Status Updates From Danse macabre

It's crazy that King expects his readers to pay for reprinted reviews of bad movies that he then comments on, in addition to a quiz that takes up a couple of pages. This is Chizmar-level commoditization.

For 55 pages, he's been writing about "William Friedkin's Prophecy" and "tadpoles as big as salmon" but there are 20 or 30 pages between these references. He can't stay on topic for more than a sentence, which serves his purpose because the arguments he's making are mostly facile, very subjective or just one-sided. Wanting to be scared is counterintuitive, but serves a purpose, we get it.

The (apocryphal) ending of the movie about the x-ray eyes sounds pretty cool, but this list of movie moments is so tedious, even for someone who loves this stuff. The story about Bing Crosby's son is legitimately disturbing--King should have leaned more on that stuff.

The Tingler gimmick sounds very cool. And it sets the reader at ease to hear the author admit that the plot written out sounds "pretty fucking stupid" but "it helps if you're eleven years old."

Here's the "annoying autobiographical pause." Three paragraphs of self-indulgent Carrie compliments climaxing in this ultimate statement of literary self-gratification, where he calls his own (first) book "a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden." Give me a break, Mr. King.

Seriously, FOCUS. How are we a third of the way into this book, the author having used the phrase "social merit" three times already, and now we're beginning a chapter with the subheading "social horror"?

King really lets his writing get wild here. He's tossing out thousand-character sentences left and right and they don't say much.

You've made a mistake when your book is obsolete three years after publication. What a different book this would have been in light of John Carpenter's The Thing and an impending collaboration between King and Carpenter on Christine. At the time he published this book, he apparently had not yet finished (or had not published) Pet Sematary. Hopefully, he at least touches on Halloween.

"As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it." This sentence is emblematic of King's whole attitude in this book. Paragraphs are anything but tightly written, the argument is directionless and individual points are arguable.

Asking why children don't tour mortuaries as often as police departments is a stupid way of illustrating the point that death is taboo, and completely redundant for every reader who isn't a sociopath.

The Exorcist is a social issue movie about the societal fears of hoodlums and vulgar children? News to me. Is this like King's response to the literati of the day? He doesn't even introduce the ideas, it's like he just expects the readers to have been subjected to that line of argument already. I'd be very interested to hear him make the case, but he doesn't.

King's "annoying autobiographical pause" (chapter IV) really seems to be an ADD detour. It's not annoying, but it continues in the thread of the previous chapters discussing horror in radio, comics and eventually, movies. The dousing rod story was great, but how it connects to the academic "why do people like horror" section is beyond me. Should have started with chapter 5, segued to forms of media, then the thesis.

'The paradox is this: children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible world—a perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from.'

Yup

"...each succeeds in overleaping reality and entering a world of total fantasy. But we are not left behind in this leap; we are brought along and allowed to view these archetypes of Werewolf, Vampire, and Thing not as figures of myth but as figures of near reality—which is to say, we are brought along for the ride of our lives. And this, at least, surpasses "good." Man . . . that's great." It's fantasy, that's it?

in Stevenson's own terms, the conflict between mortification and gratification. This old struggle is the cornerstone of Christianity, but...in mythic terms, the twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality:...the Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility, "always treading the upward path") and the Dionysian (...partying and physical gratification; the getdownandboogie side of human nature)