Linkmeister

Horror lit-crit

I'm reading Stephen King's Danse Macabre, a 1980 recording of his thoughts about horror in film and books. In it he argues that Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the core works from which all other horror literature are descended. I can't disagree. He says:

They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and films -- those twentieth-century gothics which have become known as "the modern horror story." More than that, at the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls "the myth pool" -- that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed. Like an almost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out: the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.

All of these books, he says:

have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story: secrets best left untold and things left best unsaid. And yet Stevenson, Shelley and Stoker all promise to tell us the secret.

He doesn't say they fully succeeded in telling us that secret, but he doesn't say they precisely failed, either. He theorizes that their successes and failures in fully telling the secret may be what keeps the novels alive and vital.

Hard to argue with that. It's instructive that of the three authors, only Stevenson was successful in his other writings, although Stoker wrote several excellent short stories (see The Judge's House below). King suggests that novels are engines, meaning they have a story, and the creators of these novels filled them with enough invention to make the engines run exceptionally well. Somebody else will have to figure out why only RLS was able to re-ignite his own engine.

I admit I've never read a single piece of fiction King has written, so I don't know how the style here compares to his other books. It's almost conversational in tone, which makes sense, since it's an outgrowth of a course he taught in 1978 at the U of Maine titled "Themes in Supernatural Literature." The only thing wrong with it is that it was published in 1980 and hasn't been updated since. It's a fun read.

Posted by Linkmeister at November 15, 2009 10:42 AM | TrackBack