Hogue; his favorite group, Creedence Clearwater Revival; and his most hated groups Blood, Sweat
and Tears, along with Chicago. Under ‘Future prospects’ we read, ‘This boy shows evidences of
some talent, although at this point it is impossible to tell if he is just a flash in the pan or if he has real
possibilities. It seems obvious he has learned a great deal at the University of Maine at Orono,
although a great deal has contributed to a lessening of idealistic fervor rather than a heightening of
that characteristic.’
King leaves the ‘general body politic’ and his readers alike with this advice: ‘No.1 Live peace.
/ No.2 Love a neighbor today. / No.3 If the establishment doesn’t like it, then screw ‘em. / Take care
of yourselves, friends.’
More Truck—November 5, 1970.
The title of this guest column references the original King’s Garbage Truck columns covered
above. Unimportant other than for its existence as reprise, King argues here that UMO students need
to start ‘changing the campus image’ from that of drug-taking radicals to one representing the vast
majority of the real student body, who were largely nothing of the sort, or risk ‘economic and social
strangulation’ by the angry voters of Maine’s ‘middle- and working-class’ (who fund the University
of Maine system through their taxes).
This piece may also be copied from the microfiche files of UMO’s Fogler Library.
So there it is, an eclectic collection of views from the young King, showing a growing strength
as a writer and a strong foretaste of the themes that would fill out his non-fiction in the coming
decades.
DANSE MACABRE, ON WRITING
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.
—From Danse Macabre.
King has written two volumes of non-fiction— Danse Macabre and On Writing—and co-
authored another, on the Boston Red Sox’s victorious 2004 season, Faithful. Writing an entire non-
fiction book is a lengthy task and is very different from fiction. King notes in Danse Macabre: ‘With
nonfiction, there’s all that bothersome business of making sure your facts are straight, that the dates
jibe, that the names are spelled right....” Indeed! Let’s look at these two books and The Fright Report
(only part of which was merged into Danse Macabre).
Danse Macabre (1981)
I am a writer by trade, which means that the most interesting things that have happened to me
have happened in my dreams.
King details the genesis of Danse Macabre in the original Forenote to the volume. In November
1978 he received a call from Bill Thompson, the editor who ‘discovered’ him for Doubleday (they
worked together on the five novels from Carrie to The Stand). King left Doubleday as a result of
commercial policies toward their authors and Thompson had also moved—to become senior editor at
Everest House. Thompson proposed a book about the ‘entire horror phenomenon’ but this was
quickly watered down to the previous thirty years. King says, ‘All this is by way of acknowledging
Bill Thompson, who created the concept of this book. The idea was and is a good one. If you like the
book that follows, thank Bill, who thought it up. If you don’t, blame the author, who screwed it up.’
In an aside, King tells of getting drunk with Thompson in a New York Irish pub in 1978.
Noticing a sign saying the Earlybird Happy Hour was 8-10 am, King asked the barkeep who would
wander in looking for a drink at that time. The reply: ‘College boys...like you.’ King must really enjoy
that story as he repeats it (with minor variations) in sub-section 32 of the C.V. section of On Writing,
written a full two decades later!
Also in the Forenote, written at the family’s lake home in Center Lovell, Maine, King says the
book is to be ‘my Final Statement on the clockwork of the horror tale.’
Everest House first published the volume (its rarely used full title is Stephen King’s Danse
Macabre) in a 1981 hardback edition (a signed limited edition of only 250 and a signed lettered
edition of 15 were also released). It would be Everest’s only King publication and the last of the six
books Thompson edited for King. It was later released in a Book-of-the-Month Club edition; a
simultaneous UK hardback and paperback (McDonald Futura, 1981); and US paperback (Berkley
Books, 1982). Like a number of King’s early works it is not yet available in audio book format
(perhaps because it would best be narrated by King who, as a result of not wanting the heavy work
load of updating the content, may find the whole idea unacceptable).
The Berkley mass-market paperback edition (first published in December 1983) was the first to
include King’s Forenote to the Paperback Edition. In this the author explains he’d asked, in the first
Forenote, for anyone who noted errors in the original edition to send them in. King’s then agent Kirby
McCauley suggested Dennis Etchison (whose The Dark Country King praises highly in this second
Forenote), an expert on the arcane aspects of horror, could assist with corrections. King forwarded
Etchison his file of ‘you fucked up’ letters and he assisted King to make the later editions ‘rather
more accurate in a number of respects’.
The title Danse Macabre apparently derives from the French ‘La Danse Macabre’ (‘Dance of
Death’ in English), a late-medieval allegory for the universality of death. Various depictions (such as
Holbein’s series, The Dance of Death) show a skeleton, representing death, leading people from all
levels of society—emperors to paupers—and all age groups, to the grave.
King provides an interesting dedication to the volume: ‘It’s easy enough—perhaps too easy—to
memorialize the dead. This book is for six great writers who are still alive. Robert Bloch / Jorge Luis
Borges / Ray Bradbury / Frank Belknap Long / Donald Wandrei and Manly Wade Wellman. Enter,
Stranger, at your Riske: Here there be Tygers. ’
Of course, even a casual reader will know of Robert Bloch (author of the novel, Psycho and
many superb short stories42), Jorge Luis Borges (a leading exponent of magical realism) and the
incomparable Ray Bradbury, more of whom later. The latter three names will be less known by the
average reader. Long was a friend of Lovecraft, a writer of both superior Lovecraftian works and
science-fiction; Wandrei was a founder of Arkham House, dedicated to preserving and publishing
Lovecraftian fiction; and Wellman wrote in a full range of genres, including science-fiction and
fantasy (King even donated one of his notebooks to an auction to assist Wellman’s widow—it
contained the unpublished partial story Keyholes43).
King says the book is ‘intended to be an informal overview of where the horror genre has been
over the last thirty years, and not an autobiography of yours truly.’ That would have to wait for the
opening section of On Writing. In the late 1970s King was arguing, ‘The autobiography of a father,
writer, and ex-high school teacher would make dull reading indeed. I am a writer by trade, which
means that the most interesting things that have happened to me have happened in my dreams.’ Of
course, by the end of the century, King’s life and career made interesting reading on any number of
levels and choosing to deliver some autobiography (if couched in the dry terms of a ‘Curriculum
Vitae’) showed how much more King understood of himself and was willing to share. There has been
little biography of King, and he is known to oppose the very concept. It is our opinion that the best
person to write a King biography would be King himself, and let’s leave that subject right there!
In opening the book we are delivered of an autobiographical incident, with a ten-year-old
Durham schoolboy and his friends in a movie theatre being given the shocking news that the Russians
had launched Sputnik44. In this chapter, October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance the author
posits a core question facing the horror genre and presented to its practitioners: ‘Why do you want to
make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world?’ The reasoned response:
‘The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.’ That is, at
times, horror is catharsis, or at least an analyst’s couch for the masses. Interestingly, while King is
dealing with the fantastic here (monsters, the supernatural and all the trappings), as his career has
developed the most shocking views have been the portrayal of the all too real horrors of life—
domestic violence (Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder), child abuse (Gerald’s Game), murder (Bag
of Bones), injustice (The Green Mile), alcoholism (The Shining).
Early on King develops one of the two main Arguments of this book, summarized in perhaps his
best-known quote, which appears as the beginning of this chapter. ‘The closest I want to come to
definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels,
each one a little less fine than the one before it.’ He tells us of the three: ‘The finest emotion is
terror...,’ in which the imagination alone is stimulated (using The Monkey’s Paw as example); the
‘horror comics of the fifties still sum up for me the epitome of horror, that emotion of fear that
underlies terror, an emotion which is slightly less fine, because it is not entirely of the mind....”,
normally inviting a physical reaction (E.C. comics exemplifying this level); and ‘…the third level—
that of revulsion’ (King uses Foul Play, a story from The Crypt of Terror to demonstrate).
The conclusion of this Argument, according to King: ‘So, terror on top, horror below it, and
lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion. My own philosophy as a sometime writer of horror fiction
is to recognize these distinctions because they are sometimes useful, but to avoid any preference for
one over the other on the grounds that one effect is somehow better than another. The problem with
definitions is that they have a way of turning into critical tools—and this sort of criticism, which I
would call criticism-by-rote, seems to be needlessly restricting and even dangerous. 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. ’ Putting this quote into the original context tends to make the whole thing a touch more
intellectual and a lot less cardboard cutout horror writer, wouldn’t you agree?
The second Argument is that there are three major archetypes in modern horror fiction; and that
they arose from but three novels. In the Tales of the Tarot chapter King cogently analyses Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde45, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Frankenstein46 by Mary Shelley: ‘… these three are something special. They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of
books and films—those twentieth-century gothics which have become known as ‘the modern horror
story’. More than that, at the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and
enlarge what Burt Hatlen47 calls ‘the myth-pool’—that body of fictive literature in which all of us,
even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed. Like an almost
perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out: the Vampire,
the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.’
King, having chosen to develop the theory that most modern horror extends from one of the three
great archetypes48 established in the 19th century, then excludes the Ghost from his analysis, with
reason. He says ‘the Ghost is an archetype which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a
single novel, no matter how great. The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, the Mississippi of
supernatural fiction....” Later, he describes the Ghost as the ‘fourth archetype’ in discussing Straub’s
Ghost Story.
Concluding this Argument King tells us: ‘It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that all modern
horror fiction, both in print and in celluloid, can be boiled down to these three archetypes. It would
simplify things enormously, but it would be a false simplification, even with the Tarot card of the
Ghost thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t end with the Thing, the Vampire, and the Werewolf;
there are other bogeys out there in the shadows as well. But these three account for a large bloc of
modern horror fiction.’
King’s analysis is reasoned, arguing that filmmakers constantly return to these three monsters,
probably because they really are archetypes—for instance, Norman Bates is but another form of
Werewolf, George Romero’s zombies are Vampires in another guise (cannibals rather than blood-
drinkers); and the Thing in the 1951 movie is exactly that.
In discussing the three novels King makes this broader point: ‘What the would-be writer of
“serious fiction” seems to forget is that novels are engines, just as cars are engines; a Rolls-Royce
without an engine might as well be the world’s most luxurious begonia pot, and a novel in which
there is no story becomes nothing but a curiosity, a little mental game. Novels are engines, and
whatever we might say about these three, their creators stoked them with enough inventions to run
each fast and hot and clean.’ We might say that about the vast majority of King’s novels—from the
Rolls-Royce of The Stand, through to the 1958 Plymouth Fury (and do you think King used that model
by accident?) of Christine.
In section three of the Horror Fiction chapter King discusses another archetype, ‘another of
those springs that feed the myth-pool’, the Bad Place. He argues that haunted houses (the natural
habitat of the Ghost) are but part of this wider archetype. Readers should take the time to read this
section if only for King’s entertaining description of the house in Durham, and the events surrounding
he and his friends entering it, that formed the basis of the Marsten House in Salem’s Lot. King is
something of a master of this archetype, having introduced us to other Bad Places such as the Stanley
Hotel in The Shining and the Pet Sematary.
Despite his claim not to be writing autobiography as such King does not let down those
interested more in the author than the product. In a chapter amusingly titled An Annoying
Autobiographical Pause, King recalls the first time he publicly told the story that most attribute as
inspiration for The Body. Making it clear he does not recall the events himself (what he is recalling is
his mother’s story) we learn that, aged just four, another child had been run over by a slow-moving
freight train while playing with or near King (‘years later, my mother told me they had picked up the
pieces in a wicker basket’). The point of this tale is that as soon as King had repeated it while
answering a question the audience, and even a fellow panelist, began attributing King’s desire to
write horror fiction with this single event. King goes on to deny this simplistic interpretation outright.
He does agree that the writer’s past and experiences serve as grist for the mill, as well he might,
considering how autobiographic some of his fiction is. King relates one dream that he later used in a
famous scene (or, as we shall learn, two): ‘… the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I
was about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on
a hill. Rooks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling
with clouds. This corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn
in the air, I saw that it was my face—rotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the
corpse opened its eyes and looked at me...Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of
the central images in my novel Salem’s Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten.’
Followers of the Dark Tower Cycle will recognize in the first part of this dream the hanging of
Hax, the traitorous cook in The Gunslinger, meaning King has actually mined the one dream at least
twice. 49
Another of the personal King tales that is now well known was first revealed in Danse
Macabre. Telling a little of the history of his maternal grandparents and his mother he comes to his
father—Don King, who skipped out on the family when our hero was but two. In 1959 or 1960 Steve
and his adopted brother David discovered their father’s effects in an attic above their aunt and
uncle’s garage, across a field from their own home in Durham. Among the boxes was a stash of old
horror fiction novels and collections (‘the pick of the litter was an H. P. Lovecraft collection’),
King’s first taste of serious horror writing (in comparison to comics or B-movies). He writes, ‘…
that book, courtesy of my departed father, was my first taste of a world that went deeper than B-
pictures...or...boy’s fiction....’ And the rest is history.
In one revelatory paragraph King explains why speculative fiction normally lags in sales (with
King one of the few exceptions): ‘I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time
truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the
reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of “the suspension of disbelief” in
his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be
suspended in the air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a
clean jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn’t light; it’s heavy. The difference in sales between
Arthur Hailey and H.P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes
a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while in
Nyarlathotep...whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, “I don’t read
fantasy or go to any of those movies; 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 have grown too weak.’
In his chapter on American horror movies King briefly notes, ‘In AIP’s The Pit and the
Pendulum we see another facet of the bad death—perhaps the absolute worst. Vincent Price and his
cohorts break into a tomb...they discover the lady, his late wife, has indeed been buried alive....’ In
On Writing King would say of this movie, ‘It might have been the last really great studio horror
picture before George Romero’s ferocious indie The Night of the Living Dead came along and
changed everything forever.’ And, he would tell of his ‘novelization’ of that very movie while at
elementary school, which also turned out to be his first best seller.
In the chapter The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext King makes cogent
arguments that many horror movies of the fifties, sixties and seventies were socio-political in nature;
and that many others reach deep-seated personal fears of taboos crossed. In one section King writes
of the ‘techno-horror’ films of the sixties and seventies, such as ‘ The China Syndrome, a horror
movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears: fears of radiation, fears for the
ecology, fears of machinery gone out of control, run wild.’ While changing times have eliminated
nuclear effects as inspiration for horror, two and a half decades after King wrote these words fear of
medical disaster, plague and the like (inspired by the AIDS epidemic and genetic advances) has
stepped in to take the mantle.
In his fiction King has returned over and again to one of these fears—one that, while not
exclusively his domain, is certainly a signature theme—the fear of machinery or technology out of
control. From The Mangler to The Stand, The Tommyknockers and Trucks King returns regularly to
this well. In fact the one movie he directed, Maximum Overdrive, is from this very source.
Still on movies King makes one very interesting comment about the director of a cult movie,
Duel: ‘...perhaps not Spielberg’s best work—that must almost certainly wait for the eighties and
nineties....’ How prescient is that? And while still on the subject of the silver screen King devotes an
entire chapter to a loving review of bad horror movies, The Horror Movie as Junk Food; and does
the same for the small screen in The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by
Gainesburgers.
Discussing phobic pressure points in horror King writes: ‘‘Death,’” the boy Mark Petrie thinks
at one point in Salem’s Lot, ‘is when the monsters get you.’ And if I had to restrict everything I have
ever said or written about the horror genre to that one statement (and many critics would say I should
have done, ha-ha), it would be that one.’”
The core of the book is Horror Fiction, where King discusses ten books from the period 1950-
1980 ‘that seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine: the horror story as both
literature and entertainment, a living part of twentieth-century literature, and worthy successors to
such books as Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmers’s The King in Yellow.
They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature—to tell the truth
about ourselves by telling lies about people who never existed.’
The ten are: Ghost Story by Peter Straub (later King’s collaborator on The Talisman and Black
House); The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons; The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley
Jackson; Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin; The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney; Something Wicked
This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury50; The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson; The Doll Who Ate
His Mother by Ramsey Campbell; The Fog by James Herbert; and Strange Wine, a Harlan Ellison
collection. Hard as it was for King to limit himself to but ten books from those three decades it would
be fascinating to know what ten books he might choose as representatives of the quarter century since.
At one point in Danse Macabre he does offer this: ‘… it seems to me that it [ The Haunting of Hill
House] and James’s The Turn of the Screw are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the
last hundred years (although we might add two long novellas: Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ and
Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’).’
A quarter century ago, when Danse Macabre was written, King said: ‘I’ve purposely avoided
writing a novel with a 1960’s time setting because all of that seems...very distant to me now—almost
as if it happened to another person.’ Of course, by 1999 the author had transported himself back to the
restless campus years of his youth and delivered the compelling, funny and revealing novella Hearts
in Atlantis.
King makes a number of points about fiction in general. He takes them up again and again in his
non-fiction and interviews. The base view never changes: story is paramount. At one point here we
read: ‘My own belief about fiction, long and deeply held, is that story must be paramount over all
other considerations in fiction; that story defines fiction, and that all other considerations—theme,
mood, tone, symbol, style, even characterization—are expendable.’ We’ll read much more along this
line in On Writing. At another point: ‘Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and in the tale of horror as in
any other tale, the same rule applies now as when Aristophanes told his horror tale of the frogs:
morality is telling the truth as your heart knows it. When asked if he was not ashamed of the rawness
and sordidness of his turn-of-the-century novel McTeague, Frank Norris replied: “Why should I be? I
did not lie. I did not truckle. I told them the truth.”’51
The book concludes with two interesting appendices. One covers King’s Top 100
Fantasy/Horror Films of 1950-1980 (his absolute favorites are indicated); and the other his Top 100
Fantasy/Horror Books of the same period (for this King indicates those he considers ‘important’).
Many fans have made a point of trying to see and read each item on the two lists and others wish King
would update them in some form.
Danse Macabre is certainly important—as an original work about the horror genre. Although
not couched in academic-speak there is no doubt this review by one of the genre’s leading exponents
will serve for decades as an important reference work.
Michele Slung (whose 1991 anthology I Shudder at Your Touch: 22 Tales of Sex and Horror is
the only mass-market book to carry King’s The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson) reviewed Danse
Macabre for The New York Times 52, as ‘a one-man flea market of opinions and ideas, [it] will certainly be a treat for those avid readers of horror, fantasy and science-fiction who like nothing
better than to sit around, after a George Romero double-feature followed by a late-night rerun of ‘The
Twilight Zone’, and recall the great days of E.C. Comics. However, for those who have little interest
in accompanying Mr. King on a highly discursive ramble through byways lined with other people’s
monsters and mad scientists, this book may prove both boring and baffling, a trick instead of a treat.’
Perhaps feeling she should look down, high browed upon this best-selling upstart, she continued, ‘…
we are exposed to thousands of Kingian pronouncements; there is nothing that doesn’t elicit an
opinion from him—or a definitive statement.’ And: ‘Mr. King’s class-clown mannerisms—his
fascination with nose picking and clogged pores, his fondness for words such as puke, yuch and dreck
—are partly a defense mechanism, I believe. He has serious thoughts and ambitions and wants to be
taken seriously; at the same time, he’s a little bit jumpy about it.’
On the other hand Wiater, Golden and Wagner say the book ‘… remains an affectionate yet
perceptive look at how horror in the mass media and the arts has affected our popular culture in
general—and one little boy from Maine in particular.’53 Spignesi says, ‘It is also an astute
sociocultural commentary; a discerning look at what these tales of grue and dread mean to the body
politic; and why enjoying being frightened has been a constant throughout sentient civilization.’54
Collings concurs: ‘As criticism, Danse Macabre is valuable and entertaining; as a reflection of
King’s beliefs, it brilliantly illuminates his own writing.’55 Danse Macabre won the Non-Fiction
Hugo Award in 198256 and the equivalent Locus Award in the same year57.
When writing Danse Macabre King incorporated some previously published material. These
are:
Portions of The Fright Report (reviewed later in this chapter); The Doll Who Ate His Mother58
(originally published in Whispers for October 1978), in the Horror Fiction chapter; Imagery and the
Third Eye (originally published in The Writer for October 1980; reprinted in Maine Alumnus; and
editions of The Writer’s Handbook), in The Last Waltz chapter; material from his lengthy
Introduction to Night Shift; and from his Introduction to Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (an omnibus edition released by NAL in 1978).
This book has generated sixteen separately excerpted pieces, often published as if they were
original articles (in some cases the origin was noted). These are:
Why We Crave Horror Movies, first published in Playboy for January 1981 and in the following
books: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing (2nd to 7th editions, 1998-2004); Literature: The Human
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