Tag: danse macabre

Stephen King’s Danse Macabre

Danse Macabre – Stephen King
Berkley 1983 (Originally published 1981)

Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is a history of horror. It focuses on the 30 years prior to its publication in 1980. I have read most of the old classics of Gothic horror, and in recent years I have turned my attention to more modern stuff. When I started to read King’s book I assumed that I would be familiar with most of the stuff he was discussing.

I was wrong.

In an opening chapter King discusses Frankenstein, Dracula and Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I felt good. I had read all of these. King claims that nearly all modern horror stories can be traced back to these archetypal novels. I wasn’t convinced. These are certainly important books, but claiming that all horror can be traced back to them seems like a bunch of farfetched college-boy bullshit.

Then there’s some very long chapters on horror movies, TV and radio drama. I like horror movies, but I found these parts really, really boring.

After slogging through that stuff, I finally got to the section on horror fiction. I was expecting a broad overview of the field, but King limits his discussions to 10 books published between 1950 and 1980. He chose these books because they “seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine.” To my dismay and great shame, I had only read one out of these 10.

I put Danse Macabre down and sought out all the books King listed. It took me all of August to read them. It has taken me until the end of the year to finish writing about them. Here’s the list and some brief thoughts. Click the title of each book for my full reviews.

  1. Ghost Story – Peter Straub
    This one was really good. Quite scary in parts.
  2. The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
    This was the only book included that I had never heard of. I absolutely loved reading it.
  3. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
    This was the only book included that I had actually read before. A classic of classics.
  4. Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
    Great book. Pity about the sequel.
  5. The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney
    Yeah, I guess it is a horror novel. I certainly enjoyed reading it.
  6. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
    A great book.
  7. The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
    My least favourite Matheson novel. Surely I am Legend is more interesting.
  8. The Doll Who Ate His Mother – Ramsey Campbell
    A decent book, but I’m not convinced that it really deserves to be on this list.
  9. The Fog – James Herbert
    Enjoyable trash.
  10. Strange Wine – Harlan Ellison
    This book was enjoyable, but I find it peculiar that King chose it was the only short story collection to discuss. It contains maybe 3 horror stories. King discusses Bradbury’s Something Wicked, but Bradbury’s Dark Carnival or October Country collections are far more horrory than that novel and this collection by Ellison. It really seems to me that King included Strange Wine on this list because Harlan Ellison was his friend.

Not all of these books were amazing, but most of them were really, really good. I had been planning on reading a few of them beforehand, but God knows how long it would have taken me to get around to them at my own pace.

When I had finally finished these ten books, I picked Danse Macabre back up, ready to read King’s thoughts on my previous month’s reading.

BORING.

Stephen King was an English teacher, and much of this book comes from lecture notes he gave at some writing college. He starts talking about the Apollonian and Dionysian natures of the characters in these novels. Dionysus, my bollocks. Also, if you look at this book’s publication date, it seems to have been written at the height of King’s cocaine use. Cocaine apparently gives its users a sense of grandiosity or inflated self esteem. This might explain how King thought it was acceptable to fill his book with such rambling pseudo-academic hogswash.

Danse Macabre is the most influential book that I read this year. It led me not only to read the books discussed therein but also several other books by their authors. Honestly, I really like Stephen King, and the novels discussed in here are great, but I found this book pretty boring. I far preferred reading the stories than King’s thoughts on them. I guess I don’t have much time for people sharing their opinions on books…

I would advise to stay away from King’s non-fiction, but I actually read his On Writing in February and thought it was great. I was seriously trying to do more creative writing, but then covid hit and I used it as an excuse to quit.

The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney

The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney
Dell Books – 1955 (Originally serialised 1954)

I have known of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies and had an idea of what they were about for as long as I remember, but I have never actually seen either of them. I didn’t know they were based on a book until I saw this novel being discussed in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a history of horror. If you haven’t read The Body Snatchers already, let me tell you a bit about its history before you rush out to buy a copy. I wish somebody had told me this before I read the book.

The Body Snatchers was originally serialised in Colliers Magazine in 1954. The first whole edition came out in 1955. The movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1956. After this, reprints of the book bore the film’s title. In 1978 another film version was made, and Finney updated his novel to coincide with the release of the new movie and to make the book more appealing for a younger generation

The changes in the revised text, as far as I can tell, were minor. The revised version is actually set in the 70s, the place names are switched around a bit, and there’s a few paragraphs that are moved around/added/deleted. I didn’t conduct a detailed cross examination or anything like that. I was reading from the original text, but when I was preparing dinner, I switched to an audiobook version on youtube that turned out to be a reading of the revised text. I only noticed that the texts were different when I had to switch between the two and found myself searching for phrases from one that were different in the other. I looked online (very briefly) to see if anyone else had listed off the differences, but I found nothing. I think the story is basically the same in both.

I mentioned the two film versions, but there have actually been 4 Hollywood movies based on the book and countless others inspired by it. References to this story pop up everywhere, and I knew what to expect in general terms of plot. I had been surprised to see Stephen King list it as one of the most important works of horror. Influential sure, but horror? I thought this was science fiction. After reading this (and a few more of the books that King recommends in Danse Macabre) the utter silliness of the notion that literary science fiction is inherently separate from horror has become apparent. Even if you know what to expect, The Body Snatchers is a surprisingly creepy story.

So what’s going on in here? Well, the locals of a small American town have started noticing their relatives acting strange. They look the same, talk the same and largely act the same, but they’re clearly not the same. Things get worrisome when a couple find a surprisingly plain looking corpse in their house. Then weird vegetably pods start popping up in people’s cupboards, and it becomes apparent that these pods are the source of the bizarre uncooked bodies that are assuming the forms and minds of the villagers while discarding their souls. Weird and cool.

The only thing that disappointed me about this book was the ending. The story is horrendous; what’s happening is truly nightmarish, and Finney does a great job of making his readers feel the surmounting inevitability of the doom of all humankind. In the final chapters, when the protagonists are caught, you realise that there is no way out. This isn’t going to be pretty. Personally, I love a horror story with a bleak ending. As this tale draws to a close, it looks like the entire human race is going to get their souls torn out and their bodies drained of life. Hell yes. That’s the perfect ending for a horror novel. Unfortunately, the last few pages of his book actually describe the antagonists suddenly changing their mind and abandoning their mission, leaving the vast majority of humanity unmolested.

I felt swindled.

I thought that the ridiculously fortuitous turn of events at the end of the book might have been to please a 1950s’ audience, but then I remembered that Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, a novel with as bleak an ending as any, was also first published in 1954. Maybe Finney’s publisher insisted on a positive outcome. I might just be speculating, but the turn of events which leads to humanity being spared is so sudden, unexpected and quick that it made me think that Finney might originally have had different plans for ending this novel.

Even with the dumb ending, this was an enjoyable book. There are genuinely creepy moments, and its such an important work within the horror genre I’m glad to have read it.