There are books you wait too late to read, but which you read at just the right time for you. That’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. This book is endlessly cited in more academic treatments of horror and I knew I should read it. And one thing I immediately appreciated is that even early in the eighties King expressed my long-term concern: many genres fall into horror. He, perhaps rightly, considers horror a subspecies of fantasy. Or course, fantasy has come to mean something quite different in the intervening half-century. Still, the reader is treated to thrillers, sci-fi, and weird fiction. There’s also a dose of the gothic and speculative as well. King sets his four classes of monsters early: the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name (Frankenstein’s creature), and ghosts. These are all very broadly conceived.
It will become clear in coming weeks, for anyone who’s interested, that the movies I “review” here have been influenced by King’s list. And in the longer term, the books as well. And I tend to agree with King’s antipathy toward television, although I disagree with his assessment of The Twilight Zone. Danse Macabre is a book of its time, of course. I would be curious as to the master’s reaction to such more recent classics as The X-Files. I loved that he treated Ray Bradbury as a sometime horror author and it becomes clear that each of us finds different things scary. The thing was, I found myself anticipating my too scarce reading time each day for the month it took me to read the book. I often start books that I soon find myself approaching with a kind of duty to finish. Love him or not, King is a talented writer and will keep you coming back, just like birds to a feeder.
I learned that King, too, appreciates bad movies. He grew up about a decade and a half before I did, but the small-town culture I experienced as a child was not so different, although Sputnik was already up and the Cold War already on. I guess what I find so engaging here is that this is a guy who speaks my language. My tastes differ, of course, but there’s something comforting about whiling away the pre-dawn hours with a guy who can say “The Thing” and you know immediately what that vague phrase means. And it was strangely reassuring to be reminded that the world of the seventies, which I experienced as a teenager, was just as scary as the world is right now. And if King ever looked me in the eyes, I think he’d recognize something about me, although a sometimes critical fan.