Published by Everest House in April 1981, Danse Macabre was Stephen King's eleventh book and his first work of non-fiction. It is a survey of horror in American popular culture across the three decades King grew up in, roughly 1950 to 1980, and it moves by medium rather than by chronology: separate chapters on radio drama, television, motion pictures and prose fiction, with an autobiographical thread running through them.
King argues that the genre works on three levels, which he ranks. The gross-out — visceral revulsion — is the crudest and the easiest. Horror is the sight of the thing itself. Terror, the finest of the three and the hardest to achieve, is the unease a reader feels before anything has been shown. Around that framework he reads the films and books he considers central: James Whale's Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, The Thing from Another World, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives and The Amityville Horror on screen; The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Dark Shadows on television; and in fiction Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, Peter Straub's Ghost Story, alongside Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and the pulps.
The recurring argument is that horror is a barometer: that the monsters a decade chooses record what it was actually frightened of, from Cold War atomic dread through the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate. The book won the 1982 Hugo Award for Best Related Non-Fiction Book. A corrected 2010 Gallery Books edition adds a new forenote, "What's Scary?", written nearly thirty years after the original.