Danse Macabre by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Stephen King Chronological - Notes #13
* * *No one is exactly sure of what they mean on any given subject until they have written their thoughts down.
This is Stephen King's first attempt at non-fiction, of course after giving the world a taste of his style in his introductions. And I'm hands down a fan. When he's telling stories, he's hiding behind fantastic stories. When he can't hide, he's even better. But that's only me.
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And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, "I don't read fantasy or go to any of those moviesl none of it's real," I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination [we all possess as children] have grown too weak.* * *
His style is direct and friendly, and in the way he's setting the tone, he really takes the reader by the hand, seats them in front of a fireplace and discusses The Horrors that Keeps Us Up at Nights. The ones people read to for a drop of catharsis to avoid (and even find strength to face) everyday horrors? The ones dismissed or scorned by the serious literary critics and academics? The ones you won't admit you're reading. Yeap, that's what he's talking about.
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Here is the final truth about horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. [..] We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead.* * *
He inevitably includes some autobiographical elements in it, after all he's "mortally involved" with horror, but he dissect the genre and its horrors honestly, truthfully, courageously. When Neil Gaiman writes non-fiction love-letters to his genre, he makes his readers all "awwww" and "isn't that cute?" and makes you all soft and warm inside (See The View from the Cheap Seats). When the King undertakes such a huge task as to explain the genre, its fans and its authors' (along with his own's) fascination with it, he is out-of-this-world good - you don't know if you want to highlight with a marker pen half the book, if you want to have cans of beer with the man and laugh over books and movies, or if you want to roll a spliff and watch with a few friends some of his cult 70s' horror movie suggestions (like he did).
Danse Macabre is an anatomy of the world of modern horror: books, movies, TV. He divides the book in chapters, he provides historical context, urban myths and kids stories, he traces the archetypes/tarot cards of the monsters The Vampire, The Werewolf, The Thing (and later The Ghost) of the storylines commmonly visited by authors, he discusses the most important works of the period, he differentiates between terror ("the finest form"), horror and revulsion, he and all avoiding the academic mumbo jumbo that he hates.
Most of the sections in the chapters on books are based on the notes he was using in his Themes in Supernatural Literature lectures in the University of Maine. But although he's dissecting, he's always doing it not just honestly, but with a sense of humour and a deep understanding. Even when he's using the Apollonian/Dionysian antithesis and he may sound a bit more serious, it always makes sense and is always with a genuine appreciation of the genre, with its goods and bads.
Of course, it's only 1981 and the book is 35 years old now and it's seriously dated. But I honestly think that this book is as enjoyable. It's a compass for new explorers of the genre to find the true north of where everything started and how it evolved until the end of the 70s.
An absolutely enjoyable trip down fantasy, science fiction, supernatural and horror, it's a book you need to hunt down and mark it up, highlight it, read it, re-read it, carry it with you and use as a reference.
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The primary duty of literature [is]... to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed.
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