Journey step started: August 20, 2023
Journey step ended: September 3, 2023
Click the Google sheet to the right to see every item covered on this step of the journey.
Day 597: Aug 20, 2023
I’ve reached the 10th step in my journey, the nonfiction review of horror in culture & media, Danse Macabre.
Released in 1981, I read this about 4 years after its publication when I was still a preteen.
I’m reading the 2010 edition with a new forward.
No movie or other adaptation here, just a book & 2 podcast episodes. Looking forward to this quick, little diversion!
It’s easy enough—perhaps too easy—to memorialize the dead. This book is for six great writers of the macabre.
ROBERT BLOCH
JORGE LUIS BORGES
RAY BRADBURY
FRANK BELKNAP LONG
DONALD WANDREI
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Starting with the dedication – I’ve only heard of two of these authors: Bloch and Bradbury. I’ll have to learn more about the other four.
…we’re able to let off the pressure that might otherwise build up until it blows us sky-high like the boiler that explodes and tears apart the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (the book, I mean; in the movie everything freezes solid—how dorky is that?).
I thought King had reached an agreement with the Kubrick estate not to speak bad of his The Shining film as a condition to get the rights to proceed with a TV series script.
Besides, how can you not love a genre where a movie (The Blair Witch Project) made for under $100,000 can scare the bejabbers out of the whole world and gross a mind-boggling $250 million? … One thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing looks real. Another thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing feels real.
You know, I’ve never seen that movie. Somehow, I completely missed that train when it rolled through. Is it worth watching today?
Which brings us to the best horror movie of the new century, Dennis Iliadis’s brilliant revisiting of The Last House on the Left.
Hmmm… Another movie I’m going to have to add to my backlog. I see this book is going to dramatically swell this backlog of both movies and books I’m going to have to explore!
The original 1972 Last House on the Left, written and directed by Wes Craven, is so bad it rises to the level of absurdity—call it Abbott and Costello Meet the Rapists.
That made me laugh out loud. I’d go see that movie!
For me, the terror—the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have been living in my own mind—began on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten.
My first experience with horror was at 6 years of age. I remember seeing a B&W film on the TV. Cult worshippers in the woods & a bearded figure in robes talking with a severed head mounted on a tree branch mouthing its words silently. To this day, no idea the name of that movie.
[talking about the book “Donovan’s Brain”] At the end of the book, the scientist attacks the tank with an ax, resisting the endless undertow of Donovan’s will by reciting a simple yet haunting mnemonic phrase—He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Ah, now that’s a phrase many King fans will recognize!
Day 598: Aug 21, 2023
Continuing to read Danse Macabre where yesterday I learned that Stephen King’s earliest memory of terror was at the movie theater where the film was interrupted by a visibly scared manager to make an announcement that the Russians launched Sputnik.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion…, and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.
Nine books in, I’ve found very little that terrorized me or horrified me. But have I been grossed out? Oh yeah, plenty of times!
According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker marshals a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals—cats, rats, weasels (and possibly Republicans, ha-ha).
Now this was in 1981, well before King became the liberal Twitter activist he is today! (ha-ha)
Nor is it an accident that the horror story ends so often with an O. Henry twist that leads straight down a mine shaft. When we turn to the creepy movie or the crawly book, we are not wearing our “Everything works out for the best” hats. We’re waiting to be told what we so often suspect—that everything is turning to shit.
Having just completed Cujo, boy did this statement ever ring true!
The setting for most of these films was small-town America, the scene the audience could best identify with . . . but all of these Our Towns looked eerily as if a eugenics squad had gone by the day before production actually began, removing everyone with a lisp, birthmark, limp, or potbelly—everyone, in short, who did not look like Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello,…
“a eugenics squad”
What a great phrase for the whitewashed 50s the MAGAs pine away for.
Day 599: Aug 22, 2023
Another day with Danse Macabre where yesterday I learned that the biggest failing of the classic revenge film “Freaks” was the use of actual “freaks” as actors and main characters.
One of the most common themes in fantastic literature is that of immortality. “The thing that would not die” has been a staple of the field from Beowulf to Poe’s tales of M. Valdemar and of the telltale heart, to the works of Lovecraft (such as “Cool Air”), Blatty, and even, God save us, John Saul.
When I was a kid I must’ve read John Saul’s books as much as I did King’s. But for the life of me I can’t recall a single one. That’s the difference between the two.
How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft… became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixty-four years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry
Now this here is the mystery of the ages! And why don’t we have a Pennywise Crunch cereal yet?
“…He was looking at Mrs. Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples; which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”
Certainly puts a new spin on the “Hey buddy, eyes up here” line.
Sex makes young adolescent boys feel many things, but one of them, quite frankly, is scared. The horror film in general and the Vampire film in particular confirms the feeling. Yes, it says; sex is scary; sex is dangerous.
As a kid I saw the film “The Entity” in which a woman is sexually assaulted by a ghost. (Why was I allowed watch such films?) King’s right – that spectral assault was scarier to me than any of the haunted house stories I’d seen up to that point.
Day 600: Aug 23, 2023
Carrying forward with with Danse Macabre, where yesterday the master of horror went into a deep dive of Holy Trio of monsters: The vampire, Frankenstein’s creation and the werewolf.
According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor’s house—a house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back… as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day…
It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket)… I have no memory of the incident at all…
😳
So some of what happened could well have been suggestion, and I’m not trying to convince you otherwise, although I’ve read enough since then to believe that dowsing really does work, at least at some times and for some people and for some crazy reason of its own.
The story King tells of when his uncle took him out dowsing was something.
The fact that the US Government has a website about the subject was… unexpected.
My maternal grandfather was a carpenter and, for a brief time, Winslow Homer’s handyman.
Winslow who?
Oh.
Don King was a man with an itchy foot. My brother was born in 1945, I was born in 1947, and in 1949 my father was seen no more . . . although in 1964, during the troubles in the Congo, my mother insisted that she had seen him in a newsclip of white mercenaries fighting for one side or the other.
Admit it, you thought the same thing.
Day 601: Aug 24, 2023
Another day with Danse Macabre, where yesterday I learned a lot about young Stephen King and read some weird stories from his childhood.
Seen in this light, even Disney movies are minefields of terror, and the animated cartoons, which will apparently be released and re-released even unto the end of the world, are usually the worst offenders.
Ain’t that the truth! And I’m not just talking about the intentional, Halloween-themed stuff. It was the everyday, tripping on acid cartoons targeted at children. Like this item below – it’s nightmarish!
Perhaps the supreme realization of this return to childhood comes in David Cronenberg’s marvelous horror film The Brood, where a disturbed woman is literally producing “children of rage” who go out and murder the members of her family, one by one.
I’m a casual Cronenberg fan, but I’ve never heard of this one. Will have to check it out.
As the drive-in floodlights over the screen came on and the projector flashed its GOOD NIGHT, DRIVE SAFELY slide on that big white space (along with the virtuous suggestion that you ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE)
Did they really push that church phrase at the movie theaters? How bizarre! Well, it didn’t work very well, did it?
[Talking about his elderly, and deteriorating grandmother] Sometimes she talked to Flossie, one of my mother’s sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago.
If I remember correctly, King visited this part of his family history later on in Pet Sematary.
If you view imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full of the moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a wereshark to a wereflea)…
I’m gonna be thinking about werefleas for the rest of the day! 😂😂😂
Day 602: Aug 25, 2023
Another day at the dance with Danse Macabre, where yesterday King explored the history of horror and suspense on radio. Although I was born well after radio’s Golden Age, I went to sleep every night as a child of the 80s listening to radio classics that were broadcast by a local Philadelphia station. My familiarity with all of the shows and personalities was unusual for someone of my generation. I quite enjoyed King’s detour there.
Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on Meet the Press or maybe one you’re-on-the-griddle 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler’s goose quite effectively.
In today’s world, this sentiment no longer holds true. Gooses can’t be cooked anymore.
Quite a few pages spent on Arch Obler, creator of one of my favorite old time radio shows: Lights Out.
King recounted two classics. The first was The Chicken Heart that Ate the World. I’ve heard that one before (and it was made even more famous by a classic Bill Cosby routine).
The second was about a dentist who exacts revenge on a patient who had harmed his wife. I was squirming while reading it. I can only imagine what it was to hear it! The sound of drilling!
One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper’s second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment.
Funny to think that King was able to get away with criticizing a director (Tobe Hooper) in print and yet go on collaborating with him on several adaptations.
A corollary to this is that there are “good” deaths and “bad” deaths; most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds at age eighty (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of really fine vino, and a really super lay), but very few of us are interested in finding out how it might feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift…
Is a “really super lay” possible at 80? Asking for a friend who’s closer to 80 than to 20.
…in the process of researching a forthcoming novel about a father who tries to bring his son back from the dead, I collected a stack of funeral literature a foot high…
I am soooooo excited for when I reach that book in my journey. Sadly, it may be two years before I get there.
…the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.
How King didn’t bring up the OBVIOUS comparisons between Amityville and his own haunted house story, The Shining, was surprising. The point about Amityville being about a family in crisis, driven to moving into the house because of financial hardship… That’s too on-the-nose with the Torrance family.
That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the techno-horror films of the fifties… is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden—first by itself and then trundled on missile carriers.
Could he possibly have imagined how scientists are vilified today when it comes to climate change and pandemics?
…the computer which has taken over everything tells Forbin, its creator, that people will do more than learn to accept its rule; they will come to accept it as a god. “Never!” Forbin responds…
Forbin had not yet seen a Trump rally, though.
I was thrown out of a bar called the Stardust in Brewer, Maine, by a construction worker back in that happy year of 1968. The guy had muscles on his muscles and told me I could come back and finish my beer “after you get a haircut, you faggot fairy.”
I’ve often commented how thrown off I was by King’s liberal use of the f-slur in his early novels. Now, I almost get it.
The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus, where the world is menaced by sixty-foot bunnies.
Now, I absolutely MUST SEE THIS MOVIE!
Day 603: Aug 26, 2023
Moving forward with Danse Macabre, where we are now deep into the “theory” of early horror movies. This is no mere historical account; it’s an analysis of society and of the human psyche.
Honestly, it’s taking the fun out of the experience. A little bit.
The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair…
“subteen”?
I’m glad to finally reach a discussion about one of my favorite films of all time – The Exorcist! This is one of the most human and spiritual stories ever produced.
And after only a few paragraphs in which King made the argument that The Exorcist was really about youth rebellion (🤔) he moved onto discuss at length the film adaptation of his book, Carrie.
There was a fun little “name that movie” trivia game in which the synopsis of 20 films were retold in the form of a fairy tale. For example,
Once upon a time some brave explorers landed on another planet to see if someone needed help. Nobody did, but by the time they got going again, they discovered that they had picked up the bogeyman.
I only got 5 right. And after seeing the answers, I’d never heard of most of them. “X—THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES”???
The exact plot specifics of The Tingler, a film so exquisitely low budget that it probably made back its production costs after a thousand people had seen it, now escape me, but there was this monster (the Tingler, natch) that lived on fear. When its victims were so scared they couldn’t even scream, it attached itself to their spines and sorta . . . well . . . tingled them to death. I know that must sound pretty fucking stupid, but in the film, it worked
Hah! 😂😂😂
But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye. We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that’s the worst…
A good point. A giant eye is creepy. A giant nose is comical.
Deduction number two: After you’re dead, you won’t shit if someone drops a brick on your ass.
Well… THERE’S a line you don’t read every day!
Invasion of the Saucer-Men… was shot in seven days, and in the conclusion, the Heroic Teenagers use their hot-red headlights to “light” the monsters to death.
Oh hey… I actually saw this film as a little kid! I remember thinking how clever those teens were in that master plan of theirs.
At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films: Carrie (United Artists/theatrical/1976) ’Salem’s Lot (Warners/television/1979), and The Shining (Warners/theatrical/1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated…
Oh Stephen, if only you knew what was in store for you with the thirteen Children of the Corn movies and The Lawnmower Man abomination…
This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.
Wow – right from the source here. Brutal.
Day 604: Aug 27, 2023
Another day with Danse Macabre, where yesterday was a fun review of classic horror films and what makes them good or bad. I’ve added a few to my “must-watch” list as a result.
You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it’s going to be bad yet hoping against hope—irrationally—that it is going to be good. Excellence occurs surely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late-1979 NBCTV movie The Aliens Are Coming.
King’s focus has shifted to television, but the TV of that time (early 80s) is unrecognizable compared to the TV of today.
Years after Thriller, a production company associated with NBC—the network upon which Thriller was telecast—optioned three stories from my 1978 collection, Night Shift, and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called “Strawberry Spring,”
This never did get made, but King also never mentioned what the other two optioned stories were. Interesting to surmise.
Curtis went on to make another picture with Matheson and William F. Nolan which fans still talk about—Trilogy of Terror… The segment of this trio of stories most frequently mentioned was the final one, based on Matheson’s short story “Prey.” In it, Ms. Black gives a tour-de-force solo performance as a woman pursued by a tiny devil-doll with a spear.
OMG, I remember seeing this when I was only single-digits years old! Hadn’t thought about it in decades.
Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television… And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of “it’s only make-believe,” The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism (“He Lives,” starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler)
I’ve seen every episode of this classic series but I’ll be damned if I remember this one.
…I can’t imagine why we would want to deal with all the books published in the genre anyway; most of them are just downright bad… If you want to read John Saul and Frank de Felitta, go right ahead.
Again with the John Saul bashing! I can only imagine what poor John thought as people came up to him and asked, “Didja hear what King said about you?”
King now turns his attention to “modern” written horror works (at least modern from a 1981 perspective) starting with Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”.
I’ve not read this one, but I did enjoy Straub’s “Floating Dragon” and “Koko”. And of course his two collaborations with King. When I’m done with this journey, I may have to visit the Straub catalog.
Is this really such a difficult or paradoxical idea when you consider how short our lives are in a wider life-scheme where redwoods live two thousand years and the Galapagos sea turtles may live for a thousand?
Live for a thousand??? I had to look this up.
Day 605: Aug 28, 2023
I’m more than halfway through Danse Macabre, where yesterday King briefly touched on television’s role in horror back in that day, lingering on The Twilight Zone. Then he pivoted to the meat of the book – 10 horror novels of note.
Most horror movies employing the frame-story device to tell three or four short tales work unevenly or not at all.
Was this statement made before or after Cat’s Eye, I wonder. 🤔
After a review of “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson (which I’ve never read but did enjoy Mike Flanagan’s adaptation) King spent considerable time on “The House Next Door” by Anne Rivers Siddons – a Southern gothic tale set near Atlanta about the making of a haunted house and the various families it ruins.
King returned back to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson for a much deeper dive. Based on his description, the plot is quite different from the excellent Netflix series and quite intriguing on its own right.
He prefaces his story with several classical references to what we’ve been calling the Bad Place—the Hebraic for haunted, as in haunted house, tsaraas, meaning “leprous”; Homer’s phrase for it, aidao domos, meaning a house of Hades.
I daresay there’s a few excellent ideas for names of metal rock bands in that sentence.
As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level—which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson’s concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception.
I owned a house like this once. It wasn’t cool enough to be haunted. It was just a shit house. Maybe that’s my story: The Haunting of Shit House.
Day 606: Aug 29, 2023
Plowing through Danse Macabre, where yesterday King settled on a deep comparison of two novels: “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The House Next Door”. He said he’s going to discuss 10 novels and has gotten through 3 so far. Looking forward to seeing what’s next!
We know there has been an incident of telekinesis in Eleanor’s past; at the age of twelve, stones fell from the ceilings “and pattered madly on the roof.”
Ah – an obvious inspiration for a similar scene he wrote in Carrie.
The next book he turns to is Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. Although I never read the book, I have seen the movie and found it to be rather silly, especially at the end. King obviously thinks highly enough of the work to include it so perhaps I need to give it another shot.
[quoting Levin] “And perhaps more importantly, Polanski’s directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides happily, I think, with my own writing style.”
I have flagged the film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby to give it another watch.
(two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty—Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky).
Wow – to insult Blatty like that… I’m a huge fan of his and have read ALL of his work. I’m especially attracted to his sharp, absurdist sense of humor. Shame on you, King!
Next book on King’s list is The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney.
I don’t know if this is the beginning of the trope of “aliens who look just like us” (see Marvel’s Secret Invasion for the latest example) but I find it to be extremely boring and lazy storytelling.
It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don’t know what it would be.
Fotonovel?
Day 607: Aug 30, 2023
Danse Macabre, is not a quick read, but it does have enjoyable moments. Yesterday King reviewed “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Body Snatchers”. This makes 5 of the 10 novels he promised to cover. What will today bring?
We suggest, in our endless inventiveness, that Captain Mantell did not die of oxygen starvation back there in 1947 while chasing that odd daytime reflection of Venus which veteran pilots call a sundog; no, he was chasing a ship from another world which exploded his plane with a death ray when he got too close.
Captain Who?
The next book in his list is Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”. Again, it’s a book I’ve heard of but have never read. I thought I was a well-read person but King is making me feel downright illiterate!
When the lightning rod salesman comes to town at the beginning of Bradbury’s fabulous tale (“running just ahead of the storm”) and tells the boys that lightning will strike Jim’s house…
This scene from “Something Wicked This Way Comes” nearly lifted in its entirety and placed into “The Dead Zone”.
Yesterday, it was telekinesis and rocks falling from the sky making its way from “The Haunting of Hill House” into “Carrie”.
Incredible.
Day 608: Aug 31, 2023
Only two more days left to Danse with the Macabre. Yesterday, King reached book six of his 10- book review by taking on a Bradbury horror. Will he bring up today a book I’ve actually read?
Nope. The 7th book is “The Shrinking Man” by Richard Matheson.
I wonder if a book like “IT” is going to seem as quaint to my grandchildren as this book appears to me.
[Matheson’s words] But it turned out they were going to make it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin and I wasn’t going to write it anyway. John Landis was going to direct it at the time…
I have a feeling that would’ve been a CLASSIC movie!
After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Cary begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season.
One has to believe this same “what-if” scenario inspired King many decades later to write “Elevation” where a man loses a fraction of a lb of weight every day.
…all fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.
While going through this King journey I’m also simultaneously reading all of the Cosmere books written by Brandon Sanderson. His works align with King’s definition of “great fantasy”.
All of this was well-meaning bullshit, but bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald’s Secret Sauce.
I had a hard time getting past this sentence. McDonald’s has a “secret sauce”?
…you seem to be able to count on a really good novel of horror and/or the supernatural (or at least a really interesting one) every year or so—and much the same could be said for the horror films. A vintage year may produce as many as three amid the paperback-original dreck about hateful, paranormal children and presidential candidates from hell…
I chuckled at this little bit of self-deprecation.
The eighth book in King’s list is “The Parasite” by Ramsey Campbell.
Well, maybe that was a fake-out because King spent the next several pages talking about a different Ramsey Campbell book, “The Doll Who Ate His Mother”.
What a bizarre title!
I wrote a story four years ago called “Survivor Type,” which I still have not been able to sell…
Not even the men’s magazines would consider that one, and it sits in my file cabinet to this day, waiting for a good home. It will probably never find one, though.
What a classic story THAT turned out to be!
More of it is a simple failure of that most basic writer’s tool, the working vocabulary. If you’re writing a haunted-house story and you don’t know the difference between a gable and a gambrel, a cupola and a turret, paneling and wain-scotting, you, sir or madam, are in trouble.
I took a stab at writing years ago and this indeed was the biggest challenge. I admire good fiction writers. They seem to observe, know and recall EVERYTHING!
Day 609: Sep 1, 2023
It’s my final day with the book Danse Macabre! This “top 10” contemporary horror books section (at least, contemporary as of 1981) has been interesting. I don’t think I’ll be picking up all of them to read (“The Doll Who Ate Its Mother” is a hard pass) but there are a few I’m genuinely interested in.
The next book in his list is “The Fog” by James Herbert (which, as King is quick to point out has no relation to John Carpenter’s movie of the same name).
Never heard of this author or the book, but this edition’s cover is quite nasty!
Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton’s “Seven Heads of Bushongo” or “Satan’s Virgin,” by Ray Cummings.
Now THERE’S a pair of books I would pick up based on the title alone!
“You’re not a writer at all,” an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. “You’re a goddamn industry. How do you ever expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?” Well, in point of fact, I’m not “a goddamn industry” (unless it’s a cottage industry); I work steadily, that’s all.
He may deny that he is an industry, but I think he is responsible for economic activity that outranks the GDP of quite a few countries.
The final book in this discussion is the short story collection “Strange Wine” by Harlan Ellison. I know Ellison’s name mostly from TV scripts and adaptations but I know very little about his written work.
King describes the story “Croatoan” from Strange Wine that sounds so f—ed up, I won’t repeat it here. But I will be securing a copy of this book, I assure you!
Humor and horror are the original Chang and Eng of literature, and Ellison knows it. We laugh . . . but there is still that undercurrent of unease.
An interesting simile. Here’s a visual reference if needed.
People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don’t have a few warps in your record, you’re going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
My God, if only he had an inkling as to what would transpire in the first quarter of the twenty-first!
I completed that lengthy chapter and for posterity’s sake, here are the 10 books King covered:
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
The Doll Who Ate His Mother – Ramsey Campbell
The Fog – James Herbert
Strange Wine – Harlan Ellison
About five years ago I finished The Shining, took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was The House on Value Street. It was going to be a roman à clef about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing…, her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angeles… the fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax.
I wonder where that story went off to?!
The first Dionysian incursion in The Exorcist comes when Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears that lionlike roar in the attic. In The Stand, Dionysus announces himself with the crash of an old Chevy into the pumps of an out-of-the-way gas station in Texas.
And on it goes for several paragraphs drawing parallels between two of my favorite books. I’m in heaven.
And I’ve reached the end of Danse Macabre where King ends with a list of 100 must-see horror films and 100 must-read horror books.
An obsessive-compulsive individual (like, I don’t know, someone who is on a 6-year journey to explore everything King-related) might just take those lists on as a challenge.
Postscript: Tonight I watched the movie “The Brood”. I did so because:
(a) It’s a David Cronenberg movie and he rocks!
(b) It was recommended by King in “Danse Macabre”.
This one of the stupidest f’ing films I’ve ever seen.
I love the master of horror, but I’m never going to listen to another recommendation King ever gives me again.
Day 610: Sep 2, 2023
Now listening to the first half of The Losers’ Club epic episode on “Dance Macabre”. I’m quite surprised they spent so much time on this non-fiction work, but they did release a 3-hour episode on it.
A 3 hour episode commenting on a very thick book that itself is a commentary on horror doesn’t lend itself to catchy phrases to share or witty insights worth repeating. It’s pretty much a straight rehashing of King’s major themes as retold by a group of millennials applying them to more recent film and written works.
Day 611: Sep 3, 2023
I watched The Blair Witch Project and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows last night, again, based on King’s recommendation from his new forward to the 2010 edition of Danse Macabre.
And again, I was seriously disappointed. And bored. Very bored.
Today, I’m listening to the only other episode of Danse Macabre from all the podcasts I subscribe to. This one comes from The Kingcast with guest Chris McCay.
When the co-host of this very popular Stephen King themed podcast admits he hasn’t read Danse Macabre in a 90 minute episode about Danse Macabre, it’s a bit disappointing and an anti-climatic end to this step of the journey.
This brings me to the end of the Danse Macabre portion of this journey. Another achievement unlocked! Here are some final thoughts and stats:
Number of items consumed: 3
Hours spent: 16
Days passed: 16
Movies watched: 0
Current ETA for completing this entire journey: Oct 2027
Final thoughts about the book:
🟡 This felt like the longest read of any of his works so far. Even though it didn’t match The Stand in terms of page or word count, it felt like a much longer read without things like dialog and action to keep things moving along.
🟢 Stephen King is one funny m-f’er. There were definitely lines in this book that had me cracking up out loud.
🔴 It was really tough to relate to material being discussed that were relevant 50-60 years ago.
***SIDE NOTE***
Tomorrow, I’m “circling back” to watch The Boogeyman (2023) and listen to the podcast episodes that came out about it.
And then I move onto the next step of my journey.
I am trying to keep in chronological order of novel release, with a few exceptions. For example, I moved on to Doctor Sleep right after The Shining and that reaped so many rewards for me. I also chose to wait until The Bachman Books collection before hitting those novels.
For books released in the same year, I hadn’t paid much attention. In hindsight, I should’ve read Danse Macabre *before* Cujo since that was released earlier in 1981. But no harm, no foul here.
Which led me to planning for his 1982 works: I initially was going to dive into Creepshow but then I noticed it was released on Nov 12 while Different Seasons was published on Aug 17.
So I rearranged my plan. But this morning, I uncovered something earth-shattering…
“The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger” was released (albeit in limited release) on June 10, 1982.
This means THAT will be the next work I cover after The Boogeyman.
Not only that, I’ll be going through the ENTIRE Dark Tower saga. From prequel to the horrid movie. From written word to graphic novels. I suspect this will take me an entire year, if not longer. There are 361 items I’ve captured for this stage of my journey – but what a journey that will be!
I’ll finish with my milestone rankings so far (based on entire experience – not just the book):
- The Stand
- Doctor Sleep
- The Shining
- Night Shift
- Salem’s Lot
- Carrie
- Cujo
- Firestarter
- The Dead Zone
- Danse Macabre
Day 715: Dec 16, 2023
***circling back***
My final step in this “circling back” mode is with Just King Things and their review of Danse Macabre.
I certainly didn’t expect this, but this episode is a 2-hour tear-down of this work. It’s an intellectual dissection (one of the hosts teaches literary analysis) and it’s evident they were not impressed with King’s reflections on Horror as a genre.
“I mourn for those who took this class with Stephen King.”
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