Danse Macabre.

KING, Stephen.

Item Number: 56078

New York: Everest House Publishers, 1981.

First edition of “one of the best books on American popular culture” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Octavo, original half cloth. Inscribed by Stephen King in the year of publication on the front free endpaper. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a few closed tears.

In the fall of 1978 (between The Stand and The Dead Zone), Stephen King taught a course at the University of Maine on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." As he writes in the foreword to this book, he was nervous at the prospect of "spending a lot of time in front of a lot of people talking about a subject in which I had previously only felt my way instinctively, like a blind man." The course apparently went well, and as with most teaching experiences, it was as instructive, if not more so, to the teacher as it was to the students. Thanks to a suggestion from his former editor at Doubleday, King decided to write Danse Macabre as a personal record of the thoughts about horror that he developed and refined as a result of that course.