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A review by wakejald
Danse Macabre by Stephen King
3.0
A couple of months ago I labeled King's 1986 novel It as a "treatise on the genre of horror itself", and while that statement still rings true to me, I think pinning it onto Danse Macabre would perhaps be a bit more accurate. This is King's first full-length foray into non-fiction, and as stated in that aforementioned sentence; this book is quite literally a dissection of horror. Not just the genre of horror in the media (although that does play a significant role), but also the very nature of horror. How and why things scare us, and how those things can be used to construct an entertaining narrative. In many ways reading this does feel like I'm reading a textbook, but King injects enough humor and enough personality into these pages that it avoids ever feeling too dryly academic. There are some personal anecdotes here and there, and King does very often break the fourth wall into a kind of conversational prose with the reader, but despite that, this book manages to remain a very coherent analysis on the many different horror mediums from about the 1950's through the 1970's.
Early on in the book he breaks down the horror genre into some very basic archetypes. He writes at length about the dichotomy between the "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" themes that are present throughout most literature in general (essentially order versus chaos) and how much of modern horror (at least modern by 1981's standards) tends to be rooted in those themes in a very immediate way. On the most basic level possible, a good horror story is when some kind of Apollonian "order" is disrupted by some sort of "Dionysian" chaos. And once you get there, you get about three-to-four different kind of monster archetypes to choose from. The vampire, with its strong sexual undertones and its cold yet passionate thirst for blood, the werewolf with its base-level anger and demonstration of the violent side of humanity, and the "thing without a name" (based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), which is more of a tragic and misunderstood creature than the rest. Obviously not all horror antagonists fit so neatly into these categorizations, but when you think about it broadly, a lot of them do.
And from there, Stephen King essentially dissects the major horror works from radio, cinema, television, and literature from about the years 1950 to 1980. Now, as a complete fault of my own, many (if not most) of the works he discusses in this book are things I have not seen or read, so it's kind of hard to accurately talk about how well he analyses them, but based on the sheer amount of movies I now want to see and books I now want to read, he does a great job. Obviously horror has come a long way since this book was released, so a lot of what he says does come off as somewhat dated. I mean, arguably some of the best horror cinema and horror fiction of all time were released after this book was published, but this is, of course, no fault of Stephen King. I'm sure it wasn't dated at all when this came out, and if anything its "datedness" serves as a kind of time-capsule into the interworkings of the genre at the time of this book's release.
Still however, it is kind of entertaining to see King rail on horror television and how it's the least effective medium for story-telling so many years before it was, arguably, the most effective medium for story telling, and many of the problematic cultural ideas surrounding the horror genre at that time really aren't that prominent anymore. Still though, if there's one thing that can be surmised through the reading of this book, it's that King not only has an extremely astute understanding of why the genre works, but also a wealth of knowledge and advice about how to go about making it work. It's a treatise on the horror genre from the person who is nearly objectively the most successful figure working in the medium, and if horror is something that interests you in any capacity, there is no excuse for not giving Danse Macabre a read.
Early on in the book he breaks down the horror genre into some very basic archetypes. He writes at length about the dichotomy between the "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" themes that are present throughout most literature in general (essentially order versus chaos) and how much of modern horror (at least modern by 1981's standards) tends to be rooted in those themes in a very immediate way. On the most basic level possible, a good horror story is when some kind of Apollonian "order" is disrupted by some sort of "Dionysian" chaos. And once you get there, you get about three-to-four different kind of monster archetypes to choose from. The vampire, with its strong sexual undertones and its cold yet passionate thirst for blood, the werewolf with its base-level anger and demonstration of the violent side of humanity, and the "thing without a name" (based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), which is more of a tragic and misunderstood creature than the rest. Obviously not all horror antagonists fit so neatly into these categorizations, but when you think about it broadly, a lot of them do.
And from there, Stephen King essentially dissects the major horror works from radio, cinema, television, and literature from about the years 1950 to 1980. Now, as a complete fault of my own, many (if not most) of the works he discusses in this book are things I have not seen or read, so it's kind of hard to accurately talk about how well he analyses them, but based on the sheer amount of movies I now want to see and books I now want to read, he does a great job. Obviously horror has come a long way since this book was released, so a lot of what he says does come off as somewhat dated. I mean, arguably some of the best horror cinema and horror fiction of all time were released after this book was published, but this is, of course, no fault of Stephen King. I'm sure it wasn't dated at all when this came out, and if anything its "datedness" serves as a kind of time-capsule into the interworkings of the genre at the time of this book's release.
Still however, it is kind of entertaining to see King rail on horror television and how it's the least effective medium for story-telling so many years before it was, arguably, the most effective medium for story telling, and many of the problematic cultural ideas surrounding the horror genre at that time really aren't that prominent anymore. Still though, if there's one thing that can be surmised through the reading of this book, it's that King not only has an extremely astute understanding of why the genre works, but also a wealth of knowledge and advice about how to go about making it work. It's a treatise on the horror genre from the person who is nearly objectively the most successful figure working in the medium, and if horror is something that interests you in any capacity, there is no excuse for not giving Danse Macabre a read.