![]() ![]() Finally, then, King turns to horror fiction itself with long discussions of ten representative books (classics by Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury, as well as Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door-included, perhaps, for its clear connections to the King oeuvre). Dawn of the Dead) favorite good moments from rotten horror movies and a brief overview of horror on TV, with highest marks to Outer Limits but most fulsome attention to Twilight Zone and Rod Serling ("television ate him up"). (In a typically woozy lapse, King says Frankenstein "is the best written of the three," and a few pages later says that Jekyll and Hyde is "undoubtedly the best written.") Then come childhood memories of Creature from the Black Lagoon and of radio chills-followed by: roundups of horror movies with "political-social-cultural" terrors top honors to "mythic" horror movies (e.g. And he traces most of the formulas back to the big three: Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. "Is horror art?" King says it is-when it hits those "phobic pressure points" as well as working on the "gross-out" level. which often descends to the level of a jivey, junior-high-school bull session. Mixing autobiography with literary/film criticism with sheer horror-freak gush, he rambles through dozens of titles, subgenres, and theories of horror-esthetics-in a sloppy, repetitive, sometimes funny, rarely original ghoulash. ![]() ![]() And when King says "informal," he really means it. ![]() An informal overview of where the horror genre has been over the last thirty years"-by its most financially successful practitioner. ![]()
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