King's Highway pt. 36: It

"This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free.

NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen;
JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve;
OWEN PHILLIP KING, at seven.
Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists."

Not only is that a nice dedication, but it's a useful sentiment / mission statement to keep in mind as you make your way through these 1138 pages.

Wraparound cover to the 25th anniversary edition

From the FearNet review: "It marks a deliberate shift in King's career, a stated conscious decision to sum up everything he had to say about children and monsters and functioning as a statement of intent as to what he hoped to accomplish with his later novels: explorations of adults and the dual natures of creativity and creation.  It is a massive undertaking, not only addressing and expanding upon the themes in his earlier fiction, but also transcending those themes, uncovering and creating something new."

And how! Here's another good review.

WHAT YOU'LL SEE

Chances are, if you're reading this, you know what It is all about, so I won't devote too much space to the plot. For those who don't know, though, here is Library Journal's summary: "Moving back and forth between 1958 and 1985, the story tells of seven children in a small Maine town who discover the source of a series of horrifying murders. Having conquered the evil force once, they are summoned together 27 years later when the cycle begins again."

That's all you really need to know, though one of the top-rated comments on Its Amazon page goes a bit further:

"It is two stories being told at once. One is the story of their childhood, of their first encounter with Pennywise the Clown, their troubles with the local bullies, the impact of It upon their lives, their own personal struggles, and (Its) eventual defeat. This is told from the beginning of the book to the near end of it. At the same time, the story of the return to Derry, of the research done to see what It was, the memories that were now urging to return, and subsequent events that followed which I won't spoil here. Both timelines alternate in their tellings to fit one another perfectly, even if not in perfect chronological order, and they're even further juiced with quick points of time long before their own, dipping into what else It has been up to. This construction is utterly beautiful in how it's placed, and completely builds the story up for all its plot points and climax."

I have to mostly-agree with that last sentence. Whatever else one might say of it, It is beautifully structured. (These pronouns are going to screw me up; apologies in advance) The events of 1957-1958 flow seamlessly with the events of 1985-1986, and the intermittent sections (narrated by Mike Hanlon) about Derry's past complement them perfectly, adding depth and nuance. Their collective amnesia about their interactions with It works to the story's advantage, as well; the reader discovers as they re-discover. (I also quite like how the adults all more or less ignore what goes on in their town every twenty-seven years; it adds to the children's feeling of loneliness and solidarity) Although it's one long-ass novel, it never feels bloated.

"Its true form as perceived by the human eye is that of a female spider that houses Its essence: namely writhing orange lights (termed "Deadlights"), looking directly into which can either kill a person or drive them insane."

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And the only way to defeat an evil spider/clown that feeds on fear ("fear salts the meat") is to give yourself 100% to your inner child/ utilize that magical imagination that only truly exists when you're a kid. As one other Amazon reviewer notes, "What is scarier: Pennywise or the reality of what happens to us once we leave childhood behind?"

But in some ways, of course, the reality is we want to leave childhood behind. It can just as easily be viewed as the terrifying deep from which we're relieved to escape, a Maurice Sendak pit of horrors, colonization, and sublimated panic.

And speaking of Sendak, It melds the sensibilities of  The Goonies with Where the Wild Things Are. At the same time that childhood/ innocence/ imagination is a comfort and that the solidarity formed during that time endures in a way like no other, it's also the source of all our terror. You are never more vulnerable than when you are a child, but, It argues, perhaps you're never better-equipped to deal with what life can throw at you, either.

As The Turtle tells Bill in the last act, "What can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again."

This site never fails to crack me up. Worth enlarging for a better view. All clowns are the minotaur.

WHOM YOU'LL MEET

I originally planned for It to be the last stop on the King's Highway. (All roads lead to IT, or some such thing.) But as it introduces a rather important character/ concept to the Dark Tower series, it was bumped up the queue on account of...

At the time of publication, Maturin (aka "The Turtle") had not been introduced in the Dark Tower.

I was 13 when I read It. It was the first new King book I'd read. (I remember a radio campaign on 92PRO-FM and WHJY, but I can find no internet evidence of this. I can't be making that up, can I? Perhaps it's the search terms I'm using.) I recall my friends being amused at how quickly and steadily my bookmark moved centimeter-by-centimeter from front to back over a succession of study halls. (Maybe they weren't even amused, actually. Speed-reading is a useful skill to have, but it's a bit like being the guy on the X-Men whose mutant power is... well, speed-reading.) The Turtle is introduced during the Ritual of Chud.

No, not this 80s "classic." But bonus points if you knew what the letters stood for without being told.

From StrangeHorizons: "This Himalayan tradition, the Ritual of Chud, requires the shaman to meet the taelus, the shape-changer, face to face. After the holy man and the monster each stick their tongues out and overlap them, "you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye" (675), Bill explains. The two then engage in a riddle contest."

(More riddling! Blaine the Mono would be happy.)

Anyway, so there I am in 8th grade, reading this, and suddenly the main hero mentally "bites tongues" with the main villain. Like something out of Marvel's Secret Wars, they then rocket through spacetime towards something called "the Deadlights" beyond all conception of reality. Before they get there, Bill speaks with a giant, cosmic turtle who, it is revealed, created the universe once by vomiting it up. He tells Bill, basically, Nice to meet you and all, but you better get your head in the game, and I take no part in these affairs...

And, then he's done. When Bill, Ritchie and Pennywise Chud-it-out for a second time, Pennywise tells them the turtle is dead. (But, he isn't, don't worry.) And that's that. Wait, what? Yep. I remember thinking 'What the hell is this cosmic turtle stuff?' when I read it in the 80s. And probably would have this time, as well, had I not been reading the Dark Towers. Still, this is kind of... stoney stuff.

Speaking of being stoned, I got this image for Turtle Island (aka North America according to Gary Snyder and others) from a site for "Uniting the Indigenous Peoples to Create the Indigo Bridge." More power to them and all (sincerely) but damn! BLAAOW! I think Rusted Root's CD sales just shot up from my typing those words.

So, we don't really learn much about the Turtle here except that he exists, floats in the space beyond all rational meaning, maybe created the universe while he was hungover, and, you know, maybe he just sort of died. If I sound critical or mocking of this, let me also say I look forward to finding out more about the Turtle in the last few Dark Tower books, but it's clear it's a benevolent force that, despite what it tells Bill, does help King protagonists from time to time. I kind of love the cosmic randomness of the Turtle's introduction and would have it no other way.

Next, one of King's most popular creations, Pennywise the Clown aka IT. There is a good summation of what exactly it is at the SK wiki. But "evil shape-shifting clown" works as a placeholder.

Part of Pennywise's popularity is due to Tim Curry's performance in the TV adaptation.

Funny, disturbing, memorable. (And that clip above is rather shockingly suggestive, isn't it? Creepy.)

A performance equal to Dennis Hopper's "Frank" from Blue Velvet.

Not that I'm comparing it to Blue Velvet.

Overall, the TV adaptation is a failure, I think, but we'll get to that momentarily. It has its moments, to be sure, but it is only a dim echo of the novel. Tim Curry's Pennywise, though, seems to have settled comfortably into the collective unconscious, another constellation next to Cujo, Christine, Children of the Corn, and Red Rum.

Why, h-h-h-hi, B-b-b-b-b-b-ill!

As I mentioned when I covered "The Library Policeman," Pennywise may or may not be related to some other King villains. (Mr. Linoge from Storm of the Century? I'd like to see a Deadlights family tree.)

And The Loser's Club, our heroes.

Top row: Ben, Stan, Ritchie, Pennywise (photobomb!) and Eddie. Bottom row: Mike, Beverly, and Stuttering Bill.

As kids.

All richly-drawn and detailed, and each serves the plot/ brings a unique weapon to the fight against It.

Guest cameo: Richard "Dick" Halloran: A chef in Derry Army E Company. He's only in it for a hot minute, saving Mike Hanlon's father at the fire at the Black Spot. I'd forgotten all about this (and if I ever learned it to begin with, I forgot that, too) so this was a pleasant surprise. And if you're asking yourself Who the hell is Dick Halloran? you're going to kick yourself once you find out. You almost wish you could reach in the novel and tell him to never under any circumstances accept a job in Colorado.

TRAIL NOTES

- Okay, this came out in 1986.

Here's the cover of the copy I had back then.

Here's the copy I got this year for $3.50 at Myopic.(The Shakespeare and Co. of Chicago! The That's Entertainment of Used Bookstores Everywhere!)

Open to the publication page of this last copy and what do you see?

First Signet Printing 1981?

I have it on good authority that "there must have been some misprints; the novel was unquestionably NOT published in 1981... an excerpt from it -- called "The Bird and the Album" -- WAS published (in the program for that year's World Fantasy Convention, which was called A Fantasy Reader) in 1981.  So maybe that's where the confusion comes from. I've got three copies of the book, and they all say 1986.  So if yours says 1981, odds are you are the owner of a potentially valuable misprint."

Or, I have one that was published on a different level of the Dark Tower, which is the theory I prefer. I'm tempted to write 'PROPERTY OF JAKE CHAMBERS' on the inside cover.

To complicate matters, go to Amazon and they list the book as being published in 1987! Get it together, internet.

- The band Shark Puppy from Duma Key is not a real band, but King quotes one of their "songs" a few times in the text. If you look at the copyright page at the beginning of the book, you see: Permission to use lyrics from "Dig" by Shark Puppy (R. Tozier, W. Denbrough), granted by Bad Nineteen Music, copyright 1986. R. Tozier and W. Denbrough are, of course, Ritchie and Stuttering Bill. Nice touch.

- Who wouldn't watch a 'Tales from Derry' ongoing show? I sure would.

TRAIL DIFFICULTY

Fans of short reads (or short blogs) will not be pleased... but, for what it's worth, the book reads pretty quickly. It is definitely the proverbial "page-turner." I was on page 800-something before I realized Crikey, I'm on page 800-something! 

"Beep Beep, Ritchie!" appears in this novel around 100,000 times. I'd like to think whomever made this clip below is commenting on that.

Along those lines, although it didn't bother me, Bill's stuttering might be a stumbling block for some readers. It's an essential part of his character, so I wouldn't change a thing, but the stutters plus the 'Beep Beep's really add to the page count.

Henry Bowzer, the bully/psycho of the book, is one of those flush-the-psychic-toilet-type villains. Everything negative is loaded up and dumped on him. An Alpha Male of racism, anti-semitism, etc. He does come off as truly menacing, though, which is no small feat when you're sharing bad-guy-center-stage with Pennywise. But for my personal taste, Henry was a bit overdone.

And, well, let's just look it straight in the face. At the end of the book, after the final confrontation/ egg-stomping with It, the Losers Club loses its way in the sewers. Beverly steps up to the plate to save them. And by that, I mean, she has sex with everyone, one at a time. Everyone settles in for a nice old-fashioned romantic sewer gangbang.

King's explanation: "I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."

Strange Horizons' take: "Beverly, the only girl in the circle, presents a special case; she employs no material talisman, but the power of her awakening sexuality. When the circle threatens to fall apart after the first defeat of It, causing the children to lose their way in the tunnels beneath the Barrens, Bev, like a priestess, recreates the bond by coupling with each of the boys. King here seems to allude to the familiar magical motif of a virgin sacrifice, but again he sets the image in a context of personal spiritual power, not the rituals of an organized cult. "There was power in this act, all right," Bev reflects, "a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep" (1082). When she experiences her first orgasm (with Ben), "she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it" (1084), forging the necessary connection."

Samuel L. Jackson's take:

I really don't know what to say about this one. I guess there are aspects of both explanations that make sense to me, but at the end of the day, this still strikes me as wrong. Not in the won't someone please think of the children sense, but in the not-sure-if-this-actually-works sense. This sequence is the only thing (not counting the random wtf-ness of The Turtle) that keeps It from being an unreserved masterpiece. (Though really, how could you put it up against anything that doesn't have a cosmic turtle/ pre-teen sewer gangbang? It's a category of one.) But flippancy aside, it truly is both a remarkably well-constructed novel and a wholly absorbing read.

I wonder, actually, why it's never been targeted by angry groups, of any variety (it's easy to imagine both hardcore feminists and hardcore offended-about-un-Christian-values/communism uniting on this front, something as rare as the transit of the Venus). Not even so much why but how. (shrugs)

(I'd love it if Chris Columbus revealed this was his original idea for the ending for The Goonies. If I were him, I'd have been telling that joke since the late 80's.)

SCENIC VIEW 

Like The Stand, but even more-so, this suffers from an attempt to PG-ify definitely-R-rated material. (Hell, X-rated: unsurprisingly, the filmmakers chose not to portray the tweener sewer get-down in their adaptation.) Whereas Pennywise, as aforementioned, comes across in all his lunatic glory, Henry Bowzer does not. This was a time on American TV where you could still use "the n-word" if you put it in the mouth of a racist, but even so, Henry's effectiveness is nullified somewhat.

That's perhaps the problem. Excising the material of anything not-ready-for-prime-time fatally injures the story. (Although this:

is very funny to me.)

The casting is good (I remember being truly surprised by John Ritter in this back in 1990; I'd only ever seen him in Three's Company and Real Men); the direction is fine. Excepting the above, everything hums along fine for the first hour or so. So what ruins it? Basically, this:

Not only does it look cheesy as hell, but it ret-cons the whole damn story. All it takes is a couple of rocks to kill It? What the hell you so worried about, then, Losers? And without any of the Ritual of Chud stuff, what are we to make of the scary clown suddenly being this spider-creature? Just a terrible filmmaking choice. I don't know if they ran out of time/ money or what, but damn. I sympathize. I'm curious as hell as to how Cary Fukanada plans to pull it off.

Finally, I should mention that Jonathan Brandis, the actor who played Stuttering Bill, committed suicide at the age of 27. From his wiki: "Paul Petersen, president of A Minor Consideration—an organization that deals with issues affecting child actors—stated, 'Speculations as to the underlying cause of this tragedy are exactly that: speculations. It serves no purpose to leap to conclusions for none of us will really know what led Jonathan to his decision to take his life.'" True enough, so I won't offer any. Just my condolences.

RIP, buddy; you were a good Stuttering Bill.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

NEXT!

INSOMNIA

King's Highway pt. 35: Backroads and Mist

We have reached the point in our trail guide where we diverge from the Dark Tower series for an extended foray into other King works.

First up, we return to

for another look at "The Mist." I first covered this one here, but it has the following connection to the Dark Tower mythos:

"..the cause of the Mist is alluded to be a tear between universes, similar to the Todash Darkness, a concept explored in the series, both of which supposedly renders its inhabitants "blind" and contains horrible creatures which prey on them. Additionally, several creatures described are physically similar to some of those shown in the series. In the film adaption, David Drayton can be seen painting a portrait of Roland in the opening scene."

Totally missed this, the first time around, how fun. I wonder what people who noticed this but didn't recognize the gunslinger make of this? i.e. "Establishing shot of main character, painting some kind of Clint Eastwood/ fantasy world pastiche..."

So, I guess The Arrowhead Project, alluded to but never explained in the text, is some kind of military attempt to harness the power of Thinnies? Close enough, at any rate. But, as so often happens with such attempts, something went awry and unleashed the strange beasts of this Todash Darkness? (Something I haven't gotten to yet, so I won't worry about it.)

Cool.

This remains a quick and entertaining read. My impressions of it didn't change much, but in the same way something like The Birds is even more entertaining when you bring Freud/ Oedipus into it, "The Mist" works even better when you project Dark Tower onto it.

A comment on The Stephen King "Goremet" Book Club post re: the Dark Tower "road-map" brought "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" to my attention as a Dark Tower tie-in.

I didn't comment on this story in my original post on Skeleton Crew, but it's a fun read. Another Castle Rock adventure!

Both the title and the content brought Wind in the Willows to mind.

The plot for this is fairly straightforward. Mrs. Todd, one of Castle Rock's "summer people," (i.e. not a year-round Maine resident) is a student of short-cuts and backroads. She strikes up a conversation/ friendship with Homer Buckland, the caretaker of the property she and her husband rent in Castle Rock, about shaving off time/ distance on the commute to Bangor. Homer accompanies on one such journey, where she flies through ominous backroads where the trees seem to swat at them as they drive underneath. With each short-cut, she seems to grow younger and younger. At the story's end, she has long disappeared, and Homer is seen getting into a car with a woman in her teens, off for points unknown.

The connection to the Dark Tower is (potentially) in the backroads. Mrs. Todd is accessing a network of "thinnies" in her short-cuts. I don't think she is alluded to in the Dark Towers to come, but I like to think of her and Homer, rocketing in-between the worlds on an omniversal road trip. (Additionally, the creatures she scrapes off her windshield and grill bear some resemblance to Dark Tower/ creatures of the Mist)

I quite like the following passages from the story:

- There's something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home. getting there quick is often for the birds, although no one holding a Massachusetts driver's license seems to know it. But knowing how to get there quick - or even knowing how to get there a way that the person sitting beside you don't know... that has power.

- Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

- Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know castle Rock like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench, and think about 'Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don't necessarily wish I was where they are... but I still wish I was a smoking man.

Amen, King's-Reoccurring Constantly-Quitting-Smoking-Character, Amen.

Next, we circle back to 'Salem's Lot, to re-acquaint ourselves with Father Callahan.

Played by James Gallery in the original TV adaptation and by Zefram Cochran in the remake, Father Callahan will play a major part in the Dark Towers yet to come. All we need to remind ourselves, now, is that at the end of Salem's Lot, rather than kill him, the vampire Barlow forces the faith-wavering priest to drink his blood, thus cursing him to walk between the worlds/ live the life of the undying.

Finally, I noticed "The Reploids" is listed among the major works connected to The Dark Tower. I don't know how major of a work it is; it's only ever been published in the anthology book Night Visions 5.

Google-image searching it only brings up images from Megaman.

But it, too, is a fun read. America tunes into The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1989) but instead of Johnny pantomiming his golf swing and making fun of Doc's crazy-shirt, what America gets is some guy named Ed Paladin. Ed has never heard of Johnny Carson but acts like he belongs there, even calling out to Ed McMahon by name. He is interrogated by the cops for trespassing/ suspicion of kidnapping America's favorite late-night talk show host. The story ends with the cops discovering the currency in his wallet is different. The Fed Reserve Notes are blue and the one-dollar-bill has a picture of James Madison instead of George Washington. Roll credits.

Its connection to the Dark Tower is only that Ed Paladin appears to be from one of the worlds Father Callahan mentions traveling through in the yet-to-be-blogged Dark Tower V: Wolves of Calla, a world distinguishable by different colors/ Presidents on its US currency.(I keep waiting for President Chadbourne to get mentioned somewhere else. JULY 2013 EDIT: "Under the Dome" would be perfect!)

'It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its end.'

NEXT

IT

King's Highway pt. 28: Danse Macabre

Hey, wasn't I taking August off? Yes, I was/ am. But over the course of a few plane and train rides, I polished this one off and figure it won't fit so smoothly into the Dark Tower blogs I have planned for next month. So, roll another number for the road and let's take Danse Macabre for a quick spin.

It's kind of fun to read a book like this in 2012, when so many blogs, including this one, are devoted to the sort of discussion King orchestrates here. It's tempting to say the internet makes books like this (or list-books, for that matter) obsolete. But who knows? Is print dead? Aspects of it, sure, but overall, I doubt it. Either way, it's beyond our scope here.

This book is part autobiography, part overview of the films and books King thinks best inform the horror landscape in America, and part overall-philosophy-of-horror. It comes across as a breezy lecture course, delivered by a professor who may or may not have been drinking before class (or during). One might say it does for American horror circa 1950-1980 what Chuck Klostermann did for 80s metal in Fargo Rock City. 

I remember my brother (or mother) having this on the shelves in the 80s. I tried to read it then, but I didn't know any of the films or books he was talking about, so I never did. I've spent an awful lot of time in the years between getting to know the material, though - not consciously, i.e. at no point did I say Okay, time to make my way through the recommended reading/ viewing/ listening from Danse Macabre. But as suggested elsewhere, certain books and movies are gateway-drugs to certain other books and movies, and once you go down the EC path (to pick one of my own entry points) you end up taking in things like It, The Terror from Beyond Space and Lights Out. So this time around I knew first-hand or was familiar with most of the stories under discussion.

Arch Oboler, showrunner for Lights Out, and Joan Crawford.

I was particularly interested to see King devote some time to the golden age of radio. (Which, he quite rightly notes, was actually the twilight-age of radio; the programs he remembers listening to with his grandparents in his 1950s living room were the dying sounds of the once-unstoppable-entertainment-of-choice. Video may have killed the radio star, but TV was what drove all the radio actors and showrunners to NPR et al.) My apartment in Chicago is in one of the few areas that gets audionoir over the airwaves, and for the past few years, I put that on when I'm cooking or doing dishes. As a result, I started tracking down a lot of Old Timey Radio. There is tons of it out there, for free, if you're interested. (Any sci-fi fan will enjoy Dimension X; trust McMolo.)

One last bit of radio-reverie: I have a very clear memory of being 6 or 7 and huddled around a battery-operated radio in a tent in a campground in Frankfurt, Germany, listening to both an episode of "The Shadow" on Armed Forces Network Radio and a dramatization of Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace." And Bill Cosby used to talk about "The Chicken Heart" (which King discusses here) on one of my Dad's old records. (Records that I incidentally melted on the radiator. Not on purpose, of course.)

This was originally published in 1981. King had a bit of an ax to grind with the academic/ lit-critic establishment during this phase of his career, I think it's safe to say. He addresses it explicitly in his Playboy interview, discussed elsewhere, but there are several passages along these lines from DM that are worth reproducing here.

On the overall-futility of over-analyzing things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students - two states of roughly similar incomprehension."

On the pretentious critical establishment: "...no one is so humorless as a big-time film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings. 'In The Fury,' Pauline Kael intoned, apparently, in all seriousness, 'Brian De Palma has found the junk heart for America.' It's as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and re-prove their own literacy; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho... they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a high school education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers, any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America."

Probably very true.

And on the narcissism of the intelligentsia: "I can't imagine... anyone trying to scratch out a subsistence-level existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently, Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album. For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book: the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaii - the seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples."

The book's chapters covering the radioactive-panic movies of the 1950s and their evolution through the subsequent decades are particularly fun reading.

"Once you've seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies. Films that are just bad... can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance. But real fans look back on a film like The Brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN!) with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, true, but love is love, right? Right."

A few pics from the film in question.

He mentions how horror film fans like mining the dirt-bins for the discarded nugget of gold, and how every true fun usually has one film they uncovered before any of their friends or for which every true fan is an apostle. King's is Tourist Trap: 

Which made me happy, as I, too, have proselytized, independently of King's recommendation, for this movie. True, he wrote of this in 1981 so I am late to the party, but it was news to everyone to whom I mentioned it. Ditto for The Brotherhood of Satan. 

Among other things, it is produced by and stars the multi-talented L.Q. Jones.

"If we share a Brotherhood of Man, we also share an Insanity of Man."

You mean Brotherhood of SATAN!

"...I see the most aggressive of (horror movies) as lifting a trapdoor in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath."

"When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in. When we cut off one avenue of sensory input, that sense simply shuts down (although it never shuts down 100 percent, of course; even in a dark room, we will see a trace pattern in front of our eyes, and in the most perfect silence we will hear a faint hum... such "phantom input" only means that the circuits are open and standing by."

"Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested, they love life. They do not celebrate deformity by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety... for a little while, anyway."

He devotes some text-time, rightly so, to George Romero's classic. Which if you haven't seen, shame on you.

"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection)... but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead."

The section on horror-on-TV is also great reading. The whole book is, really, but the last hundred or so pages devoted to ten or eleven horror novels was less captivating to me, personally, as I had only read a handful of the books discussed. Not so with the TV section; tho it was all before my time, I grew up watching most of this stuff.

King's analysis of the horror films of the 1970s is too comprehensive to sum up accurately here, but as it's my favorite era of film-making, my ears always perk up when it comes under the critical eye.

"This is like a sinister Woody Allen film" may be the most accurate review of Rosemary's Baby I've ever read. As an artifact of the "Is God dead?" era, it is first-rate archaeology, as well as a great flick.

"They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature - to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed."

A film I once heard described as "drenched in a menstrual panic," a phrase I've never gotten out of my head.

I quite liked this description of the "dead zone" one must dispel when bringing a story to life:

"In his marvelous novel The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams tells us that writing a long work of fiction is like gathering characters together on a great black plain. They stand around the small fire of the writer's imagination, warming their hands at the blaze, hoping the fire will grow into a blaze which will provide light as well as heat. But often it goes out, all light is extinguished, and the characters are smothered in black. It's a lovely metaphor for the fiction-making process, but it's not mine... I've always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about the castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn't look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there's really only one way safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source."

The final section is a nice summary of King's personal philosophy-of-horror and, as with most of the above, is quoted directly from the text:

"The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep double-locked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the night - a partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbow-length gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Whom, you ask me, would be so mad? Well... Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or windo willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not... and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever."

Colored engraving of the dance of death, from 1483.

"It is not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third level here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then it's strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination - just one more pipeline to the infinite."

I don't think the films of Mario Bava/ screen presence of Barbara Steele get much text consideration. (None of the giallos do, actually, though there may be some in the recommended-viewing in the back.) I suppose enough has been written elsewhere about them, but Mario Bava straddles the Hammer-knock-off era and the slasher-giallo era better than most. I'd have included a chapter just on him, were this my own Guide to Horror. But hey!

Finally, King shares a personal anecdote near the end that interested me. While a student at the University of Maine, he attended a lecture given by a couple of Black Panthers:

"These Black Panthers were suggesting an umbrella of conspiracy that was almost laughable.. except the audience wasn't laughing..." (He stands up to ask them if they were actually suggesting Nelson Rockefeller was orchestrating the Vietnam war from some shadowy room under the Pentagon, perhaps in cahoots with UFOs.) "The audience began to shout angrily at me to sit down and shut up. Which I did posthaste, blushing furiously, knowing how these eccentrics who mount their soapboxes in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons must feel. I did not much relish the feeling... It is impossible for those of my generation, propelled harum-scarum through the sixties... without a belief that someone - like Nelson Rockefeller - is pulling the strings."

I don't know if it's all that generational. The same crowd/ conspiracies exist today, as well as the same sit-down-and-shut-up angry-mob (and furious blushing embarrassment) when assumptions are challenged.

For any fan of horror (or King), Danse Macabre is a rewarding and accessible read.

NEXT!

We begin our exploration of Dark Tower National Park, following the route suggested by The Truth Inside the Lie, with... The Gunslinger.