Cocaine apparently gives its users a sense of grandiosity or inflated self esteem. Also, if you look at this book’s publication date, it seems to have been written at the height of King’s cocaine use. He starts talking about the Apollonian and Dionysian natures of the characters in these novels.
Stephen King was an English teacher, and much of this book comes from lecture notes he gave at some writing college. When I had finally finished these ten books, I picked Danse Macabre back up, ready to read King’s thoughts on my previous month’s reading. I had been planning on reading a few of them beforehand, but God knows how long it would have taken me to get around to them at my own pace. Not all of these books were amazing, but most of them were really, really good. It really seems to me that King included Strange Wine on this list because Harlan Ellison was his friend.
King discusses Bradbury’s Something Wicked, but Bradbury’s Dark Carnival or October Country collections are far more horrory than that novel and this collection by Ellison. This book was enjoyable, but I find it peculiar that King chose it was the only short story collection to discuss.
The Doll Who Ate His Mother – Ramsey CampbellĪ decent book, but I’m not convinced that it really deserves to be on this list. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury. This was the only book included that I had actually read before. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson. This was the only book included that I had never heard of. The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons. Click the title of each book for my full reviews. It has taken me until the end of the year to finish writing about them. I put Danse Macabre down and sought out all the books King listed. He chose these books because they “seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine.” To my dismay and great shame, I had only read one out of these 10. I was expecting a broad overview of the field, but King limits his discussions to 10 books published between 19. I like horror movies, but I found these parts really, really boring.Īfter slogging through that stuff, I finally got to the section on horror fiction. Then there’s some very long chapters on horror movies, TV and radio drama. These are certainly important books, but claiming that all horror can be traced back to them seems like a bunch of farfetched college-boy bullshit. King claims that nearly all modern horror stories can be traced back to these archetypal novels. In an opening chapter King discusses Frankenstein, Dracula and Strange case of Dr. When I started to read King’s book I assumed that I would be familiar with most of the stuff he was discussing. I have read most of the old classics of Gothic horror, and in recent years I have turned my attention to more modern stuff. It focuses on the 30 years prior to its publication in 1980. 
Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is a history of horror.
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