Danse Macabre
Author	Stephen King
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Horror fiction
Publisher	Everest House
Publication date	April 20, 1981
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	400
ISBN	978-0-89696-076-3

Cujo - Stephen King You practice mindfulness, on the one hand, to be calm and peaceful. On the other hand, as you practice mindfulness and live a life of peace, you inspire hope for a future of peace. STEPHEN KING DOUBLEDAY NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND. Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue. Stephen King, in full Stephen Edwin King, (born September 21, 1947, Portland, Maine, U.S.—died ), American novelist and short-story writer whose books were credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century. King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in English. While writing short.

Danse Macabre is a 1981 non-fiction book by Stephen King, about horror fiction in print, TV, radio, film and comics, and the influence of contemporary societal fears and anxieties on the genre. It was republished on February 23, 2010, with an additional new essay entitled 'What's Scary'.

Danse Macabre examines the various influences on King's own writing, and important genre texts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Danse Macabre explores the history of the genre as far back as the Victorian era, but primarily focuses on the 1950s to the 1970s (roughly the era covering King's own life at the time of publication). King peppers his book with informal academic insight, discussing archetypes, important authors, common narrative devices, 'the psychology of terror', and his key theory of 'Dionysian horror'.

King's novel The Stand was published in Spanish as La danza de la muerte 'The Dance of Death', which caused some confusion between the two books (A later Spanish edition of this novel was titled Apocalipsis 'Apocalypse'). The same happened in Brazil and Portugal with both countries translating The Stand as 'A Dança da Morte', meaning also 'The Dance of Death'.^[1] Similarly, his 1978 collection of short stories Night Shift was released in France as Danse macabre in 1980. To avoid confusion, the actual 'Danse Macabre' essay was given the title 'Anatomie de l'horreur' ('An Anatomy of Horror') when it was released in France 14 years later, in 1995.^[2]

Background[edit]

In the introduction, King credits Bill Thompson, the editor of his first five published novels, and later editor at Doubleday, as being the inspiration for its creation.

Editions Of Cujo By Stephen King - Goodreads

.. Bill called me and said, 'Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing. We'll do it together, if you want.'The concept intrigued and frightened me at the same time.

Thompson ultimately convinced King that if he wrote such a genre survey, he would no longer have to answer tedious, repetitive interview questions on the topic.

Editions[edit]

Danse Macabre was originally published in hardcover by Everest House on April 20, 1981 (ISBN978-0896960763). Along with the trade hardcover, Everest House also published a limited edition of the book, signed by King, limited to 250 numbered copies and 15 lettered copies. The limited edition did not have a dust jacket, and instead was housed in a slipcase. Later, Berkley Books published a mass market paperback edition of the book on December 1, 1983 (ISBN978-0425064627). A new introduction was added to this edition, entitled 'Forenote to the Paperback Edition'. Among other things, King discusses the fact that he asked Dennis Etchison 'to comb the errors' in the original edition, and thus the 1983 paperback edition contains the corrected text of Danse Macabre. In the book's original Forenote, readers were also asked to send in any errors to be corrected, and those were incorporated as well. On February 23, 2010, Gallery Books published a new edition of Danse Macabre (ISBN978-1439170984), a trade paperback with the corrected 1983 text, including both the original and the 1983 introductions, as well as a newly written piece 'What's Scary?', which serves as a forenote to this 2010 edition.

Synopsis[edit]

The backbone of the text is King's teaching notes from several college courses he taught in the 1970s. However, Danse Macabre has a casual, non-linear writing style and expresses a desire to avoid 'academic bullshit'.

In the introduction, titled 'October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance', King begins by explaining why he wrote the book, and then describes the event itself: the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik which inspired profound fear in him, intended as his personal introduction to what he calls 'real horror'. This is followed by the chapter 'Tales of the Hook', specifically 'The Hook'; an urban legend about young lovers parked in a car, who narrowly avoid an attack by an escaped prisoner with a hook for a hand. King uses this legend to illustrate his contention that horror in general 'offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty'.

In the following chapter, he creates a template for descriptions of his macabre subject. Entitled 'Tales of the Tarot', the chapter has nothing to do with the familiar tarot card deck. Rather, King borrows the term to describe his observations about major archetypal characters of the horror genre, which he posits come from two British novels and one Irish: the vampire (from Dracula), the werewolf (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and the 'Thing Without a Name' (from Frankenstein). In light of the sexually repressed Victorian Era publication of Dracula, King sees a strong sexual undercurrent to the story. Frankenstein is reviewed as 'a Shakespearean tragedy', and he argues that 'its classical unity is broken only by the author's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies—is it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the life-spark?' King does not mistake Mr. Hyde for a 'traditional' werewolf, but rather sees the character as the origin of the modern archetype that was later defined by werewolves. The evil-werewolf archetype, argues King, stems from the base and violent side of humanity. These major archetypes are then reviewed in their historical context, ranging from their original appearances to their modern-day equivalents, up to and including cartoon breakfast cereal characters such as Frankenberry and Count Chocula.

The chapter 'An Annoying Autobiographical Pause' begins with King's explanation for why he included the section: 'I cannot divorce myself from a field in which I am mortally involved.' He then offers a brief family history, discussing his abandonment by his father at the age of two, his childhood in rural eastern Maine, and then explains his childhood fixation with the imagery of terror and horror, making an interesting comparison of his uncle successfully dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. While browsing through an attic with his elder brother, King uncovered a paperback version of the H.P. Lovecraft collection The Lurker in the Shadows,^[3] which had belonged to his long-since-departed father. The cover art, an illustration of a monster hiding within the recesses of a hell-like cavern beneath a tombstone, was, he writes, the moment in his life which 'that interior dowsing rod responded to'.

King then resumes his discussion of the horror genre by making detailed commentary of horror in all forms of media, beginning with radio, then proceeding to a highly critical review of television horror, two separate chapters on horror in the motion picture

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