Jeff’s Reviews > Danse Macabre > Status Update

"...posters in New York suggested, that the Ayatollah Khomeini is a puppet of—yeah, you guessed it—David Rockefeller."

King's recollection of a visit from the Black Panthers is so much more interesting than everything else in this book.

This is the kind of thing King should have reserved for his diary, it's insulting to the reader to be so casual and aimless: "Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent"

King's fixations are admittedly entertaining. His grudge against hypothetical readers who turn to the back of the book to see the ending is almost as funny as his obviously sincere suggestion of publishing a book without the last 30 pages, which would be mailed to the reader only if they could accurately summarize everything that lead up to those pages.

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

Wish he'd elaborate on why he thinks Kubrick's Shining is "maddening, perverse and disappointing."

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."