Ray Bradbury

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King’s overview of horror is far more reader-friendly than the average. He has many harsh words to say about academic criticism: the scholarly text is “the apotheosis of the Dull Book,â€‌ (p.282) and “every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff’s Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks.â€‌ (p.432)The Greatest: James and JacksonKing’s discussion of movies focuses on “areas of unease – the political-social-cultural and those of the more mythic, fairy-tale variety.â€‌ (p.159) He discusses The Amityville Horror under “horror movie as economic nightmare,â€‌ (p.163) The Thing under “horror movie as political polemic,â€‌ (p.170) and on through The Stepford Wives, The Creeping Unknown (aka The Quatermass Xperiment), Night of the Living Dead, and Them! and various other B-movies from his childhood.King and Horror on TVLiterature of fear works on three levels, says King, first is terror, exemplified for King by W.W. Jacob’s story “The Monkey’s Pawâ€‌ and Robert Wise’s film The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House – which King does an interesting ****ysis of in Danse Macabre). Terror shows nothing, but by implication it takes the mind into its darkest places. Less exalted is horror, not entirely of the mind, also somewhat visceral, somewhat physical. Then there’s revulsion, not big and not clever – the “chest-bustingâ€‌ scene from Alien is King’s example. King cheerfully admits: “I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrorize him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.â€‌ (p.40)King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (London: Futura, 1982). Stephen King's Danse Macabre: An Overview of the Horror GenreTerror, Horror and RevulsionKing also includes a chapter on TV horror ******s, his favourite being Thriller, which, coming out in the early 60s, caught him at the right age. The Night Stalker is another remembered with amused affection, and of course The Twilight Zone is considered, but though King has some fond memories of watching it as a kid, he concludes it was “a pretty good show… ultimately weaker than our memories of it would like to allow.â€‌ (p.279)Copyright Mark WallaceKing has much to say of interest on many of his contemporaries, but opines that the only truly great novels of the supernatural in the hundred years leading up to Danse Macabre are Henry James’s, The Turn of the Screw and the aforementioned The Haunting of Hill House, with honorable mentions for two novellas: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (p.319). He also discusses works by, among others: Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell.King vs. Academic ScholarshipKing and Horror FilmsAnd finally, King gives as appendices two lists: around one hundred of the best horror film of the period 1950-1980, and around one hundred books from the same period. In each he takes a fairly broad view of horror: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is in there, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but mostly it’s good old-fashioned chills, and these lists are an excellent resource for anyone who wants to know about 20th century horror, and so is the book as a wholeAs well as writing many massively popular horror novels and stories, Stephen King also authored one of the most readable treatises on the horror genre in 1981’s Danse Macabre. Here he explores the roots of horror, situated, predictably enough, in Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and gives an overview of 20th century fiction, cinema and TV in the genre.