Jeff’s Reviews > Danse Macabre > Status Update

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.

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)

This seems like confusion of forms. Visual for intellectual: "Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely under the control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end. I refer you, for instance, to Alien...Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin T-shirt..." Alien isnt a novel. The story isn't sexist.

This is exactly why Lovecraft always loses me so quickly, or I should say, discussions of the greatness of his legacy lose me:

"After all, what is the paltry inside evil of the A-bomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or Yog-Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young?"

It always comes out sounding like an Avengers plotline.

"Oddly enough, the comforting lesson that many horror movies seem to teach the young is that fate is kind. Not a bad lesson at all for the little people, who so rightly see themselves as hostages to forces larger than themselves." The genre isn't short on stories that end badly, but neither does it shy away from happy ever afters. Maybe even the ones that end badly tell us something about what's right.

Here's a glimmer of that King wisdom readers are looking for:

One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth . . . and without so much as a burp of indigestion.

The writing in this book just doesn't seem up to the quality of his other work around this time. It's all very nonchalant and uncrafted:

"Walk down any ordinary street in America and count the serious physical defects you see. If you can walk three miles and come up with more than half a dozen, you're beating the average by a good country mile."

Mixing proverbial miles with literal ones? Lazy phrasing.