Danse macabre

I first read this book more than 20 years ago, and wasn't very impressed with it. It was old even back then, so why read it again now?

I was moved to read it again because several months ago I blogged on [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg]'s 70th birthday, and said that some of his monsters were convincing and others not (Stephen King is 70 | Khanya)). Brenton Dickieson commented that I had misunderstood some of the monsters. and so I re-read [b:It] to remind myself about the monster in it.

I wasn't altogether convinced. and so began reading a series of books about horror literature to see what they had to say abut monsters in particular, and we also discussed this a bit at our monthly literary coffee klatsch. And so I came back to this book.

What does [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg] have to say about monsters, his own and other people's?

In this book he deals mainly with the period 1950-1980, and nearly 40 years have passed. King himself has written many more stories featuring monsters since then, and so have a lot of other people. His own views may also have changed.

According to King there are three main types of monster in "horror" literature:

the Vampire
the Werewolf
the Thing without a Name

He uses three 19th century horror novels to typify these. The Vampire, of course, is [b:Dracula|17245|Dracula|Bram Stoker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387151694s/17245.jpg|3165724]. The Werewolf is [b:Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde|8336663|Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde (Essential Classics)|Pauline Francis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1418771388s/8336663.jpg|3257537] and the Thing without a Name is [b:Frankenstein|35031085|Frankenstein|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498841231s/35031085.jpg|4836639].

But then there is the mother of them all, the Ghost Story, which was so common in the 19th century. If anything typifies the 19th-century ghost story it is [b:The Turn of the Screw|12948|The Turn of the Screw|Henry James|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443203592s/12948.jpg|990886] by [a:Henry James|159|Henry James|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1468309415p2/159.jpg].

King (1982:79) makes a further division:

All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will -- a conscious decision to do evil -- and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning.

I'm not sure that these systems of classification work all the time, or even most of the time. King himself went on to write stories that cut across both systems.

What is the nature of a monster anyway?

As King and others have noted, one kind of monster is a physically misshapen creature. In the period King writes of, such "monsters" often appeared in circus side-shows -- dwarfs, bearded ladies, people who were unusually short or tall, fat or thin. People paid to go and see them, and King sees this as one of the functions of the horror story. When we see people with unusual shapes, we can be thankful that we are "normal" and it gives us a measure of "normality".

But in fantasy literature generally monstrosity is a symbol of evil, of twisting the good out of shape. So Tolkien's orcs are misshapen, deliberately twisted by their master. Shelob is a monstrous spider, monstrous because of her size.

But while Frankenstein's monster indeed has no name, it is also, like the Vampire, a revenant, something returned from the dead. It is created by the free will of Victor Frankenstein, but develops a will of its own and so becomes, from a human point of view, an external evil.

And this happens in one of King's own later stories, [b:Pet Sematary|33124137|Pet Sematary|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480069533s/33124137.jpg|150017].

Warning, possible spoilers

In this book there is a mixture of external evil in the form of the Wendigo, the wild spirit of the untamed woods, and the grieving father who tries to get his son back from the dead, and does that of his own free will. So at one level there is the classic zombie story.

Zombies, like vampires, are revenants, corpses returned from the dead. The difference is that vampires return of their own free will, but zombies are reanimated by the will of the living. And that applies to the composite monster created by Frankenstein too. The "thing" in Pet Sematary has a name, the name of the son who dies, so it doesn't fit neatly into King's classification system.

Several chapters in the middle of [b:Danse Macabre|11563|Danse Macabre|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309287093s/11563.jpg|1230142] suffered from its being so out of date. King described horror films and TV shows. I never saw most of the films, and during most of the period King deals with we didn't have TV in South Africa, so I had no chance of seeing them, but even in countries that did have TV, no one under 50 is likely to remember them.

The book has two appendexes, one with what King regards as the better films of the period 1950-1980, and one of the better books.

Some of the books and films he mentions, or fails to mention, are quite surprising, however.

The film Horror Express, made in 1972, was well within the period that King writes about, and yet I could find no mention of it in King's book. It even starred such classic horror actors as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Among the books he mentions is [b:Watership Down|76620|Watership Down (Watership Down, #1)|Richard Adams|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405136931s/76620.jpg|1357456] by [a:Richard Adams|7717|Richard Adams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1210188763p2/7717.jpg]. I never thought of that as a horror tale. But Adams did write at least one horror story -- [b:Girl in a Swing|1354214|The Girl in a Swing|Richard Adams|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1271535705s/1354214.jpg|1343915]. But perhaps it was too late for King's period, though only just.

I've added a few things about monsters in my blog post which are not included here, because they go beyond just reviewing King's book.