Jeff’s Reviews > Danse Macabre > Status Update

Whoah! Talk about dated. He savages Wes Craven just 4 years before horror fans are treated to Nightmare.

I've never been able to articulate why the Romero movies always frustrated me, despite the fact that they're among the handful of decent zombie movies in existence. King's example about the old woman eating a bug makes me think my issue with them is that the point of those movies is usually to be gross or disturbing. World War Z is a lot more fun.

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You've made a mistake when your book is obsolete three years after publication.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.