Danse Macabre (book)
First edition cover
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| Author | Stephen King |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-Fiction |
| Publisher | Everest House |
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Publication date
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April 20, 1981 |
| Media type | Hardcover |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | |
Danse Macabre is a 1981 non-fiction book by Stephen King, about horror fiction in print, radio, film and comics, and the influence of contemporary societal fears and anxieties on the genre. It was republished on February 23, 2010 with an additional new essay entitled "What's Scary".
Danse Macabre examines the various influences on King's own writing, and important genre texts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Danse Macabre explores the history of the genre as far back as the Victorian era, but primarily focuses on the 1950s to the 1970s (roughly the era covering King's own life at the time of publication). King peppers his book with informal academic insight, discussing archetypes, important authors, common narrative devices, "the psychology of terror", and his key theory of "Dionysian horror".
Stephen King's novel The Stand was translated to Spanish language as La Danza de la Muerte (which means "Dance of Death"), generating confusion between the two books. Similarly, his 1978 collection of short stories Night Shift was released in France as Danse Macabre in 1980. To avoid confusion, the actual "Danse Macabre" essay was given the title "Anatomie de l'Horreur" ("An Anatomy of Horror") when it was released in France 14 years later, in 1995.
In the introduction, King credits Bill Thompson, the editor of his first five published novels, and later editor at Doubleday, as being the inspiration for its creation.
... Bill called me and said, "Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing. We'll do it together, if you want."
The concept intrigued and frightened me at the same time.
Thompson ultimately convinced King that if he wrote such a genre survey, he would no longer have to answer tedious, repetitive interview questions on the topic.
Danse Macabre was originally published in hardcover by Everest House on April 20, 1981 (). Along with the trade hardcover, Everest House also published a limited edition of the book, signed by Stephen King, limited to 250 numbered copies and 15 lettered copies. The limited edition did not have a dust jacket, and instead was housed in a slipcase. Later, Berkley Books published a mass market paperback edition of the book on December 1, 1983 (). A new introduction was added to this edition, entitled "Forenote to the Paperback Edition." Among other things, King discusses the fact that he asked Dennis Etchison "to comb the errors" in the original edition, and thus the 1983 paperback edition contains corrected text of Danse Macabre. In the book's original Forenote, readers were also asked to send in any errors to be corrected, and those were incorporated as well. On February 23, 2010, Gallery Books published a new edition of Danse Macabre (), a trade paperback with the corrected 1983 text, including both the original and the 1983 introductions, as well as a newly written piece "What's Scary," which serves as a forenote to this 2010 edition.
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