult version of the Weird Tales comic books King grew up on, thrill rides whose every cliffhanging installment left readers agonizingly longing for the next. Check out the first volume from the library tonight, and, an hour or so later, you’ll be checking your watch to see if you might just make it back to the branch before it closes.

As far as it applies to the president of the United States, which I assume is what you’re intending, the man has clearly got serious problems with controlling his sexual urges. I don’t think that this is a substantive issue in his presidency, and basically there are a lot of right-wing groups in this country that want to see him impeached for adultery. I’m sorry, adultery is not an impeachable offense. The lying that he did was the sort of lying that anybody does when they’ve been caught in an embarrassing sexual situation. And that’s not substantive in terms of his constitutional duties. Ken Starr is an odious little man who is trying to justify all the money that he’s spent by finding anything that’s dirty on this guy. And God knows, sexually speaking, Clinton’s hands are not clean. But the American people knew what he was when they hired him. The crucial difference between Mike Noonan — a 40-year-old man who’s attracted to a 20-year-old woman — and Bill Clinton is that Bill Clinton was a 50-year-old man attracted to a 21-year-old girl. But even that, I don’t exactly have a problem with. They’re both consenting adults. They didn’t catch Clinton with a 9-year-old, did they? The problem is that Bill Clinton is married, simple as that. The man is married. But whether he’s married or whether he’s single, it’s not an impeachable offense. It’s not the end of the world.

To get back to “Bag of Bones,” you seem to be suggesting that the kind of attraction Mike feels for Mattie, and that she feels toward him, creates an imbalance that presents the opportunity for bad things to happen. Do you think that happens in real life?

I don’t think it really happens. I think that what Mike feels, particularly in this case … Here’s a guy that’s been grieving for four years. It’s been raining in his life for four years. And she’s the first ray of sunshine that he sees. He’s sexually attracted to her — she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s vivacious, she has all of that energy. What he sees in her is a kind of joyfulness. And I certainly react very positively to that.

Mike says to himself that just because you want something, you don’t necessarily have the right to have it. Not every thirst should be slaked.

That’s the married man’s philosophy. It’s gotta be.

That’s an interesting thing to appear in a novel now, when there is almost a guiding ethos that you’re supposed to take whatever you want from life.

Well, we have a problem both ways. The foreign press around the world will look at the situation we’re going through right now and their reaction — and that of a lot of American people, including myself — is to throw up your hands and say, “Oh, please — get over it. This is a juvenile preoccupation. People are starving in Africa. People are killing each other in Africa. Stop worrying about Monica Lewinsky’s thong panties.”

I won’t give away how you resolve the issue between Mike and Mattie. But in the book Mike sees the resolution of this dilemma as an unsatisfying novelist’s trick. How do you plead to that charge?

I plead guilty and not guilty at the same time. The situation that Mike is in is a melodramatic one. You have to ask yourself, What happens to these relationships when, say, the man is 60 and the woman is 40? Or when the man is 80 and the woman is 60? In several of the reviews of “Bag of Bones,” people have said, about Mattie, that she’s an unformed character — that she’s not as satisfying as some of the other characters in the book. Well, I’m sorry, but when you have a 20-year-old girl who lives in a trailer, who’s been married since the age of 17 and widowed a couple of years later, who’s trying to sort of scrape by — that is not the stuff of which fascinating, paradoxical, bewitching characters are made. So, I did the best with it that I could. What I’m saying is, you get married, or you have a relationship, you have weeks, months, maybe a year of delirious sex. Then one morning you come down at breakfast and you look at each other and you say, “What do I talk about?” In the course of “Bag of Bones,” as you say, we won’t give this away, but that situation is resolved. I have a lot of questions about the way the situation is resolved, and I think I express them in the book.

One thing that happens in a lot of your books — it happens in “Bag of Bones” perhaps less dramatically than in other books — is that the vector for the evil in the universe, or in the situation, is a man. Very often a husband or a father. I wonder to what extent you really think that inside every normal man, normal husband, normal father, there’s a monster, a wife-killer, a child-killer sort of waiting to come out.

I don’t think it’s in every man, but I think it’s in most men. I think most men are wired up to perform acts of violence, usually defensive, but I think that we’re still very primitive creatures, and that we have a real tendency toward violence. Most of us are like … well, most of us are like most airplanes. Remember TWA Flight 800, the one that exploded over Long Island Sound? That was an electrical problem, or at least they feel that it was probably an electrical problem, and a fire started in the wiring. And when you see a guy who suddenly snaps, a guy who goes nuts, a Charles Whitman, who goes to the top of the Texas tower and shoots a whole bunch of people, when a guy goes postal — that’s the current slang — that’s a guy with a fire in his wires, basically. That’s the exception rather than the rule. But of course, we get a lot of press on that sort of thing. I remember saying to a girl that I went out with in high school … well, we dated until we were in college and we stopped dating because we wanted to “see other people” — we always say that — but she wanted to see other people, and we broke up, essentially. And I saw her a while later and she had a bruise under her eye. And I said, “What happened?” And she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And I said, “C’mon, let’s go get a cup of coffee.” Because she was clearly upset. So we did. She’d been out with a guy, and the guy wanted to do some stuff that she didn’t want to do, and he punched her. And I never forgot that. And it became the basis of things in a number of different fictions that I’ve written. I can remember saying to her that day, “It takes courage to go out with a guy, doesn’t it?” Maybe you’re sort of attracted to him, you’re sort of interested in him, but basically you’re saying, “I’m going to get into your car, I’m going to go somewhere, and I’m going to trust you to bring me back in one piece.” It takes courage. And she said, “You’ll never know.” Men are dangerous. We’re big animals. I’m 200 pounds on the hoof, and I can hit. So don’t make me mad. And if you do make me mad, I’ll try to smile and everything, but if I didn’t I could probably do some damage.

Aren’t you also often playing on what must be the worst fear of being a father — being a parent — is that your kids will come to some terrible harm and it will be your fault?

Of course. I mean, it’s a dreadful responsibility. I think a lot of people who say no to parenthood, and a lot of men who say no to fatherhood in particular, do so because they’re daunted by that responsibility. It’s like saying, you’re in charge of these lives and you’re the only thing that’s standing between this little person and this little person’s death. You have to be the protector. In terms of “Bag of Bones,” you have to be the big guy because they’re the little guy. So it is a challenge, and it’s a huge responsibility. My own feeling … as a kid, my mother used to say, when we were scared, “Whatever you’re afraid of, say it three times fast and it will never happen.” And that’s what I’ve done in my fiction. Basically, I’ve said out loud the things that really terrify me and I’ve turned them into fictions, and they’ve made a very nice living for me and it seems to have worked. Because as of today, as far as I know, the kids are all fine.

You do such a good job capturing the feeling of vulnerability and strength that can come from childhood. The confidence, as well as the fears. Do you have especially vivid memories of your own childhood?

Well, I don’t know if they would otherwise be more vivid than anyone else’s, but I’ve certainly mined them a lot. The act of writing is very hypnotic. It’s like dreaming awake. In fact, when those scientists, those sleep researchers, hook up their EEGs to the heads of people who are composing, they get those big delta waves that they associate with dreaming. It’s like regressing somebody in a hypnotic trance. If I say in a book like “It” or a book like “Stand by Me” (“The Body”) that I want to write about what it was like to be a kid, when I was a kid, my first thought is, “Gee, I really don’t remember that much.” But if you start, little by little you are able to regress, and the more you write the brighter the images become.

Another thing that is always important in your books is a sense of place. Often you use Maine, which you know very well, and often you use other locations, too. Colorado. And in something like “The Green Mile,” there’s a sense that a given location has a spirit that can be good or bad. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that sense that places have memories.

Well, in any work of the imagination, the more real you are able to make the characters and the setting, the easier it is for readers to buy the narration. That’s just a basic. But places do have spirits. Some places have a kind of eerie resonance that really sort of amplifies the quality of a scary story. You can hear a scary story in an apartment building and it’s one thing, but it’s a whole other thing to hear it around a campfire, with the wind howling. It brings in another dimension of reality that’s entirely new. So for me, when I use Maine … I grew up in the country, and to me it really does feel as though reality is thinner in the country. There is a sense of the infinite that’s very, very close, and I just try to convey some of that in my fiction.

Does your evocation of the Maine landscape owe anything to the fiction you read as a kid — H.P. Lovecraft in his books set in the woods of Massachusetts?

No, not really. I mean, it did at the time, when I was 13, 14, 15 — which I maintain is the perfect age to read Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in their imagery. They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that have teeth. And that sense of the ancient New England landscape … very kindly, Lovecraft was a lot less interested in using the landscape as a place where reality was thin and sort of deserted in the New England community as he was in trying to express that kind of feeling of ancient life. So I had a tendency to copy that when I was a kid, and I think later on I just tried to go back and find a more realistic way to talk about the quality of that landscape. For instance, you know, when Lovecraft writes “The Dunwich Horror,” about Dunwich, Mass. I mean, in a way it’s a lot of idealized crap — he was a city boy. He didn’t live in the country. And what he knew about it he saw from the windows of buses going between Providence and New York City.

The other thing about the landscape in your books is that it almost seems to have a sense of political and social history — the legacy of genocide against the Indians and of slavery, of race relations. These things crop up in various forms. Is there a real sense to you that this history haunts America?

I have a sense of injustice that came, I think … My mother was a single parent. Her husband deserted her when I was 2, and she went through a lot of menial jobs. We were the little people. We were dragged from pillar to post, and there was none of this equal opportunity stuff going on at that time. We were latchkey kids before there were latchkey kids, and she was a female wage earner when, basically, women did scut work and cleaned up other people’s messes. And she never complained about it a lot. But I wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t blind. And I got a sense of who was being taken advantage of and who was lording it over the other people. A lot of that sense of injustice stayed. It stuck with me, and it’s still in the books today.

The character Blade, one of the first African-American comic book superheroes, was created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan and made his initial appearance in Marvel Comics in 1973. In the decade before, Marvel had made a name for itself by introducing superheroes burdened with human problems. As private demons go, Blade’s is a bitch. Born to a mother who had been bitten by a vampire when pregnant, Blade comes out half and half. He can withstand all the things that usually reduce bloodsuckers to dust — sunlight, garlic — but he has the superhuman strength of the undead. Unfortunately, he also shares their thirst for blood.

There’s nothing of the do-gooder superhero to Blade (Wesley Snipes). With his ninja sword and Terminator-scaled arsenal, he’s a stone-cold killing machine. Every “suckhead” (his term for vampires) he brings down is revenge for his mother’s death. Meanwhile he’s rapidly building up a resistance to the serum designed to keep the vampire side of his nature from taking him over. His ally and only friend is Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, with the long, graying hair and paunch of an aging biker, and looking like he’s having a pretty good time), a weapons expert who rescued the teenage Blade from the streets and who has his own revenge agenda: Vampires killed his wife and family. Blade and Whistler are able to stave off encroaching vampirism in Karen (N’Bushe Wright), a hematologist who’s been bitten. She joins their team because she’s got nowhere else to go. The vampires are so powerful and have so thoroughly infiltrated the human race even the police exist to do their bidding. (That gives “Blade” an extra-disreputable action-movie charge: Blade can mow down cops with impunity. When police bullets bounce off of his bullet-proof leather tunic he turns on the cops and demands, “Motherfucker, are you out of your damn mind?!” They flee.)

You could read this horror-fantasy as a parable about the ambivalence of assimilation: The power structure in “Blade” is literally made up of bloodsuckers and the black hero’s choice is to fight them, against the odds, or to betray his nature by joining them. But neither Norrington nor screenwriter David S. Goyer have any interest in exploring that. Blade’s dilemma has none of the tragic resonance Joss Whedon has given his heroine in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The beauty of that show lies in the way Whedon translates the adolescent feeling that the world is on your shoulders and nobody understands you into a comic Gothic horror and heartbreaking romance. Norrington doesn’t seem to care much what happens to Blade as long as he’s around to kick vampire booty. The fight scenes — particularly Blade’s first appearance — are undeniably exciting. Bodies and bullets and swords fly through the air so fast you often don’t register what you’ve seen until a few seconds after you’ve seen it.

You should probably steer clear of “Blade” if emotionless violence upsets you. There’s no lyricism to the violence; there’s not even any real horror. Though it skirts the edge of unpleasantness and sometimes (as when a child is put in danger) crosses it, some of the grisliness is pretty funny. The vampires headed by Blade’s arch enemy Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) are like bored rich club kids. After Frost feeds, he can’t resist French kissing his girlfriend so blood winds up smeared all over their fashion mag pusses and their fashion-mag designer duds. The liveliest of Frost’s crew is Quinn (Donal Logue), whom Blade whittles down limb by limb (one of the vampires can’t resist trying to feed on his bleeding stumps).

Norrington and Goyer don’t really explain the power struggle in the vampire world between the governing body of full-blooded vampires (headed by that undead icon of Eurotrash cinema, Udo Kier, whose credits include Paul Morrisey’s “Blood for Dracula”) and the ones, like Frost, who’ve been turned. And because it’s not clear how Frost’s ultimate plan will make him more powerful (or what the vampires will do for fun if mankind is wiped out), there’s no real suspense at the climax and “Blade” never builds to an emotional or narrative payoff.

“Blade” is about nothing more than the hard metallic sheen of Theo Van De Sande’s images and the kinetic blast of Norrington’s work in the action scenes. The actors are on their own to bring what presence they can. I loved the manic demented gleam in Traci Lords’ eyes as she lures an eager young stud to that bloodsucker nightclub; she’s funny and scary at the same time. But neither Dorff nor Snipes get to be actors here. Dorff is all smirk and stubble here, though his malevolent, vaguely bored arrogance is rather amusing. Snipes’ usual responsiveness is sealed up in Blade’s long black-leather coat and dark shades, but he’s a magnetic camera subject.

“Blade” in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash. A true exploitation director would have cut “Blade” down to 90 minutes to keep it zooming along. But current film technique and film technology allow even B-movies to have top-of-the-line production values, so they drag on longer than they should because we have to see where all the millions went. Ping-ponging between the highs of the action scenes and the doominess of the expository scenes, Norrington may have created a new genre: the manic-depressive exploitation picture.