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Stephen King's thoughts about horror.

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Commentary

''Danse Macabre,'' a one-man flea market of opinions and ideas, will certainly be a treat for those avid readers of horror, fantasy and science fiction who like nothing better than to sit around, after a George Romero double-feature followed by a late-night rerun of ''The Twilight Zone,'' and recall the great days of E.C. Comics. However, for those who have little interest in accompanying Mr. King on a highly discursive ramble through byways lined with other people's monsters and mad scientists, this book may prove both boring and baffling, a trick instead of a treat. (On the other hand, since Mr. King is not only a fan but a proselytizer, some unsuspecting types may buy ''Danse Macabre,'' not noticing that it's nonfiction, and end up happily conversing about press runs at Arkham House.)

Excess is Mr. King's stock-in-trade, and he has used his prodigious energies over the years to soak up vast quantities of material about weird literature and film. In a spirit of the utmost good humor and generosity, he now spews out all the thoughts he's been storing up, sharing his crotchets and promoting his pets. Mr. King, who possesses an enviable superabundance of imagination, suffers from a less enviable logorrhea. Along with hundreds of names, relevant and irrelevant - from Shirley Jackson to Joan Didion, from H.P. Lovecraft to Ronald McDonald - we are exposed to thousands of Kingian pronouncements; there is nothing that doesn't elicit an opinion from him - or a definitive statement.

As he admits, he cannot resist ''following any trace of interesting scent.'' He digresses with glee, never reins in his garrulity and always says what he is thinking - a veritable fetishist of his own synaptic responses. It's one thing to learn what were the books and movies of Mr. King's youth, another to be told what year he was toilet-trained (1950). But perhaps one ought to overlook this self-indulgence, a flaw by almost any standards, since the flood of his prose is swept along by so much warm affection for a sort of writing that, outside a narrow circle, is often underappreciated. And after all, he disarmingly tells us, even his grandfather once despaired, ''When you open your mouth, Stevie, all your guts fall out.'' -- Michele Slung, New York Times

Quotes from the Book

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."