Danse Macabre (book)
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| Danse Macabre | |
 Front Cover |
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| Author | Stephen King |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | horror fiction |
| Publisher | Everest House, Berkley Trade |
| Publication date | 1981 September 4, 2001 (Reprint) |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-42-518160-7 |
Danse Macabre is a nonfiction book by Stephen King on horror fiction and United States pop culture, published in 1981.
Danse Macabre examines the various influences on King's own writing, and important genre texts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Focusing on horror and suspense films, comic books, old time radio, television and fiction from a fan's perspective, King peppers his book with informal academic insight, discussing archetypes, important authors, common narrative devices, "the psychology of terror", and his key theory of "Dionysian horror."
In a footnote to the first edition, King credits Bill Thompson, the editor of his first five published novels, and later editor at Doubleday, as being the inspiration for its creation.
...Bill called me and said, 'Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it?' Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing. We'll do it together, if you want.'
The concept intrigued and frightened me at the same time.
Thompson ultimately convinced King that if he wrote such a genre survey, he would no longer have to answer tedious, repetitive interview questions on the topic. King agreed to write his non-fiction appraisal of the horror genre, mostly limiting the scope of Danse Macabre from the 1950s to the 1980s (roughly the era covering King's own life), and using King's college teaching notes as the backbone of the text.
The book has a non-linear writing style that—in addition to being his only non-fiction work at the time of its publication—made it unique for the author, who at this time was on the cusp of his overwhelmingly successful career. King begins by explaining why he wrote the book, and then creates a template for descriptions of his macabre subject which he calls “Tales of the Tarot.” The chapter actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the familiar tarot card deck but is, rather, his manner of describing the major archetypal characters of the horror genre—vampire, werewolf, and The Thing Without A Name. These major archetypes are then reviewed in their historical context. Such books as "Dracula," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "Frankenstein" are meticulously reviewed and compared with modern-day equivalents—up to and including cartoon breakfast cereal characters such as Frankenberry and Count Chocula.
King then interrupts the flow slightly with the somewhat mistitled chapter “An Annoying Autobiographic Pause.” He begins with a brief family history, discusses his childhood in rural eastern Maine, and then he explains his childhood fixation with the imagery of terror and horror that he has been able to capitalize on so successfully as an adult. King makes an interesting comparison of his grandfather successfully dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. While browsing through an attic with his elder brother, King uncovered a paperback version of an H.P. Lovecraft collection of short stories that had belonged to his long since departed father. The cover art—an illustration of a monster hiding within the recesses of a hell-like cavern beneath a tombstone--was, he writes,
“the moment of my life when the dowsing rod suddenly went down hard . . . as far as I was concerned, I was on my way.”
King then resumes his discussion of the horror genre by making detailed commentary of horror in all forms of media, beginning with radio, then proceeding to a highly critical review of television horror (referring to it as “the glass teat”), two separate chapters on horror in the motion pictures, and finally concluding the review by spending the most time on horror fiction, the subject which—not surprisingly—he seems to be the most familiar.
His critique of radio is not exactly original, many writers have similarly compared radio favorably with its visual equivalents in television and the movies because of the degree with which imagination plays such an important role in the medium. He describes radio programs such as “Suspense,” “Inner Sanctum,” and “Boris Karloff,” but reserves his highest praise for Arch Oboler’s “Lights Out.”
King then turns to his two separate chapters of horror in the motion pictures, “The Modern American Horror Movie,” in which he reviews classic horror films such as “Curse of the Demon,” “The Amityville Horror,” and “The Exorcist.” In the following chapter, “The Horror Movie as Junk Food” King reviews the “Bug-Eyed Monster” films and black and white science-fiction giant bug features of the 1950s with equal aplomb.
King then turns his most weighty criticism toward television, borrowing Harlan Ellison's description of television as “The Glass Teat,” and subtitling the chapter, “This Monster is Brought to You by Gainesburgers.” He reviews horror anthology programs such as "The Outer Limits," "The Twilight Zone," "Dark Shadows," and "Night Gallery," but his praise is light and his condemnation heavy, eventually concluding that television is “simply too boring and unimaginative to handle real horror.”
In the "Horror Fiction" chapter, King painstaking describes and reviews a number of recent horror novels (all of the material in the book is from the period of 1950-1980) including "Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," Anne Rivers Siddon's "The House Next Door," Richard Matheson's "The Shrinking Man," Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House, "Ray Bradbury's “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and several others. His primary context is defining what impact they have had on the genre and how significantly they have contributed to the popular culture.
Additionally, King classifies the genre into three well-defined, descending levels; 1) terror, 2) horror, and 3) revulsion. He describes terror as “the finest element” of the three, and the one he strives hardest to maintain in his own writing. Citing many examples, he defines “terror” as the suspenseful moment in horror before the actual monster is revealed. “Horror,” King writes, is that moment at which one sees the creature/aberration that causes the terror or suspense, a “shock value.” King finally compares “revulsion” with the gag-reflex, a bottom-level, cheap gimmick which he admits he often resorts to in his own fiction if necessary, confessing:
“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”
Because the book was published in 1981, the materials covered and their reviews are now somewhat dated, and King has declined to state whether or not he will write another, similar reference work covering the nearly 30 years that have transpired since this volume was written.
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