original edition, and thus the 1983 paperback edition contains the corrected text of Danse Macabre. In the book's original Forenote, readers were also asked to send in any errors to be corrected, and those were incorporated as well. On February 23, 2010, Gallery Books published a new edition of Danse Macabre (), a trade paperback with the corrected 1983 text, including both the original and the 1983 introductions, as well as a newly written piece "What's Scary?", which serves as a forenote to this 2010 edition. Synopsis The backbone of the text is King's teaching notes from several college courses he taught in the 1970s. However, Danse Macabre has a casual, non-linear writing style and expresses a desire to avoid "academic bullshit". In the introduction, titled "October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance", King begins by explaining why he wrote the book, and then describes the event itself: the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik which inspired profound fear in him, intended as his personal introduction to what he calls "the real terror". This is followed by the chapter "Tales of the Hook", specifically "The Hook"; an urban legend about young lovers parked in a car, who narrowly avoid an attack by an escaped prisoner with a hook for a hand. King uses this legend to illustrate his contention that horror in general "offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty". In the following chapter, he creates a template for descriptions of his macabre subject. Entitled "Tales of the Tarot", the chapter has nothing to do with the familiar tarot card deck. Rather, King borrows the term to describe his observations about major archetypal characters of the horror genre, which he posits come from two British novels and one Irish: the vampire (from Dracula), the werewolf (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and the "Thing Without a Name" (from Frankenstein). In light of the sexually repressed Victorian Era publication of Dracula, King sees a strong sexual undercurrent to the story. Frankenstein is reviewed as "a Shakespearean tragedy", and he argues that "its classical unity is broken only by the author's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies—is it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the life-spark?" King does not mistake Mr. Hyde