Danse Macabre is another Stephen King book I've probably meant to read for 30 years. Seeing this book around is how I first learned the word "macabre." I'm glad I found a used copy like the one I remember from back in the day with that weird pink writing and creepy picture of King's face (see above). So was it worth the wait?
This is an odd book in that it's probably too academic for a lot of the popular audience and too popular for most academics. I found myself intrigued by King's ideas and analyses, but then a little disappointed they weren't organized better or that he didn't delve deeper into the ideas. More academically inclined readers (especially philosophers) might appreciate Noël Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror.
But I can imagine some readers finding King's ideas and analyses too dry to choke down, preferring the jokes (of which there are a lot, ha-ha), engaging stories, and plot summaries. Danse Macabre is definitely not an academic tome (King didn't write this to get tenure), but for someone whose protests against "academic bullshit" are so frequent and vociferous, I think there are a lot of philosophically deep insights about horror here. Not that I always agree with them--more on that later.
But the thing with King's non-fiction (see also On Writing) is that he almost always manages to entertain. Danse Macabre is a much longer and denser book than On Writing (yet still delightfully airy compared to most academic prose). Some parts of Danse Macabre might be more difficult to get through.
I honestly grew weary of some of the longer plot summaries, but then every couple pages King hits you with a little nugget of insight to keep you going (just a few: why radio worked well for horror, why libraries are awesome, the function of fantasy, why Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a werewolf story, horror as a response to mortality, the difference between terror, horror, and the gross out, etc.). There are also some quotable lines. One notable example: "... we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones" (p. 13)
Maybe the biggest--or at least most remarked upon--ideas of this book is that horror is essentially conservative. King doesn't just mean in the contemporary political sense--although he does evoke one of his most eldritch images: the Republican in a three-piece suit! But he observes that horror is often created by some internal or external threat to the status quo, often some Dionysian threat to the Apollonian order (not that his use of these terms should be confused with academic bullshit, ha-ha).
This is true of a lot of horror. Especially with King's examples, this is a deep insight worth serious attention.
But when I consider it carefully, I don't think all horror is essentially conservative. I recently heard a great conversation on this topic with the author Victor LaValle.
LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom is a response to Lovecraft from the point of view of a Black man from Harlem. Without giving too many spoilers, I can say that LaValle explores the idea that for some people the status quo already is horror, and the way out of the horror is to threaten the status quo. A lot of Black American horror is like this (Jordan Peele's Get Out, Tananarive Due, Octavia Butler, etc.). If you have a lot of sympathy for the creature in Frankenstein as I do, it's hard to see how his life in the status quo is anything but horror. There are many other examples.
But the oddest thing is that I'm not even sure all of Stephen King's work fits the "horror as conservative" model. He mentions The Stand at one point. One of my criticisms of that novel was that I felt like the good side was too eager to get back to "normal times," which I suppose fits with the idea that they are longing for the status quo. But they never get there.
One of my favorite lines is when Frannie wonders if anybody learned anything. I hope they did. I hope the new society that rises from the devastation of Captain Trips will be a kinder, more just one than the old status quo. And I think King does, too. And maybe, dear reader, at the risk of overplaying my hand, I can tell you that I also hope we can achieve something better than a "return to normal" in whatever post-pandemic world might be waiting for us.
For all the shit people give him for being an immoral horror writer who just wants to scare people at all costs (a charge he answers in Danse Macabre), most of King's own work is oddly optimistic, at least once you get past the horror. King's work is nowhere near as challenging to the status quo as Victor LaValle's or Octavia Butler's, but I think the idea that regular people can do better, even if it takes living through horror to get there, feels more like a liberal or progressive idea than a conservative one.
But maybe we shouldn't be surprised. King himself is no conservative. Just look at his Twitter! Of course, I don't mean that all of King's fiction can be boiled down to "liberal horror," either. It's more complicated that that. An experiment: try to apply my analysis to two of my favorite King works, Pet Sematary and the Dark Tower series, and you'll just come away more confused. My point is that boiling down all horror to essentially conservative (if that's what King really meant) won't do, either.
Horror is a big, bloody mess. And that's why we love it. Even though I didn't always agree, Danse Macabre helped me love this mess even more.
See also my Goodreads review.
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