Stephen King's Danse Macabre

Stephen King's Danse Macabre
Stephen King | 1987-02-15 00:00:00 | Berkley | 464 | Horror
Tour of the whole horror genre in books, film, radio, and TV by the most popluar writer in the genre today.
In the fall of 1978 (between The Stand and The Dead Zone), Stephen King taught a course at the University of Maine on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." As he writes in the foreword to this book, he was nervous at the prospect of "spending a lot of time in front of a lot of people talking about a subject in which I had previously only felt my way instinctively, like a blind man." The course apparently went well, and as with most teaching experiences, it was as instructive, if not more so, to the teacher as it was to the students. Thanks to a suggestion from his former editor at Doubleday, King decided to write Danse Macabre as a personal record of the thoughts about horror that he developed and refined as a result of that course.

The outcome is an utterly charming book that reads as if King were sitting right there with you, shooting the breeze. He starts on October 4, 1957, when he was 10 years old, watching a Saturday matinee of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Just as the saucers were mounting their attack on "Our Nation's Capital," the movie was suddenly turned off. The manager of the theater walked out onto the stage and announced, "The Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it ... Spootnik."

That's how the whole book goes: one simple, yet surprisingly pertinent, anecdote or observation after another. King covers the gamut of horror as he'd experienced it at that point in 1978 (a period of about 30 years): folk tales, literature, radio, good movies, junk movies, and the "glass teat". It's colorful, funny, and nostalgic--and also strikingly intelligent. --Fiona Webster
Reviews
This is a great book, for its time. Just wish he would write a more recent one.
Reviews
This book, written using the author's notes from a college course he taught, explores the techniques that horror writers, filmmakers, and television producers use to scare us, entertain us, and keep us coming back for more. Along the way, King explores the horror genre from the 1950's through the 1980's and traces several key influences on his development as a horror fan, then author.



The author finds the roots of modern horror in three "tarot cards" or character archetypes, each represented by a key literary work. Our expectations about "The Vampire" were formed by Bram Stoker's Dracula; we see the essence of "The Werewolf" in the protagonist of Robert Lewis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; and experience "The Thing Without a Name" as recurring versions of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. He traces the influence of these themes in written fiction, radio, movies, television and in popular culture.



Most interesting is King's three-level taxonomy of fear reactions. The most refined is "terror" as the suspenseful anticipation of fright which can be induced by a skilful writer with the monsters off-stage. He believes that finely-tuned terror is best achieved through books and radio because they require more active engagement by their audiences. "Horror" is secondary, as we recoil from the hidden monster as it is revealed. "Revulsion" is the lowest, most visceral reaction triggered when we are "grossed out" by slime, gore and vomit. King admits that as an author he makes unrestrained use of all three.



This book is recommended for horror fans, Stephen King fans, and all those who work to improve their writing. Readers can learn more about the author's writing style and process in his subsequent nonfiction works On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Crafts of Writing.
Reviews
Danse Macabre, to me, is the singular book that showcases Stephen King's prowess as a writer, more than the novels and the short stories. It is the singular piece of work that made me sit up and take notice. It showed me what kind of a writer King really is beneath the surface: a complex yet infinitely understandable author with a well honed style which is well liked by both the young and the old, an author with a unique voice, a multifaceted voice that is logical and yet surreal at the same time, an entertaining author capable of hooking us in with a single sentence. In many ways, Danse Macabre is the definitive introduction to King's work as a whole and maybe even to King himself.



He draws us into a journey into a genre and field he so excels in, which is Horror. Just from the two forenotes alone, we can see and feel his passion for Horror: his references to Dracula and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, among many, sets the tone and feel for what's to come next. He starts off introducing us to terror, using the horror movies of the 1950s to explain just what terror means to him, putting it under the microscope, dissecting its pieces. He tells us why we, as a human race, tend to gravitate towards the genre. He then moves on to describing the various archetypes of the genre citing the three important books which have shaped it: Dracula, Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. There's even a brief autobiographical chapter explaining how he came to like the genre, which should interest the fans. But, the bulk of the book, the portion of the book I loved the most, is King's thesis on the various conventional mediums Horror appears on: Radio, TV, Movies and literature. That portion of the book fascinated me the most.



King does such a good job, describing every work or example of horror fiction in those chapters with such amazing detail, that I read all of it straight through. It was that engaging, smooth flow of logic in his words that hooked me. The macro-dissection from the earlier chapters had carried into the later ones: he delved into such disparate works as Peter Straub's highly successful Ghost Story and The Exorcist, bringing us all, horror fans and non-fans alike, into an amazing path down the cornerstones of the genre. This thrilled me: I credit this book for renewing my love for the genre to a point where I even started picking up alot of the works King described here.



Which, I think, was King's ultimate motivation for publishing Danse Macabre in the first place. This book overwhelms and exhilarates the reader at the same time, which can be said for the rest of his work in general. And that is why I think you should pick this book up, especially if you are a person who hates Horror to the bone...
Reviews
Stephen King must have gotten tired of answering the question `Why do you write such horrible stuff (and why do we read it)?'



Danse Macabre is sort of a wildly expanded version of the introduction he wrote for his first short story collection: Night Shift. Here, he discusses his love for the horror genre and explains what he finds valuable about it. This leads him to a survey of horror in the source of novels, films, radio and comics from the 1950's through the '80's.



Reading through the book, it is pretty dated. If you're an oldster like me who can remember the seventies and eighties the book ought to give you a heady dose of nostalgia and maybe remind you of some books and movies that should be checked out again, or some books you wanted to read back then, but have forgotten about.



However, if you are younger and can't remember stuff like Dark Shadows then the book's examples could come off as too unfamiliar for enjoyment. He is mainly focused on the years 1950-80 (with detailed side trips to praise the three horror bedrocks Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) so depending on your age/interest in what the state of horror was at that time, your mileage may vary.



I enjoy the way the book was written, because even in his non-fiction he still has the gift for the gab and I enjoy his writing persona. Other reviewers that I respect didn't enjoy that so much, so maybe it depends on how much you like King's style.



You'll also get more horror book and movie recommendations than you can shake a stick at. He gives some interesting analysis of The House Next Door, The Haunting of Hill House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ghost Story, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Incredible Shrinking Man.



This book also deserves credit for sparking my interest in Richard Matheson. King is fairly generous in recommending other horror writers and gives clear explanations of why he thinks the good ones are good.



I do wish he would do a companion book. Hey, in 2010 he could cover the 80's, '90's and '00's. That would give him another thirty year block. That would be cool.
Reviews
I bought this book when it first came out and continued to purchase

Stephen King....now I am collecting them for my daughter for her birthday.

She will enjoy them too.....

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