Danse Macabre: Summary and Revelation

Over the course of the summer and fall, I listened to Stephen King's Danse Macabre in audiobook form. It was one of the last takeaways I grabbed off the shelves at Borders before the Great Shutdown, so I had been saving it for a special occasion, and it seemed like my commute to a new job fit the bill nicely. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the job would last exactly 42 workdays, and it would take me a lot longer to finish the book than I had anticipated. But I did finally get through it, and I thought I would take a minute to discuss some of the things I learned about horror, and writing in general.

One has to bear in mind that King wrote DM in the early 80s, when he about five years of being a well-known author under his belt. But what impressed me about it this time around (I read it for the first time back in 2001) was how immersed and well-read he was in the history and mythology of horror. I suppose that shouldn't really come as a surprise -- it's not like he dropped in out of the sky and was suddenly brilliant at it. He's lived and breathed the stuff his whole life, as many of the childhood anecdotes in DM will attest to. Maybe it's that I *want* him to have been cut out of whole cloth… Anyway, Danse Macabre is a great dive into the history of the horror genre, and the psychological purpose it serves. So here are my thoughts on it, and I should point out that any great revelations or poignant connections contained herein are probably Steve-o's, and not mine.

The three pillars of horror, he attests, that all modern horror is built on, are novels: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Bram Stoker's "Dracula", and Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". All three are scary stories and make your blood run cold, of course, but the reason they are all so effective is that they all tap into some dark part of the human psyche and give it physical shape and form. After all, all good forms of literature are really about two things at the same time, aren't they?

Frankenstein is about the fear of death, and what lies beyond death. Every zombie film/novel/TV show descends directly from this. What does it mean to be dead (and, by extension, alive)? And we’ve all lost someone we love… what if the dead could be brought back?

Dracula is fear of the outsider, the thing that threatens our safe little societies. Back when Twilight was becoming big, I put forth the argument that the "vampires" in those books aren't really vampires, they're tragically romantic superheroes. Stoker's Dracula works so well because, as a character, the Count embodies the darkest parts of everything that Victorian society (the book's original audience) was afraid of: sex, disease, aristocracy, anti-Christianity. Sparkly vampires embody none of these things.

And then there's Edward Hyde... in the book, several people say that there's nothing outwardly wrong with him, nothing they can put their finger on, but there's clearly something malevolent that they can tell just by looking at him. He embodies the fear of the anger and primalness in ourselves, the inner ape, the part that wants to rebel against the very fabric of the society that keeps us safe.

Now that I think about it, I might have spoken too soon about how zombies are descended directly from Frankenstein. When I was following up with the summation of Dracula's effectiveness, I almost wrote "When someone figures out what our modern society is really afraid of, then they'll have found the next wave of horror." But then I realized, they already have! Because the modern incarnation of zombies, and how all zombie tales now are an "apocalypse", not just isolated cases of singular horror, really have figured out what we're afraid of in today's world: globalism, societal breakdown, unstoppable disease. And, much as Edward Hyde has always hidden inside Henry Jekyll, one of the worst things about zombies is not that they're some outside force imposing itself on the innocent. They really *are* us. In some cases, zombies even manage to carry some vestige of their humanity through into their afterlife (Romero's Dawn of the Dead being the granddaddy of this train of thought, where zombies are instinctively compelled to go to the mall in a grotesque parody of living).

So let me close with a restatement of what I was originally going to state much earlier in this essay, before the thesis revealed itself: When some new mainline into our human fears rises to take the zombie's place, I'll be really interested to see what form it takes.