Danse Macabre - Stephen King

"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'm not proud." Danse Macabre is a non-fiction book by Stephen King about horror in general, taking in classic works of fiction, radio, film, urban myths, stories, television and even fairy tales. Although not exactly up to date, it was published in 1981, Danse Macabre is a fascinating and very readable book if you are interested in the genre. It's full of stories, observations and King's nostalgic memories of old black and white tv shows and ...  Read the complete review

I first read Danse Macabre when I was a teenager, and I've just finished revisiting it again now, after picking up a copy when I was on holiday. It's an overview (or should that be overlook?) of horror from the late nineteenth century up to the eighties, when the book was first published. King's thesis is that there are archetypal monsters that pervade horror fiction from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, all the way up to the Lovecraft in the twenties, the cheesy pulp novels of the fifties and sixties, and he finishes with looking at adaptations of his own work in the eighties. He looks at books, magazines, radio ...  Read the complete review