Stephen King's Danse Macabre
by Stephen King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen KingEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-02-15
ISBN: 0425104338
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Book Reviews of Stephen King's Danse Macabre
Book Review: Dead rats in Lucite
Summary: 5 Stars
"Danse Macabre" should have been subtitled "Horror Fiction in Cinema, TV, and Books: 1950 - 1979" so that Stephen King's fiction fans wouldn't accidentally pick it up and start reading it. They might be horribly disappointed.
At what is supposed to be the climax of this nonfiction book, at the sentence in which the author is summing up everything he has been trying to teach us for 397 pages, there is a riotous typo:
"...When the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a friend--a capering, gleeful, red-eyed agent of chaos..."
Maybe the author does have a few red-eyed and capering friends (and readers), considering his written output. As he says about his own horror fiction: "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 sure felt like cutting a few capers while reading "Danse Macabre." King was able to draw me into a sometimes vociferous argument about his thesis and choices for great horror. It was like sitting at the bar, drinking beer and arguing with an occasionally gross friend.
Unfortunately like that slightly inebriated friend, this author tends to ramble tediously off-subject: the war in Vietnam; Patty Hearst; the fate of MGM; many not-so-hilarious anecdotes about Harlan Ellison (no, Mr. King you haven't written the longest footnote in history--see "Rats, Lice, and History" by Hans Zinsser); dismissive critiques of certain pulp authors (well, I guess that's what I'm doing now, but who is going to read this?); a rant about grammar; and a whole chapter entitled, "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause."
(Actually, some of the side-essays are minor gems if you're in the right mood, but they do bulk up King's discourse on horror.)
"Danse Macabre" is both purposefully funny (see the movie review of "Robot Monster") and inadvertently hysterical (the typos). If you are a baby boomer and have seen at least some of the 'B' movies and TV shows that Stephen King has seen, or have read a few of the horror novels he reviews, this is a humorous, thought-provoking book--a 421 page in-joke.
This book is about us, dear Boomers.
If you're not the right age, "Danse Macabre" will probably bore you with its ravings on vanished TV shows, decayed celluloid flicks, and out-of-print horror stories. King warns us in his two forenotes that he is going to concentrate on horror produced between the late fifties and early eighties. If you weren't able to read, watch TV or go to the movies back then, this book might not appeal to you.
Summary of Stephen King's Danse Macabre
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
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