English - Mp3 - AudioBook - Unabridged - 748 MBDanse Macabre (1981) is a non-fiction book by Stephen King, about horror fiction in print, radio, film and comics, and the genre's influence on United States popular culture. It was republished on February 23, 2010 with an additional new essay entitled "What's Scary".
Danse Macabre examines the various influences on King's own writing, and important genre texts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Danse Macabre explores the history of the genre as far back as the Victorian era, but primarily focuses on the 1950s to the 1970s (roughly the era covering King's own life). King peppers his book with informal academic insight, discussing archetypes, important authors, common narrative devices, "the psychology of terror", and his key theory of "Dionysian horror".
Stephen King's novel The Stand was translated to Spanish language as La Danza de la Muerte (which means "Danse Macabre", generating confusion between the two books. Similarly, his 1978 collection of short stories Night Shift was released in France as Danse Macabre in 1980. To avoid confusion, the actual "Danse Macabre" essay was given the title "Anatomie de l'Horreur" ("An Anatomy of Horror" when it was released in France 14 years later, in 1995.
Despite using King's college teaching notes as the backbone of the text, Danse Macabre has a casual, non-linear writing style.
In the introduction, titled "October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance", King begins by explaining why he wrote the book, and then describes the event itself: the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, intended as his personal introduction to what he calls "real horror". This is followed by the chapter "Tales of the Hook", specifically the urban legend of the escaped criminal who left his hook on the door handle of the car where lovers had parked. The author uses this for his contention that horror in general "offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty."
In the following chapter, he creates a template for descriptions of his macabre subject. Entitled “Tales of the Tarot", the chapter has nothing to do with the familiar tarot card deck. Rather, King borrows the term to describe his observations about major archetypal characters of the horror genre, which he posits come from three British novels, one Irish: the vampire (from Dracula), the werewolf (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and the "Thing Without a Name" (from Frankenstein). King sees deeply sexual undertones—in light of its Victorian Era publication—in Dracula. Frankenstein is reviewed as "a Shakespearean tragedy", and he argues that "its classical unity is broken only by the author's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies—is it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the life-spark?" King does not mistake Mr. Hyde for a "traditional" werewolf, but rather sees the character as the origin of the modern archetype defined by werewolves. The evil-werewolf archetype, argues King, stems from the base and violent side of humanity. These major archetypes are then reviewed in their historical context, ranging from their original appearances to their modern-day equivalents, up to and including cartoon breakfast cereal characters such as Frankenberry and Count Chocula.
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